Spock and John Belushi bring the beer....

There's not a whole lot to do when you grown up in a small town. The days go by slow and you have to find ways to entertain yourself.



Fortunately for me, I had a lot of interesting people to hang out with.

Beachy, Way Way and I eventually got left behind by Warrie and Helly. Once they started high school, we were mere dog shit on their shoes.
So we began hanging out at the general store up the road.

The people who owned the store looked just like Mr.and Mrs.Olsen from little house on the prairie.


EVERYONE noticed it and strangely enough they moved into the store right about the time the show came out.
Not only did they LOOK like the Olsens, they even acted like them. I can't think of them without calling them Nels and Harriet to this day.
They had three kids.
The oldest one was their daughter. She stayed in her room all day and got high. She really didn't care about anything or anyone and rarely spoke to anybody. Everyone thought there was something wrong with her so they left her alone. She spoke to me a couple of times and I thought she was nice enough, but weird.
It was their sons that I hung out with. They were my age and we all managed to find things to get into.
There was Belushi, the oldest, and I call him that because he literally could have filled in for a younger John Belushi in a movie. The resemblance was uncanny. Even though he didn't have much facial hair at 15, he still LOOKED like he had a lot of facial hair. He always looked dirty..well...kind of like this...



(Do you believe he got a full scholarship to Exeter in 9th grade and went on to Dartmouth? He's an big time engineer for one of the car companies now.)

His younger brother was the complete opposite of him. Taller and skinnier with a thatch of red hair sticking out of the top of his head. He had a long face and a long nose with ears that pointed up on the ends(this is no lie..they were pointy).So we called him Spock.



"I lifted a whole case of beer from the stock room Way Way!"

Belushi and Spock were always getting into trouble. Everyone could hear Harriet screaming at them half a mile down the road from the store.
They would steal stuff from the store, like candy, cokes, flashlights, maps, batteries...you know...stupid stuff like that.
BUT, they'd also steal beer and cigarettes.
Especially the beer.

Nels must have known how much beer they were taking but chose to keep quiet about it. He'd reprimand the boys but didn't really DO much about it. Maybe the boys would have to clean and sort the recycling shed (they have redemption on bottle and cans in Maine) or they'd have to sweep the parking lot or clean shelves, you know..stuff they'd be doing anyway.
I think he probably didn't want to listen to Harriet bitch, so he just handled it himself.



"That will be fifty whacks to the pee pee Nels and no sex for the rest of your life!"

I can picture her being like that, you know?

The boys had a dirt bike and a go-cart. Normally Belushi would take the dirt bike and Spock would roll around in the go-cart. They had rigged up a box of sorts on the back of the go-cart and it served as a place to transport the stolen beer to the river, where we would drink it.

When the store was getting ready to close for the evening, Spock would sneak into the back storage area and steal the beer while Belushi kept the parents occupied. Normally that wasn't a problem because Harriet was upstairs in their apartment getting ready to go out.(Every Saturday night, the Olsen's went out with Beachy and Way Way's parents.This left us free to run wild and do what we wanted...at least until they got home at 1:00 AM.)and Nels was cashing out the register, so they were both already occupied.

With the beer safely secured in the box in the go-cart, Spock would speed down the road next to the store and hide it near the potato houses that sat near the rail road tracks. Then he'd run back home where he and Belushi would pretend to watch TV in the living room until the Olsens had left.

Now traveling to the river was no easy task. The road to the river from the main road was rocky and steep. Not only did we have to travel several miles to get there, part of the trip was that rocky and steep road. More than one of us wrecked our bicycles on that stretch of road.



Beer helped the injured feel better but the long ride there still sucked.

That's when Beachy got the bright idea to just stay at her house and drink after the parents had left.
That seemed like a good idea but then we had to worry about how to get everyone into the house without the neighbors seeing. The road was lit up right beside her house by a street light so we couldn't get there THAT way. The woods in behind the house were so dense that it would have taken a machete and an army to clear a path for us to travel that way.



We had to be creative and think of a way to get into Beachy's house....

Trying to sneak into Beachy's house to drink posed a few problems.
We decided that we could probably get by with Spock driving his go-cart down the road to the house and then shoot a few hoops in the driveway with Way Way. No one would really think much about them playing a little basketball...
But what about the rest of us?
With Belushi and Spock, me, the two GusFartingson boys, the three Skinnystrom boys, and Potato Greg trying to sneak in, we'd be caught for sure!

Finally Potato Greg came up with a plan.

We could walk down the road until we got right beside Scary Blaze's house. Then we could run in behind his house, across the lawn and in behind the garage and then through the bamboo patch out behind Lady Elaine Fairchild and Bogart's house.That would bring us directly behind Beachy and Way Way's house where we could go in the sliding glass doors in the back without being detected.



It was a brilliant plan...a little dangerous maybe, but not so much we weren't willing to risk it....

The following Saturday night we would try it and hope for success! If we were lucky Scarey Blaze might be sedated by his mother by the time the parents left....

We could only hope.

(To be continued...)