Life in the Turn Lane

Six reporters at the News and Advance in Lynchburg spent five months interviewing more than 200 teenagers who attended 22 schools in central Virginia. The result was “The Teen Age,” a three-week series exploring teen views on guns, birth control, AIDS, parents, MTV, sexual harassment, church, drugs, stress — and “drive-by dating,” the ’90s version of cruising.

 

Lynchburg, Va. — Leaning out the car window, her blonde hair bobbing in cadence with her words, Michelle tries to explain the mating ritual that drew her to join the army of cruisers rolling along Wards Road.

“You see,” the Appomattox teen says, jerking her chin toward a carload of male admirers who have stopped nearby and are hollering at her and her two friends. “This is what happens.”

With hair sprayed into place and carefully applied lipstick, Michelle, Staci, and Jodi, all 18, are piled into Staci’s bright-red Ford Festiva to cruise. They’re here “to see friends and meet some guys.”

That there are cute guys out cruising tonight is the consensus of girls on the strip. Michelle occupies the passenger seat, and with the window down, she’s ready. Even less subtle than the guys, Michelle meets people by sticking her head out of the car window and yelling at them.

“Half the time, you just talk, find out where they’re from,” she explains. “Then you beep at them when they go by again. By the time the night’s over, you’re beeping at everybody on Wards Road.”

It’s Friday night, 10 o’clock — a prime cruising hour, but the crowd’s a bit thin. Later, after the football games are over, the floodgates will open and Wards Road will be teeming with teenagers and post-teenagers looking for fun.

But for now, there’s only a trickle of cruisers. Someone’s bass from a souped-up stereo they’re showing off reverberates across four traffic lanes. Cars honk at each other in greeting, girls pull up alongside guys and then speed off, giggling. The guys accelerate after them.

Growing up with drive-through banking, drive-up dining, drive-by shootings, it’s natural that these kids participate in drive-by dating. The car gives them safety and mobility — it allows them to pull up to meet someone and get away if they want to.

Brandon and Alan are explaining how they meet girls. “Here, we’ll give you a firsthand demonstration,” Brandon says, and toots at a car full of girls that passes by. He waves to them, and with both hands up in front of him makes a beckoning gesture, yelling, “Come ’ere.”

The girls look back and drive off, which is enough for Brandon and Alan to take off after them. “We’ll be back,” they yell and pull out of the parking lot in a beat-up Escort.

When they return an hour later, Alan says the night has gone “OK” — but not great. The two are dressed casually for their evening on the town — a flannel shirt or sweatshirt, baseball caps, and jeans. Brandon has been eying some girls in a Geo, but “they wouldn’t talk to us,” Alan says, tipping his cigarette ashes out the window.

Brandon, in turn, says Alan has two girls in mind — “but he can’t get them to stop.”

“Most times,” he adds with a macho nod, “we get the attention.”

 

The Parking Lot

Along Wards Road, the cruisers are easily separated from the drivers who are headed somewhere else. The cruisers have their windows down and are rubbernecking at the passing vehicles. The businesses along the strip don’t like the cruisers loitering, so the stream of cars has to keep moving or risk being kicked off some business’s property unless they’re customers.

Leaning closer to a new-found friend so he can hear her over the steady rumble of cars rolling by, Adam laughs and eyes the cop standing a few hundred yards away. Adam is 20 and lives in Roanoke now, but he came back to Lynchburg to hang out — and he’s been drifting around the area for hours already. Now, he leans against his car in the Kroger parking lot surrounded by a pair of high school girls and a couple other friends and asks, “Want a beer? Want to buy a cellular phone?”

Jennifer, 15, who just met Adam, says she hasn’t done much while she’s been cruising tonight — as usual. “There’s not really much to do around here,” she says, eying a police car sweeping through the parking lot, a regular Wards Road presence keeping cars moving and kids in line. “They’re trying to kick everyone off.”

What she and everyone else are doing is simple, Jennifer says. “They just sit around and listen to music and drink.”

