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Disclaimer: some of the names in this post have been changed, sort of, to protect the bipolar.

It started last spring.

My dear old friend Butch, a guy I grew up with in the suburbs of Detroit, now well into middle age and living in Texas, got a wild hair up his ass.
Butch was born in Texas but as a child, moved with his family to the Detroit area, land of belching smokestacks, 25 degrees below zero winters and the beating heart of Rock ‘n Roll.

To say that Butch (and I) grew up in Detroit is a bit like saying Iggy Pop grew up. We spent our most malleable years there but I’m not really sure any of us in Detroit actually became wise, mature, responsible adults. We did grow taller, started shaving, lost our virginity and then, our naiveté. But as decades flew by I think most of us remained just kids with the same insecurities, neuroses and obnoxious habits we had in high school. Most of us, like Iggy, with a propensity toward addiction.

So, sometime around 1977 Butch aimed his pea-soup-colored Datsun southwest and put ice storms, industrial-hell-on-earth cityscapes and his maladjusted circle of friends in his rear-view mirror, forever.

Well, almost forever.

After spending a few decades irrigating golf courses in the Phoenix area Butch found himself back in Texas, this time as the single parent of a teen-aged, skateboard riding, mini-me named Ron.
Butch and Ron are best buds now. Butch buys Ron’s breakfast, takes him on airplane rides to places like Los Angeles and turns him on to other things that stirred his soul growing up, like the sound of a stratocaster and the smooth ride of a Cadillac STS.

And Ron is teaching Butch a thing or two, such as what the word iPhone means or the “noun” Ass Knife (When you mess up a trick and the board comes up and sticks you in the butt. “Dude Josh looked like he was enjoying that ass knife.”)

Oh, and Facebook.

I think it was about the same time that Butch was coming into closer proximity with his mortality, watching his baby son morph into a baby man and his hair morph into a whiter shade of pale, that he got the idea that he should take Ron on an airplane ride. Using the subterfuge that he wanted to show Ron around where he grew up as an excuse to revisit his own youth, one last time.

I think this was also about the same time Butch came into contact with Facebook.

Within a few weeks dozens of people he hadn’t thought about for more than 30 years were sending him impromptu instant messages over Facebook as if they had a beer with him last night, and as quickly as that Butch had organized a reunion of what he would call “The Old Gang.”

This gathering was set to be held along Edward Hines Drive at a place called Riverside Park in Plymouth, Michigan over Labor Day weekend.

Edward N. Hines Drive follows a pleasantly wooded parkway along the Rouge River for 20 miles from Dearborn to Northville. It was a place where we would go tobagganing in winter, play frisbee and have corn roasts in summer.

Oh, and during the 70s it was also a place where anyone could go and openly purchase any illicit, recreational drug that you have every heard of, in any quantity, virtually every night at huge “parties” attended by thousands of people in full view of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department. But that is another story that no one would ever believe even if I did decide to tell it. And someday, I will.

So as Spring turned to Summer it became clear that this function in the park was growing into more than a reunion of  a handful of gray-haired dudes. It was generating its own weather system and spreading like a venereal disease. It had its own event page on Facebook and a continuously growing list of potential attendees and was now being referred to as “The Grasser.”

Butch launched the idea of a get-together with a bunch of friends who used to party together in the 70s while listening to the Allman Brothers and Zeppelin, but it was Gwen who set the thing on fire.

Gwen is another close friend from the period who I personally hadn’t had any contact with for decades. When she resurfaced in my life early this year, we found ourselves chatting, on Facebook, nearly every day, about her long-time and former boyfriend Zed, who was one of my best friends since before kindergarten, and who died in Gwinnett County, Georgia under a cloud of suspicion, in 2008.

Suspiciously, not long after both of his older brothers had died, separately, suspiciously.

So there was a lot to talk about.

We talked about what had happened during our entire lifetimes since we last hung out together, a lifetime ago. We talked about a long list of people, alive and dead, all of our many exes and our current spouses. I emailed her a photo of her brown Gremlin I took in the driveway of my apartment around 1975. She sent me a pack of prints in the mail that she had made at a Costco. Mostly pictures of her and Zed, back in the day.

Gwen now lives in a southern town. Somewhere south of the Mason Dixon line but still driving distance from Detroit. Driving distance in the way that you could actually drive from Los Angeles to say, Tulsa. But Gwen and her husband were going to drive up from the bible belt in her PT Cruiser.

Gwen has a lot of friends that she grew up with that still live in Michigan. Some of them are friends of mine, some of them acquaintances, some I’ve never heard of but Gwen was determined to make sure that all of them were going to make it to the Grasser. I think she attempted to book the event at Cobo Hall but there was an AA convention of former UAW workers suffering from ALS already scheduled there.

There is no question that Gwen took what was going to be a small gathering in the park and turned it into a full-fledged reunion of freaks of the 70s. She took Butch’s ‘Grosse Point Blank’ and made it her ‘Romy and Michelle.’

To her credit, without Gwen the Grasser would have not have been successful and Linda and I probably would not have gone at all.

But her intervention did come at a price.

All summer Gwen and Butch were sort of at odds with regard to the rules of engagement. Through messaging, phone calls and emails the two of them butted heads over technicality and I personally felt the Gwen was getting a little oppresi … um, heavy-handed.

I read some of their email exchanges.

(paraphrased here)

Butch: “I hope somebody brings an iPod with a boom box or something, we can’t have this thing without some of that 1970s music.”

Gwen: “Nobody is bringing music.”

Butch: “Should we have a bbq? Who can bring plates and stuff?

Gwen: “Nobody’s bringing food. We’re going out to eat.”

Butch: “I’m bringing my son”

Gwen: “No kids are allowed.”

Butch was justifiably incensed . This idea of showing his 15-year-old around the area where he grew up had mutated into a totalitarian adults only affair where food, music and a free press were not allowed. I wondered if Jews would be welcome.

Finally, all communication between Butch and Gwen ceased and we all headed for Riverside Park on Labor Day weekend with some anxiety over how it would turn out.

Discussing the list of people who were going to attend with another old friend, and some of the history they all had with each other, I sincerely remarked that if we got through this weekend without a fistfight, it would be a miracle.

This is how in my mind the ‘Grasser’ became ‘That 70s Freak Show.’

In the end, as anticlimactic as it may have been for some, for me, That 70s Freak Show was amazing.

Most of the people there may have only known a handful of others but because of the circumstances of my close relationship to the organizers and possibly because of my slacker lifestyle in the 70s, I knew nearly everyone. Of the 40 or 50 people who attended I either hung out regularly with, had 7th grade math class with, shared an apartment with or woke up in a ditch with, almost all of them.

Although, if you were to put all 50 or so of us on an eight-hour bus ride to Vegas or jammed us all into an elevator, I wouldn’t have recognized very many. Thirty five years of dealing with gravity does things to the human body.

To be honest, I had a blast. Even if, because I still have the same insecurities, neuroses and obnoxious habits I had in high school, I probably pissed off most of those people in much the same way I might have back then.

I’m certain this is true in at least one instance. When we returned home to California, an extremely weird rift developed between Gwen and I. Something that I still can not explain or understand.

It wouldn’t be considerate to discuss the details of these somewhat delicate circumstances since it’s still pretty painful to the touch.

I will say that an inane, juvenile and public campaign was launched against me and my wife that was and continues to be, unpleasant.

I feel both sad and fortunate that some of Gwen’s lifelong friends have looked at the situation and scratched their heads.

Shrug.

Sometimes you’re reminded why certain people from your past are no longer in your life.