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14th Feb 09
M. R. SellarsPart 7 of 12
Continued From: Mahwage: Mobile Bachelor Party…
… Morning arrived way too damn early that particular October 31st. I mean, I know morning pretty much always arrives early, which is part of its job description as “morning” after all. But on that one Saturday in 1987, I am firmly convinced that it arrived several hours ahead of its regular schedule. Hangover aside, I’m telling you, someone was screwing with the fabric of time, probably just to f*ck with me personally…
You just watch… Some physicist will eventually figure out that when they first switched on that new Large Hadron Collider, a minuscule temporal ripple shot backward through the space-time continuum and completely f*cked up the clocks on October 31st, 1987. Mark my words, it’ll come out someday…
For the record, I really believe this. Well… Not really… But you have to admit it sounds good…
But, let’s move on…
Yeah, I was hung over. I was hung over like nobody’s business. In fact, I have not been that hung over again since that day, nor do I believe I was ever that hung over prior to that day. I was H U N G O V E R with a capital everything… Shoot me now. End my misery. Oh toilet bowl, you are my only friend… Whatever God is up there listening to me, I promise I’ll never do it again… Yeah. That hung over.
And E K had absolutely no sympathy for me whatsoever… The Bitch!
Now I suddenly knew what all those people at ComputerTrend were talking about. My bride-to-be was just plain heartless…
Okay, again, not really. And I’m just joking about the “bitch” thing… Really… I am. Just don’t tell her I said it, okay? Good… Now, the truth is, looking back on the situation I can certainly understand her lack of sympathy… And, in reality I could even understand it back then too, even as I hugged the porcelain and told it all about my friend Ralph… I mean, after all, I had done it to myself… But, of course, that didn’t make me whine any less…
And then to make matters worse, (as if they weren’t bad enough already), there were these things called Belly Bombers churning around in my gut… We will just skip any details surrounding my ingesting of those evil little burgers, (which, to this day, I still ingest), or more accurately my inevitable expulsion thereof… Suffice it to say, the throne room was my kingdom for quite some time that morning, and much air freshener was sprayed from flowery painted aerosol cans…
Once I managed to get myself cleaned up and my eyeballs moved back to the proper side of my face, (although they still weren’t actually working properly, and kind of had the whole overused teabag sort of feeling for the rest of the day,) I set about helping the lovely, though miffed, E K set things up for the evening. Of course, one of my duties was cooking, so I managed to stay out of her way some of the time by doing just that. I had prepared the sauce for the veal parmigiana a couple of days ahead of time, the ham was already cooked, and my soon-to-be mother-in-law was handling the apple-rice curry, so most of the prep work had been done… It really just came down to a bit of frying, heating, assembling, and arranging in the chafing dishes.
Sometime around early afternoon, E K was going through her mental checklist to make sure we hadn’t missed anything too important in the grand scheme of the evening. As she rattled things off, I answered check, yo, yeah, or whatever response was warranted for each thing. Eventually she came to an item for which I had no answer, therefore I remained silent…
After a handful of heartbeats, assuming I had not heard her, she asked again, “Your suit?”
And again, I remained silent…
Assuming I had gone temporarily deaf, my soon-to-be-wife raised her voice and queried once more, “Murv? What about your suit?”
Finally, after a bit more awkward silence, I cleared my throat, hemmed and hawed, then replied, “Uhm… I have sport coats. I don’t have a suit.”
At this juncture E K was looking at me like I was a puppy who had just left a big piddle puddle on the carpet for the 37 thousandth time. I wasn’t quite sure what she was going to rub my nose in, but I could clearly see that it was coming.
“You don’t have a suit?” she asked.
“Uhm… No,” I replied.
“We’re getting married in a few hours. What were you planning to wear?”
“Uhm… I dunno.”
I knew that was the wrong answer. Hell, most of the time even I won’t accept it as a valid answer unless I really and truly believe the “answerer” doesn’t actually know, in which case I generally don’t even bother to ask in the first place. E K didn’t want to accept it either, but by this point she knew that her soon-to-be-husband was pretty much a hopeless case, at least in his present condition.
“Okay, come on,” she announced in a huff as she snatched up her keys and purse, then all but took me by the hand and led me out the door.
Now, at this point in the story, I have a question for all of you… Were any of you folks aware that unless you spend right around enough to buy a compact car, it is impossible to purchase a suit and have it altered the same day? You were? Well, it came as a shock to me. I figured what with all those sewing machines and stuff they could at least do a nip here and a tuck there… You know, just enough to make it presentable for the evening.
Well obviously, such services were nowhere within our budget. And, what with me having Basset Hound legs and Barney Rubble arms, the suits we found on the rack were definitely going to need a bit of a touch up. We finally found something on sale, at a decent price, that E K approved after doing the reverse Pretty Woman scenario with me. (Once again, it is my contention that the scriptwriters had to have been in St. Louis and witnessed the Dillard’s shopping spree, because we did this long before the movie…)
But, since I’m not going to get any royalties, I suppose I should move on… But, you know, I’m just sayin’… Yeah, okay… I know… Digressing again… Back to the story…
So, with new suit in hand, even though the pant legs and arms of the jacket were 49 feet long, we raced back home. The wedding was scheduled to take place right there in our living room at 6 PM. At this point, we were only a scant few hours from achieving critical mass… But, while I now had something to wear, my new fancy duds were pretty much going to make me look like Tom Hanks, (still not speaking to him, by the way,) from the end of Big. (given that said movie didn’t hit the screen until 1988, this is yet another flick that obviously stole a scenario from my life… Damn, I should be wealthy off the residuals by this point…)
Back to the story again…
Anyhow, in my way of thinking, there was no real reason to worry about my oversized Sunday go to meetin’ suit. Why? Because E K happens to be an A1 seamstress, and I knew it. In fact, she used to make all her own clothes and had even considered making her wedding dress, had there been enough time between all the rehabbing, cleaning, running around, working, cooking, etc… (obviously there wasn’t… enough time, that is… hence the whole Kmart® dress thing… but like I said, she was flat out gorgeous anyway, off the rack Kmart® togs or not…)
But, as we well know, my way of thinking isn’t always on the same page as the rest of the world’s, and in particular, E K’s… You see, I don’t sew. I mean, I can darn a sock, but when I once tried to really, really sew something clothing wise with actual sleeves and such, it pretty much came out as a misshapen pile of fabric with random threads hanging all over it. Therefore, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was no time to actually hem the pants, tack up the jacket’s sleeves, etc.
Of course, my dear E K knew this, and simply patted me on the head with a sad look of pity in her eyes. Still, we had a wedding on the near horizon, so she continued on undaunted without threading a single needle. She went to the toolbox, pulled out a roll of double stick tape, warmed up the iron so she could make a few creases, and there you go… Taped and tailored… Just like downtown.
And, you know what? That suit was still hemmed and altered with double stick tape when I finally gave it away to Goodwill, and it looked just fine. (Yeah, I finally gave it away, very recently, in fact. Yes, there was some sentimental attachment there, but it was no longer in style and I would never fit into it again, no matter what. I can only lose just so much weight…)
So… there we were. I had a suit, E K had a dress, the food was just about done, and we even had some fancy luminaries E K had made to line the sidewalk and porch. All systems were go, people would be arriving soon, and the clock was ticking as it counted down to the climactic zero-hour…
You know, I wonder if those wingnuts over at “24” stole that one from me too…
More to come…
Murv
… NEXT: Mahwage: Clink! Clank! Oh, Murv!
