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 5 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: So I Have This Idea…

…And I’m, gonna get maie air air reed…

Okay, old song reference, I know. I’ll stop singing now.

Unfortunately, Tom Hanks wasn’t available for my bachelor party… He was busy building his career as I was preparing to embark upon this odyssey.  But, that really didn’t matter. Given that at that point in history we weren’t on speaking terms – and we aren’t right now either, for that matter ,(probably because we’ve never met), I figured I’d just find someone else to arrange the entertainment.

But, let me back up a second…

In the last blog, E K finally said yes to the big question. While you would think that I would have jumped up and run around the room screaming, “She said YES! She said YES! WooHoo, she said YES!” – a very logical assumption given the circumstances, mind you – the reality is, I didn’t. Truth be told, it took something on the order of 30 seconds, maybe even a full minute for it to sink in that she had given me an answer that was vastly different, and diametrically opposed to the one she had been giving me to date.

Now I had a problem. No ring. Yeah, back when I had originally broached the subject I didn’t have one either… I had just been winging it. Given the answers I had been getting, I hadn’t been in a hurry to go purchase one either… Fortunately, my frugal live-in girlfriend turned fiancee didn’t mind. I think that just for grins we ended up using a cable tie, or piece of string, or something innocuous that was laying around the shop at the time. I doubt she even has it anymore because she’s nowhere near as sentimental as me, but watch her read this blog and prove me wrong. If she does, I’ll be sure to let everyone know…

(Just as an aside, for the record, a few years later when things were no longer so tight, I saw to it that she received a full blown engagement/wedding set with as much gold and as many sparkly rocks as I could manage in a tasteful ring…)

At any rate, now a snowball began rolling downhill, and it just kept growing…

For one thing, we made arrangements to take E K’s parents to dinner, whereupon I asked her father if it would be okay for me to marry his daughter. Yeah, I know, old fashioned, but even though it seemed to surprise him I think he appreciated the gesture.

Then, we were in the middle of buying the house, which as noted in the first of this blog series, was a fixer-upper from hell. I suppose we were just in such a hurry to get out of the duplex – not because it was a bad place, mind you. Not at all. In fact, it was actually very nice, and the landlord was a great guy too. You see, it’s just that the lease had a “verbal-handshake” rider saying no pets.

I can see the question marks now… Yeah, Kathy’s cats… explain that one, Murv…

Well, you see, we had signed the lease on the duplex and were in the middle of shaking hands when the landlord said, “Oh, I forgot to ask, you don’t have any pets do you? Because, they aren’t allowed…”

At this point, E K and I simply looked at one another then turned to him and lied through our teeth. We had been looking for an apartment for what seemed like forever, and this was the first one in our price range that hadn’t rejected our application due to my rocky credit history and hers as well – you see, she wasn’t delinquent on anything, but having been married and at that point not officially divorced just yet, her name was tied to her ex-husband’s debts, which made it look like she owed way too much to way too many folks to be able to afford an apartment.

So, re-acquiring the earlier thread – we bought ourselves a fixer upper. Being twenty-somethings, giddy in love, and in a hurry to get out of an apartment before we had to sign another year long lease, we probably didn’t inspect things quite as closely as we should – and, by the same token, probably paid far more for the house than it was worth, which is most likely why they accepted our offer immediately with no qualms whatsoever… But, oh well, live and learn…

Here’s the thing – we had set the date for our wedding to be October 31. Halloween. Samhain. Not the traditional sort of date, but hey, given that on that night the veil between the worlds is said to be at its thinnest, relatives and friends who had already gone over to the other side (i.e. croaked) would find it much easier to attend… Hey, works for me.

At this point, all manner of things were in motion – for one, we were beginning to wonder if we were going to have to postpone the wedding for legal reasons. It seems the attorney handling E K’s divorce had been ditzing about, and while it was one of those uncontested, sign on the dotted line, thank you very much, goodbye sort of divorces, the legal eagle had been postponing and postponing getting the paperwork filed. She seemed to have a bit of a procrastination issue. Rule number 1, never use an attorney who advertises in the TV guide. Yeah, I’m not kidding… But, in this case it wasn’t EK’s “frugalness” to blame, it was the ex-husband’s militant stinginess. There’s a huge difference… But, I digress… The thing here being, in the state of Missouri you have to be  legally divorced for X number of days, (I can’t remember the actual number), before you can remarry. Or at least at that time, (back in the dark ages), that’s the way it was. I’m not sure what the statutes are these days.

Fortunately, the procrastinating mouthpiece finally got off the pot , or sh*t, or whatever she needed to do that she had actually already been paid to do.   The old marriage was dissolved and we ended up meeting the deadline with something on the order of 3 days to spare. So, that was all good.

