An Idiot in Marriage

by David Jester

  At first I suffered what can only be described as a catastrophic wedgie, with many of my external parts trying their hardest to become internal parts, along with my boxer shorts and half of my trousers. As my pants became lodged in the fence, refusing to let me find my feet and relieve the agony, I remained hanging there, my feet kicking wildly at the ground, the seat of my pants halfway inside my colon.

  I hadn’t been able to stop a scream from leaving my lips. I also hadn’t been able to stop the ripping noise that my pants made as they tried to join my breakfast. Or the thudding noise my legs made as they hit the fence. Those sounds alerted the occupants of the house.

  A light in the upstairs window snapped on and I froze. Matthew and Lizzie also saw it, and while I remained hanging out in the open for all to see, they ducked into the shadows. Moments later, a grumpy, disheveled neighbor appeared at the window. His tired, groggy eyes scoured the yard as I remained motionless—if you ignored the gentle rocking—hoping that I could somehow blend into a fence that I had very nearly become a part of.

  My attempts at camouflage didn’t work and he spotted me. His eyes flared. He pointed a finger at me and yelled something that didn’t make it through the glass. He moved away from the window, but I knew he wasn’t going back to bed.

  “He’s coming!” I heard Matthew say, a whisper that had probably been heard by the entire street. “Fucking leg it!”

  I watched as they both ran across the yard and then stopped in the middle of it when they saw me. The look they gave me suggested that they had initially toyed with the idea that I might have been some sort of BDSM statue. I stopped kicking and breathed a sigh of relief, waiting for them to help me down, but the house attracted their attention again and they turned to see another light snap on, this one in the upstairs hallway, visible through the small window in the middle of the staircase. They turned back to me, gave me approximately two seconds of their pity, and then ran in the other direction.

  After the hallway light came the downstairs light, its murky yellow glow firing though the smeared glass panel in the back door and spreading ominous beams onto the lawn. I knew that I had to get away or face an incredibly embarrassing arrest, and not for the first time in my life. I did the only thing I could do: something that Lizzie and my future self would not thank me for, but something that had to be done. I turned around, twisting in my pants and bringing the wedgie to the front. The pain was enough to make my eyes water, but I managed to block it out.

  I couldn’t unhook my pants while I was putting so much weight on them, so I grabbed the side of the fence and pulled myself up. My old high school PE teacher once joked that I couldn’t do a pull-up if my life depended on it, and at the time I had agreed with him, believing that death was an acceptable alternative to upper-body exercise. But I managed to surpass both of our expectations as I lifted myself, easing the weight on my snagged pants and my crushed testicles, and giving me a chance to wriggle free.

  When I finally dropped and felt solid ground beneath my feet, I felt relief the likes of which I had never felt before. That relief faded like a fart in a storm when I heard the back door click, and it turned into panic when I realized that running wasn’t going to be a completely painless procedure for me.

  I hopped, jumped, and dragged my way across the yard and down the side of the house, wincing and grimacing with every yard I gained, but delighted nonetheless to get farther and farther away. I heard the back door open and the neighbor shout. The noise and the curses that spilled out of his mouth made me smile. He was a dick and I had never liked him much. And even though I had severely damaged my chance of having another child or a successful bowel movement, part of me was happy to get one over on him. Hobbling away into the night also gave me a rush and made me feel like an expert criminal, albeit a severely disabled one.

  Lizzie and Matthew had already moved on to bigger things. A group of youths were hanging around at the end of the street, using the perimeter wall and overgrown hedges of a derelict house as their meeting point. It was their headquarters, a place where the local delinquents gathered in full view of half the neighborhood and any passing cars.

  There were four of them in total, three boys and one girl, the former doing their best to get into the pants of the latter. They all wore baggy trousers, showing off their underwear in a way that always made Lizzie twist her face.

