After making the same choice twice to be with Larry, I decided to try to assemble some kind of new family dynamic. I brought my parents into my world this time.
Larry was playing with his band, so I invited them to hear him sing. To my surprise, they showed up.
I slid over in the booth with my beer, asked them if they wanted anything to drink. They did not.
Drinking in front of my parents – no matter how old I was, no matter where I lived, just felt … so wrong.
So we sat together and I just sipped. I talked over the music, pointing at the guys in the band, talking about them as though they were brilliant, explaining their musical histories. I didn’t mention their wives or grandchildren.
Instead I talked about the steel guitar since, as an instrument, it mesmerized me.
“The steel guitar player sings a song called What I’d Say; I love it.”
“I know that song,” said my dad. “It’s Ray Charles.”
“Really?! It’s a great song!” I thought my dad and I were bonding.
Actually the song came out before I was born, when my dad was a teenager. The guy who played steel guitar was probably 10 years older than my dad. No one mentioned this.
“Yeah,” said my dad. “You sat on my Ray Charles album.”
I’d done this when I was a toddler; I could never tell if he was mad at me for breaking his album, or if he was being funny. This night, I felt particularly guilty.
Our music-drenched conversation was stilted, awkward. While Larry sang, I rambled on and on.
Suddenly the music shifted; the band started playing something slow. I knew this song from my dad’s Olivia Newton-John album, Help Me Make It Through the Night.
My dad asked my mom to dance.
So my parents went right out there onto the dance floor with all the other old people, and they danced.
I hadn’t seen my parents dance often, since it’s not the sort of thing parents do in the living room when raising three children, except on television. They’d always been close, almost never argued, but I’d never seen them slow dance.
And there was Larry, on the stage by the dance floor in this dingy bar, singing his heart out: “I don’t care what’s right or wrong…!” and smiling a huge smile, playing his guitar and nodding gleefully at me. The way Larry saw it, my parents had finally crossed into our world, peacefully and happily, and would stay there forever, accepting their daughter’s fate, understanding everything.
But I knew better.
I watched my parents dance, silently stunned. They wanted to understand how I’d come to this point, how they’d lost their daughter to this smoky bar full of drunken strangers. They wanted to accept Larry – his age, his occupation, his cigarettes, his motorcycle, his theft of their beloved child. They wanted to understand the allure, to figure out why I thought this lifestyle was better than how I’d grown up.
I knew they’d never understand.
So they danced.
And then the song was over. My dad waved to Larry briefly as Larry smiled there on the stage, and they came back to the booth where I was sitting, but they did not sit down.
“We’re going to go,” they said.
I stood up and thanked them, hugged them, both grateful and agonized that they were leaving.
Then finally, when they left, I could drink the way I wanted to drink.
Larry went back to his machinist job, and the guys decided to get the band back together. After all, it had only been a few months. Pittsburgh barely knew we’d been gone.
Drummer Stogie invited us camping. Unlike the time when Larry and I slept on gravel, there would be plenty of people, warm air and sunshine.
When we arrived on the scene, though, we discovered that we were (surprise!) expected to bring our own tent and a couple of chairs.
We rolled up on a half-dozen old guys in chairs wearing baseball caps and smoking cigars. The fresh air wasn’t quite as fresh as I had hoped. We put our helmets on the ground, covered them with our leather jackets, and called those our chairs.
The old guys were surrounded by a smattering of pup tents and giant metal wash tubs full of ice and Schaefer beer. Schaefer was the only kind of beer that tasted like someone had vomited in my mouth. But after three beers it tasted like water – so I choked down my first three beers quickly.
Then I kept drinking quickly.
The restrooms were much too far away, so I went over the hill like the guys did when I needed the facilities. In fact, I wanted to be like the guys whenever I could; I had no qualms.
Around midnight, the old guys stubbed out their cigars and started climbing into their pup tents to sleep. Larry and I, who had arrived chair-less and tent-less on the motorcycle, decided to go to a local bar and get something better than Schaefer beer.
“It’s brandy time!” Larry said gruffly, smiling. “Let’s get warmed up!” He put his arm around me and squeezed, the familiarity oddly comforting.