For her friend April, 15, this Friday night was the first time she’d ever gone cruising — and after a few hours of standing around, sitting around, and driving around, she wasn’t too impressed. A track team member, April doesn’t drink, so she spent the evening chatting and listening to music. “This is just a night out,” she says. “It’s just kind of boring for me.”

Adam — who sports a buzz cut and an earring — says cruising has a timeless appeal for bored kids and adults. What everyone really wants, he says, is a place to just hang out and meet people.

“They ought to get someone to just buy a parking lot,” he says. “They’d make a killing . . . if they would just let people hang out and sit around and talk.” A few minutes later, the cop walks over to the loosely knit group of about six. They peel out of the parking lot.

 

The Mall

For at least some of these cruisers, the night began with a visit to the mall, one of the most popular places to walk around, talk — and kill time before you go cruising.

Near the movie theaters in the mall sits a sign directed at the shopping center’s youthful hangers-on. “No congregating,” it reads. “No loitering. . . . No loud or obnoxious behavior.”

Loitering quietly nearby are Kristan and Suzanne, both 13. They manage to while away two hours, walking and talking. Why are they here? “To see all the people,” Suzanne says.

Mel, 16, pauses in his umpteenth lap around the mall to explain. “We walk around, look at the girls and sometimes look at the shoes.”

“Well,” he adds. “Mostly, look at the girls.”

The goal — the pinnacle of achievement — is to come home with a girl’s phone number. But how often does that actually happen? “Not too much,” admits Chad, 17. After the mall, they may go to a football game if it’s Friday. But, often, their destination is Wards Road. “If you got a nice, decent car,” adds Chad, “you race sometimes.”

At the far end of the Candlers Station parking lot, the pink-and-green neon of the temple-like arch at Movies 10 beckons. This is another mecca for kids looking to hang out on a Friday night. A night on Wards Road frequently begins at this dollar movie theater. “Front Row Joe,” the movie chain’s mascot, stands guard over marquees promoting the movies being shown. Boys drive by slowly, checking out the action, not the movies. They go to meet girls, yelling at one they’re interested in.

What do they yell?

“Hi!”

“If they say ‘hi’ back, you can tell if they want you,” explains Matt, a 16-yearold Rustburg High School sophomore.

 

The Pickup Lines

There are, one cruising expert says, two big pickup lines on Wards Road.

1) “You want a ride?” and

2) “You wanna drink some beer?”

Those two lines, says Cindee, reflect the two goals foremost in the minds of typical cruisers: “meeting people and getting drunk.” She just turned 19 and says she now cruises only occasionally, mostly to people-watch. But in the good old days when she cruised every chance she got — starting when she was 12 — Cindee followed a simple pattern: “I’d get a lot to drink and go out there. I only cruised to meet guys.”

Actually, that mostly consisted of getting rides around the cruising circuit and finding someone to pal around with for part of the evening. Usually, she’d also hang around with friends she came with or met up with somewhere along Wards Road. Some of her friends, she says, came not just to be seen, but also to buy drugs — and here, dealers aren’t hard to find, she says.

The crowd — which starts to pick up as soon as the mall closes — ranges in age from 12-year-olds whose parents usually think they’re at the mall to 25- year-olds reliving their high school glory days.

Ginger, 22, has been cruising Wards Road since she was 16. Now, when it gets boring, she can head for Gatsby’s or Trotter’s. When she was younger, it never seemed to get boring. “It used to be a whole lot more exciting,” she says. “I guess I just got older.”

And it’s gotten rougher, she says. “The crowd’s changed. Kids now tear up things, they destroy it. It’s too bad.”

When she was 12, Cindee would walk to Wards Road from the mall — something she now thinks was foolhardy. “I would go up there by myself,” she says. “Anyone who offered me a ride, I got in the car. That’s not real bright.”

There used to be more places to get out of your car and just linger — a bench near a phone at Hardees, the K-Mart parking lot. Now, the stream of cars just keeps moving around the slow loop.

Even though the night has turned chilly and it’s growing late, many want to keep cruising. Brandon and Alan are still out to meet girls. “I’ll go all night if I have to,” Brandon says.