DIED 1977
MARTIMARCANETTI, WE USED TO call them, as if the three boys were a single entity, but Marty had the bad-boy rocker looks, Mark was the easygoing freckle-face, and Eddie, who had been held back a year, had a driver’s license and enough whiskers to buy beer. Also tinted prescription aviators, shoulder-length, frizzy ’70s hair, and a metallic green Ford Fairlane with plenty of room for my little sister, who was Mark’s girlfriend, then Marty’s. The unlikely innocent of the group, Eddie, was sweet on her too, but had it even worse for one Trisha Gorsky, a girl with jet-black hair and green eyes who never said a word to him. The four friends used to park in the lot behind the mall and drink six-packs of beer, smoke joints, and maybe take quaaludes if they were around. The laughter echoing in the dark of the car, the green bottles piling up in the well behind the seat, my sister and Marty making out in the back until the boys up front said okay, get a room.
A night like any other, except my sister wasn’t with them, stuck home doing an eleventh-hour social studies project. They shot a game of pool, drank a couple of pitchers with some guys at the bowling alley. Piled into the Fairlane so Eddie could take everybody home. A sprinkle of rain, a shortcut behind the SPCA building in Eatontown, and a head-on collision with another car. Broken arms, shattered glass, no word from Eddie in the front seat. A couple of days later half our high school is staring into an open coffin, wondering if you need tinted aviators and an uncomfortable suit in the afterlife. Just in case, someone slips in a J. Geils album. Mark—now a missionary in Thailand and the father of many children, and still friends with Marty, who’s a trucker—remembers they saw Trisha Gorsky at the funeral, her cheeks wet with tears.