one of those nights we should've died

by Jason Allen

DAYS AFTER I TURNED SEVENTEEN, on a mid-90s summer night on the East End of Long Island, I made a spontaneous and extremely stupid decision that I still regret all these years later. That night, out of pure desperation, I ended up praying to a god I didn’t believe in, praying for any force greater than myself to save me from a seemingly imminent teenage death. I remember worrying about my fourteen-year-old brother so much more than myself and wishing most of all that I hadn’t brought him along on the wildest and most dangerous ride of our young lives.

The high school bonfire started off completely normal. The sun had slipped below the horizon moments ago, and now the sand and still water of the bay beach held residual hues of pink and orange. A couple dozen teenagers had already swarmed just around the bend from the dead end sign at West Landing. A few surfers and other stoner guys from Hampton Bays carried logs and branches and other scraps of wood for the bonfire, while some of the girls from my senior class sat and knelt in the sand, more giggly than usual, some yelling random comments to people approaching the beach, all of them already good and buzzed from draining cans of Coors Light through bendy straws.

Vito Grippo, a drug dealer who’d been in the grade ahead of me but had either graduated or gotten his GED or dropped out of high school by then, noticed our two twelve packs and sauntered over to me. “’Sup, J,” Vito said with a clap-slide of his palm against mine. “Yo, you got one of those beers for me and Thomson?”

Sure, why not.

Vito snatched the beer I offered and twisted the cap in a second flat, while his sidekick, Thomson, a little toady who rarely spoke and obviously liked to get high, nodded after I handed him a cold bottle. The two wandered off soon after, which was fine with us.

Jess and my friend Will and I made it through our first bottles and had just started on our second round, when off in the direction of the dead end sign I heard Vito call out, “Yo, toss yer swag, it’s the fuckin’ cops!” I faced the guardrail where the road met the beach and saw the flashing lights. Without drawing any attention to myself, I slid the rolled baggie from my pocket and shoved it a few inches down into the sand—fifty bucks worth of weed and hash that I’d probably never see again, but at least I wouldn’t spend the night in jail.

Five or six officers fanned out from the beach side of the guardrail and called out for us to approach them. Of all the burnouts and derelicts in the vicinity, I hadn’t expected Vito to be the one to panic. Not when he and his four brothers had such extensive experience with law enforcement. It seemed safe to assume that he had drugs either in his pocket or in his car.

The cops had come equipped with long flashlights. They each walked awkwardly in the crisscrossed tire tracks in the sand. When they closed in on the drunk girls and surfers by the fire, Vito quick-walked over to us and whispered in my ear: “Yo, you need to drive my car out of here.”

“What? Why?”

“My license is suspended. Come on, we need to bolt through the beach weeds and the woods over there and get to the car before they search me. You got a license, right? And you ain’t drunk or nothin’ yet, so come on.”

I looked over at Jess and Will. “They’ll need to come with us then.”

“Whatever, man. I’ll drop ya wherever you want after we get outta here. Let’s just go.”

We left our beer in the tall blades of beach grass lining the dunes, hoping to avoid confiscation and to find it there later, and we took the stealthy way back to the road before any cops caught us in their flashlight beams. In the background we heard the surfers who’d parked a pickup on the beach and the now stoic girls each stating their names. Once we trudged through a tangle of branches along a neighbor’s driveway, Vito’s normally mute sidekick said what we’d all felt about our hometown for years.

“Man, when it’s not summer and they don’t have all the City-its to deal with, the cops in this town have nothing better to do than harass us locals.”

When we emerged from the shadows, two older police officers stood beside a squad car and turned to face us from ten or twenty yards away. Thankfully, neither appeared to care why we were headed away from the beach while their uniformed cohort had the rest of the teenage partiers corralled like sheep. Vito and Thomson stood quietly behind the rest of us, each of our ragtag group standing silently when one of the cops received a staticky call on his radio mic. I exhaled when he responded that they didn’t need any more cars at our location. In the same moment, the other cop took a lazy step toward us and called out, “No rest for the wicked, huh, fellas?” The five of us grinned and nodded—my little brother and Will giving half-waves as though the gray-haired cop had told a funny joke.

