BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Part 11 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Trick Or Treat!

Okay… So you got me to admit that E K did not actually stomp on the little groom guy from the cake topper… I suppose y’all are real proud of yourselves now, eh? Well, here’s the thing: I’m willing to bet you she thought about it,  really, really hard. As a matter of fact, I’m sure she did.

How can I say that, you ask? Easy, she’s evil. (E K … Evil Kat… Get it? Of course you do…)

So, there you go, case closed, she’s just plain inherently evil. However, if that isn’t enough  to convince you there is also the fact that I happen to know she  really likes to stomp on things… I mean, you should see this woman with an aluminum can that’s destined for the recycle bin… she gets all giggly and stuff… Then all of a sudden it’s just flat out metal carnage, I tell you! (Get it, flat out… Yeah… Okay… Well, I thought it was funny…)

Yeah, yeah, I know… I’ve said all manner of wonderful things in this blog series to purposely dispel any myths and/or rumors about the evil redhead, but I have to do that. It’s all in the script she wrote for me and if I don’t say all these nice things about her then she’ll beat me and lock me in a closet. Really… Seriously…  She will…

I’ve just lost all credibility with you folks, haven’t I?

Well… Maybe I can get some of it back.

How, you ask? (You know, y’all ask a lot of questions)… Well, I’ll tell you. It  just so happens that I have photographic evidence of E Kay’s evilness, complete with full color depictions of cruelty, betrayal, calculated deception, and no inkling whatsoever of remorse for her actions. Yes, for real. Undoctored, unfettered, pure photographic evidence that E K is as evil as they come…

Allow me to set the stage for you…

Among those time honored traditions that go hand in hand with weddings and wedding receptions, is the bride and groom feeding the cake to one another, all cutesy woodja-woodja and the like. In that same vein there is also the “smear the cake all over your new spouse’s face” collateral tradition. I have no idea who started that particular subset of the cake thing, but he or she needs to be shot. Just my opinion, but hey…my blog, my opinion. Kinda works…

Anyway, E K and I had ourselves a talk about this. In fact, E K is the very one who brought it up. (I should have known right then and there that something was amiss)… At any rate, one day as we were working on the wedding plans she looked at me imploringly with those big blue eyes and said, “Look, Murv, let’s make a deal with one another right here and now — When it comes time to cut the cake and all that, I promise I won’t smear you in the face with it, if you promise you won’t smear me in the face. Deal?”

Well, how could I resist? She was just so damned cute and convincing and all that jazz. Besides, I really and truly wasn’t all that skippy about the prospect of having cake plastered throughout my beard for several hours, so this seemed like  the perfect solution to me. Therefore, I did the only thing I could possibly do under the circumstances. I responded in earnest, “Yeah, honey.  No problem at all. I’d say you’ve got yourself a deal. I promise to not smear any cake on your face.”

Now, being from the south I knew better. And, I knew I knew better.  In keeping with the theme of things I knew, I also knew in my heart, and in my head, that I should have spit in my palm, made her spit in hers, and had a handshake on the deal right then and there, but I didn’t. Instead, I trusted my soon-to-be-wife without hesitation. Of course, even the handshake probably wouldn’t have mattered, what with her being a Yankee and all… It stands to reason with all that northern blood she wouldn’t have honored a spit promise anyway, so that would have only made the situation worse. I mean, if  she had broken a spit promise of all things, then she just would have gone from being a Yankee to being a Damn Yankee… Obviously this would have presented a major problem, because while it’s a forgivable offense to be married to a Yankee, (after all, they can’t help it they were born in a foreign country,) marrying a Damn Yankee… Well, that’ll just get you hanged.

However, I promised you evidence and so here it is. I give you Exhibit A. (left)… Notice how I am placing the cake carefully into her mouth. However, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to be able to see that her aim is way off. My mouth has never been on the side of my face and she knows that.  No… she was purposely assaulting me with the “cake smear”. If you look closely at my expression, posture, and the position of my other hand, you can also plainly see that the photo caught me right in the middle of a serious, “WTF?! You promised!” moment.

Now, had it merely been a case of poor aim on her part, she wouldn’t have continued to grind the icing into my beard, as evidenced in the next photo, which we shall label Exhibit B.

Unfortunately, what you are unable to see from this particular photo, is her satisfied grin. There were witnesses… But, I think she might have paid them off… Now I ask you… Evil or no?

What? Sheesh… I really don’t see why everyone is taking her side in all of this… I mean, yeah, I do get that she was merely establishing dominance in the relationship so that I would know who was really in control,  but hey, she promised… (One of these days I’m going to find out exactly what it was she had crossed when she made that promise, because I’m pretty sure her hands were in plain sight at the time…)

So, back to the title of this entry. “Where’s everybody going?” refers back to what I mentioned in the Fool For Your Stockings chapter of this series,  (Feb 22, 2009), when I spoke briefly about us hitting the sack in the evening as opposed to the very late night, or wee hours of the morning. I told you we’d get to it, and now here we are.

You see, soon after the smearing of the cake, someone must have mistaken the purely evil gesture as playfulness and then passed the word that E K was feeling frisky or something. I surmised this because it wasn’t long before a mass exodus began. People started patting us on the back, congratulating us just one more time, hugging and kissing us, then winking as they said their goodbyes. A couple of them even flat out mentioned to us that they were clearing out so E K and I could have… Ahem… “Alone time”…

WTF? E K and I had already been living together “in sin” for a year. Yeah, we’d been sinning left and right. So, it’s not like we had gone through this whole process in order to get a “free bedroom pass” or something. Truth is we already had ourselves a “big ol’ bag o’ tokens” for adult activities and we’d been spending them whenever we had a chance. Now, please understand, it’s not that we weren’t interested in visiting the “grown up amusement park” on a regular basis, or even having a go at some of the “rides” we hadn’t yet enjoyed, but on that particular night we wanted to have a party. We had spent every bit of money we could scrape together on food, a keg of beer, and fixing the place up enough to be able to have a shindig. We had worked hard to make this happen. We wanted to share and enjoy it with our friends. We could jump on the “tilt-a-whirl” tomorrow… Hell, two or three times if we felt like it.

However, no matter what we said, folks would just give us the “wink wink nudge nudge” and be on their way. By 10:30 PM, my hot and sexy bride and I were standing in the middle of our living room, just us, the cats, and no one else, surrounded by empty chairs and a whole mountain of food. Now, I know 10:30 PM sounds like night and not evening as I had said… These days, at my somewhat more advanced age, yeah, I’d call it night too. But, back then at the wet behind the ears twenty-something stage, when we were immortal and could drink a hell of a lot more, 10:30 PM was merely evening… Night was still on its way and wouldn’t be arriving for at least another half hour or so…

But, yeah, I know, that’s all just a matter of semantics… You say tomato, I say roundish red thing that goes on my sammich… Still, 10:30 PM? That’s just too damn early to pack it in when you have the youth combined with the level of party fixin’s available that we did…

So… We took one last look around and proceeded to do the only thing we could do. We put everything away, filling the refrigerator to the gills in the process, locked the doors, closed the windows, slipped out of our Sunday go to meetin’ clothes, went into the bedroom and… Passed out from sheer exhaustion.

Yeah. Sleep. That was it. No roller coaster, log flume, bumper cars, scrambler, or even a quick spin on the merry-go-round… Nothing… But, it was all good… If were weren’t going to have anyone staying to party with us, then what the hell… We’d just catch up on those 287 1/2 hours of sleep we’d managed to miss getting ready for this whole affair.

E K could tie me up and beat me later when we’d both be awake enough to enjo… Er… Uhm… Never mind.

But, honestly, in retrospect we both desperately needed the rest. Besides, if you recall, E K had lost the feeling in her legs and we needed to get her out of those rubber bands…

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the serendipitous, (depending on your perspective,) benefits of everyone bugging out so early… And, I’m not just talking about the sleep.

We ended up with almost an entire keg of beer to ourselves… Not a quarter barrel, mind you, we had ordered a half-barrel. And it was the good stuff… Well, as good as commercial big-brewery beer can be and this was in the days before Microbreweries became truly popular. Still, before everything was said and done, I was filling gallon jugs 3/4 full and putting them in the chest freezer downstairs so I could use the flat brew to cook with at a later date, while at the same time I was staying tanked the whole day. We washed our hair with it. We gave it to the neighbors. We invited folks in off the street to have a beer. All I knew was that we’d paid for it, so that metal barrel wasn’t going back until it was floating…

I was never so glad to return a keg in all my life… Really.

