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.
"Me? You know this car hates me!" I said.
"Yeah, but I'm still a little woozy," she told me, and moved to the passenger side and kind of oozed in. I got in the driver's seat, and started the old thing up. It was an ancient Plymouth of some kind, absolutely huge, and a bright canary yellow. It had a horrible shimmy, and driving it was an exercise in brute strength and prayer.
I'd managed to bring the beast to a respectable 30 miles per hour, and was thinking that we'd be there in just a few minutes, when Kathy suddenly yelled, "Go to that gas station! I gotta pee!"
I turned rapidly into the station, and Kathy ran out of the car. Naturally the door to the ladies was locked, so she ran to get the key. I kept the motor running; the car was peculiar about starting and stopping. Kathy emerged a few minutes later, and handed the key back to the attendant.
"You okay now?" I asked, maneuvering the car to the driveway.
"Oh, yeah, it was just the beer," she said, giggling a little. Naturally, I couldn't continue on the route I had planned; this little pit stop had landed us in some busy traffic, and I was not at all sure about the car's pick up.
I got it back on the street, though. We were in a residential area at this point. It was a little out of the way, but I thought I'd have a better chance with the car by avoiding all the stop signs. Kathy, though, yelled at me again to stop the car.
I did so, in front of a very nice house with bushes all over the front yard. "What now?" I asked.
"I have to pee again!" she hissed, sliding out of the door and heading for the bushes.
I was mortified. I knew the car was visible for miles, and didn't belong in this neighborhood; I prayed that we would be unnoticed by law enforcement. Eventually she made her way back to the car.
"Don't do that again!" I said to her, attempting to get the car past 20 miles per hour.
"Sorry," she giggled. "I really had to pee, and I got tickled in the ass by a fern." I had a sudden urge to go home, but I kept driving.
We moved out of the nice residential area, into a commercial area, and were just blocks away from the Corner Saloon when Kathy yelled again to stop the car. This time it was in front of an alley, so I drove down a little ways to block the view. She ran behind a dumpster.
A few blocks away it happened again; this alley was one way, and took us to another one-way street. One more stop in an alley; another in a gas station, and yet another by a bush. By this time I was certain that Nick hadn't touched a single beer.
I was beginning to think the drive would never end; we ended up in another residential area, not so nice, and I was getting ready to make the left turn that would take us to the Corner Saloon, when she yelled at me again. I pulled over, yet again.
