While I spent most of my time drinking with Bonnie, I still had to contend with weekends with Larry – somehow. As long as I could drink (which I could, always, every day, constantly), I was pretty content. But drinking with Larry in a dark bar in Pitcairn wasn’t quite like college.
The one thing I loved about Larry was his ability to play guitar and sing. He was a superstar of sorts in my mind, building a band from nothing anytime he felt like singing. I watched him sit around and figure out new songs on his guitar, which he did effortlessly – although it took a long time – and then he’d practice the song a few times and play it on stage the next night.
I wanted to do that, too.
I’d taken guitar class in ninth grade, and a few private lessons in high school, so I had a small guitar and I knew a few chords. I showed Larry my Stairway to Heavenriff that I’d practiced over the years – having learned it before I ever heard the actual song – and he said, “You can play!”
He didn’t mean I could play well, but he was excited to know I had potential.
Larry showed me that every, single fifties song I ever knew is made up of four chords in a very specific rhythm (G, C, Em, D). Tears On My Pillow was the first one I learned, and I played it a hundred times. I could play other fifties songs, too, but I didn’t know the words to very many of them.
Eventually I started experimenting to see if I could figure out songs on the guitar, too.
One day, while Larry was out, I sat in that tiny apartment with my guitar and figured out how to play I Honestly Love You. I have no idea if I did it right, but whatever I figured out, I practiced until my fingers were beyond calloused and sore; they were practically bleeding.
Conveniently, I still bit my nails all the time so there was no worry about fingernails in the way of my chording.
After a few days of practice, I shyly announced: “I have something to show you.”
“What’s up, Baby?” he asked, sitting at the bottom of the bed where I’d been sitting for hours.
Convinced that I loved Larry more than life itself, and that I would create my own little form of superstardom, I played the entire song – three verses and the bridge (which was quite likely incorrect) – and sang to the 37-year-old biker that I honestly loved him.
I sang it quietly, way too quickly, and much too shyly to be a declaration of love. It was more a declaration of “maybe I can sing” in a humble, confused sort of way.
It’s the only time I ever learned a song in order to play it for Larry. I deemed the song meaningful enough, in a sense, to thank Larry for taking me in, keeping me fed and full of alcohol, and giving me a place to stay for so many months.
I got a little choked up in my anxiety.
And Larry almost – but not quite – cried. Like a proud parent, he told me the song was great, and that I sang it great; he encouraged me to keep playing.
I felt like I was 12 and he was 65. But I felt proud of myself, too.
I hadn’t planned to do any more than play that one song in that one room. But much later, I did more.
In my four years at Mount Union, one day every year stands out as being my absolute favorite: Snow Carnival.
After one particularly prolific snowstorm, all classes would be canceled; we’d have Snow Carnival instead. Students would flock to the quad to create snow sculptures, build igloos, have snowball battles and flop around making snow angels.
During my first two years, I participated with all of my vigor. I am not an artist and I have very little skill when it comes to snow, but I had a blast, surrounded by friends and sorority sisters, all of us freezing cold and laughing … then to the caf for hot chocolate with marshmallows.
On Bonnie’s first Snow Carnival – my junior year – she’d said, “Let me sleep!” So I had – although I felt like half of me was indoors while the other half played games and had fun. I had a good day without Bonnie; later we had some beer delivered to the dorm and spent the rest of the evening drinking, blasting music and pretending it was a weekend.
By my senior year, after they canceled classes we both went back to sleep. We’d both been quite drunk the night before. Unlike the prior three years, I no longer cared that I was missing out on Snow Carnival. My new motto was simple: “Fuck it.”
I had to live this motto or the pain would be debilitating.
But during Snow Carnival senior year, I decided to wake up Bonnie. Her door wasn’t locked, as usual, and I walked in and plopped myself in Bonnie’s chair to wait.
She rolled over, disheveled, and said, “Hey. Ya want a beer?”
“You have fucking beer?!” I marveled. Usually all the beer was gone by morning.
“I think there’s a couple in there,” she said. “Gimme one.”
I opened her fridge and, sure enough, found four beers. It was like Christmas! No classes and beer before breakfast. Of course it was well past noon, so it was a very late breakfast.
Bonnie sat up and cracked her beer. I waited for her to take a sip before I spoke again.
“Want some real snow?” I asked Bonnie.
“I’m not going out there,” she said.
“No, I mean real snow,” I said. “Santa Claus gave me a present.”
