10. Honky Tonk Women

The women I typically met in the liquor store were generally not of the highest character: barflies, party girls, drunks, druggies, hustlers. I wasn’t a prude and I didn’t watch all these women with some kind of Olympian detachment. I was human. I was a guy and I was single most of the time I worked in the liquor store. I was definitely tempted at times; and in some cases tried to hook up with some of them but failed for various reasons, usually bad timing. This was in my drunken, despairing phase when my self-destructive urges were running at their highest.

We once had a prostitute working out of a van in the parking lot outside for several hours before the cops busted her. She came in the store a couple of times to buy cigarettes or a soda during her shift and I would have never guessed she was a hooker. It took a lot to stand out in that bunch, let me tell you.

It was the year of the redneck mama
It was announced by the sign of the comet
hanging in the sky
at 3 am
again and again

—“100 Flower Power Maximum”, Cracker

I had this young biker chick come in and ask for a pack of Camel Light cigarettes. When I asked her if she wanted box or soft pack, she replied, “Soft pack. I like Other Things Hard, not my cigarettes.”

I said, “Charming. You must have gone to a finishing school.”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” she told me.

“Makes sense. That’s where all the degenerates come from.”

“Oh, I’m a degenerate all right,” she said, lifting her shirt and flashing me her bare breasts. “Bye…” It was the first time I had a girl flash me (as an expression of sexual contempt, no less) but it wouldn’t be the last.

There was this redheaded pool player in her late twenties known as “Red”. One night, apropos of nothing, she told me, “Guys always say to me in bed, ‘Hey, you’re not a natural redhead!’ ” I looked at her, wondering what compelled her to tell me this. She misread my expression as a come-on and said, “No, sorry.”

These three women in their late thirties got tattoos at the tattoo parlor next door. They came in afterwards to buy beer and cigarettes. Two of the women asked me if I wanted to see their tattoos. I lifted my hands noncommittally. One showed me a tattoo on her shoulder. Another showed me a butterfly on her ankle. The third woman—who’d already left— came back in.

“You want to see my tattoo?”

I shrugged.

She then proceeded to pull down her shorts to show me a tattoo right above her pubic hair.

“Hey, lady! This is a public place! What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” I yelled.

“Aw, you’ve seen it before,” she muttered.

Butchie’s, the biker bar down the street, had these “lingerie shows”. They didn’t have a permit to have actual strippers so once a week they’d stage a “lingerie show” in which young women in lingerie would parade up and down amidst the male patrons, ostensibly with the purpose of selling the underwear they were wearing but in reality getting tipped like actual strippers but without actually disrobing or giving lap dances, etc. There was a contest or a vote for the hottest lingerie model, too. I couldn’t say for sure because I never saw one of these shows myself but only had them described to me by giddy male customers and a couple of the girls themselves.

One of the lingerie models took it upon herself to push me to go see her. She was very good-looking and she had a tongue piercing (mother-of-pearl) the first I ever saw; her perfume even smelled really good— but I had no intention of sitting in a bar with a bunch of horny, stupid guys so I could stick dollar bills in girls’ underwear. Nevertheless, she kept after me for a month or so. Tiring of her relentless sales job (“You’re really missing out,”she kept telling me. “You should really come see me”) I finally said, “Maybe you could arrange a private exhibition some time.” She got very huffy and offended and left, never to be seen again. Oh, well…

I did have an actual stripper come in the store a couple of times. She gave me her card and suggested I should hire her while her shady pimp of a boyfriend lingered at a distance (far enough away I guess, that I wouldn’t be intimidated by him but not so far away that I might get ideas). She came off a lot more hard-boiled than the two lingerie models I had met, not mean exactly, but with some really dark energy around her.

It was taken as a given by a lot of my female customers that if they offered me sex, I would immediately seize the opportunity.

I had this one customer, Wendy—she was a regular, but it’s not like we had some kind of flirtation going or anything—she informed me one day out of the blue that her mom had the kids and the two of us had the cabin in Tahoe to ourselves all weekend.

I was dumbstruck and for lack of anything better to say, asked her, “Aren’t you married?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But he’s in prison.”

“Your husband’s in prison?!” I said with rising disbelief.

“ Well, he’s not getting out anytime soon or anything,” she said.

I had a co-worker who upon finishing her day shift, went across the street to Schneiderman’s bar (aka, “the Schneid”) and got good and hammered for a few hours before coming back to the store and telling me that she was too drunk to drive. Could I please drive her home? she asked me. She had a hot tub waiting for just the two of us. Me and the graveyard guy Ted stared at each other in open-mouthed shock. It was her birthday, she went on, and I was to be her birthday present to herself. This woman was so out of it she was unaware she was universally despised by all her fellow employees for being stupid, useless and lazy, and especially and in particular, by me.

The worst was this female barfly in her early thirties who was steadily drinking herself into premature middle-age. She asked me what time I got off. “Why?” I asked in all innocence. “So we could fuck,” she informed me. When I firmly declined her less-than-romantic offer, not just this one time but two or three more times thereafter, she accused me of being gay. Loudly and repeatedly.

“Seriously?” I said. “Have you looked in a mirror? You’re not exactly a supermodel or anything.”

When she persisted in insulting me, I didn’t even try and be polite any more.

“Jesus Christ. You’re fucking hideous. Your skin is all pasty, your face is all puffy with booze. You’re nasty as fuck. Get lost already, my God.”

She was completely unfazed by what I said but she did eventually leave me alone.

Mrs. Goldenbrook was the wife of a local business owner. As far as I know we never talked about anything other than the transactions themselves. She did once make the cryptic remark that we were alike because we were both afraid of success. (Okay? Whatever. ) So I was completely unprepared when one night she wandered into the back stock room where I was working, all dressed up, full makeup and perfume, and asked me if I had missed her. I hadn’t—because I barely knew her to say hello to, let alone keep track of her movements.

Where had she had been? She’d been in Goldenbrook, a mental institution. Her husband had recently divorced her and she tried to commit suicide by gassing herself in the oven. It didn’t work because he’d cut off all the utilities to the house.

Now she wanted to know if we could go out sometime. I was so flabbergasted I don’t know what the hell I said. It wasn’t a yes, though. Keep in mind she had attempted suicide first—and asking me out, second. Death was option number one, I was option number two.

Caroline was a local pool player who wandered in one night. We hit it off immediately, I said something that made her laugh really hard.

Afterwards, Ted asked me, “You know that woman?”

I said, “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

“Well, the two of you were yukking it up there pretty good,” he said, somewhat resentfully.

