On Christmas morning in the Moore household, we’d leisurely awake – either blissfully late or brutally early, depending on our ages – and run downstairs to the tree. Like in a Hallmark movie, we’d find dozens of presents in brightly colored paper perfectly placed under the tree – every one carefully matched with the deep desires of its designated recipient. We’d spend the day enjoying the gifts, enjoying each other, feeling the love.
But in 1985, I didn’t live at my parents’ house. I lived in that cold, tiny room with three other people: no tree, no lights, no presents. I’m not sure – because I never asked – what Christmas morning was like for Larry and his four siblings, but 1985 wasn’t like any Christmas I’d ever known before.
My parents – who kindly and thoughtfully invited over both Larry and me for Christmas day – gave us both gifts and fed us better than I’d eaten in months, other than Thanksgiving. We were hopefully grateful and definitely sober for the bulk of the day.
But being with my parents nauseated me – not because they were nauseating, which is what I claimed at the time, but because I couldn’t rectify my aberrant feelings.
My parents represented safety and care, offering me a haven from the cruel outside world. They took care of me for my entire life, provided me with everything I could ever need. My sisters and I always had our issues but we’d been raised with infinite love. My parents were loving and kind and beautiful people, and they taught me to be a loving, kind and beautiful person.
But that’s not who I was under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want someone to care for me – obviously, I’d found Larry to do that job. It was that I believed I wasn’t worthy of their love and kindness. I knew what I was doing when I wasn’t in their home; I knew that my behaviors were absolutely destroying them. The guilt that came from just being near them was staggering.
So I wanted to stay away from them. I wanted to never see them, never remember their kindness, never think about how much I was loved before I left. I wanted to completely ignore their way of life so that I wouldn’t recognize the abyss between their life and mine.
And having Larry in my parents’ home nauseated me most of all. I didn’t feel proud or happy to have him there. He didn’t fit into his role when my parents were around. I felt like I had two fathers and one of them was an enormous fraud. At the time, I didn’t know which one it was; I just knew that something was desperately wrong.
Of course for this, I blamed my parents. They expected so much from me.
So at the end of Christmas with my parents, I thanked God that it was over and I didn’t have to do that again for a whole year. I ran away as fast and as far as I could.
I ran all the way to Pitcairn, where we found one bar open, mostly empty. The only people there seemed to have no one to love them on Christmas day.
I sat with them, both sad and happy to be there, and I drank.
Christmas break was substantially different for me in senior year than it had been in prior years.
During junior year break, a typical day went like this:
I woke up in a large, warm bed while someone made breakfast downstairs. I had a little brown poodle who casually greeted me when I arrived in the kitchen, at which point I started complaining about my breakfast and asking if I could have Peanut Butter Crunch instead. (I could not.) I complained loudly and moped silently all day about how hard my life was, about how much I wanted to get out of this stupid house with its stupid rules. I showered for 55 minutes, using all the hot water in the house. I locked myself in my room, buried under my headphones, and blasted Violent Femmes at full volume to drown out the world. After dark, I smoked cigarettes outside, sulking until the wee hours. Eventually I fell asleep in my warm, comfortable bed.
During senior year break, a typical day went like this:
I woke up smashed into a very cold wall while Larry elbowed me, trying to reach his cigarettes. He called from the bed “ya in there Dante?” to determine if the bathroom was empty. Danny would grunt and the toilet would flush, enticing Larry into the bathroom and sending Danny out the front door. I’d chain smoke cigarettes until Larry reappeared from the bathroom to have sex. Afterward, without showering, I’d light another cigarette and pull on yesterday’s jeans. We’d go to the diner downstairs, where I’d consume chocolate milk and bacon, then we’d hit the streets … for 30 yards. Inside Barry’s Bar, Larry said a loud hello to the other old men in there, then we’d drink for hours, pausing only to go back to the apartment and have more sex. We’d play the jukebox and drink until dinnertime, at which point we’d order burgers and then drink until the bar closed.
On big days during junior year:
My parents, sister and I would hike through a tree farm to cut down the perfect White Pine. We’d decorate the tree with a hundred ornaments, each one with its own story, then wrap garland around its branches. We’d drive around looking at lights, go sled riding if there was snow, or make a snowman in the yard with a real carrot. We’d go to church for a candlelight service and have a wonder-filled Christmas morning with so many presents we couldn’t count them all, and they were all exactly what we wanted.
