On Volkswagens, reputations, and why you should never call a Pizani’s house at two in the morning.

Before I tell you about the car crash, I need to tell you about the phone call. And before I tell you about the phone call, I need to tell you about the mud. And before I tell you about the mud, I need to tell you about the Pizanis. And before I tell you about any of it, I need to say something that I mean, completely and without reservation, even though nothing else in this story will suggest that I am a person capable of good judgment:

Do not drink and drive.

I say this as a man who, at fifteen, did exactly that, or more precisely, rode with people who did exactly that, repeatedly, enthusiastically, and with a frequency that, viewed from the distance of forty years and the vantage point of a high-rise apartment in Kowloon, makes me want to reach back through time and shake myself by the collar until my teeth rattle. We were stupid. We were lucky. We lived in a window of time when a cop who pulled you over after you’d had six Old Milwaukees would tell you to slow down, maybe write you a $50 ticket, maybe follow you home to make sure you got there, and that was the end of it. Nobody went to jail. Nobody lost a license. The officer knew your father. Your father knew the officer. The whole thing was handled with the informal jurisprudence of a town that had been managing its own problems since before the courts got involved.

I am not nostalgic for this. I am not defending it. I am telling you that it happened, that we survived it, and that every single one of us, every kid who climbed into the back of an El Camino or the passenger seat of a Volkswagen after a night of cheap beer at a racetrack in Vermont, was playing a game with odds that we were too young and too dumb to calculate. Nobody I knew died. Nobody I knew killed anyone. That is not a testament to our skill or our character. That is a testament to blind, stupid, undeserved grace, and I am grateful for it in the way you are grateful for a thing you did not earn and did not deserve and cannot ever repay.

Now. The Pizanis.

The Reputation

Every small town has a family whose name, spoken in certain company, produces a slight involuntary stiffening of the posture. Not fear, exactly. Something adjacent to fear. Something closer to the feeling you get when someone mentions that the dog next door got loose and you’re not sure if it’s the friendly one or the other one. In Adams, Massachusetts, that name was Pizani.

Mark Pizani and his brother Dick were, by consensus of every student, teacher, parent, and probably several clergy members in the town of Adams, the toughest kids in school. This was not a title they campaigned for. It was not a title anyone voted on. It was simply understood, the way gravity is understood, or weather. The Pizanis were tough. The Pizanis were mean. The Pizanis were not to be messed with. This was the catechism, recited in hallways and cafeterias and the backs of El Caminos with the reverence of settled doctrine.

Mark was in the class ahead of me at Hoosac Valley, which, in the social physics of a small school, placed him in a different orbital entirely. He was not someone I ate lunch with. He was someone I was aware of in the way a field mouse is aware of a hawk, not because the hawk has done anything to you personally, but because the hawk is a hawk and you are a mouse and the math is not complicated.

At one point, the Pizanis and a number of other kids from our school were involved in a brawl with kids from Drury High School that was sufficiently violent, sufficiently public, and sufficiently newsworthy to make the Berkshire Eagle. This, in Adams, was the equivalent of making the front page of the New York Times, except the readership was smaller and every single reader knew the participants and their mothers and their grandmothers and exactly what they’d paid for their houses. The principal of Hoosac Valley, in a moment of pedagogical prophecy that I suspect he regretted approximately as soon as it left his mouth, stated publicly that the Pizanis were the type of people who would end up getting into bar brawls when they were older.

I can report, from a vantage point of four decades, that I am aware of no bar brawl involving either Pizani. The principal’s predictive model, like most predictive models applied to teenagers by adults who should know better, was garbage. But the reputation stuck. In a small town, a reputation is not a conclusion drawn from evidence. It is a story that the town tells itself, and once the town has decided on the story, the story becomes the truth, whether it’s true or not.

And yet.

There was an afternoon, in the gymnasium at Hoosac Valley, when a group of comedians came to the school to put on a show. I don’t remember who they were or where they came from or who arranged it. What I remember is the moment they turned to the crowd and asked: Who is the most athletic person in this school?

The entire student body, in unison, with the spontaneous, unrehearsed certainty of a congregation responding to a prayer, shouted: Mark Pizani.

The comedians, pleased with the energy, pointed to Mark. “What sports do you play?”

Mark, who had the build of someone who could play any sport ever invented and several that hadn’t been, answered truthfully.

