Moped Diaries

One of the benefits of staying in your hometown is getting to reinterpret the memories of your childhood through a finer lens. I just hung up the phone with Maripatrice, my big blonde-haired, Irish beauty best friend from growing up, and after the requisite "How's your husband" banter, we started laughing about some of the stupid-crazy shit we pulled as kids. I started with "Hey, 'member that one time...?" and she runs off with, "Oh, the tacos?" and dissolves into a pool of giggles. It's one of my favorite memories, but God, how could I have forgotten?
Me and Maripatrice were smoking friends. We'd get high in high school, or swallow a few NoDoze from the gas station after a shift at Conde's Fine Dining (somehow we managed to have the same waitressing jobs together for like, six years) and drive out to Kimmel Beach to watch the sun rise and bitch and moan and rave about waitressing, spinning wildly in the sand and kicking up wavelets until the hems of our aprons were wet. One time we just drove back to the restaurant and slept in the parking lot until our morning shift, digging up a wrinkled piece of looseleaf from my schoolbook to write "Wake us up at 7:30!!!" and sticking it in the windshield of my Nissan. Turns out the cook who opened the restaurant the next day couldn't read English, but his bright, shining, staring mug was enough to wake us up anyway. Even as we went back to serving pancakes, we still smelled like beach.
My parents went out of town for a week every February, so this one time me, Maripatrice, and...two guy friends who I can't even remember, one had a crush on her, but we all sat around in my parents living room, smoking a bowl. This was back when Taco Bell sold a package of fifty regular, soft-shelled, beef tacos for maybe ten dollars. All I remember is Maripatrice sitting Indian-style in my stepfather's recliner, wearing cute, plaid pajama pants, a pile of paper-wrapped tacos in her lap. She carefully counted each one, then looking up at us in a panic said, "Oh my God, you guys, there's only nineteen tacos left!"
Before that, back in sophomore year of high school, we had a severe addiction to Tandoor of India and their kheer dessert. It's basically a mind-blowing version of rice-pudding, but every time we'd light up, that would be the first thing we'd think of. We ate it by the quart, one for me, one for her. This was before we had cars, though, so we'd hop on my moped and putter eight miles to the restaurant.
Now that I think about it, even though it seemed like the ideal solution to what appeared to be a very important problem, we probably looked like refugees, two full-grown girls, piled on this teeny moped, one hunched over driving and one strapped to the back with two ungainly grocery bags of takeout. If I had gotten a yearbook, I bet she would have signed it with the phone number to Tandoor.