Astrid Soderberg blew me a kiss.

 • • •

So the boys in Chrome Roses had girlfriends. Or maybe they were groupies. Or maybe they were both. When you’re in a band, it’s not always easy to tell where the line is. Norm had Hattie. Paul had Suzanne Fournier. Kenny had Carol Plummer. And I had Astrid.

Hattie, Suzanne, and Carol sometimes crammed into the microbus with us when we went to our gigs. Astrid wasn’t allowed to do that, but when Suzanne was able to borrow her parents’ car, Astrid was permitted to ride with the girls.

Sometimes they got out on the floor and danced with each other; mostly they just stood in their own tight little clique and watched. Astrid and I spent most of the breaks kissing, and I began to taste cigarettes on her breath. I didn’t mind. When she saw that (girls have ways of knowing), she started to smoke around me, and a couple of times she’d blow a little into my mouth while we were kissing. It gave me a hard-on I could have broken concrete with.

A week after her fifteenth birthday, Astrid was allowed to go with us in the microbus to the PAL hop in Lewiston. We kissed all the way home, and when I slipped my hand inside her coat to cup a breast that was now quite a bit more than a nubbin, she didn’t push it away as she always had before.

“That feels good,” she whispered in my ear. “I know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”

“Maybe that’s why,” I said. Sometimes boys aren’t dopes.

It was another month before she allowed my hand in her bra, and two before I was allowed to explore all the way up her skirt, but when I eventually got there, she admitted that also felt good. But beyond that she would not go.

“I know I’d get pregnant the first time,” she whispered in my ear one night when we were parking and things had gotten especially hot.

“I can get something at the drugstore. I could go to Lewiston, where they don’t know me.”

“Carol says sometimes those things break. That’s what happened one time when she was with Kenny, and she was scared for a month. She said she thought her period would never come. But there are other things we can do. She told me.”

The other things were pretty good.

 • • •

I got my license when I was sixteen, the only one of my siblings to succeed the first time I took the road test. I owed that partly to Driver’s Ed and mostly to Cicero Irving. Norm lived with his mother, a goodhearted bottle blonde with a house in Gates Falls, but he spent most weekends with his dad, who lived in a scuzzy trailer park across the Harlow line in Motton.

If we had a gig on Saturday night, the band—along with our girlfriends—often got together at Cicero’s trailer on Saturday afternoon for pizza. Joints were rolled and smoked, and after saying no for almost a year, I gave in and tried it. I found it hard to hold the smoke in at first, but—as many of my readers will know for themselves—it gets easier. I never smoked much dope in those days; just enough to get loose for the show. I played better when I had a little residual buzz on, and we always laughed a lot in that old trailer.

When I told Cicero I was going for my license the following week, he asked me if my appointment was in Castle Rock or up-the-city, meaning Lewiston-Auburn. When I said it was L-A, he nodded sagely. “That means you’ll get Joe Cafferty. He’s been doing that job for twenty years. I used to drink with him at the Mellow Tiger in Castle Rock, when I was a constable there. This was before the Rock got big enough to have a regular PD, you know.”

It was hard to imagine Cicero Irving—grizzled, red-eyed, rail-thin, rarely dressed in anything but old khakis and strappy tee-shirts—being in the law enforcement biz, but people change; sometimes they go up the ladder and sometimes they go down. Those descending are frequently aided by various substances, such as the one he was so adept at rolling and sharing with his son’s teenage compadres.

“Ole Joey hardly ever gives anyone their license first crack out of the basket,” Cicero said. “As a rule, he don’t believe in it.”

This I knew; Claire, Andy, and Con had all fallen afoul of Joe Cafferty. Terry drew someone else (perhaps Officer Cafferty was sick that day), and although he was an excellent driver from the first time he got behind the wheel, Terry was a bundle of nerves that day and managed to back into a fire hydrant when he tried to parallel-park.

“Three things if you want to pass,” Cicero said, handing the joint he had just rolled to Paul Bouchard. “Number one, stay off this shit until after your road test.”

“Okay.” That was actually something of a relief. I enjoyed the bud, but with every toke I remembered the promise I’d made to my mother and was now breaking . . . although I consoled myself with the fact that I still wasn’t smoking cigarettes or drinking, which meant I was batting .666.

“Second, call him sir. Thank you sir when you get in the car and thank you sir when you get out. He likes that. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Third and most important, cut your fucking hair. Joe Cafferty hates hippies.”

I didn’t like that idea one bit. I had shot up three inches since joining the band, but when it came to hair, I was a slowpoke. It had taken me a year to get it almost down to my shoulders. There had also been a lot of hair arguments with my parents, who told me I looked like a bum. Andy’s verdict was even blunter: “If you want to look like a girl, Jamie, why don’t you put on a dress?” Gosh, there’s nothing like reasoned Christian discourse, is there?

“Oh, man, if I cut my hair I’ll look like a nerd!”

“You look like a nerd already,” Kenny said, and everyone laughed. Even Astrid laughed (then put a hand on my thigh to take the sting out of it).

“Yeah,” Cicero Irving said, “you’ll look like a nerd with a driver’s license. Paulie, are you going to fire up that joint or just sit there and admire it?”

 • • •

I laid off the bud. I called Officer Cafferty sir. I got a Mr. Businessman haircut, which broke my heart and lifted my mother’s. When I parallel-parked, I tapped the bumper of the car behind me, but Officer Cafferty gave me my license, anyway.

“I’m trusting you, son,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I won’t let you down.”

 • • •

When I turned seventeen, there was a birthday party for me at our house, which now stood on a paved road—the march of progress. Astrid was invited, of course, and she gave me a sweater she had knitted herself. I pulled it on at once, although it was August and the day was hot.

Mom gave me a hardbound set of Kenneth Roberts historical novels (which I actually read). Andy gave me a leatherbound Bible (which I also read, mostly to spite him) with my name stamped in gold on the front. The inscription on the flyleaf was from Revelation 3: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him.” The implication—that I had Fallen Away—was not exactly unwarranted.

From Claire—now twenty-five and teaching school in New Hampshire—I got a spiffy sportcoat. Con, always something of a cheapie, gave me six sets of guitar strings. Oh well, at least they were Dollar Slicks.

Mom brought in the birthday cake, and everyone sang the traditional song. If Norm had been there, he probably would have blown the candles out with his rock-and-roll voice, but he wasn’t, so I blew them out myself. As Mom was passing the plates around, I realized I hadn’t gotten anything from Dad or Terry—not so much as a Flower Power tie.

After the cake and ice cream (van-choc-straw, of course), I saw Terry flash Dad a glance. Dad looked at Mom and she gave him a nervous little smile. It is only in retrospect that I realized how often I saw that nervous smile on my mother’s face as her children grew up and went into the world.

“Come on out to the barn, Jamie,” my dad said, standing up. “Terence and I have got a little something for you.”