This is my story about my old friend Dave and his transition from basic obscurity to the king of our town.
Dave was a grade ahead of me in school. He moved to Cameron in his sophomore year, and had 3 friends that he hung out with, but he was very shy and quiet, and most of us had never heard him speak. Some of my friends didn’t even know who he was when I talked about him, which is relatively weird in a school of less than 300 kids.
I met Dave at the Marshall County Fair during the summer leading into my junior year. I was talking music with one of his regular 3 friends, Kyle. Kyle said that I should talk to Dave because he had all kinds of instruments and was into the same music as I was. Dave and I kinda rambled on about shit, but after a while we found a lot of similar interests, and I said I would like to see all of his musical equipment sometime. We agreed to hang out, but I’m sure we both didn’t actually think that would ever happen.
Later in the summer we met up. I can’t remember the details, but we hung out and talked music and I also realized that he was a big Steelers fan like I was, so we also hit it off on sports. I then told some of my friends group about him, and my buddy Campbell wanted to see his guitars. Those two hit it off and started to play music sometimes, all while me and some other friends started to hang out with Dave and talk sports and other common interests.
Dave’s dad and stepmom lived in one of the biggest and nicest houses in Cameron. He had the entire 3rd floor which was a full apartment. The place was really open and spacious, and the windows overlooked the tiny town and main roads. We all fell in love with the place and Dave started to come out of his shell. His friends Kyle, Dishman, and BK started to hang out more. We all knew each other so it wasn’t weird or anything.
Slowly but surely we introduced most of our friends to Dave and his sweet setup. It seemed like every night in the summer more and more people would randomly show up to hang out. It started out as Me, Campbell, Bear, Barbalate, Spike, Kyle, Dishman, and BK, but soon there were many more people there regularly. None of us had played Halo on XBOX and we all got addicted. We would have tournaments all of the time, and we got super competitive. I have to mention that we would also play a game called Fusion Frenzy and it was so damn fun. Anyway, to break up the video game playing, we started shooting water balloons out the 3rd story window with a 3-man slingshot. The windows opened perfectly for this, and the main intersection in town was dead center when you pulled it back. This made for so many laughs and pissed off people in town. The cops showed up on more than a few occasions and told us to knock it off. Dave’s dad and stepmom were not too happy about a lot of our shenanigans, but they were troopers, and never gave him too much shit. We would mostly do the dumbest shit when they were out of town. I have so many memories with the water balloons, and messing with people that we knew when they drove by. We eventually bought a hub that connected 4 XBOX consoles together so we could play 4 teams of 4 on 4 different TVs, which most of us didn’t even know was possible. We had to seek out the 4th XBOX because Cameron was a Playstation town. I don’t remember where we got it, but I know it brought in some new full-time Halo players. We usually had people waiting to join a team when one of the 16 players had to leave or wanted a break. It was starting to get pretty busy up there, and we all started hanging out around town together and not just at Dave’s.
Going into the summer after Dave graduated high school, the house was lit up and rocking every damn night. We would have 30 or 40 people standing outside on the corner just hanging out, waiting for Dave to make the call of what we were gonna do. Sometimes we would have a fake car show with your typical small town High Schooler’s cars. A bunch of beat up Cavaliers, S10s, and Rangers. We would line up and parade around town and just be goofy and mess around. Sometimes we would go on missions for shit, usually a new 3-man slingshot, because the good ones were hard to find, and we needed one that could get a water balloon all the way to Green Valley Road, which was well over 100 yards away. A few weekends we had huge parties in the back yard. Kegs and 50 drunk kids, right in the middle of town, but they had a 7’ tall stone fence around the property, so nothing was ever said about it.
Dave’s fame was now at an all-time high. He was King of Cameron. We put out a guest book at the top of the stairs going into Dave’s 3rd floor so we could keep track of who all was there on different nights because sometimes there were so many new people in and out we couldn’t keep up. Everybody was at Dave’s at least once, and they all talked about it. We would put on little comedy concerts up there. Our friend Adam Hartley and I would mess around with a guitar and microphone. Everyone would gather around and get quiet while we sang some dumb songs to make everyone laugh. It was such a good time and unique experience. Dave had girls around all the time now, and his phone would never stop with people calling early in the day asking what the plan was. That summer was so epic, especially for Dave. He was a small town god like our town had never seen and I’m sure will never see again.
Dave left for the Air Force sometime in October and there was a bunch of us there to see him off. I’m not sure if we talked about it or not, but it was really kinda sad to see his run come to an end. Not that Dave wasn’t a good friend and genuinely cool guy, but I figured that the days like this were gone. He was outgoing and fun, but I wasn’t sure that he had the personality type to conquer a new place the way he did our town. It was all shear timing and circumstance that got him to the place he was in Cameron, and for whatever reason it made me sad to think about that.
When Dave and I both got out of the Air Force, we started hanging out again immediately, but his Dad had moved out of the big house and we were now into our early 20’s. He had a cool apartment above his Mom’s garage in the country and groups of us would go out and hang out a fair amount of the time, and it was cool, but it never got anywhere near the fun we had in high school. I guess it usually never does, but there was just so much anticipation silently inside of everyone. I blame none of this on Dave himself. He didn’t change much, but I think nostalgia got the best of me like it does a lot of people, and we just wanted some of those old memories to come back to reality. Though most of the people that used to hang out were in school, had a family, moved away, or worked long hours, so it couldn’t have worked anyway.
I haven’t talked to Dave in probably 10 years. I think he still lives in the apartment at his Mom’s, but he went silent on all of his old friends. Nobody really knows anything about him. I’ve said for years that I need to reach out and see what the hell he’s up to, but of course I never do. I just really hope that the way I painted this picture isn’t the reality that he lives. I hope that crazy year in high school didn’t change his perception of reality once people didn’t come around anymore. That’s life for all of us. I only see one of the people that I mentioned in this entire story. This obviously isn’t Dave’s actual story, but my recollection of what I see as a really unique and cool part of my old friend’s life. For 2 years, I had never heard him talk and wasn’t sure of his name, but his 3rd year in our town was the most epic goddamn year you could have in a small town, and I think his story deserves to be told.