Somehow we found a bar in the middle of nowhere – a stone building with a couple of stools and tables. We drank blackberry brandy until the bar closed. Then we hopped on the bike to go back to camp.
We’d just pulled onto a ramp leading to the highway when Larry pulled the bike over and stopped. He stepped off and stared at the bike for a second, me on the back.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Larry said. “Can you drive?” Then he laughed, so I thought he was kidding.
“Really?” I asked, perplexed.
“Yep, I’m too drunk to drive!” Larry shook his head, smiling. “Just git up here and I’ll tell you what to do.”
I had never driven a motorcycle in my life and a Harley-Davidson FLH motorcycle weighs about 800 pounds. But I was as drunk as a human being could be, so I slid myself forward and grabbed the handlebars.
Because that’s what a good drunk does to “help.”
Larry climbed on behind me. “Okay, give it some gas; get a feel for it.”
I revved the engine. “Like this?” It was loud.
“Yeah, now ya put it in gear….”
I stood the bike up – which was very difficult – then tried to just sit down and go.
The bike choked and stalled.
I turned it back on and revved it again. The motorcycle went maybe six feet, jerking us both – hard – and nearly throwing us both off. It was like riding a wild bull.
“Never mind,” Larry said, suddenly sober.
He got back into the driver’s seat, turned on the engine, and took off. We were at the campground, unscathed, in a matter of minutes.
It’s the only time Larry ever admitted to being too drunk to drive, and he never asked me to drive his Harley again.
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’sgroovy 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.
It was only a matter of time before I was gone all night again, drinking with Larry at old-person bars, listening to him sing on stage, wondering why I’d ever left the man.
Still, the thought of the Pitcairn Hotel nauseated me. I loved my job, and I was newly saved. I wasn’t sure what I was doing with Larry; I just knew I didn’t want to go backwards.
But I struggled to get myself to work on time after long nights of heavy drinking. I slept on the bus to work, mightily hungover, and I only worked three nights a week. For the rest of each week, I was fighting with my parents (in my head) about my lifestyle.
In real life, my parents had gone silent.
One night as I hopped onto the motorcycle, Larry announced, “I found us an apartment!”
“I don’t want to live in an apartment,” I said.
“Well let’s take a look,” he said. “If you don’t like it, we won’t get it.”
Larry knew that the key to getting me back was to prime me with liquor and get me away from my parents – not necessarily in that order. So we stopped and had a few beers at Barry’s before going to the apartment which was, of course, in Pitcairn.
The apartment was on Second Street, meaning it was between Main Street and Third Street. Things were simple in Pitcairn. Main Street was flat along the river, and the street numbers went up with the mountain.
We were low on the mountain; we could walk to Barry’s in ten minutes.
Alleys ran between the streets, and this particular apartment had a detached garage in the alley. Larry was thrilled about this since, if he was staying another winter, he wanted somewhere to store his motorcycle.
I was more interested in the apartment itself, which was half a house – not just a dingy room. Our half of the house would be upstairs; an older woman lived downstairs. Everything was completely separate, and we would never see her.
The landlord unlocked the door on the side of the house and let us in. We walked up some stairs into the living room, which was three times the size of the Pitcairn Hotel room. Through one doorway off the living room sat an equally enormous kitchen and through the other was a sizable bedroom.
Larry was barely looking at the place; he was looking at me. “Whattaya think?” he asked.
“It’s huge!” I said. It was at least as big as Larry’s house in Florida.
“We have our own attic, too,” Larry said, opening a door. Up another set of stairs was a giant empty room with a dormer from which I could see the houses below us.
“This is really cool,” I said. “Can I have this room?”
“You can have whatever you want, Baby.”
Larry smiled.
We walked back downstairs to where the landlord was waiting.
“Can I get a dog?” I asked both of them.
Wondering if this was a dealbreaker, Larry looked hopefully at the landlord.
“No dogs,” said the landlord. “Non-negotiable.”
“I really, really want a dog,” I begged.
“Sorry,” said the landlord. “A cat would probably be okay.”
I remembered that darling kitten who’d crawled up my arm in Ohio – a kitten who was then too young for me to take home.
“I like cats,” I said.
