Geron Kees

Hmm. An opening with sparks flying, just a little. What have we here? No, no - don't tell me. I'll just read some more and find out on my own.

Amazing, the depth you have given to Jay's family. Also, the switch from first-person to third-person narrative from one scene to the next - a little unusual, but you handle it well. The last part of that chapter was wild! Not the most relaxing thing I could have read before climbing into bed with my own love for the night

I thought you'd like finding the Wildcat, so I didn't mention it earlier. I had a buddy who had one, but I just couldn't remember if it was a '64 or a '65. It was a nice running car, for stock, and pretty, too. It was also the oldest car in our little circle, I didn't include it in the shopping center crowd because I would have had to go find my old Chilton manual in order to be able to write about it with any factuality.

Yep. Everyone in high school has at least one friend like Colin who is kind of hard to manage, but still one of the crowd. There was no way I was leaving him out, even though it would have served him right if I had!

Nice chapter. Very well captures the early stages of new love. This story is set just a little earlier than I remember, but there are more than enough things I am familiar with to be comfortable with the era. This is going in a nice direction, too.You've really captured the magical essence of a new relationship. And meeting a new couple with similar views and experiences is going to make an interesting addition. Getting exciting now!

Oh, brother! Are these two a pair or what? It's amazing the two of them don't get shocked senseless by all the electricity zinging back and forth between them. Kicked the circuit breakers out here at the house three times while I was reading! Let me go find a lightning rod and get on to the next chapter .

Great story. Love and pain. Life, death, rebirth. I always know I've read something good when I feel afterwards that I want to go and write. Pardon me while I go and write.

Yeah - that hurt quite a bit. Life does that sometimes. I can't say I'm surprised. I figured it would be Alex, since Sam was the narrator. Still - a good job you did yanking my heart out. Let me go read the epilogue.

Ah. Romance is good for the heart. My heart feels pretty good right now. You did that. Thank you.

Learning to love someone beyond your family, for the first time, is a memorable experience. Talk about a whirlwind! And just the realization that it's happening is enough to scare you to death when you're young. But once it sets in - once you see what it is and how wonderful it feels - you can never go back. Love never goes away, even if the people you love do. Once learned, it sticks with you forever. And then it's just a matter of finding someone to share it with again.

Wow. I deliberately picked something short of yours to read because I can't stay long this time around, and I wanted to return the interest you have shared with me. Wow. And again, wow. Small, yes, but packs a punch that will be remembered. Only someone who has known love, and understands love, and cherishes love, could have put these words together in just this fashion. I don't know if there is a real David someplace, but if he is loved half as much as what is here, he must be a very happy man.

I had a friend who had a '64 Ford Galaxie. It was black with a red interior, and a 390 under the hood, I think. He called it "Black Beauty", and it was that. It was amazing that all of these cars were still around when I started driving in 1983, and still in such good shape. Where I lived, the muscle car era wasn't over yet. At the same time, every guy in my school did not still want one. At least as many guys wanted MGB's, or even VW's. There were even other cars crowds that revolved around these cars and had different agendas than us "motorheads". But they were not so fun to me, and I didn't mention them in my story. Let them get their own story, I say . Thanks for the nice comments.

Thank you for reading the story and commenting on it. I am always fascinated by how writing can affect some people very deeply, yet a hundred other people can read the same story and be bored or toss it off as just "okay". I've had this experience myself, where I have read something that I thought was just wonderful, but when I passed it on to friends they said later that it was "okay" or "not for me". So it puts it in perspective, I guess. I'm pleased that you read the story and could see some of the same things in your mind that I saw when I wrote it. Those type of connections are what make writing satisfying to every author.

