44 Chapters About 4 Men (11 page)

Me:
Oh, yeah? Maybe we should stop by there after the show.

Ken:
You looking to get some new ink?

Me:
No, but you are.

Ken:
Oh, am I?

Me:
Yep. You’re gonna get a heart with my name on it.

Ken:
And where am I going to get it?

Me:
Somewhere highly visible—like your neck probably. Or the back of your hand, like Butch. YES! Oh my God, that would look SO good! You have to, Ken! A heart with my name in a banner across it right on the back of your hand! It would be soooo romantic!

Ken:
What about on my forearm?

Me:
Why? So, you can hide it? Like you hide your love?

Ken:
Um, no. Because I like forearm tattoos. But if I did get one, it would be a compass rose, not a heart.

Me:
Would it still have my name on it?

Ken:
Nope.

Me:
WHY NOT?!?! I gave you two beautiful children and all of my best years, motherfucker!

Ken:
Exactly. I don’t want the name of some old lady with two kids on my arm.

Needless to say, the tattoo objective is going to take some more work. So, while we’re waiting to see if I can covertly manipulate my husband into making some poor and very permanent choices, how about I tell you the real story behind one of my own very poor choices, Harley James?

I lurched my new (only in the sense that it was new to me—the damn thing was almost old enough to vote) black Mustang hatchback onto the curb and willed myself to let go of the steering wheel.

I’d only had my license for three months. My heart was pounding, and my mouth was so dry that my braces were starting to stick to the inside of my lips. Those were also new.

In fact, everything about me was new. In just about a year and a half, I had gone from an innocent little fourteen-year-old girl who could count the number of times she’d been kissed on one finger—dolled up in sparkly lip gloss with unruly reddish waves and a sizeable gap between her front teeth—to a thoroughly fucked rock vixen with a mostly shaved head, bleach-blonde bangs, kohl-caked eyes, and a shiny steel barbell shoved through each and every one of her erroneous zones.

I ran my hands up and down the perforated leather of the steering wheel and took one last steadying drag from my cigarette before flicking it out the window with my thumb and middle finger.

Oh, I bet that looked badass. I hope Harley saw me flick my cigarette just now—or not. That would mean that he’s home and that I’m going to meet him—right now. Oh my God. Maybe he’s going to stand me up. But how could he? On the phone, he said he doesn’t have a car.

Seriously, Journal, I was biliously nervous about meeting a twenty-year-old guy who lived in his mom’s basement and didn’t have a car…while sitting inside
my car
.

Buying myself a little more time, I smeared some piña colada–flavored Bonne Bell Lip Smackers on my pout in the rearview mirror (to prevent that sure to be humiliating braces-lip-snag-thing from happening again) and I tried to psych myself up for the long walk to Harley’s front door.

Of course he’ll like you. You look smoking hot! Your black eyeliner is smudged to perfection. You’re wearing your signature tiger-striped velour stretch pants and black Dropkick Murphys tank top. The straps of your new red Wonderbra give a nice pop of color. And your shit-kicking black steel-toed Grinders will let him know that you’re a worthy lay. And that cigarette flick? Forget about it! He’ll love you! Unless your braces are a turn-off…oh God!

Pulling myself away from the mirror, I took a deep breath and shakily opened the car door. As I stepped out into the sunshine, I felt my consciousness float away like a balloon tethered to the top of my head. I watched from somewhere high above my body as my legs—swathed in animal-print velour and anchored by ten pounds of steel and leather—lifted, stepped, and fell alternately of their own accord toward Harley’s benign-looking brown split-level. As the tiny figure below me continued to advance, now mechanically ascending the stairs to Harley’s front door, my consciousness began hyperventilating into an invisible paper bag.

Oh, shit, I’m freaking out. I’m freaking out, and he’s going to know. What if he watched me primping in my car? What if he knows this bra is padded? What if he doesn’t know this bra is padded and we fool around? Oh no! He’s a grown man! He doesn’t want to fuck a child, especially not one who also looks like a little boy. Oh my God! Breathe, BB, breathe. You’re a badass. You’re a badass…

I watched with detached wonderment as a black fingernail shakily extended from my body and rang the doorbell. Before returning it to my side, I studied it idly, thinking surely there had to be more to meeting Harley James than this. A secret knock or handshake or something. But when I looked up from my cogitation, there, standing before me, was someone even more unapproachable than the mythical creature I’d come to see.

It was Billy fucking Idol.

Billy fucking Idol just answered the door to Harley’s mom’s run-down’70s–style doo-doo–brown tri-level house. With his messy blond pompadour, mischievous baby-blue eyes, and overfull lips pulled to the side in a self-confident smirk, Harley was a dead ringer for my beloved Billy, and the familiarity instantly put me at ease.

The rest of him, however, did something else to me entirely. Harley’s broad, manly shoulders stretched the well-worn fabric of his faded black Misfits T-shirt almost to its breaking point, and his long, muscular legs were wrapped in a pair of hip-hugging red-and-black plaid bondage pants like a Christmas gift that I would definitely not be able to wait until December 25
th
to open.

God, he was perfect.

Then, he smiled.

And my consciousness came crashing back down to earth, bitch-slapped out of its reverie, by the worst teeth I had ever seen.

Fuck, they were bad. You could have parked a double-wide between those discolored front tusks, and the rest of them looked like they were engaged in fisticuffs, scrambling over each other in a desperate attempt to leap from that hellhole—pun fully intended—and finally put an end to their suffering.

