Miracle from Tobacco Road

Chapter 15

I kept hanging out at the bar, and another waitress had told some biker friends I was saying bad things about her and they came to me and asked me if I had said these things about the girl. I told them that I had not said anything about her I didn’t even like her. There were three of them, and they were huge. They had their outlaw coats on and were mean looking. Everyone in Florida knows about the Outlaw biker gang. He hit me and knocked me off the bar stool, I was scared, but I knew I had to fight or be hurt. We started fighting and it carried us to the streets. I don’t know how I did it but I ended up beating him. The next day he came up to me and apologized and we rode away together smoking pot.

My girlfriend at the time had managed to get tickets for Billy Joel at the Six-O-Clock Club, that’s the first time I heard Piano Man, which is one of my favorite songs. We were dancing and I looked up and seen this blonde hair girl coming at me with something shining in her hand. As she got closer I saw it was a knife, then I saw it was my ex-girlfriend Vickie. She scared the other girl I was with so bad she ran out and left me there. Vickie had found out where I was and hitchhiked down to Florida and followed me. I left with her and moved in with her to a small hotel apartment she had rented.

I had gotten a night time job at McDonald’s and decided I was going to try to make it with her. She was getting wilder and wilder and after a few months went by she finally opened up to me about her actions. She told me when she was a little girl her dad would send all the children outside to play except for her and her sister. Her father was molesting them, and she could not get it off her mind. She said that she felt dirty, and would drink and do drugs trying to get it off her mind. I was so mad about that and was glad he was in prison. She told me that she couldn’t even talk to him without him trying to talk dirty to her, even while he was in prison. I felt sorry for her after that and put up with things that I didn’t approve of.

We decided to leave Florida; we felt we had to get away from all the partying. We had to wait a week, because the drawbridges were raised because of the bicentennial celebration. I called my mom in Tennessee and asked her if we could come there for a while. She said yes so we took off hitch hiking on Interstate 95. All of a sudden a van load of scary looking men came by, and started hollering out smutty words at Vickie and I got a little nervous as I watched them get off the ramp and go down the other side. We look at each other and knew they were coming back.

The good Lord must have been watching, for all of a sudden a car pulls up with an older man driving and asked us if we wanted a ride. We thanked him for stopping and told him that he might have saved our lives. He just looked at us and smiled, and said that the Lord told him to stop. He talked about Jesus for the next 30 miles. He made me and Vickie nervous and took us to a bus station, and then he paid for two tickets to Knoxville. I felt bad after that because I knew I had not been living right.

When we got on the bus there was a newspaper laying on a seat that someone had left. The headlines read “Elvis is Dead” as Vickie and I read the article I believe we both had tears in our eyes, cause who didn’t love Elvis. It sure made for a long ride.