Stories I'd Tell in Bars Read online

  Instead, Fletch and I bonded over having so many esoteric commonalities. For example, I’d never met another Midwesterner who adored the state of New Jersey as much as I did.

  [Why is New Jersey a perpetual punchline? My God, they pump your gas for you!]

  I suspected he was a keeper when, while flipping channels on a lazy Sunday afternoon, we both squealed at the opening yodel in the movie Raising Arizona. (This was before everyone realized the genius of the Coen brothers.) After our mutual, spontaneous outbursts, we turned and looked at each other like, “Hold up, you like this, too?”

  He and I were older than most undergrads on campus, Fletch because he’d served in the Army, and me because math is hard. We were both take-your-time kind of people. Neither of us were dying to dash up the stage at graduation and then directly down the aisle, like so many of our peers. In our minds, marriage was a lot like flossing after each meal – outstanding in theory, impractical in reality.

  As for our differences, we figured out how to work around them. For example, early in our courtship, I asked Fletch to help me hang shelves in my studio apartment. When he arrived, I dragged the boards and brackets over to where I planned to position them above my desk. Then I fished in the drawer for some of the free-range nails I had rolling around in there.

  “Gonna clear off your desk first?” he asked.

  “No, why?” I replied, puzzled.

  “The plaster dust will fall when we hammer in the nails.”

  “Like you’d be able to tell in here,” I replied, referring to the unkempt state of the rest of the room, where shoes, magazines, waitressing aprons, hair ties, and cat toys arranged themselves into what I called “a nest.”

  He said nothing, instead pressing his lips together.

  I liked how tidy he kept his own bedroom. I attributed his penchant for neatness to the military. I was quietly thrilled that his comforter matched the freshly laundered sheets. All his shoes were lined up on his closet floor just so. His bulletin board was a paean to right angles and neatly clipped edges, each concert ticket and photograph and bumper sticker posted equidistance apart.

  Fletch’s room was an oasis in the chaos of the rest of the apartment. He lived with a group of his fraternity brothers, where the shared living space reeked of musty gym bags and too much Polo cologne. An oversized, always-on television was proudly displayed atop of a stack of cinderblocks and two-by-fours. The space contained multitudes of dirty plates and an impressive array of empty bottles of booze [the trophies awarded for binge drinking] displayed the same way big game hunters exhibited carcasses of those animals they’d bested.

  A surly iguana named Jimmy lived in a too-small tank on the dining room table, hissing and spitting at anyone who dared meet his eye, his only view that of squalor. The roommates had written a jingle for Jimmy that went: “Who’s the iguana that loves you? Jimmy the lizard, that’s who!”

  However, the constant, drunken serenades did not improve his perpetually foul reptilian mood; it’s possible the song caused it.

  My own messy apartment made Fletch twitchy. He was far too polite to say as much, at least directly. Fletch has always been a Jedi master, so he eventually used this power to help me discover on my own that I’d prefer not living in a pigpen.

  Good call.

  However, these were the salad days and we hadn’t gotten there yet.

  “Shall we start?” I asked, gesturing towards the wall.

  He was mute, assessing my strategy. I licked my finger and touched the wall in the approximate places where I’d planned to attach the metal slats.

  “What are you doing?” he queried.

  “Marking the spots where I’ll place the brackets,” I replied.

  “No measuring?” he asked.

  I pointed to the two wet spots. “I just did.”

  “With what?”

  “These.” I pointed to my eyes.

  He pressed his lips even more firmly together, a gesture I’d eventually name Muppet Mouth. He purses so hard on occasion that it’s like his head’s a Jim Henson creation, where the whole bottom half can fold into itself.

  “Okay,” I instructed, handing him a slat. “You hold this here while I bash.” I grabbed my loafer and placed a couple of nails in my mouth.

  “You want me to hold this here while you bash?” he asked slowly and deliberately, his lip curling ever so slightly. “With your loafer? You’re going to drive these nails with a shoe, and not, say, a hammer? That’s your plan?”

