As Bonnie and I drank our way through downtown Chicago, we stumbled inside a bar called Mother’s.
Atop a set of steep stairs sat the bouncer. “IDs please,” he said, looking straight at me.
The drinking age in Chicago was 21; I was 20 and Bonnie was 18. Bonnie had a fake ID that she’d been using for years. It had her picture on it and her own birthday. I was using my friend Jodi’s fake ID – whose picture (not mine) was on the ID, along with a completely fabricated name, birthdate and New York address.
The bouncer watched me swaying and said, “What’s your address?”
I looked at Bonnie for support; I wanted to run.
“Why are you looking at her?” the bouncer said. “Don’t you know your own address?”
I spit out something that may or may not have been the right address. So he asked for “my” birthday – which I had memorized; I quickly spit out the digits from Jodi’s fake ID.
The bouncer rolled his eyes and handed back our IDs. He didn’t even quiz Bonnie who, at 18, looked at least 25 while I looked 16 until I was almost 30.
We made our way down the steep stairs and into the bar. We ordered very strong drinks to calm our nerves after the close encounter. Then we started to enjoy ourselves in the otherwise very empty bar.
Maybe half an hour later, a group of freaky people came in. They sat at the bar, too, a few stools away.
“Oh my god look at his hair!” I whispered, probably too loud for the very small space. My comment couldn’t have been new to the guy whose hair-sprayed ‘do resembled a bleach-blonde Everest. A cross between a mohawk and a pompadour, that guy’s hair was totally 80’s.
Bonnie looked where I was pointing. “I think that’s Jimmy Page,” she said.
I had no idea what Jimmy Page looked like. “He’s like 20!” I said about the hair-guy.
“Not him!” Bonnie hissed frantically. “The guy sitting next to him! That’s fucking Jimmy Page!”
Jimmy Page, the legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist, was one of Bonnie’s idols. Bonnie did her high school term paper on Stairway to Heaven.
“That can’t be Jimmy Page,” I said. To me, the guy she referenced looked old and tired. Plus there was a girl stuck to him who looked like she’d just stepped out of 1962 in her gold miniskirt and thigh-high boots.
“I’m going over there,” Bonnie said.
Of course I went with her, terrified to my core.
********************************
FLASHBACK to a day in an airport, when I was young. My family and I were walking through the airport, back when airport lounges were wide open, cigarette smoke pouring into the fray.
An old man with huge glasses and a cigar sat front and center at the airport lounge; everyone insisted he was George Burns. As “cute little kid,” someone gave me 50 cents to ask “George” if he was the person he appeared to be.
It took every ounce of courage in my tiny body, but I walked over and asked.
“George” (who sounded exactly like George Burns) laughed and said, “No, but I get that all the time.” To this day, I have no idea if I met George Burns.
But in Mother’s bar in Chicago on that cold day in 1985, I definitely met Jimmy Page.
I also met Bad Company’s Paul Rogers, drummer Chris Slade and bassist Tony Franklin, all members of Jimmy’s new band, The Firm.
While Bonnie and I were in Chicago, I proudly wore my wraparound black sunglasses everywhere we went. They were plastic and blindingly dark, especially in the dark bars we frequented.
But I didn’t want to take them off. I thought I looked cool. So when I walked into the bar, already drunk, I tripped over the threshold, nearly landing on my face.
Bonnie thought this was hysterical. “It’s like you’re blind!” she shrieked. “Ohmygod you should be blind! Let’s tell everyone you’re blind!”
“But I’m not …”
“No! Be blind! And I’ll lead you around by the arm, you know, like they do with blind people. Here, here, take my arm!”
I took her arm and pretended I couldn’t see. It was an interesting way to enter a bar.
I’m not sure who we were supposed to “tell” about my blindness. We were 400 miles from campus and didn’t know anyone in the place. But I continued to be “blind” with Bonnie helping me onto the bar stool, ordering drinks for me, sliding the drink into my hand every time I wanted a sip. Apparently being blind meant being entirely incapacitated.