Snow Carnival happened to occur the very day after Nick gave me my own vial of cocaine. Suddenly the cocaine-slang word “snow” took on a whole new meaning.
“You are fucking shitting me,” she said. “Give me some right now!”
Bonnie turned up the music to full blast, and we had a day to rival all past and future Snow Carnivals. We ordered steak subs and a twelve-pack of beer. Every so often, we slyly pulled out our illegal drugs and carefully designed small lines on the desk, trying to preserve it for as long as possible. We knew we weren’t going anywhere that day, and we needed the cocaine to last as long as possible – which, we knew, would only be one day. This was our first, last and only personal cocaine party.
People ran down the hall past the door of Bonnie’s room, whooping and hooting and loving life, sometimes knocking and wandering in, causing us to panic and cover the lines with a mug – then, eventually, to lock the door to keep out the unruly.
At the time, we thought we ruled the world.
Looking back, we missed the greatest day of the year and never left the room.
Nick – our Santa Claus – was a regular at The Elm, so Bonnie and I went there all the time.
We were daily drinkers by then and we wanted to be daily cocaine users, too. But we didn’t want to be arrested, and we didn’t want to splurge for the extreme amounts of cocaine we desired.
Nick was sweet, quiet and shy around us, like a high schooler who had never bloomed. Fortunately Bonnie and I talked enough for all of us, and we adored Nick.
Nick had a sweet spot for me, and he obviously had tons of cocaine, so it was a win-win situation. I would have done anything he asked, but he never asked for a single thing.
Nick brought me back to the dorm one night, in his car and without Bonnie. I don’t remember why but I found myself at 3 a.m. smuggling a male into my room, again, risking ramifications of social probation because there was still cocaine left in Santa Claus’ little brown vial.
I don’t know where Nick got the money, but a vial of cocaine cost about $100. For Nick, Bonnie and me, it lasted one night. Or so it seemed.
The night Nick drove me home from The Elm, I figured he wanted to sleep with me. It was rare that guys came home with me for any other reason. But Nick, who was at least as old as Larry, had other plans.
Like me, Nick just wanted to do cocaine. We were both wired but tried to be quiet so as not to be caught. I played quiet music – Alison Moyet’s Alfalbum – and did lines that Nick splayed on my desk. When the second playing of the album was over, Nick stood up to leave.
Suddenly desperately lonely and afraid, I tried to kiss Nick, hoping he would stay longer, but he didn’t want that.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “I like you.”
This confused the heck out of me.
So I just walked him to the parking lot. It was snowing hard, and silent.
Nick reached into his pocket and took out a brand new, full vial of cocaine. He picked up my hand, put the vial into my open palm, then closed my hand around it.
“No!” I whined. “I can’t take this! It’s too much.”
It was, quite literally, too much. After all the coke I’d done already, it could have killed me. But the thought of having a full vial of cocaine to myself was beyond exhilarating; I couldn’t imagine anything better in the entire world.
“Take it,” he whispered, giving me a brief, awkward hug. “I’ll see ya later.”
So I pocketed it and watched him drive off.
I covertly moved the cocaine to my room where I stared at it, feeling guiltily ecstatic like I’d just successfully robbed a bank.
I recalled that night long ago, after The Firm concert, when I’d held my head out the window gasping for air, believing my heart was going to explode.
I opened the bottle anyway.
I used the little included spoon to do one hit from my very own cocaine bottle. After inserting some into my left nostril, I did another one on the right.
It was mine.
My heart was pounding; in addition to being wired, I was terrified.
I put a little coke on my finger, tasted it, wiped my finger on my gums. I wanted to have this forever.
I put it way in the back of my desk drawer, behind my pens, push-pins and post-its, and closed the drawer tight.
I can’t figure out why I don’t want to write about Bob and Nick.
Maybe it’s because I so loved Nick, our sapling Santa Claus, and I’m so sure (now) that he was married and that his grand gestures of giving me cocaine even though I didn’t sleep with him … well, that was just nobility, not guilt, causing that.
Maybe it’s because Nick was so shy and careful and because he treated me like a friend. Maybe it’s because I used him so obviously for his cocaine and never even knew his last name and he could have died and I wouldn’t have even known.
Maybe it’s because of Bob. Maybe it’s because Bob was the first consistent Black man in my life, unless you count Tyrone from high school. Bob was more brazen than anyone I’d ever known, even Larry.
Maybe Bob was the reason that my ex-roommate Donna said – and I quote: “At least my parents won’t let me date niggers,” ending our friendship forever.