On big days during senior year:
We’d walk through the snow to Caputo’s and buy square pizza that tasted like dish detergent. We’d take the bike across the river to Paul’s Place, next to the strip club, and drink until well past closing time. Or we’d hit Denny’s at 3 a.m. and order eggs “lookin’ right at me baby” for Larry and pancakes – sometimes with chocolate chips – for me. We did not go to church or decorate a tree or buy each other presents.
By senior year, I didn’t even want to look at Christmas lights. I knew what I was missing. I detested the beautifully decorated holiday houses. They reminded me that something better was still out there, something simple that used to be able to make me smile.
The only thing worse than my pre-Christmas angst was living through Christmas day.
If I had to categorize the relationship I had with Larry, I would not say it was love. It was the dictionary definition of lust.
In Larry’s world, having a woman on the back of the bike was the only essential thing to complete his lifestyle. I don’t believe it mattered to him who I was, how deeply I felt about things, what I thought about the state of the world, or how much intelligence I had.
It mattered that I looked good on the back of the bike, that I was always there when he went places, and that we had plenty of sex.
While I was still wishing I had more intellectual companionship than Larry could provide, I knew my place. I knew that in order to have unlimited beer and chocolate milk, I needed to do whatever Larry wanted to do, go wherever Larry wanted to go, be whoever Larry wanted me to be.
Larry wanted me to be a hard-core biker chick with no qualms about risk – so that’s what I became.
In addition, we had a physical relationship that was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Given that we had little else to do, and little money with which to do anything, we had sex all the time. We had sex in the morning and sex at night, and often found time for sex once or twice during the day, too.
Larry’s vasectomy gave me the freedom to enjoy sex for the first time in my life. As a result, we had mind-blowing sex almost every time we connected. We could have sex anywhere at any time, virtually always resulting in simultaneous orgasms.
So we had sex a lot.
It helped me that he played guitar and sang, because I was in love with music. It also helped that we had absolutely nothing in common. There was no thinking involved – just animal instinct. Our conversations were baseless and dull. He talked about the bike; I thought about the meaning of life.
We rarely connected emotionally or philosophically. My head was swimming with ideas and observations about this new life I’d started. Looking at Larry, watching Larry, listening to Larry … it fascinated me – like Jane Goodall, observing the apes.
I’d never experienced anything as wild as Larry. He was tough and simple and confident. He was sure and determined and free. He had nothing, including ambition, yet he was extremely comfortable with himself – and that never wavered.
While I believed that he was 100% in charge of everything, he spent his time pacifying me – my requests for camping, comfort foods, beer, or leather. He even occasionally got me cocaine, in spite of its expense. He wanted me to be happy, and would have given me anything I’d asked for, if he could afford it.
He couldn’t afford things like traveling on the toll roads, or flying anywhere. He couldn’t afford a vehicle off the showroom floor or a custom-tailored suit. But those weren’t things I wanted anyway. I just wanted to drink, to stay drunk, and to get cocaine occasionally.
Being with Larry, I had everything I wanted, except sometimes there was no heat.
Fortunately his body kept me from freezing, and the desire for warmth added to our sexual activity. It was a simple life, really.
Looking back often makes me forget the pleasurable parts. I recognize all of my idiocy – and his. But there were pleasurable parts – and those memories are still inside my brain somewhere, swimming around with my animal observations.
Like the idealization of sleeping on the beach and living on raw potatoes, I loved the idea of camping. Camping was something that I imagined I could do forever: a cozy tent in the woods, cooking hot dogs and marshmallows over a roaring fire, staring at the stars.
As a girl, camping usually involved a camper – five of us shoved into fold-out beds, eating burgers cooked on a little grill, using a shower somewhere down the street. It was probably more “glamping” then camping. We camped at the beach, too, which made it that much more exciting. Sometimes I would nap on the hammock outside, which was delightful.
All of my camping memories were fond ones.
So I dreamed about camping. A case of beer and a bag of marshmallows seemed like all we would need, and those glorious summer nights would re-materialize in front of me.
We’d be sitting in Barry’s Bar and I’d say: “Can we go camping?”
“Camping?!?” Larry said the first time I asked. “We have everything we need right here!”
But after awhile, he started to realize I wasn’t giving up on the idea. He’d say: “Nah, not tonight. Maybe next week.” He said it over and over until I started to believe we would never go.
One night, on an atypical winter day, when the weather was nice enough that we’d ridden the motorcycle to a bar far from home, I mentioned camping again.
