The year before I was
old enough to drink, I spent my summer nights on the streets of
Sedro-Woolley. It's a
hick town with
cigar store Indians and bears on every corner, a few sparse blocks of utilitarian downtown before it slips into a
white trash residential wonderland, trailers and rusting
semi cabs, "
This family is supported by timber dollars" signs in every other window.
As we were sucking the last of the blood out of our relationship, all we had left together was trips out to get candy and movies. Sometimes he'd ride his six foot
unicycle and the younger
redneck kids would jeer at us as we rolled along. It wasn't far enough to the
Handy Pantry to justify taking the motorcycle. We tried to do other things - went to garage sales,
he taught me to weld in the backyard - but mostly we just fought, and when we weren't busy with that, we went out for candy. He was
SweetTarts and
Warheads and
sour gummy worms. I was
Twizzlers and
York Peppermint Patties. Sometimes he got a popsicle, instead. Some nights we'd rent
pornos, for kicks, and fall asleep halfway through. We stopped having sex months
before it really went to hell.
On the nights when I was alone, walking around waiting for him to get off work, or trying not to wonder where he was and
trying not to call and find out, I'd pass
this bar. It was huge and made of logs -
timber dollars - full of destitute cowboys with
military hairstyles and prematurely inflated bellies hanging over carefully tended-to silver belt buckles. The town was too small to get catcalled, so I passed unmolested. But at that point I was wanting
a real man and they looked to be it. I wondered how it would be to
go home with a cowboy.
I finally went in two years later, with a different boyfriend. And he had the boots and the belt buckle, but
he was no cowboy. And I was no redneck. When I lived in Sedro-Woolley, I was about six months from
white stretch pants, about a year from
welfare and the firstborn that comes when you've got no job to keep you busy. That had changed, I was back on the route to smart and stable, I didn't fit in anymore. The
loggers and the
cowboys just glared. We had a beer and left, the boyfriend thinking it was all amusing in his arrogant way. I wanted to shout back that
I used to live here, so don't look at me like I haven't earned the right to Coors Light on tap. This is not slumming. Again that night, I wanted a
beer gut and a
crew cut.