Today I have 31 years clean and sober.
I didn’t do this on my own; I couldn’t have done it without Alcoholics Anonymous. I wanted very much to do it on my own. I wanted more than anything to not need any help.
And since I’d gone to a rehab in 1989, I thought I knew what was required to stay clean. I thought I could do it on my own. But in 1992, when I was so beaten down that I was incapable of getting back up, AA reached out and pulled me back onto my feet.
I still did everything wrong. AA’s suggestions were not suggestions I liked. Suggestions like “hang with the women” and “stay out of relationships for the first year” were particularly challenging for me.
I wanted to live my life without anyone telling me what to do. I didn’t want to make my bed, cook my own food, wash pots and pans, empty the garbage or take care of my aging car. I didn’t want to do anything to take care of myself; I wanted life to be “fun.”
I still have trouble with responsibility. My bed is made but it’s not beautiful. I am very lucky to have a man in my life who makes enough money to take care of almost everything, so I don’t mind taking out the garbage because he hates doing it. I am very blessed to have so much materially, but mostly to have so much love.
Still life is sometimes not fun. And when I realized this, I was almost 30 years old.
I’ve always seen things through rose-colored glasses, but not because I was optimistic. I am the biggest pessimist I know. But I have forced the world around me to be fun. Last week, I was nearly hysterical with laughter at the patients in a doctor’s office – all noisy and grouchy and ridiculous. I’ve spent my life making games out of the mundane, keeping myself entertained in spite of the horrors of reality.
When I was six, my favorite game was traveling to imaginary worlds. In my backyard, I pushed a “button” of peeling paint on a pole, then I’d spin around and around. When I got dizzy I’d fall down, wait for the head spin to subside, then “awake” in a new land – outer space, a dog sanctuary, another country, a zoo, an amusement park – anything I could imagine.
This should have been a clue that someday, I’d be … me. When I’m bored I still play this game, but without spinning. Inside my head, I can put myself anywhere I want.
Lately I’ve been visiting the past.
It was a year ago, on my 30th anniversary, that I decided to start telling my story. It took me awhile to really start delving deep into the details. Now sometimes my writing is too powerful for my brain; I’m fully reliving those years. When I sleep, I’m right there with people from high school or college or post-college stupors. Then I wake up wondering where I am.
I am so, so grateful to find that I’m in my huge, comfortable bed and not in a puddle of mud or vomit. I’m thrilled to make myself a healthy smoothie for breakfast instead of drinking from a bedside can of beer with cigarette ash in it. For 31 years, I haven’t offered my body in exchange for drugs. For 31 years, I’ve been able to make choices that won’t hurt me or the people I love.
Thanks, God, for my sobriety and for my life. I’m eternally grateful.
In spite of my appearance of “normalcy” during my senior year, I suddenly had a new place to live, no parents determining my actions, and an ancient boyfriend with a very different way of life. I realized quickly that I needed to find a way to enmesh my separate lives without losing my college friends.
Larry felt confident that all the young girls admired him – which was nowhere near the truth – so he had no qualms about visiting Mount Union. But Bonnie wasn’t sure what to do with Larry. She liked the bold step that I’d taken, breaking away from my own parents while still acquiring an education. But for some reason that I couldn’t fathom, she wasn’t immediately crazy about him.
Having Larry visit my personal haven wasn’t my favorite idea. I didn’t mind roaring off on the motorcycle for all the world to see, but I didn’t want Larry to actually spend time there. I’d spent three years enjoying life with people my own age, creating my own space, loving intellectuals, laughing with people who understood my sense of humor, partying the way partying should be, and making friends I adored. In other words, I finally felt like I’d found a place where I belonged.
I didn’t want to demolish all that by sharing weekends with a bushy-bearded old man who thought fart jokes were funny and who’d only graduated from high school – and he’d done that before I was born.
But Larry was now my life, so I didn’t have much choice.
Clonking through the dorm in his heavy boots, Larry smiled without letting his cigarette drop from his lips. “I’m finally in college!” he said, way too loud, throwing ape-arms above his head in triumph. “My mom’s gonna be so fuckin’ proud!”
Larry thought this was very, very funny. He later shared his joke with all of his friends and many strangers.
I wondered how old Larry’s mom was, if she was even still alive. If she’d wanted him to go to college, why hadn’t he gone? I’m guessing brains and money were lacking.
I wanted to get off campus as quickly as possible, so Larry took Bonnie and me to bars we’d never seen before. Larry bought all the drinks, and Bonnie and I partied for free.