I felt twitchy knowing the police in our small town knew Vito and all the Grippo brothers’ bad reputations. Vito wasn’t the worst guy, but he definitely wasn’t a friend. He was just another townie without any real prospects. And normally he carried himself like a cliché drug dealer, so I mainly avoided him, but now he wanted what we all wanted—to draw as little attention as possible and to get out of there. The two cops had turned their backs to us, writing us off as a handful of harmless kids, likely assuming we were turning back because they’d killed the party before we arrived.

I slid onto the driver’s seat of Vito’s late-80s sports car, wondering if he had any drugs or weapons hidden away in there, but I kept thinking we wouldn’t be with him for long since the ride to my house would only take about ten minutes. His key chain had a pair of dice that clacked together when I placed them in the ignition and turned. Gangster rap thundered from the door panels and a subwoofer in back where Jess, Will, and Thomson had to squeeze in a tight row on the bench seat. Vito reached over in a flash and turned the stereo volume down, then closed the passenger door to ride shotgun. Whether or not he had anything illegal stashed away in the console or a secret trap drawer, short drive aside, I wasn’t thrilled to be behind the wheel of his gaudy car that had some stupid stenciled phrase across the back window, some string of words basically telling the world that he lived outside the law.

As I rolled away from the patch of grass beside the woods and the line of parked cars, he said, “Make a right up there. Then pull over and switch seats with Thomson, and I’ll drive.”

We turned the corner, and the police lights finally faded from the rearview. We made the switch, and I found myself wedged in back with my little brother and one of my best friends, the three of us believing we’d be home by the time we finished the cigarettes we’d just lit.

An hour later, after asking Vito to drive us to my house multiple times and him saying he would but then saying we should smoke another bone first, a moonless night settled in above us. We cruised back roads on the opposite side of town from my house with zero destination whatsoever, the car a cloud of pot smoke, the gangster rap cranked so loud that the bass hit my lower body like a string of kidney punches from a boxer. I sat with my knees pressed to the passenger side seatback, Jess wedged between me and Will, the three of us and Vito and Thomson all chugging tallboy cans of Bud that we’d bought a little while after leaving the beach. Normally, I would’ve been all about riding around those quiet, curvy roads of our hometown on the outskirts of the Hamptons and smoking with whoever else was along for the ride, but I wanted to get out, and with each passing minute, the feeling only intensified.

Sometime later, the rap thundered even louder. I liked rap and hip hop well enough, even though I’d usually choose the most intense metal for my own car stereo, but this album at that vicious volume was the formula for a migraine. Plus, the lyrics were mostly spewed threats to kill or hurt the speaker’s enemies in horrific ways. I shouted to Vito to ask him to turn it down a little but he either didn’t hear me or pretended not to. I knew my ears would be ringing for the rest of the night, long after we eventually got away. I’d asked him to head to our house at least three times in the past hour, but Vito or Thomson always answered the same way—by passing a joint or a freshly packed bowl of weed. I loved marijuana then. I loved it so much that I actually sold it on the side to friends so I would have a massive amount for myself to smoke. Even so, I didn’t want to smoke any more with the two braindead guys up front, but since we were basically trapped, I smoked more anyway. Jess and Will and I tried shouting to each other but each of us could only respond by shouting back, “What?”

It didn’t matter if we could hear anything, though, because I knew we all wanted the same simple thing. We had to get out of that car.

Hours into that brain-cell-killing, destination-less drive, Thomson finally asked Vito to pull to the side of the road for a pit stop. There were no houses nearby, only woods, and we all stepped out while the engine idled with a rumble and the music kept booming. Twigs snapped under our shoes until we each stopped and chose a tree to relieve ourselves. From a few feet away, Jess whispered to me what he and I and Will had been thinking and shouting to each other for most of the drive.

