Only the Young

You Know Very Well

I’m driving. I’m 16, and I’m coming home from something — a game, watching a movie at a friend’s house. It’s late, dark. It’s Southwest Kansas, where all the towns are small and huddled around a water tower and grain elevator, with a gas station on their edges, lit up. I’m driving and the towns are far apart, tied together by two-lane roads that run mostly straight and flat and want you to drive them. I’m 16, and it’s March or April, the night perfect, and I have the window down. I want to feel the air I’m moving through, want to feel the moving. I’m driving and the sky is black and flecked with stars and bigger than anything has ever been. I’m 16 and “Only the Young” by Journey comes on, a song that’s already moving from the first note, the whole band there together already at speed. I’m driving and the song tells me that I’m fast and I feel fast and like I will always be fast. It’s just me and Journey and desire and the road, empty and familiar, and I push the car. Steve Perry’s voice, somehow sharp and soft, does that thing that it always does where it floats above the song and runs straight through your head to the back where it bounces and is everywhere. I’m 16 and driving and looking for tools to shape a self, to make sense of one, and Journey is telling me to fly. It’s the song from Vision Quest, the wrestling movie, which I saw sitting in the dark as one thread in a knot of high schoolers. But I hate wrestling, never understood it, and anyway my body is rushing to make itself and doesn’t yet belong to me. But I understand Mathew Modine running to this song, how a song could make you run in a way that isn’t from or toward anything, could make you feel faster, could hand you something to help you carve yourself. A girl I like has just given me a mixtape she made for me, and the first track is “Crazy for You,” also from Vision Quest, and I’m 16 and I know what that means even if I don’t know what to do with that knowledge. I’m driving and I’m fast and I become the car and the car becomes Neal Schon’s riff that smolders low under the rhythm and then explodes, but the song doesn’t because an explosion is a moment stuck to a place, and Journey has already moved on. The band all one polished thing, Steve Perry, soaring, sings “They know very well” and he stretches ‘well’ into three notes and I feel like I fit inside them, like maybe I do know. I’m 16 and I’m driving and the song fades out but I’ve already flown away.

I’m not 16. I’m sitting in Madison Park in New York on a bench by a pond capped in algae. It’s hot, humid, the air slow and thick, but this is New York and people are out. I’m not 16, and I’ve bought a book to read, a good book, full of striving to make beautiful sense of an ugly world, a book about searching for adventure or finding something and calling it adventure. But I’m not 16 and it’s hot and anyway the pretty good jazz trio that’s often in the park is playing standards for Venmoed tips. My wife and I were driving yesterday on two-lane roads between small towns upstate and stopped at some local place for biscuits and gravy served in a skillet. Between our ordering and lifting our forks, “Stone In Love” by Journey comes on, and I’m reminded how all that music is still in the atlas of me, pages of maps of old roads. And the song still slaps. I’ve raised two kids, got them through 16 and a little beyond, and one of them can make words that reveal the world as it is and the other can tie your ear to Heaven with a ribbon of sound like Journey. I’m not 16 and I’m sitting on a bench in the park with a book that I haven’t opened and won’t open and I open Spotify instead on my phone and put on Journey’s Greatest Hits. The first song is “Only the Young” and I am sitting in the park and the sky goes big and shimmering and dark above me. I’m not 16 but I have loved and been loved well, and Neal Schon’s guitar is a road between the small towns of my self, and I’m driving and I’m fast, I’m fast, I’m still fast.

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