“None.”

The comedians paused. They recalibrated. They moved on.

“All right. Who’s the class comedian?”

The crowd, with equal conviction: Ernie.

Ernie was Mark’s good friend. He was also my cousin, because in Adams, everyone is someone’s cousin, and if they’re not your cousin, they’re your cousin’s friend, and if they’re not your cousin’s friend, they’re the guy whose mother told your mother something at the post office, and the whole town collapses into a single interconnected web of people who cannot escape each other no matter how hard they try.

The comedians pointed to Ernie. “Tell us a joke.”

“I don’t know any,” Ernie said.

The crowd ate it up. The most athletic kid in school played no sports. The funniest kid in school knew no jokes. This was Adams in microcosm: a town that understood its own people so well that the labels it assigned had nothing to do with the evidence and everything to do with something deeper, some collective intuition about who a person was that operated entirely outside the reach of facts. Mark Pizani was the most athletic person in school because he looked like the most athletic person in school and because the town had decided he was, and if he didn’t actually play sports, well, that was the sports’ problem, not Mark’s.

The comedians, who were professionals and knew gold when they found it, brought Mark and Ernie up on stage. The bit was simple, they’d feed lines to the two of them, lip the words from behind, and Mark and Ernie would parrot them back to the crowd like ventriloquist dummies. It worked beautifully, mostly because Mark and Ernie committed to it with the absolute sincerity of two people who had no idea what they were doing and didn’t care. The comedian would mouth a phrase, Mark would repeat it. The comedian would mouth another, Ernie would repeat it. The audience was already in pieces.

Then one of the comedians, standing behind Mark, mouthed the words: I feel foolish.

Mark looked out at the crowd. He looked at the comedian. He looked back at the crowd.

“Me too,” he said.

The place lost it. The comedians themselves broke, one of them had to turn away from the audience because he couldn’t hold it together. It was the purest kind of comedy, the kind you can’t write, the kind that only happens when someone who isn’t trying to be funny is funnier than the people who do it for a living. Mark hadn’t refused the line to get a laugh. He’d refused it because he did feel foolish, and when someone tells you to say “I feel foolish” and you already feel foolish, you don’t parrot their words, you just agree with them. The fact that this was, structurally, the funniest possible response to the situation was entirely incidental to Mark, which is what made it the funniest possible response to the situation.

This was the man I was going to have to call at two in the morning. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Track

Green Mountain Racing Track was in Pownal, Vermont, about thirty minutes from Adams, and it was, for a fifteen-year-old with a fake sense of confidence and a real thirst for cheap beer, paradise.

Vermont’s drinking age had been raised to twenty-one, but the change had grandfathered in eighteen-year-olds who were already legal, which created exactly the kind of enforcement chaos you’d expect when you try to legislate sobriety in a state that considers maple syrup a food group and mud season a legitimate calendar event. If you were eighteen when the age was raised, you could still drink. If you were fifteen, you could stand next to someone who was eighteen and blend in with the effortless camouflage of a teenager who has been practicing the art of looking like he belongs somewhere he absolutely doesn’t since the first time he walked into Pop’s Variety and walked out with three twelve-packs of Old Milwaukee and his dignity intact.

We blended. Fifteen, sixteen years old, standing in the grandstands at a greyhound race in southern Vermont, drinking beers that cost less than the gas it took to get there, watching dogs chase a fake rabbit they were never going to catch with the same desperate sincerity of people who bet on them, and feeling, in that particular way that only teenagers feel, that we had figured out the entire system and the system couldn’t touch us.

I had gone to the track with one group. This was standard operating procedure. In Adams, the logistics of a Saturday night were fluid, improvisational, governed by a set of unspoken rules that everyone understood and nobody had ever written down. You left with one carload. You came home with another. The connections between groups shifted and recombined throughout the night like molecules in a warm solution, and by the end of the evening you’d find yourself in a vehicle with people you hadn’t planned to see, going somewhere you hadn’t planned to go, doing things you hadn’t planned to do, and this was not a failure of planning. This was the plan. The plan was that there was no plan. The plan was that Adams would provide, and Adams always did, even when what it provided was catastrophically ill-advised.

