Jan, who was Steve's Mom, drank
way
too much.
I didn't have a problem with her drinking. How could I? I mean, the first time I got drunk was in 8
th
grade, when I raided a bottle of my parent's bargain basement blended scotch that I found in their wet bar. Damn, but they had shitty taste in liquor! The next morning after that was my first hangover. History class was not fun that next day, let me tell you!
So, I was okay with drinking, just not all the time. Not like Jan did it. Every time we'd visit Steve's house, she'd have a beer can in her hand. And she didn't drink good beer, either. She drank crappy Bud Lite or something like that. Low-caloric swill, as far as I was concerned. Even though I was still in high school I had already developed better taste in alcohol than either she or my parents had.
Me and my buds would get together at somebody's house—whomever had a free house with parents out of town—and we'd explore. We'd do "taste tests" and "flights." We would line up like ten different beers, from all over the world, and talk about what we liked (or didn't like) about them. You know, like we were some kind of liquor connoisseurs. "Connoisseurs-in-training," let's say. The point is, I was drinking dark beers from Germany and Switzerland before I was sixteen. I was drinking single malt scotch (and sneering at blends) before I was seventeen. By the time I was eighteen and a senior, I was pretty well-versed in knowing what I liked to drink and what was crap. When I would go to high-school parties, the keg needed to be at least Heineken. If not, I wasn't drinking it.
Anyway, the beer in the keg didn't really matter because I had probably brought my own six-pack or bottle along with me. I was tall for my age and I knew where to go so that I wouldn't be carded. You see a six-foot guy with big shoulders buying top-shelf scotch and imported beer, you tend not to worry about that guy, is what I'm saying. I was like ...
confident
... in my alcohol knowledge—even though I was only eighteen and still a senior in high school. You know what I mean?
What Jan drank was crap. She drank a shit-ton of crap American low-calorie beer. She drank that crap beer all the time, as far as I could tell.
Jan's drinking was like the first thing I noticed about her. I mean, it was probably the first thing anybody would notice. She was not especially attractive, is what I'm trying to convey here.
Jan was not tall—maybe about 1.6 meters—and she was heavy for her size. She had a beer belly. Maybe the belly was from having two kids—Steve and his older sister, Lisa—but I was pretty sure all the beer she drank didn't help with her weight problem. Drinking low-calorie crap wasn't helping with weight-loss as much as she probably hoped it was.
Jan had long straight hair that was probably really brunette but which she dyed blonde. She could have maybe done a better job because her dark roots showed pretty clearly. Her breasts were pretty good, I guess. Kind of big for her body—maybe C cups? They were a little saggy, but what are you going to do about that? She was in her early forties. Gravity is a bitch, am I right?
But her ass was pretty fine. I mean, she had broad hips but her big ass was just
fine.
If you saw her ass first, you'd probably be kind of into her. But if not then, well, she was okay, at best. Better when she didn't wear her heavy-framed glasses, 'cause she had pretty blue eyes.
(I am an eye man, for whatever reason. How weird is that? My wife has multi-colored eyes with gold flecks in them. I married her because of her eyes. She's also pretty hot, but I didn't notice her body when we met because I was staring into her eyes. It was love at first sight.
Hah.
)
Jan wore a bikini when we hung out at Steve's family's pool, so I guess she didn't care about what she looked like. She wore a bikini and I noticed that her breasts were kind of nice and big, and that her ass was fine ... and I also noticed she probably didn't shave her pubes as much as she should have. Her pubes were midnight black and thick, and stuck out from her bikini bottom. Not that I looked. (
Sarcasm.
)
She would lay out on one of the lounges while Steve and I—and sometimes a couple of our other buds—would splash in the pool. Usually we'd play "Marco Polo" or something like that. We would all be high when we did that, 'cause it was SoCal in the eighties and weed was pretty much everywhere. We would get high then goof around in the pool while Jan watched us from her lounge, wearing dark glasses, a smile on her face and a can of crappy beer in her hand.
*****
I grew up in a pretty nice neighborhood. I guess you'd call it "upper-middle-class" or something like that. The schools were good. The homes were pretty posh; they were set on pretty big lots. Most people had pools. Many people kept horses. Barns and stalls were common. Most of the kids got cars when they turned sixteen. Not fancy cars, but new cars like Fords or Hondas or Toyotas or Mazdas. A few got Beamers. Not me, though. My family was not particularly well-off. We lived in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, but we didn't have much money. No pool. We had a couple of horse stalls and a big corral but we didn't have any horses of our own. My father rented out the stalls to other people, which helped with the monthly house payment. I guess you could call us "house-rich and cash-poor" and that wouldn't be wrong.
