Looking back and smiling

When we were teenagers, Laura and I used to go to this club Medusa's nearly every weekend. We were maybe 16 when we started going there. Medusa's was wonderful. We loved to dance, and the music there was awesome. New Wave, Industrial, all the good stuff from the early 90s. The crowd? While they were our people, we were on the more conservative side of things. I didn't have a driver's license at the time, and I don't think Laura had gotten hers yet. That's the reason her dad drove us there once. ONCE. We were young and blissfully ignorant to how Medusa's and the people that went there would look to Laura's career police officer dad. He drove by - I think we weren't cool with having him drop us off in front - and he saw the fine element that were hanging around outside before going in. Black leather. Mohawks. Chains. Weird piercings. Black lace. Black lip stick. Black eyeliner. "Psssssh." (Laura's dad made some weird noise) Uh oh. That was not a good noise. "You're going THERE?!" He was pointing at the tall big dude with the mohawk. Sigh "Yes." He looked at me, in my blazer and peg rolled jeans smiling hopefully from the back seat. He looked at Laura, in her blazer and peg rolled jeans smiling nervously from the seat next to him. (She was nervous that night because she was the one hiding the cigarettes in her pocket that night.) "Well. Be careful. See you later." He gave us a nervous little chuckle, and his familiar 'those two' shake of his head. But, he let us out of the car. He didn't trust the place, nor did he trust the people. But he trusted us. Even then, that meant something. *** A side note: The big dude with the mohawk? Many years later he would become Laura's husband. To this day I don't think her dad believes that to be true, but it is.