SELF-IMPLOSION

The last time I saw the Rockets, Lenny D. kept pestering me to sell my concert tickets at regular cost. I'd spent the summer of 1981 teaching swimming classes and lifeguarding for the Bruce Township Parks and Rec. Not much money coming in; yet, I'd purchased those two tickets with the intentions of asking my coworker, a popular high school cheerleader, whom I never talked to except for the occasional "hello," if she'd be interested in going. In order to challenge myself, I told a few friends, perhaps for no better reason than to hear their words of encouragement.

Thus Lenny D. And his phone calls. And he wasn't a friend. Just someone from my high school graduating class. The cousin of a friend. "Are you going to ask her?" I heard him repeat into the receiver every time I gave a reason for my delay. I hadn't yet discovered that some ten years later he'd run a backhoe over a major gas line in downtown Rochester, Michigan, and blow up a building. I had learned about the explosion on the local news. His involvement was revealed months later when I asked, "What happened to your eyebrows?"

He fessed up to the accidental dig but claimed no one informed him of the gas line.

"You're lucky to be alive," I said. He acted like it wasn't such a big deal. No deaths occurred and the area had been evacuated.

"You're too late," he claimed. "Why don't you sell me the tickets?"

The phone calls continued into the next morning, the day of the concert, pushing me over the edge. "I already called her," I said. "It's a done deal."

Shortly thereafter, I picked up the phone and made that call. There's no sense in going over the details except to acknowledge that it was our first and last date and that I had probably sabotaged all chances of ever dating her again. By the start of my senior year, I became a faded memory.

As for Lenny D., I'd run into him now and then. "Hey, can you give me a ride home?" he asked. He had a suspended driver's license for too many DUI's and the Michigan State Police were waiting for him in the parking lot of our local watering hole.

"Sure," I said, knowing that my condition faired much better than the night I'd last seen the Rockets in concert.

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