Larry regularly declared, “Pitcairn’s the only place in Pittsburgh that has more bars than churches!”
I’m not sure if that was factual, or even why it inspired pride in Larry. I wish I had somehow counted the churches – which I never saw – and compared that number to the handful of bars we frequented.
Since we lived on the other end of Pitcairn – a full ten minutes’ walk from Barry’s – we started exploring some of those neighborhood bars. The Sharwood Lounge, always pronounced incorrectly as “The Sherwood,” was only a three-minute walk from our new apartment. It was bigger than Barry’s and it had a pool table, so I enjoyed drinking there immensely.
Unfortunately for Larry, The Sharwood had a much younger crowd – my age, instead of gray-hairs. This included young men who, quite consistently, believed it was okay to talk to me whenever Larry wasn’t looking. Larry would go to the bathroom, or across the street to buy cigarettes, and he’d come back to someone hitting on his ol’ lady.
I didn’t mind, as I often got free beers – and occasionally cocaine – out of the deal. Larry, however, didn’t like The Sharwood as much as I did.
“But I can play pool,” I whined, when Larry wanted to go elsewhere.
“I know a different place we can play,” he said. “It’s right across the bridge.”
I hadn’t ever seen a bridge but, sure enough, there’s an enormous bridge right at the end of Main Street. It goes into a minuscule town called Wall.
Apparently someone had named a town after a slab of concrete, or maybe plaster.
Larry and I started going “right across the bridge” to Paul’s Place whenever I wasn’t working. For Larry, they had Miller Lite on tap. For me, they had a great jukebox, featuring not only country and classic rock but also one of my favorite songs by the Talking Heads. And they had a pool table!
Owner Paul was there every night, sometimes bartending, sometimes not, but always drinking.
Larry and I went straight to Paul’s after work, because Paul’s Place had hamburgers and pickled eggs and reheated frozen pizza, which meant we could start drinking at dinner time.
We’d sit down at a table because the bar was too crowded with other people eating their pickled eggs, and we’d have our dinner and a couple of draft beers. We’d listen to the jukebox and sometimes play a game of pool. Eventually, the after-work crowd would clear out, and we’d move our glasses to the bar to sit where we were more comfortable.
I loved those high, spinning chairs. Plus I always wanted to be as close to the alcohol as possible.
Then, as we sat at the bar drinking, Paul’s Place would slowly fill up again as the night crowd descended. They’d stay for hours, getting drunker and louder as the night wore on, and then they’d shuffle out the door to go home.
Larry and I would stay through both waves, drinking and laughing and having a good ol’ time. We got to know Paul really well. Sometimes he’d get us a beer at 1:59 a.m. and allow us to drink it before shooing us out the door.
Then we’d wander out to the bike, put on our helmets, and drive the two minutes across the bridge to our home.
We loved the camaraderie there. But every night, as we pulled into Paul’s Place, I was inexplicably drawn to the drab, window-less building next door.
As the weather started to get cooler, and the longest summer of my life ended, I became acutely aware – again – that I was living a double life.
Three days a week, I was the young adult who was smart and friendly and hard-working, who loved new wave music and laughing with my young-adult colleagues. Our little crew ordered subs and Diet Coke and ate while we “worked.” Those happy times started on Tuesday afternoons, when I hopped on the bus and rode into Pittsburgh with my Walkman in my pocket and my REM tape on repeat.
Between shifts, I drank and slept.
Around three o’clock in the morning, Larry would pick me up on the motorcycle. Even in the snow – when my teeth would chatter and my fingers turned blue and I’d nearly cry – I’d ride the motorcycle ready to party, having just completed a rousing shift of paste-up with my new best friends.
But sometimes we worked until the sun came up and the busses started running again. Then the bar downstairs opened so the Pennysaver staff would have a few drinks.
One morning, no one else wanted to drink with me so I was left to drink with only Steve, the press operator. Steve and I drank and drank. He had two rows of front teeth, which caricatured his mouth into such a state that it was hard to notice the rest of his face. By the end of that drinking escapade, Steve and I were making out on the bar stools; the man was inexplicably a great kisser.
