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Troy Allen had seen a lot of SF that I had never heard of. He was older than me, and sometimes it seemed like his past had taken place in a long-gone neverwhen lost to me through time.
"I'm not familiar with that. Was it a TV ser--"
"Aw, maaaaan! You haven't seen Damnation Alley?" Alan Rice, too, seemed to know of this distant wonderland; he was the one who introduced me to Troy, after all. Maybe that's where he found him.
Troy smiled, a big-ass goofy smile. He may have squinted with delight to have another shiny memory to share. "It was a post-apocalyptic movie. They had these vans, see, with the wheels...."
He and Alan went on with this little bit of my nerd education (nerducation?), there in Troy's grey-lit room in a little house somewhere in Harrodsburg, IN. I couldn't tell you where it was, now.
Troy, man. Troy knew a lot of stuff, and when he told me about stuff like this the gleam in his eyes and the glee in his voice made me want to fall in love with them, too--these ephemeral things that I knew I'd never see, these obscure and unknown tidbits of my geek heritage. I'd written them off, though, as things of another world, never to be seen by me.
Standing in Troy's room on a cold winter day ca. 1990, I would never have dreamed that, when babies born that week would finally be able to get legally blasted at a bar, I would be idly browsing the DVD selection on the Monroe County Public Library's Bookmobile and that there, in orange and yellow, those words would stare back at me, plastic monolith of mystery revealed.
Troy doesn't read this blog. But if he did, I'd say to him: "HA, HA HA HA HA -- LOOK AT WHAT I FOUND!"
