by Tim Sandlin
“Thank you very much, Miss Hayes. I’ll see you there.”
I walked across the street, picked up my unfinished Mello-Yello, and sat back down on the porch, watching the friends and family load into their Buicks and Oldsmobiles, even saw a couple Mercedes. When the Mello-Yello was gone, I went inside, used my roll-on deodorant, put on a clean shirt, and wiped off my glasses. I stared at myself in the mirror for twenty seconds, then walked to the Americana.
The group from in front of the altar had gained a few mothers, an extra father, and a couple more people I don’t know who they belonged to. The wedding party stood side by side against the east wall while the rest of us shuffled past and congratulated each one for whatever he or she did. I stood in line behind a group of happy girls who were kissing their way north. One of the girls whooped whenever she hugged a man. The groom’s father pretended he knew me.
“Haven’t seen you around the house in a while, sport. You’ve got to come back soon.” He was partially bald, reminded me of Robert Duvall in one of the Godfather movies.
“My name’s not Sport and I’ve never been to your house in my life.”
“You must be with the bride then.”
Shaking hands with the bride’s father was like squeezing old salmon eggs between my fingers.
The groom, Danny himself, shook my hand and winked at me. “Why did you wink at me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning to the woman behind me.
When it was my turn to kiss the bride on the cheek, I didn’t touch her. I tried to stare into her eyes, but she was looking down the line to see how many more people she’d have to be nice to.“Where can we talk?” I asked.
She didn’t hear me at first. “What?”
“We must talk. Is there a place where we won’t be disturbed?”
She looked at me then. “Are you a friend of Danny’s?”
“No. Listen, I’ll go sit in that corner, by the piano there. See the piano?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll go sit by the piano. When you can get away, come over there.”
I walked to the piano and sat on the bench, facing the bride and the rest of the crowd. My mouth was dry and I wanted some punch, but it didn’t seem right since I wasn’t invited, so I just sat and watched.
The bride shook hands with the rest of the guests, smiled at a few, hugged a few, but she kept glancing at me, then away, then back again. I looked at her good for the first time. Her cheekbones were nice, erect, out-front. I couldn’t see a bit of fat under her traveling dress, but she wasn’t skinny, not like me skinny. Her eyes were the nicest part. Dark brown and sparkly like a fried aggie, they bugged out a little, just enough so you noticed them. As to her dark Cinderella hair, the important question in my mind was: Natural or perm job?
Jenny Hayes was the last person through the line. She clutched the bride’s hand while the bride kissed her rouge and said something, then Jenny said a long something else. Finally, Miss Hayes released the hand and shuffled off toward a six-story cake in the middle of the room. The bride chatted for a moment with her father, said something to the groom, then walked over to me.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“I’m the guy on the porch you looked at just before you went into the church.”
“I don’t remember any guy on a porch.”
“You are an excellent football kicker.”
“Right.” The bride wasn’t hostile, exactly, but then she didn’t recognize me as her fate either.
“Sit down, you need to hear me.”
She didn’t sit down, so I went ahead. “It’s not too late, you can still get out of this.”
She paled a little. I think. “You know it’s all wrong,” I said. “You don’t love him. You don’t want to be married to him. I can help you save yourself.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I saw your face after that beautiful punt. You had the same look a lifer gets just before he goes into the penitentiary. My mother used to get that look outside the dentist’s office. She always thought she was going to die in the chair.”
“Twenty thousand weddings a day in this country, and the nut comes to mine.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me that right before you started down the aisle, you didn’t feel like you were going to your doom.”
The bride’s right hand closed and opened and she looked at the keyboard. “Listen,” she said quietly, “I don’t deserve this. Would you please leave?”
“Haven’t you ever seen someone in a restaurant or a parking lot or someplace and known deep inside that here is a person who could make your life good and meaningful and you could do the same for them? Only you don’t say anything because you’re embarrassed, and thirty seconds later they’re gone. I’m not going to let that happen to us.”
“Yesterday I wrote out a list of everything that could possibly go wrong with my wedding. But I never dreamed of this one.”
“The moment you kicked that ball, I knew we could save each other,” I said. “Life with him will be an empty void. You know it. Come with me.”
She just looked at me with those bug-out brown eyes.
“What’s going on over here? You trying to seduce my wife?” Danny laughed, coming toward us. He’d changed from the blue tuxedo into a concrete-colored sports jacket with matching loafers. Danny’s father was right behind him, a drink in each hand.
“I’m trying to convince…uh…” I looked at her.
“Colette. Colette Sullivan.”
“Colette Hart,” Danny corrected.
I started over. “I’m trying to convince Colette to get an annulment and come with me.”
He looked at her. “Is this a joke?”
Her eyes stayed right on me. “He likes the way I kick a football.”
“No,” I said. “It’s no joke. If you go through with this marriage, you’ll hate each other in two years. She’ll be an alcoholic and you’ll be screwing your friends’ wives. You should both admit it was a mistake and quit before you put yourselves through a lot of pain.”
“Shut up,” Danny said.
By then, a sizable crowd of guests had gathered. Danny’s father stepped forward with his fists clenched. He growled at me. “Punk, I could break you in half.”
