Folks dubbed Stoner’s small, 2-bedroom house with a covered rear porch and deceptively large backyard, ‘Stoners Shack,’ and at night he’d light up the trees and shrubbery in his secluded backyard with red and green ornamental lights, some flashing others dying a slow flickering death, and he had, (oh my!) –those kinds of parties, the ones with boys and girls and beer and wine and (inexpensive) liquor and music and dancin’ and funnin’ and flirting and maybe some hugging and some kissing and maybe some petting and maybe, make that, definitely, some marijuana. In other words it was everything you’d expect for their age-group and all fairly innocent.
Anyway, Stoner, the laid-back guy that he was, unwittingly became the epicenter of controversy, and a storied part of Mashnee Folklore.
The older teens loved partying there, despite the nightly need for some stretching-of-the-truth, white-lying and fib-telling to cover their tracks parental-oversee-wise, and they intended to party there every night that summer, if not for the rest of their lives. So there.
But this was the summer of ‘70, and the Island had, as small quaint places of that age and time-period tended to have, more than its fair share of well-intended, (others less-so), summertime busy-bodies, rumor-spreaders, and gossipers. No better, nor worse, than any other place.
There was however, this one very odd and particularly troubling older kid on the Island whose parents owned a cottage. The kid was awkwardly tall and pencil thin. His complexion was being ravaged by acne and he bore an unnaturally foul body odor which tended to permeate the air around him. Even the skunks took notice.
There were some fairly clear signs that all was not well with this guy. He had some kind of a distorted policeman alter-ego psychiatric split-personality wannabe cop dress-up thing going on. That doesn’t sound very scientific, but it pretty well explains it.
He routinely wore a long-sleeved white shirt boasting a police logo and American flag, and what looked like a fake State Troopers Hat. He consistently wore combat fatigue pants, sported a belt full of ‘security paraphernalia,’ and carried some sorry-ass fake badge. Plus, he drove around in a knock-off security car, complete with amber flashing lights which he used to pull people over with.
He even had a huge, domed, zillion-watt spotlight mounted on the hood of his car, which he took great pleasure shining into the eyes of any teen caught in the throes of “inappropriate-behavior,” as defined by this self-appointed Prosecutor. He’d nearly blinded half the damn kids on the Island in his so-called ‘pursuit of Truth and Justice.’
Worse yet, he was a snitch.
So, we openly nicknamed him, The Narc.
Why? Because he was one.
And whadaya know?
He was nothing but trouble.
Although Stoner’s place was quite secluded, and every effort was made to keep the noise low enough so as not to disturb the neighbors, the parties at Stoner’s Shack were unknowingly being monitored. The Narc had worked hard to craft a detailed plan. After all this was official business and he was an official creep.
First, he found the perfect place to stash his Narcmobile where it would be virtually invisible, just around the corner from Stoner’s dirt road on an adjacent dirt road. Then, outfitted in camouflage tactical gear, (I kid you not) he would follow a narrow, worn path through the abutting, enormously tall sea grass, before stealthily crawling on his stomach and squeezing under a thick, wall of overgrown, ragged, untended shrubbery and into the dark, outer border of Stoner’s house. There he would position himself for an optimal view of the party.
From all accounts this traitors’ act of betrayal and outright subversion was repeated quite often, and certainly often enough to gather damning evidence and first-hand sightings of the older kid’s behavior. The problem was; he was reporting his findings directly back to Mr. Reginald G. Knight, Senior. Worse yet,
There was about to be a serious accident.
I had seen my sister earlier in the evening at The Club, hanging out in the front parking lot with my cousins, and their ridiculously buxom next door neighbor, Bonnie, who by the good graces of God had burned the last of her bras with the women’s movement, along with those of her two-years younger, (and every bit as genetically-blessed) sister, Abigail, who just happened to be my age, and was, shall we say, somewhat interested in me.
Oh, ya, and factor in their hour-glass figured mother, who threw hold-em-high-and-let-em-fly bras to the wind as well. For his own part, the girl’s dad seemed to be a big fan of extra short shorts, so his personal business was often at risk of exposure, with even the smallest of, heaven forbid, missteps.
They were a... free-spirited group.
But I digress.
The girls were eventually joined by Stoner and others (including me and my own friends) in the parking lot, where they were gathered around Stoner’s shit-box of a shit-brown sedan with A Hard Day’s Night blaring from the car’s cheap AM radio, in truth half music, half static, while the girls danced around, smoking the cigarettes they had just bummed from the boys.
“Ewe. I can’t smoke this Tony. It tastes like poop-on-a-stick. Doesn’t anyone have menthols?” Then looking around and seeing me and my friends, “Hey Jimmyrocket, do you guys have any KOOLs or something?” my sister Alison asked me.
“You know I don’t touch em,” I replied, and she rolled her eyes at me.
“What are you guys up to tonight anyway?”
“I think it’s just the usual…”
So everybody ended up down at Stoner’s place, and when I got ready to leave, rather than join me, Alison said she’d just catch a ride home with friends.
I was awakened from a deep morning’s slumber to the sound of my father yelling. Screaming might be more accurate. Something had happened the night before, and whatever it was, it was bad. My father didn’t yell often, preferring instead to use his trademark ‘Death Stare,’ but when he did yell, you could hear him a mile away, and this morning, you could hear him two miles away.
Then a particularly sensitive set of words penetrated the thin bedroom wall, the volume rising above the intensity of my sister’s desperate pleas of innocence and the sounds of her pleading for leniency.
“The Dike!”
“Older boys!”
“Hippies!”
“Mar-i-juana!”
And then the clincher (Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Please don’t say it..!),
“STONERS SHACK!!!” (He said it!)
The shit had officially hit the fan, and stuck.
There had been a pretty bad accident on Mashnee the night before. It was a wet and foggy night, and very late. One of the older kids, Stoner’s best friend, whom we called “Haffenreffer” because nobody ever saw him without a can of the malt liquor, packed a bunch of Mashneeites, including Alison, into his beat-up truck, and was nice enough to offer to drive them home after a long night of partying. It was obvious whose house they were coming from.
What began as a fun ride with everyone singing to Bob Dylan’s hit song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” when the truck suddenly fishtailed, and Haffenreffer lost control coming around what should have been a no-big-deal corner by the baseball field, heading towards The Club’s rear parking lot.
The truck skidded off the road, and when its tires lost contact with blacktop pavement, flipped over on its roof and skidded across a piece of left field, landing still upside down, buried in the long, five-foot deep scruffy ravine which made-up the outer border of the outfield grass which ran all the way to the shore. The five foot deep ravine would be partially filled with ocean water at normal high tide and completely filled at full-moon tides. Thankfully, last night it was neither, or someone could have drowned.
Their injuries were not serious but there were plenty of cuts and bruises to go around, as they all scrambled on top of each other to get out of the car, with Haffenreffer, pretty heroically, smashing the back windshield to do so.
