Larry’s sudden brutal attack on Joe shocked me, momentarily, into paying attention to what was going on in my life. After all the brawls and skirmishes I’d seen in bars, and all the stupidity I’d seen at frat parties, I’d never seen anything quite as animalistic as my boyfriend beating the crap out of someone who put his arm around me.
Until I watched Joe walk out of the kitchen covered in his own blood, I didn’t know Larry was capable of that kind of violence. I’d heard people talk about bikers and their capacity for such things, but I’d never seen it with him – or any of his friends. Larry was nearly always calm.
I recalled the night when, in our very first teeny apartment, someone had knocked on the door at 3 a.m. Larry had leapt out of bed and grabbed a heavy chain in one fluid motion – wrapping it around his arm like a seasoned assassin before he opened the door. It terrified me. And then, after he opened the door for his buddy, I shrugged it off as a fluke. I never saw Larry prepare to attack again.
But after Joe, all I could think was: it’s like living with animals. I was stuck in the middle of an ancient ritual that affected all species. Males fight over females, sometimes to the death, and whichever male wins … gets the female.
Larry had quite clearly announced that his mission was to possess and protect me, because I was his female. Larry may as well have been a bear or a hippo or a duck. And my job – as I sat on the couch motionless – was to be the female bear-hippo-duck. My job was to wait and see who won.
As if Joe ever stood a chance.
I thought about The One – my dream man at college – who, during our very nice chat, immediately turned tail and ran when Larry appeared. I thought about the guys in the bars who had turned their backs on me when Larry returned from the restroom. I thought about the men with whom I’d had sex, without it mattering to me or them, when Larry was nearby. Those men could have been beaten, too. Or worse.
I realized for the first time that Larry might actually be dangerous. I’d never asked him if he was a murderer or even a convicted felon. And it was too late now. I belonged to him.
Larry and I – who talked about very little anyway – never discussed what happened with Joe. I didn’t imagine Larry as my knight on a white horse. Instead I suddenly felt like I was living with a bear. Or a hippo. Or a duck.
Larry’s killer-instinct pulverization put everything into perspective for me. I realized with astounding clarity: there was nothing, and would never be anything, beyond the surface simplicity I’d seen in my new lifestyle. Bikers lived like animals. I had willingly joined and the culture was not going to change for me. I was stuck in it, like a burr. Although I wanted substantially more for myself, I could see no alternative.
And without college to balance out my mentality, I became more and more lost in the void. I had no one with whom to share my deepest thoughts. I had no one to discuss anything intellectual. Nobody read books or watched TV. We didn’t go to movies or on hikes or try skydiving.
We rode motorcycles and drank beer. And that was going to be my whole life.
Larry’s biker friends stopped by on a regular basis. Everyone wanted to come to our house to drink. My new roommates, Joe and Dave, were always invited to drink with us.
While I did not find Joe or Dave attractive, it became evident that they both found me to be attractive.
While Larry was doing god-knows-what, I was fending off advances from both of them. Joe and Dave fought each other constantly trying to get closer to me, impressing me with their worldly ways.
Joe realized very quickly that I liked music, and talked to me about all the concerts he’d seen. He shared tapes of his favorite bands – all classic rock, music I already knew well. Joe talked louder than everyone in the room, and he never left a room when there was still beer in the fridge.
Of course, Joe slept on the couch so it’s not like he could have gone anywhere anyway.
It was obvious from the first night that Joe wanted me for his very own, and that he believed he was worthy. It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was living in Larry’s house and that I was Larry’s “old lady.” He was cocky and obnoxious and rude and, as loud as he was about wanting me, he didn’t seem to have a brain in his head.
Although they were both gross, I much preferred Dave.
Dave was a greasy fellow with dark hair and brooding eyes. He was soft-spoken and junkie-thin with shiny yellowish skin. Unlike Joe, Dave waited until no one else was looking to make his advances.
We’d all be sitting around in the living room – me and a bunch of guys – and I’d look at Dave, who’d be staring right at me. He’d wink and keep staring. I started to believe we had a secret.
Or we’d be sitting alone waiting for Larry to get back with the beer, and Dave would rub my feet, talking all the while about the different pressure points in feet, as though he were explaining anatomy instead of being surprisingly sensual.
Dave’s were the kind of smooth moves to which I usually responded, but I was with Larry.
And unlike Joe, Dave was terrified of Larry. So Dave stayed quietly seductive in a corner while Joe blurted out his intentions every day.