Yes, really she said that.
But I didn’t date Bob, nor sleep with him. I’m pretty sure he was married too, because sitting for hours with two college-aged girls in his two-door Accord … well, that had to be enough guilt already. Bob never made a move on us, but he constantly talked about sex.
In order to obtain cocaine, Bonnie and I were willing to answer Bob’s questions. Maybe I don’t want to write about Bob because he asked me which finger I used to masturbate, which I proudly said was none of his fucking business.
But then I told him anyway and it makes me gag a little just to admit that. I got another blast of coke for that answer.
Maybe I don’t want to write about Bob, but I need to tell the finger story to explain why I didn’t like Bob and still like Nick to this day, even though they’re probably both dead, like Bonnie and I should be.
Maybe it’s because our name for Nick was Santa Claus – Saint Nick, get it? And Nick was a true saint who gave out cocaine like it was candy, to me at least. And once I tell the story of Nick, then the idea of Santa with the cocaine is gone forever.
Maybe it’s because these were the last good times with Bonnie, and maybe once I write about the good times, then they’re really over, just like the bad times wane when I write about them.
Hanging out with Bob and Nick … this is where my year went poof! up in smoke.
Maybe it’s because this was almost the end of college, and I don’t want to let go of the good memories.
Maybe I don’t want to write about Nick or Bob because I’m getting to the place in my story when I started giving away more of myself than I wanted to give, and maybe that’s what I don’t want to admit. Maybe this is when the tides really turned. Maybe this is when I went from being a happy-go-lucky sorority girl to a sleazy barfly.
Maybe I don’t want to write about Nick or Bob because once I write this, the story turns and I’ve crossed that line and it’s all downhill until the inevitable crash.
Maybe it’s because it’s sad that hanging out with two dirty old men were some of the happiest times I had during senior year, and all I remember is the incessant, insane craving for their cocaine.
One night, Bonnie and I went into a bar bathroom together – as we often did – and discovered a white, powdery substance lying neatly in a line.
It was on the toilet tank, as if someone had forgotten to snort it.
Bonnie and I saw it immediately; we both stared at the powder.
“Do you think it’s for us?” Bonnie asked, incredulous that something so valuable would be lying there forgotten.
“I don’t know!” I said. “Maybe?”
“Let’s just do it right now!” She looked at me for reassurance. I wanted it so bad but ….
“Wait,” I said. I was worried – not about the repercussions of doing someone else’s coke, but about the possibility of death. “What if it’s not cocaine?”
Bonnie had already pulled a dollar bill from her jeans pocket and rolled it up. She snorted half the line, and handed me the rolled-up bill.
“It’s cocaine,” she said.
I snorted the rest of the line before I’d had time to think too long.
Then, as though we were using a thousand-dollar mirror enameled in gold instead of a toilet tank, we wiped up every speck of cocaine from the back of that toilet. We used our fingers to make sure we got it all – then wiped the excess coke on our gums, as is customary, and licked our fingers.
When we were sure there wasn’t one dust speck left on that toilet tank, Bonnie and I started to walk out of the bathroom – and then remembered we’d gone in there for a different reason.
As Bonnie used the toilet she said, “Let’s act like we didn’t see anything; we don’t want someone getting mad because we did their coke.”
“They’re going to know!” I whined, paranoia from cocaine creeping in.
“They won’t know it was us,” she said, confident. Bonnie always believed she could get away with anything – and I felt better when she felt better about things. She was never afraid.
“Okay,” I said, taking my turn on the toilet. “We’ll just act like we were in here using the toilet.”
“We were in here using the toilet,” she said. “See?” She laughed at me, literally using the toilet while fretting.
And that settled it.
No one even looked at us as we ventured back into the bar. We’d gotten free cocaine from who-knows-who, and no one was the wiser.
That night, Bonnie and I wandered into the bathroom several times. We only got the one free line, but we kept checking anyway. It never happened again.
But this led to a pattern of bathroom usage that haunts me to this day.
Every time I went into a public stall from that day forward – for many years, in fact – I locked the door behind me, knelt down on one knee, and checked to see if there was any cocaine on the toilet tank.
Sometimes something would be there.
I could see, through my drunken vision, that there was a powdery substance there – sometimes in a pile, sometimes more spread out, as though someone had blown the line around on the back of the toilet.
So I would take my fingers and wipe up every tiny bit of that “powder,” licking my fingers until I was sure I ingested whatever was there – in case it was cocaine.
