Free Riding In Cars With Boys by Beverly Donofrio Page A

them shades) day and night, and bell-bottom jeans that were so long they dragged on the ground and frayed on the bottoms—but we had a dream: to live Easy Rider. Raymond had even borrowed a thousand dollars from the credit union to buy a chopped Harley-Davidson, then managed to get laid off so we could hang out together and collect unemployment. He’d also become tight with a bunch of guys from the Animal Pack, the local motorcycle gang. I could take or leave the Animals—obviously, they were nothing like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper—but the important thing was I was dreaming again. There was California, there were communes, there was free love for married people. Not to mention how beautiful the world looked, in the spring, under the influence of drugs. I began to write poems.
    My mother thought I’d gone off the deep end. I’d regained my independence. I was different from her. So what if I was disorganized and a slob, I was imaginative and a thinker. “Jason,” she said when he stuck his finger in his nose at a year and a half. “Get your finger out of your nose.”
    “Leave him alone, Ma.”
    “What, you’re not going to teach him manners?”
    “If everybody picked their nose when they felt like it, everybody would be a lot happier. You pick your nose, I pick my nose, everybody picks their nose, so why hide it? We got ruined from socialization.”
    “You’re saying I should’ve let you pick your nose?”
    “Yes.”
    “Honest to God, Beverly, I don’t know who you take after.”
    And my father, never a slouch when it came to detective work, took one look at the cars that ended up in our driveway at all hours and knew exactly what was going on in our house. He refused to set foot in it. Which was fine with us, since he was a cop and we were doing illegal drugs.
    Raymond finally had friends, so instead of sitting alone in the living room and not playing Scrabble with my friends in the kitchen because he felt too stupid, he had guys to go out with. Plus, he had long hair and a beard and was handsome. Sometimes when there was company, I’d sit across from him in a miniskirt and I’d catch the way he looked at me and want to leap across the room and land on top of him.
    It was almost as though Ray and I were single. Life was blissful. One night I’d go out with my friends, and Raymond would baby-sit. The next night Ray’d go out with his, and I’d baby-sit. My friends and I rode around town smoking superb red marijuana sent from Vietnam. The air through our windows smelled of damp earth. We were awed by each leaf flapping separately on the trees. We peed in cornfields and ran through sprinklers on golf courses.
    I even had a crush that spring. His name was Peter Dodd. Raymond had met him at the Crystal Spa and told me about this guy who’d shot off his toe in Vietnam to get discharged, which made him a hero to us because we thought the war was bullshit. Peter wasn’t only missing a toe, he’d been born with only one testicle. I fell in love before I even laid eyes on him, then fixed him up with Beatrice. He was tall and skinny and drove a school bus. He wrote songs. Some mornings he’d pull his yellow bus across my front lawn and we’d sit in the kitchen eating toast and drinking coffee, Jason on Peter’s lap. We talked about people. I read him my poems, which were very short: “Lemon days alone and lost. What will happen in the dark?” That was one. “Swing high. Swing low. Never know. Where to go.” That was another. Sometimes at night with Raymond, Peter sang us his songs and I read them my poems. I felt a little sorry for Raymond because all he did most of the time was listen, but he didn’t seem to mind. He nodded out in the rocker, and I watched Peter fold his long legs this way and that as we passed a joint back and forth and Peter laughed at things I said. We talked until dawn many nights. I looked at Raymond, asleep by then in the rocker, and I felt tender.
    That sleeping in the