Manic Monday – Cruising

This is the very first Manic Monday post. Manic Mondays are the brain child of Morgen over at It’s A Blog Eat Blog World. Morgen provides a word each week on Friday, and on Monday, we post a blog inspired by that word. I think it’s an awesome concept. To learn more about participating in Manic Mondays, check out Morgen’s blog.

On to this week’s topic at hand – cruising. I grew up in a small town in southern Kansas. There was nothing to do in that town. The main entertainment consisted of underage drinking, and parking someplace out in the country to make out. Needless to say, there were a lot of teen pregnancies for such a small town. Luckily, I dodged that bullet, since I was a virgin right up until my wedding day. (Hey, my parents read this blog. Work with me!)

But I digress. Aside from that, the only other thing there was to do on the weekend nights was to go cruising. The excitement of cruising in Wellington was to drive down a stretch of main street, drive through the A&W parking lot to turn around, drive back down main street and turn around by the old movie theatre. Repeat about 100 times. That’s cruising in Wellington. Woo hoo. I did this every weekend during my high school years, and even during college when I was home on the weekends.

The height of teenage hormones really ran wild if there was a certain boy or group of boys following you down main street. Looking back, it was only a two-lane street, so whatever car was behind you didn’t have much choice but to follow you, but at the time, that was enough excitement to send us girls into a tizzy.

Anyway, since you could probably guess that cruising got a little boring after awhile, we always got to the point of creating our own excitement. In the hands of a gaggle of 16-year-old girls, that could be a dangerous thing.

One night, a bunch of friends and I went out cruising, which consisted of seeing how many of us could shove ourselves into my Cavalier. (We could have won any clown car contest.) We quickly saw that my ex-boyfriend was out cruising, too. We will call him Jay. I don’t even remember how my relationship ended with Jay, but I do remember that while on a “break” with his current girlfriend, we “hooked up” as kids would say now (isn’t that the lingo?). Anyway, that, I remember, did NOT end well.

When we saw Jay out cruising, we made it our goal to terrorize him, which in our minds, was the key to a fun evening. First we tried to subtlely follow Jay, but we needed more excitement. So logically, we decided to do something to his car. We stopped at the grocery store. I decided against eggs because I didn’t despise him that much, so we settled on mustard. Mustard would show up nicely on his big black truck.

We purchased our condiments and off we went. I was driving, so technically I could be considered innocent, right? We cruised up along side Jay, and my partners in crime hung out the window and squirted the hell out of his truck with mustard. Then we sped off giggling. Jay was pissed.

We spent the rest of the evening trying to hide from him. Considering my previous description of how small a town I’m from, that was not easy. It didn’t matter if we pulled over in a crowded parking lot and turned off our lights, he was onto us. Finally, when we thought we had lost him, we pulled over at Love’s for a bathroom break. We weren’t there 30 seconds when Jay pulled up blocking my car in. Oh, double crap. He just came up to me and said, “Do you have any idea how difficult mustard is to get off of my truck?” And then he smiled. The damn charmer.

Things worked out okay that time. Jay and I later hooked up again during college. Again, it didn’t end well. Why don’t teenagers know how to leave well enough alone?

I ran into Jay a couple of years ago in Wellington. He’s been divorced a couple of times and has a couple of kids. He’s now bald, and he looked as if he had swelled. And the way he was staring at me, he knew he screwed up.

Satisfaction is still sweet, even if you have to wait 12 years to get it.

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