“Probably.”
Danny’s father forgot he had a drink in each hand because one of the glasses fell on the floor and broke.
“I don’t know who the hell you are,” Danny sort of hissed, “but you’ve got ten seconds to haul your ass out of here, or I’m going to make you wish you had.”
I looked at Colette’s face.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Kelly Palamino.”
“You’d better go now, Kelly.”
“Okay, but can I see you again?”
“No, you cannot,” Danny said, that same hiss in his voice. Colette didn’t move, not at all, but her beautiful eyes said yes, she wanted to see me again.
I stood up and walked home.
***
My own wedding was drug-induced.
During our early-seventies hippie period, Julie and I traveled around a lot. Like all good longhairs, I owned a ’67 green-and-white VW van—even painted a picture from a Grateful Dead album cover on the back. I never was very original.
When we’d been together about six months—eight years ago last June 16, to get down to the details—we stopped at the house of some friends of hers outside Victoria, Texas. Julie liked them because their cats were named Today and Tamari.
The friends fed us this damp green stuff called peyote. Peyote is cut off a type of spineless cactus and it makes you sick. After you get sick, your back feels funny, then your neck. Then almost anything can happen.
Like every other night I ever wasted in south Texas, t
hat night was hot and humid. Julie and I wandered outside to watch the full moon pulsate and the stars spin. We stood in the yard and went One with the Universe (whatever the hell that meant back then). I raised my right hand and her left.
“Hey, God,” I shouted. “Hey. This woman and I are partners. We’re going to stay together a while. You can write it in the book that Kelly Palamino and Julie Deere are an official unit.”
Then Julie shouted, “He isn’t much, Lord, but I’ll take him off your hands because I love him.”
The next day, fortified with expensive Sonoma Valley wine and more peyote, we drove into the county courthouse in Victoria. It took a couple of hours of hanging around to get licensed and find out neither one of us carried any clap. We sat on the courthouse lawn, eating enchiladas and drinking warm Lone Star until I got sick again.
Julie was at the top of her life the day we got married. Sitting in the grass next to an old cottonwood, she looked so beautiful and tall in her white peasant blouse and the skirt made from cut-up blue jeans and a tapestry. Her hair and skin were alive. She laughed all day and her eyes were alert. I guess, at least for one day in there, Julie and I were happy together.
Later on, her friends drove us to an unpainted shack of a church run by a gigantic black man calling himself Father Funk. To be real honest about the whole thing, I still don’t know if the marriage was legal or not. Father Funk dressed like a tourist in Maui with a collar. He put a Stevie Wonder album on the stereo and quoted a poem by an African or somebody I never heard of. Closing his eyes, he made us all hold hands—his was the biggest hand I ever held. He said golden rings were circling the room above our heads, moving in tighter and tighter.
I didn’t see any rings, but Father Funk said they flip-flopped twice. I may kiss the bride, and pay him ten dollars please.
It felt real nice to be married, secure and warm. We drove to Houston that afternoon. The sky was clear and a deep blue you usually only see in water. Julie laughed and hitched the jeans skirt up to her waist and pulled down my zipper.
A hundred fifty miles of foreplay later, we stopped at a tacky motel on the north side of Houston that charged by the hour, four dollars for the first two hours, dollar an hour after that. I bought us eight hours’ worth, of which we made love seven. Then we drove to New Orleans.
***
Julie was taller than me and we both agreed she was smarter. She was young and blond and filled to the eyes with potential, and I haven’t got any idea why she married me. All I know is she did, and I appreciated the gesture.
***
My last two years haven’t been spent alone, exactly. The women come and go in two categories. Platonics, who behave like girlfriends, and Romantic Interests, who stay awhile, then leave suddenly, wondering what happened. My Romantic Interests are generally confused when I meet them, unhappy while we’re together, then ridiculously at peace about six months later.
I have pretty much the same effect on women as shock treatments on a manic. One woman told me, “Kelly, you’re the darkness before the dawn. You’ve got to get through it to find the light, but life sure is bleak while you’re in there.”
The Romantics never like the Platonics. The Plats are always very young, nineteen or twenty, and very pretty. They stay with me several months, several hours a day. The townspeople who worry about these things all think we’re “together,” which can be an ego thrust since they’re so good looking and young, but can also frighten away possible sex objects. The categories never, ever overlap. I don’t sleep with a Plat and I don’t spend any relaxed time with an RI.
My current sidekick Platonic is Cora Ann. She lives upstairs, but you wouldn’t know it without seeing the lease. Her toothbrush, hot curlers, and disposable tampon pack are in my bathroom. She’s the best-looking Plat yet, a classic, perky blond with that clean, glowy look of the girls in situation comedies on TV. She’s strong on athletics and a great western-swing dancer, the perfect blend of sensual grace and down-home dried cowflop on her Nike tennis shoes.
Cora Ann’s tragic flaw is that she eats all my food.
On the Wednesday after Colette’s wedding, Cora Ann bounced into my apartment without knocking. She headed straight for the refrigerator. “There’s an article in this month’s Cosmo about men faking orgasms.”
