Devil in a Yellow Dress

1/06/06


I’ve only been in one fistfight in my life. The trouble is that I didn’t know I was in it until after it was over. Intrigued, dear reader? I thought you might be. Given my propensity for caustic, even rude sarcasm I’m surprised I haven’t been in more, and this particular fight had nothing to do with my rapier wit. It all started with a wedding…

A few years ago a friend of mine announced he was getting hitched. This was back before I had really begun to feel the icy hand of Father Time creeping up my spine like a malicious centipede, and I was still operating under the illusion that the big three-oh was some vague, far-off realm about as tangible as cigarette smoke. Nowadays I sort of view that date like an elephant standing outside your bedroom window; not overtly threatening but definitely unsettling and probably an omen of something really fucked up going down…like a zombie infestation.

The wedding was in a little town by the name of Blue Springs, Missouri, which is a suburb of Kansas City. More on this little slice of heaven later. My roommate, his girlfriend (since become his fiancé, a state which has, in the intervening years, ceased being a happy announcement and now just strikes me as inconsiderate,) and I drove up from Springfield and were mercifully excused from the actual ceremony and expected merely to show up at the reception. This was especially fortuitous as they are Catholic, and as anyone who’s been knows, Catholic weddings are marathon sessions of madness that test your patience and ability to stay awake in an uncomfortable pew. But the receptions…let’s just say they quickly make up for it; Catholics like them some booze.

The reception was out of doors which was fine since it was a pleasing April day and the nights were no longer too cold for comfort. I should mention that my friend was marrying a Polish girl, which is only important in that there were many single Polish girls in attendance and I find Slavic women powerfully alluring. I think it’s the accent, but I also heard they fart candy…I think I read that in an encyclopedia somewhere.

So the reception’s jumping along and right away I’m drawn to this pale little Polish chick in a yellow number with her hair done up in a forties style, also one of my weaknesses. It only intensified my desire for her when after taking surreptitious photos of her for about an hour I got up the nerve to approach her (liquid courage helped on this one,) and one of the first things she said upon our introduction was, “I’m wearing yellow so that if I pee myself nobody can tell.” Coming from the perfectly-formed mouth of a hot Polish broad this is fucking hot…and pretty damn funny to boot.

Yellow Dress Girl had spent a fair amount of time hanging around this rather broad Bostonian fellow who I had met earlier, and who had informed me that he was dating Yellow Dress Girl. Alright, no big deal; I was just talking to her, I wasn’t going to go harvesting in another guy’s pumpkin patch. That was, until she informed me later that, yes, they had dated but weren’t currently doing so. Somehow I managed to keep from rubbing my hands together like a cartoon villain at that.

I was getting pretty inebriated but not sloppy drunk. By now we’re several hours into the reception and it’s dark and Boston disappears for about twenty minutes only to reappear with a bottle of Grey Goose, (this was received with mixed emotion, as Grey Goose is French vodka and thus sub-par to Polish,) and passed out shots. I think he must have taken a few on the way out because he was looking rather bleary-eyed and the groom’s father would tell me the next day that Boston sidled up to him that night and said something to the effect of, “I’m really a drunk asshole, you know, just wait.” He was. Wait.

So I dance a little with Yellow Dress Girl which is totally out of character but the liquor was working her magic fingers into my inhibitions. Three or four hours into the reception I’m pretty lit and I’ve been talking to Yellow Dress Girl for at least forty-five minutes straight. I think things are going really well, potential panty-dropping-wise. Both Yellow Dress Girl and I decide we need to pee and wander off toward the supposed facilities provided on the grounds. I was feeling pretty high as Yellow Dress Girl was wearing my coat draped over her shoulders which is the garment equivalent of a green light.

So Yellow Dress Girl and I walk away from the party out into the dark searching for somewhere to put our urine and I’m in mid-sentence when something flashes around the side of my head and slams into that spot where your jaw meets your skull. I’m drunk so it doesn’t hurt, but is it surprising. I fall over in the grass and all of a sudden there’s someone on top of me flailing around like a beached perch and, I guess, trying to punch me some more. I thought it was one of my friends fucking around; you know, the old “I’m gonna tackle you in the grass!” joke, so I’m kinda laughing when I say, “What the fuck are you doing?” I did not get an answer.

