At 3 o’clock in the morning, I pulled into a gas station and sat for a moment, staring at the guy in front of me. He was pumping gas into his motorcycle, facing away from me. All I could see was long, brown hair sticking out from under his helmet.
I almost stayed in the car, a little afraid that I wasn’t alone at the station at that ungodly hour. But I needed gas, the stereo was still blasting, and Van Halen made me feel brave. I clicked off the car but turned the key backwards, the “music only” gear.
Wearing my typical attire – cutoff jean shorts and a t-shirt that went well past the shorts – I hopped out in bare feet and went straight to the pump. I kept my head down and avoided eye contact, also typical.
This did not deter the motorcyclist. “Hey Baby,” he said, in a gruff, growly tone.
I looked up. He had bright green eyes, a very full beard, and a wide smile in spite of his truly awful tooth alignment.
“Hey,” I said, way too quiet for anyone to hear over Eddie Van Halen’s guitar riffs. I looked down again.
He took two steps closer, but didn’t quite reach my car. “What’s your name?”
After one look at his teeth, I decided he was too stupid to properly pronounce “Kirsten,” which is Keer-stin. It would have taken 10 minutes for me to give him the tutorial about my name.
“Kris,” I said, using my standard name for stupid people.
“Okay Kris,” he smiled again, his voice growly enough to be almost creepy. But it was happy-creepy. “Ya wanna go for a ride?”
I looked at him again. He could probably see the wheels turning in my brain.
Do I want to go for a ride? YES I want to go for a ride! A motorcycle ride in the middle of the night? YES, YES, YES! But this guy is a moron.
I made this judgment after he’d spoken only 13 words.
Then I remembered: I have literally nothing to do and nowhere to go and a whole night to kill.
“I could do that.” The words came out of my mouth almost without my permission and certainly without any forethought about danger.
“I’ve gotta get another helmet,” he said. “Ya wanna wait here while I grab one? I only live right over there.”
“Okay,” I said.
And here’s the really, really stupid part: That’s what I did.
I finished filling up the car with gas, pulled over to the empty space by the tire pump, and sat there for 10 minutes while he went and got another helmet for me to wear.
He came back with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He smiled when he saw me sitting there. This guy smiled all the time. It was gross.
He pulled up next to my car. “Ya ready, Kris?”
“Yep,” I said, trying to be cool. I wanted the ride, but I did not want to be with this guy.
He helped me strap on my helmet, told me where to put my feet on his very old Harley, and pulled my arms around his waist.
“Ya don’t wanna fall off!” he said, and laughed a gravelly laugh.
I grabbed my left wrist with my right hand and hung on. I didn’t want to actually touch the guy.
I didn’t get back to my parents’ car until almost noon the next day.
When summer rolled around, I decided to have a party. My parents were out and all three “kids” were old enough to stay at home alone, so we had a bash. We stocked the fridge with a ton of beer and invited all of our – meaning my sisters’ – friends to a party. I don’t remember any of my own friends being there.
I was so happy sitting on my parents’ deck, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Music blasted, people laughed loudly; I felt like I was in a John Hughes movie.
But the party wasn’t pleasing to my parents.
Another long meeting ensued about how I needed to follow their rules, blah blah blah. There was some mention made about my younger sisters who, at this point, were 14 and 17 years old. Blah blah “role model” blah blah “rules” blah blah “set a good example” blah blah blah….
So many things I didn’t want to hear, so little space to do what I wanted to do.
A few days later, I told my parents I was going to my friend Cherie’s house to spend the night. I hadn’t yet been invited, but Cherie always offered me the opportunity to spend the night. I just didn’t want to be home anymore.
So I went to Cherie’s and we drank. Only on this particular night, for whatever reason, for the first time in many years, the words “you can spend the night” never came out of Cherie’s mouth. If I had asked, I could have stayed, but I didn’t ask.
It was 3 a.m. I had an opportunity to be alone, to do whatever I wanted to do, wherever I wanted to do it. I even had a car!
I felt … independent. I felt free.