That day and several others, I slept through my bus stop at the end of the line. The bus had already headed back into Pittsburgh. I’d wake to a rush-hour-crowded bus, panicked, and jump off the bus wherever I was. Then I’d cross the street and wait for the next bus home.
Back in Pitcairn, especially in the middle of the night, I’d blast my music at full volume, smoking cigarettes and drinking whatever beer we had in the fridge. I’d wake Larry for sex when the sun rose, then I’d pass out in the bed as Larry was pulling on his jeans for work.
These were good days.
On Fridays, I morphed into full-time biker chick. For me, that meant country music and drinking beer from Friday afternoon until whenever I passed out Tuesday morning. If we also went out for pizza, or Larry’s band played in one of the bars, it was a big weekend.
Larry and I did absolutely nothing else.
Larry spent his days – when I was sleeping – working on his bike in his new garage. He did all the shopping, too: bread and bologna for him, and sliced mushrooms for me. I sautéed the mushrooms in butter virtually every day and called it sustenance.
Larry made sure we had at least a twelve-pack of Miller Lite in the fridge so I’d have something to drink when I came home from work. There was nowhere to get beer in the middle of the night. “Closing time” – two o’clock in the morning – doesn’t mean much to most people, but to an alcoholic, it’s the end of forever.
I never, ever wanted it to be two o’clock.
For three nights of work, a twelve-pack wasn’t nearly enough. Larry started buying cases, which he’d split to carry home in the saddlebags. Then I’d complain because I couldn’t drink them for many hours; the Harley turned them to foam.
But I always drank them eventually, and it was impossible to keep the fridge stocked with me living there.
Back in the day, calling someone on the phone meant walking to the wall, picking up the phone, and standing beside that wall while talking on the phone. If you needed to use the restroom, drive a car, or reach your cigarettes on the other side of the room, you needed to put down the phone and walk away, often hanging up before doing so (particularly when driving).
When the call was long distance – say, to Bonnie in Ohio or Debbie in Virginia – that added a cost to the bill at the end of the month. Long distance bills could be very, very high.
So I didn’t talk to Bonnie or Debbie very often. We wrote letters to each other, and waited by the mailbox for a response, which came immediately in Debbie’s case, and almost never came in Bonnie’s case.
When I did talk on the phone, then, my conversations felt especially important. But in our new apartment, we spent most of our time listening to other people’s conversations.
This made it very challenging to have a conversation of my own.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me,” I would start.
“And then Jerry found a carrot in his soup and as you know Jerry hates carrots and …” Then there would be static.
“Hello?”
“Still me,” I’d say.
“What about the car? Didn’t he just get it fixed?”
“What?”
“I don’t know what’s happening, sorry. Something’s wrong with our phone we think.”
Some kid would ramble: “Every day I get butter sandwiches in my lunch. I HATE butter sandwiches!”
“Did you hear that?”
“Of course I heard that. What is it?”
“I have no idea.”
The voices would suddenly notice us. “Who is that talking? Did you hear something?”
“It sounds like someone else is on our line! Get off our line you asshole!”
“I’m not on your line! I’m on my own phone!”
“What did they say?”
“I have no idea.”
“This is fucking insane!”
“If I ever buy carrots again, I’m hiding them in the back drawer!”
“Are you still there, Kirsten?”
“I’m here!”
“Kirsten? What were you saying about carrots?”
“I wasn’t talking about carrots!”
“He didn’t just get the car fixed. He never got it fixed the first time so this time….”
My conversation would end before it ever began.
It took me awhile to realize that the people talking on “our” phone line were living in the apartment building next door.
Pitcairn isn’t known for its glamour but the apartment building next door was an eyesore. It was a pasted-up, falling-down, three-story building with about 12 apartments. I called it the Pitcairn slum.
Our house didn’t have windows facing in that direction, but we started to recognize that the voices from outside were eerily similar to the voices we were hearing on our phone. If we opened our kitchen window and listened really carefully, the phone conversation echoed.
There was no way to remedy the situation.
Eventually it became fun to see who could hear us talking, and who could respond. We’d try to hold conversations with the people next door.
“Hey! Tell me more about the carrots!” I would yell.
The other person would get very quiet. “Did you hear that?”
I’d giggle, waiting. Phones were fun.
Only a few years later, the building next door was completely demolished leaving only dirt and grass.
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.