At the track, I bumped into Pete Love and Scott. Pete was a year ahead of me at Hoosac Valley, same class as Mark Pizani, which meant I knew him the way I knew everyone who was a year ahead of me: well enough to drink with, not well enough to predict what would happen when I did. Scott, who was in my class, was there too, in the way that Scott was always there, present and accounted for and game for whatever the night was assembling.

Beers were cheap. That was the other reason we went to the races. The greyhounds were incidental. The racing was background noise. The real event was the beer, sold at prices that seemed designed specifically to ensure that no one in the grandstands would be sober by the third race, and we were not. Pete, Scott, and I had more than a few. We had enough that the phrase “more than a few” is itself a generous understatement, the kind of understatement you deploy when the truth would require a number that you’re not entirely sure you can calculate and are not entirely prepared to defend.

Pete had driven to the track in his Volkswagen. He should not have been behind the wheel for the drive home. This is not ambiguous. This is not a matter of interpretation or hindsight or the application of modern standards to a different era. He should not have been behind the wheel. I should not have gotten in the car. We both did, because we were young and stupid and immortal in the way that only young and stupid people are immortal, which is to say: temporarily, and by accident, and with an expiration date that we could not see and would not have believed if someone had shown it to us.

The Drive Home

The drive from the track back to Adams was approximately thirty minutes. Thirty minutes of dark Vermont roads turning into dark Massachusetts roads, winding through the kind of Berkshire County darkness that is not the polite, suburban darkness of a neighborhood with streetlights but the actual, primordial darkness of a place where the trees outnumber the people and the mountains block whatever light the sky has left to offer.

Scott was in the back seat. Scott was singing.

Specifically, Scott was singing a version of the HBO jingle, the little sonic signature that played before every HBO movie in the 1980s, that five-note sequence that meant you were about to see something your parents would not have approved of. Except Scott had modified the lyrics. The original HBO tagline was HBO, you’re going to like it. Scott’s version, performed with the confidence of a man who has had seven beers at a greyhound race and is riding in the backseat of a Volkswagen being driven by someone who has had eight, was:

DWI … you’re going to like it.

He sang it on a loop. Not once. Not as a joke that lands and is retired. On a loop, the way a man sings something when he has found, in his inebriated state, a piece of comedic material that he believes to be the finest thing ever composed, and he is going to perform it until someone tells him to stop or until the car stops or until consciousness stops, whichever comes first. DWI, you’re going to like it. DWI, you’re going to like it. The same five notes, the same six words, delivered with escalating conviction into the darkness of the Berkshire night while Pete drove and I sat in the passenger seat and God, for reasons known only to Himself, chose not to intervene.

We made it. Miraculously, inexplicably, we made it back to Adams in one piece, which I attribute not to Pete’s driving, which was objectively terrible, but to the simple statistical reality that at 1 AM on a Saturday night on Route 8, there is nobody else on the road, because everyone else in Berkshire County has already made it home or is still at the bar between the church or has pulled over to sleep it off in a parking lot like a reasonable person.

We dropped Scott off. Scott went inside, still humming the HBO jingle, presumably, and was heard from no more that evening. His role in this story is complete. He entered singing and exited singing and the universe, in its wisdom, let him go home unscathed, which is more than can be said for the rest of us.

Fisk Road

What happened next was not necessary. We had survived the drive from Vermont. We had delivered Scott to his door. The smart thing, the right thing, the thing that any reasonable person with even a residual flicker of self-preservation would have done, was to go home. Go home, park the Volkswagen, drink a glass of water, lie down, and thank whatever higher power you subscribe to that you made it through another Saturday night in the Berkshires without becoming a cautionary tale.

We did not go home. We went to Fisk Road.

Every town has a road like Fisk Road. A road that exists, nominally, for the purpose of connecting one place to another, but that has been repurposed, by generations of teenagers with more horsepower than judgment, into something between a proving ground and a dare. Fisk Road had a hill. At the crest of that hill, there was a rise, a bump, a geological feature that, at any speed above about five miles per hour, would launch a vehicle into the air. Not metaphorically. Not in the exaggerated retelling of people who were there and want to make the story better. Actually, physically, into the air, all four wheels off the pavement, daylight between rubber and road, the full experience of temporary flight in a machine that was never designed for it and does not enjoy it.