I decided to drive around, sleep in the car, watch the sunrise in a park somewhere. I could do whatever I wanted because nobody was going to stop me.
I blasted the stereo at top volume, forging a solid path so that I didn’t get lost. There were no GPS trackers and no cell phones and I never know my way around, so I just drove up and down Route 30, the road that passed directly in front of my parents’ neighborhood. I figured if I just drove for a couple of hours one way, then drove back a couple of hours the other way, I would be home at a reasonable time.
Route 30 runs the entire width of Pennsylvania. I could have driven back and forth for a month without getting lost.
I spent a lot of my drinking career – before and after this moment – wishing desperately for this kind of freedom. I wanted the stability of shelter and transportation, but ultimately I just wanted to be left alone. I wanted to create my own fun alcoholic life.
I imagined myself as a hippie stuck in the wrong generation, flowing freely from place to place, following my dreams of freedom and the road.
In reality, because I had no money, I ended up immediately dependent on the first guy I saw, especially if he had an extra 50 cents to buy me a beer. But I didn’t recognize this pattern for decades.
So tonight was my chance. No friends, no family holding me back: middle of the night, stereo blasting in my parents’ car, I launched myself into the wild black yonder.
I made it as far as North Versailles, maybe 15 minutes from home, where I stopped for gas. And that’s where my plans for independence vanished into thin air.
Bonnie and I watched The Firm’s tour bus drive away from the parking lot. The band members may have been in the back – we never quite knew – and our buddy Phil was long gone – no idea to where.
Decades passed before it occurred to me that I’d had no money, no food, no way to get home after Massachusetts, no plan for what came next. But at 20, I never thought beyond another backstage concert.
Bonnie and I were despondent; our dream of groupie life had been unceremoniously dumped into the crapper.
We were also wired on some very high quality cocaine, so we drank more beer to tamper the effects of the stimulant. We hung with Mack and wondered aloud about the life of a driver for a famous rock band.
Mack said he drove all night and slept all day, which was cool – to us. If Mack had been subsisting on raw potatoes, I might have never left that cab.
The little cocaine mirror went around and around and around. Eventually the sun started to rise.
And I still had my parents’ car.
My parents had no idea if I would ever be home. Probably they didn’t sleep at all, but I thought I could get home before they woke.
We thanked Mack profusely for letting us hang with him, as if we were mere peasants, then raced home. When we got to my bedroom, I opened the window wide. There was no screen and I leaned my head out.
“I can’t breathe,” I told Bonnie. “I feel like my heart’s beating out of my chest.”
I could feel the pounding – rapid-fire boomboomboomboomboom – all the way from my core to my brain. I could hear it in my ears and it was much, much too fast.
I hung the entire top half of my body out of the window, trying to suck in whatever air the morning offered. Breathing was getting harder, not easier. I was nearly hyperventilating.
“What’s going on?” Bonnie asked. She seemed fine. Of course, she was on the tour bus while I was snorting nonstop lines off that little mirror.
“Maybe I did too much coke?” I actually looked to the 18-year-old for verification.
“I don’t think you can do too much coke,” she said. “Just leave your head out the window and keep breathing, but try to breathe slower.”
Bonnie went into the bathroom.
Hanging out the window, desperate for air, desperate for an end to the pounding, my brain was screaming with boomboomboomboom. I couldn’t breathe any slower. My heart was racing; my eyes were watering; my lungs felt like they might explode.
I knew this was an overdose. I knew I needed a hospital. I knew I was going to die.
But I didn’t want to tell my parents; I didn’t want to get into more trouble.
So I just hung there, trying to breathe while my heart beat like the drum solo in Wipe Out. There was no calming it, no controlling it.
My heart was not under my control.
I pulled myself upright and sat on the window sill. I tried to breathe more slowly, but I could barely breathe at all. I sat that way for a long, long, long time.
Eventually, I rolled onto my bed and closed my eyes: boomboombooomboomboom. I just listened to the rhythm, and I breathed.
