Bunkers, in one word.
The unimportant town where I spent my teenage years wasn't a particularly adventure-laced place, which suited my sedentary sensibilities.
The council never licensed a coffeeshop so the kids had to score their weed from one-armed-Achmed-with-a-tattoo-on-his-stump around the back of the butcher's shop at night.
He was a really sweet guy, but he really hammed up the tough guy act so they'd feel a greater sense of mischief and, as I mentioned, adventure.
The closest thing to adventure and mystery we had access to was a bunker a few miles out of town. German-built and situated in a cow pasture surrounded by, in typical Dutch fashion, pointless little canals.
It never evoked much curiosity in my - that said, it also never evoked none. I'd cycle past it on the way to school every day, but it would only be visible once the leaves fell and I just wouldn't think about it in the rich, horizonless month of summer.
My dad had grown up in that town, and one day it occurred to me that he, as a lifelong '80s rocker, must have been much more adventurously inclined than I was when he was my age and I was the horrifying and unimaginable long-term consequence of his teenaged evening dreams.
So rather than bike five miles outside of town and cross a tiny fence in daylight and carefully vault a soggy little most into a cowpatty-peppered mirror-flat Teletubbyland to explore the bunker, I could just ask him, right?
"So Dad," says I, pouring myself a glass of milk while he rolls a joint at the table with the exact right amount of spit, and ask him about the bunker. Dad lights up, takes a drag, considering the many dimensions of the question and the fractal facets of the answer, exhales and answers.
He answers with one word.
One word.
With that word he cures me of, and rationally satisfies, my tiny smidge of curiosity. With that one word he explains that if I discover anything at all in that prefab concrete pothole, it'll be multi-used condoms and syringes and if I'm really, really lucky I'll meet some of the smelly unwashed hairies who come to the bunker to reuse and recycle them.
All that, with one word.
"So Dad," says I, pouring myself a glass of milk while he rolls a joint at the table with the exact right amount of spit. "What's in that bunker outside of town?"
Dad lights up, takes a drag, considering the many dimensions of the question and the fractal facets of the answer, exhales and answers.
"AIDS."
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