And that was that.
I took my childhood bed and my college suitcase and I moved back in with Larry.
I began to believe that I was born broken. I considered: maybe God can fix me.
I turned to my Aunt Joy with prayer requests and God questions, because her direct connection to The Big Guy hasn’t wavered for nine decades. In my family, “WWJD” stands for “What Would Joy Do?” She is a beautifully religious stalwart who, quite literally, once gave me the shirt off her back, and whose faith is absolutely contagious.
So it was with her guidance that I headed to a young people’s Christian retreat. While riding the bus across Pennsylvania, I met women – my age! – who were funny, sweet and gracious. Normally I would be wary of humans, but these people were impossible to dislike. By the time we arrived at our retreat center, where we met hundreds of other young Christians, I had friends.
Our weekend was spent playing games and sitting in circles discussing moral issues and eating delicious meals that made me believe I really needed to eat more often. In my spare time, I became closer to the women in my group, who assured me that I was indeed likable.
But I was terrifically lost. When I asked how I could improve my life, they encouraged me to give myself to God so that I could follow the path meant for me.
“How will I know what path is meant for me?” I asked everyone.
“You just pray and you’ll know,” said my new friends.
On Saturday evening, there was a powerful sermon. The guy at the pulpit talked about the soul being broken and needing to be healed. He talked about drugs and drinking and sex.
“Every time you have sex,” he said, “you give a part of your soul to another human being.”
I thought about the many, many times I’d had sex with complete strangers, just because they’d paid for my beer, given me cocaine, or looked at me like they cared. My soul must have been splintered into a thousand pieces.
Tears unwillingly dropped from my eyes.
The pastor continued: “You can be saved! Step up to be released! Receive the Lord as your savior!”
Maybe this is what I need.
People were flocking toward the front, a slew of clergy waited to receive us, and I was crying. My new friends nudged me a little.
I knew I had to go.
Shaking, terrified, hopeful, I walked to the front of the room. Someone instructed me to kneel, then he grabbed my head, his hands over my ears, squeezing.
“Lord, release this child from the bondage that has held her soul captive! Speak through her, Lord!”
Still crying, I waited; I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.
“Give her Your voice to speak!” the guy was saying, hurting my ears, squeezing even harder.
Was I saved now? I was ready for the guy to let go of my head.
He kept talking. It was several minutes before I realized that kneeling people were only able to get up if they started speaking jibberish. The guy squeezed harder until finally I sputtered some jibberish, too.
“She is speaking in tongues!” the head-squisher announced. “She is saved!” And finally, he let go of my head, pronounced me “released,” and sent me back to my seat.
My new friends were crying tears of joy. I was saved.
We had a beautiful, relaxing ride home, all of us peaceful and happy. I was excited about my life for the first time in years.
My mom warily called down the stairs: “Kirsten, you have a visitor!”
“Okay!” I yelled. A visitor? No one ever visited me.
I walked upstairs and there he was, on the porch, looking every bit as old and bedraggled as ever.
It was Larry.
My stomach flip-flopped. “What are you doing here?”
“I came for you, Baby!” he said, smiling that all-too familiar smile. “I drove all the way here on the bike, didn’t stop except for gas.” He was so proud of himself, gesturing toward the Harley on the street.
Behind me, my mom appeared not to listen while hearing every word.
“I don’t know what you want,” I said. “I am not going back to Florida. I have a job.”
“We don’t need to go back to Florida! We’ll stay here and start a band!”
A band, I thought, remembering the guitar, Larry naked on the mattress, singing Waylon Jennings songs.
Suddenly I felt my mom’s eyes on me, her hot breath on my neck: the warden. Just like that, I needed to escape.
“Let’s go somewhere and talk about it,” Larry said, his gravelly voice oozing, his timing perfect.
Go somewhere, I thought. I can drink I can drink I can drink.
It had been a long time since I’d had a drink.
“I don’t know,” I hesitated.
I turned around but Mom was nowhere to be found; I must have imagined that hot breath.
When I looked at Larry, he was smiling. “I brought your helmet.” He pointed at the bike again. Yep, two helmets.