“We should just walk home.”

“I know,” I said, but we both knew we were miles away from home, deep in the woods of another town. Walking didn’t seem like a viable option: we had to be ten or more miles away and in the middle of nowhere, and back then none of us had a cell phone to call for a ride, so we were stuck with these two idiots.

I heard Will say to Vito over by the car, “Veets, man, this has been cool and all, but we really need to get back to J and Jess’ house now.”

Vito zipped up while walking back to the driver’s side, chuckling.

“Thomson, you hearing this? Fine, get your lame asses back in.”

Jess made eye contact with me just before we squeezed into the back seats again.

I know, I know…

I was stoned to the point of total stupidity and well on my way to being drunk. We all were. At this point I didn’t see why Vito wouldn’t just drive us back. So, I shrugged to Will, then to Jess, and we all crammed in front of the vibrating subwoofers again. Thomson closed the passenger door and leaned over to crank the music back up to ear-bleed volume. I turned to Jess and Will, and they were both grinning but with slight head shakes and eyes of disbelief. The night had gone from random and strange to completely ridiculous. We couldn’t get away from these two idiots. Then I noticed Vito hunched forward, and a second later he raised his head and pinched at his nose. He passed a playing card with a line of coke on it for Thomson to snort, then shifted into drive. Awesome, now they’d be coked-up, too.

The next hour or so became a total paradox. Each minute passed in super slow-motion, when in reality we were flying down these dark roads way too fast, tires veering over the center line and then over to the edge of the shoulder. We’d been taking the curves like we were on one of those crazy racetracks in Europe where the Ferraris and Lamborghinis screeched and whined loop after loop. Jess and Will hadn’t been grinning since it became obvious that Vito had no intention of driving us home yet. They both looked fried, their expressions as serious as I’d even seen. Mine must have been the same. The three of us had fallen into a pattern of bracing ourselves for upcoming curves in the road by placing both hands on the backs of the front seats and tensing our arms. So stupid. So crazy. We should walk, no matter how far, and I said so to Vito with my loudest guttural shout.

Instead of responding, he reached over and yelled, “Ready?” I knew he wasn’t asking if we were ready to go home, because why finally release us from this horrible carnival ride after only four or five hours? Then I thought, Oh, man. Ready for what?

The moment I heard the question form in my mind, the headlights clicked off. We were still driving at the same high speed. My stomach dropped. I saw a curve coming up a moment before darkness fell across the road, and the psychotic idiot behind the wheel was laughing. I could barely see Jess or Will beside me, only enough to notice that they were lunged forward like me, shouting, trying to get Vito’s attention. Even Thomson finally yelled something from the passenger seat. The headlights suddenly flashed to life, the tires squealing into the curve a few inches from the weeds and the tree line just off the shoulder. Vito over-corrected and we straddled the center line before the road curved the other direction and all four tires reentered our lane. Pounding the steering wheel, laughing, he finally turned the music down so he could shout about how hysterical it just had been to see us all freak out, to hear us shouting in terror.

I wanted to kill Vito. If it wouldn’t have sent us torpedoing into the trees, I would’ve cinched my arm around his throat right then to choke him out. But just then the hell ride began again. Bam—the headlights clicked off once more, and Jess and Will and I hunched in crash positions like the cartoon people on the safety cards you see on airplanes, except with our hands pressed to the seatbacks in front of our faces. We were about to crash, I knew we were.

I wasn’t supposed to die like this. Neither was Will. Neither was Jess.

The torture went on for another twenty minutes or so, while Vito killed the headlights at least five more times and laughed like a maniac. The entire time, I was convinced we were only one second away from dying. The entire ride in that back seat had been so exhausting, I didn’t even have the energy to shout to the front anymore. Neither did Will or Jess. We were prisoners back there. No way around it. We were at the mercy of these coked-up, drunk, and stoned dumbasses, the townie drug dealer and his shadow, people we never would have chosen to hang out with outside of a big group.

