Holding On was Rough.
We roared out of the trailer park around dawn, probably waking everyone within a mile radius, and went to get cigarettes and gas for the road. I needed to get back to Ohio for class.
But before we headed out of Florida, I begged Larry to take me to a beach – any beach. Other than the sand strewn on the side of the road and under the trailer, I hadn’t seen any sand at all.
“We gotta go!” Larry said. “We gotta get to fuckin’ Ohio!” The F word had become a frequently used noun, verb, adjective and adverb in our very limited vocabulary.
“We drove all the way to fuckin’ Florida,” I whined. “I just want to see some fuckin’ water!”
“We don’t have fuckin’ time,” he said. “We’re moving down here in a fuckin’ month. I’ll take you to the beach every fuckin’ day if ya want! But right now, we gotta go!”
As we drove across a bridge out of town Larry yelled, over the roar of the engine, “There’s some fuckin’ water!” He laughed but he wasn’t joking. That was all I saw of the beach during my spring break in Florida.
My head hurt; my body ached. I had a hangover that wouldn’t be erased with half a dozen cigarettes and two cans of Diet Coke. And I had to hop on the back of the motorcycle and ride a thousand miles home.
The trip north was substantially worse than the trip to Florida. First, we took two days for the trip south; on the way back we made it in one – nearly 24 hours without beer or sleep. Larry drove the whole way, and my only job was to try not to fall off the bike while it was moving. Holding on was rough.
But also on the way down, I had dreams. I believed I was going to have fun in the sun, party with college kids from all over the world, lounge in the sand and splash in the waves. Instead I hung out with Larry, doing whatever he wanted to do, and the highlight of my trip was sleeping with dogs under a trailer.
Somehow I didn’t connect the dots of my life at this point. I didn’t recognize that when college was over, I wouldn’t be hanging out with college kids anymore. I wouldn’t be doing cocaine at The Elm with Bonnie, or playing music in her room, or watching The Graduate or going to parties on weekends doing beer bongs and passing out on floors and waiting for Snow Carnival.
I thought college would last forever.
Finally “free” from my parents, with no rules and no discipline – not even self-discipline – I somehow believed that I’d discovered the key to adulting without responsibility. I thought that life with Larry, no matter where we lived, would be the perfect amount of freedom and happiness, the two things that had eluded me since I’d started drinking.
It never occurred to me that my trip to Florida might foreshadow my future. I wrote it off as a bad vacation and just wanted to tell Bonnie how lame it had been, and how much I’d missed her.
So I could hardly wait to get back to school, back to my friends, back to the campus I’d grown to love. As I hung onto Larry for a thousand miles, my butt sore and my head screaming, all I wanted to do was get back to college … and drink.