Larry said: “Okay! Let’s go!” And Larry meant now.
He got up off the bar stool, put on his leather jacket, and we hopped on the bike. I was so excited I could scream. It was gorgeous outside – unseasonably warm – so I rode with my arms outstretched in the wind, imagining sitting by a roaring fire pulling apart those gooey marshmallows.
Neither of us had any idea where the nearest campground might be. We were already far from Pitcairn, and we drove at least an hour before we saw a sign for a campground.
We pulled in; nobody was at the check-in booth. It was winter; nobody was anywhere. In fact, we never saw a human.
We drove through the grounds and found a campsite far from the gate – the perfect spot. “There’s a good one!” Larry said.
He turned off the bike, making it pitch black and deathly silent. I was standing on a patch of gravel but could see nothing.
Flicking lighters randomly, we searched for sticks to build a fire, which Larry tried to burn with his lighter. The handfuls of grass Larry found did nothing to help our cause, but he kept trying.
As my eyes adjusted, I looked around. This is the moment I realized we didn’t have a tent.
Then I realized we didn’t have a sleeping bag or a pillow. The roaring fire was in my imagination, too, as was the bag of marshmallows. We didn’t even have beer; we surely didn’t have food.
Larry gave up on building a fire. He said, “I guess we should just get some sleep!” He threw his helmet on the ground, tossed his leather jacket over it, and laid down in the gravel.
I stared at him for a minute. This was not the dream.
“C’mon, Baby, I’ll keep ya warm!” he said. He didn’t seem to know the dream at all.
It was painful sleeping in gravel. And it was very much not warm.
The next morning, we woke up when the sun rose, frost all around us, freezing beyond frozen.
Sometime after we started living with Larry’s brother, Danny started dating Carol, so our minuscule apartment housed four people. Danny and Carol slept together in the kitchen on the fold-out chair that was barely big enough for one person, while Larry and I continued to sleep on the twin bed. All four of us shared the doorless bathroom and the rusty sinks and the dorm-sized fridge. Since it was cold outside and there was no apparent heat inside, I guess we kept each other warm.
Carol was a husky type who never once smiled, her voice loud, low and angry. Her eyes were big and glassy and she always pulled back her stringy hair into a ponytail, making her face seem harsher than it needed to be. She was taller and wider than me, and a little intimidating. But Danny liked her and he was a kind man, so I decided to be grateful for female companionship.
One day Danny and Larry went out to get food or cigarettes or beer, leaving Carol and me alone in the apartment. We hung out on the fold-out chair, which was still folded out like a bed. She was angrily spewing venom about some guys she’d met earlier in the day.
“I don’t have to take none of their shit,” she spat. I didn’t know what she was talking about; I just kept nodding and grunting my agreement.
While still rambling on, Carol casually reached into her purse and pulled out a tiny baggie of something black.
“Ya want some?” she asked.
I had given up marijuana in high school and I sure didn’t want to do opium again. “No thanks,” I said, swigging my drug of choice.
Carol pulled out a small rubber hose from her purse, still talking about the guys she’d met down the street. Then she pulled out a hypodermic needle, a lighter, some foil … I don’t know what all she had in there. But while she talked as casually as could be, she liquified the black stuff and sucked it into the needle.
“Don’t tell Danny,” she said. “He doesn’t like me doin’ this stuff.”
“Okay.” I had no idea what I was not telling him. “What is it?” My voice shook a little.
“Just some H,” she said. “Ya sure you don’t want some?”
“I’m sure, thanks,” I said, scared to death and trying to remain cool.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” she said, and she plunged the needle into her arm.
I watched her shoot heroin from twelve inches away. There was nowhere for me to go. I had nothing else to do.
Carol got quiet very quickly. There was no more talk about the guys.
“You have no fuckin’ idea what you’re missing,” she said. “You have no ….” And then she stopped talking. She swung her head from side to side slowly, like she was singing some very mellow song inside her brain.
Then she reached for a cigarette. She lit it after 12 tries, then just held it while it burned. She stared at the wall for a very long time.
I wanted so badly to leave.
If this is heroin, I thought, I never, ever want to do heroin.
Carol dated Danny for a very long time, so we lived together for the rest of my college career. I never saw her shoot up again and I never told Danny.
After they broke up, I only saw Carol once, in a bar; she didn’t acknowledge me. I assume she died young.