“Give me a sec,” I said, and closed the door. I found my mother in the kitchen, her despondency already apparent.
“Are you really going to go with him?” my mom asked, incredulous. “After all that’s happened?”
“We’re just going to talk,” I said. “I’ll be back.”
She shook her head, incredulous, her hope for me destroyed. I felt it as disdain but it was grief.
I ignored her, pushed past and ran downstairs. I pulled on some jeans, my boots, my leather jacket. I felt like a god.
I went out “my” basement door and found Larry smoking by the bike, helmet in hand.
“Hey Baby,” he said, his cragged-toothed smile as big as the sun.
“Let’s go,” I said. I strapped on my helmet, hopped on the bike, and settled in for the ride. The summer air was glorious.
Larry took me to the same bar where we’d gone so many times before, with the old people dancing, the country band playing. I sat down in a booth feeling better than I’d ever felt with Larry before – awake, alive.
While Larry got our beers, I sat quietly scanning the room, mysteriously bothered. I couldn’t quite identify the nagging feeling that something was dreadfully wrong.
Larry sat down next to me, a can of Miller Lite on the table in front of me. I took a healthy sip, and another, and the nagging slowly went away.
Finally I felt calm. I hadn’t felt calm in a long time.
Larry talked over the band. He said he understood why I left Florida, although he absolutely did not. He talked about getting an apartment, starting a band, living without roommates, blah blah blah.
As he talked, I continued to drink. I looked at his calloused hands, his thinning hair, the little wrinkles around his eyes. I listened to his voice, like liquid valium. I drank beer after beer, hearing less and less about Larry, returning to that anesthetized dreamlike state where I believed anything was possible.
My misery in the backyard did not go unnoticed. My parents occasionally yelled outside “can you please turn down the music” or “we have dinner if you want any” or “it’s midnight! turn it down!” … things like that.
I didn’t feel happy and I didn’t feel free. I’d lost my treasured “independence” when I left Larry. I felt like a prisoner. Again.
I couldn’t drive – since I didn’t have my own car – so I didn’t go anywhere.
My parents suggested that I earn some money and buy a car. As a show of good faith, which I did not deserve, they let me use their car for job interviews.
I’d wanted to be a journalist for years, since I believed “journalist” was the only version of “writer” who could earn enough money to survive. So I applied for jobs with every publication I found in the Post-Gazette classifieds.
Since I’d done no internships and had zero experience, the few callbacks I received were from entry level sales positions that had little to do with publications. I went to some awful group interviews and listened to presentations. Sometimes I got free donuts. But I left wondering what was wrong with me, since those “interviews” took forever and implied that I’d need something called “commission” to do their work.
Finally I got a job at a place called the Pennysaver.
The Pennysaver was a multi-page magazine full of nothing but ads, a Jurassic-era Craigslist. It was something I’d seen every week in my parents’ mailbox. Like the colorful grocery pages announcing “GROUND BEEF $1.40/LB,” the Pennysaver went into the garbage immediately.
We’d never heard of recycling.
My job was in downtown Oakland, so I could take a bus to get to work. Best of all, I worked with people I adored. Kim and Jemma were also new college graduates, and we spent a great deal of time laughing as we did paste-up for the publication.
“Paste-up” meant that we tried to find full-page, quarter-page and eighth-page ads that were jumbled into a huge wall of ads in front of us. We’d find the correct ad, “paste” it onto a giant piece of cardboard, then carry the cardboard to a place where it would be photographed and turned into print. Then we’d take all the ads off the cardboard and put them back on the wall, where we’d find them again for the next slab of cardboard.
It was a fun, collaborative effort. We played music and laughed like we were in college, preparing for a party.
I loved this job with every ounce of my being. Work was great. It was like playing Concentration all night. And it was all night … because it was a night-shift job, three nights a week, from 5 p.m. until the wee hours of the morning when the work was done. We worked more than 40 hours in those three days, but then we had four days off.
I spent those four days lying in the yard, moaning and singing at the sky, wishing I could “be free” and believing I was locked in a cage.
I complained every day about the hellhole that was my warm, safe, comfortable, dry home. I whined about the basement being too cold. I whined about making my own (free) food in the kitchen. I whined about sharing a bathroom. I whined about absolutely everything, feeling miserable and lonely and alone.
