One For the Ages

46** West 82nd Place, Chicago, Illinois 60652.

A mid-sized ranch, with three bedrooms, two baths, one the size of a small closet, a living room, an eat-in kitchen. A modest house, that was about to become a legend.

The date was Friday, July 26th, 1974. I was fifteen years old.

My parents were going out of town for a long weekend.

They left me in charge.

They told me "no parties."

The party started ten minutes later. At first there were just a few of us. Bob, Butchie and some of the Mount Greenwood boys, assorted girlfriends, people coming in and out. The music was loud, the joints were fat, and by the end of the evening, most of my old man's liquor was replaced with water since he foolishly thought that drawing pencil lines on the bottles would stop us from sneaking booze.

As the wee hours of the night came and went, the house was hushed. A few of the guys were still up drinking and listening to records, but most of us dozed or were passed out. The girls had gone home hours ago. Dawn became morning. People slept-in, showered, rolled and smoked joints around the dining table. Made breakfast out of what food was in the house.

The day was spent relaxing, people checked in at home, the guys that had summer jobs reported for work. But by late afternoon, Bob, Jack, Butchie and the gang had reassembled. Someone started talking about getting something to eat. Some time ago, Bob and I had managed to slip the spare key for my dad's Rambler out of his top dresser drawer and had a duplicate made. A bunch of the guys headed for the grocery store. The fact that no one had any money, was of little concern.

I had just finished cleaning up the house when I saw the station wagon pull back into the driveway. Butchie came in the kitchen door first, carrying a twenty pound bag of Kingsford charcoal. Bob came in next and pulled ten pounds of T-bone steaks from under his jacket. One by one the guys came in with baking potatoes, corn on the cob, Sara Lee cheesecakes, and more. And as if it had been scripted for a movie, the last guy straggled in, a shit-eating grin on his face, holding up and waggling a bottle of A1 steak sauce.

We fired up the grill and started cooking. Meanwhile, our friend Pat got off the wall phone in the kitchen and said he needed to borrow the car. He got back just as the food was coming off the grill. He went around the car and opened the tailgate. The front passenger door and the two back doors opened. No less than a dozen chicks climbed out.

There was plenty of food for all, and the guys chowed down, but the girls refused to eat, having some kind of unspoken rule, teenage girls being what they are, that eating in front of boys was gross.

After dinner, we went into the front room and were about to smoke a reefer, but Bob and Butchie scooted closer to me, and Butchie took a baggie out of his pocket. He reached into the baggie and pulled out two small, round, purple tablets. Bob said, "Here Stevo, take these." I asked him what they were and he said, "Purple microdot." I had never tried anything but pot up till that time, but I swallowed the pills. Bob and Butchie started laughing. "Hold onto your hat," Bob said.

One of the guys said his older brother was willing to get us a run, so everyone chipped in what they had and Pat took off again in my old man's car. More kids were showing up, but they looked kind of funny to me. Almost like cartoon characters. We had my folks' console hi-fi up pretty loud, and the music reverberated in my head. When I looked around, everything looked sharp and clear, but the perspective seemed off.

Pat and a couple other guys came in carrying cases of Old Style and bags of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill, followed by another carload of chicks. Everyone started partying down in earnest. I was already higher than I'd ever been in my life, and I just kept getting more stoned. Someone put on the new Foghat "Energized" album and I thought I'd never heard a record so good. I wanted to play it over and over again, and no one seemed to care. Beer and pot were like little gnats up against the bug zapper trip I was on.

Things were really heating up. It was a beautiful midsummer night. All the doors and windows were open, and kids spilled in and out of the house. Cars were parked up and down the block. Every room was jam packed with people laughing, shouting out, carrying on, and raising hell. I was having the time of my life.

Bob's girlfriend Sue was beautiful. Tall, with long, light-brown hair, big doe-like brown eyes, curvy figure in all the right places, high cheekbones, cute nose, heart-shaped lips. I swear to God I told her she looked like Bambi. She wasn't sure how to take that, but I meant it in the nicest way.

In the midst of all the chaos, I heard a voice calling out, "Whose house is this!? I said, whose house is this!?"

A woman shoved her way through the crowd into the bedroom and made straight for me, a stern look on her face.

My first thought was, "Who let somebody's mother in here? I'm too high to deal with this."

She came right up to me, her face mere inches from mine. I saw she was our own age and I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers. She said, "Hi, my name is Michelle, I just wanted to tell you what a great party this is!"

Later that night, we'd be making out.

But in the meantime, Jack got it in his head that he wanted to climb up on the roof and smoke a joint. It was actually pretty cool up there above the fray. The moon was out, the lights in the neighborhood were on, it was more peaceful away from the music. My brother, Bunce, a year younger than me, called up, "Hey Steve, you better get down here, a bunch of guys are going streaking."

Streaking was en vogue at the time, but it was really the last thing I needed. I got down off the roof and went into the house. Some of the girls were clapping, and some turned away in mock modesty, but Bob, Butchie and a dozen other guys were stripping down to nothing but their shoes, and they burst out the door, buck naked, and tore off down the street.

