New Wheels, Moving Out
Part 6 in the Road to Freedom Series
After my sister’s wedding, I finished up my class on Abnormal Psychology at Rutgers, then decided to not take the second class I had planned to take for the second half of the summer. I needed a little down time after working hard in the warehouse all day. The few days I’d had with the family and friends down at the shore after the wedding had reminded me that there was more to life than working and studying all the time.
My brother-in-law’s older brother was getting rid of his car, a nice, older Pontiac LeMans, and sold it to me for 500 bucks. I had my own wheels for the first time in several years! I’d had such rotten luck with cars when I was in the Navy, I’d eventually found it easier to just get around via public transportation, rides with shipmates, or hitchhiking. But now I could drive myself to work and back, and I had an easier way to get up to visit my friends in Connecticut, which I started to do once a month, now that I had my own car. I was really coming into my own.
It was about a 4 hour drive each way, but I loved going up there. They were my tribe. They’d always been there during my 4 years in the Navy, my friends back home. I was still living there, in Windsor, when I joined the Navy. Although my parents moved to New Jersey while I was in Boot Camp, I still thought of Connecticut as my home — where my tribe was. I’d never really lived in my parents’ house in Cherry Hill until I landed there, flat on my ass after my discharge and quick descent into alcoholism in Norfolk afterwards, so I didn’t really have any friends in that area. My two closest friends in Pittsburgh had each joined the service as well, so I really had no one there except my brother Brian and his wife Judy.
I downplayed to my tribe what had happened when I first got out of the navy. I never told them about my suicidal depression, or my time in the V.A.’s Depression clinic, or that I might be an alcoholic. I just didn’t see them understanding any of that, and I was honestly ashamed of that period of my life. I thought I was past all that now, so I just did my best to forget it ever happened. When I was up there, I would tell them I couldn’t drink because the V.A. had discovered a rare blood condition that required me to be on medication that I couldn’t drink anything with. No one questioned that story, so I stuck with it.
I was still game for getting high on pot, and it seemed that was always around up there. I came to live for those weekends up there with my tribe. I never thought of it as living a double life — it was more like a continuation of my life in the Navy. I worked hard there, too, then went home to my friends to get high and to be with people who, I thought, really knew me.
We’d all been through a lot together. Early the year before, my closest friend, Reed, had been diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease. After a lot of treatment, he now appeared to be in some form of remission from it. It was during this period that he and I really bonded. I felt like I was in remission from the manic-depression. While I never talked about that, I did feel a real kinship with him in that regard.
Just before he was diagnosed, his girl friend of many years, Peg, had begun dating another good friend of mine, David. I’d first gotten to know David through my friendship with his little sister. She’d been there after I’d had my heart shattered by the first girl I ever fell in love with, and had been a really good friend to me.
After I joined the navy, where everyone, it seemed, had a girlfriend back home, I began to fancy she and I becoming more than just friends. I really liked the idea of that — I kind of fell in love with that idea. Given what she was going through at home, that I had no idea of at the time, she did, too.
We wrote beautiful letters back and forth to each other. We’d actually convinced ourselves, each in our own lonely places, that we were in love with each other. In the harsh light of day, it never matched the fantasy we each had, and it embarrassingly never materialized.
Through the process of our “non-relationship” falling apart, David and I got to know each other, and became good friends, as well. Things had gotten a little strange when Reed was diagnosed — Reed and Peg had been together the entire five years that I’d known them, but they had grown apart, and David and Peg had just started seeing each other. Once Reed was diagnosed with the Hodgkins, David gracefully backed off, and Peg and Reed soon were back together. All remained close friends, to me and to each other. I did my best to remain neutral about their triangle, but years later, would learn from David that he thought I hadn’t approved of his hooking up with Peg in the first place. Since I wasn’t there most of the time, I really had no opinion about that, I just remained friends with all of them.
I did well at my new job, establishing myself as reliable, and helping to better organize the warehouse, implementing improvements in the inventory techniques used to keep track of the paper. It was thrilling to me to be useful again on a job, after all the time I’d spent being unemployable when I first got out of the Navy. The owner’s son was getting a little more involved with the business, and he and I seemed to hit it off. He thought highly of me, and sang my praises to his father.
That fall, a friendly guy who worked in the other building on the firm’s complex, approached me about going into an apartment together near the printing firm. I’d been driving the half hour back and forth from New Jersey for several months at that point, and did like the idea of being much closer, with a 5 minute commute instead of 30. I also felt like it was an opportunity to move out of my parents’ house sooner than I thought I’d be able to, which was attractive. This would begin another chapter on my road to freedom, one that would prove to be a bumpy road.
