Spent an hour this morning watching portions of “Singin’ in the Rain” … boy, that Gene Kelly had real white teeth. I heard that Donald O’Connor had to have 3 days bed rest after the “Make ‘Em Laugh” sequence.
The whole thing, though, just made me think about these two friends of mine from high school, Gene and Kelly. Inseparable. Gene wore dirty raincoats, cut-off clamdiggers and Dr. Martens, had a Fishbone emblem tattooed on the fatty webbing between the index and thumb of his right hand, worked at the local bevy. Kelly looked like Michael Anythony Hall with stringy Kate Hudson hair, always had pints of Wild Turkey in the thigh pocket of his fatigues, worked at the same bevy. They didn’t go to my school. Actually, they dropped out of Massapequa High School and were living with my friend Corrina and her mother, who was a biker chick. The five of us used to sit around on the plush velour couch and loveseat in their dark living room (vertical blinds mostly drawn) and smoke Kents and drink the cases of beer that Gene and Kelly used to steal from the bevy … they’d put a few cases on the slats that were going out for recycling, then throw them (or place them, probably, because we drank a lot of Moosehead and it was always in bottles) in this enormous dumpster behind a chain-link fence that sometime after midnight we’d pull up beside in Corrina’s Dodge Dart, lights off, and climb over … we’d have to climb into the dumpster, too (except for Gene, who was too short and couldn’t get out of it, which he learned the hard way) and pass the cases up to whomever was leaning over the edge above you. One time we went to Sunken Meadow State Park and smoked joints while sitting on the edge of the big pond in there … I made out with Corrina while her mother and Gene kept yelling curses like ”Fuckhead” and ”Douchebag” to see how they echoed off the water. We closed up shop and left after Kelly actually caught a duck and wound up snapping its neck … I remember the way he turned around and looked at us, not necessarily blankly but not quite shocked, the duck in his hands, its head hanging limply over his fingers like a soft hose.
