You Can Never Surrender.
After moving in with Larry, I got a letter from my younger sister, cheering me on in my rebellion. She supported my need to break free of the authoritarianism at home, and she wanted me to know that she believed in me.
She included the lyrics to Never Surrender by Corey Hart: “If you’re lost and all alone, you can never surrender; and if your path won’t lead you home, you can never surrender….”
This letter made me cry harder and more often than any letter before or since. My sister believed in me. She wanted me to go on to do great things. She had no idea, in her innocent youth, that I wasn’t a success story. I wasn’t rebelling in any way that made sense. I was just gone.
I was already lost and all alone. And maybe I would never see my family again.
So when I thought of home – which I tried to do infrequently – I just cried.
Most evenings, Larry and I went out to a bar, a generic sort of place with booths on one side, tables in the back, and a giant, sticky dance floor in front of the live country band.
Most nights, nobody danced. For me, those nights were bearable.
But some nights, people would get up out of their booths and boogie. The old women wore pink polyester pants and the men wore embroidered cowboy shirts and they would spin around like they were in a fifties dance marathon. They’d hold one another in ways I didn’t appreciate. Occasionally there’d be polkas and two-steps and line dances.
I didn’t understand any of it.
While Larry sat casually listening to the music and tapping his toes under the table, I would stare at these people on the dance floor: strangers to me in every way. Women with too-red lipstick and puffy, dyed hair that didn’t move when they bounced. Men with bad comb-overs and beer bellies and belt buckles emblazoned with Colt 52s. Everyone smoked. Some danced with bottles in their hands. And the longer I watched, the more stunned I became.
It wasn’t so much that these people were blue-collar and I’d grown up in a family of white-collar people. It was that they were decades older than me, that they were acting like they were young but they didn’t have the capacity to do it because they were so darned old.
I sat in the booth and I watched the dancers and I wondered: is this where I’m heading? Is this what my life is going to be?
We’d go there night after night after night after night. I was so happy to get drinks without being carded, it didn’t occur to me to ask to go anywhere else. But Larry actually fit here. And anywhere the liquor flowed, I followed.
But I didn’t do it blindly. I watched these people with their bright red lips and their flabby stomachs and their baseball caps flying off their heads as their partners swung away from them and I thought: This is how old people behave; this is what I’m going to become.
The thought made me want to retch.
As I sat and drank and watched, I knew: “Never surrender” didn’t apply to me. I’d already succumbed to a battle I didn’t even know I was fighting.
So when it started to get cool at night again, and my parents said they’d still pay for school if I went back and graduated, I was more than a little thrilled to head back to my real home: Mount Union College.