  “Someone should just yank them down,” she had told me once. She was joking then, so I agreed and thought nothing of it, but as I hobbled out into the street and saw the youths ahead, with Lizzie and Matthew hiding around a nearby corner, I realized that they were about to move from trespassing and into sexual assault.

  The kids were no more than fifteen or sixteen, and every other word that came out of their mouths was an obscenity— like listening to Matthew describe his sex life. They had been annoying the neighborhood for weeks, but Lizzie and Matthew were equally delinquent that night and keen to be just as annoying.

  Lizzie was the first to react. She exploded out from the corner, throwing her arms into the air and yelling as she did so, “I am the Underpants Avenger!”

  The kids were too shocked to do anything. The boy closest to her just stood there as she propelled herself forward and yanked his jeans down, taking down his boxer shorts in the process and exposing his boyhood to the girl he had been hitting on. The other boys laughed, relieved that the Underpants Avenger was skipping into the night, laughing hysterically like some pantomime villain. But they hadn’t counted on the perky vigilante having a sidekick.

  Matthew had used the distraction to sneak behind them and steal something from their pockets. I watched him do it. I saw him take something, look at it, pocket it, and then stand there with a should I or shouldn’t I? expression his face. As I tried to speed up my hobbling, he made his choice, and in two quick movements, he exposed the backsides of two more teenage boys before running away.

  Two of the boys tried to follow him, but one of them tripped over his own pants and fell face-first onto the pavement, while the other fell on top of him. The third boy was seemingly too embarrassed by the penis incident to do anything and just stood there, hoping the fact that his two friends were naked from the waist down and lying on top of each other would serve to deflect some of his embarrassment.

  There was an awkward silence. A moment in which the penis boy tried to smile at the girl, and a moment in which the naked boys tried frantically to wriggle off each other, only making the scene even more traumatic for the both of them. That was also the point at which I hobbled by, breathing deeply, wincing in pain, and trying my best to smile at them and thus avoid absorbing any of their anger.

  They all stopped what they were doing and stared as I plodded along.

  I saw the penis boy slowly mouth, “What the fuck?” right after I greeted them with a polite nod and a call of, “Nice night, isn’t it?”

  I found Matthew and Lizzie hiding down an alleyway, giggling like school children. They paused when I stepped into the opening and blocked the fluorescent light from the streetlight above, casting a shadow down the alleyway.

  “Shit, it’s the fuzz,” I heard Matthew say.

  I rolled my eyes. He watched far too much television.

  “It’s not the fuzz, it’s me.”

  “Who’s me?”

  “Your best friend?”

  “Marcus?”

  I stopped, feeling a little hurt.

  “Bah, only kidding,” he said, bringing a giggle from Lizzie. “Get over here, see what we’ve got.”

  What they had was a small bag of hash, a solid brown lump. Matthew was holding it up proudly.

  “You stole that?” I asked, shocked, although not as much as I should have been in light of everything that had already happened.

  “Cool, eh?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You stole drugs from a teenage boy who you then assaulted?”

  Matthew gave me a dismissive wave. “It wasn’t assault.”

  �
��Yeah, we were just doing our bit for society,” Lizzie offered.

  “You’re both out of your minds.”

  “We’re having fun, and you can’t stop us, no one can stop—”

  He paused, looking very alert. We all listened to what sounded like heavy footsteps coming from the end of the alleyway, followed by hushed and angry whispers.

  “Bastards took my fucking dope.”

  “They’re down here.”

  “What was that?” Matthew asked, looking like he already knew the answer and hoping I would tell him that a gang of fairies were coming to fondle him and bake him cookies.

  “Someone’s coming to stop you.” I was grinning, happy that he was going to be taught a lesson and that my concern was going to be proven right. My smile faded when I realized the implications for me. Not only was I with them and guilty by association, but I was also the only one incapable of running away. If they found me hobbling after the people that had assaulted them, I might never hobble again. Or breathe, for that matter.