People in Adams knew about this. Everyone knew about this. Locals approached the crest of Fisk Road at five miles per hour, maybe ten, the way you approach a speed bump in a school zone, because they had learned, either through experience or through the experience of someone whose story had been reported over breakfast at the Corner Lunch or the Red Carpet, that the hill on Fisk Road was not a suggestion. It was a promise. Drive too fast and you will fly. Drive much too fast and you will fly far. And what happens after you fly is between you and gravity and whatever is waiting on the other side, which, as it happens, is a steep downhill slope that runs for close to a mile.

Pete took the hill at approximately forty miles per hour.

Forty is a conservative estimate. It may have been fifty. It may have been faster. I don’t know, because I was not looking at the speedometer. I was looking at the road, which was disappearing beneath us with the alarming enthusiasm of a road that wanted no part of what was about to happen. And then the road was gone. Not receding. Gone. Below us. We were airborne. The Volkswagen, a machine built by German engineers for the purpose of sensible, fuel-efficient transportation, was flying through the air over Fisk Road in Adams, Massachusetts, like a scene from The Dukes of Hazzard, except the General Lee was a Volkswagen and Bo and Luke Duke were two kids from the Berkshires who had been drinking Old Milwaukee at a racetrack in Vermont for five hours and one of them was still humming the HBO jingle in his head.

We caught air. Real air. The kind of air where you feel your stomach lift and the seatbelt tightens and for one second, maybe two, you are weightless, suspended between the decision and the consequence, between the stupid thing you’ve done and the stupid thing that’s about to happen, and in that gap, that one- or two-second gap, you feel something that might be exhilaration and might be terror and is probably both, because at fifteen they are the same thing.

We landed.

The Ditch

When a Volkswagen lands after traveling over a hill at forty miles per hour, it does not land gracefully. It does not settle back onto the road like a plane touching down on a runway. It lands hard, with the full downward force of a vehicle that has been briefly and involuntarily liberated from the surface of the earth, and when it lands hard on a road that immediately pitches into a steep downhill slope, the driver, if the driver has had eight beers and is seventeen years old, does not have the reflexes or the road position to correct what happens next.

The car veered right. Not gradually. Not in a gentle drift that could have been steered out of. It veered with the sudden, committed trajectory of something that has made a decision and is no longer consulting the driver. We left the road and hit the drainage ditch that ran along the passenger side, my side, and then the wheel, the front wheel on the passenger side, struck something solid.

It was a concrete cover. A drainage basin cover, or a manhole cover, I don’t know which, and it doesn’t matter, because what matters is that it was concrete and it was immovable and the Volkswagen was moving at a speed that was entirely incompatible with striking an immovable concrete object. The wheel hit it. The impact ripped the wheel off. Then the rear wheel. Then the side panel. Then everything on the passenger side of the vehicle that was not the passenger, which was me, and which remained, by some arrangement between physics and mercy, inside the car.

Both wheels on the passenger side. Gone. Both axles. Gone. The side panels, the fenders, the sheet metal, the parts of a car that make it look like a car instead of a half-car, gone, torn off and left behind in the ditch like components that the vehicle had decided it no longer needed.

And then we started sliding.

The other side of the hill, as I mentioned, is a steep downhill slope that runs for close to a mile. We slid down it. On two wheels. The passenger side of the Volkswagen, which no longer had wheels or axles or anything resembling structural integrity below the door line, was grinding against the pavement with a sound that I can only describe as what it would sound like if you fed a Volkswagen into a woodchipper at moderate speed. Sparks flew from beneath the car and up over the windshield in a continuous, streaming arc, like a welding torch being dragged down a mile-long hill, and I sat in the passenger seat watching sparks cascade over the glass in front of my face with the detached, slow-motion clarity that the brain produces when it has decided that the situation is beyond intervention and the best use of its remaining resources is to record everything in high definition for future reference, assuming there is a future.

We slid. We ground. We sparked. The sound was extraordinary, metal on asphalt at speed, a shrieking, grinding, scraping roar that echoed off the hills on either side of Fisk Road and announced to every house within a half mile that something had gone very, very wrong and was continuing to go wrong at approximately thirty-five miles per hour, downhill, with no steering and no braking and no wheels on one side and two terrified teenagers inside.

The car came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. The engine was off, or maybe it was on, I don’t know. The silence, after the noise, was enormous.