Once after a very long day of drinking, Joe sat down on the couch next to me and smugly put his arm around me. This was not something I wanted, nor did I snuggle into Joe. Instead, I froze.
That’s when Larry decided he’d had enough.
As Joe casually lifted his beer to his lips, Larry took two giant, boot-clad stomps across the room and smacked the beer out of Joe’s hands.
Before Joe could complete the phrase, “what the fuck,” Larry had lifted Joe off the couch with one hand and started punching him in the face with the other.
Tossing out delinquent apologies, Joe scrambled away into the kitchen where Larry pummeled Joe until Joe couldn’t rise from the kitchen floor.
The house was dead silent.
Larry calmly strolled back into the living room, sat on the couch and put his arm around me.
Minutes passed. Crickets chirped. When Joe finally emerged from the kitchen, Larry didn’t even look at him.
Larry’s voice was a hushed roar. “Get the fuck out of my house, Joe.”
Joe and all of his worldly possessions were gone in five minutes; I never saw him again.
Before long, I seriously questioned my desire to live in sunny Florida.
We’d been to the beach, and it did not live up to the dream.
I’d conveniently ignored the foreshadowing of spring break, when my best day concluded with passing out under a trailer. I still believed that things would get better since I lived somewhere warm.
But it wasn’t warm. It was hot.
Moving to Florida from the snowy north makes a ton of sense – in the winter, when it’s actually snowy. But moving to Florida during the summer is absolutely insane.
It was brutally hot every single moment of every single day. Larry’s “cooling system” included an air conditioning window unit in the bedroom and a fan over the dining room table. If we opened the door to get more air flowing through the living room, even with that one ceiling fan, the blazingly humid air that poured inside engulfed us, making it hard to even breathe. So we kept the doors shut.
During the day, it was impossible to walk outside except to go somewhere air-conditioned, which we never did. Even when it rained, it was hot. In the evening, when my drinking fun was just getting started, the air was stifling. In the wee hours of the morning – when I was getting ready to go to sleep – it was still hot.
And my drinking “fun” was relative, now that there was no one with whom to drink. There were no weekend parties, no concerts or comedy shows, no sports to watch. Other than our “day” at the beach, we didn’t go anywhere or do anything. Since we weren’t living in a hellhole (relatively speaking), we could finally drink in our own home.
Yippee.
Unlike Larry, whose day included drinking, my day revolved around drinking.
With college over, and Larry lacking the obsession with alcohol that I had, there was no one around who could commiserate. There was nothing but a twelve-pack in the fridge that needed to be repeatedly replenished.
Larry thought being “home” was great. He thought working on the bike in the front yard was better than working on the bike in the gravel lot in Pitcairn. And while he worked on the bike, or ran out to get bologna or beer or cigarettes, I stayed inside where it was not quite so unbearably hot.
Drinking without a frat house or a bar jammed with people or a floor full of screaming girls … well, it was just boring.
But I was an alcoholic who had been drinking every day for at least a year. It never occurred to me that I could create any life I wanted to have. I was too busy drinking to create anything but occasional puke.
Quite frequently I was drinking with Joe and Dave, my new roommates. I’m sure they both had jobs, because they occasionally disappeared for hours on end, but they were also home a lot. They sat around inside with cans of beer, too.
Joe and Dave were younger than Larry, but they were not my friends. They weren’t interesting or funny or smart or even particularly nice. They weren’t fun to be around. I didn’t look forward to spending time drinking with Joe and Dave.
Worse yet, Joe and Dave didn’t even like each other. And we were living with both of them and their squabbles, which happened whenever they were both home.
Apparently it got worse when Larry and I moved in … because of me.
After my miserable Florida spring break mere months before, during which I never saw a beach, I started whining to Larry.
“I’m missing my whole life!” I said. “I want to go to the beach! We’re in Florida! That’s what people in Florida do!”
“What beach do you want to go to?” Larry asked. “There’s a fuckin’ ton of ’em!”
“Any beach!” I said. “I just want to put my toes in the sand and stare at the ocean.” I remembered from my childhood vacations that this was the female adult ritual while the men and kids splashed in the ocean.
So one day, we all went to the beach: me and Larry, and my new roommates Joe and Dave.
I got up around noon, as usual, and we headed out. Larry and I rode on the Harley, while Joe and Dave took the cooler in Dave’s truck. We got to Clearwater Beach in a matter of minutes.