Ten minutes later, the first ones came running down the block, saying that one of our friends named Jim was hurt. Sure enough, Bob and Bunce were carrying Jim, one under each arm, and when they brought him into the kitchen, his face was a bloody mess.

In the dark, Jim had run smack into a tree, knocking himself out cold. We got him in the bathroom and started cleaning him up when the last guy ran in, yelling that the cops were coming.

If the house had been in chaos before, it was now total bedlam. In seconds a hundred drunk and wasted kids piled out of doors and somersaulted out of windows. In the swirling emptiness that followed, there I was, blazing away on my first acid trip; a naked, bleeding guy in the bathroom; our friend Don passed out in the La-Z-Boy; a house overflowing with empty beer cans and wine bottles; pot and cigarette smoke so thick you could cut it with a knife; and my five-year-old sister, Dee, who my parents had left in my care.

A squad car rolled up the driveway, and two Chicago Police Officers knocked on the door. If they expected to find illegal drugs, underage drinking, and various violations of Fire Department maximum occupancy codes, they could not have been prepared for the three-foot bundle of cuteness, or the wide smile beaming on the cherubic face that greeted them.

"Um, is your mommy or daddy home?"

"They're on vacation. My big brother is watching me."

"Can we talk to him?"

"He's not feeling well. He's sleeping."

From where I was hiding, I saw the cops looking into the house.

"Is everything okay?"

"Yes, everything is fine."

The two cops looked at each other and shook their heads.

"Okay, you better get to bed."

"I will Officer, good-bye."

Slowly, kids came out of the shadows and cars started to return. Everyone wanted to know what happened, and when I told them, Dee was the hero of the hour. People were giving her sips of beer, and even a toke off a joint, till I told them to knock it off. (Before you rush to judgement, times were different then, and Dee is now married with three beautiful daughters, and is loved and respected by family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers alike, none the worse for wear.)

An hour later the party was going even crazier than before.

It was the law in Chicago that cops had to live within the city limits, and the southwest side where we lived had some of the most affordable properties in the city. Our next door neighbor, Mr. Macklin, was a cop (and a mean drunk), and our neighbor across the street, Mr. Clifford, was a Captain. Eventually, they and a few other neighbors came over and told us to break it up. There was some loud arguing, but they threatened to call the cops for real and tell our parents, and we knew when enough was enough.

So now instead of having all the kids in one place, there were a hundred drunk and stoned teenagers walking and driving around the streets.

The few of us who remained - Bob, Butchie, Jack, the chicks we hooked up with for the night, and Don, still dead to the world in the recliner - partied for a while longer, then sought out a bed. Michelle and I climbed into my top bunk, and Bob and Sue took my brother's lower bunk (Bunce had gone out with some of his buddies). Butchie took the back cushions off the couch and there was just enough room for two. Jack and Melinda shacked up in my parent's room.

I got up earlier than the others. I wasn't feeling any ill effects from the night before that a quick joint wouldn't cure. Dee heard me moving around and came into the kitchen. We had bowls of cereal, and she went in her room to play.

My parents were due home by late afternoon. I began to clean. I tossed one beer can after another into a garbage bag, leaving the ones that still had something in them, so I could flush the dregs down the toilet.

Later in the day we planned to take the garbage bags to Bob's house, so my parents wouldn't find any evidence.

As I straightened up the living room, Don started to stretch and slowly open his eyes. "Wow, man. I musta fell asleep. Did anything happen last night?"

Everyone was getting up now. Some headed for the shower, some made coffee, and some looked in the fridge to see if there were any cold beers left.

We needed to get my old man's car back in the garage. Our driveway ran all the way behind the house with the two-car garage perpendicular to the driveway. To get the big Rambler station wagon into its stall, you had to swing partially in, then reverse to straighten out before pulling all the way in. This was a difficult maneuver even for an experienced driver, and my old man had backed into the chain link fence so many times, that it was permanently bent backwards.

A friend of ours named Dave, who was a gearhead and one of the better drivers among the too young to be licensed set, was parking the car. But as he was backing up, he hit the gas too hard and the car rolled completely over the fence. When he pulled forward, the rear bumper got hung up on a metal fence post.

No matter what he did, we couldn't get the car unhooked. "You jackass," I said. I didn't want our next door neighbor to come out, and my parents were due home at any time. One of the older kids on the block saw us standing back there with the car, and he came to check out what was going on.

He got in the car, dropped it into low, and mashed the pedal to the mat. The wagon lurched backwards and popped off the fence post. He hit the brakes, and Bob and I got on the ground and pushed down on the post as he rolled the car forward.

When my parents got home a short time later, they found the car in the garage, the garbage cans empty, the house clean, my sister safe and sound, and all as it should be. That in itself may have made them suspicious, but the only proof they had to back them up was a faint, sweet, smoky aroma covered over with Glade.