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The Lot

Kelly Darrow

    The Lot was a nice piece of level land surrounded by twenty or so feet of woods. The thickness of the trees isolated it from the street, which served as a great wind barrier. It was about half the size of a football field with thick green grass. It was a great place for kids to play and hangout in.
    When Johnny was ten years old, his family moved into the newly developing subdivision and at first he was the only kid on the block. People were moving to the neighborhood every day and he always wished that another kid would move in so that he would have someone to play with, but so far that had not been the case. As a result he found that he spent a lot of time alone.
    A short walk down the street was a vacant lot that he had discovered one afternoon while exploring. He enjoyed going to the lot in the warm afternoons and lying on his back in the grass looking up at the clouds. The bright white puffy clouds reminded him of huge cotton balls floating effortlessly across the blue sky. He watched them for hours as they drifted into each other melting into various shapes. He would see many familiar objects in the clouds as they formed into one big cloud. He noticed images of his dog and buildings, even his house. He always seemed to find shapes in the forming clouds that matched his young forming imagination. Sometimes he would see clouds shaped like Snoopy or Kermit the frog. He would close his eyes and day dream that he could touch and mold them into any shape he wanted. It felt good to have the warm sun bathe his face and to drift off into a nap on many an evening. Just as he would fall into a good sleep he would hear his mother hollering out of the back door of their house calling him home for supper.

    He would clumsily stand on his feet and look down to see the outline of his body disappear in the grass as it popped back up towards the setting sun. These were very special times for Johnny that even thinking of them now as an adult gives him a feeling of peace.

    A couple of years passed and Johnny was now twelve. Other kids eventually moved into the neighborhood and at last he had several friends to play with. The lot had gone from his cloud shaping, napping refuge to a place where he and his friends would gather to play football games during football season and baseball games during baseball season. It was a good meeting place and was big enough for any sport they wanted to play. They were even known to play an intense game of kick the can on occasion. Every year on New Year’s Day all of his friends would gather at 1:00 o’clock and play a huge football game that they referred to as the toilet bowl. They looked forward to this every year and it continued all the way through High School. The teams consisted of different players every year but the names of the teams were always the same. It was The Wipples against the Tidy’s. The Wipples were named after the commercial where Mr. Wipple squeezed the Charmin, and the Tidy’s were named after the Tidy Bowl man.
    Halloween was another time of year they really looked forward to. This was a big turn out because Johnny’s neighborhood was where kids from not only his neighborhood but other neighborhoods would come to hang out. He and his friends would save their money all year long to buy water balloons and toilet paper for rolling houses and water ballooning. They would hide behind the bushes and throw water balloons at passing cars. This was a big event in their young lives. Johnny and his friends knew the lot very well and could run through it in pitch blackness and get away from anyone that would stop and chase them for nailing their car, although someone getting out of their car and chasing them was a rare occurrence. One year however, one of the older kids who also knew the lot very well chased them through it in pitch blackness. Johnny tripped on an old broken down barbed wire fence cutting his leg. The older boy caught him and held him down by the shoulders and just told him, “It better never happen again Johnny.” It scared Johnny and his friends but they continued throwing water balloons at passing cars anyway.
    On many evenings Johnny found that he would now lie on his back with friends looking up at stars instead of being alone looking at the clouds. His imagination went from shaping clouds into anything of his choice to fantasizing about flying through the stars in a rocket ship, or walking on the yellow moonbeams. They would see shooting stars and many times things they couldn’t explain, such as strange bright blinking lights, or perhaps they wanted to see something strange so they just created it in their minds. Anyway, they assumed it may be a flying saucer, which gave them a story to share at school. Johnny and his friends had many interesting conversations in the lot on these evenings as they went through puberty together.

    The lot had taken on many identities during Johnny’s tenure in the neighborhood. By the time he was sixteen it was the place to sneak beer into and drink and hang out with his buddies. They were good kids, they just went through what most kids do, which was experimenting with trouble. They would drink baby Budweiser’s and listen to music and talk about girls and what they wanted to do in life. They talked about how tough they were when they all knew they weren’t that tough at all. They bragged about the girls that they hadn’t been with convincing each other that they actually had been. It was mostly a good time with innocent fun. There were the negative aspects of the lot as well. When kids at school had differences, the lot at dark was the place to go settle it. Many fist fights settled various disagreements in the lot. Johnny knew this first hand having had his nose busted several times.
    It didn’t take him long to learn that he was not quite as tough as his mouth made him sound. He even fought his best friend in that lot over a girl that ended up liking someone different than either of them. His friend busted his nose and knocked one of his teeth loose with a solid left hook knocking him hard to the ground. Within a couple of days however they were best friends again. There was a steadfast rule that Johnny and his best friend adopted in regards to fighting at the lot. The rule stated that after a fight, the two parties involved had to shake hands and agree that the beef was over before stepping out of the lot. Even though fighting is not necessarily a positive behavior, it seemed necessary when growing up, and Johnny learned how to defend himself and be a man in that lot.

    On Johnny’s seventeenth birthday he took a girl to the lot to have sex for the first time. He thought he was a real man. It was with his girlfriend of three months. He had no clue what he was doing and neither did she. He was so nervous when he took off his clothes that he couldn’t stop shivering and she was so nervous she couldn’t stop talking. They thought they were so grown up, but they were young kids moving much too fast. It was a horrible experience for them both. It was in the front seat of his truck on a warm summer evening with a girl named Wendy. His parents had never taught him anything about sex. He had never even recalled hearing them say the word. He learned everything he knew, which wasn’t much, from his friends at school, of course in all actuality he knew far from enough. At least he was smart enough to go to the Road Runner and buy a condom from the restroom vending machine and had enough responsibility to actually use it. Of course being a boy, the first thing Johnny did that Monday at school was to brag about how good she was and how good she said he was. He learned a hard lesson during this point in his life. He learned never to brag; because once it gets around school, the girl is looked down upon while the boy is a hero. For a few weeks he was the hero, which he despised. It made him feel so bad because his hero status meant slut status for Wendy. She was a good friend until they had sex, now she hated him and he was too embarrassed to face her so they stopped talking to each other. Eventually his friends followed suit and took girls to the lot and of course they bragged about it even though Johnny urged them not to.
    By his senior year the lot became so popular and would get so crowded that the neighbors would call the police because of the noise and loud music and as a result the cops would run them off. The hangout moved to a place out in the country off of farm road 10 where nobody could be disturbed. Johnny however, found solace in the lot after the hangout moved to another spot. He would go there in the afternoons and look at the clouds and imagine he could mold them into anything he wanted. The shapes were more complicated now that he was older. He now saw shapes of himself and figures such as Beethoven. He saw flowing rivers and erupting volcanoes instead of dogs, houses and his parents as he did when he was ten. One afternoon it dawned on him how he was now almost a senior. He had never really taken a moment to think about the time that had passed since finding the lot as a boy. He would find himself often drifting off into a mid-afternoon nap until one of his friends would pull up to take him somewhere. Nevertheless, he still found peace in being alone in the lot just as he did when he discovered it as a ten year old boy. Johnny is now grown with his own family and hasn’t been to the old neighborhood in twenty five years or more, but the memories of the lot are ones that he cherishes.

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