Wearing jeans, boots and a tank top, I hopped off the bike and raced for the sand. I never wore socks so when I reached the sand, I pulled off my boots and ran onto the beautiful white-sand beach.
“Ooooooowwwwwwwwww!!!!” I screamed. The sand was incredibly hot. We were way too far from the water for me to cool off there, so I threw myself down and put my boots back on.
Larry, Joe and Dave caught up easily, carrying the cooler. It was a small cooler – only big enough to hold a six-pack – and no one had bothered to get ice. Our beers were already getting warm when we plopped down in the sand to “enjoy” them.
We didn’t bring towels.
Larry handed me a koozie. “You can’t have an open container here,” he said. “Put this on your beer or you’ll get arrested.”
No beer on the beach? Well, that was a bummer, but I wasn’t going to let it deter me from my beach day.
“Let’s go fuckin’ swimming!” I said, starting to pull off my jeans.
“You can’t do that!” Larry shrieked. “Ya gotta have a fuckin’ swimsuit to swim!”
He remembered that I didn’t wear underwear; I’d forgotten it mattered. “I can’t go in the water?”
“Not unless you want to go in wearing jeans,” Larry chuckled.
Adult ritual or not, I wasn’t going to just sit on the blazing hot sand. I wanted to be in that ocean. So I pulled off my boots again and raced toward the water as fast as I could, carrying my koozie’d beer, trying to avoid all the “hot” on the Florida beach in June.
I stood in the water and stared toward what I thought was Europe; I had no idea I was in the Gulf of Mexico.
I stood and stared, alone, while the saltwater cooled my feet and dampened my jeans. As my feet sunk into the sand, I willed myself to be swallowed whole.
It didn’t happen.
After what seemed like an hour but was probably three minutes, my beer was gone. I strolled back to the guys to get another one. Joe and Dave were squabbling; Larry was smoking a cigarette and ignoring them.
I opened the cooler and pulled out one of the two remaining beers. It was not cold.
“We need more beer,” I said to Larry.
“Not here,” he said. “There’s a bar right over the bridge when you’re ready.”
With Joe and Dave still arguing, I cracked the beer. The warm liquid foamed over my hand.
“I’m ready,” I said.
And that was the end of our day at the beach.
Larry’s small ranch house was fairly typical of the nearby Florida landscape. All the other houses in St. Petersburg looked like his house, although most of those were better maintained.
We parked in the yard since the driveway was just a bit of gravel and concrete and not a driveway at all. Also, everyone else parked in the yard. I liked this feature, since it reminded me of Mask.
My mission was to be perpetually barefoot; Florida was always warm. I’d envisioned myself – in spite of my spring break foreshadowing – spending all my time on the beach, my toes in the sand.
But we still hadn’t gone to the beach, and much of the “sand” in our front yard wasn’t actually sand. It was dirt shaped into mounds by something called a fire ant. Unlike regular ants, fire ants were vicious, evil red creatures that stung mercilessly when they bit people. These were to be avoided at all costs – so being barefoot outside became suddenly impossible.
Lizards – who, I learned later, occasionally eat fire ants – were my favorite critter in Florida. The lizards lived in the house with us, and I’d drink beer and watch them peek out from behind a chair or a table, or squeeze out through the crooked patio door.
They were so cute, scurrying quickly across the floor toward whatever insect might be flying through. There were no screens on the front or back doors, so we got lots of bugs.
By far my least favorite critter was the palmetto bug – otherwise known as a giant, flying cockroach.
Larry told me that they weren’t roaches, though, and I believed him. “Roaches don’t fly,” he laughed. “Palmetto bugs are harmless! Like lady bugs!”
I believed him.
We had enough palmetto bugs in our house to start a lady-buggish colony. They were everywhere, scattering when the lights came on (like roaches) and flying across the house when they needed to get somewhere quickly.
More than once, a palmetto bug in mid-flight ran into the swirling ceiling fan above the dining room table. When this happened, the giant roach would be flicked lightning-fast across the room, causing everyone to duck for cover, hoping not to get hit by the enormous bug. If it didn’t hit anyone, it would smack against a wall, stunned, then scuttle into a dark space to recover.
There were also the occasional flying creatures, which Larry murdered for having the audacity to fly through any open door. I spent a lot of time playing catch-and-release with bees, flies and wasps before Larry saw them.
Larry had a lot of biker friends in Florida. They’d sit outside working on their bikes, or stand around with open beers talking about nothing at all.
