Just another one of 18 completed novels waiting to see the light of day...here's the opening for 'Outside the Clique', a fictional tale depicted in Calhoun Falls, S.C.

This has been one hell of an eye opening class reunion. I still straddle the fence with what I should do with the dirt I’ve uncovered and the challenges I face. I had not seen my group of high school buddies in twenty years, last attending the five year get together. I had no earthly idea that their Entrepreneurship had flourished so. Hell, I didn’t even know they were all in business together. I suppose I can be thankful that I moved out of town after graduating or I too could have been part of this hometown enterprise. As it turned out, luck smiled down on me and I wasn’t privy to their mad house or at least not until the last few days, but knowing their dirty little secrets has placed me in a most uncomfortable predicament.

            We have our bags packed and ready to check out and I still haven’t shared my discovery with my beloved little trophy wife, their name for her, not mine. That would just make her an accessory too, so I need to think my next move oh so carefully as not to endanger either one of us.

Given the circumstances I could possibly work this to my advantage, even though I question whether I should have joined them for that first boy’s night out. Adult beverages have a tendency to loosen ones’ tongues. Friends say a lot of things to friends that they wouldn’t share with anyone else, especially when ripped. I suppose I’m still a valued member of the clique after all. Frankly I should count myself lucky to be here to tell about it.  I guess I’m getting ahead of myself.  I should start at the beginning and not so close to the end, since I’m as much a part of it as them now.

 

1

The latest chapter in my life actually started two months ago when I received the invitation for my 25^th Class reunion, the class of 1971. I had skipped the ten year reunion, for good reason. My second wife and I were honey mooning in Bermuda. Not even she would have granted me a kitchen pass for such a lame excuse as partying with my old school pals. A honey moon divorce wasn’t on the agenda. Two wives in less than five years, I wasn’t quite ready for a third. History has a tendency of writing its own pages unfortunately.

My buddies and I were inseparable while in high school and we vowed we would never lose scope of that fact. They didn’t. I’m the one who drifted away long before that fifth year out of school. Love had tugged at my loins and influenced the purple headed warrior to take charge of those brain cells that had not been rendered useless from toking on all those left handed cigarettes. We didn’t consider burning a joint doing real drugs back in the day. It was more of a rite of passage in a small town with nothing better to do. Hell, we had nothing better to do...really.  

Anyway, directly after our senior year I relocated one state over in Georgia, The Peach State, living on the outskirts of Atlanta, if living that close to Atlanta really has any outer boundaries. I could see Stone Mountain from my deck. Thinking back now, I should have renamed it Stoned Mountain because reefer madness had dominated much of my life there. For anyone who hasn’t traveled in and around Lawrenceville, where I lived for a while; Stone Mountain is a quartz monadnock, a large granite rock in the middle of nowhere. It has these gigantic carvings on one side of civil war heroes, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis all riding horses. The south may never rise again but we still have our rock with a confederate portrait chiseled on the side that the Yankees can’t take away from us.  

Stone Mountain claims to be the largest exposed slab of granite in the world. At the top its elevation is over 1600 feet. They say the granite reaches depths of nine miles. The carving covers about three football fields. Okay, so much for the history lesson but I just so happened to have researched this while living there. This really has nothing to do with the events that will change my life forever but it seemed like a great history lesson and they have a neat park, weekend concerts, a train ride and laser shows there. Okay, I’m done with Stone Mountain. You should be glad I remembered this after burning so many joints.

Let’s fast forward twenty years to 1996. I opened the 25th year invitation and asked my third wife, Ginger, if she would care if we attended. She had never met any of my high school buddies and being newly weds of less than a year, she humored me with my request, saying it sounded like such a quaint little town. I’m not sure about that quaint part but little certainly fist the build.  

Wifey number three, Ginger and I reside in close proximity to Charlotte, North Carolina. She’s twenty years my junior and gave up a promising striper career, headlining at Twin Peaks, to join me in blissful matrimony or at least that’s the way she tells it. I don’t remember all that much about the actual proposal but I’m sure she wouldn’t lie to me about a thing like that. She said she wasn’t interested in my money and loved me for just being me. I’m sure she’s honest as the day is long because she’s been spending it at a record pace to just show me that once it’s all gone we’ll still have each other.

In two short months I would be joining up with the old crowd. I could hardly wait. I returned my RSVP promptly and called to make reservations at the only hotel in town, a locally owned mom and pop three story restored behemoth anchoring the south end of the town. The John C. Calhoun Inn, Bar and Grill had become quite the tourist stop. This would be my first time staying there. It had been condemned during my youth but still laid claims to being haunted by a whore or should I say a Madam of the night, which had been allegedly murdered by a drunken mayor back in the late 1800’s. Playing the ghost card now drew tourists like flies to cow manure. I of course asked for the whore’s room to partake of the ambiance. It only cost twenty eight dollars more than a regular room so I thought why not splurge.

Ginger could hardly contain her excitement. She often pretended to be a medium while performing at Twin Peaks, painting her size 38’s to resemble dual crystal balls for her gypsy routine. An apparent clairvoyant, she had seen me in her future. I do recall gazing into them and being head slapped a time or two between those mountains of delight during a friend’s bachelor party. Those wonderful assets lead to my many returns to Twin Peaks and to me eventually proposing matrimony to her so I’ve been told. I’m a sucker for all natural tits and there was nothing artificial about either one of hers, so bouncy and fleshy, not like those rigid basketball sized ones most strippers sport. I think they call them boob jobs because boobs are a sucker for them.

So the table had been set. We would arrive on a Thursday. A Scotch Foursome golf tournament was scheduled for Friday for those men and woman who did play golf. A concert was planned Friday night with performances by three local bands, all made up of a splattering of our fellow graduates. The main gala would be Saturday night, a reenactment of prom night 1971. While all events would have an open bar, we were encouraged to BYOB and I opted to bring ours. In two months I would be united with the brew crew as we called ourselves back then. Ginger would require a new wardrobe for the occasion and I saw a case of Jack Daniels in my future. Neither of us would be disappointed.