That night we lingered in my driveway, seven or eight of us, shooting baskets and drinking beer. It was the last night before everything changed.

We had all been at a house party, circulating between the muggy backyard heat and the bone-chill of the living room, where we tried not to spill beer on the Turkish rugs and Barcelona chairs. The outlines of these parties had become comfortingly familiar over the years--drinking skunky MGD, blasting Jane’s Addiction and the Dead, hanging out with people I had known since grade school.

When it was time to leave, three of us sat in a friend’s car down the road, headlights off, doing whippets and listening to hip hop. We cued up Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” the song that sampled Israeli singer Ofra Haza’s ethereal wail.

Thinking of a master plan

There ain’t nothing but sweat inside my hand

As we huffed our nitrous oxide balloons, Rakim’s baritone wobbled on some sublime frequency. The air in the car vibrated; the beat turned itself inside out. I leaned my head back, undone for a moment, melting into the warm vinyl seat.

Then we drove through the suburbs of Detroit, windows down, the rushing air clearing our heads. We headed for my house, the usual site for the after-party.

It was August of 1990. I had just graduated high school, and nobody was watching over what I did. My parents, who had separated the previous year, were locked in a War of the Roses-style divorce, and I was learning to operate in the yawning spaces between them.

In those days, my mom rarely left her bedroom, and I went days without seeing her. In some ways, this was for the best, because she thought I was conspiring with my father against her. She cut my dad’s face out of all our family pictures and rekeyed the locks after discovering I had spoken to him. For dinner, I’d microwave hot dogs or make a turkey sandwich, trying to avoid her until I could retreat to my room upstairs.

My dad hadn’t moved very far away, but I had only visited a couple of times since he’d left. I asked him about the man-sized stuffed teddy bear that had materialized in his foyer; was it a gift from a new girlfriend? He said he wasn’t seeing anyone. Later I got a call from my stepsister-to-be, inviting me to the wedding in Atlanta.  

My house was old and rambling, of vaguely colonial style, its white bricks crawling with ivy. The backyard, where I had sledded in winter as a kid, tumbled towards a desultory creek and the “pumphouse,” a decrepit, mossy building that looked like something out of a slasher film. I was an only child, and had the house’s upper floor to myself. I spent most of my time in the rec room, sprawled on the blue-and-white checkered couch, reading and listening to the stereo my dad had left behind, a tank-like, audiophile system with wood-grained speakers as tall as my sternum. As chaotic as my life felt back then, my house—it had long ago ceased to feel like “our” house—had become, paradoxically, a refuge.

That night in my driveway, Eric drove to the rim in a frenzy of dribbling, the ball loud on the asphalt. Carlo, a half-foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, swatted the ball into the bushes, eliciting a muted roar from our little assembly. All of us were off to college soon—mostly to Ann Arbor or East Lansing, close enough for weekend laundry runs. I was on my way to North Carolina, where I knew no one. I desperately wanted to get as far away from my family as possible. But now, as my departure loomed, I was quietly terrified. This was the life I knew. This was my normal.  

Midnight passed. Bugs spun dervish circles under the floodlights. Eric tossed me a beer from the 12-pack in his trunk. I had learned to skate and snowboard with him, first got drunk with him in the woods nearby. I looked around at my friends; these guys were all I had. And this night, I realized, was the last that we would all be together, just like this.

I plopped myself down on the rough rock wall at the driveway’s edge, suddenly unable to remain standing. A few seconds later. the sobbing rose up and washed over me. I was helpless, overcome by a mix of loss and gratitude that even today I can’t fully parse. Doug, the gentlest of us, put a paw-like hand on my shoulder. We had always mocked him for his temperament, but I was glad he was there. The heaving subsided, and my head began to throb as I stared at my feet. I couldn’t remember the last time I cried.

###

By the time I had my first summer break at college, my mom had moved to a smaller house. The move had surprised me; I hadn’t expected her to do it so quickly.  After my freshman year, I came home to work as a camp counselor because I didn’t know what else to do, and I lived with her. I missed the old house, and out of a vague sense of unfinished business, I decided to throw a party there. The place hadn’t sold yet, and I still had a key.

That first summer, we all came back, and none of us came back. A friend who had been straight-edge was now a stoner. Another talked incessantly about film. I had been a punk-rock kid, but that spring I had pledged a fraternity. I was having trouble reconciling these sides of myself; they would never fit, in fact, but I didn’t know that yet. That summer, I put all of my punk and metal LPs in leftover movers’ boxes and sold them to a dingy used-record store on Woodward Avenue. I still regret that decision.

Maybe twenty people came to the party at the old house: close friends like Eric and Kyle and Tony, other high-school types, and a smattering of new people like Susie, whom I had met at a party in East Lansing. She was everything I wasn’t: outgoing, spontaneous, endearingly loud in her enthusiasms. During the divorce, I had walled myself off from strong emotions of any kind, and my life since then was marked by a utilitarian blankness. The psychological term, I’d learn later, is dissociation. Someone at college nicknamed me “Little Buddha”; others thought I was just a burnout—too many drugs, too early in life.

Susie and I only lasted a few months, but she sparked something in me, a fire I couldn’t access on my own. We snuck into condo complexes late at night to soak in their hot tubs; closed down hockey bars in Windsor, across the Detroit River in Canada; and went to dollar movies where the audience shouted advice at the screen. At The Silence of the Lambs, we roared at Clarice Starling: don’t trust that cannibal!

We all hung out in the kitchen, its 1970s beige linoleum faded by the sun, the cabinets’ brass knobs scrubbed dull from decades of use. I leaned against the marble counter, where I’d eaten countless breakfasts as Gordon Lightfoot and America played on WCAR. I had written a shameless rip-off of Sartre’s No Exit for drama class at this very counter, drinking coffee late into the night. I watched the party happen as if from outside myself, drifting, emptily content.

The house was empty—this was before home staging became routine--and the den opening off the kitchen looked cavernous, our shadows dancing across the walls. The sliding glass patio door banged open and closed as people went out to smoke cigarettes or pack bowls. Our voices echoed through the empty rooms, the sound hanging in the air before finally, grudgingly melting away.

Toward the end of the evening, I wandered off by myself, a ghost on his final rounds, to the sun room with its blue shag carpeting, where I had opened presents under our Christmas tree—a fake tree, because of the cats. The living room, where I had slept next to the fireplace when a midwinter ice storm knocked out the power for days. Then upstairs, to my bedroom. The door was still plastered in punk stickers, a mosaic of skulls and flames and leering, iridescent devils riding skateboards. A realtor’s nightmare, no doubt.

Opening one of the windows, I climbed out onto a flat portion of the roof. A susurration of voices wafted up to me, Susie’s husky shout and Eric’s staccato laugh, along with snatches of music from the CD player. Someone was playing Nine Inch Nails.

I sat out there for a while, knees pulled up to my chest, overlooking the driveway where I had launched myself off kicker ramps and played clumsy basketball. The landscaped hillside was running riot from months of neglect, once-manicured bushes a little sinister in the spotlights. The air was cool and still; a perfect Michigan summer night.

I breathed out, and some of the tension drained from my limbs. Then I stood up and stretched. Time to leave.

Chris A. Smith is an award-winning San Francisco journalist and writer who has reported from Middle Eastern war zones and American protests, profiled big-city mayors and squatter punks, and produced deep dives into everything from political messaging to asteroid strikes to African acid rock. Find him at chrisasmith.net or on Twitter @chrisasmith.