For years, I did this.
I am certain that what I was licking up was dust, dirt, dead skin cells, clothing fibers and whatever else might make its way onto an extremely unclean toilet tank.
But I wasn’t taking any chances on missing out on leftover cocaine remnants, just in case.
Taking the truck back to college – leaving Larry to drive the motorcycle to work in the snow – made it easier for Bonnie and me to venture off campus and drink. Bonnie and I wanted very badly to see the world, go places, do things – expand our horizons from Mount Union College to regions beyond.
When The Rose got boring, we started going to The Elm – another biker bar. The Elm was a place we’d visited with Larry, when it was quite dull. People ventured out of the back room and stared at us, but no one conversed. There were only a handful of people in the front room. It was fine – but not as fine as when Bonnie and I showed up by ourselves.
Two young girls walking into the front room brought people out of the back room in a heartbeat. We met a ton of people, many of whom invited us to go into the back with them. When we finally decided it was worth the risk, we followed a guy into a whole other bar. There were pool tables and long plastic tables and a vat of chili always cooking. There was a second jukebox in the back room, and the biker clientele that had wandered through the front room periodically hung out grandly and raucously in the back room.
When Larry sat with us, no one approached us. But when he was gone, Bonnie and I made many new friends.
Best of all: our new friends seemed very fond of cocaine.
We saw the clues instantly: five or six people going into a one-person restroom; someone at a pool table leaning way over with their face near the wood; a couple of bikers huddled together unnaturally in a corner; an empty table suddenly surrounded by people tapping their credit cards on the plastic; half a dozen people leaving by the back door – and coming back four minutes later.
We’d finally found our place.
On our first trip to the back room, we sat around and waited for someone to offer us cocaine. The bikers mostly stayed with their own – since most of the guys already had a “chick” attached to their sides – but there were stragglers who weren’t bikers – including the guy who’d brought us back there – who were willing to share their stash with the poor college kids.
It was hard to tell if they were trying to keep the illegal drugs hidden from the bar staff or not, since it was so obvious, but we often crammed into a bathroom to do lines off the sink or the back of the toilet. We didn’t care how we ingested the stuff – only that we got as much as we could for as long as possible.
We never once paid for it.
But sometimes we’d go to The Elm and no one would discover us sitting in the front room, and we didn’t get invited to the back room. On those days, we drank a couple of beers and then went to The Hood.
Eventually, though, we found Nick. Then we found Bob. Both of them – although they did not hang out together – became our new best friends at The Elm.
Some historical events are so big in scope and significance that most people who lived through it remember where they were when it happened. I remember where I was during 9/11, of course. I also remember where I was the first time I experienced an earthquake, the day I learned that Jerry Garcia had died, and the day the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in mid-air.
The Challenger flight is the only one of those that happened during my active alcoholism.
I have no idea why I was home from college on a Tuesday in January. Perhaps it was a long weekend that I’d lengthened into a longer weekend, but I know I was in that tiny twin bed in the Pitcairn Hotel when it happened.
I know because I was busily sleeping through it when Larry and Danny burst through the door and woke me up.
“Wake up, Baby!” Larry said urgently, shaking me with one hand and reaching for the television with the other. The roar of static filled the room immediately.
“Turn it off!” I groaned, rolling over to face the wall while Larry played with the rabbit ears.
“Get your ass outta bed!” Danny said. “It’s fuckin’ noon!”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“C’mon, Baby, you gotta see this!” Larry said again, sitting down on the bottom of the bed, still messing with the rabbit ears. The white noise had calmed into the staticky voice of a news anchor.
“See what?” I said, my head throbbing and the tiny light from the tiny TV agonizing me.
“It blew up!” Larry said.
Danny echoed, “It fuckin’ blew up!” Now Danny was sitting on the bed, too.
“What fucking blew up?” I said. I was not an avid follower of space exploration.
“The Challenger!” Danny said. “The fuckin’ Challenger blew up!”
I squinted at the TV between the backs of Danny and Larry. “What’s a Challenger?” I asked, now a little curious.
“The fuckin’ space shuttle!” they said simultaneously.
I had very, very little knowledge of current events; I only watched the news if it came on at the bar and someone asked to have the volume turned up. Then I usually tuned it out immediately. I didn’t follow sports. I didn’t follow politics or international happenings. The news was not something I cared about at all. I didn’t even follow the weather. If it wasn’t MTV, I wasn’t interested.
