This post has been a long time coming. When I started this whole blog thing I figured that I would start diving back into memories from my youth, and while the memories from my youth are grand, they simply aren’t the Blood on Blood memories of High school. What could possibly iconify that Blood on Blood attitude more so than a post to explain the logic behind it? Well, nothing, that is why I sit here typing.
I was a grade behind my brother when this alliance started to form. It was Dan, Dave and Steve that made up the core of this little group, while I was the little tag along that no one gave even half a shit about. As the High School years went on (actually I think it was after Dan’s first year of High School while living with dad), Dan moved away to live with my mom in Arizona. That left Dave, Steve and me to tear the whole state a new one, boy god how we tried.
I am probably not really proud of some of the stuff that we did, but I had a hand in it either way. I might have cared that I was with the girl that I thought would be my wife, yet I didn’t let that have any effect on our nightly prowl. We were closer than brothers, and as such we chose the old Bon Jovi song Blood on Blood as an anthem (it is the first song on the list you get there if you happen to click through).
I haven’t heard from Dave or Steve in a lot of years now. I guess that is sort of the way it goes when you are children (basically) talking about the life you will lead later. No one really knows where their life is going to go, mere speculation does not a doctor make. We have all gone our own ways to live separate lives, which is good, there must be something after high school, right?
Yet, as I sit here thinking, I can remember only one of the very last lines from that damned Bon Jovi song. It says, “Through the years and miles between us, it’s been a long and lonely ride, but if I got that call in the dead of the night, I’d be right by your side… Like blood on blood.”
I don’t really know what happened to Dave Tolleson and Steve Fausnaugh, but I really would like to. And like the song says, though I haven’t spoken to one of them in Ten years, and the other in 15, if I got that call in the dead of the night, I would be there in the morning. We were, after all, like blood on blood.
That is all.