BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Part 1 of 12…

What’s a nice girl like you… Doin’ married to that guy?

We’ll get to that in a minute. Right now I just have to say that I absolutely loved that bit from The Princess Bride.

“Mahwage…Mahwage is what bwings usth togethwerrrr …tooooo-dayyyyyy.”

Of course, I actually got a huge kick out of the whole movie. I even own the DVD… But, like usual, I didn’t come here to talk to you about a 1987 comedy. Well, not one that spent time on the big screen, anyway…

The reality is this: I get asked, more often than you can imagine, how it is that E K and I met up, “lell in fuhve”, and came to be hitched. I fully suspect that there is a kind of interest there born of circus sideshows. You know, the train wreck awe of seeing “Timmy the ape boy” or “Lulu the tattooed lady”. What I mean is, my guess would be what’s really going through their minds at the time is, “How in the hell did a troll like you end up with a hot babe like her?” But, in the end that is really just my own self-deprecating insecurity showing through.

I usually tell myself to ignore what my off-kilter grey matter “thinks” they are asking and simply answer the query with an abbreviated rendition of the  true and bizarre tale. You know, just enough to tell them what time it is in at least four geographical zones, but not quite enough to explain exactly how to build a clock. However there is an inherent problem with that approach, because more often than not it just ends up begging a few more questions. And then a few more… And then a few more…  Until finally, the entire story has been told, albeit in a roundabout and somewhat disjointed fashion – and as always, leaving out something or even some things entirely, simply because the discombobulated sequence has confused me and I forgot.

The truth is, the full span of our story is semi-complicated. I say semi because it isn’t really fraught with major complexities – just a few bumps, a couple of dips, a hill or two, a small mountain, and a handful of incidents that read like a script for an episode of a sitcom. All in all, no different than anyone else’s “love story”, other than the fact that it’s our story, and not their story. Know what I mean?

Because it truly is a FAQ when I am on the road, and even in email from interested fans, I had this bright idea that maybe I should blog about it.  Get the story out in the open and in a chronological, coherent fashion so that the next time I am asked I can say,  “Here’s the thumbnail sketch, but if you want the whole story, then you should read my blog…” I mean, how’s that for a segue to my website, eh? (no, not the mall cop electric two wheeler thingy – I’m talking about the  actual meaning of the word and all that).

Besides, when you get right down to it there is also that whole dying brain cell factor to consider. I mean, since I’m getting old and stuff like that, it might be  time to think about recording these important memories for posterity (or, posterior as the case may be) before I lose them for good. I mean, hey, my kid might need something to laugh at in her later years when I am in Depends^TM, drooling all over myself, and being a burden on her. (You see, I think E K will probably still be a hot babe and most likely have run off with “Ricardo the Pool Boy” at that point… I’m pretty sure I’m her picture in the attic so to speak. As the years go by, I just keep getting greyer and she keeps getting prettier…)

Well, moving on, I think we all know how bright ideas can turn out to be really intense Xenon flashes with no diffusion filter fired directly into your face, or in some cases just a really dim flashlight with almost dead batteries. It all just goes back to perspective, I suppose. At any rate, I think maybe  this particular stroke of brilliance is kind of like a whole row of  bulbs in one of those fancy, flashy signs, winking on and off in a taunting fashion. Why? Well, allow me to explain… You see, when I sat down to compose this blog, I gave it a bit of thought. First I had the initial question to answer, and then there were the often forwarded followups…

Yeah, you guessed it… Dominos began to fall, and before I knew it I realized that this “little ditty ’bout E K and Murv” was in no way something Mister Mellenkamp would be able to condense into 4 or 5 verses over  approximately 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 minutes. I mean, he’s good…real good, in my opinion. I am actually a fan… Loved Scarecrow. Great CD…

But, I really shouldn’t go off on that tangent…

You see, the thing is this story has legs – and, I mean besides those shapely gams belonging to E K herself – yet another tangent that could keep me occupied for hours, but we won’t go there in public... The simple fact of the matter is that it will take more than one song, or even music video, to do the story justice. Well… maybe if it was a music video… Hrrrmmmmm… Well, let’s just not go there either…

Seriously… it became painfully clear to me that this tale really and truly has a life of its own. One that I wasn’t going to be able to condense into one blog. Therefore, I set about the task of figuring out just what it was going to take to do it justice. Well, the answer surprised even me. All I can tell you is this – it’s way bigger than a breadbox.

