Sunday, March 21, 2010

The Wedding

We had four guests at our wedding. Three were my friends. One was an Axe-murderer. And by Axe-murderer, I mean he abused the shit out of Axe deodorant. So much so that as I walked down the aisle the minister turned to my husband-to-be and told him, "Sprayed on the cologne a little thick, eh?"

My husband's eyes were on me as I walked towards him in the white dress he helped me pick out a few weeks before. He pointed to one of the four guests on the bride's side of the tiny chapel and nodded.

"Put it on a little thick, eh?" the minister asked my bridesmaid's date.

He grinned, thinking it was a compliment, and said, "I like to smell good."

The minister choked back a gag, coughed then began, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today ..."

It was a small ceremony. A quick ceremony. We had our reception at Bubba Gump's Shrimp Co. in downtown Gatlinburg where the six of us ate some seafood, drank a beer and got completely hammered. Off of one beer. Maybe the sleep deprivation coupled with dehydration had something to do with that.

My three friends, and the other guy, drove 13 hours to see me walk down the aisle. They drove 13 hours to watch a 15-minute ceremony, eat some shrimp and spend the night in a hotel with a pool. Two of them, my dearest male friends (one of whom was addicted to acid and crack, but I was too naive to realize it until he mentioned getting in a fight with his dealer as we guzzled our beers and wolfed down our shrimp), got off work at midnight the night before, then one of them (the one without the DUI) drove all the way without a bit of sleep. I myself was going on 48 hours of no sleep. My husband had managed to squeeze in a two-hour nap after he got off the night shift and before he drove the whole way to Tennessee.

But, my parents couldn't come. My husband's parents couldn't come. Mine "couldn't afford it", which was code for "we're going to the river boat instead". It wasn't like I only gave them half a day of warning. We'd been planning the wedding for quite some time. Hell, I even offered to pay for their gas and hotel stay. My husband's parents said they couldn't come because we were having the wedding in a church that wasn't a Jehovah's Witness church. Do drive-through chapels really count as churches? We both knew the real reason was that I was the devil and so was he.

I think the best part of that day, aside from the part where I got to marry the man I loved, was when my editor called me as we drove through Dollywood. She sang to me, "Going to the chapel and you're gonna get married..." When she finished slurring the entire song, she asked to speak to my fiancé and told him to not get me drunk because I needed to remember my honeymoon. She wished us luck and said she couldn't wait to see us when we got back to work two days later. It was sweet, really. She was also the one who pulled me aside one day at work and told me the one thing that every married woman needs is sexy lingerie. She even offered to go with me to pick something out. She also offered to go dress shopping with me. My editor was far more motherly than my mom who called me the day before to cry about how I didn't involve her in the plans (after she told me she didn't want a fucking thing to do with any of it) and make me feel guilty only because she feared sudden death from a tornado...

1 comment:

  1. Although I married into the asshole family, I totally get where you are coming from. And some of these hurts and atrocities are so familiar to me. Keep writing, and most importantly, keep healing.

    ReplyDelete

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