Larry was happy that I was happy. And I was always happy when I was drinking. Until I wasn’t.
We went to a crowded bar called The Red Rose with wood-paneled wall-to-wall people, but not a single college student. There were a couple of bushy-bearded guys wearing leather at the bar, matching the motorcycles we’d seen outside. There was no dance floor or country band, so I browsed through songs on the jukebox and played darts.
We got wasted and then I snuck Larry through the window into my loft bed.
The next night we went to The Elm Inn, where the parking lot was full of motorcycles and the bar itself was nearly empty. It took awhile for me to realize that the front room was not the only place to sit. Bikers appeared seemingly out of nowhere, then disappeared again through a door that looked like it led into someone’s house. We didn’t dare go into that door.
Not that night, anyway.
I’d thought all the bars in town revolved around college students but apparently not. Alliance had its own biker bars and its own non-college population. Students had referred to these folks as “townies” for years – and suddenly, I’d been thrust among them.
Little did I know how deep into that population I would dive.
While I was in college, Larry started building a life for himself in Pittsburgh. He got a job – which I didn’t know about for months, because I didn’t care – and he put together a gigging band, which I cared about instantly.
Larry had been playing country music since I was born. The highlight of his musical career was the night he opened for Hank Williams, Jr. in the ’70s. After my Firm experience, this felt like touching fame again.
Larry Wayne and the Wranglers even made an album of country cover songs. The album’s sleek silver front featured a contemplative Larry standing in cowboy boots with his guitar … and looking like he might have once been my age.
Briefly. A long time ago.
I played that album and stared at that picture and worked hard to fall in love with the man I knew. Larry’s voice was smooth, melodic, professionally mixed. The songs were new to me and classic to the world. I’d listen and choose favorites and memorize lyrics and admire his young voice and wonder why I couldn’t have known him when he opened for Hank Williams, Jr. … when I was 8.
And then 36-year-old Larry would pick up the guitar and sing and magically, he’d become a country star.
So when Larry created a band, I was enraptured. It didn’t matter that country music had once made me so nauseous, I’d begged my dad to pull over so I could vomit. It didn’t matter that I found the music simplistic and crude. It didn’t matter that I loved George Michael, Robert Smith and Boy George – each the antithesis of country music. It didn’t matter that most of the songs Larry sang were written before I was born.
The only thing that mattered is that Larry sang on stage.
All those nights spent staring at polyester dancers were instantly replaced by nights staring at my superstar boyfriend. He knew ten thousand songs, could play anything anyone requested, and had a pretty decent band backing him, too, although for me, the backing band was a tiny bit of a problem.
Even though I insisted on ignoring Larry’s age and imagining him as the guy on the silver album cover, it was hard to ignore the ages of the band members.
Larry’s friend, Leo, who worked with him at whatever job he’d found, was a strong bassist and a decent backup singer, but he had a wife and two kids, a paunch belly, a black mustache that stuck out from under his nose like a giant caterpillar, and caterpillar eyebrows, too.
Larry’s also-paunched drummer, Tom, was called Stogie because he smoked cigars non-stop. These stunk to high heaven and forced me to frequently look at him, ignorantly holding that cigar stub in his mouth. Stogie had no hair at all and, as a modern college student, I hadn’t known anyone who was actually bald until this time.
My favorite of Larry’s band members was Steve, a pedal steel guitar player, mainly because I’d never seen a pedal steel before. Steve showed me in his spare time how the pedals and keys worked, fascinating me. Steve sang one song, She’s About a Mover, which I loved dearly, and I believed Steve had invented it. Steve looked old enough to be my grandfather.
Larry was the clear leader, the frontman and the business man, pulling in $20 a night for every one of the guys. As I watched him bring that old music to life, I found a new way to fall in love.
Bonnie and I did not miss a beat when we got back to McMaster Hall. We continued drinking every night, partying like wild women on weekends, and sleeping through classes much of the time. We continued to drink before every party, go home with our men d’jour, and buck authority at every opportunity.
But Mount Union College was no longer the beautiful experience I’d had during my first three years. Classes were getting in the way of my partying. I no longer got an “allowance” from my parents. And having a live-in boyfriend changed nothing about my moral compass so I found myself doing the same things I’d always done – but with the added component of guilt on the side.
