Clad in denim bell bottoms and cutoffs, we gathered in the cool shadow of the cylindrical water tower. Nightly, this mecca called to us to sacrifice our minds through the passing of a Big Bambu-wrapped bud or a six-pack bought by a benevolent elder teen whose trip to the store became the perfect excuse to burn rubber with his muscle car.

Not even midway through our teens, our body parts expanded, often unsynchronized. The molten core of our beings had yet to solidify. We were impatient boys-on-the-verge, sprouting nascent muscles and peach fuzz—a hopeful harbinger of our adult selves. We grew our center-parted hair as long as possible without our uptight fathers deeming us fags.

We were, without a stitch of make-up, girls who fueled the boys’ fire in our halter tops, platform sandals, and slender fingers adorned with puzzle and mood rings. We girls could go from insecure to brazen in the time it took to down a tallboy.

With music from a portable radio or slurred a cappella, we moved and swayed—inhibitions, like pesky younger siblings, left back at our suburban homes. Our minds turned primeval, plummeting 30,000 years. As the tower’s shadow stretched eastward, we regressed into the agitated monkeys around the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey—equal parts aggression and angst. Instead of the horns and tympani of Also Sprach Zarathustra announcing our awakening, we explored Dark Side of the Moon.

Late-night probing tongues and inquisitive hands prompted awkward tomorrows unless a mutual fugue state obliterated the memory.

We poisoned our insides until they erupted, only to do it again the next night.

Fear of death was foreign to us, no matter how close its bony finger came to tapping our shoulders—for we felt more alive than anyone had before.

We were bonded together like the necklaces we forged from links of pop-top rings.
Everything and nothing mattered.

When Labor Day brought an end to our reign, we raised both beer and spray cans to immortalize our glory in 3000-point scrawl on the steel tower climbing to the sky:

Summer of ’74

A proclamation that the world was once ours.