I knew closing my eyes was dangerous. I had overdosed on cocaine and I was alone.
Bonnie and I quibbled all the way back to the Civic Arena, wondering how to get to Massachusetts without getting me thrown out of the house.
“We can’t not go!” Bonnie said. “Your parents’ll take you back.”
“They won’t,” I said. “And anyway I can’t just leave their car in Pittsburgh.”
“But it’s The Fucking Firm!” Bonnie countered.
“I can’t,” I said again as we pulled into the parking lot. The fans’ cars were mostly gone but the tour bus and tractor trailers were still where we’d left them an hour before.
We didn’t see Phil or the band so we explained our predicament to the first person we found. He happened to be smoking a cigarette out the window of a Mack truck.
The guy’s name was – really – Mack.
Mack pointed at the tour bus. “I’d check in there,” he said.
We slunk over to the tour bus to say our goodbyes but Phil and the band were nowhere to be found; it was just a bus full of strangers.
We went back to Mack and his truck for more ideas. He handed us two cold beers through the window. We had to reach way up to get them; Mack was very short, toothless, and about 105 years old.
“That’s the bus everybody rides,” he said. “Wanna do a line while you wait?”
Cocaine.
Suddenly we became eight-year-olds chasing puppies. We forgot The Firm, climbed into the cab, plopped ourselves down next to the old man, and obediently did lines. Then we did more lines. We drank our beers, still moaning about the Massachusetts dilemma.
“I’ll get you there,” Mack said, passing the mirror again. “Sleep the whole way if ya want!” He motioned to the bed behind the seat.
“That’s really cool,” I said. “But I can’t go.”
Suddenly Bonnie lit up. “Ohmygod!” she said. “You can’t go, but I can! And I’m fucking going!”
With that, Bonnie hopped out of the truck leaving me, Mack, and the cocaine. She ran directly onto the tour bus not even looking back.
Bonnie was going to Massachusetts without me.
Her parents weren’t stopping her from following her dreams.
My parents were so cruel.
Mack and I continued to do lines. We drank and talked about trucking, which convinced me to be a truck driver someday; it seemed like the perfect life. Do drugs, drive, sleep….
But I was sad. “I’m going to say goodbye to Bonnie,” I told Mack, and I walked over to the bus.
Climbing on board, I saw Bonnie in the third row. Immediately she leapt out of her seat screaming: “You’re going with us! I knew you’d go!”
“I just came to say goodbye.”
“I love you!” Bonnie said, hugging me hard. I started to cry and stepped off the bus. I waved to Mack, who held up the coke mirror. How could I refuse?
I drank and whined and did lines with Mack until the tour bus started its engine, lighting up the lot like Christmas.
But the bus didn’t move. Suddenly, Bonnie appeared in front of the bus’ headlights.
Arms outstretched, she ran straight for the Mack truck. “I can’t go without you!” she cried, climbing back into the tiny cab. “I thought I would be fine but when you came to say goodbye, I just couldn’t do it!”
The reunion was intensely emotional, the drama almost unbearable. We thought we’d nearly lost each other forever.
“This will help,” Mack said, and we both snorted a bit more cocaine.
We never saw Phil, The Firm, or even the roadies ever again.
When Phil asked Bonnie and me to go to Worcester, Massachusetts with them, we nearly spontaneously combusted.
“Okay!” we shrieked. “Let’s go!”
But I had a nagging suspicion that I should be doing something first.
“We need to grab our stuff!” I said. “How long can you wait?”
“We’ve got to tear down,” Phil said. “Just hop on the bus when you’re ready.”
I don’t think he understood: I needed to drive to my parents’ house – a good 30 minutes from downtown – and pack for an indefinite stay, and Bonnie needed to condense her stuff from Ohio.
We needed to move fast.
Driving at breakneck speed (only slightly buzzed since we’d had nothing since before the concert) we pulled up outside my parents’ house in record time, thundered inside and up the stairs.
As always, my mom was awake. I think. Maybe the thundering assisted her awake-ness.
“The Firm invited us to go to Massachusetts!” I screamed. “We’re going to Massachusetts!” I could not pronounce “Worcester” for the life of me.
Mom nearly combusted, too. “What? You can’t do that.”
“Yes we can!” I said. “We just came home to get our stuff! Can you drive us back downtown?”
“No,” she said. “You cannot go to Massachusetts with a rock band.”
The conversation may have been a bit more heated, but my mother appeared substantially calmer than me. In my view, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. We were going to party with world-famous rock stars, travel the world, and leave the doldrums of college behind.
“We have to go!” I screamed. “We just came home for our stuff! We’re going! They invited us!”
Bonnie – who generally stayed quiet when my parents spoke – nodded. “They want us to go!”
My mother went to discuss the situation with my dad while Bonnie and I started piling shirts and makeup into bags. We were generally spinning in circles around the room, not knowing what was important and what wasn’t.
“She has to fucking let us go,” I said. “They have to let us go!”
Bonnie agreed. “They will. This is our life! And we’re adults! They have to know how fucking huge this is.”
My parents knocked on the door, which I’d closed so we could swear freely.
Very carefully my mom spoke: “If you go to Massachusetts, you would be going against our advice. We think it’s a terrible idea. If you decide to go anyway, we don’t want you coming back here. You won’t live here anymore.”
I dropped all the stuff in my hands, along with my jaw.
“WHAT?!? You’ve got to be kidding! We will never get this chance again!”
“That’s our decision. If you go, don’t come back here.”
My parents went back into their room and closed the door.
I started to cry. I sobbed, in fact. I didn’t want to move out. I didn’t want to lose the comfort of home. I didn’t want to lose my parents, my family, my whole life.
But more than anything in the world, I wanted to travel with The Firm.
“I can’t go,” I said. “I can’t fucking go.”
“Let’s go anyway,” Bonnie said. “They’re not really going to throw you out!”
“They will.” I said. My parents had never threatened anything so serious.
“Well let’s at least go back and tell the band we’re not going,” Bonnie said. I knew she thought I’d change my mind if I stepped foot on that tour bus.
So we got back in my parents’ car and drove back to the Civic Arena.
The Firm was playing in Pittsburgh, and we wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Bonnie and I prepped for the concert at my parents’ house, and drove their car to the show. We were so certain of our kinship with the band that we showed up with no tickets. We walked around the building until we found the backstage entrance, and started looking for people we knew.
We didn’t know anyone.
Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena staff was not thrilled to have us milling about, either. They tossed us out twice while we tried to sneak in through the heavily guarded gate, so we regrouped.
“Let’s buy tickets,” Bonnie said. “We’ve got to get in there!”
“I can’t afford tickets,” I said.
“I have my mom’s credit card!” she said. And just like that – we were in.
Back in the eighties, things were not quite so secure as they are now. We got into the building and high-tailed it to the stage area. We went up some stairs and walked around in the second tier, looking down at the stage while trying to figure a way to drop down into the backstage area without killing ourselves.
We paced back and forth through the rows of empty seats like lions waiting for a chance to strike. It was a long way down, but we were pretty sure we could make the jump without breaking any bones.
And then, quite suddenly, there was my buddy, Phil the tour manager, supervising stage set-up about a hundred feet below us.
“PHIL!” we screamed in unison. “PHIL! PHIL! Up here!”
Once he found us, he stared for a moment – and then he smiled. “Hello Loves!” he yelled in beautiful British. “What ya doing up there?”
“The backstage guys wouldn’t let us in!” Someone started playing a guitar and drowned us out.
“What?”
“They wouldn’t let us in!”
“Who wouldn’t let you in?”
“NOBODY will let us in!”
“Those focking ass-o’s!” he yelled, then pointed. “I’ll meet you at the back!”
Phil hopped off the stage and headed to the other end of the arena – while we raced to the same spot (through masses of waiting fans) a hundred feet above his head. We saw him talking to a security guard and pointing in our direction. When we finally reached him, the security guard moved to the side we walked right down to the floor – no problem.