The Assessment

Several people came out of their houses. This is what happens in Adams when a noise occurs. You don’t ignore it. You don’t call the police and go back to bed. You put on your bathrobe and your slippers and you walk outside, because in a town of 8,000 people, whatever just happened probably happened to someone you know, and you need to assess the situation personally before the folks at the Corner Lunch and Red Carpet got the story wrong.

They approached the car. They looked at us. They looked at what was left of the car, which was not much. They asked if we were all right. They asked if they should call the police.

We said no. Please don’t call the police. We’re fine.

I got out of the car. I walked around to the passenger side, the side that no longer existed in any meaningful sense, the side that looked like it had been opened with a can opener by a giant who was in a hurry. I surveyed the damage with the careful, analytical eye of a fifteen-year-old who had been drinking Old Milwaukee for five hours.

“It’s all good, Pete,” I said. “Just a couple of flat tires. We got a couple of spares, we’re good to go.”

I want to be clear about what I was looking at when I said this. There were no tires. There were no rims. There were no axles. There was no passenger-side body panel from the front quarter to the rear quarter. What I was looking at was a Volkswagen that had been cut in half longitudinally and stripped of everything that makes a car a car on one entire side, and I was standing next to it, swaying gently in the 2 AM Berkshire air, telling my friend we just needed a couple of spares.

Pete, to his credit, did not dignify this with a response. Pete had his own problems. Pete’s Volkswagen was no longer, by any legal or mechanical definition, a Volkswagen. It was a piece of modern art. It was a sculpture titled Bad Decisions at Speed. It was not going home under its own power or anyone else’s.

“Call Mark,” Pete said.

The Man I Had to Call

I need to stop here and tell you why those two words, call Mark, landed on me the way they did. I need to tell you about Blueberry Hill.

Blueberry Hill was a spot in the woods, roughly two miles outside of Adams, where parties happened. Not organized parties. Not parties with invitations or themes or designated drivers. Parties in the way that fifteen-year-olds in a small town in the 1980s understood the word: a clearing, a fire maybe, a case of something cheap, and whatever combination of people and vehicles had managed to navigate the dirt road to get there. You drove in, you parked, you drank, you talked, and eventually, when the beer was gone or the cold won or someone’s curfew threatened consequences that even Old Milwaukee couldn’t make you brave enough to face, you drove out. Or you rode out with whoever was leaving, because in Adams, the same rule applied at Blueberry Hill as at the racetrack: you didn’t necessarily leave with the same people you arrived with. You left with whoever was going your way, or whoever was going at all, or whoever had a car that could make it back through the mud, which was not always a given.

On one particular night, I found myself among the last people at Blueberry Hill. The group had thinned. The beer was gone. What remained was me, Mark Pizani, Brian, and another individual whose name I cannot recall but who was a year ahead of me. Brian drove a car that can only be described as a boat, one of those American sedans from the late ’70s or early ’80s that was less a vehicle than a maritime vessel with a steering wheel, the kind of car that got nine miles to the gallon and could seat a family of seven and still have room for a cooler and a spare teenager in the trunk.

The boat was stuck. Sunk into the Blueberry Hill mud to its wheel wells, immovable, beached on a dirt road in the woods two miles from town in the dead of night. It needed to be pushed out. This required manpower. It also required someone behind the wheel, someone to drive while the others pushed.

I was the youngest. I was the smallest. I was, by a considerable margin, the least muscular person present. The math was not complicated. Mark, Brian, and the other kid would push. I would drive.

There were two problems with this plan. The first was that I did not have a driver’s license. The second was that I had never driven a car. Not once. Not in a parking lot. Not in a driveway. Not in any of the controlled, supervised, low-stakes environments in which a normal person learns to operate a motor vehicle. My entire experience with the driver’s seat of an automobile was zero, and I was about to apply that experience to a full-sized American sedan stuck axle-deep in mud in the woods in the dark while three guys pushed from behind.

I was nervous. That is an understatement of clinical proportions. I was terrified. My hands were shaking. My foot was on the gas. The three of them were behind the car, braced, ready. Mark was directly behind.

I distinctly heard Mark say go.

I floored it.

What Mark had said was don’t go.

The tires, which had been sitting in a soup of Berkshire County mud and decomposing leaves, spun with the instantaneous, explosive enthusiasm of tires that have been given full throttle by a panicked fifteen-year-old who has never operated a vehicle and is acting on what he believes to be a direct order from the toughest kid in Adams. The mud did not stay where it was. The mud launched. It launched backward, in a rooster tail of wet earth and debris, directly into Mark Pizani, who was standing three feet behind the rear bumper with his arms extended and his face at exactly the wrong height.

