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The Old Man and the Previews November 30, 2001

There was a time... a time, well, yonder. Thataway. Back there.

A time when the calendar fell between November and December. A time not too cold, back there, back east where we lived, and we lived like men. Men wearing flannel shirts rolled up past the elbows and untied Timberlands, sure, cold men, hungry men, but honest still and men nonetheless. And back then it was easy to get liquor because a good bottle of Kountry Kwencher only cost a dollar ninety-eight and we could often find two bucks in change in the cushions of the leopard skin-patterned couch that was bequeathed us and it was a short walk to the package store, a short walk when drunk even or hungover from the night before because we were men and the drinking age was but eighteen and Kountry Kwencher is a dollar ninety-eight even now, many years later, which I often note ruefully but not without a small amount of nostalgia for that rose-colored liquid that tastes so soothingly, I remember well, so soothingly of apples and faintly of jas mine and stronger still of unleaded gasoline, often I note as I trundle along the aisle vainly searching for Ranch-flavored Wheat Thins and unchipped bottles of good Islay Dew. But back then we would wait until a brisk autumn day would turn to bitter night and a threatened rainstorm would turn to snow and we would drink to warm ourselves and go out into the storm and look for trouble, not to get in but to help out, trouble of the automotive kind. The kind where a car's tires happy, once, to grip the road and the asphalt, and the stones with the white-knuckled grip of gravity once let slip and to slide into tree or street sign or embankment, content to slide off shoulder's gentle curve and wait, wait, perhaps one tire spinning idly, beckoningly, morosely in the air, wait for us, us unshaven, unkempt, largely untutored louts who stopped going to class once it started to snow and the one hundred and ninety-eight pen nies were found and roamed the streets carrying our lengths of rope and flashlights and bottles of Boone's Farm looking to right a Detroit wrong. And thus we did once, back then, back when Reagan, addled, stooped Reagan ran on and on amidst even those Contra-indications warning us all, heralding in fact for those who could pay attention but not us, not us, watching as we did the L.A. Law and the MTV but not the CNN that we came upon a carload of girls, what luck! a carload of girls with hazards on and blinking, winking into the night waiting to be rescued but perhaps by

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