  I spat out the nails to answer. “Uh huh, why?”

  “That’s not how you hang shelves,” he said.

  “Sure it is,” I replied. My family tackled home repairs like that all the time.

  He simply said, “No.”

  “No?”

  More emphatically, he replied, “No.”

  I said, “You have a better way?”

  In fact, he did. He sat down at the chipped Formica table in the kitchen alcove, gently displacing the cats who were napping in the fruit bowl. Then he made a supply list (a list!) before hustling me into his truck. He drove us to a strange and magical place called a “hardware store.”

  Having grown up in a household where the sole tool box contained a rusty set of Vice Grips and a paint-splattered butter knife, I hadn’t a clue there was a better solution. He loaded up our cart with items like “electric drills” and “anchors” and “stud finders,” the whole time explaining a job wasn’t worth doing if it wasn’t worth doing right.

  Huh.

  I was less in awe two decades later when it took him six solid weeks to repair and repaint an old dresser.

  [Spoiler alert: YouTubing clips of Phil Hartman’s old Anal Retentive Carpenter skits on SNL did not motivate him to work faster.]

  Anyway, marriage had been on Fletch’s list for years, but we’d never quite gotten around to it, even though we eventually saw the light about flossing.

  Neither of us wanted children so that’s one reason I wasn’t in a huge hurry. The other reason was I didn’t have much invested in the idea of being a bride. I didn’t throw pretend weddings when I was little. While make-believe was a huge part of my childhood, “imaginary wife” was the last thing on my mind. I was far too occupied filling my bed with all my stuffed animals, navigating Jen’s Ark through forty days and nights of torrential rains.

  [Sure, those basic bitches out there could get hitched if they wanted, but some of us were busy saving every creature who ever roamed the earth, bro.]

  I’d also spend my time practicing karate moves in my bell-bottoms and buffalo sandals, running drills so I could join Charlie’s Angels the second Bosley started recruiting eight year olds.

  When not engaged in feats of strength/heroics, I’d conduct interviews with myself in the bathroom mirror, clutching the microphone (hairbrush) and prepping for my close-up.

  So, pretending to wear some fluffy dress?

  That seemed like a lame goal in comparison. Everyone got married, even my weird evangelical cousin who fixed her teeth herself without having braces.

  [FYI, she pushed on her canines with her thumbs all day for, like, six years, and that seemed to do the trick.]

  Bottom line? I was far too busy for a mock wedding. I mean, I was enlightening and enriching Johnny Carson’s viewing audience. I was kicking ass for America. Participating in pretend nuptials was beneath my creative endeavors.

  I wonder if I’d have been more enthused about bridal games if my parents’ marriage had been a better template. Their relationship was nothing I aspired to emulate. While my folks never split up, I can’t remember them having much fun together; they didn’t seem like friends. They weren’t on the same team.

  My parents weren’t big talkers, at least to each other. However, my mom would spend hours on the phone with her sisters, running up the long-distance charges, complaining about my dad between other bits of family gossip. Then my dad would be furious when the bill arrived and my mother would throw a fit because she felt
like not being able to talk however long she wanted was tantamount to being silenced.

  So much of what was wrong could have been resolved if those two had calmly discussed these issues. My mom was lonely because my dad traveled all the time and she lived far away from her people. My dad was perpetually exhausted from extensive, high-stakes business travel. Sometimes he was stuck at a table representing Management, faced off against Teamster leaders, for six weeks at a time. That stress must have been unimaginable. The last thing he wanted when he got home was conflict or superfluous chatter.

  I was only eight years old and I could see this; why couldn’t they?

  They were equally at fault for their lack of communication, my dad because his entire job was to stay steadfast and never give in, and my mom, for perpetually going from zero to hysterics in a split-second. Neither one ever acknowledged each other’s needs or tried to operate within the other’s parameters.