The mud covered him. Not splattered. Not sprayed. Covered, head to toe, with a thoroughness that suggested the universe had been planning this moment and wanted to make sure it was done right. When the mud settled and the wheels stopped spinning, Mark Pizani was standing in the woods at Blueberry Hill looking like a man who had been dipped in chocolate by an angry god. The only thing visible was his eyes. White circles in a mask of mud, staring at the car, staring at me, performing the kind of rapid calculation that precedes either violence or forgiveness and could, at this point, go either way.

The door flew open. Mark reached in and punched me in the nose.

I need to be precise about this. It was not a full-force punch. It was not the kind of punch that breaks things. It was, in the taxonomy of punches, more of a corrective than a punishment, the physical equivalent of a stern word, delivered with just enough force to communicate the message without causing structural damage. If I had been punched in the nose by anyone else in Adams, I would have shaken it off. But I was not punched by anyone else. I was punched by Mark Pizani. And being punched in the face by the toughest kid in Adams, even lightly, even correctively, was like being spanked by a parent. The pain was negligible. The psychological impact was permanent.

Mark pulled me out of the car. He told me to push. I pushed. He got behind the wheel. He floored it. And he covered me, head to toe, in the same mud I had just covered him in, with the practiced precision of a man who believes in justice and believes in it immediately.

We were even. Or at least, Mark considered us even. I considered myself lucky to be alive and in possession of my original nose.

This was my most recent interaction with Mark Pizani before the night on Fisk Road. This was the relationship I was carrying with me when Pete said call Mark. A boy who had punched me in the face the last time I’d done something stupid, and here I was, about to call his house, at two in the morning, to report that I had done something stupid.

The Call

It was the 1980s. There were no cell phones. Some people still had rotary dial phones, the kind that took eleven seconds to dial a seven-digit number because the dial had to rotate back to zero after every digit, giving you plenty of time, between the seven and the four and the three, to reconsider your life choices. Most homes had one phone, maybe two, and when they rang, the whole house heard it, because phones in the 1980s did not vibrate politely on a nightstand. They rang. They rang with the shrill, mechanical insistence of a device that had been engineered in an era when a ringing phone was an event, a summons, something that demanded immediate response because the only reason someone would call your house was that something important had happened or someone had died or Sears was confirming a delivery.

A bystander, one of the people who had come out of their house in a bathrobe to see what had produced the mile-long shower of sparks down Fisk Road, was kind enough to let me use their phone. I stood in a stranger’s kitchen at two in the morning, still slightly drunk, slightly shaking, and dialed the Pizani house.

It rang. It rang again. And then a voice answered with the warmth and hospitality of a man who has been woken from a dead sleep by a telephone and is prepared to commit acts of violence through the receiver.

Mark’s father. Who also, it should be noted, had a reputation. The Pizani reputation was not confined to the sons. It was a family brand, passed down with the same reliability as eye color and jaw structure, and Mark’s father carried it with the quiet authority of the original article.

“Who the hell is calling my house at two in the morning?”

I want you to imagine this moment. I want you to place yourself in that kitchen. You are fifteen. You are drunk. You have just survived a car crash that removed an entire side of a Volkswagen. You have been asked to call the one person in Adams whose family name makes your blood pressure rise, and instead of that person, you have reached his father, a man whose reputation precedes him by approximately the same distance as his son’s, and he is asking you a question to which you do not have a good answer, because the truth, hi, Mr. Pizani, I’m a kid your son once punched in the face and I’m calling because your son’s friend Pete just destroyed his Volkswagen on Fisk Road and we need Mark to come get us, is not a sentence that any reasonable person would speak into a telephone at two in the morning to a man who sounds like he is considering reaching through the phone line and strangling you with the cord.

So I did what any reasonable person would do.

“Hello, sir. This is Sears. We’re just calling to confirm a scheduled delivery of a new stove at nine AM.”

There was a pause. A long, dense, loaded pause, the kind of pause that contains within it an entire universe of disbelief, contempt, and the slowly dawning suspicion that the person on the other end of this phone call is either a criminal, an idiot, or both.

