When I was in high school I always complained about being bored.  Now that I’m older I realize that I would have been bored living anywhere because it wasn’t so much that there wasn’t anything to do in Vermont, but rather, that aside from blaming one’s lack of popularity on one’s ten year old foster brother being allowed to roam free at soccer games and pretend- bite my female classmates, there wasn’t anything to do for any 17 year old.   

Where we lived, one of the main things to do was drive our cars in oddly-shaped  laps around the town, mostly in search of other teenagers. Sometimes, we would see other teenagers and would stop and stand near their car and discuss how there were no parties going on.  Sometimes we would discuss throwing eggs at cars, which sometimes lead to actually throwing eggs at cars, specifically, the car driven by an older kid named Andy  who for some reason, nobody respected, even though he was pretty nice.

Sometimes, after making several laps without spotting so much as any person between the ages of 14 and 27, we would do a different loop around my neighborhood.  This loop gave us an opportunity to shoot paintballs at a truck owned by a guy who one of my friends believed may have been involved in the theft of his dirt bike seven years prior, and more importantly, a chance to break the Clarendon Street Record, which involved driving as fast as possible down an arrow-straight residential street in whosever 130 horsepower Japanese economy car we happened to be driving, and then talking about how much faster we could have gone if we had been driving one of any number of cars which we believed to be “sweet”, such as Dusty's absentee father’s Mitsubishi Diamante, which allegedly had a sunroof.

The record was held by a fairly clean cut and prematurely professorial guy called Dan who allegedly drove his father’s white Camry 80 or 81 miles per hour.   The belief around town was that one of my brothers also had a near-record in a gray Corolla, but this story was never confirmed, and was often confused with another story about when he attempted to break the record on a weekend afternoon and one of the neighbors called my mother to complain in either a loud voice or a New Jersey accent, depending upon my mother’s mood when she tells the story.

In 2000, I nearly lost my life in pursuit of the record while a passenger in my friend’s car, a recently-purchased Audi, which was genuinely fast, but which we regarded as approximately a lot nicer than it was.  One evening we went for a ride and several times my friend took corners, mostly alongside a river, at speeds that were usually reserved for things attached to a rail.  I was genuinely petrified, but disguised my fear in a zealous appreciation of his driving, in much the same way some of my classmates at college paraded fanatical heterosexuality in hopes of masking their appreciation of men.   

That night, after watching some dreadful movie, my friend urged me join him for a try at The Record.  I resisted, allegedly on grounds of fatigue and on actual grounds of fear, but ultimately agreed to one shot at fame.   Though his car put forth a strong effort, my friend was unfamiliar with the rules, which involved taking one’s foot off the gas several hundred yards before the end of the street and eventually, pressing the breaks to avoid smashing into the living room of the house that sat on the side of the street that ran perpendicular to Clarendon where the people who lived there were watching Letterman.  While blaming me for the accident was enough to make his parents dislike me forever, it surprisingly did not change the fact that his vehicle was imbedded in the front of a house or that he lost his license for 18 months, and he ultimately moved to Manhattan, where even people with clean records don’t have cars.

A few years back, I broke the record to surprisingly little fanfare while I was staying with my parents after my first year of law school.  The record fell quietly, during a private ceremony involving my motorcycle, which easily broke the record in 3^rd gear, leading me to believe it may even be faster than a Diamante.  It didn’t feel as good as I thought it would and until now I haven’t shared the accomplishment with anyone.  Mostly because I didn’t want to disappoint Dan Hall, but also because the only chance I had to tell him was when I saw his brother at a bar, but he was wearing overalls and looked pretty weird so I decided to take a few laps instead.