Larry and I did not eat much. He was very thin and I – also malnourished – subsisted mostly on beer and whatever nuts were in that bowl on Barry’s bar. We often had burgers. There’s something about a cheeseburger that makes it really easy to eat, even if it has to be done with beer.
Occasionally we would splurge and get a pizza. While I loved pineapple on my pizza, Larry would have none of that silly fruit mixed with his pizza.
Larry liked mushrooms and pepperoni, so we got that every time.
I learned to love mushrooms and pepperoni on my pizza, so much so that I will now order these toppings when I am seeking a comfort food (as if pizza weren’t already enough of a comfort food).
And cold pizza in the mornings was one of my favorite breakfast foods. I loved reaching into the tiny fridge and pulling out a giant pizza box, folded over twice so that it fit inside, and pulling out a slice of hardened pizza for breakfast.
Mushroom and pepperoni pizza also takes me back to the few moments of the day when I didn’t drink beer. I couldn’t consume pizza and beer together.
At some point, after drinking too much beer while trying to eat pizza – or eating too much pizza while drinking beer – I realized that I was getting sick. Rather than recognize any kind of lactose intolerance or gluten problem (which I had later in spades), I just suffered every time I ate pizza.
I really wanted to eat pizza while drinking beer. Everyone said pizza and beer were a great combination; I wanted to believe them. They sold beer right there at the pizza place, and Larry really enjoyed pizza and beer together, and everyone else seemed to be fine. But I wasn’t.
I just couldn’t pull it off. I got sick every time. Even at college, I had to keep my beer and pizza separate. At college, I mostly kept my meals separate from my drinking. With Larry, I was drinking all day long, so there was not a lot of room left for food.
Eating pizza while drinking beer made me feel like a waterlogged hippo.
I had not yet learned the fine art of vomiting when I felt sick. I just suffered. I guzzled the beer, then shoveled in some pizza, then guzzled more beer, and more pizza. I ate as much of the pizza as I could possibly consume, leaving a couple of slices leftover for morning.
Later in my drinking career, I learned that if I felt sick – even for a second – I could go somewhere and vomit, then come back and drink more. This was a huge relief to me. I was able to drink for many, many more hours this way – vomiting sometimes four or five times a night.
But I never vomited after pizza. A precious commodity like mushroom-pepperoni pizza cannot be wasted in such a manner.
I was almost 30 before I realized I had trouble digesting dairy – which includes cheese. To be honest, by then it was just a relief to know.
Bonnie and I were headed to Pittsburgh for Christmas break when we stopped at The Hood to have “one for the road.” But leaving after one beer was hard.
As consolation we decided to stop at the Bier House a few blocks away. But the Bier House was dreadfully dull. So after one beer, we came up with a brilliant plan.
“Let’s have one beer at every bar between here and Pittsburgh!”
“Great idea! Let’s do it!”
By then I’d inadvertently decided that driving drunk was okay. I was always drunk and I still wanted to drive. My rationale was that simple. And stupid.
We hopped into the pickup and drove to the next bar, and the next. There were quite a few bars between Alliance and Salem, 20 miles away. Also there were bars that appeared town-less.
We stopped at all of them.
We’d driven the route before, so it was fun seeing the interiors of the places we’d always passed. We proudly stuck to our one-beer regimen. Most were relatively empty bars, which was perfect for us.
When we stopped at a large, dark building on the side of a two-lane road somewhere near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, we knew it would be our last stop. The drinking age in Pennsylvania was 21, and Bonnie wasn’t legal yet. We went inside.
There were pool tables and a brightly lit jukebox blasting tunes in the corner. The place was sprawling and empty, except for a couple of “old” guys (maybe 40) playing pool. We ordered our beers and decided to have a shot, too, since it was our last stop.
We drank our “last beer” and then we drank several more on top of the dozen or so beers we’d had already. I vaguely remember the guys sending us shots more than once, and trying to play pool with double vision. (There should only be one cue ball.)
By the time we dragged ourselves outside, we could hardly walk.
Laughing like idiots, we aimed ourselves toward the truck. I stumbled over to the driver’s side, throwing myself against the hood to stay upright. I leaned on the truck all the way around, clawing my way toward the driver’s side, grasping in the dark for a door handle. I grabbed it and pulled the door open – it was never locked – and threw my boot up onto the running board to climb in.
As I climbed, I reached for the grab handle above my head, but I missed. My hand grabbed only air and I fell backwards into the gravel, hooting “whooooaaa!” as I went. I felt nothing but the effects of the alcohol. I slammed my head on the parking lot as an afterthought, then pushed myself back into a sitting position, flailing at the open door to pull myself up.