It didn’t take long before we were approached by two guys, both our age and adorable. The ruse continued.
Bonnie told them, “She has to feel your face to see what you look like.” And she put my hand on one guy’s cheeks, so I explored his face from hair to chin. Then she moved my hand to the other guy’s face.
I had no idea what I was supposed to “see” from touching them; we had a tough time not laughing through this ridiculous form of greeting.
We chatted with the guys and continued to drink. And drink. And drink.
At one point, I fell completely off my stool. I was so wasted, I simply couldn’t stay upright. I started to laugh; I certainly couldn’t feel any pain.
Bonnie leaped to her feet screaming, “The blind girl’s hurt! The blind girl’s hurt! Get out of the way!”
She helped me to my feet and carefully and quietly led me to the bathroom. When the door shut behind us we fell onto the floor, sprawled in hysterics. We were laughing so hard, it became impossible to do anything but roll around into one another, tears of laughter pouring from our eyes.
I believe this is the moment when someone coined the term “rolling on the floor laughing.”
My black glasses fell off in the hoopla, leading Bonnie to reveal her next brilliant idea. “Ohmygod let’s say that when you hit your head, you regained your eyesight! This stuff happens all the time, right?”
I was crying and laughing too hard to even respond. I started to put my glasses back on.
“No no no no!” Bonnie grabbed the glasses. “Leave them off!”
We walked back into the very dark bar, Bonnie still holding my arm. “It’s a miracle!” she yelled as we made our way through the crowd. “The blind girl can see! Step aside! It’s a miracle!”
We got back to the bar, where we casually climbed back onto our stoools next to the guys, grabbed our drinks and took a few gulps while the guys stared, wide-eyed.
We said nothing.
Finally Bonnie swallowed and turned to the guys, stoic. Then suddenly she said, “When she hit her head, it must have knocked something back into place! She can see now! It’s a miracle! She can see!”
We both started to laugh so hard, I almost fell off my bar stool again.
When Spring Break rolled around during my junior year, Bonnie and I wanted to go somewhere and do something really cool.
“Let’s to South Beach!” she suggested – a hub for college kids seeking the kind of drinking extravagance only Miami in March can provide.
I didn’t know anything about Florida. “If we’re going somewhere warm, let’s go to Los Angeles!” I said. Obviously I didn’t know anything about Los Angeles either. I dreamed of wandering on Venice Beach like Jim Morrison, spouting poetry and dragging my toes through the sand. I had no idea that the Pacific Ocean was cold, and I sure didn’t know about the riff raff at Venice Beach.
We brainstormed ideas, imagining the entire world as a Spring Break option, until we finally decided to discuss our plans with our parents.
“How are you going to pay for this trip?” my parents asked me.
“Well I was hoping you would pay,” I said. I’d made some money at Kennywood and I got an allowance for college expenditures, but I didn’t have any savings.
After much discussion, my parents suggested that we consider going somewhere slightly less exotic. If we did, they said, they would help with costs. Bonnie’s parents said about the same thing. So we regrouped.
“Everybody goes to Florida for Spring Break,” Bonnie said. “We should go somewhere where nobody else goes.”
“I guess we could go to Delaware,” I said, trying to pick a place I’d never seen that wouldn’t be crowded.
“Delaware?!” Bonnie scoffed. Then she brightened. “Hey! My brother lives in Chicago! And he’s the coolest person in the whole world! They have tons of bars and restaurants and nightclubs that stay open all night long! Let’s go to Chicago!”
I didn’t know Bonnie’s brother, but she’d always said good things about him. Best of all, he was gay – so I didn’t have to worry about him ogling me. The drinking age in Illinois was 21, so we had to finagle a way around that. But otherwise, the bright lights and big city were suddenly calling me.
In 1985, while all the other college students flew south, Bonnie and I flew northfor Spring Break.
