John Marshal High School had an “open campus” in those days. The school day wasn’t quite as free of a scheduling system as the brand new and modern modular scheduling we’d experienced in Junior High, but it was pretty liberal. We could come and go from the school grounds as we pleased, as long as we made it to class when we were suppose to. So anyone with a car would usually go to town for lunch.

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And that simple freedom (to go off campus for lunch) was enough for me and my friends during our sophomore and junior years at John Marshal High School in my home town of Rochester, Minnesota. But once we were seniors, packing a car with kids and going to Bridgeman’s Ice Cream for a “Lalapalooza Sundae” no longer made it when being “cool” was the most important part of going to school.

In the spring of 1977, as we seniors started counting the days to our ultimate freedom, coolness was pretty much the point indeed.

Oh but, I wasn’t cool myself you see… and I didn’t think I could be cool. I was just experiencing coolness through friends (yea, that’s it) and Mark being my best friend and the coolest guy in school was enough for me in that area.

Heh… yea right!

So when I started exploring some of the other groups of seniors who were seen as cool in ways Mark wouldn’t, I told myself that I was simply going with the flow. Checking out the neighborhood… the lay of the land. But there was a reason Mark didn’t hang with some the types I started meeting.

See… Mark was cool, but he was “clean”. He smoked cigarette’s, drank beer and whisky, but he scoffed at smoking pot or doing any other kinds of substances like that. He wasn’t a good boy like me, but he wasn’t a “lowlife”. Once Mark discovered girls however, there were a few who would eventually argue with that.

And once Mark discovered girls, my role in his entourage became a bit less cool for me. So I started to wander, looking for other kinds of coolness. The most obvious choice to check out was right there in the center of the parking lot every day.

It was was a big black 1968 Pontiac Bonneville with big fat tires, mag wheels and lots of chrome. A very cool car. And everyone knew who it belonged to. Shifty Schaffer. Shifty and his gang were bad boys for sure and for me to get into “Bonnie” (Shifty wouldn’t hear it called anything else) was like crossing over to the dark side.

My introduction to Shifty, Bonnie and their little group of Shifty wannabes, was a guy I’d met in choir (of all places)… Brad Burkhauser. Before my senior year I can’t remember ever seeing Brad. He may have been new to JM that year for all I know now, but I’ll have to check and see for sure and update this later.

Like me, Brad was a big guy. Tall and heavy. He was a bit bigger than me, and although his weight sloshed around more than mine did at the time, Brad carried his size with a swagger I would never have thought to have done.

Brad also talked like a big man. He was a bass in the choir and although it wasn’t an exceptional voice, a low range is a rare commodity in a high school choir so Mr. Ketterling was glad to have him. They might have thought twice however, if they’d heard some of the things I heard Brad say.

Brad was constantly talking about his dick, and what he was planing to do with it. To girls… and it was stuff I’d never heard before. Many years later I was told he was gay and this changed my whole image of Brad but at the time I just thought he was a total asshole for talking about girls like that.

But I still followed him into Shifty Schaffer’s car.

This was my introduction to some serious pot smoking. Sitting in the back of “Bonnie”, sinking into the deep black leather seat, I couldn’t even see out the front window. The smoke was so thick. The car was a two door so it was customary to get out from the back seat by leaning forward as someone opened the huge door. You pretty much had to roll onto the pavement on your back as all the smoke billowed out. Shifty would insist on filling the car with fresh smoke when someone indicated they wanted to leave. That way, anyone watching to see who was emerging from this spectacle of a car (and there was always someone watching) would get the full treatment for their entertainment.

Of course the stereo would be blasting the whole time.

Shifty loved his image and played it up as much as possible. I didn’t spend much time in that car, but no doubt the few times I did, did interesting things for my reputation.

I didn’t hang out with Brad after graduating and Shifty never graduated. He ended up going into the Navy, but few as they were, my experiences in his car “Bonnie” was certainly a first for that naive, farm-raised good boy me. And it may have played a role in some of the other, darker experiences I would eventually have in the not to much more into the future of my young, nearly adult (physically anyway) self.

Stories of this and many more to come…