  As early as grade school, I knew that if I wanted my dad on board for something, say, buying me some Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, I had to present the facts in a rational manner. He might not say yes, but he’d take my ideas under consideration, were he presented with a logical pitch. If I required my mother’s buy-in, I’d make an emotional argument. She was always on the side of anything that appealed to her pride or sense of adventure, regardless of logic or feasibility.

  My parents were always fighting, as neither one would meet the other halfway, never tailoring his or her approach to the other. While every other kid lived in fear of their parents’ divorce, I started to wish they would end it already. I was nothing if not pragmatic. Two Christmases, two birthdays, two bedrooms, maybe even two dogs?

  Sign me up.

  Fletch had a similar experience with his family. Early on in our relationship, we made the conscious decision to not replicate what we’d seen that didn’t work. For example, we both respond better to logic, so when we’re angry, the quickest route to resolution is rational conversation, not yelling. We’re not always successful – and I’d be lying if I claimed to have never thrown a plate – but we try.

  Despite years together, building our dispute resolution skills, confident that we’d found the right person, we were reticent. Less about marriage, per se, but weddings. Weddings were a shit-ton of work and we weren’t up for the challenge – we didn’t have the bandwidth.

  Our attention spans?

  Not so broad.

  [Right now, as we sit outside and I read him a draft of this chapter, Fletch keeps commenting on a bird squawking in a tree across the yard. That’s his sole input on what I’ve written so far. Endless fascination about a small, loud bird. You can feel me rolling my eyes right now, yes?]

  Anyway, as we were newly-minted executives, we believed our ceremony should reflect our station in life. We wanted to get married dot-com millionaire style, even though we were barely dot-com thousandaires. Plus, all our friends already had weddings and because we were hyper-competitive and self-important, we intended our big day to crush everyone else’s into a fine paste; that would take planning.

  We’d started seriously discussing marriage in 2001, figuring it was finally time. While no one had bought a ring or joined a gym yet, we were headed in that direction. Essentially we’d planned to plan. However, I was downsized that fall due to corporate cutbacks after 9/11 and I channeled all my energies into a fruitless job search. Wedding plans were put on hold as I was far too spent trolling Monster.com postings to dither about fish forks.

  A few months into my layoff, I lost my health insurance because I couldn’t pay the premiums. I’d assumed I’d be working soon and had spent accordingly. Fletch had to fake allergies so he could fill my Claritin script. That worked for a while.

  However, after an entire year being unemployed, I needed a new strategy. Suddenly our discussion was less about prime rib or salmon and more about how we’d continue to pay rent. We had to be pragmatic.

  We could solve our problems if we were to get married. While I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, I decided our forever should start ASAP because: (A) Claritin, and, (B) the receipt of enough wedding cash and prizes to dig ourselves out of the financial hole unemployment had created. We abandoned our plans for a huge, someday, impress-everyone ‘do at the Drake on Michigan Ave on our own dime, instead opting for a modest, informal ceremony in Las Vegas at the end of the summer, financed by my parents.

  [My mother made the offer because she thought if she had to wait for us to get around to writing checks, she wouldn’t see a wedding in her lifetime.]

  Taking the non-traditional route of a hotel/casino wedding was a huge relief. I didn’t have to obsess over seating charts or florists, which had never interested me in the first place. I was especially happy to not have to pick bridesmaids.

  “You don’t want a wedding party?” Fletch asked.

  I replied, “My friends are either in grad school or have little kids. No one can afford to throw us a shower and it’s not fair to ask. Why, do you want groomsmen?”

  “I’ve been in so many weddings, I feel like we have to, like a quid pro quo,” he replied.

  “Would you rather be a groomsman or just be a guest who can have fun, no strings, no obligations?”

  He thought about this for a minute. “I choose fun.”

