I Could Finally Live Guilt-Free.
Living in our second-floor, two-story apartment in Pitcairn felt like immersion into a dream I never had.
Compared to our teeny Pitcairn hotel room, we were living in a mansion. The living room was twice the size of that hole we’d once shared with two other people; the kitchen was almost as big as the living room. Everything was carpeted – a bonus for me, since I often went barefoot. We moved my childhood bed – a double – into our bedroom.
Larry let me have the entire third floor to myself – an attic room reminiscent of Greg’s groovy pad in The Brady Bunch, a room I could decorate however I pleased. Almost immediately I took a can of orange spray paint – the only color Larry could find at the shop – and sprayed an entire wall with my version of graffiti. It looked like a preschooler had scribbled on it with orange crayon.
Compared to Larry’s Florida house, which always had roommates running in and out, we were finally alone and able to have sex on the living room floor if we wanted. (We did.) More importantly, Larry finally had access to a guitar again, at all hours of the day and night, and he played guitar and sang all the time. We had a TV, too, but we rarely turned it on.
We set up one side of the living room like a stage, complete with a floor mic and amps, so – while Larry was working and I was off for four days of the week – I could plug in my guitar and sing at the top of my lungs, finally acting like the rock star I believed I would someday become.
Getting out of my parents’ basement meant that I could finally live guilt-free, or at least bury my guilt so deeply I didn’t even know it was there. I still behaved atrociously, but knowing my parents didn’t know where I was or what I was doing … that made my choices feel less awful.
But I never dreamed of living with Larry in Pitcairn. I didn’t dream of a big apartment without roommates, or a place to pretend I was a rock star, or a three-night-a-week job at the Pennysaver. When I dreamed, I imagined myself in California, maybe at Berkeley, flowers in my hair, working to save the planet or teaching its children or writing for The New Yorker and doing publicity tours in Europe.
My dream did not resemble my reality, not even slightly, and I took no steps to remedy that.
Larry was not my dream man, nor was he the person I intended to marry. In fact, I hadn’t even missed Larry when we were apart. I missed the motorcycle and I missed the feeling of freedom, but I did not miss the person who provided those feelings for me.
My forever man was someone different. I was pretty sure I’d marry an English professor who recited poetry to me in the evenings as we sat by candlelight around our vegetarian dinner. Or perhaps I’d find someone who’d take me in his VW Minibus to follow the Grateful Dead around the country. As long as “my man” resembled the person I wanted to become, I thought I’d be happy.
Right now, I wanted to ride motorcycles and have no responsibilities, but I didn’t want to get my own bike. Living with Larry was so much easier than trying to get what I wanted for myself. And I had needs.
My number one, over-arching, overwhelmingly essential need was to drink alcohol every day.