And, so begins a series of blog entries. An interconnected web of how E K and I came to be a couple joined together in wedded bliss (or so they say, whoever “they” are), and moreover the insanity punctuating it all. At this stage, I have sketched outlines for 7 separate entries to tell this story. Some long, some not so long. But, in any case, 7 separate incidents throughout the process, each of which deserves its own title and place in history. Some of them are funny,  some of them are simply Hallmark Channel^TM sappy, and others are just plain “WTF” moments. But, in the end, the real point is they are all 100% true, with witnesses and everything…

And, just so we are clear, I’m not going to guarantee that the number of entries involved here won’t grow to 10, or even 12 before everything is said and done… it could happen. I am, after all, a “writer of books”, and the process kind of does that fluctuating thing at times. But, right now, I can almost assure you that there will be a minimum of 7 over and above this introduction.

So, what I would like to do now is start you off with a picture.  A picture from the first page of our wedding album (note: we did not hire a professional photographer for the basic reason that we couldn’t afford it, therefore all of our pictures in the album are candid and amateur… but, we feel that captures the moment even better than if they were truly posed.) When E K reads this blog she just might beat me about the head and shoulders for showing this pic to the world, what with it not being the most flattering of them, for either of us. But, I think it sets a tone that you will come to understand as this blog series progresses… (Note – throughout this series you will see my dear and lovely referred to as E K as I do now, as well as Kathy, her given name, and even Kat, her preferred moniker… E K has become her tongue-in-cheek persona over the years, so it is just one of those things. Suffice it to say, the three names are interchangeable and refer to the same person, just in case it seems a bit confusing…)

By way of explanation, the photo below was taken in the kitchen of our  recently purchased (recent as in 1987 when the photo was taken) “Handyman’s Fixer Upper” of a house (read between the lines here – “needs to be totally gutted and completely redone”).

That would be my young and gorgeous bride on the left, running about with a container of sugar and her mouth hanging open. The guy in orange with his back to the camera would be me.  (see, I told you it wasn’t exactly flattering.) As you can see, the house needed more than just fixing up. It needed life support, which we were both willing to provide. Unfortunately, we had just purchased the money pit less than 30 days prior to this photo being taken, and had already been spending every waking hour  when not at work, refinishing hardwood floors, patching plaster walls, rewiring, and all manner of other things involved in rehabbing a house.

Oh, and the MOST IMPORTANT point. This photo was taken a mere handful of hours prior to our actual wedding ceremony and reception, all of  which took place in our partially remodeled living room, October 31st, 1987.

But, before we can get to that, we have to back up a bit and start at the beginning… A beginning which, unfortunately was a very dark day for our country and space program. And, an even more horrible day for 7 astronauts.

January 28, 1986… The day of the Challenger disaster.

I know, I know… It seems a morbid way to start a blog series about love, romance, and marriage, but certain events in our lives are impressed upon us like technicolor still frames, individual in a sense, but interconnected by a thin thread that ties everything together and makes us whole…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Love At First Sight…

Such is the life of an author.  Sitting by the pool, sipping hurricanes and having a gorgeous assistant apply tanning lotion. We lounge and read high-brow literary endeavors penned by our colleagues, wax prophetic, say witty things for no apparent reason, then break for a leisurely dinner of lobster salad on a bed of mixed greens, all washed down with some manner of imported and unpronounceable blend of teas. We get cleaned up, put on our smoking jackets with the elbow patches, then head off (in a limo, of course) to yet another party being held for a charity no one has ever heard of, but that part really doesn’t matter because instead of investing the donations in the charity itself all of the money is being spent on caviar, crab puffs, Dom Perignon, and an open bar. I mean, after all, it’s a party, right? If you don’t give good party then no one will show up to donate money to finance the next party. But, I digress yet again… We laugh, we say more witty things in order to make other people laugh, and then we slip out to head home (in the limo, of course) and grab a few hours sleep before starting the whole process over again, plus maybe an interview with an editor from People magazine and a quick, on camera tour of our digs with someone from Entertainment Tonight. (Hopefully it would be Mary Hart… That gal has got some serious gams… but, we won’t go there…)

