Jake Allenier & the Ramada Inn
When I was 9, one of my best friends was a kid named Jake Allenier. I was older for my grade, a virgo birthday helped make it that way, and Jake was a little bit younger, even smaller than some other kids, in a way that he felt like a little brother but he always made up for it in curiosity, humor, and smarts. He used to often wear some sort of polo shirt and shorts, with large glasses that didn't help him look any bigger. As kids we explored the backwoods of his neighborhood, finding what we were sure was a creek in which toxic waste had been dumped by some nature hating nefarious baron or builder, running back to his house as quickly as we could to fetch his parents to tell them about our findings, someone to make the world just and safe again. I first saw Monty Python & the Holy Grail at his house, his mother, knowing her audience really well, checked it out for us from the Roanoke County Library.
I don't remember quite when it happened but I know Jake told me that at the end of the school year his family would be moving to Ohio (or maybe back to Ohio) and that it would be fine because there was a place called King's Island there, an amusement park similar to King's Dominion, where we'd go once he was there and have a blast. The school year began to end, finishing third grade, just in time for Jake's birthday and a party, followed by their departure from Roanoke. For his birthday, we all went to see Dick Tracy at the movie theater that was once at Tanglewood Mall. One of the cultural highlights of our youth at the time, mainly in part to the extremely excellent toys released along with the movie. I gave Jake a few of the villains for his birthday, they really were rad. After the movie, and after his other friends had said goodbye, I rode with Jake back to the Ramada Inn where his family was staying on their last night in town. We hung out for a little while their hotel room, checking out the haul of toys he had gotten for his birthday. As night approached and it began to get dark outside, my parents arrived to get me. They talked with Jake's parents briefly asking them about the party and their move to Ohio. I don't remember panicking or feeling anxious but I remember Jake and me getting really quiet, a bit of a shadow closing in over what we knew was next. Most likely noticing this, our parents tried to ease our goodbyes, talking about how we'd be sure to write and call, and maybe seeing each other sooner than we thought. With a few "okay... okay... bye"s, we left the hotel room. Before I had gotten very far down the balcony at the hotel, Jake came running and hugged me. We said goodbye for real and left the Ramada Inn. It wasn't until the ride home that I started to cry, a weird kind of premature sadness you start to understand when you're getting older, a permanence and finality to things, even if they hadn't happened yet, that just a few years ago weren't there when you were 6. When I got home, I called Jake at the hotel, I asked him if he had been crying and when he told me he had I admitted the same.
I may have talked to Jake just one more time since then, later in the summer, to see how his move went, then, for whatever reason, never again. He might be in Ohio or wherever, he's one of those people who Facebook and the internet has never been useful in finding. And at 42 sometimes I admit that maybe it's for the best. Maybe it's been too long to have meaningful rejoinders and we realize we're super strangers who grow awkwardly silent after talking about the one formative birthday of his that happened over 33 years ago, doomed to the same fate we had as kids to have that last phone call then never speak again. But maybe I'm wrong, who knows...
One of the funny things about returning to a town where you were young are the transparent events and feelings, just outside of your periphery, that are sewn to memories of a place that both does and doesn't exist anymore. When I was a kid, we lived in the county, the Ramada Inn seemed fancy and foreign in the same way that the resorts in Disneyworld were. It was this secret fortress of 80s decor and rooms that housed that specific memory and in a way, despite anything that came of that building, it remained that way in my mind. At the time I never would have thought one day that I would live near by, passing it each and everyday on the way to work, making it more and more ubiquitous and undefined as the years went by. That one day, I would see it again and forget about Jake and seeing Dick Tracy and the summer that ended third grade until in the most ironic of circumstances, seeing the Ramada again just before it too was gone. Memory is a funny thing, but then again so is living in Roanoke for me, a land of phantoms, the quantum empire of my youth.