Bonnie and I Made Many New Friends.
Taking the truck back to college – leaving Larry to drive the motorcycle to work in the snow – made it easier for Bonnie and me to venture off campus and drink. Bonnie and I wanted very badly to see the world, go places, do things – expand our horizons from Mount Union College to regions beyond.
When The Rose got boring, we started going to The Elm – another biker bar. The Elm was a place we’d visited with Larry, when it was quite dull. People ventured out of the back room and stared at us, but no one conversed. There were only a handful of people in the front room. It was fine – but not as fine as when Bonnie and I showed up by ourselves.
Two young girls walking into the front room brought people out of the back room in a heartbeat. We met a ton of people, many of whom invited us to go into the back with them. When we finally decided it was worth the risk, we followed a guy into a whole other bar. There were pool tables and long plastic tables and a vat of chili always cooking. There was a second jukebox in the back room, and the biker clientele that had wandered through the front room periodically hung out grandly and raucously in the back room.
When Larry sat with us, no one approached us. But when he was gone, Bonnie and I made many new friends.
Best of all: our new friends seemed very fond of cocaine.
We saw the clues instantly: five or six people going into a one-person restroom; someone at a pool table leaning way over with their face near the wood; a couple of bikers huddled together unnaturally in a corner; an empty table suddenly surrounded by people tapping their credit cards on the plastic; half a dozen people leaving by the back door – and coming back four minutes later.
We’d finally found our place.
On our first trip to the back room, we sat around and waited for someone to offer us cocaine. The bikers mostly stayed with their own – since most of the guys already had a “chick” attached to their sides – but there were stragglers who weren’t bikers – including the guy who’d brought us back there – who were willing to share their stash with the poor college kids.
It was hard to tell if they were trying to keep the illegal drugs hidden from the bar staff or not, since it was so obvious, but we often crammed into a bathroom to do lines off the sink or the back of the toilet. We didn’t care how we ingested the stuff – only that we got as much as we could for as long as possible.
We never once paid for it.
But sometimes we’d go to The Elm and no one would discover us sitting in the front room, and we didn’t get invited to the back room. On those days, we drank a couple of beers and then went to The Hood.
Eventually, though, we found Nick. Then we found Bob. Both of them – although they did not hang out together – became our new best friends at The Elm.