And it was cold. It was early March in Chicago – bitterly, brutally cold. The wind blew so hard, we literally helped an old woman cross the street. She was standing on the curb, hanging onto a lamp post, unable to step down for fear of having her 98-pound self blown over by the gusting wind.
She could not have crossed the street without us.
But we were helpful and happy and young and eager and excited and thrilled to be somewhere – anywhere – other than our little campus in Ohio.
I remember going to one bar at 3 a.m. – after the bar where we’d been drinking had closed – and it was like being transported into a movie. Lights and colors and sweaty dancers and deafening music filled the warehouse … and we wandered into the crowd, bouncing around but tired. When we wandered outside, it felt like we were in a different universe.
Chicago was different.
Little did we know what a huge effect our Spring Break would have on our psyches.
Drugs weren’t commonplace at college. Unlike today, when free-floating CBD oils and legalized THC gummies boast their own stores, Mount Union students didn’t readily espouse marijuana and cocaine as acceptable forms of recreation.
A big event instead would be a party that offered something in addition to kegs of beer – meaning, shots of tequila or some fancy mixed drink, like rum-and-coke.
To be honest, I preferred drinking beer to “fancy” stuff. There was something to be said for getting drunk at a slow and consistent pace, with an expected and often acquired result. Vomiting and head spins were still optional, but I knew what I was getting with beer.
By my junior year, I was an expert at having a few beers before the party, then deftly finding my way to the keg as soon as I arrived. I considered myself “impressive” because I could put away a ton of beer. (Very few others considered this feat impressive.)
But I realize now that drinking was almost the only thing I did in college. Sure, I went to classes and somehow graduated. But every day – especially after I hit the ripe old age of 20 – my efforts focused on how and when I could – and would – drink.
This is not to be confused with the Harley-Davidson motto “live to ride; ride to live,” which entered my life later.
Here’s a metaphor to explain what happened:
Imagine that you wake up and you have Cheerios for breakfast every day. You eat the Cheerios, then you go off to work. You have a sandwich or salad for lunch, then finish your day – you work, go home, go to the gym, have dinner, watch TV – whatever you do. Then you go to bed.
The next day, you wake up. You have Cheerios for breakfast as always, but you eat the last of the bag. Suddenly you panic because you remember you heard about a shortage of Cheerios. You go to work anyway, but you obsess all morning about cereal. You spend lunchtime hopping from store to store, looking for Cheerios, to no avail. Suddenly there are no more Cheerios anywhere.
You can’t think at work; you spend your entire afternoon looking online for Cheerios. There’s no rest. You can’t go home. There’s no time to relax or watch TV. There’s nothing but the inside of your brain screaming: I MUST HAVE CHEERIOS! And there are zero Cheerios. From this day forward, there will never, ever be enough Cheerios. Worse yet, there is no reasonable alternative.
Addiction is that simple, that stupid, and that incessant. It’s like a flip switched in my brain and I became irreparably obsessed.
During my junior year of college, my life quietly evolved from “collegiate fun” to “maniacally compulsive.” There was no prior thought, no decision made. I didn’t sit down and think, You know, I think I’d like to spend more time drinking and less time doing everything else.
I just … stopped caring about anything except Cheerios – oops, I mean alcohol.
It happened as quickly and as silently as a ball of dust rolling into a corner behind a desk.
I never saw it coming; I didn’t even know it happened. At the time, I didn’t care. My life was glorious, carefree and wonderful. I wanted nothing except … more beer.
I didn’t skip a beat without Scott. As I slunk further and further into my drunken ways, I continued to do whatever I wanted to do, believing I was more alive, more independent, and more free than I’d ever been before.
I didn’t feel the invisible chains. But things started happening that I didn’t want to happen.
Bonnie and I still had our pact that we would never leave a bar with a stranger – unless we left together with two strangers – but sometimes those strangers were not of my choosing.
