Member-only story
Walk Away, a memoir
Nightmares & Dreams
Quick movements near my head still made me jump. Recurring dreams of Jimmy woke me on nights when I was not passed out drunk, and although I drank hard and often, that hair-of-the-dog cure never worked for me, and so I didn’t drink every day. At first, I jerked awake from the dreams when reaching out to touch him. Later, I woke with my heart pounding, gasping for breath from trying to run on feet that stuck to the ground like magnets.
During college, I was a good worker at the factory and waitressing jobs I took during the summers, and at my year-round housekeeping jobs, but I was a bad law student right from the get-go. In my law school ID from my first year, 1978, I look like a caricature of a stoner hippie. My hair is long, uncombed, and falling over my summer face: a tan so deep the perpetual dark circles around my eyes blend in. The tan doesn’t hide the bloodshot in my eyes, or the fact that my lids are half-closed, and it’s not from sunbathing; it’s from walking everywhere I wanted or needed to go, from hanging out on the street. I’m wearing worn-soft clothes that once belonged to my mother: a flowered blouse and a light brown suede jacket with big buttons. Coming off of what I thought of as my last summer as a free woman, the summer before law school, I was fried from trying to get it all — the drugs, the booze, the men, the rock and roll, and the violence…