I wish I could say that calling Larry’s apartment “home” had some impact on my behavior, but it never occurred to me to be faithful to the man. If anything, I felt a little more daring than I had been the previous year because I knew I’d be riding into the sunset on the back of a Harley Davidson at the end of college.
So Bonnie and I – and anyone who wandered near – partied with abandon at every given opportunity. When there were no opportunities given, we made our own. Sometimes Thursday morning was reason enough to drink. More often than not, we drank in the dorm, then went to a party, then went to the bar until it closed. If there were no parties happening, we just skipped that step.
Sometimes Larry would ride the two hours to campus on Fridays to take me home for the weekend. He’d show up mid-afternoon right there in the campus center parking lot where parents had dropped off their babies and deemed it “safe.” He’d let his motor BRRM-BA-DUMM-BRM BRRM-BA-DUMM-BRM until he’d woken every napping student within a five-mile radius.
Larry wore the same black leather jacket every day, chaps for long trips like this, and always those beastly black boots. He’d get off the bike slowly, amidst the Greek-clad upperclassmen steering carefully away from him, wide-eyed and unsmiling, trying to safely reach the campus center. Oblivious, Larry’s cheap metal rings sparkled in the sun as his calloused fingers scraped through his distressed hair.
Since I couldn’t see him from my dorm window my friends would stare momentarily, then rush to let me know he was out there. I could hear his Harley from my room so I’d already be pulling on my boots and leather jacket.
By the time I reached Larry, he’d be smoking a cigarette and leaning in all that leather against the equally black leather saddle, his long legs crossed at the ankles. Upon noticing me, he’d break into that crooked-tooth smile that I’d begun to love.
“Hey Baby,” he’d say, sometimes lifting me into the air and spinning me around, other times planting a hard kiss on my lips, owning me for all the world to see. Then Larry would flick his cigarette into the campus center parking lot while I lit one for the ride, and off we’d ride.
At the Pennsylvania state line, which wasn’t marked on the back roads, Larry would pull over. We’d both get off the bike while he opened the saddle bags and removed the helmets. Pennsylvania had a helmet law; Ohio did not. Freedom ended at that line: we had to wear our “brain buckets” the rest of the way.
And on our way back to Mount Union, we’d stop at that same line to free ourselves again. But I rarely felt free knowing what was ahead.
Returning to college with a new home address made absolutely no difference in my lifestyle, except that I no longer tried to refrain from drinking seven nights a week. I’d been daily drinking for so long, it seemed silly to stop for things like “classes” and “exams.”
It was my senior year when I decided to take the easiest classes I could find – one of which was anatomy.
Body parts were fascinating to me, but I knew literally nothing about how anything worked. So I took the class. I thought it would be interesting.
Plus, it was taught by the football coach, Coach Kehres, who was very easy on the eyes. I could be bored to tears and still wildly entertained. And if I got bored with looking at him, the class was required for anyone majoring in physical education – which means the room was full of football players.
Win-win! I signed up without thinking twice about it.
Before my first anatomy test, in spite of my regular drinking, I actually studied. Learning bones and organs took more effort than I’d expected. I learned everything I could, and then I wrote down what I’d learned on the test the next day.
When I left the exam room, I thought I’d done pretty well.
Two days later, Coach Kehres returned our graded tests. Everyone groaned. My “pretty well” wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped. I got a 32%.
Failing that test was a real eye-opener. First of all, I realized that I should never, ever study medicine. Science was really not my thing.
Second, I was a senior. If I failed a class, I might not graduate. And I didn’t think my parents would pay for a fifth year of college, especially since I had moved out of their house. And I couldn’t exactly call them anymore to discuss my options.
So I walked straight from the classroom and to the registrar to drop the class.
“It’s too late to drop the class,” said the registrar. “But you could take it pass/fail.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means that the class won’t affect your GPA,” she said. “But if you want the credit, you’ll need to pass.”
I considered the 32%. I wondered if I could raise my grade to a percentage that would mean I could pass. My only option was to try – and try hard.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take it pass/fail.” I would have rather thrown my anatomy book in the garbage, but I still had all those football players to admire.
A few days later, Coach Kehres found me ordering spaghetti in the cafeteria line.
“Kur-stin, right?” he said, pronouncing my name all wrong.
I looked up and melted a little.
“Yes?” I said, somewhat terrified. The coach had never spoken to me directly before.
“I hear you’re taking my class pass/fail,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. Could he force me to take it for a grade? I was getting more scared by the minute.
“Next time you want to do that, come and talk to me first,” Coach Kehres said. “You had the highest grade in the class.”
