Not the party I expected

  It started like any high school weekend party. There was a keg or two, the jocks, a couple of nerds and of course some of us long haired hippies. The parents of the girl who was giving the party were away for the night and we all knew we couldn’t get too crazy. About half way through the festivities a fight broke out about some boy girl drama but it got calmed down pretty fast. It was not the type of neighbor hood that we wanted the cops to show up at. People started leaving shortly thereafter. A couple of people stayed to help clean up.

   Mitch, who was one of the high school seniors offered to take one of the girl’s home. He was a cool kid. Participated in sports, was civil to almost every different clique in the school, and an all-round nice guy. I think he was trying to cool off after the fight because he had been involved in it. No one is really sure what happened but he smashed his car in a brick wall that surrounded a area on Milton point in Rye NY called marble hall. He died and the young lady was badly injured. At first everyone was told it’s because he was driving drunk. In fact, the driver ed teacher got copies of the police photos and plastered them all over the drivers ed classroom. This was his way of drilling into our brains “DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.”

    Well like any small town we soon learned that it was a kind of cover up. It seems someone had cut Mitch’s break lines. It showed that he had tried to shift the car into its park brake mode to stop the car. But at the time he didn’t know his break line had been cut. Everyone figured it must have been done sometime during the party and after the fight. The young lady was in the hospital for a long time and paralyzed from the waist down. No one really wanted to talk about because that meant we had a murderer in our class.

    In the 1960’s and 1970’s Rye NY had a lot of people with a lot of money. The families involved kept asking people to respect their privacy. So, we did. At these type of high school parties, we were of that age where we planned out whether we were going to be sexually active and who would be our first. Absolutely none of us wanted to talk about this with our parents. Therefore, we all had a kind of silent agreement to let the grownups handle the whole thing. We also knew that break ups after these experiments into adult behavior could get messy. Which is why at the time the fight didn’t seem like that big a deal. However not one of us ever thought it would wind up with a death and permanently crippled class mate.

   As the grapevine wove it’s rumors the pictures came down off the driving education wall. Peoples circle of friends changed. After about six month the girl came back to school. She had a special van and a really nifty wheelchair. Again, the rumors whispered about large cash settlements and all of us had to act like this was just some normal kind of thing. I graduated early and left Rye but promised my friends I’d come back and participate in the graduation ceremony. It was a relief to leave because nothing was the same after that party.

   I came back to Rye about a week before the graduation ceremony. We had lived in an area of the City called Milton point. I even had a paper route when we lived there. I figured I’d go for a walk out on the point and as I was walking up Forest Ave, I stopped right about where the fatal car accident had occurred. It was right by the brick wall surrounding Marble Hall. It once been some wealth person private resident but now it was sort of a spa for the upper middle-class women. I remember when I delivered the paper, I would always get a glass of the spring water they get in a water dispenser in the main hall. I thought about the party. I kind had an idea of who might have been responsible for the whole thing and actual cut Mitch’s break lines. I pondered what it must feel like to be 17 or 18 and know you had done something that lead to a death. What it was like to walk around in school and look at the young woman you had paralyzed by your actions.  I thought about the up-and-coming graduation. I wasn’t really in the mood to play to social game one need to play at our high school but I did want to see a few close friends. I head back home in a really thoughtful frame of mind.

   I was kind of a Jesus freak hippy back in those days and I kind of understood what had been done by the adults following the car crash. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the individual who had cut the brake lines. You see Rye had a bunch of families that looked oh so well put together on the outside but once you scratched the surface boy what a mess. So my classmate had not had to go to jail or face public humiliation by the city. Yet what did it do to him and his family? Did it even register in his mind? Maybe when he got older it would give him feelings of remorse maybe not. Maybe his family thought it was just adolescent hormones that had gotten out of control. I wondered if he’s ever gotten the help he needed or if he’s spend the rest of his life with this hidden secret problem.

   I stopped going to house parties after that night. At least the ones held by classmates. I spent a lot more time in church youth fellowship. I was definitely not the party I had expected.