I remember one night in particular when Bonnie and I were the only two people left in the bar at closing time, with the exception of two guys with really bushy facial hair and bad teeth. They were throwing gutter lines at us like, “Hey ladies, ya wanna get lucky?” They weren’t exploring our intellectual prowess.
At 2 a.m., Bonnie and I – who were broke as usual – had a choice. We could go back to our dorm without any beer, or we could go home with the bushy guys buying a six-pack. And we made the obscene choice to go home with the guys, because that meant more beer.
For the math-challenged, one six-pack for four people equals 1.5 beers per person.
For a beer-and-a-half, we followed two complete jerks to their filthy home where we rolled around on the floor doing things neither of us wanted to do. I was drunk out of my mind before I arrived but I remember very clearly thinking, Why am I doing this?
This was never, ever what I wanted.
To Bonnie’s credit, she grabbed the last two beers – which were warm by then – as we headed out. So technically we got two beers each for selling our souls.
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous succinctly describes this kind of behavior as “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.” The pitiful, incomprehensible phase in my life began slowly, simply.
The book then says that over time “… we get worse, never better.”
But I didn’t learn this from a book; I lived it. The more I drank, the more I shifted my moral compass, the more I violated my personal convictions to ensure that I would get another drink.
One night (without Bonnie) I naively went home with Denny, a guy I’d befriended during weeks of drinking at The Hood. Denny wore thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look much larger than they were, but not in a cute, stuffed-animal way. He looked deformed.
Denny was a teacher, so I deemed him “safe.” Plus he had a twelve-pack of Budweiser.
At his house, I scanned Denny’s album collection. From prior conversations about my childhood, Denny knew I grew up with the Carpenters. Very quickly, he threw on a Carpenters album. He was already half-naked and kissing me before I had a chance to tell him that the album was wildly inappropriate for his sudden and astonishingly brash intentions.
Inspired by a song I never liked and now detest – Touch Me When We’re Dancing – Denny morphed completely. With his bug-eyes three inches from my face, he whispered “touch me… touch me!” while staring into my face, practically drooling on me. Wasted, appalled, and utterly repulsed, I stayed and played Denny’s game.
That beer was never really free.
“Demoralization” is a simplification for what I did. “Degradation” is closer, but barely scratches the surface. Even after 30 years, jagged memories stick like a knife wedged in my gut, twisting and threatening my sanity.
And these relatively harmless incidents were only the beginning; I had years ahead to spiral downward.
After New Year’s Eve, Scott and I saw each other steadily for several more weeks. He still rarely spoke.
Everything we did involved music. We went to bars where bands were playing. We drove into Cleveland several times, hitting the nightclubs there. Everywhere we went, there was a ruckus so we didn’t need to talk.
In the car, we’d listen to tapes and Scott would drive wordlessly. I talked non-stop to make up for the silence between songs. I asked him questions about himself – his life before me – and he’d answer with grunts and two-word answers.
Sometimes I would talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and he wouldn’t even nod. I’m not sure if he cared that I rambled on, but I’m sure he knew I idolized his silence.
I didn’t need him to speak. Cool was my only concern.
Cigarettes, cocaine, and shiny silver beer cans were now a part of my life.
I was sure that my delusion of his coolness was seeping directly into me as I imitated his every move. What happened instead is that I developed two new addictions – cigarettes and cocaine – and believed this made me special.
To this day, it still amazes me that I believed I knew so much; I knew so very, very little.
Since Scott had no interest in hanging out with me on campus, and I had no interest in sleeping at his parents’ house, we stayed in hotels near whatever bar we frequented.
He didn’t talk at the hotels, either.
We’d zonk out at around 3 a.m. and sometime after sunrise, he’d wake me and drive me back to my dorm. There was no breakfast involved, just morning cigarettes to offend my hangover.
When Scott dropped me off, he’d say, “I’ll pick you up Friday at 7.” And that would be our next date.
We certainly did not talk on the phone.
After a couple of months of this deeply quiet relationship, it occurred to me that I might accidentally become pregnant. I hadn’t had a consistent sexual relationship before – not ever – so this was something I considered in depth.