But someone must have asked to have the volume turned up in a bar at some point because I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew something about a space shuttle.
“The one with the teacher?” I croaked quietly.
“The one with the fuckin’ teacher,” Larry confirmed. He turned up the staticky announcer and tried to see the nauseatingly repeating video on a black-and-white television with virtually no picture.
I closed my eyes. In my heart, that teacher was every teacher I’d ever loved: my beloved fourth grade teacher who told me I could write; my beloved sixth grade social studies teacher who taught me to keep an open mind; my seventh grade English teacher who taught me how to do research; my college creative writing professor who showed me how to connect with myself.
I didn’t want to watch the Challenger blow up over and over again. I wanted to pretend it never happened.
“Turn it off,” I said, knowing they would watch the explosion, fascinated, for at least another hour, which is exactly what they did.
I had nowhere to hide. I lit a cigarette and stared with them at the tiny screen, trying to stay numb.
I have to interrupt this drunkalogue to talk about the addict who died yesterday.
Probably more than one addict died yesterday, actually, but most of us know the name Matthew Perry. Beloved Friends star and world-famous actor, he also wrote a book called Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. Even the title was funny.
The content was funny, too, but only because Matthew Perry was always able to be funny about anything – even his own demise and first death.
The book details his struggles with addiction from first use to literal death, when he was brought back to life and declared that he would never use again.
When I read Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, one thing stood out to me. It was a story of a lonely child who traveled from one parent, who lived in Canada, to another parent, who lived in America, as an unaccompanied minor. His parents put him on an international flight alone. He was only five years old, and neither parent bothered to go with him on his first flight.
He was terrified and alone and he never recovered from the trauma.
He referred to himself as an unaccompanied minor well into adulthood. The loneliness that he felt on that first trip – and several subsequent trips thereafter – taught him that he wasn’t wanted. He carried the scars with him for the rest of his life.
Addicts almost always have a story like this – a story onto which they grasp that explains who they are and why, a story that explains why they’re using. They believe it’s the root cause of their addictions.
Their perceived trauma becomes an excuse. With time, they should heal from the trauma – but they instead hide behind the perception, the excuse, the feeling that they can never overcome the trauma.
My trauma was my parents moving me to eight different schools in 12 years. After a mid-year move in 8th grade, I broke.
An addict who wants to get clean has to do one thing that, from his book, I don’t believe Matthew Perry ever did. Addicts need to forgive whoever caused the trauma and recognize that the blame for addiction can’t be placed anywhere but on the addict.
I think Matthew Perry was starting to get clean, recognized the trauma, but still held onto it so tightly that he had no way to break free. I think he started using again because he couldn’t find it in himself to forgive them – or to forgive himself – for his entire life.
I watched the same thing happen with Jeff Conway, who was on Celebrity Rehab. He’d been locked in a car trunk at a young age, bullied by some boys who were total jerks, and he couldn’t get over it.
I don’t think Matthew Perry randomly drowned; I imagine toxicity levels in his bloodstream were very high. I’m glad he wrote the book; it gave a clear picture of how much abuse a body can take before crumbling.
But I’m so, so sad that he didn’t recognize his ability to forgive before it was too late. It’s a powerful tool, and one that we all can use to survive the very worst things that were ever done to us – by our parents and anyone else who comes our way.
I will dearly miss Matthew Perry, his quick wit and his sweet soul, even though I never met him. And I am so, so saddened by his death.
When another addict dies, it’s always heartbreaking; but this one hits so close to home, I had to speak up.
Larry slept in my dorm room the night I returned to campus. He’d done it before, climbing into my loft bed at night, peeing out the window before sunrise.
I usually snuck him in through the first floor window after a long night of drinking, but we were careless on the first night of the new semester. We walked right into my room – the room directly across the hall from the living quarters of the Resident Assistant, the dorm’s main security person.
Since I’d had a few issues with my hamsters escaping already, to say I had been previously warned would be an extreme understatement.
I was immediately put on social probation – again. If I violated my probation, I would not be able to graduate in May.
Unlike my first social probation experience, this one concerned me. I’d passed all of my classes for the prior three and a half years. I’d survived until the very last semester of senior year. And now, with a 37-year-old in my bed who scared the bejeezus out of many students and every authority figure on campus, I was risking a timely graduation.
“I don’t know what to do!” I said to Larry. “You have to sleep over sometimes!”
“I’ll figure it out,” Larry said. And, as usual, he did. He took the truck home – much against my will – and figured it out.
