Where Everything Is Beautiful And Nothing Hurts

When you run out of ideas, there's only one place to go.

Photo by Simon Ray on Unsplash

It started when Jack blurted out, “Free the boards!”

It was January 2011, late late at night. My friends and I were strewn across the living room of my first college apartment, a cookie-cutter three-bedroom off-campus. It was by far the most exciting place I’d called home yet. We were not drunk.

Miles and Jack had driven to Blacksburg to visit Ben and I at Virginia Tech. A year prior Miles and I had made a similar trip to JMU on which he’d meet the woman who’s now his wife and the mother of his children. Life is weird sometimes!

We spent that day in 2011 doing the kind of aimless palling around that defined our high school lives, and as 2 a.m. neared a case of the sleepy ha-has fell over us. Then, Jack said, “Free the boards!” apropos of nothing.

For a very brief moment when we were in seventh grade, “Free the boards” was a rallying cry at Swift Creek Middle School. The story goes that a handful of kids brought their skateboards to school and had them promptly confiscated by administrators. I was not one of those kids; I took skateboarding much too seriously to ever risk bringing it to school. The whole movement actually kind of confused me, but then again most things did when I was 13.

“Free the boards” was hollered out in hallways and it was written in Sharpie on binders. It was a hashtag before hashtags existed, and it wasn’t the skater kids driving it. The Free The Boards movement broke contain and somehow the whole school was in on it. The whole movement lasted probably two weeks. I don’t know if the boards were ever freed or not, but it died just as quickly as it came alive. I feel confident saying that until Jack said it that night, none of us had thought of the phrase, “Free the boards” since 2004. We all laughed so hard we passed out.

On the side of the highway that night. Apparently it was warm enough to wear the greatest shorts ever made.

The next evening Miles and Jack packed up the car and headed out. We hugged and promised we’d see each other in a few months at home during spring break.

About an hour later I got a call from Miles. Jack’s 1999 RAV4 had broken down.

Ben and I ran out the door and tracked them down on the side of I-81. We ran out of ideas pretty much immediately: we had no way to fix the car, little knowledge of the area around us, and no clear way to get Jack and Miles back to Richmond, certainly not in time for their classes the next day.

We went to the only place that we knew would host our braintrust for as long as required. We looked to the “warm yellow glow (that’s) a beacon of hope and salvation,” as Anthony Bourdain famously put it. We went to Waffle House.

Jack, Miles, Ben and I sat in that Roanoke Waffle House until the early hours of the morning. When we were on the side of the road, the situation felt helpless. From that Waffle House booth, the stress and sleep-deprivation wasn’t so bad.

That night was the first time I experienced Waffle House as the universal safe harbor. Our server didn’t hurry or judge us. The rest of the clientele passed no judgement to the four young dudes chuckling incessantly, calling seemingly everyone in their contact lists. Only a single grainy photo exists as evidence from that night, but I’d give a kingdom for a recording of our conversation that night.

Ben and I didn’t do anything for Jack and Miles that night that a cab couldn’t have, and we sure didn’t help get the RAV4 moving again. Our cumulative IQ scores wouldn’t get into MENSA, but maybe sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with them in that booth turned a stressful evening into a fun one. I learned that night that being a good friend doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got to help solve your friends’ problems. It’s just being there.

Jack’s dad was working that night, but once he got off he hightailed it from Richmond to Roanoke to get them and drove them back, which damn, what a guy. It had reached an hour that us missing class and sleepwalking the next day was a fait accompli, and yet I wanted to tell Jack’s dad to take his time. Life’s made up of nights that you don’t want to ever end, and if you’re lucky, you’ll notice when they’re happening.