It was a Saturday night in September 1973 — the last one, in fact — and I was in the Crazy Horse in Georgetown.
It had been the bar of choice for my friends and me since the summer of 1969, but on this particular evening I was alone and getting nowhere.
I had two choices. I could give up on the evening and go home, or I could do something I had never done before. It was already 10:30 p.m., but I could call someone I knew but had never dated and see if she was busy.
This was not me.
I was not spontaneous.
I had met her the previous year when she was dating my friend Chris. They had stopped seeing each other long ago. I don’t remember how I had acquired her phone number, but I had it. I went down to the pay phone in the basement of the club and called her.
Nothing to lose, huh?
Surprise of surprises, she was home. I asked her if she wanted to go to a midnight showing of the new movie, “American Graffiti.” She agreed, and I went to pick her up.
That was our very first date. She later told me she was glad I had asked her out, but she was annoyed with herself that I was able to catch her at home on a Saturday night.
But we did hit it off. So well in fact that it was 8 1/2 years later we got divorced. The last time we saw each other or. spoke was April 1982 when we filed our last tax return as a married couple.
That was more than 41 years ago, and times go by that I don’t think about her at all. It turns out she wasn’t the love of my life, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t good memories.
Sometimes it’s tough to be sure of what those good memories mean. Was I happy because of her or was I happy because I was 23 years old and looking back from 73? Or was it a combination of the two.?
At any rate, “American Graffiti” still touches my heart, and one reason it does is because in a fairly sneaky way it has a very sad ending.
Spoiler alert?
For a 50-year-old movie? Anyone who hasn’t seen it by now isn’t going to care.
The last thing we see on the screen, as Curt’s plane carrying him to college flies off in the distance, is the story of what happens to the four boys. John is killed, Terry is MIA in Vietnam and amibitious Steve not only never gets out of town, he has a horrible career. The misbegotten sequel five years later did improve things for one of the characters, but not that much.
Even Curt, who goes off to college in the east, has a mixed blessing of a future. Yes, he becomes a writer. But what causes a boy who is 18 in 1962 to end up in Canada? Vietnam? Draft evasion?
We barely have time to think before the credits come up with a wonderful Beach Boys song.
“American Graffiti” is a Baby Boomer movie, although setting it in 1962 and making most of the characters 17 or 18 means they weren’t boomers but war babies.
But in our eyes in 1973, they were us.
And if I never see my date from that night again, as I almost certainly won’t, enough time has passed that I can remember her fondly.