My Marlboro Man

Dale was everything to me. Everything a seventeen year old girl could dream of. He was a handsome older man, exotic, mysterious, and unknown to my family. And he had good reason not to be familiar with my family. Because he was the man every mother hid their daughters from.

I met Dale in his brothers bar. It was the old post office/general store, Dale's brother had renovated. Less than a mile away from our house, it was the only business, other than the garage in the rual ghost town we lived. I was never carded when I when in the dark tacky saloon. Maybe because Dale's brother was desperate for my money. I had always hung out with an older crowd, and a single girl was always welcome there. If there was an available woman in the bar, the men would stay longer and drink more. And at the end of the bar, that's where Dale always stood.

I was flattered with the obsessive attention he poured on me. That was before I realized he was so stoned that he found my minutiae fascinating. Not ever having been exposed to a loser, I had no idea the caliber of nair d'well I was drinking with. I was having way too good a time being in a bar with a man in his thirties. We would party way past last call and then close the place and dance on the empty dance floor. Sometimes, when he got the munchies, we would eat breakfast at 3:a.m. With all the neon bar lights and music and meals at all hours, it was my Las Vegas.

And sometimes he would take me back to his parents cabin on the lake, and we would talk about our future. Or more like he would talk about his future, and I would listen, tucked underneath the saddle blanket beside him in his bed, and try to picture myself with him on a ranch out west.

Dale was our post man, when our regular mail carrier took time off. Which was often because the full time carrier drank in the bar regular too. But Dale never once drove me home, or picked me up either for that matter. He was such a chicken he would hang up if my dad answered the phone when he called me. That alone should have been my red flag. But even when I started to see Dale for the low life he really was, the trill of my indiscretion still lured me in.

When he started tripping aacid and disappearing for a month or two at a time, it was hard on my still tender little heart. I wanted to save him. I tried everything a juvenile girl could do to rescue him from himself. I would become so wasted myself, or I let him think I was, he would have to take care of me. Or I would throw a fit, pick a fight and storm out of the bar, so he would come running after me. The last time I tried that with Dale, when he picked me up on the side of the road, I tricked him into driving me into the next town, to an A.A. meeting. He dropped me off on the side of the road outside the building. I remembered watching the tail lights of his Nova as he drove away from me thinking this time, I really was going to sleep over at a girlfriends house were my parents had always assumed I was.

I turned eighteen when he was out in South Dakota. I welcomed in my adulthood without him. My friends took me back to the neighborhood bar to celebrate my becoming an adult. There was a party already going on, as Dale's grandfather's will had died and left the family a huge wad of cash. Dale's brother paid off the bar. Dale invested all his money in an expensive race horse.

The horse died ten days later.

Some years back, I learned Dale had married a barmaid. They moved out to Arizona where the desert air is easier on the lungs as Dale died of lung cancer.

I picture Dale driving his mustard colored Nova, wearing his cowboy hat, a white t-shirt, baggy shorts, and tall pointy toed boots, delivering our mail. I used to imagine myself, instead of hiding behind the cedar trees in our yard to get a glimpse of him, running and jumping into his car, and pushing him aside, and driving him myself to an A.A. meeting. Or to South Dakota. Anywhere that was not an unhealthy smoke filled bar.

But that too, died.