Small Town ... Long Memories...St. Bernard...Coppini

So, Mark Livingston and I were driving around with a third buddy in the guy's 1968 Olds Cutlass. Helluva car ... in 1972 ... when gasoline still cost 25 cents a gallon.

Kids today think filmmakers made up the quaint notion of small-town kids cruising around on weekend nights, looking for something to do and, when all else fails, making up the dumbest damn ways to amuse themselves. In Eureka in the early 1970s, we actually did cruise around town killing time...looking for girls...trying to find somebody to buy us beer without one of us having to go try to convince a sales clerk at an out of the way liquor store that we only looked and sounded 16 years old, that we were actually 21 and, yep, we'd like that case of Mickey's Big Mouth.

Livingston was the first guy I knew who went to St. Bernard High School. We met and hit it off playing baseball during the summer. He had the sharpest, most acerbic, wild, perceptive sense of humor I'd ever scene. He was a three-sport star who got his picture in the Times-Standard, always getting a rebound, more than any basketball player in history. (I later learned the T/S photographers routinely stood under the hoop, focused their camera on the rim and starting shooting photos when rebounders appeared in the frame. Actually, I later was a T/S photographer who did that.)

I wasn't that impressed with Mark's being a three-sport guy. I went to Eureka High. Three-sport guys were the exception, not the rule there. (Livingston would've played three sports at EHS, too, but ... you don't get all warm and fuzzy about what a great athlete your pal is, you know?) I was completely taken by Mark's willingness to say or do the most outlandish things...at the drop of a hat. We didn't hang out much for very long, so I'm sure he did far more wild things with others -- if only because I wasn't at all wild, we just made each other laugh...and it was my pal who had the car.

Still, my gosh, while I'd think of saying something or doing something...then weigh the pros and cons of the action...Livingston would just do it, say it (usually loud) and be laughing at how damn funny he was before I'd even moved. He had a brother named George who, he said, St. Bernard kids called "George of the Jungle." I always wished I'd thought of a nickname that captured Mark Livingston's wild imagination and willingness to bring it to life.

So, yeah, Mark Livingston and I were passengers and we were headed east on Harris Street in Eureka. Henderson Center was dead at night in 1972, too. The Fresh Freeze, however, was still a bit of a hot spot. My crazy half-sisters used to hang out there in the late 1950s -- like the joint from the TV show "Happy Days." I think they even had waitresses take orders from their cars. By 1972, it was just a place close to the high schools with food.

I was there the night before Steve Herzog pulled into the Fresh Freeze, apparently after a few beers, and didn't stop to park until his car had crash through the glass doors and nearly taken out the cash register. I always missed that type of stuff.

Livingston more than made up for it with something not nearly as outlandish, but with something that captured the spirit of Humboldt County, the schools, the rivalries...and how some things could never go unsaid...there were always debts to be repaid, new debts to be run up to be settled on the football field at some later date. Maybe, they'd be settled at a party if you left your girlfriend alone for a second and she became somebody else's girl...or, sure, guys threw punches sometimes.

Livingston was in the back seat. I was in the front passenger seat with the window down. As we approached Fresh Freeze, going maybe 30 mph, I noticed a group of guys standing aimlessly by their cars. That's all I did...notice...guys.

Livingston lurched forward from the back seat, pushed me out of the way and shouted out the window, at the top of his lungs: "Hey Coppini! Bite my wienie!"

I laughed until I cried. I didn't rightly know anything except that Coppini and wienie rhymed, but I figured on the guys at the Freeze was named Coppini and my wild friend's idea of getting a laugh at Coppini's expense was to shout...out a car window, really loud...using a word my 10-year-old daughter would find sophomoric.

Wienie? C'mon.

That was Livingston's gift. I don't know which of the many Coppinis it was, but it was one of the football-playing Coppinis he saw at the Freeze. Hell, he couldn't have been sure...he thought it was a Coppini. The Coppinis were, and are, inextricably linked to Ferndale High football and all sports. Livingston was a St. Bernard guy, to the heart and soul. So, by God, when he saw (or thought he saw) Coppini...he was going to let him know he had no use for him, Ferndale...and anything else he could think of before he shouted out the window of a moving car.

"You are a f*&^%n' moron," I laughed. "Who the %$$## screams out the window and tells somebody to bite his wienie? Who were you even hollering at."

By that point, Livingston was sitting calmly in the back seat of the car. Expressionless.

"Oh, it's *&^%$ Coppini from Ferndale. He can bite me. Turn up the radio, I like this song," Mark said, as though I was the one who seemed wildly clueless. It didn't matter that when asked Livingston couldn't think of anything Coppini had ever said or done that really bothered him. He could just, um, bite him...on general principle. Ferndale vs. St. Bernard and all, you know?

Every town and every guy has a memory like that...er, one something like that. But, I lived in Eureka almost literally forever. So, that story isn't just tucked away in the corner of my brain. I've told my oldest sons that story and they laughed politely while I laughed, out loud, all over again.

"See...he shoved me like this and shouted, 'Coppini bite my wienie!' God, it was hysterical..."

OK. Whatever, dad.

Then, years later, I told the same story to my youngest son. He looked at me as though I'd lost my mind.

"So, what was so funny? You were in high school and your friend said the word 'wienie' or what?"

Wise ass.

"No...he hollered at bite my wienie at a sports rival guy from the school he hated and the guy's named rhymed with ..."

Memories like that aren't vivid to anybody who was born, raised and lived in Humboldt County because...almost nothing changes. The Fresh Freeze is still the Fresh Freeze. The Coppini clan is still representative of Ferndale sports. St. Bernard-Ferndale is still the most heated rivalry. There's still nothing to do on weekend nights in Eureka...there's a memory on every street corner for me. Time's sort of frozen at every intersection. Mark Livingston's not wild, not loud, and I doubt even gave Ferndale sports a second thought in the last 35 years, but...when I drive by the Fresh Freeze...you know?

It must be a Humboldt County thing.