The wedding party pulls up to the reception in the limousine, a stretch Cadillac Deville. I help Beth out of the limo. A guy wearing a white oxford with rolled-up sleeves, a black tie, and earphones walks up to us. I guess him to be the DJ.
The ceremony was a blur. What did I say? What did Beth say? I remembered Jeanine serenading us with a stirring rendition of “Edelweiss,” but that’s only because I heard her practicing the song at the rehearsal. Didn’t Beth’s cousin give one of the readings? Yeah, that’s right. The unemployed thespian cousin as opposed to the heavily medicated celebrity vegan chef cousin who introduced me to Woody Harrelson.
Woody had come back to his alma mater, Hanover College, to star in a play called The Diviners. I cornered him at the cast party at the buffet table. He was wearing a tall cowboy hat to compensate for the fact he was much shorter (and much balder) in person than he appeared to be on camera. We talked while shoving handfuls of pan-fried tofu in our mouths. I couldn’t recall a word I said to Woody. Much like my own fucking wedding.
All I genuinely recall is looking into Beth’s eyes and putting things on cruise control for about an hour. In the limousine ride to the reception I asked Mack—three times—if he and I remembered to sign the wedding license.
“Yep, we signed it…” Mack said. “Still.”
Beth and I decided to have the reception at Beaver Stick Golf Club, a refined but understated club overlooking “one of America’s premier public golf courses.” I don’t golf, so I’m impressed merely to the degree Beaver Stick affords Beth and our wedding guests a nice backdrop for getting hammered. The clubhouse is a contemporary design—clean lines, a gray-shingled roof broken up by white columns, walls of glass surrounded on three sides by an expansive redwood deck pitted by golf spikes.
“Just count to sixty and then come inside,” the DJ says to us, his pocket already lined with a fifty I spotted him in exchange for a promise that he not play “The Chicken Dance” under any circumstance.
The glass walls of Beaver Stick, an anemic air conditioning system, and a guest list thirty percent longer than the fire department legally mandates for this particularly sized building conspires with the one hundred-degree heat index to turn our reception into an oven. My mother-in-law walks around with a linen napkin filled with ice cubes, massaging the necks of the older folks. The younger folks—well, they’re just drinking themselves into an oblivious stupor.
“Again, I apologize.” I tip the manager a fifty as he starts to walk away from me. “Thanks for being so understanding.”
“What was that about?” Beth asks.
“No big deal,” I say, sipping on my third or fourth beer in the last half hour. “Somebody got busted peeing off the balcony.”
“Already?” Beth swipes my beer, tilts the pint glass into her mouth. She hands the glass back to me. “That’s not a good sign.”
I set my beer down, take her hand in mine. “You ready?”
“Does my answer really matter at this point?” Beth says.
We thought long and hard about what our first dance together would be. We thought about being sentimental old fools. But honestly, how do multiple generations of newlywed couples continue latching on to “Unforgettable,” “What a Wonderful World,” and “Unchained Melody” and still with a straight face call their wedding song special?
Beth and I had no recourse. I escort her to the dance floor. The DJ pops the CD in the player.
With a little love, and some tenderness…
Damn straight. Hootie and the fucking Blowfish, baby!
For seemingly as long as Beth and I’ve been dating, there’s been Hootie. We loved Hootie before anyone else loved Hootie. We never get tired of Hootie. I pledge to get some Hootie from Beth while she’s still wearing her wedding dress. It’s an hour’s drive up to the airport hotel. We’ll have a couple glasses of champagne, feed each other chocolate-covered strawberries. I’ll casually raise the privacy window between us and the limo driver. Then I will slip my hands beneath her dress and—
“What are you thinking about?” Beth asks.
“Hootie,” I say.
In the wake of the BoDeans’s breakout hit “Closer to Free,” people forget that Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Hold My Hand” was the actual theme music of the Party of Five pilot episode. Granted, gliding across the dance floor lacks the dramatic flair of Scott Wolf and those impossibly dreamy dimples sweeping a nubile, pre-boobs Jennifer Love Hewitt off her feet, but Beth and I do our best. I dust off some of the old cotillion standbys.
“Debbie, I think Hank’s doing the foxtrot,” Grandma Louise says to Mom. Grandma is here with her nurse after we secured her a day pass from the Franklin Community Alzheimer’s & Dementia Care Center, so this will likely constitute her solitary coherent sentence of the afternoon.
I dip Beth again.
“Easy there,” Beth says, blowing a few stray curls out of her face. “This champagne’s kind of getting to me.”
I furrow my brow, give Beth my close-mouthed, I’m-up-to-something smile while grinding my pelvis into her. “Isn’t that the idea, honey?”
Beth pokes me in the chest. “Someone needs to hose you down.”
