The Day I Became Mortal Essay Research

The Day I Became Mortal Essay, Research Paper

The Day I Became Mortal

By Ray Kellam

Sept.20, 1998

I was truly beginning to enjoy the wonderful fruits of life. Sports were at a peak in my life. I loved my baseball and ice hockey. School was winding down to the point where everyone knows that junior year grades are the most important out of all of your four years, and I had to finish strong. Yet there was something about the changing of the seasons, perhaps the increasingly diminishing supply of threads that the girls were covering their bodies with was a tell tale sign that the green light was on. There was definitely something in the air that all high school students felt in the closing months of each year. More so was true for us immortals. You know, the guys who can’t be fazed by any sort of higher disciplinary level, who obey by no sort of law enforcement regulations, and who flat out just don’t give a damn about anything except getting out of the parking lot to proceed with the days leisure activities. The usual, call up a few numbers to see if we could go test drive some fast cars, play a few games of pool, locate an actual pool, figure out the teams for stickball. Basically nothing. This was a daily routine after school. When there wasn’t a baseball or hockey practice to go to, a job to slave at, or a girlfriend to nurture, we hadn’t a care for anything in the world. We were reckless. Did anything we wanted. I truly believed that we were immortal. In a way. A way that since nothing bad had ever happened to us, then nothing bad ever would happen to us; that the purpose of life was to wander a long, just barely get by, and have fun. Well, all of those thoughts came to a crashing halt one blazing hot Thursday afternoon. One Thursday afternoon that has been etched in my mind ever since the second it happened.

The sun was being especially cruel to the Earth that day. It had to be one hundred. Should it have been one hundred outside, the interior of the old, beat up Datsun with bald tires, a squeaky fan belt, holes in the passenger side floorboard and no air conditioning had to be one fifty. The dust factor only incinerated the fury of the heat, making it not only hot but stuffier than a small box filled with useless old X-mas mugs, long since forgotten in the corner of the basement. It was one of those days where there was an urgency to get off of the confines of the campus, for no particular good reason. So we did. It was Scott Dewalt, the guy who spoke softly but carried a gigantic stick and vast knowledge of just about anything. Trevor Shepard, (the owner of the vehicle.) an aspiring pipe dreamer with prominent visions of owning a cherry ‘66’ Chevelle SS, and living off the chicken scratchings of minimum wage work in lower class housing projects the rest of his life. And I, a striving sports follower who really just wanted to be somewhere other than wherever I actually was, at whatever particular point in time I happened to be at.

A fresh scent of nacho supremes and mexican pizzas was abundant in the car. As we returned from Taco Bell, the atmosphere was the usual. Laughter was plentiful, primarily from a stupid comment Trevor always seems to poke into every conversation about how he thinks that some girl, who none of the other fellas give a thought over, is all of a sudden some kind of goddess. And how we all must be crazy for not agreeing with his ridiculous notion. And Scott who only casts more belly aching laughter into my mouth by simply quietly twitching very abruptly while pasting the omnipotious ear to ear grin on his face, as he does consistently every time he is laughing as hard as possible. All of this good fun and laughter sort of eased up all of our nervous systems. For what was about to come.

We made a pit stop back into the parking lot to notify the other boys that the three of us were going to go to Scott’s house, located not very far from campus. I really should have had better judgement than to ever allow myself in the poor condition of the Datsun B210 in the first place. Not so much the state that the Datsun was in but the combination of the Datsun and the driver who was about as experienced at driving automobiles as I was at calculus. Trevor had his license for about two weeks at this point. As the car rolled forward, I could almost hear the repentant clinking of the roller coaster I was on, about to embark over the first spine tingling hump of the track. Of course I didn’t know it yet, though. The car stalled a jolting death. Trevor was not an experienced driver and an even less experienced stick driver. It took a couple of tries for the engine to turn over again. But it finally did. And we were off.

Exiting the parking lot was always a big deal at Menlo-Atherton High School. It was routine to spin the tires if you were cool. And if you weren’t really cool, it was customary for anyone to spin the tires if the car in front of you did so. So, naturally as the car full of hot dogs in front of us in the real nice ‘68’ Mustang spun the tires, Trevor was simply doing his duty as a high school male with a car. An excellent showing of raw recklessness and abuse of a quickly diminishing car was performed. We did a perfect fishtail and swung the vehicle back around into control. As pavement securely gripped the tires, a sigh of relief flustered throughout Scott and my own hearts. But Trevor wasn’t don