  “Run!” Matthew said, turning.

  I grabbed him on the shoulder, refusing to let him get away from me again. “I’m injured, you have to help me.”

  He turned to Lizzie and the two exchanged a brief stare, one where he asked if he could leave me to die, and where she countered that although it would be a viable option, I was the father of her only child and might still serve a purpose.

  They each grabbed an arm and escorted me down the alleyway. We had made it to the end by the time we heard them at the entranceway behind us. They paused for a moment, their voices silent, and then we heard them shout.

  “There!”

  “Get them!”

  My anus felt even looser and we all quickened our steps. The fear helped me move faster than I had before, fighting through the pain. They were also partially carrying me, but it still didn’t seem like enough, and with each step the teens seemed to be gaining on us.

  We made it down another alleyway—the sound of angry teenage feet slapping the tarmac behind us—and then out through an underpass and into a park. We made a detour at that point, hoping that we could throw them off and buy some time. Instead of going onto the street beyond, we hopped the short fence that led onto the park, with Lizzie and Matthew doing the hopping and me doing the flopping. They would realize where we were eventually, but it would give us a few more minutes in which we could hobble to safety.

  “We have to keep going,” Matthew said, hearing my agonized yelps as I fought for breath and struggled to move, every step sending painful vibrations through my body.

  “I’m. Fucking. Trying!”

  “Don’t get—” Matthew paused. “Shit.”

  I had my head down, unable to find the energy to keep it up, but when we stopped moving I looked to see why. My heart sank to the pit of my stomach when I saw what they were looking at.

  A dozen feet away, sitting on a set of rusted swings, were three men. It was clear they were drunk, and it was also clear they were meaner than the kids we were running from. They had been drinking cans of lager and chatting loudly, but they stopped when they saw us approach. They slowly climbed off the swings and made a move toward us.

  I felt my sphincter relax and my muscles follow suit. My body was leaving me. It was giving up. I was on my own.

  “Well then,” Matthew said, releasing me from his grasp. “We’re fucked.”

  The taller and bigger of the three came the closest, his friends on either side of him. He stank of beer and cologne, indicating he had been at the bars before stopping off for some casual drinking in the park, as seemed to be common in the area.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  The fact that he seemed genuinely concerned and wasn’t slurring his words gave me hope, and it also seemed to give Matthew hope, as he abandoned his fear of impending death, wrapped his arm around me, and did his best to look concerned. I lowered my head into my chest, anticipating Matthew somehow managing to make this situation worse. Beside me, I knew Lizzie was thinking the same thing as I felt her hand clench around my waist.

  “You’ve got to help us,” he pleaded. “There are some lads chasing us, they—they—they abused our friend. They got a kick out of beating him to a pulp. It was like a game to them, and they did horrible, horrible things to him.”

  I looked up, out of breath, still in pain. I tried to object, but couldn’t offer anything more than a pained expression, which only served to make matters worse.

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” one of them said, looking me over. “Are you okay?”

  I turned to Lizzie and to Matthew, seeing the pleading looks on their faces. This was their fault and I had been roped into it, but as much as I wanted to make them suffer, if I didn’t go through with this then I knew then I would suffer anyway. And quite frankly, I had suffered enough for one night.

  “I’ll live,” I said in a genuinely agonized voice. “Just a little tender.”

  “There they are, the fuckers!”

  The kids were behind us now. The shout made me flinch, which in turn made my fear seem even more genuine. We all spun round. The three boys—the girl presumably deciding not to follow them, and perhaps never to talk to them again on account of their anger, their small penises, and their poor choice in pants—were angry, out of breath, and trying to hold up their pants as they ran. It didn’t paint a very innocent picture for them, and the men who had chosen to protect us were quick to notice this.

  “The sick little fucks,” the tall one said, shifting forward and standing in front of us.

  The three kids halted in front of our new saviors, trying to brush the brick wall of cologne- and lager-scented flesh aside to get to us.

