I Would Not Be Held.
My dad wasted no time driving the U-Haul to Larry’s house to get my stuff. I knocked on the door, Daddy by my side.
A smiling, shirtless Larry flung open the door, cigarette in one hand, and started to say, “I knew you’d be back!” But he trailed off and stopped smiling when he saw my dad. Dad was not smiling.
“What’s going on,” he said flatly, nodding in my dad’s direction and holding the door open for us.
“I just need my stuff,” I said, ducking past Larry and heading into the bedroom. I started shoving my clothes into the boxes from whence they’d come, some into the duffel that had been strapped onto Larry’s motorcycle only a couple of months before. I should have known I was in trouble when I got choked up packing my filthy black Harley-Davidson t-shirts.
But I squashed my tears and shoved my crap into bags and boxes. I handed all the boxes to my dad, grabbed as many packs of cigarettes as I could find and, finally, headed for the hamsters.
Larry watched me in disbelief. While my dad was outside he asked, “Are you sure you wanna do this?”
“I’m totally fuckin’ sure,” I said, spitting the words at him. Suddenly I was furious with Larry for forcing me to live in this hellhole, this beastly hot place with no air conditioning and no guitars.
Suddenly everything was Larry’s fault.
I fumed silently, shoving hamster food into torn plastic grocery bags. When Larry tried to pull me toward him, I pushed him away with my head, shrugged him off.
I would not be held.
This was the only time I ever realized that real Dad was better than fake Dad, although I still didn’t understand the Freudian aspect of what I’d been doing. I left Larry in Florida almost exactly a year after I’d found him, and I tried hard to burn that bridge before I left.
From a young age, I’d believed that being angry would protect me from my angst about loss. I weaponized my anger against my sadness and took it out on anyone associated with me. Every time I learned we were planning to move, I started to hate the place we were leaving. I thought anger turned me into something more stoic than the lost child I ignored. When I moved away from places I loved – schools, homes, even vacations – becoming angry kept me from crying. I thought anger would make leaving less painful.
In actuality, I ignored pain completely. Along with everything else, alcohol robbed me of any distinct feelings. My pain disappeared along with my love, my hate, my fear, my joy, my excitement, my mind. In the process of trying to destroy my pain, I destroyed every feeling I’d ever had.
At the age of 21, I was already dead inside.
My dad took the last of the boxes to the U-Haul and started the engine, cooling the cab while he waited for me to say goodbye. He didn’t need to say anything to Larry.
I grabbed the half-bag of wood shavings, then picked up the hamster cage – waking up both furry critters, their noses crinkling at the sky, confused, their eyes still closed. They were adorably ignorant.
Larry gently grabbed my arm, shaking the cage. “What can I do to make you stay?”
“Not a fucking thing,” I said, yanking my arm from his grip.
He let go without a fight and watched me walk out the door without another word.