My highschool had one wall you could spray paint in the back parking lot where the buses pulled up. You could make a mural for a friend's birthday or a memorial for a classmate who didn't pay attention in D.A.R.E. and failed to negotiate the time difference between drunk driving and curfew.

One night me and my misfit asshole friends painted it for some reason. I hope it was for an underdog friend of ours who dared to run for school office. But it may have been at the expense of some well meaning sports team. The only friend we had who could drive was a six foot tall red headed girl named Tori. We all harbored crushes on her. And at the exact moment when you felt your love for this unnattainable senior girl--who had all the Minor Threat records you could ever want--her younger brother would turn on you. And for the rest of the year you weren't cool enough.

Tori had a decommissioned police car. An $800 birthday present from her mother. We piled in, paint spattered and giggling at what clever things we had just created for the next morning's bus riders. It was a six seater and my friend JD--who was not cool enough for Tori's younger brother--sat next to her in the middle of the front bech seat. And in and effort to touch any part of her body he accidentally jammed his foot on the gas pedal.

He was too young to understand how a car worked. Gas vs. Brake was a fight he would lose again and again. The Crown Victoria screamed out of the parking lot and backed into a chain link fence at 40 MPH.

The scratches on top of her car criss crossed as they went under it. Chain links made a perfect argyle of her paint. The six of us stood there, cell phone-less and wondered what to do. One young punk looked over the situation while everyone else imagined what their parents would do to them. He saw that they had destroyed an expensive fence and knew that all the money he made that summer picking corn could never afford the repairs needed. And for the first time in high school--or maybe his life--he found himself in a situation where he was the only one with a good idea.

The car could not escape. But they could--with some pushing--get it all the way into the soccer field.

He got everyone together and they bent the fence back into position. With a struggle that most high schoolers would reserve for toilet papering or tearing down a goal post they wiggled the cemented posts upright and re-rearranged the chain link fence into place. If destruction is a form of creation then re-building something in its proper order is a task akin to more than creation. No wonder Jesus was a carpenter.

When the police came they found one of their old cars sitting on the other side of a fence. As if it had snuck through the forest and stalled in front of a fence it was too polite to tamper with. The cops were just as stunned as we were that the six of us should end up on a sports field at all.

All six of them swore that we heard a friend was to be defamed on the spray paint board that night. When no one showed up, they said, they decided to leave but the car came alive and demanded that it go through the fence.

Tori, the tall red head smiled at the cops as the principal drove over in sweatpants. In the end they got someone to unlock the service gate and we all went home that night feeling like we had achieved more than destruction or defamation or self-promotion. We had damned the man and earned red headed Tori's respect for the rest of the school year.

I don't know what that story has to do with anything but I think of it whenever a musician begs me to remember what it was like when I was young.