  I said, “Exactly my point. Wedding attendants are for people in their twenties. Once your hit your thirties, you lose your window to force your friends into identical strapless gowns and dyed-to-match shoes. No one has time for that.”

  We decided to stand in front of the minister alone. We wanted people to enjoy the day, hard stop. We didn’t want turn the whole thing into an obligation or a popularity contest. The ceremony would last fifteen minutes, so the officiant couldn’t sneak in a sermon, either. Plus, with such an abbreviated timeline, we’d bypass the worst of the nuptial traditions – the reading of that awful Love Is verse that has vexed me since childhood.

  While the message contained in First Corinthians is touching and heartfelt, I still hate it.

  HATE.

  The blame lies in its association with the creepy circa-1970 Love Is comic strip. Do you recall those? In each cartoon, the saucer-eyed lovers would be engaged in some thoughtful activity together, like, maybe he’s helping her tidy up the house or she’s by his side while he’s in the hospital, and the caption would read, “Love is... being there for each other.”

  Sounds nice, right?

  The kicker was these two lovers were: (A) children, and, (B) naked.

  On occasion, one of them might be wearing a gardening hat or pair of running shoes, but that’s it. Otherwise, they were nude, nude, nude, all day, all night. What the hell was happening in our country back then that no one else was weirded out by a cartoon about two naked children?

  Was this because of Watergate?

  Were high gas prices that distracting?

  Was I the only person who had questions and concerns?

  And where were their parents?

  Wasn’t anyone else all, “Say, aren’t you two a tad young for so much full frontal?”

  And why were they always baking bread and decorating cupcakes and scooping ice cream in the buff? I didn’t care how much those kids loved each other, they still needed to put on some goddamn pants if they were going to be in the kitchen.

  Speaking of naked people, our wedding hotel was the site of the 2002 Adult Film Awards that weekend. We discovered this fun fact at check-in when we found ourselves in the middle of wall-to-wall porn stars and producers. So many aviator sunglasses. So much chest hair.

  This discovery sent my mother into a tremendous emotional tailspin. She was furious that the hotel was more concerned about the satisfaction of thousands of adult film industry guests with the hundreds of private events they’d booked over the week than my fifteen-minute ceremony and dinner for a handful of cousins.

  [Fletcher is still talking about the bird. He’s still talking about the bird. I’m reliving the day we pl
edged ourselves to each other for eternity and he’s all, “That’s quite a bird we’ve got there.”]

  While a blown-out wedding was something my mother had been fantasizing about ever since I was in diapers, my father thought ceremonies were wasteful. So, instead of starting a wedding savings account to fund my mother’s dream, he funneled all his extra cash into retirement accounts. No one would argue that wasn’t the wiser choice. However, when the time came to pay for everything, he balked and, with no other choice, my mother charged everything on her credit card. This put them at odds in once we got to the hotel.

  Here’s the thing – I was thirty-four. At some point in the thirty-four years leading up to the day of the wedding, they probably should have come to some consensus on how they might handle said expenses.

  That’s why when my parents walked me down the aisle, my mother decided to remain at my side. Seriously, she refused to have a seat. She’d decided if she were footing the bill, she was electing herself my maid of honor. Having no clue as to what was happening, my father remained standing as well. Fletch kept looking at me as if to say, “What the hell?” and I could only shrug.

  We’d met the minister briefly before the ceremony and he explained how everything would shake out – the pianist would play a couple of songs while (most) people sat down, he’d give us our vows, we’d repeat them, we’d exchange rings, we’d kiss, then he’d introduce us as the married couple before we exited to one more piano song.

  Easy enough.

  By that time, we were both so stressed out by my mother’s obsessing, my father’s complaining, and my brother’s passive-aggression that we couldn’t wait for the wedding part to be over.

  We gave our vows and exchanged rings. Fletch and I smiled at each other, thrilled to be at the finish line, ready to be pronounced husband and wife after so many years. Then the minister uttered the ten most devastating words in the English language: