Dietrich! Your ass… Is mine.

Less than half the age I am today, I rode in the rear passengers’s seat of one of my only friend’s in life’s mid-size American four-door. It was November, maybe December — around the Thanksgiving holiday, at any rate — & we were engaging in that American teenage pastime: lacking direction. Friday evening, done with school for the weekend. Teetotalers, each of us. (With one exception, I would learn a dozen years later. How little I knew, that the one who would be my only friend, the next year, after the others had scattered to various campi of the state university system, was not a man of varying, changing interests, but an easily-distracted drunk.) What to do on a weekend, no libations, no must-see films at the kino. What to do.

We drove. Or, rather, M. drove. It was his car, his parents’s car, that was acquired for his disposal. We had a cd-to-tape-to-tape-deck music set up, Prodigy, I believe; or, any rate, regardless the actual sonic category, we were discussing “Firestarter” as we rode. Not all of us were sold on it. Most, in fact, were hung up on Keith Flint’s punkishly rave trappings, his jittery steps & repetitive waving of his palms against his clownish ‘do. (For my part, not yet having access to MTV in my home — no cable hook-up — I only knew the song from a few spins on the local alt-rock station (which remains, in this age, 2014, the alt-rock station, though re-branded as “independent.alternative.”), & the crashing drum opening. Which, was nice, but wouldn’t endear itself to me ’til six years later, hearing t.A.t.U. repurpose it on “Not Going to Get Us” on cd on my boombox at my flat in Deva.)

So, we drove. Thinking, what to do, what to do. Eventually, of course, we settled on a late evening nosh at Johnny V’s — sometimes, I miss it still, though six years on from my last visit, I remember why I stopped; or, wait, is it seven? (really!?) — but not before tooling around on our fair exurban burg’s underutilized mid-south neighborhood, near the independent grocery & due east of the park where we played pick-up football.

Going south down 76th, we came side-by-side to a sportier American car, possibly also four door, but probably just two, & we waited out the light. (Semaphore, I would say, to be fancy, & also wrong, just retroactive interference, my Spanish &/or Romanian vocabulary, ‘semafora’, creating a false cognate of the English ‘semaphore’. The term, of course, one more common to our driver’s Boy Scouts background.) Our opposite coach revved his engines — or hers, the driver quite possibly having been female, my memory of the event not as perfect as I’d like, more than a decade & an half on — then we, ours. We were going to drag-race. Or, at least, supposing it.

We didn’t drag-race. The other driver still drew a commanding lead, at the light’s change. Sped off, winning. All we were left was to sputter, “Dietrich! Your ass is mine!” Dietrich, of course, or likely, the shorthand, to fit the then-six-characters-limit for Wisconsin auto tags, ‘DTRICH’, being the car’s tag, &, we guessed, the driver’s name.

Dietrich. Your Ass. Ours.

All these years later, I have yet to find Dietrich. To stake my claim. Have yet to see that tag. I have, though, seen the same vanity tags multiple times. Namely, ‘RU18YET’ (at some point, the law regarding character count changed), but also ‘GETUWET’, which maybe I have only seen once, the summer before everything changed, when I worked dayshifts at the ‘Stallis city yard off Beloit, about a mile & an half from where once I glimped Dietrich. Or DTRICH.

Still, I lurk about, hoping to find him. Or her. (Hopefully, her. Not to be overly heteronormative, or gay panicking, but if I am to own an ass, I would rather it be a female’s. & more than that, to be the ass of one particular female, herself a native, then resident of, my same hometown ’til age 14, & the year 2002. Doubtless, her ass, her first name the same as my high-school’s ‘Popsicle Girl’ — though I will provide no further elucidation of her identity — is not also the Dietrichan rear in question, as the ages do not align.)

(I am starting to lose the thread, though. Parentheticals with no association to the time period in question, the end of the first Clinton term, replacing contemporaneous parentheses.)

Now, then, to attain, for one & once & all, Dietrich. DTRICH. Where are you, drag-racing mid-nineties-vintage Westallican? Where?

I must have you. For your ass… It is mine.

Mine.

I mean, ours. I mean, I should share with my then compatriots. Doubtless, too, they have forgotten that night. Forgotten, too, they ever enjoyed the Prodigy. (
The same as, just a few years hence, they would forget they ever enjoyed the irono-contrarian stylings of Reggie & the Full Effect. (But I digress, plot almost lost, again.))

Still, they deserve that ass. That ass is as much theirs as mine. It is ours. Just as the memories are.

Even if the memories are ass, sometimes.