Phil grabbed my hand and led us through the crowd. “Those focking ass-o’s!” he said repeatedly. Phil turned swearing into the most beautiful language we’d ever heard.
We followed him through the crowd, Phil with his VIP badge swinging around his neck. He took us straight backstage and told us to make ourselves at home.
“I’ve got to do some work,” he said, “but I’ll see you after.”
“Backstage” was really just a cement tunnel with little rooms here and there. Phil showed us to a room with free alcohol, so we grabbed a couple of beers and walked around a bit, then went back into the room and sat down.
It was quite boring backstage.
Eventually we saw the show from waaaay off to the side – which was great. When the band ran off, we yelled our hellos and they all smiled like they remembered us.
I am sure they did not.
But Phil did, and he treated us like royalty. After the show, on his way to the tour bus, he said, “Come with us!”
And that’s when the next part of our adventure began.
Before summer started, we had to finish the school year which, for me, meant drinking more.
Bonnie and I had joined the same sorority. She was very much anti-establishment, and she didn’t want to join, but I told her that she had to join because our sorority – Alpha Chi – did the most drinking.
I have no idea if this was true.
Many Greeks drink a lot. Still, when it came time for sorority events, we liked to include as much alcohol as possible. This was one of the great things about Alpha Chi.
Bonnie became my sorority Little Sister – a convenience of her being younger than me. We did all the Big Sis/Little Sis activities in line with tradition. We got pins and paddles and shirts and sweats. I loved feeling part of a group of girls, this group of girls, and having Bonnie by my side made that even more wonderful.
I remember strategizing for the Greek Sing event – a competition that required all of the fraternities and sororities to perform on stage. (Click here to see a fine example of Greek Sing from 2015.)
Our strategy: let’s be the drunkest. Rather than trying to win the competition, we wanted to be so wasted, we’d guarantee ourselves last place.
Our performance starred an “on-the-street reporter” asking questions of sorority sisters, who answered the reporter by singing something. For my part, I sang the line “our house in the middle of our street” – my own funny one-hit wonder experience.
After singing that one line, I understood why we’d chosen to be drunk. Getting the appropriate laughter was awesome but singing on stage was terrifying. Being drunk together, as a team, made it bearable.
When the judges announced last place – the losers – they called out “Alpha Chi Omega.”
We jumped and hooted and screeched and hollered like we’d won the Powerball. I remember the other sororities trying to calm us: “No, no, you didn’t win…” as if trying to explain to a small child that their pet had just died. We yelled and jumped around just the same, confusing everyone but ourselves. We’d reached our goal!
One night, at a sorority-fraternity bash, I got drunk and punched a guy named Tom right in the face. I don’t have any idea why I did it, or what angered me so greatly that I felt the need to lash out physically. Apparently I had no rational adult way to handle my internal rage, so I punched Tom.
Back in 7th grade, I also punched a guy named Donald and knocked out a filling. Donald had just come from the dentist. He wouldn’t stop talking to me, so I clobbered him.
Like Donald, Tom probably did nothing at all. Thirty years later I messaged him an apology on Facebook but I’ve no idea if he ever received it. I have no recollection of the actual incident; I was obliterated.
What I remember, though, is the emergency meeting called for me to meet with my sorority board. I didn’t even know the sorority had a board. My sorority sisters (“the board”) suddenly looked solemn and professional. No one laughed.
I sat and listened as they announced that because I’d punched someone during a sorority event, I would be deactivated. I didn’t know what “deactivated” meant either.
My drunken behavior had gotten me thrown out of my own sorority.
There were three guys at Mount Union who took me home on a regular basis. I called them “friends.” I’m not sure what they called me.
All three guys drank like I did.
It’s not my place to diagnose whether or not The Three were alcoholics. I can say that they had some things in common, and they had characteristics that I later identified as part of my own alcoholism.
For example, I never saw any of them outside of class when they weren’t drinking. If they went to class at all, they were hungover. Just like me.
They often walked around double-fisted at parties and bars – meaning with a drink in each hand. Just like me. (I found this to be an attractive trait.)