Now came the new money issues… Obviously, since Kathy had been married before her parents weren’t going to pop for a wedding, even if they could have afforded it, so it was all on us. And, we had just bought a house, so we weren’t exactly flush with excess cash. We looked at halls, and even hotel suites, to rent for a reception but just couldn’t hammer them into our budget, no matter how hard we tried or which corners we cut. So, we finally made a decision… We would pour our limited funds into fixing up the house as best we could in the interim, buy some food, and have the wedding right there in the living room…

Yeah. Stupid eh? Well, we were young. Give us a break.

The problem we faced now is that by the time we reached this decision and had officially closed on the house, we only had about 30 days to make this happen. Somehow we did… (Remind me to tell you sometime about running a floor sander for hours on end…)

Of course, in the pictures you will see over the next few installments, it is obvious that things are woefully unfinished – no baseboards, partially sanded woodwork, and don’t even get me started on the kitchen, which remained untouched as far as remodeling for a few years. We were concentrating on the living room and dining room, since that was where things were to take place. The rest was, unfortunately, temporary storage for the time being…

So, where did this leave us? Obviously planning a wedding and reception, but it also left us being our own caterers as well. And, being the eclectic, bizarre folks we are, we didn’t want all the traditional wedding food one has , in Saint Louis, at least.  That being tasteless roast beef, baked mostaccioli, and green beans almandine. No, we just had to be different. Therefore, our menu ended up consisting of a spiral cut Honey Baked Ham® from none other than the Honey Baked Ham® company themselves. In addition, we also served veal parmigiana, and apple-rice curry. Erin, remember Erin from ComputerTrend, the busty blonde? Well, Erin’s husband was actually a restaurant manager at a local country club so he loaned us some extra chafing dishes they had laying about, which was a huge help. With that, we were almost finished with the menu save for several large boxes of assorted heat and serve hors d’oeuvres, also purchased from HBH… When we placed that order the guy at the counter called into the back, “I need x y number of boxes of Whores Duh-Vores…” E K had plenty of fun with that…

We ordered up a keg of beer,  and I even picked up everything I needed to make sauce for the veal patties. We should have been set, but we weren’t…

My dad dropped by for a visit and asked how things were going. Beaming, we told him all was good, and outlined the menu choices. He nodded, grunted, then asked, “So what kind of cake are you getting?”

Kathy and I looked at one another. Then we looked at him. Then we looked at one another again.

I said, “Uhm…uhh…”

Kathy said, “I guess we aren’t. We can’t afford one.”

My father raised an eyebrow, then snorted and said, “Bullshit. You can’t get married without a cake.”

With that, he reached into his wallet and withdrew a 100 dollar bill and handed it to Kat while adding, “Let me know if it costs more.”

And so, we went “cake shopping”… This was new to me. Even with all my experience with restaurants and diners, (on my mother’s side of the family) , I had never been all about the baking end of things… So, I did what any self-respecting man should do… I gave in to whatever E K wanted, listened closely so that if she needed help making a decision I chose whatever it sounded like she was leaning toward, and voila… We had a cake…

At this point all of the guys reading this are probably doing a rundown – “Lemme see… ya’ got ham, ya’ got beer, ya’ got cake… Yep, we’re good.”

If I had to guess, however, I’d say you women readers are most likely all pretty antsy at this point. I suspect – though I may be wrong – that you’re probably dancing around in your seats, shaking your fingers at the screen, and muttering, “But… but… but… what about… but…“

Do you mean, “What about The Dress?”

Yeah, I figured as much.

So, yeah… We also had to go wedding dress shopping. Yet another new experience for me, especially since I was wholly unaware that the groom was in any way involved in the selection of the dress.

Okay… We’ve established that this wasn’t Kat’s first rodeo. In addition to that, our house isn’t all that big, (i.e. no room for a 90 foot long train), and we were out of money. Also, while she can be as girly girl as the next woman, she isn’t all about too much foo-feraw…

And so, we went wedding dress shopping at… wait for it… Kmart®. Yeah, “Definitely Kmart, definitely definitely definitely Kmart…” I think I might have even picked up a 3 pack of tighty-whities while we were there.

Now, before you ladies get together a mob to come after me, it wasn’t my idea. It was Kathy’s. But, let me tell you something, she picked out an incredible dress and couldn’t have looked any better in my opinion, and it came in at around 40 bucks. She already had a brand new pair of white heels, so no new shoes were needed in her estimation. See what I mean about her being frugal? Yeah… it amazes me too…

So… Now were were set. She had a dress, we had a menu, the polyurethane was dry on the newly refinished hardwood floors, and we even had rings… we’ll get to those in a bit. My best buddy, Scott Ruddle, (after whom Detective Benjamin Storm in the RGI novels is modeled), was tapped to be my best man, and Erin (remember Erin?) was to be Kathy’s Matron of Honor. We had a license, and we even had a preacher – Kathy’s father, who is a Baptist Minister…

The day was fast approaching, and little did we know all hell was about to break loose…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Mobile Bachelor Party…