“What can I tell you? I made her laugh.”

The next time I saw Caroline we talked a little more. I started thinking there was a possibility here of something. Then out of the blue, she got very short with me and wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I was surprised, I wasn’t aware of saying or doing anything wrong. About a year later, she made a comment to me about me being married.

“Married? What the fuck are you talking about? I’m not married,” I said.

“You’re not? Are you sure? You don’t have a family somewhere?” Caroline asked.

“Yeah, I’m pretty fucking sure,” I told her. “You think I could support a wife and kids on what I make at the liquor store? Seriously?”

“Someone told me you were married,” she said. “That you had a family.”

“Someone? Who?” Then I realized that Ted had told her this, being jealous of me.

“Somebody here told me,” Caroline said.

“Well, don’t believe everything you hear,” I told her. We both shook our heads as she walked out the door.

I was bummed at the lost opportunity. She seemed so nice and down-to-earth. Oh, she was down to earth all right. Not longer after that, I had an old guy, a regular customer, come in with a black eye. He didn’t want to talk about it but another customer filled me in. Caroline was having a three-way in the park with two teenage boys. The old guy stopped to watch and one of the kids punched him in the eye. Some missed opportunity. Jesus, what a world.

One winter night I met Brianna on the bus. She was an attractive blonde about thirty. She sat down next to me and talked my ear off all the way back. We got off at the same stop. She was living in a house in an empty lot next to the freeway. She asked me for a kiss. So I obliged. I was pretty freaked out to discover that her lips were cold; it was like kissing a snake. Then she asked if she could stop by my house on her way into town. I considered this. Kate was watching me pretty close around this time, what with me in my downward depressed drunken spiral. I tried to imagine bringing some blonde hoochie I had just met into my bedroom under my sister’s disapproving eye. I just couldn’t do it—so I told her no.

Brianna was very surprised. “You sure?”

“Maybe another time,” I replied.

Afterwards she told me it was a good thing I said no. Her boyfriend at the time was a drug dealer who was would have “cut (my) guts out with a knife”. This hit me on two levels: one) that she had a boyfriend was news to me; and two) the only way Psycho Boyfriend would have ever found out about me was if she told him. That summer someone did a drive-by on their house with an M-16. To send him a message, Brianna told me later after she broke up with him.

Brianna became one of the lingerie models down at Butchie’s. I’d see her at the liquor store periodically and we’d chat. She must have given me her number because I called her up one summer afternoon and asked if she wanted to have a beer with me. Brianna said, Well, she was on her way to work in a half hour but I could stop by if wanted. So I went across the street to her house.

I sat in her bedroom as she got ready to go, thinking I might still have a chance with her. (Brianna had an amazing body; obviously, I was thinking with a different part of my anatomy than my brain). Looking around her room, I scanned the books on the bookshelf. The titles were either on witchcraft or sexual positions. Wow, I thought, I got a live one here. This might be the worst idea I’ve ever had. (We did not hook up.)

“She turned me into a newt! I got better.”

—John Cleese, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

A short time later, she got involved with a male stripper. They made a point of making out quite strenuously in front of me every morning at the bus stop where I was on my way to my drugstore job in Petaluma. It was obnoxious, to say the least.

Not long after I returned to work at the liquor store, the two of them got married. One of them was always stopping by the store looking for the other one. I’m not gonna lie: I was somewhat pleased that the marriage of the two narcissists wasn’t exactly working out. And about ten years after that, when I was working in a grocery store and both Brianna and her husband had lost their looks in a big way (she had had a kid with him and it looked like they were both boozing it up pretty good) she’d come through my checkout line and gaze wistfully at me. I didn’t feel sorry for her at all, not one little bit.

Megan no. 2 was originally a customer. She came in one night with her idiot boyfriend. They had just pissed off an extremely angry and dangerous biker in the parking lot who followed in after them, barking out insults and threats. They took no more notice of him than if he was a harmless little old wino like Buddy. I was completely freaked out because I knew the guy was someone to be taken very seriously. He was half-looking for a fight from me every time I dealt with him. I had always been careful to never give him any reason (and he still acted psycho with me!) And here were these fools clowning him. How nothing terrible happened I don’t know, but they left in one piece.

Later she became an employee at the store. She had the same name as my ex; she didn’t look identical to her but had the same ethnic background. She asked me out one night and I said, Sure. The way my luck was going with women, this figured to be uncomplicated. (Right…)

She was supposed to swing by the house and we’d go to dinner. Instead, she drove over and informed me when I opened the door that she’d already eaten. (Okay? So now what?) I grabbed some beers and we talked a little bit and I gathered she expected me to jump her without too many preliminaries, which immediately put me on my guard. I got rid of her somehow that night and never asked her out again. Ten years later, I ran into her at the supermarket with her ten-year-old son, who was probably conceived right around the time as our abortive first date. Talk about your close calls. She still wanted to go out with me. (That would be a no. A big no.)

Lori was one of the better-looking biker chicks on the scene. She resembled a bustier version of Linda Rondstadt. The first few times I had her as a customer she was buying groceries with food stamps. That struck me as weird; you don’t see a lot of super-attractive women on welfare generally. What was even weirder was when I saw the guy she was with: one of the uglier, dirtier, bearded rednecks in town. He actually wore overalls and no shirt. He looked like he’d never bathed. I pegged him immediately (and I think accurately) as a drug dealer, a big-time one. Why else would she be with him? He always paid in cash.

When he disappeared, presumably off to prison, Lori hooked up with Terry, one of the bouncers at the biker bar. With his big black mullet and boyish face, the two of them sort of matched. He was always pretty mellow when I dealt with him. Affable, even. (His fellow bouncer and running buddy, Scooter was a different story. He always had a scowl on his face. The one time I saw him smile was one of the rare occasions I was drinking in the Schneid. I ran into him and Terry at the bar and I guess Scooter was lit and feeling expansive so he told me the following story: He got into it with a customer at Butchie’s. The guy went out to his car and got a tire iron and Scooter followed him outside with a baseball bat. “I says to the guy, ‘C’mon, do we really need weapons? Let’s settle this like men.’ The guy says, ‘You’re right.’ He put down the tire iron and then I hit him with the bat!” Laughter.)

Lori and Terry would come into the store fairly often together. When she came in alone she’d often say, “Hey, good-looking!” And I’d chirp “Hey, beautiful!” in a kind of mock-parrot imitation. I was covering my ass if Terry was there, and he did— in fact— sometime follow in after her and overhear our exchange. I really didn’t need Terry getting the wrong idea on what I was sure was just Lori playing around. So it came as a shock to me when Lori broke up with him and gave me her number.

