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.
I didn’t spend a lot of time with my high school sweetheart in the summer of 1985. But between The Firm concert in May and the night I met Larry, we reunited for a few short and beautiful weeks.
Brian had always been the responsible one. We dated for a long time in high school and when we broke up, it was mostly because he didn’t want to do all the really stupid things I wanted to do.
So when we got back together, I was thrilled to find that he’d grown up enough to do some of the stupid things I wanted to do. We had some great dates and I felt like we were finally connecting in a way we couldn’t connect in high school. We’d both grown and matured, I reasoned, and we had more in common now that we were both 20 than we did when we were 17.
I was pretty sure I was in love with Brian for real this time … for those few short weeks.
Then I met Larry and I forgot all about Brian and his silly “normal” dates and dove headfirst into life as a biker chick.
But Brian didn’t forget about me.
After I left home, leaving nothing but wreckage in my wake, Brian called my parents and talked to them. I’m not sure what they told him, how they explained my absence. In fact, I rarely thought about my absence from their viewpoint. I assumed my being gone was doing them a favor.
It never occurred to me that Brian would keep calling – and calling – and calling. Finally, one night when I was talking to my mom about something “important” like whether or not I’d left my favorite album in front of my bedroom window when I left, my mother said: “Brian is still calling. He wants you to call him.”
Brian was very, very cute. It never occurred to me that it would be a challenging conversation to have. So I got off the phone with my mom and I called Brian.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said.
“I know,” I said, quite cool. “That’s why I’m calling.”
“You moved out of the house?”
“Yeah,” I said, taking a long drag of my cigarette. “I needed to be on my own.”
Brian didn’t waste any time getting to his point: “Did you think at all about what you’re doing to your parents?”
He may as well have kicked me right in the gut. No, I wanted to say, I haven’t thought about anyone but myself and I’d like to keep it that way!
Instead I decided to be defensive: “What the fuck difference does it make? My parents don’t give a fuck about me or what I want!”
“I think they do,” Brian said. “I think they love you very much and they want what’s best for you. I want what’s best for you and I’m not sure what you’re doing is what’s best for anybody.”
I briefly lost the ability to respond. Then I spoke: “You have no idea what’s BEST for me! And neither do they! Is this really what you wanted to talk to me about? My parents?!” I spat the word at him, hard, through the payphone receiver.
“I just want you to think about what you’re doing. You are hurting people with some of your choices.”
“I’m not hurting anybody,” I said. “I’m sure as fuck not hurting you! Anything else you want to say?”
There was a pause. “No,” he said. “I guess not.”
I never spoke to Brian again.
Larry and I sat on the couch in our tiny cinderblock motel room, as we often did: him with a guitar, figuring out how to play whatever new country song he heard on the radio, and me with a can of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, waiting for him to figure it out.
I was pretty happy. Life without parents was easier than I’d expected. I only needed to roll over and grab a smoke in the morning, figure out where Larry was (usually getting coffee) and wait for him to come home so I could start drinking again.
Oddly, I don’t remember any hangovers during this summer. I ate food whenever I wanted it, drank beer whenever I wanted it, and didn’t feel quite as compelled to get completely wasted every night. Looking back, I believe it’s because I knew that “tomorrow” I could do it again. Even though I wasn’t yet of legal drinking age in Pennsylvania, beer was always available.
I liken this to the many times I planned to diet “tomorrow.” If my diet was starting on a Thursday, I would eat absolutely everything in sight on Wednesday – especially pizza, candy and ice cream – so that I could “get it out of my system” before starting my carrot-and-lettuce starvation diet the next day.
Obviously this never worked – not with food or alcohol. But I felt content with Larry in this little room. I drank all the time, but not as much to excess.
I was contemplating my contentment when Larry leaned over his guitar to grab a Winston from the half-crushed cigarette pack on the table. He looked at me and smiled as he lit it.
“So,” he said in his gravelly voice while exhaling smoke. “When are we gonna get married?”
I nearly choked on my beer.
Married?!? I thought. We’d been living together maybe two weeks. Why on earth would I ever MARRY this guy?!?
It had never, ever, ever occurred to me that I should be thinking about marrying him, nor did I understand love. I was barely getting my bearings as an independent young adult.
In fact, I wasn’t really getting my bearings at all. I was just finally able to enjoy my life without parental supervision.
“I don’t know,” I said. “When do you want to get married?”
“Whenever you want, Baby,” he said. “Just tell me what you want from me, whatever you need so we can get married.”
I couldn’t think. I didn’t “need” anything except beer and cigarettes. What did I actually want?
“Okay,” I said, believing I was presenting Larry with the world’s toughest challenge. “If you learn to play Top of the World by the Carpenters on the guitar, then I’ll marry you.”
“Deal,” he said, and he actually shook my hand.
I laughed and forgot about it, thinking he’d never actually learn a piano song.
A week later, Larry sat me down on that same couch and said, “I’ve got something for you.” He pulled the guitar onto his lap and started playing and singing: “Such a feeling’s coming over me ….” It was Top of the World.
Larry played and sang it perfectly.
I had no idea what to do or say. He’d worked hard to do this for me, obviously, so I made a big fuss: “That’s amazing!” I said. “How did you do that?!”
He handed me the guitar and taught me how to play it.
It was many moons before he mentioned marriage again.
When the movie Mask was released in 1985, I loved it.
I was mesmerized by the plight of the red-headed teenager with the giant head, who was bullied mercilessly but who stood up for himself (unlike me) throughout the film. I was awestruck by Cher’s performance and torn apart by her heart-wrenching mega-scene near the end of the film. And I was head over heels in love with Sam Elliott, who played Cher’s boyfriend in the film.
I had no idea I would soon be immersed in the biker culture so accurately portrayed in Mask, nor did I know how accurately the film represented that culture.
For decades, I watched Mask whenever I had a chance: on the big screen, on free HBO weekends, on TV whenever it appeared, on VHS when it came out at Blockbuster, and on DVD when I finally bought my own copy. I’ve forced my husband and kids to watch it, and I’ve watched it alone since then.
The biker lifestyle in the film was so close to how I lived – with the exception that, eventually, it got very cold outside in my life. The film took place in southern California where the weather is mostly perfect.
So the bikers rode motorcycles in the movie all the time. Sometimes there were trucks interspersed among the Harleys, but for the most part, Mask characters did what I did: rode motorcycles and drank beer.
In the movie, the bikers ride down the street in a pack, three or ten at a time. Motorcycles always travel together. Everyone wears denim and black leather. Everyone smokes. Everyone drinks shots and beers.
There are sober bikers, but my limited alcoholic imagination cannot comprehend why this would be.
In one scene, the bikers pick up Rocky (the kid with the big head) to take him to school on the back of a bike. Rocky gets on the bike with toast – which he doesn’t eat, because he gives it to the guy who’s driving. Because bikers eat on motorcycles. They smoke on motorcycles. They laugh and cavort and camp on motorcycles. Passengers can sleep on motorcycles and bikers drive drunk without remorse and they all smoke cigarettes and eat sandwiches and sing and cry, all while riding on a huge machine that never stops vibrating.
Motorcycles roar down the highways, but they also drive on the grass – in parks, on lawns, anywhere. This part, in particular, is amazingly accurate. Bikers do not care if they park on cement or grass. They only care that they don’t park in mud or gravel. There’s no mud or gravel under the tires in Mask.
Also the bikers are rather clean cut in the PG-13 movie. They’re a bit rougher in real life: more beards and knives and bad skin and bad breath.
But there’s a party scene that still gives me chills when I watch it. The house is swarming with people, motorcycles are pulling onto – and off – the lawn. Everyone’s drinking beer. The camera focuses in on some cocaine, and Cher’s character imbibing, before it pulls back to an Allman-like character with long blonde hair. Soon the camera finds Sam Elliott’s character – who, in my warped brain, represented Larry, which means I likened myself to Cher.
It’s the scene that feels truest to me, that propels me back to biker life in an instant. I lived that party.
Mask always takes me right back to where I lived, how I lived, why I lived the way I lived. It’s the closest thing I have to home movies from that time period.
Larry’s vasectomy removed my fears of becoming pregnant, so I felt pretty confident about having sex with him. I stayed drunk, had sex whenever I felt like it, and then drank more to fully ignore my callous decision to have regular premarital sex.
Way later in my relationship with Larry, my grandfather – a minister – found out that I was living in sin and he sent me a letter, reprimanding me for the error of my ways.
“God judges the sexually immoral and adulterous!” he declared. The letter went on for five pages, detailing sixty different reasons why I was going to Hell.
Believing that I’d disappointed him and my parents, I sobbed for hours upon receipt of that letter. It didn’t change my behavior, but I had actually wanted to save myself for marriage. Living with Larry was the first time I couldn’t lie to myself and say I wasn’t saving myself for anything anymore.
I went from saving myself to always naked almost overnight.
Larry and I had been together a couple of weeks when he asked me to take a close look at his crotch. I didn’t want to do this.
“I think there’s something down there,” he said.
I looked. There was, indeed, something down there. Lots of somethings: tiny, white, crawling things, like maggots only smaller.
“Yuck,” I said. “What are they?”
“I don’t know. Let me see yours,” Larry said.
Mine?!?
Larry looked and, sure enough, I had tiny maggot-things crawling through my pubic hair, too. I hadn’t even noticed.
“We’ve got lice,” Larry announced.
I’d never heard of lice before. I had no idea if this was a fatal ailment or just an irritant. It turned out that it was something in between.
“How did we get lice?” I asked, baffled.
Larry crushed his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. “They probably fucking came from this fucking mattress,” he declared.
I jumped off the mattress and sat on the couch, but Larry kept talking. “They’re probably in the fucking couch, too.”
So I sat on the floor. Naked. With something called lice crawling on my private parts. I had no idea what to do.
“I’m gonna go get some stuff,” Larry said. He got dressed and roared off, leaving me there naked on the floor with unfamiliar bugs eating my skin. I felt like a carcass.
Larry came back with lice-killing medication and two huge plastic tarps. He wrapped one tarp around the mattress and covered the couch with the other one. He’d obviously done this before.
We spent the next several days washing and re-washing our pubic areas with lice killer. We checked and rechecked to see if they were gone yet, and they never were. It was like these particular lice had decided to lay billions of eggs before we found them, and the eggs kept hatching.
On. My. Body.
We slept on the plastic, believing we were keeping ourselves safe from the dreaded bugs crawling on us in our sleep.
Then one day, miraculously, the lice were gone.
Given the reputability of the “motel” in which we were staying, I never questioned the validity of getting lice from a disgusting mattress that had been used by countless naked strangers.
Forty years later, I finally googled it … and learned that pubic lice are transmitted almost exclusively through sexual contact. If our mattress had lice, it’s because Larry had lice first.
Although Larry may not have known that.
It never occurred to me to doubt Larry’s wisdom. I learned about each tidbit of “wisdom” the hard way: one agonizingly incorrect fact at a time.
Living with a motorcycle man – a term I later translated to “the biker” – was like living in another world.
A nice living room with furniture and a chandelier over my dining room table became unnecessary luxuries. A warm double bed for one person disappeared and two people slept on a single mattress on the floor now. Smoking cigarettes indoors was not only allowed, but expected.
Leather became a necessity: black leather jackets for our arms, chaps over our jeans. Larry bought these for me immediately. The reason for leather was to avoid “road rash,” meaning if we crashed, we wouldn’t get scraped up. At the time, I thought this was brilliant; I loved leather.
I now realize that if we had crashed, we would have been dead.
Underwear became completely unnecessary. I did away with my bra pretty quickly – biker chicks didn’t wear them – but I’d been pretty enamored with underpants. I’d worn them for my whole life.
But Larry said, “It’s all about freedom, Baby.” He hadn’t worn underwear in years, so now, neither did I. This also made laundry less urgent.
Gone were the days of breakfast cereal and peanut butter sandwiches; we had cigarettes for breakfast and burgers and beer for lunch, which eliminated the need for any kind of dinner. Larry ate beef jerky or pickled eggs at the bar; I ate neither. Sometimes we’d pick up a pizza. Balancing that pizza while roaring down the highway is a skill I mastered proudly.
We drank every, single night. Since our apartment was so tiny, we mostly went out for beers.
My new wave music preferences – the Cure, Violent Femmes and Yaz – were suddenly replaced with Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Jr., and Willie Nelson. Larry was a country fan his whole life, so I became a country fan, too. The bands at the bars always played country, and we always went to bars with bands.
Movies and malls and concerts – my main forms of entertainment until this point – completely vanished from the world. While we occasionally visited a diner or a convenience store, we didn’t go anywhere else. Just bars. With bands. No cover charge.
We certainly didn’t have a car.
If we left the house without going to a bar, it was because it was “time to work on the bike.” Something always required fixing, and I never, ever knew what it was. But I would stand, beer in hand, while Larry sprawled on the ground next to the Harley, metal debris splayed around him, random jigsaw pieces on the ground. There were nuts, bolts, washers, screws, plates, covers, bowls, grills and racks – all interspersed with old tools on the road.
I referred to everything as “small metal objects.”
On a really big weekend, we might attend a swap meet – a giant room full of small metal objects for purchase. I liked the men’s jewelry: enormous cheap metal skull rings made to knock out someone’s teeth. Larry bought me one, which I adored.
But for me, what mattered most was the freedom to drink and smoke to my heart’s content.
No more hiding from Mom and Dad. I was a grown-up now in a grown-up world where my full-time job was to drink. Get up and drink. Smoke cigarettes and drink. Go to the bar and drink. Stand around Larry’s bike and drink. Listen to a country band and drink. Every, single moment of every single day revolved around drinking beer.
And that was exactly what I’d always wanted. I was “free.”