On top of the beer-en-dipity there was also food-en-dipity… I didn’t have to cook for a week and a half. We just took stuff out of the freezer and ran it through the microwave. Ham sandwiches, apple-rice curry, veal parmigiana… Good thing too, because with all that extra beer I was sucking down, I was just too damn drunk to cook.

And so we had a relatively anti-climactic end to one of the truly climactic points in our lives… We spent our honeymoon here in town, shopping for furniture with the money we’d earned for getting married, (what a racket… I’d be willing to do it once or twice a year if I thought folks would keep forking over the cash), and just generally hanging out.

But, before I can formally end this proverbial stroll along memory lane, we still have one more little pothole to investigate… And, to do that, we have to get back to the subject of food…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Whores Duh-Voars…

Part 3 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Love At First Sight…

When last we left our intrepid blogger, he had fallen hard for an evil femme fatale, and was perilously close to being…

Oh, sorry… I sometimes have a flair for the dramatic and all… Part of that whole writer thing…So anyway, where was I? Oh yes…

And there I was… Hopelessly – and secretly – in love with this woman everyone had told me would chew me up, spit me out, and then grind her heels into my corpse just for spite while cackling madly and spitting on me for good measure –  All for no other reason than she was just that kind of psychobitch. And, to add even more insult to injury,  she would also cut out my liver and kidneys with a rusty letter opener just so she could cook them up and feed them to her cats.

These folks really and truly did have a bizarre view of this woman.

To this day, I’m still not entirely sure what she did to make these people, especially the men, be so damned afraid of her. All I can say is that if  it was because she did in fact tap-dance on someone’s head around there, (figuratively or literally, either one), that person most assuredly deserved it. Believe me, I worked with them and I had my own daydream moments about some of these individuals falling off a cliff,  simply disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle, or some other such demise, and not all of them were as bloodless as those I listed…

Besides, look at that picture… How could anyone think such horrible things about this woman? Yeah, okay, well admittedly there is a bit of a “dominatrixish” gleam in her eyes… Well, more than a bit, actually…more like a whole bunch… But, that’s okay.  I’ll admit to being afflicted with Joss Whedon Syndrome (JWS), meaning I happen to love strong female archetypes. However, some folks – men and women alike – find strong women intimidating, so maybe that was their issue. (shrug). Or, they could have just been assholes like I said at the outset, which is probably the more likely explanation in my opinion…

But rather than go there, let’s move on. Actually, this is the point where we sort of hit the Fast Forward / Scan button on the story. All manner of things happened in the weeks that followed, but they are a bit of a drudgery in many respects and a bit too personal to blog about in others. So, in order to get from point A to point B, I’ll toss in an abbreviated sort of synopsis here.

Begin story compression:

Due to an oversight, it seemed that a tech position actually was open with the company, but had not been advertised, nor had the management of the store responsible for doing the hiring been told. This was rectified when the district manager came through town for a visit. Of course, I waved my flag and upon proving my claim was immediately transferred to the tech center (my heart went pitter-pat for more than one reason at this point, let me tell you)… Unfortunately, the district manager didn’t consult E K about this change to her staff and since she was the “tech management” she wasn’t terribly happy about that fact. Soooo, I was pretty much viewed as an enemy my first couple of weeks there. In fact, I was even interrogated by her with condescending questions like, “Do you know how to do x y z?” Invariably, x y z was always something ridiculously simple,to me, at least, and something I had been doing for 10 years longer than anyone else on staff: things like soldering components, swapping motherboards, aligning disk drives, etc… Rather than take true offense, I would simply answer in the affirmative then set about proving myself by completing the task perfectly and in record time. (No, I’m not bragging here… just telling it like it was. You see, while I had years of experience, Kathy, Erin, and Phil, all three, were recent graduates of the electronics program from the local community college. Although they had degrees not a one of them had even a full year under their belt in the real world of electronics repair.  The truth was they were  all green enough to stick in the ground and sprout roots. I was a veteran tech, and to a large degree found this whole scenario amusing beyond belief…)

Of course, Kathy’s condescension really didn’t matter at that point because I had no other choice but to worship her from afar anyway, because you see, it turned out she was married. My heart sank upon that discovery, however, I contented myself with spending 8 hours out of each workday in the same zip code with her and reveled in the opportunities I had to converse with her too. What I didn’t realize at the time was that her marriage was already dashed upon the rocky shores, and that for all intents and purposes it was really all over except the paperwork.