I didn’t call her right away. I went back East to see my parents. When I came back, Lori was hopping mad.

“You didn’t call me!”

“Yeah, I was gone for a week…” I began to explain.

“—Yeah, I know. I found out from your boss you were on vacation,” Lori said, her eyes blazing. “You might have told me.”

“I really didn’t think you would care that much,” I said in all honesty. I thought she was attractive but I didn’t picture us as a couple. We were hardly compatible, her as the queen of the biker bar scene, me the dumb working schmo down at the liquor store.

She told me to call her and I said I would. One night Lori told me to come by after work. I got off early at 1 am (I usually got off at 2 am) and went home and had a couple of beers and a couple of shots of whiskey. Then I headed over to the address she’d given me. I walked up an outside staircase to the second floor and knocked on her apartment door. There were muffled voices and some shuffling around and Lori came to the door with a bedsheet wrapped around her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked with a combination of anger and embarrassment. It was obvious that I had interrupted her in bed with somebody else.

I grinned back stupidly. “You said come by after work so here I am.”

“What time did you get off work?”

“One am.” I told her.

“Well, what time is it now?”

“I don’t know..one thirty?” I said, somewhat enjoying her discomfiture.

She glared at me. “Well, it’s not a good time.”

“ Yeah. I see that. Bye,” I said, with a big stage wave, before staggering away home. (It wasn’t exactly my finest moment. Or hers, for that matter.)

I never called her again and I sure as hell never went over to her house, either. A week or two later, she came in the store with a local yokel in tow, a greasy, bearded redneck, a regular on the pool scene. They came up to the counter with a six-pack and a small bag of chips.

The guy asked me for a half-pint of whiskey. As I rang them up, Lori locked eyes with me. Then she started smashing the bag of chips on the counter with her palms. Smash! Smash!

Me and the guy said, “Whoa…” at the same time.

Then I said, laughing, “Don’t be shy, Lori, tell me how you really feel…” Smash! Smash!

The guy had no idea what was going on but I did. She was pissed at me!— as if I was responsible for her dating the scumbag she was with. We always were at cross-purposes, in conversation and otherwise.

Lori actually saved me from a gay stalker one time and she had no idea she did so.

I had this creepy guy named Nicholas who would come in the store about once a month. He rode a motorcycle and wore a fancy leather jacket but it was obvious he was not a typical biker. Too much personal grooming for one thing; the other was the way he talked to me. (I had been hit on relentlessly by gay men in San Francisco so I had a pretty good instinct for this crap by now.) He asked me some questions about myself (Was I happy working in a liquor store?, etc ) and then talked about himself, trying to impress me with how much money he had, how much he traveled, how tough he was, etc.

I told him the first time I wasn’t gay. “Oh, I’m not either,” he said quickly before continuing with his come-on. He never said or did anything overt so I had no pretext to kick him out (or explain kicking him out to management) but it really creeped me out dealing with him once a month for the better part of a year. He’d fix me with a kind of Svengali-like stare like he was going to hypnotize me into turning gay for him and then he’d blather on and on about what a cool and attractive guy he was.

So one night, he’s doing his creep act and I’m gritting my teeth, just enduring it when Lori sashays in, bigger than life. I wish to God I could remember what she said, because she was as rude as she could possibly be to him, and funny as hell at the same time. Every time he opened his mouth, she’d cap on him even harder.

Lori turned to me with a fierce grin, very proud of herself. She had no idea of the weird drama she was interrupting — she was just clowning yet another presumptuous drunk guy as far as she knew. She bought some cigarettes from me while bantering with me very flirtatiously for a minute or two. She left, but not before insulting him one last time as she walked out the door. (I could’ve kissed her for this alone—my hero!) Nicholas looked over at me in bewilderment, shocked by this feminine onslaught out of nowhere.

“She’s a friend of mine, “ I said, grinning with delight.

“I see.” He looked like he’d just stepped on a rake—and that it had hit him in the teeth.

And I never saw his dumb ass again, thank God.

One of the last times I saw Lori, I was walking down one of the busier streets in town. It was late afternoon. She stopped her car in the middle of the road to talk to me. After a quick exchange of pleasantries, Lori asked me out of the blue if she could move in with me. I gulped in surprise.(We had never dated, the longest conversation we’d ever had was maybe five minutes long, and now she wanted to move in with me? What?)

“Well, I have a roommate…” I said, trying to decline gently.

“Really? You don’t want to live with me?” Lori asked, shocked I wasn’t jumping on her offer.

“Uh, let me think about it. I’ll get back to you,” I told her with no intention of doing so.

I guess it seemed like a straightforward transaction to her— sex in exchange for a place to live. I was surprised; both by the offer and by the idea that Lori thought I was the kind of guy who would be open to that kind of proposition. I guess coming from the kind of social scene she was familiar with, my behavior was a lot more unusual than hers.

Here’s the thing: a few months before Lori dumped Terry, she was in the store one night and after she had left some random guy asked me and my graveyard partner if we knew her.

“She lives in my building in the apartment above mine,“ the guy told us. “Last night she came downstairs and started pounding on my door, asking me to let her in. I would have loved to but I was already in the sack with another girl! You fucking believe that shit?”

And at the time, I didn’t believe it. Lori was with Terry and by all appearances, they were very happy together. But I also wondered if I should tell Terry—but then why start trouble?

After Lori dumped Terry, it was a few months later when I ran into Terry in Schneiderman’s. After his buddy Scooter told me the baseball bat story, Terry took me aside and tried to talk to me about Lori.

“You’re seeing Lori, right?”

“No, Terry, I’m not,” I told him.

He waved my denial aside.

“Look, I don’t care,” Terry said. “But you should know, she likes being hurt.”

“What do you mean? Like in bed?” I asked.

He lowered his voice and started going on about her. With the jukebox blaring, I couldn’t hear a word he said.

“Terry, I can’t actually hear you!” I yelled. Terry smiled back at me. He continued talking in a low mumble.

“Seriously! I mean it!” I told him. “Not a fucking word!”

He shrugged and slapped me on the shoulder. “It’s okay. It’ll be fine.”

I had no idea if he was simply trying to find out if I was seeing her or just sabotage me by putting the idea in my head that she was a masochist or he was actually telling me the truth.