At least five hours after leaving the beach party, Vito finally exited the more remote woods and entered an actual neighborhood with houses and porch lights. I exhaled, because now he drove much slower and kept the headlights lit. Hallelujah, he even stopped at the stop signs.

Then, on a street I didn’t recognize, out of nowhere—Thank you, Baby Jesus, thank you—Vito turned the wheel and pulled into a driveway, pressed the brake, and shifted into park. The rap was still booming, rattling the door panels with a beat from the same damn CD that had been jackhammering the back seat for hours. Will leaned forward and shouted, “Veets, yo, where are we?” And I thought I heard Vito answer that we were at his house, but in the rearview I also saw his eyes closing.

Vito’s head settled, his mouth angled up and hung open just wide enough to stick a cigar between his lips if we’d wanted to. From over the seatback, I shook Thomson awake and shouted above the music for him to open the door and let us out. Barely conscious, he shifted toward the dashboard enough for me to push my way out, then for me to hold the seat for Jess and Will to quickly slide through. When I let the seat go, Thomson slumped back, already passed out again beside a passed-out Vito.

A woman in a bathrobe swung the front door of the house open and started screaming, “Vito! Shut that shit off!”

I’d never seen her before, but I knew this rough-looking woman in her bathrobe with a drink in hand was his mother. The passenger door hung wide open, the whole neighborhood now forced to listen to the same thunder we’d endured for so long, the rapper promising to kill more people while Jess, Will and I stared at Mrs. Grippo, who screamed more curses at her unconscious son from the front steps.

Then she screamed at us, cursing so much more than I ever imagined a mother would, and with her eyes trained on us, she stomped down the steps in her slippers and robe. The three of us snapped out of the momentary spell and made eye contact with one another. The shared smile partly included a massive sigh of relief, partly a reaction to the combination of curses from the rapper and the onslaught of profanity from Vito’s mom, who seemed intent on smacking us each across the face if we didn’t bolt right then.

She kept yelling, while we began to backpedal and then turned in unison to run away.

We were a good three blocks from the house and the car with the two passed-out townies and the screaming woman before the bass from the rap finally faded. We were still miles from home, practically the same distance it would have been to walk from the beach hours ago, which seemed now like it had been days ago, another lifetime altogether. My pulse throbbed the whole time crossing over Montauk Highway and zigzagging through side streets until we reached the train tracks. We could have died, and none of us had even lived much of a life yet. Jess was still only fourteen, just a kid, but really so was I. Even though we’d each laughed during the past ten or fifteen minutes of the walk, laughing with relief, laughing about how crazy the whole night had been, I couldn’t shake the sick feeling. Dying in a car crash with Vito Grippo behind the wheel would have been the most absurd end.

After a few more minutes and with miles still left to go before we could sleep, we walked inside the peace of the night, quietly holding to the path of the train tracks. Once in a while one of us kicked a stone or tossed one into the woods, but none of us said a word for a long, long time. We still had another few miles of tracks ahead. I kept looking over at my brother, grateful that he and I had survived.

Then I stared up at the sky, the moon a hangnail sliver hanging low in the east. The stars like pinpoints in the black.

About the author:

Jason Allen writes and teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. For his novel, The East End, Bonnie Jo Campbell provided the cover blurb: “Every page is filled with wise insights about social class and the human heart.” Jason has since been nominated for an Edgar Award and the Georgia Author of the Year Award, and recently completed a book-length memoir. His poetry collection, A Meditation on Fire, was initially published by Southeast Missouri State University Press and is now with Black Lawrence Press, and he has published essays with Salon, Literary Hub, and The Strand Magazine. Jason teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Wichita State University and lives in Kansas with his sweet rescue dog, Luna. You can find him on Instagram.

This is the second of Jason’s stories to appear in sneaker wave magazine. His first, "The Babysitters were Stoned," appeared on April 20, 2025.