Eventually I endeared myself to my co-workers. They came to realize I had experience in the field and developed a true respect for my skills as a tech, so it wasn’t unusual for me to fix something, then find whatever one of the other techs had been working on positioned on my desk so that I could fix it too. I became the go to guy… Kathy, being the manager, would spend most of her time doing paperwork, but did check up on us regularly… That was always interesting, because trust me, this young lady made it very hard to concentrate when “inspection time” rolled around. You see, she would observe from a close vantage point… and I mean close. More than enough to be ah… um… shall we say… a distraction. This often left me parked at my bench for a bit after she returned to her office, whether I had completed the repair or not. (yeah, I know, that was just the lust talking… but hey, love and lust go hand in hand at times…)

Still, I continued to work there and secretly worship her. I didn’t have a shrine in my home or anything like that, nor did I stalk her. I’m not insane… Well, at least I wasn’t back then… But, I did think about her quite a bit, and I’m willing to admit I allowed my imagination to run wild on several occasions. But that is for me to know and you to, well… not know.

Speaking of imagination running wild, in one of those “what was happening on this day in history” sort of veins, Wildest Dreams by The Moody Blues was in the Top 20 on the airwaves at that time… Kathy despised it, primarily because it was overplayed. Me, I reveled in it, but for reasons not yet revealed to her. Every time it came on she would wonder aloud why I liked it so much. I just smiled and went about my business of daydreaming…

Then, a fateful day came… The VP of ComputerTrend showed up at the tech center. Kathy happened to be out of the office on a service call, and at this particular juncture Erin and Phil had both been laid off. It was just E K and me handling the repairs. Well, we had seen the writing on the wall when the layoffs happened, so I wasn’t surprised when the VP announced that the whole company had filed Chapter 13, was going under, see ya’ later, good luck, now get the f*ck out… Having read the earlier writing, I had already been trolling for another job and luck had been on my side for some odd reason. Within a week I was again gainfully employed, this time as the service manager for a new computer company opening up in the Brentwood area of the county. One of my first acts as the service manager was to hire a staff. I called Kathy immediately and offered her a job as a technician. She accepted and now the tables had turned. She was no longer my boss, I was hers… or so I thought.

End story compression…

Yeah, no kidding… believe it or not, that was abbreviated…

It was while working with T C Service (Total Computer Service, in it’s first incarnation as a side company to a T C B C computer store… I mention this only because I believe T C Service still exists, but I know for a fact it was sold shortly after I quit, and that was less than a year after I started… yeah, another story entirely)… Anyway, it was while working overtime one night for T C Service that Kathy finally announced to me that her marriage was all but done, and would be done soon enough if all went well with paperwork, lawyers and such, and that she had developed more than a passing interest in taking our friendship beyond the platonic stage. We were the only two souls in the place that evening, and all was quiet when she rolled her chair over to my desk and offered up this bit of news in a soft, mellifluous tone.

Yes… Once again my knees were like Jello and my feet like wet bags of cement, even though I was sitting down at the time. I’m surprised my heart didn’t explode straight out of my chest, especially when she leaned forward and proceeded to give me a thorough tonsil examination to validate her statement. But, before you get the wrong idea, no clothes flew off, and no one found a bra or a sock hanging from a monitor or workbench the next day.  It  literally didn’t go any farther than a few passionate kisses… well, not for a while anyway.

Since her marriage was in the process of dissolution, (a process that took longer than expected as you will discover in a later installment), we began to date. At this particular juncture she still didn’t know all that much about my financial situation. Probably because I wasn’t one to discuss this sort of thing. I suppose it was just how I was brought up. Your business is your business and other people’s business is their business, so keep it that way.  Suffice it to say, I was still deep in debt, behind in my payments, and my salary still wasn’t what it had once been: meaning, I was falling farther and farther behind money-wise.

However, I felt a deep need to impress this woman. In all honesty I saw this as a last chance. You see, I had been in love once before and that particular young woman had broken my heart. Yeah, that happens to guys too. In fact, to quote Steve Martin from Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, “All dames are alike: they reach down your throat and they can grab your heart, pull it out and they throw it on the floor, step on it with their high heels, spit on it, shove it in the oven and cook the shit out of it. Then they slice it into little pieces, slam it on a hunk of toast, and serve it to you and then expect you to say, ‘Thanks, honey, it was delicious.'”