A year or two after Lori asked to move in with me, I ran into Terry and Scooter. It was in the middle of the night, about 4 am. I had just finished going running and I was walking home down the main drag when a car pulled up alongside me.

“Give you a ride?” the driver asked me.

I looked over and it was Terry and Scooter. “Hey, guys, what’s up?”

Terry grinned and Scooter scowled, their usual division of labor.

“C’mon, get in, we’ll give you a ride,” Terry repeated.

“Oh, no, fellas, that’s okay. I appreciate the offer and all but I don’t mind walking home. I just finished running and its good to stretch my legs afterwards…”

“—Get in,” Scooter demanded. I was more than a little uneasy about this scenario but I got in the backseat.

We hadn’t been driving for long when Terry turned around. “Seen Lori lately?”

“I haven’t seen her in a couple of years, Terry. Just so you know, we never actually dated,” I told him.

Terry waved a hand. “Look, relax, I don’t care. I’m just asking.”

“I haven’t seen her.” My imagination started to overheat with visions of these two gorillas taking me somewhere out in the boonies and beating the piss out of me.

Terry then launched into a story about him and Scooter dealing with these two teenage imbeciles, two brothers who used to give me trouble down at the liquor store.

It was after-hours. Terry and Scooter were chilling on a park bench downtown after a long shift at Butchie’s when the two morons approached them.

One of the kids asked Terry for a cigarette. Terry told him, “Sure, give me twenty pushups first.”

The kid plops down on the sidewalk and started busting out pushups. He was about halfway through when he realized that Terry and Scooter were laughing at him.

“The next thing I know I’m fighting off these two fucking scrawny kids,” Terry says, chuckling. “I look over and Scooter is just sitting there. ‘You can get off your ass and help me, anytime,’ I tell him.”

We all laughed together.

“Wow, those kids used to give me shit, too,” I said. “I feel a lot better about it now. If they’re crazy enough to screw with you guys, they’re crazy enough to screw with anybody.”

They dropped me off at my house without incident, although I was painfully conscious that they now knew where I lived. No retribution was forthcoming, however, and I never saw Terry or Scooter again.

Carmen was half-Mexican by birth but all-redneck by association. She was short and curvy with long, dark, curly hair and sleepy, bedroom eyes. If Hollywood was casting the bad guy’s girlfriend in a movie, she would have made the cut. (A buddy of mine met her just once, very briefly, and told me afterwards, “She looks like trouble.”)

I first knew her as a customer. Carmen would come in late at night with the quiet, blissed-out smile of a hard-core drug user. Like she had a secret that made her happy. I knew she was high but I would never have guessed that she was a speed freak. Carmen, who had a somewhat hyper personality by nature, told me later that speed actually mellowed her out, slowed her down. (I guess that’s why they gave Ritalin to kids with attention-deficit disorder. Same principle.)

She used to drive up in a big orange truck that was jacked up with these giant tires. Watching her short figure climb in and out of this monster vehicle was a sight so incongruous it always made me smile to myself.

Carmen was dating a one-eyed drug dealer named Renny at the time, a self-described “crankster-gangster”. I asked her later how Renny came to have a glass eye. “He had a girlfriend who stabbed him in the eye,” she told me, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “What the fuck did he do?” I asked, horrified. “He pissed her off somehow,” Carmen said casually.

When I returned to the liquor store to work for the new owner, Carmen was already working there. She and Renny were no longer together and she had gone through rehab and was no longer a drug user. She was a little flirty but I didn’t take much notice. I figured she just liked attention.

Carmen came in one night on a date with some big biker guy, who was relatively clean-cut as bikers go. She herself was all cleaned up with fresh makeup. I could even smell the shampoo in her hair.

I looked her up and down. “Carmen, you’ve been bathing again. I can always tell.”

“You asshole,” she muttered while suppressing a smile.

That winter she asked me out on a date, which surprised me. (I wouldn’t have guessed I was her type.) I told her I couldn’t do it that week, my parents were in town. She got really bent out of shape about it, which surprised me even more. (I didn’t ever get the impression she was that into me.) “What’s the big deal?” I said. “We can go out next week.”

The next week rolled around and we went out for pizza. Afterwards, we drove back to her house where her best friend, Meg, was waiting for us. I thought that was a little weird but whatever. Carmen left the room to change. She came back wearing a ratty sweatshirt and the ugliest, dowdiest pair of eyeglasses I’ve ever seen. (I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Was this some kind of cue? Like hands off? I’ve never seen a girl try and make herself look worse on a date.)

But then she offered me a drink. We had a couple of beers and a couple of shots of whiskey together, the three of us. Carmen suggested the two of us take a drive. “Sure,” I said, thinking this was the weirdest date I’d ever been on.

First she drove us up into the hills, an old high school make-out spot Carmen informed me. She reminisced about her youth (she was a few years older than me) but again, I wasn’t getting any kind of signal that she wanted something more from me. So then Carmen drove us way out towards the ocean and parked in a turnout off the road. It was a spot so remote that I was actually pretty freaked. My imagination had us getting jacked by a bunch of crazed rednecks while we were making out. But again, I never got any sign of her wanting some kind of romantic gesture or physical affection from me. I just let her ramble on.

The next thing I knew Carmen was telling me how she had been raped a few years before. She’d been accosted while leaving the biker bar. She never reported it and afterwards, Carmen told me she had these recovered memories of a male relative molesting her as a child. “It was good in a way. It really cleared things up for me,” she told me. “ Why I had some many issues with men, why I abused drugs and alcohol.” Stunned by this revelation, I said,” Well, it sounds like a rough cure.” Carmen laughed.

It was a strange topic for a first date but I felt somewhat touched that she felt she could confide in me. Carmen was such a badass chick and here she was baring her soul to me, while wearing granny glasses no less, she couldn’t have been more vulnerable. I thought to myself that maybe she just needed a buddy, someone to confide in, and she chose me for whatever reason. (Carmen wouldn’t have been the first to do so.)

After that night, everything went sideways for the next year and a half. I don’t have a real clear timeline in my head. We never went out on a date again, although we did hang out a few times (she drove the two of us around in her car in the daytime). I became infatuated, stuck badly in knight-in-shining-armor mode. I was gonna save Carmen from her sad existence in the underbelly of the bar scene.(Looking back, it’s hard to believe I actually believed that crap. It was like she put a spell on me). I think sometimes Carmen even believed it, too, because she’d run hot and cold on me. I’d withdraw, she’d advance. I’d advance, she’d withdraw.