Ahhhh… The life of an author… It just can’t be beat…

Whoa! Did you hear that? Yeah, it was loud…What was it, you ask? Could it be the sound of the above fantasy shattering like a plate glass window?

Or, might it have been the sound of a distant yell followed by something whistling past your head then going “plooooop!” (gotta love onomatopoeia) into the pristine waters of the pool… But, we’ll get to that eventually. (I promise)

No, no, no… I’m not about to lecture you on how the majority of us authors are generally poor folks who work just as hard as everyone else (even though that’s true). Nope, I really and truly am going to go on about sitting by the pool. Well, maybe not sitting so much as standing…and walking around it…and, well, pushing the vacuum head around on the bottom of said pool with one of those extendable aluminum poles. But, like I said above, we’ll get to that.

Now, before you ask, the answer is no. I wasn’t a pool boy… Although, when the kid is having a sleepover at a friend’s house and we are all alone, EK and I sometimes play “wealthy lady and the pool boy“… JUST KIDDING. We don’t even have an inflatable kiddie pool so that one definitely is NOT in the repertoire…

Okay… so is everyone settled down? No more impure thoughts and all that? Wait…You in the back… yeah, YOU. Did you have something you wanted to share with the rest of us? Excuse me? Say that again… (sigh) No, we don’t play “wealthy lady and the gardener” either. Sheesh… Can we just get back to the topic at hand now? Thank you…

Now, before we can get to the pool – and more importantly, the loud noise – As usual I have to prattle on endlessly about some of the background. You might already have a head start on the background if you are one of those folks who reads the acknowledgments at the beginning of a book – obviously in this particular case, my books. If so, you have probably run across the honorific and name, “Sergeant Scott Ruddle, SLPD” in my litany of couldn’t have done this withouts. (Yes, in the earlier books in the series it was Officer, not Sergeant… Believe me, he points that out to me every chance he gets…)

So, in case you haven’t figured it out, this is another one of those dominos. I’m not quite sure what knocked this one over. Maybe it is just brain cells dying off and emptying memories into the ether as a final cry of defiance. Suffice it to say a line of the figurative, dotted, oblong hexahedrons went clickity-clack and we ended up here… go figure.

I also need to point out here that I really and truly do come from humble beginnings. I’ve rambled on about that fact several times before. Summers on the farm, work, values, etc.  (See the PB&J blog for instance…) However, I will admit that in my late teens things were looking up for our family, primarily because my father was frugal, had a Midas touch when it came to investing, and worked his ass off. At any rate, by the time I hit the tender age of 16 my parents had managed to purchase a very nice 5 bedroom ranch on an extra large lot, and it happened to be right around the block from the small cracker box of a home where we had been residing. The great thing is that they did this all without overextending themselves. And, as an added bonus, they sprang for a pool to be installed. (Not right away… that came a year or so later.) In any case, they managed to fit into the budget a 16X32, in-ground pool with a 3 foot shallow end, an 8.5 foot deep end, diving board, and a nice patio. It had a vermiculite-based bottom with a liner, as opposed to being poured concrete. This saved money, and it was still durable and looked just like any other pool.

I’m not flaunting this fact. Really, I’m not. But, I have to say that it was really nice. I mean, not every high school kid gets to say,  “Hey, wanna come over and take a swim?” to his friends. But, that’s another story/blog. At this point we fast forward…(yes, we’ve made it to the pool, but we have to go somewhere else for a moment…I promise, we’ll come back…)

I met Sergeant Ruddle of the SLPD a few years before he ever pinned a badge onto a uniform. Well, a real one. I have no idea if he ever played cowboys as a kid and happened to take on the role of the sheriff or some such. As to what he and his wife do in the privacy of their own home… Well, I’m not even going to speculate on that because if I did and blogged about it he’d probably have me arrested and lose me in the system for a few days. Besides, it would be like thinking about your parents…well…you know… Wayyyy too much, “eeewwwwwww!” factor there.