So I was thrilled and not the least bit apprehensive when, about a month after I’d left Florida, a visitor showed up on my parents’ doorstep.
When I wasn’t visiting college friends, I tried to stay entertained at home. I couldn’t just sit around drinking with my non-drinking family, and I hadn’t kept in touch with many people from high school.
Covertly I drank from my parents’ wine stash. The bottles were “hidden” under the stairs in the basement, where I now lived. Gifts to my parents from long-ago dinner guests, they’d been forgotten. I’d chug a little wine and then add water to the bottle from the basement sink.
After a week, the bottles contained mostly water that smelled like wine. Since my parents didn’t drink, I figured no one would ever know.
Apparently my parents gave that “wine” to future dinner guests. Oops.
Drinking was unusual, though. I slept until afternoon every day. When I finally crawled out of my bed, I only made it as far as the backyard. I took cigarettes, a blanket, my boombox and my new R.E.M. cassette tape. I sprawled in the yard until well past midnight, loudly singing every song over and over.
Fall on Mewas my favorite, its lyrics offering the sky a chance to fall right out of space to crush me, right there in my parents’ backyard. I’d stare into the void and sing at the top of my lungs, daring that sky to “faaaall on meeeee!”
I didn’t realize until years later that the lyrics actually told the sky: “Don’tfall on me.”
I was a doomsday seeker from way back; it never occurred to me that the sky wasn’t coming down.
While I lay there in the yard, night after glorious summer night, I started to realize that there was something beyond cigarettes and a falling sky. I started to notice that someone young and beautiful was nearby.
Quite literally, I discovered the boy next door. He wandered by an open window, listening to my music (along with the rest of the neighborhood) and I started to pay attention to what he was doing – which, from what I could tell, was not much of anything. He’d walk back and forth in front of his open window, disappearing and reappearing, sometimes shirtless on a warm summer evening, and I grew intrigued.
I mentioned him to my mom, asking if she knew his name, and she did not. But – given that anyone was better than Larry – she encouraged me to walk over and knock on the door and ask his name.
After several days of total boredom, I did just that. Rob answered the door and told me that he was part of the National Guard (which was very cool) and so he only worked during certain days of each month. He made me laugh in our two-minute conversation, so when he then asked me out, I said yes.
Rob took me to a nice dinner where he made me laugh and laugh and laugh until my stomach hurt and my cheekbones ached and I thought: I could never date a comedian and we kissed for an hour at his house, still laughing.
I went home and closed my door and hid in the basement so that I would never, ever be subjected to the constant laughter that Rob caused ever again.
Of course he found me; I was literally next door. So I had to tell him I didn’t think it was going to work out between us, which was fine because he was shipping out to somewhere to take care of some national emergency anyway.
Rob left, and I went back to lying in the yard and wailing at the sky.
After hanging out with Bonnie in Ohio, I realized it was no big deal to leave home whenever I wanted to go. I had my own entrance after all, so who was going to stop me?
My parents – who never thought Bonnie was a particularly good friend for me – suggested that if I wanted to go somewhere, maybe I should visit my more responsible college friend, Debbie, who lived in Norfolk.
I’m sure they expected Debbie to be a positive influence on me. While I’d always considered Bonnie to be “my other half,” Debbie was my other other half. Debbie had genuine love and respect for my inner child; that was the part of me she knew best. She saw my drunken episodes as things I did, not who I was – unlike my view of me. I knew better.
I imagined Debbie as the person I would have been if I’d never picked up a drink. She was sweet and naive and responsible. She had a job in public relations. She had her own apartment, a car, and a whole weekend to entertain me.
She picked me up at the Greyhound bus station, and we cried and hugged like we hadn’t seen each other in forever, even though it had only been a couple of months.
We went out to eat and talked as though no time at all had passed. She told me about her job and her co-workers and her new crush, Norman – whose name was ironically also her father’s name – and I told her about Larry and Florida and leaving.
Then we went to a bar, where I drank enough to knock out an elephant.