She had black hair like ravens
crawling over her shoulders
all the way down

She had a smile that swerved
She had a smile that curved
She had a smile that swerved
all over the road

It’s all wrong
All wrong
It’s all wrong
All wrong

–“All Wrong”, Morphine

She showed up one night at the store where I was outside sitting on the flower box, taking a break. Carmen told me I was “a fag” for not fucking her on our one date. “I don’t do anything on a first date and I’m not looking for a one-night stand,” I told her. “Too bad,” she said. “For who?” I retorted.

Another night when the store was jammed with customers, Carmen stood at my register and drunkenly exclaimed, “ I want you to fuck me!” I looked at her very deadpan and said, “Well, I’m a little busy right now.” After she left, the young black guy who had been standing behind her (a regular) asked me,”Yo, man, what’s up with that nutty broad?” Shaking my head, I said, “Dude, I don’t even know where to begin.”

One time Carmen told me she hadn’t showered in two days. “Yuck,” I said. “You’re gross.”

“Well, my hands are clean.”

I said, “Your hands are clean? What about the rest of you?”

Carmen told me one afternoon the only thing she had eaten all day were a few slices of salami and an ice cream sandwich.

“Salami and an ice cream sandwich? That’s what a dog would eat if it had hands,” I said.

I was once driving with in her car and her kids were in the backseat acting up. Carmen turned around and told them to “act white.” Then she looked to see my reaction.

“Is that bad?” she asked me, already wincing.

“Well, the last time I checked you weren’t exactly the poster child for Aryan Nation, “ I said disgustedly.

She stopped by one day on one of my rare early shifts to chat with me. Carmen sat down on a milk crate behind the counter. I crouched down to talk to her. A woman customer walked up to the counter. “Can anyone help me?” she asked us. “Sorry,” I told the lady, as I stood back up. “I was just stooping to her level.”

On Carmen’s last day working at the store she asked me to help with a heavy pot in the deli sink. When I walked over there, Carmen sprayed me with the sink’s hose. I jumped back but she still got me. Then I chased Carmen down, grabbed her and carried her under my arm over to the sink where I hosed her down like she was a baby elephant just as her buddy Meg showed up with Carmen’s kids. “That’s the cleanest you’ve been all week,” I told her while Meg and the kids howled with laughter.

Well, I was feeling kinda beat
I decided to hit the streets
I was looking for a place for this heart of mine
I said to myself
Oh God, this must be hell
I think I was slowly losing my mind

Well, ’round and ’round she goes
Where she stops nobody knows
That woman put a spell on me
You can start me, start me, start me
You can’t stop me, stop me, stop me
When she begins to rock, honey, I begin to roll

Well, I was hanging out by the phone
Tired of sleeping alone
Baby, tell me where did I go wrong?
Well, minutes seemed like hours
And days seemed like weeks
How could a year last so fucking long?

–“When She Begins”, Social Distortion

Carmen once asked me,”Why are you such a fucking loser?”

“I wasn’t aware I was given a choice,” I told her.

My head was all kinds of fucked-up. I had been drinking a lot before but now I added whiskey or tequila to the mix on a daily basis. With all the dysfunctional encounters with women I had had recently, this was the worst. It didn’t stop, either, not even when I tried to date other girls during this time (I knew she wasn’t being celibate) at least partially in an attempt to move on from her. She worked days and I worked nights but she’d come in the store during my shift, even seek me out sometimes if I was in the back. There was some genuine connection between us but there was something else there, something darker that neither of us wanted to acknowledge, for different reasons.

Everything came to a head one Sunday afternoon. I actually sought Carmen out in the biker bar (one of the very few times I was ever in there). She was drinking with her best friend, Meg. Carmen looked up and said, “Oh, God, it’s you. I”ll be right back.” She went off to the bathroom and left me alone with Meg.

Meg grinned at me and said, “I don’t know what her problem is. I’d fuck you right now.” I smiled back faintly (Meg made her living talking on a phone sex line). Carmen returned and Meg cleared off to give us some space.

We began talking and early on she dropped the little nugget that she had seduced the best friend of Meg’s teenage son. I felt the revulsion rising in the pit of my stomach. Carmen continued prattling on like it was no big deal. I finally said, “Stop. What is going on? What do you want from me? Why did you ask me out?”

There was no open, full confession on her part but I was given to understand (in so many words) that the whole idea of our one actual date was to drive me out somewhere remote and let nature take its course. Inevitably, I’d fuck her— because that’s what guys do—get her pregnant—and be on the hook for child support for next 18 years, a nice little side income for Carmen. I was a nice guy so it would be the easiest thing in the world to pull off. But I screwed everything up but not only not fucking her, but actually developing feelings for her stupid, duplicitous ass. That was the gist of it.

It’s hard to believe it myself, looking back on it; my naive, foolish, idiot self, not wanting to believe the ugly truth in front of me the whole time. I know Carmen didn’t want to acknowledge it. If I had just taken the bait and fucked her, well, I deserved to played for a sucker. By refraining from doing so and actually caring about her, it doubly damned her as a lying, scumbag con artist. (No wonder she reacted to me all the time like I was a guilty secret. I was.)

Bright light almost blinding
Black night still there shining
Can’t stop, keep on climbing
Looking for what I knew

I had a friend, she once told me
You got love, you ain’t lonely
Now she’s gone, left me only
searching for what I knew

–“Friends”, Led Zeppelin

I’d still see Carmen from time to time when her and Meg would stumble into the liquor store from the bars. I didn’t tell her when I finally gave notice and left the liquor store for good.

Years afterward Carmen came into the grocery store I was working in with some dirtbag in tow and she acted very smug and superior towards me. Then one day a year or so later, I went in the break room at the store and opened up the local paper and there it was: a newspaper article detailing how Carmen embezzled two hundred and fifty grand from her employer. She was sentenced to a year in prison plus restitution.

I ran into her once more a few years later at a different store where she was working. Carmen spotted me and followed me outside. She asked me to hang out with her while she had a cigarette. We just made small talk. I think Carmen was testing to see if I knew about her conviction but I never let on that I knew anything. Maybe she was also trying to see if I had any feelings for her. (I did not.)

As I recount these stories of these different women and our star-crossed paths together, I’m not trying to boast. It’s not like I held some irresistible attraction to them; they were just working their way through their opposite numbers on the scene and sooner or later, my face was gonna pop up on their radar screen. (If I had gone over to a college campus and set my hair on fire, it’s unlikely a girl would’ve even bothered to even spit on me to put the fire out. And God forbid, I went to a bar or party where my peers were present, I’d have been absolutely invisible. No girl is looking for a liquor store clerk in his thirties, trust me. Like I told my dad once, “I only meet two kinds of women: those who despise me immediately and those who despise me eventually.” My dad laughed. “That’s pretty funny.” “Yeah,” I said. “It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t true.”)

Nor am I engaging in some exercise in misogyny; if some of the women I describe seem nasty, most of the guys in their social orbit were ten times worse. I once went with my sister to a liquor store in a neighboring town. There were two young redneck derelicts loitering outside next to their car. Kate was really freaked out by them. “They look like rapists!” she said. I laughed, “ Those guys? They’re nothing compared to the guys I’ve dealt with. They’re like their kid brothers.”

“…I see men with quiet, gentle women—I see them in the supermarkets, I see them walking down the street together, I see them in their apartments: people at peace, living together. I know that their peace is only partial, but there is peace, often hours and days of peace…all I’ve ever known are whores, ex-prostitutes, madwomen. When one leaves, another arrives, worse than her predecessor…I need a good woman…I know that she exists but where is she upon this earth as the whores keep finding me?”

— “quiet, clean girls in gingham dresses”, Charles Bukowski

I wanted to meet a nice girl but nice girls do not spend a great deal of time in liquor stores. I’d meet the occasional college girl but that wasn’t going to go anywhere. I had these two college guys from Southern California, Rob and Cole, as regular customers. We’d talk Giants baseball usually. Rob was dating a college girl who was a musician, a quiet, thoughtful red-haired girl who I’d actually taken a class with. Cole’s girlfriend was a knockout, a brown-eyed blonde who was funny and smart, not just good-looking. Rob was the more laidback of the two guys. Cole was cocky, bordering on arrogant, with a touch of incipient violence brewing just below the surface, your real alpha male, the one that gets all the girls. I never saw him openly mistreat his girlfriend or do anything overtly abusive but he was often curt and dismissive with her in a way I found disturbing. In fact, I think she saw it in my eyes that it bothered me how Cole treated her. She came in a few times on her own and we had some nice quiet chats, nothing overly flirtatious but mutually respectful. The night she graduated she came in the store on her own. “Want to see the truck my parents bought me for graduation?” she asked.“Sure,” I said. We went out and stared at her truck for a few moments, both conscious we’d never see each other again.“Well, it’s been nice knowing you,” she told me. “Yeah, you, too. Take care of yourself,” I replied, cursing myself for not being the guy who could sweep her off her feet.

Another time I had these three Asian college girls come in. We were joking around, mildly flirtatiously. It’s hard to flirt with three girls simultaneously but one of the girls I found very attractive. It was all very harmless and lighthearted when this middle-aged white lady walked in. Reading my name off my name tag, she turned to the girls and said, “You can stop wasting your time. Chris doesn’t want anything to do with you.” We were all shocked to speechlessness.

The racist lady bought some cigarettes from me and I got her out of there as fast as possible. After she left, one of girls finally exploded. “Fuck! What a bitch!”

I said, “Hey, I don’t know that bitch and I don’t think like that bitch. You girls are welcome in here anytime. She isn’t.” They thanked me and we shook our heads at each other. The attractive girl left last. She paused at the doorway. “See you around, Chris.” She winked and then took a huge hungry bite of the apple she bought like some kind of modern-day Eve. I never saw her again either. (Not that I blame her.)

Bonnie was a large young black woman employee who was unbelievably well-endowed. When she was wearing overalls her breasts stuck out the top and sides, literally the size of beach balls with no artificial enhancement of any kind. Dana, another young black woman hired at the same time, told me that Bonnie said I was always staring at her breasts. As I started to die from embarrassment, Dana continued.“I told her, “Are you crazy, girl? We all staring at your breasts. They’re the biggest tits anybody ever seen. Ain’t no way anyone can look at you and not see them. They’re huge!’ “

From then on, I did my best to maintain constant eye contact with Bonnie at all times while talking to her. She was actually pretty cool to work with. She was a tough chick who didn’t take any shit from anyone. Twice I saw her scold large redneck guys for using profanity in the store. “Sorry, m’am,” they’d apologize.

Bonnie told me she got into it once with some redneck dude at the K-mart where she was working. They agreed to meet in the parking lot after her shift and she beat his ass. I believed her.

Dana, who was petite only in comparison to Bonnie, was also a character. She was engaged to a white convict and was counting the days to his release. According to Derek, another black employee, she confided in him how many times a day she needed sex and it freaked him out. I don’t remember the number now but it was daunting, to put it mildly.

She hit on me one time and I told her, “I never had the need before I started working here but I’ve kinda made it a personal rule I don’t date women whose husbands or boyfriends are in jail.”

Bonnie left after a few months but stopped by a couple of times to say hello. The second time she gave me her phone number. I never called her. I have to say I didn’t really see us as a couple though she definitely would have had my back (and more) in a fight. (I once briefly dated a little blonde girl from Hawaii who knew tai kwan do. She used to kick up all around my face and say, “Wanna spar?” I’d say, “No, but when I walk down the street with you I feel safe.”)

Dana left around the same time as Bonnie. About six months later I was in the back room eating my lunch when Dana walked in with one of the biggest white guys I have ever seen in my life. He was all muscle, he looked like a “ ‘Lil Abner” cartoon come to life. She said, “I want you to meet my fiancé”. We shook hands, my tiny hand disappearing into his paw as he grinned from ear to ear like he had won the lottery. They left and I sat there wondering why in the hell she had made a point of introducing us.

About a year later, I’m standing in line at the Mexican joint when someone nudges me in the back of the leg with their knee. I turned around and it was Dana, who was with a girlfriend, a big blonde lady.

I said, “Hey, Dana, how you doin’? How’s married life?”

She just stared at me and said, “How would I know? I’ve been divorced a month.”

“ Oh? I’m sorry to hear that, “ I told her.

“So?” she asked me.

“So? So..what?” I asked, at a loss.

“So, how ‘bout it?” she said, swinging her hip into mine.

I gulped with surprise.

After a small pause, I said, “Dana…I always thought you’d be too much woman for me.”

Her friend nodded and said, “Smart man.”

A couple of years later I’m reading the local paper and there was the name and description of a woman matching Dana exactly. After an extended high-speed chase by the police, she died in a fiery car crash.

Tiffany was a wholesome All-American blonde, the kind of girl who normally wouldn’t give me the time of day. She worked at the store for about six months. After she left, Tiffany gave me her number and told me to call. So I did. The problem was her roommate answered. Her roommate, Monique, was an evil, good-looking blonde, dark to Tiffany’s light. She hated my guts.

The first time Monique came into the store she was with her boyfriend, Josh. He was a tall, laidback, blonde jock (and the two of us ended up getting along just fine later on).They asked to buy some scratcher lottery tickets from me. I lifted up my cash drawer to show them what kinds of tickets I had under the till. As I was stood there waiting for them to make their choice, Monique, standing behind Josh, began to run her hands over his torso and kiss his neck while giving me the eye. I found this display really obnoxious. I yelled,”Just pick one already!” Josh apologized while Monique called me an asshole.

So I don’t know what Monique said to Tiffany before handing the phone over to her but when Tiffany finally got on the line she made some bullshit excuse to me and I never heard from her again.

A short time later, I started working with this lanky, nineteen-year-old kid, Jeff, who was a rodeo cowboy, a bull rider. He told me how much he loved it and how he wanted to turn pro, even though he had a friend get killed after getting stomped by a bull. “At least he died doing something he loved,” he told me. Jeff showed me his tongue piercing which he said infuriated his girlfriend’s dad when he noticed it at the family dinner table. “I’ll bet,” I said. Jeff’s best friend, Morgan, was Monique’s brother. Morgan, who looked like a male model, was blind in one eye because his sister intentionally hit him in the face with the side of a window screen just a few years back.

I worked with Jeff for a couple of months through the summer. One day he approached me, very distraught. “I need your advice. I got a big problem and I don’t know who I can talk to about it with.”

I said, “Sure. What’s up?”

Jeff told me that Morgan had just confessed to him that he was gay and that he was love with Jeff.

“Oh, shit. That’s a new one.”

Jeff shook his head. “What am I gonna do? Morgan’s my best friend. What do I do now?”
.
“Uh, I don’t know. Couldn’t you just stay friends with him? Keep it on a friend level?”

Jeff fixed me with a look. “ Seriously? Could you? If you were in the same situation?”

“No, I guess not,” I said.

So Jeff stopped hanging out with Morgan, which was unfortunate but understandable, given the circumstances. (It’s not a question of homophobia. Jeff didn’t care that Morgan was gay; he couldn’t handle being the object of his adoration. Heterosexual platonic friendships dissolve for the same reason.) Not much longer after that, he got an offer to move to Kentucky to pursue his rodeo career. I encouraged him to go and off he went. A month or so later, his mom stopped by with a letter from Jeff.

“He says he’s doing great down there. He thinks the world of you, you know,” she told me.” He says you really helped him out.”

I shook my head, “I don’t know why. He’s the one chasing his dream, not me. Just tell him I said good luck with his rodeo career.”

Years later I was working in a grocery store when Tiffany came through my line with two little kids. She was all dressed up, gold jewelry, pearls, heels, the glamorous trophy wife to the max. “Oh my God,” she said. “You look exactly the same!” “Oh, don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m older.”

Lovechild was a snub-nosed, full-lipped, blue-eyed, busty blonde. She was twenty-eight going on forty. Her voice was almost always raspy with cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. The first couple of times I waited on her, she acted completely normal. The third time she offered to blow me in the parking lot. (Her exact words were: “You’re cute. Why don’t you follow me outside to the parking lot? And I’ll make you real, real happy.”) The store was packed with all male customers. They watched her leave and then all of them turned to see my reaction. “She’s probably a venereal bomb” was what I said.

After that Lovechild was after me the whole time I worked in the liquor store. (Not that she ever lacked for company.)

One day Lovechild confronted me. “We ever gonna get together or what?“

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” She put her hand on my shoulder and I sidestepped away from her.

“Look. It’s not happening, okay?” I told her.

“But why? I know you like me.”

“Because you’re with a different guy every night of the week,” I said.

Her eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings but that’s how it is.”

She decided to handle rejection by embarrassing me at every opportunity. I was in a local grocery store at the checkstand, getting rung up when I noticed Lovechild in line at the register across from me. I turned around, hoping she hadn’t spotted at me but it was too late.

Lovechild cried, “Hey, it’s you!” Noticing my toilet paper being rung up, she exclaimed, “ You use ‘Soft ’n Gentle’? I use ‘Soft ’n Gentle’, too!” Lovechild then scurried over and crouching in front of me, puckered up her lips and said,”C’mon baby, give me a kiss.”

I literally turned my back on her while muttering, “Get-the-fuck-away-from-me.”

Completely unfazed, she said, “Okay, be like that. Catch you later, sexy.” Turning on her heel, and holding her head high with a regal air, she made a sweeping exit.

I looked over at the cashier and bagger (both college girls) who were literally frozen in open-mouthed shock. “She’s a customer. At my store. Where I work,” I explained. Recovering, the cashier said, “ Oh. Oh. You know her?” I shook my head in embarrassment, “ Not really.”

Lovechild once unknowingly hit on me in front of my girlfriend. I was behind the register and my girlfriend Megan was facing me at the end of one aisle while on the very next aisle also facing me, Lovechild was making a play for me.

“I already have a girlfriend,” I told Lovechild.

“Oh, c’mon!” she scoffed. “She’s not gonna know.”

Megan and I exchanged a glance and ironic smiles. (She knew who Lovechild was from my description of her. Lovechild had no idea who my girlfriend was or that she was even standing there on the next aisle over.)

“Well, I’m gonna know,” I said. “And I’m not gonna do that to her.”

“Suit yourself. I think you’re crazy,” she told me on her way out the door.

Over the years, things escalated between us. Lovechild routinely used to make a scene in the liquor store, occasionally flashing me her bare breasts or loudly proclaiming her plans for me. “I’m gonna clean up and marry you and we’ll have twelve kids together,” she told me. “Well, the Pope will be happy,” I replied.

Lovechild had no internal censor. In a packed store one summer night, she exclaimed loudly,” Oh my God! I had a dream about you last night. You had a really big dick and you were boning the shit out of me!” The horde of customers all turned to see my reaction. Very deadpan, I said, “Well, the best thing about fantasies is that they’re free.”

As uninhibited as she was, I suggested (after Lovechild flashed me a couple of times in a single week and was kicked out of the Schneid for flashing guys in there) that maybe she should work as a stripper. “Oh, I couldn’t ,” she said. “I’d laugh.”

“Well, maybe you could start a whole new genre, the ‘Laughing Stripper’.”

“Will you be my manager?”

