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?”
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.”
One of the first things I learned about Larry was actually about his motorcycle: Larry drove a black 1970 Electra Glide. It was a shovelhead.
What this meant is that everywhere we went, people nodded at Larry and said, “Nice bike.” This happened everywhere: gas stations, parking lots, inside and outside of bars, convenience stores, grocery stores, beer stores and at stoplights.
Sometimes people would roll down their windows at the stoplight and yell, over the roar of the engine, “What year?”
And Larry would say, cigarette hanging from his mouth and with the lowest possible growl, “Seventy.” But it sounded like “seb-endy” because of the cigarette, and that was always okay with Larry. It was also okay with the person who asked the question.
Nobody held long conversations at the stoplight.
Having a 1970 Electra Glide shovelhead meant that people walked around the bike slowly wherever it was parked, staring at it. Sometimes they would mumble, “huh, shovelhead,” as if this explained everything.
In the world of Harley Davidsons, Larry’s bike was some kind of royalty. And that, of course, meant that Larry was royalty, too. There was a respect given – completely unearned – simply because he rode around on this particular motorcycle.
At that point in my life, motorcycles all looked the same to me.
Because his bike was 15 years old, it was “classic.” It was unique and special and wonderful to every single pair of eyes that noticed it.
To me, it was just old. It was very, very loud. And it was also very uncomfortable.
The bike had one long seat, like a widened version of my banana seat bicycle, and I had to squeeze onto the back of that one long seat. It wasn’t comfortable having two people on a banana seat, either.
Not only that, but once I got situated, it was very hard for me to stay on the seat – meaning, I was in constant danger of falling off the back. There was no backrest. So there was no way for me to continue moving forward with the motorcycle as it roared down the highway unless I had my arms wrapped tightly around Larry’s waist.
This seemed fine with Larry. I felt wobbly and loose, like dice rolling around in a can.
But this seemed to be a small price to pay for having an incredibly fun mode of transportation.
The Harley leaked oil – so I assumed all Harleys did – and Larry did all his own work on the motorcycle. He spent a couple of days working on the oil leak without much success, all the while driving me back and forth to various bars for burgers and beers.
One day, Larry came home with a new Harley.
“I got it for you!” he smiled. “See the backrest?”
It was the tiniest backrest I had ever seen – but it kept me from falling off backwards. I no longer had to hold my arms around Larry’s waist, which meant I could wave my arms around in the wind, fix my hair when it slapped me in the face, and light cigarettes (a story for another day) while I rode.
“Cool,” I said about the new bike, which looked like all the other bikes I’d ever seen. But I had learned from listening diligently that you can’t just say “cool” and not ask any questions. So I asked, “What is it?”
I don’t remember when or how I discovered Larry’s age. I only know that I tried very hard to ignore the number after I heard it.
Larry was 36 – and more than 16 years older than me.
When we were alone, it was fine. In spite of the wrinkles around his eyes (“so cute!”) and the male-pattern baldness he attributed to his helmet, I lusted wildly after this craggy, guitar-playing, motorcycle-riding outlaw.
But outside the walls of our apartment, it was hard.
And the most sickening, gut-twisting realization was that my own parents were only four years older than Larry.
Larry’s sister was my mom’s age. Larry’s mother was born before the Great Depression.
And Larry’s “baby” …? Larry’s daughter was 17 years old, only three years younger than me.
My boyfriend was old enough to be my dad.
I know: age is just a number. But as a college student, living with a balding man who was never carded by bartenders felt just … wrong. I believed 30-somethings ate jello and walked with canes; Larry may as well have been my grandfather.
So internally I cringed every time my youthful world collided with … him.
I lived with someone old enough to be my father, who grew up listening to my parents’ music, who went to school during segregation. Larry believed that men were in charge and women were arm candy.
To make matters more interesting, Larry came from a culture I’d never known existed. He worked with his hands. He read magazines instead of books. He didn’t own a tie.
And Larry was a biker. I’m not saying he owned a motorcycle; lots of people own motorcycles. I’m saying the motorcycle was the solid base for his entire world. A whole biker culture emerged in front of my eyes as I rode around on the back of that bike.
Everyone Larry knew owned a motorcycle. They hung out in groups and they all grew bushy gray-speckled beards and spat on floors of garages and always had oil under their fingernails.
Yet the cry of the biker – “Live to Ride, Ride to Live” – was a real world motto. This culture believed riding was the essence of life. Getting on a motorcycle and roaring into the sunset – or home from the bar, or off to the local 7-11 – was literallythe only thing that mattered.
And the only real motorcycle was a Harley Davidson. The occasional Indian – a rare treasure – and/or a BMW or Triumph were tolerated, but there was no tolerance for anything made in Asia.
Larry and his friends believed in freedom above all else. They trotted around proclaiming rights for all Americans as they raged against anyone who had the audacity to purchase a Suzuki or Honda motorcycle, aka “Jap shit.” Larry considered anyone who didn’t speak English as a first language to be sub-human and simultaneously in line for his machinist job.
So here I was, an incoming college senior, learning that my middle-class existence wasn’t the only way to live. And I had been desperately yearning for a new way to live since before I picked up my first drink at age 15.
When Larry was 31.
It is important to note – in case it wasn’t obvious – that I’d inadvertently adopted a pseudo-parent. I would likely not have survived my alcoholism without Larry. He worked hard and he tried very hard to meet my basic needs.
Unfortunately, my “basic needs” were impossible to meet. I was insatiable.
During our ride to “my new home” I learned that Larry had moved out from the junkie’s apartment when his former roommate tried to sell Larry’s guitar for heroin.
The new apartment, like the old one, had a sunken loveseat and a single mattress on the floor and a grand entrance. (I stopped by last week for this picture.)
Larry would sit on the loveseat and play the guitar for me while I lounged on the mattress and listened to him sing. That gravelly voice translated beautifully into song and convinced me instantly that I was falling in love.
So when I moved in quite spontaneously on the day my parents threw me out, my new lifestyle immediately became awesome: a summer dream-come-true.
We’d buy a 12-pack of Miller Lite – always Miller Lite, when Larry was drinking – and we’d sit in that tiny apartment. He’d play guitar and I’d listen and drink. And when the beer ran out, sometimes we’d go to the bar and sometimes we’d just pass out on that mattress on the floor.
I called this “freedom.”
One night, someone knocked on the door while we were sleeping on that tiny mattress.
Larry leapt from the bed, scream-whispering at me: “SHHHHHHH!” Larry grabbed a six-foot steel chain from the corner and wrapped it around his right hand up to his elbow.
Fist above his head and ready to pummel the intruder, Larry whipped open the door.
An old hippie who lived upstairs, Marley, stood outside.
“Whoa!” said Marley, gaping at the chain and sounding like Spicoli. “Just wanted to see if ya wanted a beer!”
Larry exhaled. “Ya can’t fuckin’ do that, Man,” he said.
He unraveled the chain and invited Marley inside. Apparently we did want a beer at 3 a.m.
My macho protector deserved something in return: my body, no holds barred. It’s all I had to give.
But I’d been holding back. “I really don’t want to have sex unless we’re using some form of birth control.”
Larry said, “I had a vasectomy.”
“You did not!” I almost laughed, knowing this was a ploy.
“I did,” he said. “I had a baby with my first wife, and then I had a vasectomy.”
“You had a baby?” I choked.
“Yep!” he smiled. “Karen Marie! She’s beautiful!”
“Okay…” I thought: He’s got a BABY?!?
“I thought my wife was cheating on me so I had a vasectomy. If she got pregnant again, I would know the baby wasn’t mine.”
This seemed … logical. Really stupid, but logical.
Still, the actual operation is what mattered to me. “So you really had a vasectomy?”
“I really did,” he said. “Wanna see the scar?”
I found it very hard to believe that Larry’d had a vasectomy in order to catch a cheating wife, but that was before I knew Larry well.
“Yes, I want to see it,” I said.
He showed me something that may or may not have been a scar.
“Okay,” I said, as convinced as I needed to be.
Then I thought about the convenience of a vasectomy. Suddenly I felt almost giddy.
“So let me ask you something.”
“Yeah Baby, ask me anything.”
“So in this relationship … I get unlimited sex, unlimited beer, and unlimited music. What do you get?”
Larry didn’t blink. “Someone to share it with,” he said.
At the time, this was so romantic and sweet, I nearly cried.
Now I realize it didn’t matter to Larry who I was, as long as he had a warm female body on the back of his bike.
After staying out all night with Larry, my parents wanted to talk.
At 20, anything my parents said to me was irrelevant. I knew everything and they knew nothing. I am not sure how they even got me as a daughter, since we were so completely different in our core values.
Health and safety, for example, were completely unnecessary in real life.
Still, they tried. They calmly sat me down and said: “You are our daughter, and we love you. We would do anything for you. But we need you to follow the rules we’ve set, and you haven’t been doing that. Your curfew is midnight; we think that is reasonable while you’re home for the summer. If you need to stay out a little later, we can discuss that. But there are other people living in this house who need to get some sleep and you are not setting a good example for your sisters.”
“Okay,” I said with an eye roll and an imaginary “whatever.”
“We are very serious,” they said. “If you can’t follow the rules and be home by midnight, you will need to move out.”
“Okay,” I said. “Is that it?”
They sighed and leaned back. “Sure,” they said. “But the next time you don’t follow the rules, you are out.”
“OKAY!” I said, and stomped up to my room.
A few days passed and I went out with Larry again. I came home sometime well after sunrise.
My mom came to talk to me. “Where were you?”
“Out.”
“We thought you were dead.”
“Well I’m not.” I was throwing stuff around in my room.
“Kirsten, this has to be the last time. You can’t keep breaking our rules. We told you if you broke the rules again, you would need to move out.”
“Fine, I’ll move out!” I screamed. My immediate follow-up thought: If I’m moving out now anyway, I should have just gone to Massachusetts with The Firm!
My mom was still trying to keep me home: “You can’t just come home when we ask?”
“I guess not!” I bellowed.
“Then I guess you’ve made your choice.”
“Fine!” I started throwing stuff into a bag.
My mother, suddenly quiet, watched. She knew this was real. I did not.
“I didn’t think it would be like this,” she said.
“Oh really?” I snapped. “How did you think it would be?”
“I don’t know,” she said, errant tears appearing as she spoke. “I thought we might have a party or something.”
A party, I thought. Why would I want a stupid party?
I’ve thought about my mom’s comment a million times since that day: she wanted to have a party. She wanted to celebrate my independence, help me to move forward in my life, reward me for becoming a successful adult and set a festive tone for my transition to a new residence.
I just wanted to get out.
“Well I guess you’ll have to have a party without me,” I said. “I’m outta here.”
And I took my stuff – whatever I had shoved into my purple duffel – and walked out the door.
I had absolutely nowhere to go, no money, and no plan. So I walked to the nearest pay phone, next to Sweet William a mile away.
“Can you come get me?” I asked, without a “hello.”
“Sure!” Larry said. He didn’t even ask why.
He just showed up, tied down my purple bag, and roared off with me and my bag on the back of the bike.
Being at home with my parents meant that I didn’t drink nearly as often. Occasional parties and time with complete strangers aside, since I was underaged in Pennsylvania, my drinking time was severely shortened.
My parents also didn’t approve of my smoking – which was a full-blown addiction already. They didn’t allow me to smoke “out my window” – which meant I had to go outside. And I didn’t feel comfortable smoking in front of them at all. So I felt a bit imprisoned by my summer housing.
My response was to dive headfirst into the only addiction that wasn’t trying to kill me: music. I woke up and turned on the radio. I had a stereo in my room, and I lived with my boombox beside me as a crutch to get me through those long, alcohol-free days.
I would sleep, too, as long as was humanly possible, to avoid my family. I would stay awake after everyone else slept, listening to music until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then sleep until well past noon.
My parents worked so I fed myself. I would get up and make myself a bowl of cereal and then, a few hours later, I would make myself a “salad.” Because I wasn’t a huge fan of lettuce, my salads consisted of croutons with French dressing and Kraft parmesan cheese shaken on top. For a fancy meal, I would make myself a slice of Havarti toast, melting the cheese over bread in the broiler. I never enjoyed cooking so using the oven was “fancy.”
When my parents came home, I would get out of the house as quickly as possible – taking my boombox with me to the backyard, no electricity required.
In 1985, I was obsessed with Yaz, Prefab Sprout and the Violent Femmes, as though they were mentors. I’d lie in the grass on my back, staring at the sky as it turned from dusk to midnight, wailing about my woes. Singing at the top of my lungs and sobbing, I’d replay songs over and over and over and over, daring the sky to come down and swallow me whole.
Sometimes I actually expected it to happen, the angst was so great. And my music choices enhanced my pain. I believed I’d always felt this way, I was always going to feel this way; I would never recover, and the songs I loved echoed those sentiments.
My problem was always the world – my parents or society and its rules (the same thing) – never me or my use of alcohol and drugs. I was lost and alone in a sea of blame.
So I attached myself to songs the way others attach to people, and the Violent Femmes sang one of those songs. I listened to it over and over and over, but I didn’t connect any dots.
The song could have been a warning about addiction. It was Violent Femmes’ Good Feeling – enveloping me and spitting me out with every listen:
Good feeling, won’t you stay with me just a little longer? It always seems like you’re leaving when I need you here just a little longer… Dear lady, there’s so many things that I have come to fear; Little voice says I’m going crazy to see all my worlds disappear…
Vague sketch of a fantasy laughing at the sunrise like he’s been up all night… Ooh, slipping and sliding, what a good time but now I have to find a bed that can take this weight….