I stayed inside. It was brutally hot anyway. After my third beer, I mostly just watched the critters scamper from place to place, or fly across the room with or without the aid of the ceiling fan.
I found the “action” in Florida to be tremendously boring. Previously I’d had a place to go with friends and peers when I got bored. College kept me entertained.
Now I had lizards and palmetto bugs and fire ants and a whole lot of time on my hands.
So I drank, and watched bugs, and wondered what to do with my life.
Larry left his guitar in Pittsburgh, since it’s not an easy task to carry a guitar a thousand miles on a motorcycle, especially with hamsters residing in the tour pack.
I’m not sure either of us realized that what I loved most about Larry was his ability to sing.
When we got to Florida, the focus was entirely on his real identity: motorcyclist. He was thrilled to be in weather where he could ride every day of the year, where everyone he knew owned a motorcycle, and where all he had to do to was keep his motorcycle running.
I am guessing Joe and Dave were paying the mortgage, since Larry did not have to go to work anywhere.
This meant that he spent the vast majority of his days sitting next to his bike, which always required some kind of work. There were small metal things all around him on the ground, and his beer – unlike mine – grew warm in the sun. Sometimes his friends would stop over with their bikes, and they would all stand outside staring at them, talking about what they were going to do to fix them.
I didn’t recognize the lack of music as a problem in my life, but I knew I felt left out.
One day, bored out of my skull, I asked, “What am I supposed to do while you’re fixing your bike?”
“You can start fixing up your bike!” Larry beamed.
“My bike?”
“Yeah! The Triumph in the backyard is for you!”
“You got me a Triumph?” I asked, incredulous. Other than Harleys, the only brands of motorcycles accepted by the hard-core biker community were Indians (as though they were gold), BMWs, and Triumphs. The Triumphs were British, which I loved.
“Sure I did!” Larry said. I never questioned how or when Larry had purchased a Triumph motorcycle for me, here in Florida, while we were living in Pittsburgh. “C’mon I’ll show ya.”
We walked into the backyard, and there was my Triumph.
It was black with the little Triumph logo on the gas tank, sure enough!
But the bike had no tires. In fact, it had no wheels. The seat was torn and the loose stuffing was moldy. The frame held only part of an engine, but not the part that would make it go. The Triumph had no pipes, no lights, no speedometer, and what little was still attached was rusted beyond repair. It was like a horse with no legs, dying on the ground.
“I can’t ride that,” I said.
Larry laughed, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth like always. “Well not yet you can’t! But this can be your project. This’ll be a great fuckin’ bike when we get it up and runnin’!”
He rested a hand on the moldy seat, petting it like a stray puppy, dreaming of the day.
“When are ‘we’ gonna do that?”
“Real fuckin’ soon!” he said proudly. “And you can have your own bike!” He put his arm around me, squeezed me close, proud that someday his Ol’ Lady would be riding this piece of shit down the road.
As always, I believed him.
If you’ve never slept on a waterbed, you might think it’s cool. But I truly believe that there are reasons beyond “imminent flooding” that made waterbeds disappear from popularity rather quickly.
First, special sheets are required for a waterbed. I’m not sure Larry knew this, and I certainly didn’t know. The sheets Larry had on the waterbed wouldn’t stay in one place on the bed, so when I moved, the sheets moved, too. By morning every day, the sheets would either be wrapped around someone’s leg or they would be on the floor. And sleeping on a waterbed without sheets meant sleeping on sticky, awful plastic – so that’s what we slept on after the sheets fell off.
In the morning, we would have to rebuild the mess back into some semblance of “bedding” or we’d have to rebuild it in the evening before we passed out. Either way, it was unpleasant.
Having sex on a waterbed was also impossible, for many of the same reasons. A waterbed has no solidity. There is no way to get traction. Any movement we made meant that I desperately sought some form of stability – which meant I often begged to be allowed to move to the floor. Waterbed sex might be glorious in movies, but in real life it’s miserable.
And there was nowhere else to have sex in that house since we had two roommates, one of whom lived on the couch.
As a result, for the first time in our young relationship, Larry and I had sex much less frequently in Florida.
Fortunately I was always, always drunk, so I was usually able to pass out in the bed. Staying asleep … well, that was something else entirely. I woke up every single time Larry moved, because the whole world shifted. It was not as pleasant as sleeping on a boat, or even on the sand when the tide came in. It was like sleeping directly on water.
