And come they did, the rowdiest youth of all central Virginia and points beyond, to this place where the routes of very disparate sorts of people crossed paths and conspired both to create and witness together a remarkable, weird, voluptuous scene. As no one ever wished to be the first to arrive at Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House on a given weekend night, vehicles customarily would cruise back and forth in front of it once nightfall came on, slowing as they passed, before one eventually committed and turned into the driveway at a slow, respectful speed and at last tentatively rolled to a stop in some discreet, remote location on the lawn in anticipation of the scores of vehicles destined eventually to follow. Usually it was the younger kids who arrived earliest, boys newly possessed of their learners’ licenses, younger friends piled in with them, eager to witness for the first time the incredible mythology of the place that had been recounted to them by their slightly older siblings and acquaintances.

If an observer were to attempt to track types, or perhaps stereotypes, one might safely say it was most often the rednecks who were next to appear after the newly mobile youths, truck engines rumbling to a halt wherever they pleased, often belligerently taking up significantly more space than they needed. Then the occupants of cab and bed alike would gather on flung-down tailgates, waiting—boots dangling, drinking cheap beer, muttering jokes and oaths—until enough other people arrived for them to make their collective move toward the house. Following these rednecks there would appear the socially ambitious preppy kids, mostly of white middle-upper class stock and overanxious in their desire to exhibit their studied potentials to appear cool. The Sports Utility Vehicles and occasional sports cars of the parents of such youths would be followed by the heavily-stickered, more rundown vehicles of the alternative crowd, who cared almost nothing for the scene and merely desired a place to get high, listen to their music, and converse quietly among themselves. Often the alternative kids lapsed immediately into critiquing and laughing at those who had arrived before them, for knowing themselves to be different—in appearance, if nothing else—they proudly claimed and reveled in the deviant license of the counterculture minority status they had staked as their own. At last came what was commonly referred to as “high tide”: the big push or surge of jumbled people, not all of them high schoolers, representing all manner of identities and walks of life. There were, of course, the athletes and a couple carloads of the least socially-inept and more self-possessed geeks from school, but also there were those we labeled “has-beens,” the recently graduated young people who had not departed for college and still awkwardly sought to run with the high school crowd. A certain strain or unease accompanied the presence of these ghosts of classes past. Yet more peculiar than them were the full-fledged adult participants: the falling-down middle-aged alcoholic man everyone laughed at, the thirtyish blonde whore who had done the better part of the football team in pairs or in groups (“Y’all are at y’all’s sexual peak,” she had said to us more than once), and a nondescript fatherly man we initially had taken for a narc, but who eventually had earned our trust, functioning as a kind of unofficial vendor of liquor and cigarettes, and never hesitating to transport the younger kids on their maiden beer runs.

Throw these people together, deep in a collective state of social confusion and chemical inebriation, and one might imagine the shifting tide of crazily happy faces that rose and receded each weekend in the various rooms, hallways, and dim stairwells of Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House. True, it was, by turns, a beautiful, terrible, wrong, and lovely thing, but the force of its existence proved both undeniable and overpowering to us all, for within that house, though we could not articulate or even fully grasp it, all of us heard and felt, however vaguely, that feverish, short-lived heartbeat of teenage wildlife which called to each of us, stoking every youthful heart to dreams, possibility, and action.

***

I doubt my own experience of Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House was much at variance with that of my companions and fellow revelers, though I did have my own regular way of going about the place. I made it my habit, for instance, to first investigate the kitchen every time I arrived, always noting how there hardly ever was any food inside the stained and smeared refrigerator, while some form of alcohol seemed to lie behind the door of nearly every cabinet and closet, waiting to take part in the unceasing flow.