I blinked and looked up at him. “I did?”
“You did,” he said. Then he walked away.
I stood holding my tray of spaghetti, wondering which way to turn.
At the end of that semester, there was a “P” on my transcript; I never took another science course again.
I was raised in a warm, loving home. I had two kind parents, two younger sisters and a poodle. We went sled riding when it snowed, went to the beach every year for vacation, and ate dinner together every night. There was no abuse, very little yelling, and a whole lot of love.
None of this stopped me from becoming a belligerent alcoholic who blamed my parents for everything from my low self-esteem to the despairing state of the universe.
One day in the summer of 1985, just before my senior year of college, my parents gave me an ultimatum. “Follow our rules,” they said, “or move out.”
“Then I’ll move out!” I screamed. I spat and swore. Then I left.
A guy I’d met at a gas station at 3 a.m. picked me up on his Harley, and off I rode.
We lived in a cell-block sized apartment with a mattress on the floor and a chain by the door to threaten possible intruders. I’d never gotten lice before. Even though I wasn’t of legal age, I drank beer at dive bars, watching gray-haired couples waltzing to country songs older than me.
I went back to college wearing sorority sweatpants, a leather jacket and an enormous metal skull ring. I lived across the hall from the dorm’s largest authority figure, which I rebelled against instantly, thoroughly and consistently. My 21st birthday was spent passed out on a sidewalk.
I partied as though I were still single; my nights were whatever I wanted them to be. I drank and drank and drank and drank and drank.
My good days were spectacular, even though I couldn’t remember them.
My bad days were always someone else’s fault.
I believed in one thing: freedom. I believed I had the right to do what I wanted to do, whenever and however I wanted to do it. I shoved aside anyone who tried to get in my way.
It took five more years of chasing “freedom” to discover that I had slaughtered my own soul. Those years were the most brutal years of my life, and I created them with my own choices.
The day I raged and left home, my mother cried. Having no kids of my own, I was completely self-absorbed. I don’t think I truly understood the love of a parent for a child until I had a child of my own.
It never occurred to me that my mom was worried for my safety. After all, I had it all under control. I had “freedom” and I had my life under control.
Until I didn’t.
Everything I was, everything I wanted to be, disappeared the day I left home. I gave it away, purposefully, thinking I could find something better, something more “real.” That was the day my life started to unravel, the beginning of my learning that I was the source of my own problems.
It was so much easier when I believed in the illusion.
The details of the next few years are about to unravel on “paper” for the first time. To be honest, I’m a little afraid.
But here goes.
Wearing skull rings on my fingers and sorority letters on my butt, I returned to college for my senior year – just in time to celebrate my 21st birthday.
I was supposed to be an adult at 21, no more excuses, no more childlike irresponsibility. Instead, I was now a biker chick suddenly thrust back into a world where there were rules and classes and visiting hours.
I’d gotten a single room since Bonnie wanted a single again and no one in their right mind would have roomed with me. My new single was directly across the hall from the dorm’s Resident Advisor.
This was an unfortunate coincidence; my comings and goings were monitored much too closely. I’d gotten a loft bed for my room. I don’t remember who built it for me; I certainly didn’t do anything for myself.
But on my 21st birthday, none of that mattered. I went to The Hood – where else? – and partied with a hundred friends and strangers. Everyone bought me drinks: beers and shots and more beers and more shots… I am sure I was wasted by the time midnight rolled around, but I stayed until 2 a.m. when the bar closed. As usual. And I kept drinking.
When I finally had to leave, The Redhead (my freshman year darling, “RH”) offered to walk me home. The rest of this tale is recreated from his story to me the next day, since I remember nothing.
I literally could not see straight when I stumbled out of the bar. My first step missed the top stair outside, and I fell down three stairs and landed on my face.
RH rushed to the bottom of the stairs to help me up, but I insisted on staying down.
“No this is good enough!” I whined, rolling in the gravel at his feet. “I’ll just sleep here.”
“Nope, let’s get up,” he said, pulling my arm until I finally flopped to my feet. We had a long way to go.
Arm around my waist, RH dragged me the entire way from The Hood to the back door of my dorm, where I finally fell over for the last time. This time, I didn’t get up.
I passed out on the sidewalk outside of the dorm door.
The reason this is symbolic is that I’d never passed out on a sidewalk before. But I remembered my mother telling me that my alcoholic grandfather had passed out on the sidewalk once outside her house. As a youth, I remembered wondering why my grandfather didn’t just go inside to sleep.
