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