Journey and Laney

Halfway through writing the previous post, Journey blared from my earphones and as usual, rocketed me back to being 17 years old and driving down the road in my friend Laney’s muscle car, singing Wheel in the Sky at the top of our lungs, reckless, careless, and carefree. This time I remembered a few things I’d forgotten and opened my heart and mind to step into the past. As I told a friend recently, I often live in the past, replaying memories over and over in my head, and with a certain smell or song I can spend hours stepping through and around nearly visible recollections from the past.

Laney was a friend to me during a tumultuous time in my life. I’d moved out on my own at an incredibly young age and graduated high school nearly a year early. I had nothing but time on my hands. She couldn’t have been more the opposite of me. Smaller than me but larger-than-life, she had vibrant blond hair, wide, rebellious green eyes and was the embodiment of a free-spirit. My supervision growing up was militant and highly sheltered, hers was largely unsupervised and hands off. She smoked Marlboro Reds by the carton and laughed at me when I coughed up a lung when I tentatively tried my first cigarette while staring up at the stars from the hood of her car one night. She was absolutely wild and I remember just blossoming around her, shedding years of learned inhibitions and enjoying the crazy ride that was the world of Laney.

Journey (among a few others, notably Kansas and Black Sabbath) were her favorite driving music. We would hop in the huge, slightly rusty, old baby blue muscle car and drive to the lake waaaay on the other side of town, just for the hell of it. Or more often, we would drive a few towns over to go see her boyfriend, Justin. He was tiny, wiry and had long, silky dark hair with a sweet smile and a room filled with heavy metal paraphernalia. Someone wasn’t supposed to be seeing someone else but now the memory is slightly faded and I can’t remember why. What I can remember is Laney and I, with our respective boyfriends, being absolute minxes one day on the sandy edges of a large Texas lake and building a truly giant replication of the male genitals entirely out of sand. We left it for some poor unsuspecting child to hopefully kick over. In her wildness she gave me a license to be free but that also scared me. I recall pulling away from her after awhile because of that fear and just growing apart.

As one of the lucky kids with not only a car but the license to drive it wherever she pleased, she was always being hit up for a ride to somewhere. However, again the opposite from me, she had not one problem saying no. Laney had very few people in her inner sanctum of true friendship and adopted friends and boyfriends like pets. She would become enamored with someone and force them (most were quite willing) to become her constant companion until, eventually, she tired of them and moved onto the next one. I was one such pet, but our friendship outlasted her others and we stayed relatively close until I moved on, leaving several old friends behind for a new job and a new area of town.

To this day, I don’t know what happened to her and I’ve often hoped that it was something good. She is one of those friends that could’ve gone either way; a Jane Doe with a tag on her toe or a rich and thriving trophy wife, there was no way to tell. No matter what, every time the haunting lyric “Just a small-town girl, living in lonely world…” slides into my world, my heart fills with poignant and pleasant memories of the wild blonde chick who used to be my constant companion in a world of trouble and young fun.

I think its amazing that music has that incredible power to bring back the past so sharply.