Yup. Great chapter. You've just given me a line to use down the road someplace:what the hell was I doing on a horse when I couldn’t even roller-skate? Great line. I like Jay's parents, and the Danish is a nice touch. Gives a lot of atmosphere to the story, a sense of depth to Jay's family's past. When I came to The States at nine years of age, I was the only kid that most of my new friends had ever met who spoke a second language. I had been raised in a bilingual household - English and Dutch. My friends were forever asking what the Dutch word was for this or that. And because we were nine, and boys, they wanted to know how to cuss in Dutch, and say stuff like butt and...uh, other body parts in Dutch. I was very fortunate to meet a certain guy at thirteen, who became my first official boyfriend. He put the icing on the cake of language games when, one day, after we both had become acutely aware that something special was happening between us, he asked me how to say I love you in Dutch. I told him, and the rest is a very fond memory.

Gotta admit I am happy again. I wasn't sure if you would let Sammy and Alex heal, but they seem to be on their way. You big old softie! I didn't think there'd be an unhappy ending here - but I wasn't positive. Love does conquer all!

I hope you have just researched this very well and that no one in your life has suffered through something like this horror. Sammy is exhibiting all the correct signs for his personality type after an incident of extreme abuse. Your storytelling is spot on. I'd like to think that someone reading this story will gain some hope and insight from it in dealing with a problem in their own life. That, in my opinion, places what you've written well beyond the realm of entertainment writing.

Tough chapter, but well-done and very convincing. This is one hard subject to deal with, and I don't mind saying I'm glad you wrote it rather than I. Very good job.

San Francisco was a gay haven even in the eighties, but I don't recall knowing that as a teen. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. In any event, it certainly wasn't as well-known a then as it is today. I would not then have automatically thought that just because someone was from Frisco they would be gay tolerant. So that's why I didn't make Brian more aware of that. It was 1984. I recall a glimmer of light at that time - just the suggestion of a hope for a brighter future for gays; but overall, it was still a bleak time. Much better now. In 1984, you and I could not have had this conversation.

Oh, a Nifty Alumni, huh? Hi! I love that place. It's like when I was a kid and we'd go to the dump and dig through the piles of stuff all about. Lots and lots of junk; but you dig long enough and you'll find some great stuff underneath. In my car days in the mid-eighties I met a lot of guys who had been into that scene for ten years or more. A lot of guys that were driving in the seventies had really nice muscle that they had bought when it was just a few years old, and which they had babied and kept as close to mint as possible. I bought my Bee from such a guy. The eighties were really the tail-end years for all but the diehard cars guys, and through the nineties and the early new millennium I stopped seeing those sixties cars on the road where I live. But about seven or eight years ago, they started coming back. I decided that the guys who were teens when I was were now getting older, and wanted to relive a lot of memories. Most of the guys I see driving the Chevelles and Roadrunners and Mustangs these days are older. Just goes to show that there is no such thing as being a kid just once.

I'm not telling. Annabelle is in the sequel, too. You'll have to wait and see...

Thank you for the time you spent reading and letting me share your thoughts. And for sharing your stories with me. Definitely, a very pleasant two-way street.

Thank you. The difficult part about writing a follow up to a story is best outlined by the same muse that Brian had about summer: you are not the same person at the end, as you were at the beginning. Even though I wrote Rules this year, I've written much in between that tale and the one that will follow it. I will do my best to recapture that car summer, but - life moves on. Thanks again.

Thanks for taking the trip with me. Much to be said for the company one keeps on the road.

Brian and Ed appeared at the shopping center just before 7:15. Brian nosed the Bee into an empty couple of spaces between Wade Tomlinson's Chevelle and Pete Brigg's GTO. Pete was a sometimes member of the car crowd, but had been making himself seen around a lot more lately. His green '67 goat was pretty, but was bone stock, and Pete was more of a driver in it than a racer. Mike Zurka was at the window even before Brian shut off his car's engine. "Brian! What the fuck? I thought you went AWO

I think every kid has had that one friend that goes very quickly from being close to inexplicably distant without any explanation as for why. Usually, we never know what happened. Kind of sad, but that's just part of growing up. When I wrote Rules of the Road I envisioned a sequel. But then I got caught up in other projects and time went by, and I kind of got away from the idea. Rereading the story in preparation for posting it here brought the whole thing back, and so now I want to add to what is there. So there will be more.