Many friends have sheltered me. I’ve also slept in cars parked in corn fields and on patchy grass highway overpasses with just a ragged quilt for a cover, and once, on the library lawn in my hometown, Taylor, Michigan. We moved frequently when I was a child, but never far. Finding or making a loving home was something I wanted, but had a hard time finding. I kept trying, but the world is full of dangerous places. Like the time my friend and I were hitch hiking in New Mexico and got picked up by some guys maybe in their early 20s.
Deb and I were 17. She’d been to New Mexico before; this was my first time. We were coming off a sorta scary stopover in Colorado, another adventure that began great and ended scary. I wrote about that adventure in Sweet Melissa.The Albuquerque guys were nice. They knew a place where we could stay. They took us to an abandoned house and explained they were just nailing the front door shut from the outside to keep us safe. They’d be back later with food and beer. I have never liked beer but I was tired and hungry. The day had been filled with not good circumstances like the cops who pulled our ride over and did not like the fact that my driver’s license said I was 17. But we got past that and other problems, like the mishap in Colorado.
I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before and now we had found a safe place. I flopped on the bed and instantly fell asleep. Deb shook me awake. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll come back and rape us.” Anxiety came off her in waves. I tried to talk her out of leaving but she had been in this town before and she had been gang raped (now she tells me!) and her voice was shaking as she begged me to go. Being locked in meant we’d have to bust a window, and that’s what we did. We fled for home.
On the other side of this adventure, I had a bed waiting at a friend’s house. I’d been on my own more or less since I was fifteen. When my mom was in a bad way, at the time I interpreted those spells as her very bad moods, she’d kicked me out of our actual home. So it had been two years of staying with friends. Friend after friend after friend got tiring. For them and for me. So I asked my mom if I could move back home. I had decided to go back to school. I’d dropped out the year before to travel. There was nobody to tell me no don’t do it, you’ll regret it. I took my own self in hand and tried to correct the course of my life.
That was my senior year. The powers that be let me stay with my class. Apparently I had enough credits. I stayed with my mom for awhile. Then with my dad. Then they got back together which was the main part of their trip. Break up, get back together. Over and over. So now Dad had an empty house. They let me stay there. Alone. Across town from where my family lived. But I graduated. I actually graduated and got married in the same month and year.
My high school sweetheart and I did not even last a year of being married. He was very good to me, we made a kind of a home together in Dad’s old place. A good man with little ambition. I hope at some point he finished high school. Or maybe fulfilled his dream of playing guitar in a band. Still to this day you do not have to finish high school to become a rock star. But rock stars are famous for never really having a home. And that was all I wanted. Plus a husband and two or maybe three children.
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