From start to finish this whole process takes maybe twenty seconds and all of a sudden I’m alone on the ground again. I look around and stand up to see a dark figure sprinting toward the parking lot, followed quickly by the sound of an angry car engine firing to life and peeling out of the parking lot. Only then does it dawn on me, “Hey, wait…I think I was just in a fight!” And now I’m pissed off because I was under the impression that if you’re going to fight someone, especially if you’re going to do it with the ferocity and competency of a three-legged hamster, you could at least do the other fellow the courtesy of sticking around long enough for him to figure out you’re serious and suffer the rebuttal. Also, hitting me from behind was pretty cowardly, I have to say.

As you may have guessed, I had just been accosted rather impotently (the worst casualty was that it sort of hurt to chew on that side the next day,) by a savagely drunk and wildly jealous Bostonian. Apparently he’d been watching Yellow Dress Girl and me all evening, slowly getting angrier and drunker until his reservoir of New England hate blew into a shit-geyser of freaky. Needless to say, this sort of queered the sexual mood I’d been quietly building through the evening. Yellow Dress Girl informed me that this was not out of character for her not-boyfriend…who she ended up spending the night with in his motel room and yours truly was treated to a lovely evening with bad motel room television.

EPILOGUE: The next day, bleary and hung over, my roommate Aaron, his girlfriend and I attempted to check out of our room and procure a taxi as we had left her car back at the reception park…thing. This turned out not to be as easy as one might suppose. First of all, if you ever have the desire to stay in The American Inn in Blue Springs, MO, just stick a metal spoon up your ass instead, (make sure it’s one that has gone a few rounds with the garbage disposal,) it’ll hurt less and you don’t even have to leave home.

First of all they have the farcical check-out time of 10 a.m.; ‘nuff said there. The real horror came with the taxi debacle. We called down to the front desk as we packed and asked the woman there if she knew of any local cab companies. Whenever you ask a desk clerk at a goddamn motel this question you are ill prepared for a flat “no.” And yet, that was just what we received. “Uh, ooookay,” I think was our response. Finding, oddly, that the motel room was uncontaminated with a phone book, we went downstairs and procured one from a desk clerk who may have not ended up just where she wanted in life and had decided to take it out on unsuspecting guests. To this date I don’t know whether she was maliciously obtuse or just a stark raving moron.

Phone book back in our room, we called the cab company and discovered…they don’t service Blue Springs, and no, we don‘t know any companies that do.. Kansas City proper was their bread and butter, terribly sorry. Back down at the desk, we acquired a Blue fucking Springs phone book, a look of blank surprise from the woman when we asked why she hadn’t given us that one in the first place since, you know, we were in fucking Blue fucking Springs.

Ten minutes until check-out time, we finally got a hold of a conveyance service for Blue Springs who told us they’d be there in about a half hour. I was a little afraid they were going to show up in a horse and buggy or Model T, but that turned out to be unfounded as they didn’t show up at all.

Forty-five minutes later we, with all our possessions out on the curb, return inside and spend ten minutes trying to find the desk clerk, as she has apparently wandered off to shit in someone’s bed or something. Eventually we reacquire the phone book and call the company back. The woman on the other end of the pay phone (no, no, you certainly may not use the desk phone, that’s for guests only,) grudgingly admits that yes, this is in fact the cab company and then promptly informs us that we had never called here and had we considered the fact that we might not even exist. I start to get a headache from all the Twilight Zone music in my head.

Letting the fact that we had called that company go for the moment, we asked if they wouldn’t terribly mind sending about a cab or taxi or kid with a fucking Radio Flyer wagon to pick us up. “Well, we can,” the woman said, “but it’ll be about two hours before we can get out there.” I think I may have blacked out for a minute or two at this point. I begin to suspect that we have stumbled onto the Nexus of the Universe.

We spend the next hour and a half smoking cigarettes and trying desperately to get in contact with any one of the people we know from the reception, all of which appear to have been spirited away by U.F.O.s. I begin to suspect we may actually have died and are now in Hell.

Two and a half hours and no cab later, we finally reach someone who hadn’t been abducted, (the groom’s brother,) and he mercifully agrees to come pick us up. I am fully prepared to suck this guy’s dick for a ride if he asks. Thankfully, he does not.

My theory is that the employees of the entire town of Blue Springs are under instructions not to help anyone ever, under penalty of ass-raping. I don’t recommend it as a vacation destination.