Every. Movement. Caused More Movement.
It didn’t help, of course, that Larry had spent eight years in this bed with Suzy. But I was trying to forget that.
I wanted to be happy in Florida. I just couldn’t find a way to do that. Yet.
Pulling into Larry’s house on the Harley was not what I thought it would be.
I felt relief to get off the bike, and was glad to get the hamsters out of the tour pack finally, but I didn’t feel excited. In fact, seeing Larry’s ranch-style house in the dark made me kind of nauseous. I tried to forget my malicious behavior with regard to his ex, Suzy, but it was all I could think about.
This was his home, not mine.
I tried to be cavalier, hopping off the motorcycle and rescuing the hamsters, introducing them to their new abode.
I’d had visions of dancing around in the living room, sprawling naked on the sofa, sex on the table … but going inside was not what I thought it would be.
Instead there was Joe, sitting on the couch.
He barely glanced up from his magazine. “Oh hey, Larry,” he said in a low rasp. He looked at me. I was grizzled from the ride – but still a 21-year-old braless female in tight jeans and black boots.
Larry saw him looking.
“Hey Joe,” he said. “Kirsten, this is Joe.”
Joe was younger than Larry but older than me – tall and thin with wild eyes and tousled brown hair. He looked like he had either been sleeping all day or hadn’t slept in a week.
I glanced from Joe to Larry, although neither really noticed. Why was this man in our house?
“Joe lives here, sleeps on the couch,” Larry said without any further explanation.
Later I would learn that when Suzy found another place to live, she hadn’t bothered to rehome Joe … or their other roommate, Dave. So they were staying.
With us.
Dave was in his bedroom with the door closed; I didn’t meet him until the next day.
At least we have a door on the bathroom, I thought. I put the hamsters down on the table for Joe to observe, then I skipped into the bedroom – also with a door on it.
Okay, so it was a little bit exciting. Doors should never be taken for granted.
But the bedroom wasn’t what I thought it would be.
Larry had lived here with Suzy for years, so I still felt like an intruder. There was no furniture – just a double bed with a thin, flowery blanket. And when I threw my suitcase on the bed, it bounced right off, falling with a clunk onto the floor.
My jaw dropped.
Larry walked in behind me and saw it happen; he wrapped his arms around me and laughed.
“Didn’t I tell ya, Baby? It’s a waterbed!” He pushed on it with his calloused hand to show me how it rippled. “It’s great for my fuckin’ back!”
Suddenly, I didn’t care about Joe or Suzy or the whole state of Florida. Boots still on, I jumped onto that bed with both feet like it was a trampoline, hooting and nearly falling off in the same motion.
Now Larry’s jaw dropped. “No, get down!” he bellowed. “You’ll fuckin’ bust it!”
I slunk to the floor, fun over. Larry explained that the waterbed was to be treated with the utmost care, not because it was fragile but because of the flood that would occur if I punctured it with my boot heel.
The waterbed was no longer a toy; it was more like an egg just waiting to be broken.
I looked around, disheartened. Florida was not what I thought it would be.
With college behind me and Larry’s career being mobile, we decided to follow “our” dreams. We were moving to Florida.
Larry already had a house there, and we’d all had enough of our dilapidated hotel room.
While “we” were earning money for the move, I did nothing. I fed “the rats” – as I called them, although they were quite literally hamsters. Chippy and Dozer had somehow survived college – and now they ran on their very squeaky wheel all night long in our tiny room, which especially irritated Larry’s brother.
I’d slept through that wheel every night at college. Plus I loved my little rodents. Chippy – who did most of the running – was a constant source of entertainment. And Dozer was a cuddly buddy whenever I needed a friend.
Since college had ended, I’d realized I had not a single friend in the world.
My pets were my only real pals. So packing for Florida should have been easy; we’d just throw everything into the back of the pickup and go.
Except … Larry said we had to sell the pickup.
“Nooooo!” I whined. I’d never loved anything the way I loved that truck.
“That fuckin’ truck’ll never fuckin’ make it,” Larry laughed.
My dearly beloved oil-leaking Ford pickup was gone the next day.
I stopped in at my parents’ house before we left, presumably to say goodbye. After all, I was leaving forever.
The way I saw it: I was leaving their prison of responsibility to go where I would finally be free and livin’ the life. I’d be an adult in the real world – that ever-elusive real world – and I’d somehow be a success. This “goodbye” marked the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood.
My parents didn’t see me seeing it that way.