Did I want to have Scott’s baby? No, I did not. As cool as he was, Scott didn’t strike me as great father material.
So one night in a hotel somewhere, I said to Scott: “I’m thinking we might need to start using some kind of birth control.”
He just stared at me. As usual, he said nothing. Then he went to sleep.
I thought this might require further discussion. So the next day as he was dropping me off at the dorm, I mentioned it again: “I really think we ought to start using birth control. I really, really don’t want to get pregnant.”
There may have been a slight sigh, or a grunt, but no words.
He was beautiful.
“Okay, see ya!” I said, hopping out of the car.
And I never saw Scott again.
**********************************************
Epilogue: years later, I found Scott on Facebook. The fingerless gloves were gone, replaced by North Face black fleece. His coal black hair is now silver. His grown daughter looks like a movie star.
Scott gave up leather in favor of patterned shirts and chino shorts. He’s completely obsessed with golf.
Golf!
There’s not a single picture of a raw potato anywhere on his Facebook page, which I don’t fully understand.
But I am sincerely glad he walked away when he did.
Like every family, mine was raised with some dysfunction, but we were raised to know the difference between what’s right and what’s destructive. My entire, enormous extended family comes from the same moral fiber.
There are people in my family who drink, but I’ve never seen any of them drink the way I did. I drank like my grandfather, who died of alcoholism. I have a couple of cousins who, at some point, got sober; I never saw either of them drink. Everyone has demons to battle – but in my gene pool, there just aren’t very many active drunks or drug addicts.
To say that I was raised believing drugs were “wrong” would be a drastic understatement. Not only did I grow up in a drug- and alcohol-free environment, but I took the required health class in school. I knew that heroin would kill me, LSD would make me jump off a bridge, cocaine would make my heart explode, and PCP would land me in an insane asylum.
Even nicotine is hugely frowned upon throughout my extended family – about 115 people at last count, not including my cousins’ grandkids. Smoking and vaping are nearly non-existent. To this day, I can still visualize the poster of a cigarette-smoking old person that hung in the middle school locker room – a horrid creature whose skin was like a sun-dried tomato. “Smoking is glamorous,” said the poster.
I was always very attuned to sarcasm. I never planned to smoke.
But in late 1984, I stepped across a line that I’d drawn for myself in the sand. I didn’t know the line was there until I’d stepped onto the other side, and by then it was too late.
I smoked cigarettes for about six months before I started “trying” to quit. I hated what cigarettes did to my throat, to my lungs, to my soul. But I liked the feeling of having a cigarette in my hand. And if it was in my hand, I smoked it. As a result, I burned through a pack a day pretty easily, through two packs a day within a year, and three packs a day before I was done.
I knew that drugs would kill me. I knew that drinking would cause my liver to disintegrate and that marijuana would ensure that I never worked a full-time job. But by the time that famous commercial announced that my brain resembled a fried egg, I scoffed.
I laughed even. Because I knew better.
Once I started doing drugs, nothing could stop me from doing drugs.
Bonnie had explored drugs more than I had. Maybe a month before my first cocaine, Bonnie described an LSD trip to me: “You would look at a lamp and suddenly it would be the best fucking lamp,” she said. “And you would realize how much you fucking love lamps and then you would laugh because lamps are so fucking awesome.”
I didn’t understand; LSD still scared the crap out of me. I was raised to be terrified of all drugs – and rightfully so.
But on cocaine, I was floating on a cloud, a euphoria right inside my head. There was no pain; my usual feelings of anger and self-hatred disappeared. It was exhilarating.
That feeling lasted approximately 42 seconds.
Then it vanished and the only way to get it back was to do more cocaine, to feel that way for another 42 seconds.
Thank God I had no money to buy it. It was way out of my price range.
If no one had cocaine, I just drank. And smoked. A lot.