  “Who the fuck are you?” one of the kids spat. “Let us through.”

  The men remained where they were, refusing to budge.

  “He’s got something that belongs to us,” another kid argued.

  “Really?” the man said, folding his thick arms. “Belongs to you now, does it? Well then, why don’t you describe this thing that belongs to you and I’ll see what I can do about it.”

  The kid looked unsure at first, worried about the legal status of the little brown lump. But it soon dawned on him, perhaps a little later than it should have done, that the three drunk men in a park in the early hours of the morning were probably not police officers. “Well,” the kid, clearly unsure and hesitant, looked at me, smirked and then shrugged his shoulders, “It’s—”

  He didn’t get to finish his description before the man, repulsed by what he had misrepresented, swung for him. The punch nearly broke the youngster’s jaw, and as soon as it landed, melee ensued. The three kids jumped on the adults, swinging, kicking, and giving it their all.

  We could have joined in, coming to the aid of the men who had come to our aid. This thought ran through my head as I watched, and I knew it would be running through Lizzie’s and Matthew’s head, as well. We all exchanged glances, and through those glances we agreed that we probably would help if the fight looked like it was getting out of hand and the three men were in trouble. But only because we knew that that wouldn’t happen.

  The fight didn’t last very long, and we were saved the ignominy of involvement when the youngsters were sent scrambling away, back into the shadows, back onto the streets. The three men turned to us, to me in particular. I gave them my best damsel-in-distress look, and if not for the severe rectal and testicular damage that made everything from bending to breathing a chore, I might have even curtsied for them.

  “Thanks so much for that,” Lizzie said, still clinging to me.

  The men smiled proudly at her, turning on their heroic knight expressions. This was their moment in the sun, a chance to show some pride and absorb some respect for saving the damsel in distress. Even though that damsel was a scrawny man who had been sexually molested by a fence.

  “We’re glad to do our bit,” the leader of the three said, nodding at Lizzie. He then turned to me, exchanging
the heroism for pity. I did my best to smile. “You must have been through hell.”

  I nodded. That much was true. I averted my eyes shyly, suggesting that I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Well, get yourself home, get some sleep. You just need a little rest.”

  I nodded in agreement, although in this instance I also needed a pair of tweezers, as I had a feeling that I would be using them to pick splinters out of my ass for the rest of the night.

  “We’ll tell everyone what you guys did,” Matthew said as we prepared to leave. “You’ll get the recognition that you deserve.”

  They seemed humbled by that, but proud nonetheless. As Matthew and Lizzie carted me away, taking a different route home in case the three boys were waiting for us, I whispered to Matthew, “You better not fucking tell anyone.”

  He seemed to find that amusing. “You’re kidding, right? This is hilarious, how can I not tell anyone?”

  “Because if you do then our friendship is over.”

  He stared at me for a moment, weighing up the pros and cons. On the down side, he wouldn’t be able to see me anymore, but on the plus side, he would have a great story to tell to all of his new friends. And this was the sort of tale that Chris Peterson and his empty-headed cronies would love.

  “I’ll also tell your wife that you tried to score with a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  “But that’s a lie,” he said, appalled that I would do such a thing.

  “But you’re a creepy pervert, and she knows that. Who do you think she would believe?”

  “But—but—”

  Matthew turned to Lizzie, looking for guidance.

  She shrugged. “I’m staying out of this.”

  “Fine,” Matthew grumbled, holding onto me just a little bit harder and dragging me along just a little bit faster.

  When we returned home, I smoked some of the stolen hash. I was happy for something to dull the pain and take away the memories of what had been a long night. Not only had I been forced to leave a baby alone in the house, but I had chased my best friend and my wife through the streets, been assaulted by a fence, nearly murdered by a gang of youths, and played party to the theft of illegal goods. For Matthew, it would just be another night, but for me it was one of those nights that was only possible when he was involved.