What followed was a string of language that I will not reproduce here, out of respect for the Pizani family, for the English language, and for the general concept of printable prose. The substance, stripped of its more creative anatomical references, was that he had not ordered a stove, that no one in his household had ordered a stove, that Sears had no business calling anyone’s house at two in the goddamn morning, that if Sears called again he would come down to the store personally and deliver something of his own, and that I should perform an act upon myself that is, as far as I know, physically impossible.

He hung up.

I walked back to Pete. I reported the news. Pete was not pleased. Pete was standing next to the remains of his Volkswagen on a dark road in Adams at two in the morning and the one lifeline he’d asked me to throw had just been severed by my decision to impersonate a department store.

The Lights

We had been standing there for about twenty minutes, two teenagers and a bisected Volkswagen under the Berkshire stars, when the flashing lights appeared at the top of the hill.

A police car. Moving slowly. Coming down Fisk Road with the unhurried inevitability of a consequence that has taken its time but has, at last, arrived.

I did not stay to greet it.

I ran. I left Pete standing next to his destroyed car, alone, on the side of the road, and I ran into the darkness with the survival instincts of a man who has already made every bad decision available to him tonight and has decided, in a final act of self-preservation, to add one more. I ran the way you run when you are fifteen and drunk and the law is approaching and your only remaining asset is the fact that you are wearing dark clothes in a dark place and the officer doesn’t know you’re here.

Pete faced the consequences. The consequences, because this was Adams and this was the 1980s, were as follows: the car was towed. Pete was given a ride home. In a cruiser. By the officer. Who probably told him to be more careful. The benefits of living in a small town.

Six Months in Hiding

It did not take long for Pete to tell Mark what had happened. Pete told Mark about the crash. Pete told Mark about the phone call. Pete told Mark that the kid who had covered him in mud at Blueberry Hill had called his house at two in the morning and told his father that Sears was confirming delivery of a stove.

I do not know Mark’s initial reaction. I do not know if he laughed or if he cursed or if he sat in silence for a long moment reconsidering the trajectory of his life that had led him to a point where a boy he had once punched in the nose was now waking up his father in the middle of the night with fictional appliance deliveries. What I know is that I spent the next six months avoiding Mark Pizani with the discipline and commitment of a man in witness protection.

I took different routes through the hallways. I scanned every room before entering. I developed a sixth sense for the Pizani presence, an ability to detect Mark’s approach from distances that would have impressed military radar, and I adjusted my trajectory accordingly. For six months, I lived in a state of continuous, low-grade terror, imagining what Mark Pizani was going to do to me when he finally caught up, imagining it in vivid detail, imagining variations and permutations, each one worse than the last, because the imagination of a fifteen-year-old who has wronged the toughest kid in Adams is a factory of worst-case scenarios that runs three shifts and never shuts down.

He never caught up. He never came for me. He never, as far as I know, gave it more than a passing thought, because the thing about the Pizani reputation was that it was exactly that: a reputation. A story the town told. A story that had almost nothing to do with the actual person.

The Actual Person

In time, because time in a small town does what time in a small town does, which is compress and heal and rearrange the furniture until even the most terrifying memory starts to look like something you can sit on, I got to know Mark Pizani.

The reputation was fiction. The Pizanis were, or at least Mark was, one of the kindest and most down-to-earth people you could have as a friend. Not kind in the performative, I’ll-help-you-move-but-I’m-keeping-score way of people who want credit for their kindness. Kind in the way that people from small towns are kind when nobody’s watching and nobody’s keeping score and there’s no audience and no reward and the only reason to be decent is that decency is what you were raised with and what you’ll pass on and what the town expects even when the town pretends it doesn’t.

Mark was that. Quiet about it. Steady about it. The kind of person who shows up, who answers the phone, who doesn’t hold grudges even when he has earned the right to hold them and even when the person who wronged him covered him in mud and then called his father pretending to be a department store. He let it go. He let all of it go. And what replaced the fear was a friendship that I did not expect and did not deserve and that became, over the years, one of the things I looked forward to most about going home.

Pete was the same. Pete was the kind of person who could survive the destruction of his Volkswagen, a ride home in a police cruiser, and the revelation that his friend had tried to reach help by impersonating Sears, and come out the other side not with anger but with a story. And in Adams, a story is the highest currency there is. A good story, told well, at the right bar between the right churches, is worth more than money, more than pride, more than the car that was sacrificed to produce it.