Anyway, I met Scott and his lovely wife when I was working as a salesperson at a mall store called VideoConcepts^TM. Yeah, I was one of those annoying guys in a sport coat who talked your arm off until you gave me your credit card and I sent you out the door with a VCR/Big Screen TV/Stereo. To give you an idea of the time frame this was happening, Beta was a big deal and VHS was a relatively new format. High-end turntables for LP’s were the thing, MP3 was two letters and a number strung together in random order, and if you wanted to carry music with you the Sony Walkman radio/cassette player (or generic equivalent) was your only choice. I even have vivid memories of us all standing around and doing the “ooohh – aaaahhh” thing when the first CD player showed up in our store (which BTW had the following functions – play, pause, stop, & skip and it cost a “reasonable” $1299.95 <– No, that is NOT a typo.)

Moving on… Scott and his bride came into the store one random day in order to look at stereos. They lived nearby and were pretty much just window shopping at the old Northwest Plaza outdoor mall. I happened to draw a bead on them first and like any jacked up salesperson I went in for the kill. I have to admit, they did NOT leave with a stereo that day. They did, however, leave with an impression, some spec sheets on amps, and a giant load of information about the VideoConcepts^TM Movie Rental Club. Fortunately, the impression they took with them was a good one (How I managed that, I will never know…)

So, anyway, when my shift came to an end, like any average, single guy in his early 20’s I beat feet out of my place of employment and went in search of beer and women. If I remember correctly, I found beer (that was easy) but I think I struck out in the women department that evening.

Scott, however, returned to the store and purchased a membership to the movie club well after I had gone. SOP at the store was to ask a customer if they had talked to a particular salesperson so the commissions could be properly assigned. For whatever reason, Scott didn’t have my business card and at that point couldn’t remember my name, so he just said yeah, “some sandy-haired hyper guy.” (yeah, my hair darkened considerably as I aged – plus, I don’t have a pool anymore…yeah, we’re getting back to the pool…) So, the long and short of it is that I got my two bucks commission (or whatever it was) and when Scott returned his initial “hey, you just joined so have a free rental on us” movie, I happened to be working so we spent some time chatting and eventually became friends.

The process by which our actual friendship proper came about is a bizarre and psyche damaging history… And, there is plenty of blog fodder in there. Believe me. Maybe we’ll get into that at another time. Depends on the dominos…

Now, about that pool… (see, I told you we’d get there…well, almost)

At this stage in my life my parents had divorced, my sister was living with my mother, and I was renting half of that 5-bedroom ranch from my father. The way it was laid out, there were basically two wings each with its own bathroom, and the kitchen & living room nestled in between. There was even a door separating the wings that could be shut. So, it was kind of a bachelor’s paradise in a way. My dad traveled quite a bit when he wasn’t working, so I pretty much had the place to myself, and the rent was reasonable. It beat the hell out of a tiny little apartment with a huge price tag, even if it did still carry the stigma of “What?! You still live with your dad?” attached. The stigma, however, quickly faded whenever friends – or girlfriends – would see the place and realize that even when my dad WAS home, he was off in his own end of the house and you rarely, if ever, saw him.