Even though we lived in LA, we were out in the country. LA isn't all city, you know. I didn't realize that we grew up differently from a lot of kids; it was just how I grew up. Riding horses; walking on the horse trails. Getting high behind the bushes far from any observing eyes. Going to parties on Saturday nights where crowds of teens got high and got drunk, and threw up into somebody's parent's toilets. Almost always, the parties get busted by the sheriffs and then I'd bum a ride home where I would lie in bed watching the ceiling whirl round and round until I finally passed out. It all seemed so
normal,
you know? I thought that life was how everyone grew up.
I was pretty normal, as well. Decent grades. I got accepted into a decent UC school. (That's the University of California, if you didn't know). I did a couple of sports, badly. Swimming (Junior Varsity). Wrestling (Junior Varsity). Like, I was the slowest guy on the Swim Team. As for wrestling, I can proudly say I never got pinned in three years of competition. I never won a match—true. But I never got pinned. No Varsity Letter for me.
I had a girlfriend for a couple of months during my Junior year, but she broke up with me because I didn't ask her to the Winter Formal. I didn't ask her because I didn't know how to dance and I was too embarrassed to admit that to her. I guess maybe I should have talked to her about my issues with dancing, but I never did and then she broke up with me. Looking back, I think the fact I partied with my buds and got high most every night (never during school hours) may have also been a slight factor in why the girls weren't so into me. I wasn't ready for a girlfriend at the time, I guess.
Another thing about me was that I got my height early. I was done growing when I was fourteen—just a freshman in high school. By then I was six feet tall (1.8 meters). The football coach wanted me to play on the high school team, but I wasn't having any of
that.
I mean, I was having too much fun partying; I didn't need long-ass practices and games to cut into my party time. Swimming was okay, because morning workouts were done before school started, and the afternoon workouts were done by four. As for wrestling, the workouts were also done by four or four-thirty. I could handle that.
It was weird, though, to see my friends—the same ones I had towered over in middle school—grow up to look me in the eyes and then keep growing. Too soon, I had to look up to meet their eyes. That was a weird feeling. It kind of sucked, to be honest.
It also sucked that I was a virgin. All my friends—especially those on the football team—were going to dances and getting laid; but I was too shy and too high. Looking back, I can see that I was not exactly presenting an attractive appearance, even though I had a decent body and kept in shape through my sports. It wasn't my body that was the issue, you know? It was my emotional state. I was kind of fucked up emotionally, I guess—and it showed enough to keep the girls away. Without my buddies to party with, I was pretty much a loner. When I was home, I was in my room, reading. With the door shut and locked.
*****
Steve's dad was definitely weird. No; not weird: he was an asshole. He had no idea about what it was like to be a teenager.
I didn't know what the fuck he did for a living, nor do I know today, decades later and five states away from where I grew up. Steve said his dad was a banker, but he wasn't like any banker I ever heard of. He sat in a big office in their separate house, where he had this big leather chair and a big desk, and where he smoked his stinky cigars. I mean, why smoke cigars when there's weed around, you know? What's the point of that?
Yeah, about the separate house. Steve's family had this really huge lot that went down a hill, into a small valley thing, and then up again on the other side of the valley. On one side was their house, with a pool in the back yard. On the other side was the barn and riding ring. In the middle—the little valley—there was nothing except a driveway and some dirt. So, Steve's dad built a second house—three stories—on the other side of the pool. The second house started in the valley and went up from there. That was the garage part. It was a huge garage where Steve and his dad would work on cars—especially his dad's rusty old pickup truck, which was a complete POS. (Piece of Shit.) What kind of banker drove a POS pickup truck? Then above the garage was another floor with that big office, plus another bedroom and a kitchen and a pretty large living area with a cool stereo system we were never allowed to play. The second floor was level with the main house. A sliding glass door opened to the pool deck, so you could walk from the main house over past the pool and hot tub (jacuzzi) into the other house.
Above the second floor was the roof, which was set up with solid walls that rose about three or four feet, so you could hang out up there and catch rays, or barbeque—or do whatever you wanted to do, like get high—and nobody could see you from the ground.
Whatever Steve's dad did, he must have made good money doing it. Even if he drove a POS pickup truck that he was too cheap to replace. But the dude was really weird.
I mean, for one thing, he was a member of the Sheriff's Mounted Auxiliary force. As far as I could tell, the only thing that "force" ever did was to ride in city parades.
Whatever.
But the dude said he was a part of the Sheriff's Department and I guess he was—technically. So, he was kind of a pain in the ass about us getting high and going to parties where there might be underage drinking taking place.
(
Might be.
