BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Part 10 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Fool For Your Stockings…

Grabby little minx, isn’t she? I mean would you look at that? She’s only had the collar around my neck and the ring around my… Uhm…  Uh… Finger, yeah, finger… That’s what I was going to say… So, anyway, yeah…  Ahem… Well… Back to what I was supposed to be saying, I guess…

The marriage had only been official for about two hours when the above picture was taken, and my bride was already just grabbing things right out of my hands like Kwai Chang Caine snatching pebbles from a blind Shaolin monk. (If you can believe the old TV show that task is much harder than it sounds…)

Okay, I have to be honest… I have absolutely no clue what E K is so intent on taking away from me in this photo. Well, that statement isn’t entirely accurate, because I do have at least a faint clue, but I cannot in any way be absolutely positive what it is in this particular picture. The only thing I can assure you is that it’s not candy. She only takes that away from babies. Just kidding… Man, y’all are way too serious… loosen up… please…

Let’s put it this way, since people were well aware of our  financial situation – not much cash in the bank, just bought a house,  financed our own wedding, very little furniture, yadda yadda – rather than give us relatively useless crap like Terra Cotta Taco Racks or some such as wedding presents, many of them simply gave us cash. So, I suspect money is most likely what my bride is reaching for… I probably had a couple of twenties in my hand that I had just pulled out of a card or something of that ilk. But,  you know, I can’t really blame her… I mean, after all, she knew  all too well my history with getting myself into debt, so letting me have any manner of control over the cash was cause for immediate alarm. And besides, she’s a Taurus. She absolutely loves money…

Wait… You know what? Something just dawned on me… I think maybe we did get a Terra Cotta Taco Rack… Oh hell, there it is! Right there in the middle of the picture… that yellowish box with the bow on the corner… And, it even looked exactly like the one in this other picture here on the left… (Yeah, I actually had to go out and steal the picture off the web since we no longer have our Taco Rack, therefore the closeup is not of the actual gift, although it is exactly the same kind we received.)

Yep… It’s true, we did in fact receive a Terra Cotta Taco Rack, and it came from some dear friends, Dave and Deb. The verbal caveat they added when we unwrapped the box was that it was more or less a moral imperative that a newly married couple receive at least 1 somewhat useless gift as a wedding present. Well, D and D, we actually did get some use out of it – as well as plenty of amusement given your “explanation”, so here’s another “thank you” all these years later…

But, I suppose I should be staying on topic, correct? Well, you know me better than that by now… I’m afflicted with Blog A D D, and I just can’t help it…

Unless I missed my guess, it most likely hasn’t escaped your notice that our wedding was held on Halloween. I mean after all, not only have I repeatedly tossed the date out there, I even pointed out that it was on Halloween… And, I’ve been going on and on about how it was held in our living room… In our new house…on a residential street… Need I continue scattering breadcrumbs?

I seriously doubt I do, because y’all were already on top of this one. E K and I, however… well… not so much.

Now, in our defense we were twenty-somethings without kids. The duplex where we lived prior to buying this house was on an extremely busy thoroughfare and there weren’t really a lot of kids around… On top of that, let’s go back to the twenty-somethings thing… What do folks in their early twenties do on Halloween? Stay home and give out candy? Well, unless they have kids of their own, probably not. More than likely they are misspending their young adult youth at a party in not-fit-for-all- ages costumes, with dip, party food, and ungodly amounts of alcohol. Know what I mean?

Yeah… We completely and totally forgot about the fact that kids could possibly come to the door and scream at us until we produced candy… candy that we had neglected to purchase for the occasion.

I’m sure you see where I am going with this…

About 5 minutes into the ceremony a handful of tiny voices bellowed outside the front door, “Twik o Tweep!”.

Everything came to a screeching halt as we all looked around in sudden realization. My father looked at me and said, “Where’s the candy?”

To which I replied, “We forgot.”

“You forgot?”

“Yeah, dad… We’ve been a bit preoccupied.”

Saving the day, my father stepped over to the door, swung it open, then dug into his pocket and started handing out change to the kids. I believe we only had one other interruption during the ceremony itself, but by the time the reception was rolling, kids were knocking on the door left and right…

Eventually, my dad ran out of change and so did I. We ended up offering wedding cake, ham, and veal parmigiana to the costumed beggars after that – only with their parent’s permission, of course… As I recall, we had 1 taker for a piece of cake. However, I think what I ended up finding to be the most amusing out of all of this were the numerous compliments we received. Not because we looked damn sharp, which we did… Especially E K… (Hey, I’ve been good for almost an entire blog entry now)… No, it wasn’t just our costumes… it seems we were garnering compliments on our Halloween decorations and spirit for the occasion. Apparently, several of the folks who were escorting their kids around the neighborhood thought that we were simply in costume as Bride and Groom, and that the whole reception itself was an elaborate, wedding-themed Halloween Party, complete with food and cake. Some who had been by the house earlier actually thought the wedding ceremony itself was a mocked up act to lend credibility to the facade.

Since we are on the subject of “wedding cake”, I would be remiss if I didn’t include the picture on the right. Especially since E K went to the trouble of digging out what passes for our wedding album  for me  in order that I be able to scan a few of the photos for this series of blog entries. (Remember, I said we couldn’t afford to hire a pro)…  So, what you have here is obviously a picture of us next to the wedding cake my father insisted we have… (And we definitely appreciated that more than we could ever convey).

But, unfortunately, there is an evil and insidious story behind this particular snapshot… Notice how we are both reaching? Well, you see, E Kay had been hitting the champagne pretty hard. She was starting to get a little rambunctious, and no one could seem to calm her down. A suggestion was made that we cut the cake in hopes this would bring her under control, but alas, it just fueled the fire. In this piece of historical still life, what you are witnessing is E K as she is just about to pluck the tiny little groom off the top  of the cake so that she can throw it on the floor and stomp on it. I, as you can see, am rushing to save him.

Really. She did. Danced all over his little body in her high heels. Crushed the poor bastard into a gazillion pieces… Laughing maniacally with a bizarre gleam in her eyes, and mumbling with each step, “Take that… How does that feel?  … How about this? … And this?”

Yeah, really… She did…

Seriously…

You don’t believe me?

Okay, so she didn’t. Y’all are just no fun today at all are you? Oh, and since we are apparently operating under a full disclosure policy here,  I suppose I should point out that she hadn’t really been hitting the champagne either. Yes, we had some, but not even enough to tickle our noses in the grand scheme of things… Besides which, E K isn’t a very big fan of the bubbly.

So, in reality, if memory serves, our grabby, reaching gestures in this particular photo have something to do with us trying to figure out how to go about disassembling the cake and store the top layer away in the freezer for our first anniversary, as is called for by time honored tradition.

I have a comment about said tradition: … For the record, year old freezer burned wedding cake tastes like crap…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Where’s Everybody Going?

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