Finally upright, with Bonnie still laughing, I gripped the steering wheel, stepped on the running board, and successfully hauled myself into the driver’s seat. I felt for the ignition with the key and, holding my left hand over my eye so I could see straight, I started the truck.
That’s when I realized it had been snowing. It took me a minute to find the windshield wipers, but eventually I swooshed away the flurries that had settled. Then I put the truck into reverse, pulled onto the pitch black road, and drove the remaining 90 minutes to Pittsburgh.
I have no memory of the drive. Someone must have been praying mightily for me that night.
When Thanksgiving rolled around, my parents invited a slew of people to their house – all family – all very loving and Christian.
They also invited me. And Larry.
In the prior three years, mostly thanks to alcohol, I had transformed from a church-going missionary into a road-warrior biker chick. I was still a believer in some form of God, but I didn’t know what to do with my immediate family, let alone a room full of God-fearing Christians.
I didn’t want to go to the Thanksgiving dinner, and I sure didn’t want to take Larry with me. But I really, really loved my mom’s stuffing, and that only came around once a year.
So I decided it would be worth it to spend a few agonizing hours with my peace-loving, non-drinking extended family.
Larry tried to reassure me that it would be fine. “I’ll take my guitar!” he said in his normal, upbeat way. As if having a 37-year-old chain-clad sinning performer in the midst of my family reunion would be a positive thing.
So Larry, his guitar and I showed up – all of us sober. We arrived just late enough that I hoped I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone before we ate. But I talked to everyone before and during dinner, too.
After dinner, we hung around longer than I would have liked. I was itching to get to a bottle of some kind but Barry’s Bar was closed.
That’s when Larry pulled out his guitar and started taking requests. I can’t remember how many songs he played, but I do remember when someone asked him to play AmazingGrace.
Surprising everyone and especially me, Larry started strumming the tune immediately, and singing:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me …
Within seconds, as if we were standing in the pews on a Sunday morning, my entire extended family sang:
I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see …
The tone was pitch-perfect and beautiful. Everyone in my family could sing. They joined together in worshipping the heavens with voices of angels, not a croak in the house. They even knew how to harmonize.
They sang the first verse, which was all I knew. Then with Larry still strumming, they sang the second verse. And the third verse. And then they sang the first verse again. With harmonies. Without hymnals. I felt like I was listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
I stood there, jaw to the floor, incredulous. They sang and sang and sang. Larry smiled and smiled, playing for as long as they needed him to play.
It was the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard, before or since.
If I hadn’t been so dead inside, I would have wept.
Instead I felt guilty and angry and mournful. I didn’t want to think about beauty. I didn’t want to think about my loving family. I didn’t want to think about songs or harmonies or God.
I was far too lost.
I wanted to be found. But I didn’t know how that worked.
So as soon as Larry put the guitar away, I started making my way toward the door – him feeling happy and loved, and me feeling like a traitor and a fraud. I begged Larry to take me to a bar – quick – where I force-fed myself multiple beers, trying to get drunk.
But – after all the stuffing – I succeeded only in making myself more sick.
Larry and I did not attend Thanksgiving dinner again.
After frequenting The Rose biker bar with Larry on weekends, Bonnie had an idea.
“Let’s go to The Rose!” It was a Tuesday.
“Without Larry?”
“Sure! Why not?”
We had a truck, after all. So we went.
The Rose had darts and I loved darts, although I rarely got to play because someone else was always playing. I was hopeful for a Tuesday that there’d be no one there, but the place was packed. Bikers drink all the time.
We sat at the bar drinking draft after draft. As I stared straight ahead, I noticed that one of the rough, tough, bearded bikers across the bar was using sign language with his friend. I had taken sign language with my mom when I was 12, and I still remembered the alphabet.
I had only used this skill once. It was the night Bonnie and I had to tell The Firm we couldn’t go to Massachusetts with them.
On our way back to the Civic Arena, the town was completely dead and Bonnie and I were lost. So I jumped out of my car at a red light and asked the people in the car in front of us: “Do you know how to get to the Civic Arena?”
The driver looked at me, puzzled, and pointed to his ears, indicating that he couldn’t hear my blathering.
“Oh!” I said. And then I signed – very carefully “C-I-V-I-C …” and he understood. He tried to sign back but I only knew the alphabet, so he held up two fingers and pointed – so, two blocks that way – and then, he motioned, turn left.