That was pretty much what happened to me on the first go around, and it was exactly what I feared would happen with E K if I allowed her to know how I truly felt. But I forced myself to take the chance… And like I said, I was going to do whatever it took to impress her, wine her, dine her, and capture her heart so that there wouldn’t be a repeat of what I’d dealt with before. Well, I couldn’t really afford to wine and dine her. I couldn’t afford to do the things for her I felt she deserved. I simply didn’t have the money.

But, I did have plastic, and she didn’t know that I didn’t have the money to back it up…

So, one Saturday, bright and early I picked her up. We had already planned to spend the day together, but hadn’t really made any actual “concrete plans” about what we would be doing, other than simply hanging out with one another. At least, that is what she thought. You see, I had a plan and it was definitely being set into motion… I had heard her mention a few days before that she really wanted to get her hair trimmed and spiral permed, so I decided if that was what she wanted, then that was what she would have.  I  drove us to the mall and waltzed her into a local salon, arranged an appointment, then waited patiently as they pampered her and spent a couple of hours on her coif. Once finished, I walked her over to the nearby Dillard’s where we did our own version of a scene from Pretty Woman, (well in advance of the actual movie I might add), and eventually walked out with a gorgeous red dress. Of course, this also meant a trip to the hosiery store around the corner for stockings, a side trip to Frederick’s for pretty underthings, and was rounded out by a visit to a shoe store as well: because what good is a new dress without new shoes to match, correct? And then that evening we went to a very nice, very expensive dinner… (Yes,  the photo above of E K assuming a Marlene Dietrich-esque pose was taken that evening, and she is wearing the very ensemble I just described… as  she also is in the come hither-esque photo at the top…)

I think I ended up dropping better than 500  bucks that day. Money I didn’t have, and couldn’t afford to rack up on my credit cards. But, when all was said and done Kathy felt like a princess and that was what I wanted for her. Of course, it was a gamble that nearly backfired when she found out how far in debt I was, and that I was struggling to dig myself out, but that I had spent all that money anyway (she is a very frugal individual)… Fortunately, luck was somehow on my side and she didn’t immediately dump me… She did, however take a pair of scissors hold of the plastic in my wallet lest I be tempted to repeat my silly behavior…

On a musical note yet again, by now there was another song riding the airwaves in the top echelon of hits. This time, my future bride actually liked it, overplayed as it was. I did too. Pete Cetera, undisputed master of the make out song and former front man for Chicago, was crooning “Glory of Love“, the theme from Karate Kid II which was one of the hot movies that summer. As sappy and sentimental as it sounds, then and now, that tune became the proverbial “our song” that set a tone for our future.

(On a side note – since I often refer to E K as the evil redhead, I should point out that indoor pictures rarely showed the hidden auburn in her hair.  As you can see above it simply appears brown… These days, however, her deeper red comes from the  “Clairol Spell” which I cast upon her tresses, by her request, at 6 week intervals.  And, just so you know, I have her permission to reveal that fact.)

So, anyway…

After a few months things at T C Service were taking a turn for the not so good. Mainly, the owner wasn’t on the same page as the rest of us who were living in the real world. So, serendipitously, E K and I became aware of a computer cabling company that was looking to get into the computer repair business as well. They had the money to back it, they just needed someone with the know how to run it.  We had a meeting with them and within weeks we said our goodbye’s to the craziness at T C Service and launched, MicroFix, Inc…

About this time, Kathy and I had just rented one side of a duplex here in the burbs in the shadow of an old radar tower known to locals as, “the golf ball,” and finally moved in together.  Just us, her three cats, and some secondhand furniture. Yeah, cohabitation.  The whole living in sin thing… But, by the same token, the location of MicroFix happened to be very close by, which made for a quick trip to and from work. I know, lame excuse… especially since we shared a bed, not just an apartment…

So, back to the cohabitation thing… Well, there were the obvious fringe benefits. Things like being able to see one another without burning any gas, or driving home late at night and getting only a couple of hours of sleep before having to get up and go to work again… Life was good.

It was sometime within those first few months dwelling in that duplex that I took her hands in mine and asked a very serious question…

More to come…

Murv

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