Lovechild wasn’t just with a different guy every night of the week, often it was guys, plural (I saw her, more than once, go off with three guys at a time). I suggested to her (as gently as I could) that maybe she should charge for sex, that she’d actually get more respect that way.

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

I asked her one time, “How do you remember all their names?”

“I find that “Hey, baby’ works most of the time,” she said.

I ran into her late one night on my way home from work. She was all fucked up, drunk and tweaking hard on speed . Lovechild didn’t recognize me at a distance and started to panic. “Oh my God, not another one of these freaks from the bar. I can’t handle it,” she cried loudly to herself.

“Lovechild, it’s me. It’s Chris.”

“Is that really you?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Let me walk you home.”

I walked her home and we went inside for a few minutes, me keeping a safe distance from any spontaneous attempts at physical affection on her part.

Lovechild was actually overwhelmed.“I can’t believe you walked me home. Its like a dream.”

I left without incident and the next day I was sitting outside the store, drinking a Pepsi before the start of my shift, when Lovechild approached me, her eyes shining.

“I just want to thank you for last night.”

“Forget it, it’s nothing,” I told her.

She sat down next to me on the wooden flower box. “No, you really looked out for me and I just want you to know how much I appreciate it.”

She grabbed my shoulder and started to turn me towards her.

“Hey, watch it! I’m gonna spill!” I warned her.

“No, this time this kiss is gonna happen!” She grabbed me as I tilted my head away. We ended up in a heap on the sidewalk.

“Dammit, you crazy woman, ya made me spill my Pepsi!”

“Awww, poor guy!”

Not long afterwards, Lovechild came in the store late one night. It was just the two of us.
She looked at me, very soberly. “You really think I’m a whore, don’t you?”

I hesitated. “No, not a whore…maybe a slut.”

We both laughed.

“A skank?” she asked me, playfully.

“A floozy.”

“A hoochie-mama?” Lovechild shook her hips at me.

“—A shameless hussy.”

“ ‘Hussy’. That’s a good one. I like that,” she told me.

Early one summer evening, Kate and I went downtown to eat. When we sat down at a patio table outside the restaurant, there was Lovechild nearby. She asked if she could join us. I introduced her to Kate and she sat down. Lovechild seemed completely sober and at ease with us. (Maybe having my sister there helped relax her.)

She started telling us her life story: how she’d been studying to be a ballerina until her big breasts got in the way; then she had taught little girls ballet at the community center— a job she loved but lost—when too many late nights led to her oversleeping and missing her teaching sessions; how she’d been happily working as a secretary in Silicon Valley and was madly in love with her fiancé—until she discovered he was secretly working as a gigolo (“fucking rich old ladies while I was off at work” was how she described it). It was the most I ever heard her talk, and the most serious I had ever seen her. Afterwards, Lovechild apologized for taking up our time and left quietly.

Kate gazed after her. “Wow, that is a beautiful girl. How sad!”

“Yeah, I guess she is,” I said. The thought had never occurred to me. Lovechild so often looked—and acted—so cartoonishly slutty, it was easy to overlook that she really was a very attractive girl.

I once took a screenwriting class at the local junior college. I had to read the first twenty pages of a script I had written about the liquor store out loud to the class. I described Lovechild as “slutty but attractive, twenty-eight going on forty.” The professor (and a lot of the class) took issue with that description, implying that I was some kind of misogynistic, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. The professor, an old ponytail-wearing hippie, was already up in arms because my character explained Lovechild’s name as being the outcome of having hippie parents. He told me—in front of the whole class—that the character that was obviously based on me was “an asshole”; that I myself lacked empathy for other people; and that he liked all the characters except for mine. I laughed out loud because the only alternatives (as I saw it) was to either slug him or cuss him out or both.

I didn’t have the presence of mind to explain that: a) Lovechild’s actual name was something a lot more crass and overtly sexual than the one I gave her; b) the characters the professor liked were based on people he’d never met and was only familiar with because of my portrayal of them (so I guess I had empathy for other people after all); and finally c) Lovechild was called a lot worse things than “slutty” by the people who knew her, especially the female barflies who despised her for being both better-looking than them and even freer than they were with her sexual favors.

Here’s a story I heard about Lovechild: She went off with some guys to a local motel where they drank and got high and then the men all had their way with her. When they were finished with her, they left Lovechild tied up, spread-eagled naked on the bed with a child’s plastic toy car track running between her legs. I heard this story from a woman (Carmen) and she relayed it to me gleefully like it was funny. (But I’m the misogynistic asshole who lacks empathy? Sure.)

I used to cover Lovechild’s purchases with my own money if she was short, anywhere from a few cents to a couple of bucks. (J-Cat saw me doing this and asked me why I was helping her. “I thought you hated her,” he said. “I don’t hate her,” I replied. “I’m just not gonna sleep with her.”) I never once asked her to pay me back. One night I came back from my lunch break and the guys up front told me she left me something. They pointed to something over on the deli counter. It was a piece of magazine paper folded over. I started to unwrap it when I realized it was a little packet of speed that she left for me. I re-wrapped it, and hurried down the block looking for her. When I caught up to Lovechild, she was super-surprised that I was returning her little gift.

“I can’t accept this,” I told her, handing it back to her. “I don’t do speed.”

“You guys at the store all do it,” she said.

“No. We don’t. I don’t do it and the other two guys are on parole,” I explained. “Their PO piss-tests them all the time.”

“Well, I tried to pay you back,” Lovechild said.

“Its fine. You don’t have to pay me back. Forget about it,” I told her.

(Walking back to the store I realized I had just dashed down the street with a felony in my hand and the area crawling with cops. Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.)

As the years went by, Lovechild’s existence grew more bleak. Her appearance started to suffer, the drugs and alcohol and hard living were taking their toll. Twice I tried to dissuade her from hitchhiking in front of the store late at night. I told her I’d call her a cab, even pay for it, if need be.

“What do you care?” she asked bitterly.

“I don’t want to see you end up dead in a ditch,” I told her.

Years later, a former co-worker, Dan, told me that Lovechild hooked up with a rich guy from Marin who treated her good and really took care of her. And a year or so after that, he gave me another update: she was dying of some rare intestinal disease. (I didn’t try and go see her. It would have been pretty awkward, I think.) And finally, Dan informed me that she had died, surrounded by friends and loved ones, at peace at last.

I could have told that professor that Lovechild once told me that I was “a beacon of light in a sea of darkness.” Her words, not mine. (Of course, in that crowd, that really isn’t saying all that much.) She was funny, smart and attractive and she deserved a much happier life than the one she got.