I was busy finishing a letter to the Davenport, Iowa, police department, so I answered with something along the lines of “Huh.”
“Thought you might like to know how it’s done. Got any cheese?”
“I never buy cheese since you started hanging out in my kitchen. Why should I need to fake a ’gasm?”
“From what I hear, it’s the only way you can finish the job with honor.”
I did a quick inventory to figure who ratted. “Bullshit, who told you that?”
“A little bird.”
“I never screwed a bird yet that I didn’t get off.”
Cora Ann settled on the couch with a half-full jar of peanut butter and a full jar of grape jelly. “That’s not what I heard.”
“You’re jealous because I last longer than an eight-second bull ride. Don’t you ever get tired of those hair-trigger little boys you bring home? And what are you doing to my peanut butter?”
“Little boys are enthusiastic.” Cora Ann carefully shoveled six spoonfuls of jelly into the peanut butter jar and stirred it into brown-and-purple slop.
“Sure,” I said. “How many times have you heard ‘I’m only like this when I’m drunk,’ or ‘This never happened to me before.’”
“Never. Want a bite?” Cora Ann propped both feet up on the old army trunk I use for a table and proceeded to pour the stuff into her mouth. Lord only knows why she doesn’t get fat.
“I know what it’s like to wham-bam, sorry, ma’am,” I said. “I was twenty once.”
“Hell of a long time ago.”
I licked my envelope and sat it on the elk skull next to my TV. “How can you eat that crap, Cora Ann? Doesn’t look healthy.”
“When you’re raised on shit, you take a hankering to it. How’s the big love affair with Colleen going?”
“Colette. They’re honeymooning in St. Lucia. That’s in the West Indies somewhere.”
“I know where it is. All the rich couples on Guiding Light go there. I bet that’s where she got the idea. You’re strung out on a dip, Kelly.”
“Am not. Look, you’re dribbling slop on the floor. Want to walk over to the post office?”
Cora Ann set the peanut butter mixture on the arm of the couch. “I’ve got things to do, but I’ll meet you in the Cowboy later. She’s still a bonus-baby dip.”
I picked the letter back up off the elk skull. It’s a nice skull, white and smiling. “She said ‘fuck’ at her own wedding reception. Would a bonus-baby dip say ‘fuck’ at her own wedding reception? Huh?”
“She said ‘fuck’?”
“Out loud.”
“If some skinny wacko told her to annul the wedding and run away with him, even a dip might say ‘fuck’ out loud. How do you know she’s in St. Lucia?”
“Her mother-in-law told me. I pulled the fraternity brother line. Even found out which hotel they’re staying in before she got suspicious.”
“You planning to go there?”
“Can’t afford it. I sent a dozen roses.”
Cora Ann gave me one of those looks she saves for tourists who don’t tip. “Her husband is going to break your legs, Kelly. And rightly so. You deserve it if you try to steal another man’s wife—on their honeymoon yet. You don’t even know her. She might be a Jehovah’s Witness or something.”
I showed her the letter to the Davenport, Iowa, police department. “That’s what I’m fixing to find out. According to the wedding story in the newspaper, she’s from Davenport, Iowa. I’ve written the police, told them I’m considering hiring her for a top security job and asked wh
at they know about her.”
“That’s sick, Kelly. Have you seen a psychiatrist?”
“This morning. She says I’m sick. I also ordered all the high-school yearbooks put out in the Davenport area in the last five years. Colette looks young. I don’t think she graduated from high school more than five years ago.”
Cora Ann laughed. A pretty laugh, kind of low-pitched. “He’s gonna hang your nuts in a tree, Kelly.”
“Danny’ll understand.”
“You bet.”
***
Some people would wonder why a twenty-nine-year-old college graduate who hears voices in running water became a professional dishwasher.
I’m good at it. Hell, I’m fantastic at it. With one hand I can sling a stack of monkey dishes into the rack while spraying down coffee cups with the other. I handle ten-inch china plates like a Mississippi River gambler handles fifty-one cards and a joker. There has never been a burned pot I couldn’t have gleaming in thirty seconds of steel wool and elbow grease.
Sometimes the whole crew—waitresses, cooks, even the cashier—will abandon their stations to watch me fly into a sinkful of filth.
And the water—the beautifully wet gallons of hot water, all of it singing for the joy of cleaning dishes. My Hobart dish machine plays entire symphonies at 160 degrees. At 180, the rinse cycle sounds like D-Day in a box, and my UL-approved Waste Disposal System can grind, chew, spit, and completely dissolve anything that has ever been alive except beef bones and avocado pits.
I’ve tried it all, cooking, waiting tables, I’ve done everything a grownup can do in a restaurant, but nothing gives me the true satisfaction, that gut-level glow, like cleaning up the mess.
My second love at work, after my Hobart, is the waitresses. Tall, short, skinny, fat, built like a poster picture in a freshman’s dorm room, I don’t care. Put a tray in a woman’s hand and I love her. My whole life, from the day Julie said, “I won’t say it was fun ’cause it wasn’t,” and slammed the door until I saw Colette’s punt sail over the rectory, was dedicated to and obsessed by the chasing and seduction of waitresses.
