What’d You Do to the Truck?
Larry slept in my dorm room the night I returned to campus. He’d done it before, climbing into my loft bed at night, peeing out the window before sunrise.
I usually snuck him in through the first floor window after a long night of drinking, but we were careless on the first night of the new semester. We walked right into my room – the room directly across the hall from the living quarters of the Resident Assistant, the dorm’s main security person.
Since I’d had a few issues with my hamsters escaping already, to say I had been previously warned would be an extreme understatement.
I was immediately put on social probation – again. If I violated my probation, I would not be able to graduate in May.
Unlike my first social probation experience, this one concerned me. I’d passed all of my classes for the prior three and a half years. I’d survived until the very last semester of senior year. And now, with a 37-year-old in my bed who scared the bejeezus out of many students and every authority figure on campus, I was risking a timely graduation.
“I don’t know what to do!” I said to Larry. “You have to sleep over sometimes!”
“I’ll figure it out,” Larry said. And, as usual, he did. He took the truck home – much against my will – and figured it out.
The next time he came to visit, Larry showed up in the same old black Ford F150 pickup truck – but now it had a severely ugly giant white thing on the back.
“What’d you do to the truck?” I asked.
“I put a cap on it!” Larry smiled. “Now we can sleep there!”
“Oh, like camping!” I said. “That’s awesome!” I forgot how ugly it was; now I could graduate!
“We can spread out, too! Plenty of room in there!” He was so proud of himself. The cap probably cost him a fortune.
That night we went to The Rose, then to Denny’s for a “midnight breakfast.” (It was 3 a.m.) After breakfast, we crawled into the back of the truck where Larry had stored a blanket and a pillow.
The knit blanket was about five feet long, with holes. There was no pillowcase on the bed pillow. Both had been in the back of the truck; they were already very, very cold.
And we had to share them, like we did in every other bed.
The bed of the pickup truck was dirty and brutally made of hard, ridged metal. It was the most uncomfortable sleeping surface I’d ever encountered.
There was no heat in the truck bed to counter the January weather.
Drunk as usual, I decided this was great. Larry and I christened our new sleeping quarters, then I huddled up next to him for warmth and passed out somewhere around 5 a.m.
I woke up freezing in the dark.
My bare body was sticking to the icy metal and I was bruised from rolling around on the bumpy surface. I pulled my jeans back on, complete with the Levi’s rivets that always prodded my body when I slept in them. I grabbed the blanket off Larry, sitting up and wrapping it around myself while waiting for my teeth to stop chattering.
Larry barely woke up. “Ya all right, Baby?”
“Yeah,” I said, dying.
Eventually I fell asleep and, when I woke again, sunlight electrified our white ceiling.
Larry was shaking the truck trying to get out. “I gotta take a piss,” he said.
We slept this way half a dozen more times … just so I could graduate.