{bazima.com}

You are part of an incestuous lot, and you have our own language for everything. For example, hooking up is "scamming". To "score a packy" is to find some of-age passerby willing to purchase beer by the case and bottles of root beer schnapps from the liquor store for some seemingly languishing local teens with one eye on the lookout for the Five-O. You plant yourselves and assorted summertime lubricants, including bug spray stolen from the 7-11 and a boombox complete with Metallica, Led Zeppelin and Beastie Boys cassette tapes, at the top of an open field surrounded by woods in a section of town called the Highlands. You've dubbed yourselves The Highlands Crew.

By day you hang out in front of The Coffee Connection waiting for the sun to go down. By night you are on the loose. This is, in fact, how you spent the previous summer and the summer before that. These are your quintessential, romantic teenage years. You are nostalgic for them as they unfold. Still, you sense that something's got to give. Maybe it's the sheer promise of the summer before your senior year that's got you anxious, or just the fact that you've already scammed with all the guys in The Crew and are hungry for fresh boy-meat.

So when you're standing in line at The Coffee Connection counter and notice the new guy behind it and your best girlfriend Katherine throws an arm around you and says, "Can we just talk about how that dude is a hot piece of ass?" you see an opportunity for some serious business to give way. Like, the business between your legs. Suddenly, all the boys you know and love with their floppy Mohawks and bleached blond devil locks pale in comparison to this guy's obvious college-guy-ness. With his shoulder-length halo of ringlets and legs that go on to forever plus infinity, he looks like no one you've ever seen before except on TV. In fact, you think he looks exactly like Michael Hutchence from INXS. Yes, here in your coffee shop, is A MAN, and you say to yourself, you are, like, a woman. With real feelings and thoughts and desires. You are on the edge of seventeen. You are a white-winged dove ready to soar beneath an electric thundershower of his exotic, collegial manliness.

While your crew hangs out outside the coffee shop, you and Katherine spend more time inside loading up on caffeine solely for the eye candy. And the eye candy's swagger says he knows it. He cools himself in front of the cheap plastic oscillating fan, wiping coffee grinds and sweat from his brow. It is just like an INXS video. He officially enters your life when, after handing you another cup of coffee as you fumble for the crumpled up dollar bills you stole from the front pocket of your dad's Levi's, which you also stole and are actually wearing because they are perfectly worn-in and really bohemian, he waves your money away, says it's on him, and tells you that his name is, of all things, Ziggy.

Amazingly, randomly, you actually end up hanging out with him one night. As the crew gathers for the Highlands trek, you and Katherine secretly plan to boldly go where no crew member had gone before: somewhere... else. You find yourselves kicking back in Ziggy's white VW Rabbit convertible, smoking a bowl, nodding your heads to the rhymes of De La Soul. You are gleaming and slightly stunned and plastered with a perma-grin. You wonder for an instant why he wants to hang out with teenage girls, but then you think: you are really mature for your age. And you understand that Ziggy is a free-spirit! A collector of experiences! You think he must have been sent.

When he asks if you want hang out in Oak Park tomorrow night, Katherine says, "What's Oak Park?" And Ziggy says, "Basically..." (He often starts sentences with "basically" which you find cool and refreshing.) "...It's this park that my friends and I like to chill out in," he says. "We usually bring a tent and spend the night. We could do that. There's this cool clearing in the woods that’s perfect for it." And you think, Oh my god--yes. We are totally going to party in different woods. Highlands Crew, take that!

Cut to you and Katherine hectically primping in front of your bedroom mirror, waiting for a call from Ziggy you're both betting will never come. Meanwhile, you have each told your parents that you are sleeping over the other's house. Frankly, with all apologies to your dad, this inherent trickery is one of your favorite things about being in high school.

With all the planning and deception and fantasizing about what could happen between Ziggy and either one of you, you and Katherine have already invested, like, your future children and your children's children into this night and only then does it occur to you that one of the things that could happen when two girls go into the woods with a random guy IS MURDER, so when the phone finally rings you and Katherine have worked each other up into a giddy girl-time frenzy of terror/ecstasy but you breathe and you wait until the third ring and then you go "Hell-oh?" all super-friendly, yet casual, calm, cool, collected, and most importantly, very adult-like. Ziggy tells you he's already been to Oak Park to pitch the tent ahead of time. Ahead of time, like, in preparation for your UNTIMELY DEATH.

"I'll meet you in front of the coffee shop in an hour," he says. And that's when you get THE KNIFE.

You and Katherine exchange lip-biting glances in the kitchen. You could be in some very serious shit that you may not be brought out of with every thing intact. At the same time, he doesn't seem like an axe murderer. You grab a knife that happens to be the dullest one in the collection. After strategically stuffing it in an inner compartment of Katherine's overnight bag, the two of you carve out silent "GRAB. THE WEAPON" signals and practice a variety of "if he grabs you like this, I'll go like this" scenarios.

You are both sitting curbside, nervously pulling on the frayed edges of your cut-off jeans, lighting one Camel off another. The streets: dead. Your crew: deep in the Highlands by now. Nobody knows where you are. But you are doing it. You are officially seniors. And you are armed.

The object of your obsession pulls up, top down, Hutchence hair flying out like wildfire. You and Katherine pinch each other as you get up and walk to the car. The Stone Roses are blasting out of his speakers. "Hey, what's happening?" he smiles. And you totally call "Shotgun!"