As part of the fun, Debbie pulled me aside for an hour to discuss whether or not she should go home with Norman. While Debbie and I talked, I made googly eyes at a blonde guy across the room. He was wearing a flannel shirt and smiling at me as though I were the only woman in the entire jam-packed nightclub.
His smile was perfect.
After a few more rum-and-cokes, I wanted to talk to the guy instead of Debbie. I convinced her to go home with Norman – right now. Debbie left with Norman, giggling and thrilled, leaving me with her home address on a napkin so I could find her later.
I walked over to the guy with the flannel shirt. “Can you drive me home?” I asked, by way of introduction.
He blinked, briefly cocked his head, then said, “Sure!”
Minutes later, I was getting a tour of Norfolk from a complete stranger who was driving drunk through town. An hour after that, we stopped in the middle of the road to have sex. We laughed like children, like lovers, like friends. As the sun started to rise on the horizon, I told him that this was the best night ever, and that I wanted to keep his flannel shirt forever so I would never forget him or the most incredible night of my very young life.
He wrapped me in the flannel and I wore it, along with my cutoff shorts and bare feet, as I carried my sandals to Debbie’s door, knocking and smiling as a blissful Debbie answered.
Forty years later, Debbie is heart-wrenchingly dead and I don’t even remember the guy’s name. But I still have his shirt: disintegrating, huge holes, stuffing coming out. It’s my favorite shirt. It reminds me of my drunkenness, my stupidity, my good fortune, and my youth.
I wear it like a badge, an albatross, and a blanket.
My new “apartment” meant that I could go wherever, whenever I wanted. It was my chance for freedom while living with parents. But of course, I had no car.
I wasted no time calling Bonnie to discuss possibilities. Bonnie had transferred to the University of Akron but it was still summer, so she was bored.
Bonnie came to visit my new digs immediately. She was more thrilled than anyone that I was no longer tied to Larry. She had her best friend back, and I had mine, and we could be young and free and wild again.
Bonnie wasn’t legal drinking age yet, but she still had her fake ID. We determined that a hotel bar would be less likely to card us.
“And a hotel bar would have rich guys to buy us drinks!” she said. She surmised – and I agreed – that only rich people stay in nice hotels. I generally slept on the ground or under trailers, so I probably couldn’t afford hotel bar prices.
So we went to the local Marriott. We found plenty of “rich” guys to buy us drinks – and take us to their hotel rooms. The fact that the two we found were married didn’t matter at all. We all stayed together in one room, as was our usual custom. We were always safer if we stayed together.
The next night, Bonnie and I went to a biker bar, since old habits die hard. Two of the bikers followed us home on a beautiful summer evening after we’d all drunk substantially more than our share. When we got back to my parents’ house, we kissed our safety-keepers goodnight.
After the kissing, one of the guys said we should all go for a longer ride. “I know a place,” he said. “It’s out in the country.”
“That sounds great!” I said.
But Bonnie grabbed my arm, pulled me aside, and stared hard into my eyes. “I can’t ride on a motorcycle,” she said.
“Whattaya mean?” I asked. I thought she, like me, loved motorcycles.
“Please don’t make me go!” she whispered – loudly, panicked.
I looked back at the guys, their engines sputtering in front of my parents’ house in the middle of the night. “Sorry guys, we can’t go,” I yelled.
They waved and drove off, no problem.
“What’s wrong?” I looked at Bonnie, who I’d never seen look more upset, ever.
She paused. “It’s my face,” she said. “I don’t care if I die; I’m not afraid of death. But if something happens to my face….” She paused. “My face is all I have,” she said. “I can’t let anything happen to my face.”
“Okay,” I said, hugging her, drunk, in the front yard. “Nothing’s going to happen to your face.”
We went inside and played music until we passed out on the basement floor.
The next day she drove us to Ohio, where we could both legally drink. We got wasted and went to The Smiths concert, but spent our evening on the bathroom floor and missed the entire show.
The next day we went to see Micki, from college, whose cat had three-week-old kittens. One of them was crawling up my arm.
“Can I have this one?” I said.
“You can’t take her yet!” Micki warned. “Come back in five weeks!”
“Okay!” I promised. I was so rad; I hadn’t even asked my parents if I could get a kitten.