For years, every time I came home from Hong Kong, where I have lived for over a decade, I made it a point to see Pete and Mark. We would sit somewhere, a bar, a kitchen, a porch, and we would relive the night on Fisk Road. The crash. The sparks. The flat tires that weren’t flat tires because there were no tires. The phone call. The stove. Mark’s father’s voice coming through the receiver like the wrath of God channeled through a rotary telephone. Pete standing alone next to his destroyed car, watching me disappear into the darkness like a man who has just learned that his friend’s commitment to solidarity ends precisely at the moment blue lights appear.

We told the same story every time. The same beats, the same pauses, the same moments where one of us would add a detail the others had forgotten, or dispute a detail the others insisted on, or simply shake his head and laugh the way you laugh at something that was not funny when it happened but has become funny because it happened to you and you survived it and you’re sitting here, decades later, still telling it. Always smiles. Always laughter. The kind of laughter that doesn’t need new material because the old material is inexhaustible. The kind of laughter that is, if you listen carefully, not really about the story at all. It’s about the fact that you’re still here to tell it. Together. In the same small place, or close enough to it, breathing the same Berkshire County air.

Pete

The last time I saw Pete, we relived the night. The same story. The same beats. The same laughter. We parted with big smiles on our faces, the way you always part in Adams, with the unspoken assumption that there will be a next time, that there is always a next time, because the town holds and the people endure and the stories keep. That is how I like to remember Pete. Standing there, smiling. The same kid who flew a Volkswagen off a hill on Fisk Road. The same kid who told me to call Mark. The same kid who faced the police cruiser alone while I ran.

Pete didn’t make it to a next time. Pete Love died in 2023.

I was in Mei Foo when I heard. Eight thousand miles away. Thirteen time zones. Reading it on my phone the way I read about everything that happens in Adams now, at a delay, through a screen, with the distance that never feels like distance until it does, which I have mentioned in another story about loss in a small town.

There is a thing about small-town friends, about the Marks and the Petes and the Scotts and the Shiftys and all of them, that I have never been able to explain to my wife, Ruth, or to anyone who didn’t grow up in a place like Adams. It’s not that they were your best friends. It’s not that you saw them every day. It’s not that you had some deep, philosophical connection that transcended the ordinary bonds of human interaction. It’s that they were there. At the track. In the car. At Blueberry Hill. On Fisk Road. At two in the morning, standing next to a destroyed Volkswagen in the dark, making the best of something that should have been worse than it was, because in a town of 8,000 people, making the best of things is not a choice. It’s a way of life. It’s the only way of life. You make the best of the cold hot tub. You make the best of the iced hot toddy. You make the best of the destroyed Volkswagen, and you turn it into a story, and you tell the story for thirty years, and the story becomes the friendship and the friendship becomes the story and you cannot separate them anymore and you don’t want to.

Pete is gone now. The story stays.

I still make it a point to see Mark when I go home. The last time I was back, I texted him from an anonymous phone number.

Hi, this is Sears. Just wanted to confirm a delivery.

I like to think he laughed. I like to think he showed someone. I like to think that somewhere in Adams, in a kitchen or a bar or a table at the Daily Grind, Mark Pizani read that text and shook his head and smiled the way you smile when a joke has been running for forty years and still lands, not because it’s funny, which it is, but because the person telling it is still here, still connected, still calling from the other side of the world to say the only thing that a small-town friend ever really needs to say:

I remember. I’m still here. And the story’s not over.

Even when one of us is gone. Even when the Volkswagen is scrap and the track is closed and the mud at Blueberry Hill has dried and the phone in the Pizani kitchen doesn’t ring at two in the morning anymore. Even then. The story holds. The way Adams holds. The way it always has.

Pete, wherever you are: I’m sorry I ran. I’m sorry I left you with the cop. I’m sorry I told your friend’s father that Sears was delivering a stove.

But I’m not sorry about any of it. Not really. Because that night, that stupid, reckless, sparking, grinding, impossible night on Fisk Road, gave me something that forty years and 8,000 miles haven’t taken away. It gave me the story. And the story gave me you, and Mark, and Adams, and a friendship that outlasted the car, and the crash, and the mud, and the fear, and everything else that was supposed to separate us but never did.