“You’re acting like it’s a vacation,” my mom said.
“This is my life!” I retorted. “I know it’s not a vacation!” I grabbed some of my old jewelry for added effect. I was really leaving forever!
My mother has since told me that I left on her birthday, though I have no idea when I left. I certainly don’t remember saying “happy birthday” to the person whose life I was both dissing and destroying.
I just left.
I had a purple duffle bag, which Larry tied with bungee cords to the top of the tour pack. Larry threw his worldly possessions into the saddlebags. We had two cartons of cigarettes, some jeans and a couple of toothbrushes in a plastic bag.
We lined the bottom of the hamster cage with t-shirts and put the entire cage into the tour pack. The cage was made of metal; we didn’t want them to scorch themselves during the ride. We left the tour pack open half an inch so Chippy and Dozer would have “fresh” air.
Then we climbed onto the Harley and headed off to the Sunshine State.
It was a loooong trip to St. Petersburg. We’d done this trip during spring break, so I knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant. But this time, we also had to stop at least hourly to take out the hamsters and let them run in some grass.
We would rouse the two nocturnal creatures and plop them in the grass, where they’d waddle about a little, nibbling at the green. We offered them water, and sometimes they drank. Sometimes they insisted on sleep.
It was hot in that tour pack. And it was summer. And we were going south, so it got hotter as we drove.
After three days, we somehow got them – and ourselves – safely to Larry’s house.
As though he were explaining the concept to a ten-year-old, Larry told me: “I know a trade. I can work anywhere in the world.”
I wanted to be able to live “anywhere in the world,” so this seemed perfect.
Larry’s trade meant that he worked in something called a “machine shop.” I envisioned stores that sold machines – with no idea what kind of machines would need to be sold, or who would buy them, or what those machines did.
“I’m a machinist!” Larry said proudly. Everything he said about himself, he said proudly.
“You make machines?”
Larry laughed. “I make machine parts,” he said.
Larry had been doing this work at a “shop” in Braddock, which is a town near Pittsburgh that one should never visit at night. Sometimes, though, we visited Braddock in order to get cocaine since my connections in Ohio were … well, still in Ohio.
I had never seen Braddock in daylight. But with Larry working there every day and me “free” from college, he suggested that I visit him at work.
“I’ll buy ya lunch!” Larry said. I hoped this meant “beer.” Beer would be worth the ten-minute drive.
When I arrived, I parked in an alley. There was no parking lot. Larry’s motorcycle was in the alley, too.
The “building “shop” resembled a large garage outside. Inside, it resembled my seventh grade shop class, only in a very spread-out sort of way. Every five feet or so was a freestanding machine of some sort. To me, they looked like big blenders or small jackhammers. Many of these machines stood empty.
But the ones that ran were very, very loud. It was deafening in there.
Larry was wearing safety goggles, just like I wore in shop class. I saw Leo, the bass player for Larry’s band, also wearing safety goggles. A bunch of giant blenders, Leo, Larry and one other guy … that was the whole “shop.”
Larry noticed me walking in clothed, as usual, in cutoff jean shorts and bare feet. Jeans and boots were reserved for motorcycle rides.
“Hey Baby!” he said, smiling, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Then he saw my feet. “Ya gotta have shoes on in here!” He pointed at his boots, which Larry always wore.
I went back to the car and put on moccasins. That was all I had.
Then Larry showed me around the shop. He pointed at Leo, who nodded at me. He pointed at the other guy, who didn’t nod. The entire time he spoke, he held a small metal object between his fingers – something that could have been a bolt, a weapon or a plate. He didn’t let it move in his hand; apparently it was only part-way finished.
“So this is what I do!” he said, holding his cigarette and grandly waving his one free arm.
I had absolutely zero interest.
“So you make small metal things,” I said.
“Yep!” Larry said, still smiling, holding the half-finished bolt-weapon-plate a little higher.
“Okay,” I said. “Can we go to lunch now?”
Larry laughed. “It’s past lunchtime!” he said. “It’s almost time to go home! Here – take five bucks; I’ll meet ya at Barry’s after work.” He handed me a bill from his chain-clad wallet, and leaned over to kiss me. He smelled, as always, like oil.
I took the money and held it. I glanced around. I lit a cigarette.
Still with the goofy grin, Larry shook his head in his isn’t-she-adorable way.
“Okay,” I said. I pocketed the five bucks, got in the car, and drove to Barry’s.