Now I knew.
I was too drunk to walk another step. I was snoring before my face hit the pavement.
I’d left my key in my room, so there was no way for either of us to get inside. RH knocked on windows, hoping someone would let him in – but everyone was asleep. He sat on the ground next to me for a long time, waiting to see if anyone else came by, but no one did. Eventually and remorsefully, he left.
I woke when someone swung the door into my back, trying to get out.
Too drunk to be humiliated, I dragged myself down the hall and passed out on the floor of my room. Getting into the loft would have been impossible, even hours after passing out on the sidewalk. I didn’t go to any classes that day.
Happy birthday to me.
After moving in with Larry, I got a letter from my younger sister, cheering me on in my rebellion. She supported my need to break free of the authoritarianism at home, and she wanted me to know that she believed in me.
She included the lyrics to Never Surrender by Corey Hart: “If you’re lost and all alone, you can never surrender; and if your path won’t lead you home, you can never surrender….”
This letter made me cry harder and more often than any letter before or since. My sister believed in me. She wanted me to go on to do great things. She had no idea, in her innocent youth, that I wasn’t a success story. I wasn’t rebelling in any way that made sense. I was just gone.
I was already lost and all alone. And maybe I would never see my family again.
So when I thought of home – which I tried to do infrequently – I just cried.
Most evenings, Larry and I went out to a bar, a generic sort of place with booths on one side, tables in the back, and a giant, sticky dance floor in front of the live country band.
Most nights, nobody danced. For me, those nights were bearable.
But some nights, people would get up out of their booths and boogie. The old women wore pink polyester pants and the men wore embroidered cowboy shirts and they would spin around like they were in a fifties dance marathon. They’d hold one another in ways I didn’t appreciate. Occasionally there’d be polkas and two-steps and line dances.
I didn’t understand any of it.
While Larry sat casually listening to the music and tapping his toes under the table, I would stare at these people on the dance floor: strangers to me in every way. Women with too-red lipstick and puffy, dyed hair that didn’t move when they bounced. Men with bad comb-overs and beer bellies and belt buckles emblazoned with Colt 52s. Everyone smoked. Some danced with bottles in their hands. And the longer I watched, the more stunned I became.
It wasn’t so much that these people were blue-collar and I’d grown up in a family of white-collar people. It was that they were decades older than me, that they were acting like they were young but they didn’t have the capacity to do it because they were so darned old.
I sat in the booth and I watched the dancers and I wondered: is this where I’m heading? Is this what my life is going to be?
We’d go there night after night after night after night. I was so happy to get drinks without being carded, it didn’t occur to me to ask to go anywhere else. But Larry actually fit here. And anywhere the liquor flowed, I followed.
But I didn’t do it blindly. I watched these people with their bright red lips and their flabby stomachs and their baseball caps flying off their heads as their partners swung away from them and I thought: This is how old people behave; this is what I’m going to become.
The thought made me want to retch.
As I sat and drank and watched, I knew: “Never surrender” didn’t apply to me. I’d already succumbed to a battle I didn’t even know I was fighting.
So when it started to get cool at night again, and my parents said they’d still pay for school if I went back and graduated, I was more than a little thrilled to head back to my real home: Mount Union College.
I’d long believed I should buy a motorcycle of my own. But I also wanted a pet. My dilemma: should I save up for a vehicle that would provide me independence or blow everything I’d saved on something that would be dependent on me?
I really didn’t know what was more important.
But living with the biker made the decision for me. I was riding a Harley every day, and I hadn’t spent a dime.
So that left all the money in my bank account for … hamsters!
My mother was deathly afraid of rodents, so I knew I would never, ever be going home again if I bought hamsters. Still, having something to cuddle was important and, as a college student, I had to put my dream of owning a dog on hold.
So Larry and I went to the pet store. Without giving it an ounce of thought, he grabbed the cheapest metal cage he could find, which was to become their home. It had a built-in wheel, which was all that mattered to me. I envisioned days of watching my little critters running and running on that wheel.
Obviously I knew nothing.
This did not stop me. I walked over to the hamsters piled in a giant cage and pointed at a little white-and-tan rodent who was running around. The rest of them were sleeping, so I thought this was a good sign.
“I want that one!” I declared. I named him Chippy on the spot.
Then I saw one in the back, in a pile of sleeping animals, reddish-brown with white spots. Eyes still closed, he lifted his head and wriggled his nose, irritated with all the ruckus.