They were horrifying, Journal. Horrifying. These teeth would have made Steve Buscemi blow chunks.

Oh well, he was still a legend and a damn fine one at that—with his mouth closed. As long as he kept his trap shut or semi-shut most of the time, I would be thoroughly prepared to overlook this one flaw.

After all, who was I to judge? Still in braces, I wasn’t completely rid of my own gap yet.

Besides, you don’t see people
not
having sex with Woody Harrelson or Madonna because of a little gap, do you? Fuck no! Because they’re famous, and so was Harley James, at least locally.

Then, he began to speak…

Goddamn it!

Harley was a fucking snaggletoothed moron!

I mean, I knew going in that he’d dropped out of school, and he was homeless and all, but I’d thought it was because he was a hardened criminal, not because he had the IQ and processing speed of a three-toed sloth on barbiturates.

Ugh.

At least he was nice to look at, especially from the nose up and the neck down, and he was super warm and friendly (which was kind of unfortunate because it caused him to smile a lot, with his teeth), and his voice was every bit as slow and deep and gritty as I remembered from our phone conversation…

Hmm…

Ever the optimist, I went out for coffee with Harley anyway. If I could just get Knight to see us together from a distance of at least twenty-five yards while the lower half of Harley’s face was hidden behind a coffee mug, it wouldn’t matter that he had bad teeth and half a brain. Knight would know that I was under the protection of
the
Harley James—a gorgeous, grown-ass man who breathed napalm and ate bullies like him for breakfast.

I don’t know if it was because my expectations for the afternoon had been so severely lowered or because the abuse Knight had put me through was still so fresh, but about an hour into my date with Harley, I realized that I was actually kind of digging this guy. While he looked like he’d just stepped out of a Sex Pistols video and he had a voice that sounded like it was coming through a static-laden speaker at the bottom of a bulletproof visitation window at the state pen, Harley’s vibe was laid-back, affable, happy, even. Having been raised by two affectionate, pot-smoking, Woodstock-era hippies, Harley’s calm contentedness was strikingly familiar.

This feels nice. This feels right. This man would never hurt me. This man would cherish and protect me. This man is also probably dumb enough to throw down with Ronald fucking McKnight, if need be. Yep, this one might do after all.

Stupid, stupid brain.

As it turned out, Harley’s familiar vibe had nothing to do with his spirit and everything to do with the fact that, like my parents, he was just stoned all the time. In fact, I think Harley was physically incapable of being sober. He’d smoked, snorted, and swallowed so many drugs by the time I got to him that I could have probably removed my nail polish with his blood and gotten a contact high from the fumes. In my defense, I honestly didn’t know he was on drugs for the first few months of our relationship. Like I said, my parents were always stoned, too, so his half-open eyelids and inability to tell analog time was nothing new. I just blamed it on his low IQ.

Then, one day, after we’d been dating for, like, three months, Harley settled his glassy eyes on my face and casually stated, “Man, I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you sober.”

Before I could process the significance of that statement, Harley burst out laughing, throwing his head back and wiping tears from his eyes.

It took him a moment to regain his composure before he was able to choke out, “Holy shit! I totally fucking forgot I smoked a shit-ton of weed with Mark before you came over! Bah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

And that was when I realized that Harley had never
not
been high.

In the name of making Knight jealous, I looked past the discolored, misshapen Chiclets jutting out of Harley’s mouth. I rolled my eyes at the drug problem. I disregarded his lack of education, intellect, and future. I shrugged at Harley’s lack of a car. And I even had to accept that his living situation involved ’70s-era wood-paneling, mildew, and two grown men sleeping in side-by-side twin beds.

When I first began dating Harley, he was sharing his mother’s one-room daylight basement with Davidson, his adult-aged younger brother, who worked at the local Army-Navy surplus store. He housed an impressive cache of homemade pipe bombs, sawed-off shotguns, big Dirty Harry–style handguns, live hand grenades, and night-vision goggles in their closet. Davidson even had what I considered at the time to be a smallish block of C4 but later learned was actually a crazy go-straight-to-Guantanamo Bay-with-a-bag-over-your-head shitload of C4. Evidently, it’s really concentrated, like wasabi.

After discovering Davidson’s stockpile of death, their mom (who was on husband number eight looked exactly like what a woman who had named her sons Harley and Davidson should look like) decided that it was time to separate her increasingly criminal sons. Even though Davidson was the arms dealer of the pair, Harley was older and more of a crackhead, so he was exiled into a corner of the garage that his stepdad had hastily drywalled off and run an extension cord out to.

It reminded me of how people typically regarded a litter of puppies. They’re cute and cuddly but completely incapable of following basic social mores, like not pissing on the floor, so you keep them warmish and dryish in the garage and visit them when they get loud enough to remind you that they exist.

Harley did have a TV out there, so there was that.

But the one thing I
never
accepted, never failed to be humiliated by, never wanted to acknowledge or admit existed was Harley’s tattoos. Oh my fucking God, the tattoos. Journal, you know I love ink on a man, but these tattoos were an embarrassment to us all. Every time I caught a glimpse of one of Harley’s biceps, I wanted to weep. I don’t even know where to begin. I can still feel the heat rising to my cheeks from just thinking about those crimes against art. I have an actual visceral reaction to their repugnance. That’s how bad these tattoos were
—are.