At 4 AM we were still passing around the perforated juice can, trading our jivey tales of horror and dread. Guys huddled around a makeshift bowl at such an hour often turn to boasts of asses kicked, money made, or babes scored; noncontenders in these categories, we three bragged instead of weirdnesses witnessed and chemicals ingested. We threw down stories ever more lurid, ever less likely. Drug-induced brain damage, criminal trespassing, and supernatural menace all crept into the fray. Finally I played my trump card.
“Probably,” I said, hesitating.
In the 80s and early 90s, greater McHenry could be a bleak place for the wrong sort of kid. If you were into sports, organized or freestyle–by which I mean snowmobiling, BMXing, jet skiing–it wasn’t so bad. If you fit in with the in crowd there was a floating party scene that moved from parent-free house to parent-free house. But if neither described you, there really wasn’t much to do or much of anywhere to go beyond a long stretch of strip mall parking lot, where you could pop the hood, assume a badass pose, and wait for something to happen. (Eventually a pool hall with an arcade would set up shop in the strip mall, institutionalizing the gearhead miniculture that had taken root on the bleached asphalt.) And if you were a pale, skinny kid like me, slipping into the modified gothdom of the late 80s, or any other kind of alien, there were also two diners you could pretend were cafes.
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When properly combined with beer and marijuana, these two, the parks and parkways, were a teenager’s best friends. Slip out the basement window, roll down the driveway in neutral, throw the Skinny Puppy tape into the stereo, light up, start up, roar off into the night. OK, past the last speed trap, around the corner one, two, five miles an hour faster than last time. Down the dirt road, headlights killed, the rest of the way on foot, on into a perfectly dark nothing.
That was more or less what we did: drive around at night, and periodically invade the parks, cemeteries, and wildernesses surrounding the city itself. A speeding ambulance or police car easily qualified as an event, and we’d pursue it to the crash site. Riddled with preposterous hairpin curves on tree-lined lanes, greater McHenry produced wrecks that were frequently spectacular to behold. Sometimes the cops would even forget to hassle us and just recount what they knew with a kind of awe.
By the fall of 1990, when I was a junior in college, Eric had moved in with Jim, and come Thanksgiving break I wasn’t home more than a few minutes before he called. “What’s up?” Nothing. “Wanna go for a ride?” Sure. “Well, all right then, there’s something you’ve got to see.”
As we approached, the nature of the terrain grew clearer. Each clump was actually a single vast willow tree, as big around as it was tall. Gnarled, primeval organisms, they towered over the marshy prairie. The ground sloped down as we drew close, the virtual floor gurgling louder, the sinkholes multiplying.