“Can we get two?” I asked.
“Sure!” Larry said. “Why not?”
Neither of us knew anything.
“I like the fat one in the back,” I said. “See that one?”
So we got the fat one, too. I named him Dozer, after the fat mute biker in Mask.
We went home believing we were done.
But Chippy and Dozer never liked each other. They were both male so they tried to kill each other every, single day.
And they required actual care, not just names. They required food and clean water every day, which was not easy for a drunk. And someone – namely, me – had to clean out the cage regularly. I didn’t even clean myself regularly, so the cage smelled really bad all the time.
Chippy and Dozer spent a lot of time chasing each other around and spitting; they were not friends, nor were they cuddly. Trying to catch one was nearly impossible, and holding one to pet it seemed to traumatize the poor little guys every time. So mostly I just let them be.
Worst of all, hamsters are nocturnal. That hamster wheel I’d once adored started turning sometime around 11 p.m. and didn’t stop until the sun came up.
And it squeaked. All. Night. Long.
As drunk as I was every night, and as thoroughly passed out, I woke up to that squeaking every night for years. In the morning, they’d be sound asleep – and I never, ever got to actually watch them run on the wheel.
I now know that what I actually wanted was a guinea pig. Guinea pigs are awake 18-20 hours a day, and they love to be cuddled. But I didn’t learn this until the advent of the internet – and after having children.
I thought hamsters were little guinea pigs, but they aren’t.
They are really NOT little guinea pigs.
But hey, I had my own pets, something completely dependent on me. Those hamsters are how I learned that absolutely nothing and no one should ever depend on me.
Having a motorcycle as sole transportation could make things challenging.
For example, talking on a motorcycle is hard; it’s way too loud to hear each other. The passenger can yell in the driver’s ear, but it’s pretty hard for the passenger to hear what the driver yells over the engine. I learned to wait until we got to a red light – which sometimes didn’t happen for a long, long time – before saying, “Hey, I gotta pee.”
Polite lingo goes right out the window when transferring into biker lifestyle. The words “fuck” and “shit” are used as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, as well as both pronouns and proper nouns.
So no one says, “Could you stop at a restroom, please?”
Going to the local convenience store to buy smokes, which should be quick and easy and is done a million times per week, requires long pants, a leather jacket, black gloves, a wallet with a chain, a securely fastened helmet, and big, clunky boots. You can’t just jump in the car in your bare feet with five bucks in your hand.
And lighting a cigarette on the back of a motorcycle – or even on the front when the bike is stopped – can take anywhere from two minutes to two hours depending on the weather. I had it down to an art form but sometimes, on very windy days especially, I would have my head inside my jacket, my lighter singeing my hair, and my thumbs both blistered trying to light a cigarette, and I’d still be sucking on the filtered end, soaked wet with my saliva.
At that point, it was more of a mission than a need to get that cigarette lit.
Going anywhere is tough, but going to the laundromat is a major ordeal. With one person, the bag of laundry needs to be bungee-corded down somehow to get it safely to the laundromat. With two people, someone’s got to hang onto that bag for dear life all the way to the nearest washer.
And having accessible garbage bags for transporting laundry? Well that’s a convenience I took for granted for way too long.
Groceries can be transported in smaller bags, so you can put some groceries in the saddlebags, but not bananas. You can’t ever buy a lot of groceries! But a 12-pack of Miller Lite? That has to be held because shaking the cans – which happens whenever the bike moves – makes the beer get all foamy.
I learned to hold those beers still.
Larry’s saddle bags were ultra-small until he got the ’80 FLH. Then we had bigger saddlebags and a tour pack, too, which holds a whole case of beer and two leather jackets.
As a suburbanite growing up with food on the table three times daily, a washer and dryer right in my house, and a bedroom bigger than my new apartment, none of these challenges ever occurred to me until they happened.
And whether we were driving two miles or a hundred, the process of hopping on and taking off rarely changed. It was never, ever easy.
And yet, throwing my leg over that seat and clicking my boot into place on the foot rest was heavenly. I’d shift briefly in the seat while buckling my helmet, light my cigarette and tuck my lighter into my leather jacket pocket, and pat Larry’s shoulder as a signal.
“Ya ready, Baby?” he’d ask in that gravelly voice.
“Oh yeah,” I’d say, and take a hard drag on my cigarette.
I finally believed, to the core of my being, that I’d reached the epitome of cool.