When the holidays rolled around, I invited Scott to visit me and my parents in Pittsburgh, but he declined. Instead, he suggested that I go with him to a New Year’s Eve party in Ohio – and I happily accepted.
New Year’s Eve has been notoriously lousy for me. When the days of banging pots and pans with my parents ended and I still wasn’t quite old enough to legally drink, New Year’s Eve celebrations went steadily downhill.
Except for New Year’s Eve With Scott.
When Scott picked me up for the party, he was dressed in different black attire – a black button-down shirt and a diamond in his ear. I wore my usual Forenza sweater and silver pants, and hoped I wasn’t underdressed, although I remember discovering that frat parties had a whole different dress code.
The party was a mass of strangers, all substantially older than me, but I tried to fit in. Scott’s friends were perfectly cordial, although he didn’t talk to them, either. I wondered where he found these friends. They were serious partiers, too, particularly on this wild, celebratory night.
Scott drank Coors, so I drank Coors Light. His can was gold; mine was silver.
Scott smoked Salems, so I smoked Salem Lights. It seemed like the feminine thing to do.
So when Scott pulled me into a side room and whipped out a tiny vial of white powder, I knew instantly I would be trying my first-ever cocaine. It was New Year’s Eve – the biggest night of the year. I was not going to mess up this one!
Scott dispensed the powder onto a little mirror and used a razor blade to swipe it into lines. Where did he find these things? I wondered. Did he pull them out of his pocket?
As he worked, I panicked a little. This is a real drug. What’s going to happen to me?
Then he rolled up a twenty-dollar bill so it became a little tube, and he handed the rolled-up money to me.
“How do I do it?” I asked Scott, completely baffled.
“Want me to show you?”
I nodded – and watched carefully. One end of the bill went in the nose while, somehow, I was expected to inhale a line of powder through the little tube.
“Just don’t breathe through your mouth,” Scott said.
I tried. I got most of it into my nose. It was a learned skill – getting the entire line in one inhaling motion – but I learned quickly.
Immediately my head felt delightful.
Many studies have been done about the effects of cocaine on the brain – particularly about its extremely addictive component. Because cocaine’s “rush” hits so quickly then dissipates at the same rate, it’s a drug that needs to be done over and over and over and over to maintain a “high.”
In rehab years later, I watched a film where monkeys were given cocaine. They chose cocaine over both food and rest … until they dropped dead.
And at that moment, I already understood.
I was hooked instantly. From that night on, if cocaine appeared, I chased it like a cat chasing a laser, a panther chasing a deer, a dog chasing a squirrel. If someone had cocaine, I was interested. Once I knew about it, I never took my eyes off it. I got myself into many, many bad situations by following the cocaine.
But that was ages away.
First, I spent a beautiful champagne- and cocaine-filled evening with Scott until the sun rose and 1985 officially began.
Scott and I became exclusive – I thought – immediately. I had no interest in seeing anyone else, since this guy with the black leather was all I’d ever want or need in life.
It never occurred to me to wonder why Scott never spoke. He just didn’t. He was too cool.
Scott would pick me up in his car. I thought we would always go to The Hood, but Scott wasn’t a one-bar kind of guy.
In spite of his attire, he didn’t drive a motorcycle, or even a particularly cool car. But because he had a vehicle, we could go places.
So that’s what we did. We went places. We saw bands and drank at nightclubs and ate at diners and delis. We drove to Akron and Cleveland and Kent and Canton, just because we could. I thought Kent was particularly exotic, because of the massacre.
Scott could go wherever he wanted, and I felt fortunate to be included. I thought Scott was worldly.
Scott spoke through music – sharing obscure Lou Reed songs with me, which I swallowed whole, then reevaluated for weeks, listening to Street Hasslelike it was the word of God. Later Scott introduced me to Trio, a band that wowed me with its brilliant lyrics (“Uh huh uh huh uh huh” and “Da Da Da”) interspersed with real German. Scott’s musical choices made me believe Scott was brilliant, too.
