His name was Keith and he was a wild man. By the time he was 16, he already had a crazy, fly-away beard. He had a primal shriek and a reputation for daring. If anybody was going to dive off the rumored 90-foot cliff at The Crusher, get into a fight with five guys from a rival school or tell a cop to go stuff it, it was going to be Keith.

He also had a Trans Am, a monster of a car with a four-hundred-something under the hood, big wide tires and a Hurst shifter. This was a car that would pin you back against the seat when Keith made it get up and go. The rear end would slide sideways, the tires would squawk and away she would go, so fast it was frightening.

We were every stereotype ever invented about young people and cars. At stop lights, Keith would gun the engine and challenge the guy one lane over to a race. We’d hang out in mall parking lots, all muscle shirts and bravado, winking at the girls and smack-talking with the boys.

My buddy used to get that Trans Am up to 70 on the serpentine back roads of Vassalboro. If there were girls in the car with us, they would squeal and clutch each other in genuine fear. Keith would grin around a cigarette and urge the car a little faster, throwing up dust around the curves, stomping on the gas on the straightaways.

Good times. Even that one afternoon when the Trans Am flipped twice into a field. Even the time the car bounced up onto two wheels on a dark and unfamiliar road out in God’s country. Even on the few occasions when a semi came up over the hill while Keith was trying to pass a long line of cars. Even on those nights when we sped away from parties in no condition to be anywhere near something with wheels and an engine.

Every time I find myself at a deadly crash involving young people, I get a strange little chill. It’s not that it could have been me and my adolescent friends inside all that twisted metal. It’s that it almost certainly should have been. We weren’t just indulging in the recklessness of youth. We were flat-out stupid.

Whenever young people are killed in a wreck, things tend to follow a script. The dead are almost always good kids with bright futures. The police put out press releases that suggest speed was a factor in the crash. And your average Joe, 30 years and older, gets around to tsk-tsking and asking aloud why kids these days are so damn stupid.

It’s a valid question. Once you get to middle age, you start to remember the pure awesomeness of being young — of being in your prime with all the good stuff ahead of you. And you hate to see someone throw all that away by gunning the Subaru up to 60 on a road where you should be driving 35, at best.

But a lot of that is selective memory. We’ll remember that we passed our driver’s license test the very first time but conveniently forget about the night we managed to get mom’s Pinto up to 75 while drag-racing some loudmouth in a Chevy Vega. Or the time we drove home from a keg party at the pits because why walk when you’ve got a perfectly good car and a roll of Certs?

Most of us need both hands to count the times we could have been wiped out but weren’t. If you start to think about it too deeply, it becomes an existential riddle. Why were you allowed to skip unscathed through the minefield of youth? Is it all part of some grand plan? Or just blind luck?

Young people die in car crashes all the time. They did back in the 1980s too, when I was howling from the passenger seat in that fearsome Trans Am. But the ruination of other young lives never served as lessons to the rest of us. I don’t recall ever thinking: “Wow. It can happen to anybody. It could happen to us.” No, to honor our dead friends, we raised our plastic cups, downed foamy beer and then went screaming down the avenues like fools who learned nothing.

It’s a real bummer when kids die on the roads because every one of them should have gotten the do-overs that we got. But if the universe has a plan, it’s a baffling one. The sad fact is, some kids will do everything wrong and survive unscratched while others will perish the very first time they take a risk.

I think most of us realize, in some unformed way, that we got off easy. We skidded into adulthood with our foot down on the gas and our hands over our eyes. We made it in spite of ourselves. So now, when the front page bears the news of more kids dead at the side of the road, we experience a feeling that borders on survivor guilt. We know that a minute before the crash, the kids in the car believed they would live forever, the same sense of immortality we once felt when we went roaring off to our own high times.

My friend eventually got married and had a couple of kids. He sold the Trans Am and ended up with a wagon. Luggage rack instead of a Hurst shifter, air bags in place of a suicide knob. No shame in that. It’s all a matter of growing up, and it happens to all guys.

If they’re lucky.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can scold him for his errant youth at [email protected].