Also, when I ended up with one of these guys it was often because everyone else had gone home and we were still drinking. Sometimes the lights would suddenly blare, shocking us from darkness into florescence. The floor would be riddled with empty red cups and cigarette butts and sticky, chunky globs no one could identify.
But I didn’t want to quit drinking yet (meaning, I hadn’t yet passed out), so I would go with them to their rooms. And then – unlike with other guys – we would play music, dance, laugh, talk and … inevitably, we’d drink until we passed out.
If he passed out first, I would sit up, listening to music and continuing to drink. I didn’t realize then that I never purposefully “went to bed” anymore. I just passed out. I would walk home sometime after the sun came up, feeling like I’d accomplished something wonderful. This was never a “walk of shame;” it was a personal victory.
The other thing about these guys: I adored them. I thought they were funny and sweet and interesting. And they treated me with a respect I didn’t usually get from one-night-stands. We talked about our lives. I knew what their majors were, what they wanted from life, why they chose Mount Union. We laughed a lot.
I actually knew them. These little drunken friendships gave me hope. And hope was a revelation, since I was learning about people one person at a time. Men weren’t all Prince Charmings and they weren’t all idiots.
I didn’t know how much I could like a man without feeling like I needed to either detest or marry him. Drinking into the wee hours with the soundtrack of our lives forming in the background was not only pleasant, it was life-affirming.
I know that not all people learn things this haphazardly; I insisted on learning everything the hard way.
To be fair, if I’d looked around a bit more, I would have found other men that weren’t reprehensible. I just didn’t know to look for rational, level-headed humans, especially at the end of the night when my shoes were stuck to the beer-laden floor and I was holding my left hand over my eye so I could walk without bumping into anything.
I think about each of The Three from time to time, usually when a song plays that reminds me of one of our nights together. I wonder where they went, what happened to them. None of them are on Facebook – or if they are, they’re well hidden. For all I know, they could be dead.
But I hope they are alive. I hope they’re sober or, at least, clear-headed enough to have created an exquisite adulthood. I hope they found meaning in their lives and loving people with whom to hang, even after the lights came on and the party was over.
After meeting famous rock stars on our spring break in Chicago while all the other college students went to Florida and danced in the sun, Bonnie and I believed we’d reached a sort of holier-than-thou status. We’d touched greatness; our lives would never be the same.
We spent the last few months of my junior year staring at The Firm poster on Bonnie’s dorm wall, listening to the album, crying and reliving the moments. We hung out at the sorority house where there was a TV, watching MTV from morning until night hoping for a glimpse of the band’s video for Radioactive. When the video came on – just a three-minute clip of the band playing – we would scream like they could hear us. We absorbed and memorized every note, facial expression and movement for the entire video.
When MTV announced the release of The Firm’s second video, Satisfaction Guaranteed, we were elated. We camped out at the sorority house waiting for it to play. (This wasn’t necessary, since MTV provided the exact hour it premiered.) When it finally started, Bonnie and I got deathly quiet, staring at the screen, waiting to see … something new.
The video was a huge disappointment: a mash of hot, sweaty people standing around and the band sweating along with them. The video showcased Jimmy’s ability to play his guitar with both a beer bottle and a violin bow, things he’d done in his Led Zeppelin years.
I suppose this is impressive if you’re not looking for the guys you met in some random bar in Chicago. But Tony – the bass player and Bonnie’s tryst – was barely featured and Phil, the road manager, was certainly nowhere to be seen.
Even Jimmy looked wrong. When we’d met him, Jimmy was sullen, eyes glazed over, no one inside. He was wasted, grumpy, almost mean, slumped and slurring his words. In the video Jimmy is fun, a legend, a bit of a trickster with a gleam in his eye.
Decades later, I saw Jimmy Page on TV. By then he only barely resembled the guy we met in the bar.
