Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Hanging out on my roof in the dark circa 1983

  In 1983 I was 14 living in Blackburn Hamlet and all of my best friends lived within a stone's throw of my house, that is to say, if I couldn't hit your house with a rock, you probably weren't my friend.
  One hot summer evening found me on the roof of my parent's house with two of my friends. I used to go up on the roof to read comic books in the summer when I was younger to get away from my little brother, who was an unrelenting annoyance of locust proportions. I'm not sure why we were up there that night, but we were enjoying the unusual vantage point in the hot night summer air. Across the street lived one of my best friends, who oddly enough wasn't with us on the roof that night. Also across the street lived my friend's beautiful older sister, who was worshipped by my group of friends as a minor deity, much to the horror and chagrin of my friend who would tolerate no talk on the subject.
  On this night, as we were sitting up there in the dark, a curious thing happened. A switched on light illuminated a second floor window in the house across the street and a female person walked into the room with a towel on their head and a towel on their body. The towel on the head came off followed by a long haired head shake and then as we sat there in shock and disbelief , the lower towel came off and we saw some bits of bits we should not have seen over the top of the window sill.
  No one said anything. Silence. It got weird. Someone said  "Oh My GAWD!". I agreed. We had just seen half of a bare naked lady after all. It probably lasted 7 seconds. As long as a top notch bull rider can stay on a bucking bull. Then the person put on PJ's and left the room.

It was surreal. We must tell no one we said. No one speak of this to anyone. It's creepy. It's wrong. We all agreed. Not good. Let's not do this again..

The next night there were seven kids on my roof. Everybody had told at least one other person and one of them had told two people. All of the noble second sobre thought from the previous evening  had gone right out the window (in deference to the much more interesting window across the street). I was actually questioning the load-bearing safety ramifications of having this many people up there when my friend from across the street walked over to my place, probably to ring my doorbell which would lead to questions of where I was etc.. so I hissed at him from the roof: "Up here".
"What?" He asked, looking around. .
"Up here" I hissed.

He looked up at me (uh, well, all of us), then across the street and then we were told to get down off the roof or he would come up and toss us all down one by one.

We complied. Besides, it wasn't safe that that many people up there and he was bigger than us.