The next time he came to visit, Larry showed up in the same old black Ford F150 pickup truck – but now it had a severely ugly giant white thing on the back.
“What’d you do to the truck?” I asked.
“I put a cap on it!” Larry smiled. “Now we can sleep there!”
“Oh, like camping!” I said. “That’s awesome!” I forgot how ugly it was; now I could graduate!
“We can spread out, too! Plenty of room in there!” He was so proud of himself. The cap probably cost him a fortune.
That night we went to The Rose, then to Denny’s for a “midnight breakfast.” (It was 3 a.m.) After breakfast, we crawled into the back of the truck where Larry had stored a blanket and a pillow.
The knit blanket was about five feet long, with holes. There was no pillowcase on the bed pillow. Both had been in the back of the truck; they were already very, very cold.
And we had to share them, like we did in every other bed.
The bed of the pickup truck was dirty and brutally made of hard, ridged metal. It was the most uncomfortable sleeping surface I’d ever encountered.
There was no heat in the truck bed to counter the January weather.
Drunk as usual, I decided this was great. Larry and I christened our new sleeping quarters, then I huddled up next to him for warmth and passed out somewhere around 5 a.m.
I woke up freezing in the dark.
My bare body was sticking to the icy metal and I was bruised from rolling around on the bumpy surface. I pulled my jeans back on, complete with the Levi’s rivets that always prodded my body when I slept in them. I grabbed the blanket off Larry, sitting up and wrapping it around myself while waiting for my teeth to stop chattering.
Larry barely woke up. “Ya all right, Baby?”
“Yeah,” I said, dying.
Eventually I fell asleep and, when I woke again, sunlight electrified our white ceiling.
Larry was shaking the truck trying to get out. “I gotta take a piss,” he said.
We slept this way half a dozen more times … just so I could graduate.
Before going back to college after winter break, Larry and I spent some holiday fun time with Larry’s brother, Timmy, and his family.
Timmy was two years younger than Larry – so, mid-thirties. Unlike Larry, Timmy was married and had a daughter who was in high school. Kim was in her rebellious years, like me, and I related a lot more with her than I did with her parents. Timmy and his wife, Lee, were just old fogies like my own parents.
But I was confused. I didn’t want to give away my age by hanging out with the daughter. So I sat with Timmy and Larry and Lee at the kitchen table, listening to them complain about their daughter’s “phase” and wondering what to do about it.
I wanted to say leave her alone! She’s doing what she wants to do! Why can’t she stay out until 2 a.m.? What’s unreasonable about that? She’s 16 for God’s sake! But I said nothing. I frequently walked outside to smoke cigarettes and tune out the whole lot of them.
Fortunately Timmy also wanted to tune out the whole lot of them, so while Timmy also had a sports-themed bar downstairs, Larry, Timmy and I often went to the local VFW. I have no idea if Timmy was a veteran of a foreign war, although his age put him directly in the draft path for Vietnam. If he went to Vietnam, he never talked about it. But he sure did love that VFW.
When Larry and I were finally able to go off with Timmy to drink cheap draft beers, my biggest concerns were behind me. The daughter was no longer a confusion for me; I didn’t have to relate to her or her parents. Timmy and Larry could talk and I could just sit there and drink. The VFW even had BeerNuts.
I sat on the bar stool and I ate Beer Nuts and drank beer; I stared at the scene around me.
At the VFW, my new drinking buddies were decades older than me. The men had pot bellies and bald heads and they wore hats that said VFW and Ford and Irwin Bowlers.
They talked loudly to the people next to them, so loud in fact that no one could hear the television over the bar, and nearly every one of them was male. Timmy talked louder than almost everyone else, able to carry an entire conversation across the bar and into the corners of the establishment if necessary.
Timmy was darling and funny and hyper, although I rarely spoke to him one-on-one. When I did have time alone with Timmy, it ended in a situation that I pretend never happened for fear of causing him harm 40 years later.
Timmy’s wife thankfully never wanted to go the VFW. She stayed home with “Kimmy” – who wanted to be called Kim – and neither of them ever ventured out just to get sloshed.
So I went and listened with one ear to Larry and Timmy blather on about bikes and cars, and listened with the other ear to the incredibly dull conversations around me, and with both eyes I stared at the TV. Being in the bar with these people fascinated me; it was like being an alien observing human life forms.
I was glad to be returning to college in a few days. It never occurred to me that this would be my life after graduation.
