Brian and Billy
My two best friends help take my mind off of my parents’ troubled marriage
Most nights, I high-tailed it out of the house after school. I had a 1966 dark green Chevelle with a three-speed manual transmission. The shifter was attached to the steering wheel, three on the tree, it was called. “I’m going out with the guys,” I said to Mom and Randy as they sat at the kitchen table.
I would typically pick up Billy Cuff and Brian Hood and head out to the Quakertown Circuit. It was a loop about five miles in length. The guys called me the “taxi driver”. We started at the Quakertown Shopping Center, drove down Broad Street into town, looped around some stores past the Palace Theater—back to Broad Street, returning to the shopping center.
We beeped at other cars, checked out the girls, and talked on the CB Radio. Holding the microphone in my right hand, I click the button. “Breaker one-nine, This is Spiderman.” We used all the lingo. What’s your 20?, Hey Good Buddy, What’s your handle?
The ignition for my car was in the dashboard, and the keys could be removed while the engine was running. As we were driving down the road, Brian pulled the keys out of the ignition and held them up in the air, dangling them just out of my reach. “Hood, give me my goddamn keys.”
Laughing, cackling actually, he held them out of the passenger window with two fingers swinging them around.
“Hood! I’m fuck’n serious.”
“Okay, I’m hungry anyway. Let's go to Frank’s.”
Two guys from New York City ran Frank’s Pizza. Frank made the cheesesteaks, and Guido, the pizza. Frank was working the grill. He looked over his shoulder. “What da – ya want?” he said in a thick Italian accent.
“Frank, c’mon, you know,” I said.
He smiled and added four slabs of bright red beef to the grill and, with some quick tap, tap, taps with the spatula, started working on my order. Guido delivered our meal to us, cheesesteak and fries for me, and a pizza for Billy and Brian.
The steam rose above the long roll, and the melted cheese on the shaved beef almost bubbled. I took a tentative, painful bite. I sometimes actually burned the roof of my mouth on that first bite. The roll was crunchy and soft at the same time. The steak, salty and savory, mixed with the gooey cheese.
Brian was the crazy one of the group; he was tall and thin with jet black hair. He had no fear and would jump off the cabana roof into our pool that was twenty feet away over a concrete deck. Brian once drove his 1974 Gremlin, the special edition version with Levi’s interior, on to a flooded road. It started to float away, and we had to climb out the windows and push it back. The last I heard, Brian had joined the Army and was driving tanks in Germany.
Billy was nerdy, short, thin, and had big ears. In grade school, we told him he looked like a VW going down the street with its doors open. Billy was almost as bad at soccer as I was, but he didn’t score a goal for the other team like I did. Billy was killed in 1993 in front of his fiancée as he changed a flat one, rainy night.
Billy picked up a slab of pizza. “So your dad moved out?”
“Yes, he’s staying with his old boss.”
“What’s it like living only with your mom?” Hood asked.
“Weird. I thought she was going to be okay, but she’s taking her pills again. Dad calls them her prescriptions.”
“Are you going to have to move out of your house?” Billy asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I hope not; I like swimming in your pool,” Billy said.
We ate in silence for a while. “Hey, stay over at my house this weekend; we can sleep in our trailer,” Hood said. “Kristi will be there.”
Kristi was Brian’s sister and was built like a brick shithouse. They had a small travel trailer that was parked in his parent's driveway. We often slept out there and listened to Cheech and Chong.
I swallowed the last bite of my cheese steak. “Sounds good.”
Billy piled up the paper dishes on the big silver pizza platter. “Let’s make like a tree and leaf.”
“Yeah, let’s do that!” Hood said.
This is a scene from my upcoming book Motorcycle Stories - Finding forgiveness on the open road. It is the story of Scott, a young timid boy saving up and buying a motorcycle that becomes his lifelong love. He and his best friend Ross take motorcycle trips around the North Eastern United States where Scott faces his fears and comes to grips with his drug addicted and abusive mother. For more about the book, please see https://www.scottocamb.com/ and subscribe to my Substack to stay informed about the book’s launch this fall.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! I will take this ride with you, my boy, and look forward to it. Kids today wouldn't even know what "three on the tree" means. Your chapter called to mind my own teen-age experiences of "cruising the boardwalk", circling round and round Beach Street every Friday and Saturday night. How we loved our cars, ogling and yelling at the boys, hooking up ( well, hooking up in the OLD sense of the word, not today's definition. ha ha ha.) I am going to have to write about that too! How about giving us the date on this adventure? What was it -- late 70s?