Pt. I: Beer, Bushes and Bouncers
This story, Goddess help me, is true; the names have been changed to protect people who are probably wondering, as I do, how they could be that dumb. My only excuse is that it was 1972 and I was 19 and really, really stupid.
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God - is there anything worse than sitting home on Saturday night? I mean, all by yourself, except for your parents and brother and sister, watching Lawrence Welk and a movie you've already seen six times?
Maybe it's being 19 and living with your parents and brother and sister and working in a boring bank, and wishing you were dead . . .
My life was over. In spring, I'd been in school, cutting classes to meet my boyfriend and having a great time. By the end of September, I had dropped out of school, had to work, had no boyfriend (well, that was no loss; he was an asshole, but I missed the sex), and was stuck living with my parents again. I mean, they watched me like a bomb that was going to explode, you know? All because I threw my stuff out of my bedroom window into Kyle's car, and lived with him for three months.
I guess they thought I'd be a virgin forever, and if they keep an eye on me, it would grow back or something.
Well, it was a bummer, I can tell you, sitting there, listening to crappy music and being afraid to go to my own room because one of them would come in and start yelling at me. About my moodiness, about my lack of ambition, about my birth control pills, about my clothes - I couldn't do anything right.
A good thing happened, though, I thought. I ran into my friend Kathy.
I hated my boring job. I hated filling out forms, and talking people into loans. Most of them couldn't afford loans, so I got to tell them that, too, and they got pretty crappy about it. I hated having to have all my work balanced by 3:00. I hated having to fill in at the teller window when Gladys wanted to take one of her half-hour breaks. It took her that long to poof up her hair and glue it together. I timed her.
Anyway, I hated my job. Kathy hated hers, too; she did the same thing, at the same place, but was better at it. I mean, the forms didn't get to her, like they got to me. One day at lunch, I told her everything, just dumped all over her about my non-life since coming back home. Miracle: she understood!
"The same thing happened to me," she said cheerfully. "My mom flipped out when I moved in with Darryl, but she's been cool since I came back home." Well, it wasn't the same thing, exactly. Kathy's mom was a single parent, and Kathy paid a shitload of rent, all the utilities, and half the groceries as well. Her brother paid zilch, but he was Weird.
"Yeah?" I asked. I had my doubts. "Do you have to watch Lawrence Welk? Did you have all your music tossed out because it was a bad influence? Did she even criticize your underwear? My mom threw all my bras and panties out, because she said they were trashy. You should see the stuff she bought me - I had to replace it all again."
"Not now, though Mom was strange to begin with," Kathy said. "I just started going out, though. I got a car, and I've got some freedom."
Wheels equaled freedom; I knew that. My own wheels were tied up with so many strings I walked or biked everywhere.
"So," I said, thinking it through, "what does 'freedom' mean, exactly?"
"Anything I want," she said. If I had had a clue just what those words meant, I could have saved myself a lot of grief. But hell - I was 19 and frustrated and ready to roll.
We agreed to go out Saturday night. I was to spend the night at her place, bringing only my basic things. "I hate to say this," she told me, "but your clothes are impossible." True, they were, and living at home wasn't helping.
Getting sprung from Saturday night at Home with Mom and Dad was hard work, but they relented eventually. I didn't even bother trying to get the use of my car; my sister had to work, and needed it. I threw my toothbrush, toothpaste and a change of underwear in my bag, and biked over to Kathy's.
I got there at about 4:00, and it was clear that Kathy had not been alone that afternoon. For one thing, she was drunk. Stoned, too; her bedroom had the most amazing combination of odors I'd ever smelled - grass, beer (there were about 18 bottles rolling on the floor), and sex. Her bed was a wreck.
She was half undressed, too. It was a good thing her mom was at work.
"Nick came over," she giggled, and then belched. I rolled my eyes.
"Nick?" I asked. I knew only one Nick, and didn't know that he and Kathy were screwing.
"Oh, he crawls in from time to time," she said. She turned and stumbled to the bathroom, and I started picking up the beer bottles. I wondered how many Nick had had, but didn't think much about it. I heard the shower start.
While she showered - and, hopefully, cleared her head - I checked out her wardrobe. Her taste in clothes ran to Cosmo wannabe on a Lerner's budget, and I wasn't sure if I'd look good in it. When she emerged, a little more together looking, she zeroed in on a deep eggplant halter dress with a plunging round neckline and handed it to me. "Put this on," she said. "You'll look great."
Hmmm. I was 19, socially retarded, and the dress looked as if I were playing with my mother's clothes, except my mother would never wear anything like this. I had to be very careful when I straightened; my chest was not quite full enough to do justice to that plunge, and my breasts kept poking out.
Kathy put on an even more revealing dress in electric blue, and declared that we looked great. I really had doubts, but my own clothes were jeans and a tee shirt, and one could not show up at a place like the Corner Saloon in jeans and a tee shirt.
She ran into the bathroom before we left. It turned out she thought that she had consumed twelve of the beers, and I wondered a little about Nick, but we headed for the car. She turned to me. "You'd better drive," she said. I looked at the gas-guzzling monster in front of me in amazement.
