So what was a hundred percent? That was a good question. It was always a good question. As his life went on, Bill would discover that there were lots of good questions.
This question and thinking about it did not stop him from keeping her close to him. If anything, wondering if he really loved her, if there was even such a thing as true love, and if there was what it looked like, caused him to keep her closer and to do his best at that moment to make her feel really loved. But he wondered, and he wondered if she could feel what he was thinking. He wondered what she felt.
They didn’t talk much as they lay there. She asked about tomorrow and if he was going to be working a lot of Sundays. He didn’t have an answer for that, not yet, but he told her he’d work as much as he could. He held her really tight when he told her he never wanted to have to borrow money again. When he told her this he was thinking about how her father had turned him down when he’d asked for a loan.
Just how it happened that he was going back there was another question. It was tied to Rosie and Edelgarde, to feeling whatever it was that he was feeling. Maybe, he thought, he should have gotten out of town.
Well, maybe I should have he thought as he stood in front of his locker buttoning up his chef’s coat. Today was all banquets and as per what the banquet chef had said when he first saw him they might get out around nine after the last party was served and things were put away.
Back there wasn’t so far back. They needed a new car, not a new one of course because they couldn’t afford anything near new. Mr. Bowman had offered to loan him the money but Bill hadn’t wanted to borrow from his boss. In the end, he had to do that anyway because her father — and he had the money too — wouldn’t give him a loan.
Bill had borrowed rent money from his brother for several months in a row and while he’d paid it back, it had made him uncomfortable. He’d borrowed his last trimester’s fees from his father as well. When his father had given him the money, he made him promise he’d stay away from the demonstrations. Bill had had every intention of keeping that promise.
The road to hell…
Not so long ago he’d been on that road. It was etched in his memory, the meeting with his professor who was supposed to look at his poetry, the professor wanting to see what was going on at the demonstration. Well, what was happening at the demonstration was that Bill, person that he was, ended up busted and down and out.
The promise was why he couldn’t tell his father he’d been arrested and needed help, why he had to fight through it all on his own with no funds and just the help of a friend who was able to hook him up with the legal defense fund.
“Get out of here you got goddamn hippies.” That’s what the bartender at The Clock said to The Doors. Well, Bill thought, that’s what he was to the plainclothes FBI agents and then the Columbus cops who’d worked in tandem to make the arrest and take him away.
How far away they took him, he thought. He was sure they had no idea. He was sure they didn’t care, had no thoughts about it, never even considered the ramifications of what they were doing. At the time, Bill had no idea how far away he was going either.
But here he was only about a year and a half later in a hotel doing banquets and restaurant work, working all the time in all sorts of places he’d never imagined he’d ever go, in a whole new universe.