I spelled “T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U” and we got to the arena, no problem.
And now, in The Rose, I had another opportunity.
But The Rose was a biker bar. Most of the guys wore colors, as did a few brawny women. A handful of drinkers, like us, braved the waters in spite of their depth. Speaking to hard core bikers – who mostly pleasantly ignored us – seemed somewhat ill-advised.
I’d been a biker chick for a couple of months, though, and I was getting drunk enough to try anything.
The deaf biker stepped up to the bar for a beer and waited for the bartender. Meanwhile, I waited to catch his eye. When he finally glanced my way, I quickly spelled “H-I” – but he missed it entirely.
I spent the rest of the evening trying to get his attention so I could say hi. It had nothing to do with wanting to talk to him and everything to do with wanting to show him that I knew how to spell things with my fingers.
Eventually, he looked my way; I spelled out “H-I” again.
He beamed and waved “hi” at me (like a normal person would). Then he looked at his friend and pointed at me, smiling.
While I had his attention, I spelled “H-O-W A-R-E Y-O-U?” He smiled and signed something back.
Then I had to spell “I O-N-L-Y K-N-O-W T-H-E A-L-P-H-A-B-E-T” (which took forever).
He spelled “O-K, G-O-O-D” at me. Then he smiled, waved again, and went back to his friend.
From then on, I wanted to go to The Rose all the time.
I walked into The Rose just looking for the guy across the bar. We had dozens of alphabet conversations, and he never once came to my side of the bar, nor I to his. He was sweet and seemed to really enjoy our chats.
If he wasn’t at The Rose when I went, I’d go somewhere else.
“A what?” I was on the payphone in the dorm hall and didn’t think I’d heard him correctly.
“A pickup truck!” There was pride in his voice. “It needs a little work to get it runnin’, but it’ll run.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, it just needs a blah blah for the blah so it can blah blah and it’ll be fine.” (Coincidentally, my current husband uses this phrase a lot.)
A few weeks later, I had my first ride in a very old black Ford F150 pickup truck. It was creaky and loud and smelled like gasoline and oil. I loved it instantly.
“Ya just gotta keep dumping oil in,” Larry explained. A permanent oil stain magically appeared everywhere we parked.
Best of all, I had to climb up to reach the cab. Disintegrating running boards graced each side so I could push off mightily while climbing. Every time I landed in the seat, I felt like I’d just conquered a mountain. I was the coolest, toughest chick on the planet.
Before heading back to Ohio, Larry gave me the keys – as if this were normal. For a 37-year-old, maybe it was – but I was 21.
I climbed up into the pickup with a feeling of invincibility I’d never had before.
Not only did someone hand me a vehicle, but it was a truck. A big ol’ dirt-hauling, oil-leaking beater that I could drive however I wanted to anywhere I pleased.
I immediately drove to Mount Union.
“You have a truck?” Bonnie squealed.
“We have a truck!” I answered. “Where do you wanna go?”
“Who fuckin’ cares?!?” she screamed, running outside. We hopped in the truck and headed out.
This went on for the rest of the year.
Bonnie and I went to Dairy Queen a lot. Blizzards had just been invented and we wanted them all the time. We went to Burger King a lot. We went to the drive-thru beer place a lot. We’d been walking to these places previously but now that we had a quick way to get there, we could be gone and back in way less time than it took to get subs and beer delivered.
We always had beer, except in the mornings when we’d finished it all.
One day as we completed our visit to the Burger King drive-thru, the truck stopped. It just conked out, right in the middle of the road in front of Burger King. I tried to restart it but it just made a coughing sound and didn’t move.
The truck was diagonally parked across the road, blocking traffic on both sides.
“Oh well,” Bonnie said. “Let’s eat!”
“Burger!” I agreed.
We opened our bags and ate our food, right there in the center of the street. I remember shoving fries in my mouth and laughing hysterically at the cars who were honking at us, begging us to get out of the way.
Mouths full, we screamed “we’re in a fuckin’ truck!” at everyone who passed.
After our burgers, we got out and stood there, staring at the pickup. An older man in another pickup finally stopped to help.
“What’s wrong with it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It just stopped.”
The man tried the ignition to no avail. “Did you have gas?”
“I don’t know,” I said, quite honestly.
“I’ve got a gas can in the back; let’s see if that works.” He went away, came back with gas, and dumped it into the tank.