Now, as a part of my rent, I had certain duties. In retrospect, it was much like owning a home. Mow the lawn, do this, do that, and other stuff. Among those duties were the care and maintenance, as well as the opening and closing, of the swimming pool. If you have ever “opened” a pool in the spring or “closed” one in the fall, you know how much work this can be. (I will spare you a complete rundown of the details…)

The year was… Well… I dunno what the year was… suffice it to say it was a long time ago. I took a weeks vacation during the late spring/early summer in order to open the pool. Scott, having become one of my best friends – he was even my best man when EK and I married, but that came years later – took a week of his own vacation to come over and help me. Okay, so here’s the thing. Scott and I are the same age. He’s like 2 months older than me, so not much difference there…

Think about this… You have two guys in their early twenties, on vacation, and opening a swimming pool. Things are going to happen… Yes, there was much BBQ’ing involved while working. I mean, why not? We had to eat, right? But, we still worked our tails off. No kidding. We just found a way to make the work fun… But, think harder about the situation… A couple of twenty-something guys, a swimming pool, warm early summer day, and no worries… Yeah, exactly… Even more insidious than the BBQ’ing was the proliferation of fermented and hopped malt beverages served cold from a convenient twelve-ounce aluminum container with a small hole in the top.

Beer. That sparkling elixir… The potion that makes all things…well, blurry and uneven, but I digress…

Now, with all this work to do, we managed to go through quite a bit of beer. And, as will happen, we would, on occasion, run out. One day, right about the end of the week, we did. Run out, that is. We had run out before, but this particular day we had a nice London broil cooking on the grill, the pool truly was pristine and ready for swimming, and Scott’s wife was going to be over as soon as she got off work. We were going to kick back and enjoy the fruits of our labors for a change… But, we were going to need more beer. Scott, in his infinite wisdom, went to buy some more.

Now, before you get all excited, he wasn’t drunk. We were both sober at the time, which is what makes what happened next even more bizarre…

Yeah… Now we are back to the noise (see, told ya’…)

I was putting the finishing touches on the pool and Scott had been gone maybe 10 minutes at the most (there was a liquor store three blocks up the street). I hear this distant voice calling…

“Mmmmmeeeeeerrrrrrrppppppp!” (that’s what Scott and his wife called me…Seems I “looked like a Merp” to them. Whatever the hell a Merp looks like.)

I cocked my head to the side and listened. Silence.

Then again, “Mmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeerrrrrrrppppppp! INCOMING!”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this until the noise met my ears…It was kind of a Doppler distorted whistling whoosh-pfffffffffbbbbbbbttttttt type sound, followed very closely by a loud KER-PLOOOOOOOMMMMMMPPPPFFF! This racket which brought up the rear of the whole cacophony was joined by the physical action of water splashing up out of the pool and all over me. This, of course, was followed by my reaction, which took the form of extreme surprise and me nearly falling into the pool as I attempted to jump out of my skin, run around the yard, then climb back into the aforementioned shed epidermis.

Before I could even begin to speculate as to the planetary origin of the meteorite that had just crashed to earth before my eyes, another came whistling past my head and repeated the loud KER-PLOOOOOOOMMMMMMPPPPFFF! and splash. This time, while not entirely prepared, I was a bit less surprised. Instead of trying to climb out of my skin, I simply turned around three times while inside it, then spent a minute or two adjusting my bellybutton back where it belonged due to the twisting. (I never have managed to get that thing centered correctly since)…

The Whistle filled my ears one more time, but instead of being followed by KER-PLOOOOOOOMMMMMMPPPPFFF! it was punctuated by a horrendous sounding KRUNCH-CLATTER-CRASH-GRONKKKKKK-Hisssssssssssssss. This was combined with an object cartwheeling backwards (relative to its earlier trajectory) through the air as it expelled some manner of liquid propellant in a violent spray. A split second later it plummeted into the water and continued to spew and bubble.

A couple of short minutes passed by with nothing else falling from the sky.  As I stood watching a pair of 12 ounce cans bobbing up and down in the pool, while another slowly worked its way toward the bottom, I heard a deep chuckle coming from the sliding doors leading out to the patio.

You see – and I’m sure you figured this out already – it seems Scott had been standing in the middle of the street in front of my house, lobbing full beers over it to test his “marksmanship”.

“So, did I hit the pool, white man?” Scott finally called from the doorway. (yeah, just like Ben Storm.)

At that point all I could think of to say is, “I think we’d better add some more chlorine or something.”

Yeah, and now he’s a cop.  Welcome to my world.

More to come…

Murv