This Was Not Where I Wanted To Be.
It was a spacious bar, with a jukebox blasting and people playing pool. Carrying a bottle in my pocket made me feel like a degenerate but I sure wasn’t leaving it outside.
This bottle would forever be my last drink.
I sat down on the bar stool in Meadville, feeling completely at home with the strangers. I felt safe.
This was a mistake. Drinking always implied my relative safety while simultaneously throwing it out the window.
I carefully concealed the bottle in my leather jacket pocket as I sat down and ordered a draft beer. Finally, I thought. I completely forgot about the root beer schnapps I’d wanted. Instead I drank two beers, then slipped into the bathroom to take a clandestine sip of peach schnapps in the toilet stall.
When I got back to the bar, an uninvited man was waiting for me on my bar stool.
I don’t know his name. I’ll call him Hank, though it could have been Eric or Tim or Bob. He was scruffy, blond, tall, obnoxious and drunk, not necessarily in that order, and his name didn’t matter.
When Hank found out I was buying beer on credit, I bought him some drinks.
Then, when my credit card was suddenly randomly declined, Hank bought me drinks.
So when the bar closed and Hank offered to drive me back to my hotel, I accepted. I still had visions of finishing my bottle alone.
I hopped into Hank’s pickup truck, but he didn’t drive me to the hotel.
Instead he said, “I’m gonna show you a special place.”
“I don’t want to go to a special place,” I said, fondling the bottle in my pocket. “I want to go to my hotel.”
“Just wait,” he said, putting his unwanted hand on my knee. “You’ll love it.”
I did not think I would love it. I didn’t even like this guy. But, completely stuck, I rode with him to what can only be described as the middle of nowhere.
I stepped onto an enormous grassy field. There was no light.
“This is the best place to see the stars,” he said. “C’mon, lay down!” He threw himself into the grass in the pitch blackness. I sat down warily next to him.
This was not where I wanted to be.
Within minutes, he was kissing me, rolling on top of me, slobbering all over me, taking off everyone’s clothes leaving me half-naked and scratched by rocks in the grass.
I did not participate. I turned my head and said, “get off of me” and “I want to go back to the hotel” and “stop it” until finally, in the darkness in the middle of nowhere, I screamed, “You’re raping me!”
And that’s what finally made him stop.
“I thought you were enjoying it,” he said.
“No,” I said.
I opened my schnapps and glumly took a sip, calming my nerves.
“Aw man,” he said. “Gimme some of that.”
Then the obnoxious man whose name was probably not Hank took my bottle of peach schnapps out of my shaking hands, put it up to his lips, and downed the remaining liquid in one agonizing gulp.
I stared, dumbfounded.
“You drank my last drink!” I screamed at him. “You drank my LAST FUCKING DRINK!” I started whaling on him, swinging hard, fast, repeatedly. “You fucking raped me then you DRANK MY LAST FUCKING DRINK YOU FUCKING BASTARD! TAKE ME BACK TO MY FUCKING HOTEL!”
Within seconds we were in the truck, within minutes at the hotel. Still fuming I leapt out, cursing him. He barely stopped, then careened away.