The outer depths of the Oak Park Playground are in the middle of the jungles of Nowheresville and when you come to the clearing, seeing the tent is like stumbling upon the great Temple of The Gods; a teal-colored canopy in which Adonis/Ziggy lives and loves and, dressed in a loincloth, feeds red wine and grapes to women who look like Helen Mirren in Caligula. Honestly, it's as though you and Katherine have never seen a fucking tent before.

You leave your Doc Martens at the door and enter The Lair. Ziggy has brought candles, Bartles & Jaymes, and kind bud. He teaches you more drinking games than you already know because he is a sophomore in college. It isn't long before you are all singing jingles from television commercials. You talk about music and art and waterbeds and The Barbapoppas, and The Bermuda Triangle and other unsolved mysteries, and everything is deep and profound and when any one of the three of you says something funny it is brilliant and hysterical. You're also jonesing for a scam, but you are not in the Highlands anymore. This is not squirming around with one of your dudes on top of the dryer at some party in someone’s basement. This is not frenching Jeff "The Mullet" Mullane over a case of Heffenreffer while half of the crew pretends not to be watching and the other half mimes hand-jobs.

You and Katherine have forgotten all about stabbing Ziggy and running for your lives. You settle down in the double sleeping bag, with him in the middle, and listen to the sounds of the leaves rustling in the trees outside. Then Ziggy turns and puts your face in his hands and kisses you. For a second you worry about Katherine, but then you get over it because you were just lying there doing nothing and suddenly Ziggy is kissing you like no one ever has kissed you before. Perhaps because every boy you'd kissed was a child. Ziggy's hair smells like apple butter, wildflowers, and Suave deep, deep, rich, lathering conditioner and it dawns on you that this is probably what it would be like to make out with Michael Hutchence which you'd do if you ever met him.

He gently pulls away from you, smiles and sighs. Why is he stopping, you wonder. Answer: to kiss Katherine. Now you're confused. He senses this and he reaches back and pulls you close behind him. Now you are relieved! He kisses you again. And he kisses Katherine again. By this time you are thinking holy fucking shit, and you are reminded of that movie Summer Lovers starring Daryl Hannah and Peter Gallagher about a three-way love affair in the Greek islands, but you are in Newton, Massachusetts in the woods behind a public playground, and that is so fucking unbelievably kick-ass.

Now you've got one hand on Ziggy's belt buckle. Buzzing and floating in a teen dream trance you totally try to dmount him. In so doing, you learn through the coming together of the layers of your jeans and his, that IT IS HARD AND IT IS HUGE, which is, oddly enough, scary and intriguing at the same time. You know that wanting to dry hump with Ziggy is not in the best interest of your friendship with Katherine, but you are overcome with the need to let Ziggy know that if you were alone with him you would totally go all the way.

Just a few hours later, you awake with the sun to the sound of droplets of rain falling on nylon. Ziggy starts another round of sweet action--a slow motion replay of the night before--and none of you have even brushed your teeth. The world is timeless, the birds are singing, your pants are still on and so are all of your limbs. You and Katherine never kissed each other (because you weren't in college yet), but you're pretty sure that at one point you were caressing an arm that wasn't man-hairy. You're a little worried about what your hair looks like, but it is a beautiful morning and you swear that somewhere off in the distance you can hear the sound of Stevie Wonder singing the chorus of "Isn't She Lovely" just for you.

The three of you drive back to your house because you know your dad won't be there. You sit on the floor against the bed, quiet and disoriented. You offer tea. You don't even drink tea. No one you know drinks tea. You drink sugar with a tablespoon of coffee in it and shot-gunned cans of Golden Anniversary. But somehow Celestial Seasonings seems appropriate.

While you put the kettle on in the kitchen you imagine Ziggy coming in to tell you that he really wants to see you again and he kisses you and you squeeze his ass and he fondles your left breast, which you only recently realized is a little bit smaller than the right one. But before the Lemon Zinger has a chance to cool down, Ziggy says he should probably get going and you're instantly nervous for all of you because goodbyes are weird. You know you'lll never hang out with him again but that’s fine because you are mature enough to be okay with that. Besides, when you and your best friend have spent a night in a tent with a hot, twenty-something, Michael Hutchence look-alike from out of nowhere, you have truly been blessed.

You have a serious debriefing with Katherine ("Wait! He was making out with YOU while he had his hand down MY PANTS!" and "Could you hear it when he fingered me?"), and you both agree not to tell anyone about camping with Ziggy except for your closest friends, which means within 24 hours everyone knows. You curl up in front of the TV and watch Saturday morning cartoons until you both fall asleep. Ziggy stops working at The Coffee Connection just as mysteriously as he started, but the fact of him breathes new life into your old scene, so much so that you wish you had one more summer before high school graduation. You are left with a sense of something you can't quite name; an instinct that meeting him would somehow turn out to be one of the milestones that paves the road to something like adulthood.

Two summers and two intense boyfriend-type relationships later, you're home from college and you've even possibly declared a maybe major. One warm July night you trudge back home from a rock show at The Paradise (21+). You find a folded up piece of paper sticking out of the mailbox. It has your name written on it--and your name is Blaise--and inside it says, "Hey, If you're around call Ziggy."