Car Light at Night

Tonight I was walking to get dinner when I happened by a gated apartment complex. I guess I startled the security guy (no one walks in Houston - seriously, at my work they had to send a bus to carry people 5 blocks from one building to another) who responded by shining his big ass mag flashlight right in my face. My eyes are very sensitive to light. I was pissed.

I decided to yell out "It's okay, I'm white!" The guard laughed (luckily, because I don't really want to get my ass whupped with a mag light). The incident reminded me, for some reason, of a game that I invented when I was a kid.

The game was called Car Light at Night. Parents, if you are reading, now is a good time to stop.

We (my brother Bob, my best friend Vic F, and a motley assortment of neighborhood kids whose parents hadn't banned them from playing with me yet) would stand by the side of the road, a somewhat busy two lane highway, called Taylorsville Road. It didn't have much in the way of lighting. If the headlights from a car driving by shone on you, you had to do something crazy. Among other things, we mooned cars, did crazy dances, did cart wheels, shot at the cars with our dart guns, or threw rocks. We were chased by more than one pissed off driver and even caused a few accidents.

The saddest part of this whole story is that Car Light at Night was sequel game for another game I invented called Cross Light. Again, at night, we would stand on either side of this two lane road waiting for a car. When the car came, you had to wait until the last possible second to run across the street. In front of the car. Safety first! The closer the car the better, although you lost props if the car slammed on its brakes.

Cross Light came to an untimely end when a kid in the neighborhood was hit by a car while playing the game. Actually, he was just tagged, and the guy driving the car was drunk, so the situation had the potential for no consequences except that the kid had some kind of weird breakdown and ratted on us. His name was either Joey or Scotty and he lived diagonal to our house. After he was hit by the car his mom kept the blinds permanently closed on their front window and never let Joey (or Scotty) out again to play . Joey (or Scotty) had a military dad who was never home, and the mom was a little tweaked even before I almost killed her only child.

I should also mention I delivered their daily paper so it was a kind of awkward situation. I remember taking the newspaper to her house the day Reagan was shot and all I could here inside was this high pitched wail.

It prepared me well for my adult life...