Life With Larry was Dull.
If anything good came out of my being randomly attacked, it’s that I finally had some sense of mortality tossed into my path of self-destruction and insanity. I recognized for the first time that following the cocaine wasn’t always the smartest path, and that going anywhere with strangers – or even friends – wasn’t a great idea.
So instead of starting fights and storming out to bars by myself, I reverted to life with Larry as Larry would have it. I still had my job, and I still worked three very long nights a week, smoking pot on lunch breaks. On non-work days I still slept until well past noon then immediately started drinking beer.
I sought intoxication constantly.
Weekends were full: band gigs, football at the VFW, burgers and beers, boom box blasting after the bars closed.
I could hardly complain, although I constantly did. Life with Larry was dull. It wasn’t like college. It wasn’t like Bike Week. It was just one long, drawn out day at a very dark bar with nothing to do and no end in sight. At home, I’d wail along to Luka: “Just don’t ask me how I am….”
I thought about what life with Larry might look like in the future and I realized that nothing was going to change. I would be sitting on barstools sucking on long cigarettes and listening to jukeboxes forever. I would be riding on the back of a motorcycle in sunshine and thunderstorms, and I’d have racing stripes on my rusted-out car. I would never get a dog because cats were easier. I would never have children. I would go to bars every weekend, watching Larry play guitar and sing, for the rest of time.
In short, I would become the woman I saw at The Hood during college, who sat in the corner and sang off-key with the jukebox until she walked home alone. I would become ancient and friendless and stuck in a relationship with a guy who was dumb as a rock.
He would hit me if I woke him up. He would blame his mother for his smoking, and me for any cheating, and chase my pets down the street with his clonky boots and spend every spare moment fixing that stupid motorcycle in our tiny garage because we would never have any money and sex would be the only way we would ever communicate.
Worse yet, Larry would never be reassuring or emotionally supportive. After I was attacked, Larry was completely ignorant of the fear in my eyes. He didn’t see any difference in me – the difference that Bonnie saw immediately. With Bonnie gone, there was no one to know how I felt.
If anything, Larry saw the attack as a positive thing because, as he said, “It knocked some fuckin’ sense into ya!”
In short, having a surrogate father as a boyfriend was starting to wear on me.
I tried to be fun. I tried to be wild. I tried to remain the rebel I thought I had become. But my soul was losing ground to my addiction without my even knowing it. I’d numbed my pain for so long, I could no longer feel joy. In fact, I felt completely dead inside.
Nobody noticed when the life disappeared from my eyes.
Not even me.