Scott worked nights at the local grocery store, stocking shelves while the store was closed. This, to me, seemed like the coolest job in the world. He got to stay up all night and get paid for it!
Scott smoked clove cigarettes, which smelled like spicy candy. When he ran out, he smoked Salems.
After a few dates with Scott, I started smoking Salem Lights, so I could smell the way Scott did. I lacked leather and cloves, but I definitely smelled.
Scott had formerly lived on a beach in Florida, eating raw potatoes to survive. I believed this was the ultimate freedom, and aspired to do exactly the same thing.
“You think eating raw potatoes is cool?” Scott said.
“Yes!” I screamed. “You could eat whatever you wanted! Do whatever you wanted! Go wherever you wanted! And you got to sleep on the beach!”
Scott shook his head slowly. He didn’t talk enough to argue with me.
I never considered the fact that Scott had left those Florida beaches to return to Ohio to live with his parents and work night shifts in a grocery store.
One night, Scott took me to his house for dinner so that I could meet his parents. I was scared. The coolest man in the world probably had the coolest parents – and I was not cool. Would they like me?
They did like me.
In fact, they seemed to be just regular parents. We ate regular food at a regular table in a regular house.
Scott didn’t talk at dinner either, so I got to know his parents really well. But I only met them once.
Most of the time we were having our worldly adventures in eastern Ohio.
I dreamed of riding with Scott to a beach, a sack of raw potatoes in the trunk, a case of Coors for him and a case of Coors Light for me, and a whole carton of menthol cigarettes in the glove compartment.
College seemed distant and unimportant.
But as I finished my first semester of my junior year, I had to leave both Bonnie and Scott to go home for Christmas.
The beach and its potatoes seemed far away indeed.
While I spent evening after evening and night after night at The Hood, I remember very little about being inside the bar. I remember the smell of stale beer and the drab, darkened decor, but my memories of what happened there are … foggy.
Mostly I sat at the bar, if crowds were low, and drank beer. On really special occasions, I would get a Hood Burger, but mostly I sat and drank beer. If the bar was crowded, my activities consisted of making my way through the crowd to get another beer, then finding a less crowded place to stand and drink … and then making my way back to the bar to get another beer.
Then one night, when crowds were low, I saw a guy walk in dressed all in black: leather jacket, black leather pants, and black fingerless gloves that he didn’t remove, even when drinking his can of Coors.
I’d never seen fingerless gloves before, so I decided that he was the coolest person ever to walk into that bar. His eyes were as black as his clothes. He sat at the darkest corner table, right next to the door.
Once in awhile, if he turned his head just so, I could see the glint of gold in his left ear. Like the incomparable George Michael, David Bowie and Boy George, this guy had an earring, too.
He was mysterious.
He lit a cigarette which made him even cooler. After only one beer he left, never speaking to anyone, not even looking around. Just sitting quietly and then disappearing.
For weeks afterward, I went to the bar looking for the black-clad man. I wanted to know this guy.
Finally, one night, he returned: same black leather, same fingerless gloves, new can of Coors. I stared from across the bar. He sat at the table next to the door, spoke to no one, and then he was gone again.
I nearly followed him outside – but instead, I just watched him go. Again.
This happened four times over several weeks before my nerve – and my alcohol level – sufficiently pushed me to speak to him. Or maybe it was Bonnie and a dare. I don’t actually recall.
Suddenly I was at his dark table, plopped down next to him, introducing myself and shaking the hand with the fingerless gloves.
“Scott,” he said, his voice low, nearly nonexistent. I was terrified and could barely form a sentence, so I raced into the bathroom to make sure I looked okay.
When I came out, he was gone again.
The next time he walked in, I nearly threw myself into his lap. “Where did you go?” I yakked – then kept yakking until somehow I got his number – before the days of cell phones, so I had to call him. Having this incredibly cool guy call the dorm floor payphone seemed ridiculous.
I waited a couple of days and then I called.
“Hey,” he said. And then I talked for half an hour.