In 1985, Jimmy was drinking heavily and chain smoking. He looked like a puppy in a downpour waiting to drown. Jimmy has since given up all substances – alcohol and cigarettes included. Decades older now, being clean gives Jimmy a youthful countenance unlike anything we saw in 1985. He looks and sounds like a completely different person – upbeat and smiling and engaged in life.
But in 1985, he was just a guitar legend that had temporarily dropped down to earth and spent a few hours near Bonnie and me. We started to believe we weren’t ever going to be right again – although we didn’t know what it would entail to make our “new” lives whole. We felt like we’d experienced mind-blowing astral projection when all we did was party with strangers in Chicago.
College wasn’t the same. Parties on campus weren’t the same. Hanging with our friends wasn’t the same. We thought we might die of heartbreak, even though there was no love involved. We were starstruck teenagers on a mission to regroup with a rock band we randomly found in a bar.
So it was fortunate when, that very summer, Bonnie and I found them again. But first, I had to finish my junior year of college.
Bonnie wanted to sleep with Jimmy Page. It didn’t matter that he was just an old man (40), or that some woman in go-go boots was practically climbing on him, not allowing any of us to get closer to Jimmy Page than was absolutely necessary.
Bonnie held up a cigarette and asked Jimmy for a light. He obliged – and Bonnie pocketed his lighter.
The Firm’s lead singer, Paul Rogers, and drummer Chris Slade slipped out the door pretty quickly when they realized we were starstruck kids. Their darling British accents were enough to star-strike anyone, but Bonnie was out of her mind. She couldn’t believe she was talking to The Legend Himself.
Since Bonnie was suddenly overwhelmed with a need to follow Jimmy Page wherever he might go, I decided I would like to sleep with the guy with the big hair. Bass player Tony Franklin was very cute.
But Jimmy wasn’t interested in Bonnie; he already had his bizarre arm candy.
And Tony wasn’t interested in me, but Bonnie struck his fancy.
That left me completely ignored. So like a small child, I went into the bathroom and sobbed.
Bonnie, who hadn’t given up hope that she’d snag a night with her idol, quickly realized I was inconsolable. Not wanting to blow her chances with Jimmy, she left me alone in there – and sent the bartender to make sure I didn’t kill myself while she was hanging with the band.
The bartender – a nice young woman who’d probably seen this sort of thing a thousand times – tricked me into laughter with some kind of joke snot – yes, snot – that appeared to be coming out of her nose and hanging all the way to the floor. Drunk as I was, I actually fell for the rubbery trick. And while I am not normally a fan of gross humor, I admired her ability to make me forget why I was crying.
I rejoined the bar crowd. Shortly after I reappeared next to Bonnie, we all headed back to The Firm’s hotel.
There were at least two dozen people milling about in the suite. Alcohol was free for the taking in ice buckets around the room. People were smoking everywhere. Almost immediately, someone offered us cocaine.
That’s when I hunkered down near Phil, the guy with the rolled-up hundred dollar bill.
After even limited exposure to cocaine, I knew this was the drug for me. I don’t remember socializing anymore that evening, except when Bonnie and I went (together) to the bathroom in the adjoining hotel room. When I came out of the bathroom, she was holding a wallet taken from someone’s open suitcase.
“There’s a million fucking hundred-dollar bills in here,” she said.
“What are you doing?” I scream-whispered. “Put that down!”
She pulled one hundred-dollar bill out of the wallet. “They’re not going to miss one of these,” she said, tucking it into her jeans like a gum wrapper.
Eventually Bonnie and Tony disappeared together (Jimmy long gone) while I spent the night with Phil Carlo, The Firm’s (and Led Zeppelin’s … and Bad Company’s) road manager. What I remember best is Phil showing me pictures of his two adorable kids and both of us laughing all night long.
Sex isn’t necessary when you have cocaine.
Bonnie and I felt guilty taking Phil’s money for a cab in the morning – but not guilty enough to stop us from going shopping at Chicago’s luxurious Waterworks Plaza with the stolen hundred dollars.
Bonnie bought a stuffed bear. I bought my favorite-ever neon pink DON’T PANIC! shirt.