I take note of the guests surrounding the dance floor, none of the men wearing their coats, all of the women barefoot and wrapped in dresses so drenched with sweat they look glued on. Jeanine crouches in the corner of the dance floor capturing the moment with her camera and her black-and-white film. One of Beth’s Illinois friends quietly dry humps his date, a raven-haired minx in a tight-fitting, snakeskin-patterned dress with a slit that goes halfway up her thigh.
“Someone needs to hose all of us down,” I say.
“Good point,” Beth says. “Still, it’s been a good reception.”
“Mack’s speech was funny. Claire rambled a bit.”
“That’s what Claire does when she’s nervous.”
“Then she must have been terrified.”
“Be nice,” Beth says. “And thanks, by the way.”
“For what?”
“Not stuffing the cake in my face.”
“Oh, you’re welcome, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I thought you were going to say something romantic like, ‘Thanks for being my husband’ or ‘Thanks for saying yes.’”
“Do you want me to say that?”
“No, at least not now that I’ve prompted you to say it.”
Contemplative pause.
“Okay, Beth, go ahead and say it.”
The song ends. She leans in, nibbles my ear. “Thanks for being my husband,” she whispers.
I kiss her on the neck. “You’re welcome.”
I lost Beth after our dance together. First she danced with her father, then I danced with my mother, apparently thereafter Beth snuck out for a cigarette—to the extent a five-foot mound of billowing white could “sneak” at anything. The party felt like it was starting to wind down, although Dr. Burke was still trying to strong-arm the Beaver Stick manager into tapping into a fourth keg.
“I miss anything?” Beth asks.
“Where’d you come from?”
“The ladies’ room.”
I sniff, detecting a generic floral air freshener and a whiff of spearmint all but subsumed by tobacco. “That’s not what it smells like to me.”
Beth and I are “mostly” non-smokers now, both of us still in that post-college transition phase in which we have to teach ourselves how to drink without smoking. We’ve tried using straws for a few months, pretzel rods after that, but sometimes there’s just no stopping that first cigarette once you have three or four cocktails in you.
“Cut a bride some slack.” Beth chews furiously on a stick of spearmint gum. “It’s been a stressful day.”
“Sure has,” I say. “You and your dad have a good dance together?”
“It was nice,” Beth says. “How about you and your mother?”
“It was good, all things considered.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that given a choice between hitting me in the face with a frying pan for three and a half minutes or dancing to an unbelievably heartbreaking song, my mother went with the more painful option.”
“The song?”
“Yep.”
“Dan Fogelberg was pretty rough.”
“‘Leader of the Band’?” I shrug my shoulders. “Rough? Hell, how about borderline incestuous? Mom was glued to me like a second suit.”
“Her desperation on full display.”
“Debbie unfiltered.”
“You should really help her.”
My mother isn’t equipped to be by herself. I realize that, but at this point in my life I have better things to do than babysit a fifty-year-old woman. She is the most tragic of widows, the kind who goes from high school to college to marriage to family without breaking stride and so never learns to discern between being alone and being lonely. The kind whose happiness will forever labor beneath the yoke of lost love.
“Why do I need to help her, Beth? She’s got her mimosa pitchers, narcotics, and Leon to get her through the day.”
“Leon came?”
“He’s out in the parking lot in the car listening to a Cubs game. He told Mom he’d drive her home, but he doesn’t want to come into the reception.”
“What a dick,” Beth says. She rests her head on my shoulder. “But at least Jack is eating all this up.”
“You think?”
“Being his big brother’s ring bearer is the biggest day of his life. He told me so. Your mom said he tried that tux on yesterday morning and hasn’t taken it off since. The kid is over the moon for you.”
“His brother’s ring bearer, huh?”
Beth smiles, brings her head into my chest. “Like I said, you need to tell him on your terms. I get that.”
I continue to live a lie with Jack—my brother, my son, my whatever. He’s happy. Isn’t that enough? With a mother teetering on the precipice of abject despair, who am I to push her over the edge?
I reach down, straighten Beth’s dress. “After we finished dancing, Mom said to ‘make sure to ask Jack where babies come from.’”
Beth giggles, more than a little tipsy. “Well, have you asked him?”
“Not yet. But speaking of the place where babies come from, one of the Kornatowski boys tried to feel up Callie.”
Grandma Louise’s sister, Great Aunt Joy, married into the Cleveland-based Kornatowskis. Kornatowski is a surname that evidently in Polish means, “He who fucks like rabbits.” They have ten kids, separated by fourteen years, and an exponentially larger number of grandkids. Six of the ten Kornatowski brood have been the reception’s main entertainment for the last few songs, assaulting the dance floor—and some of the female guests—with moves and gesticulations more Miller Lite than measured.
“My cousin Callie?” Beth says.
“No, honey, the Kornatowski boys tried to feel up the entire state of California.”
And there you have it: the first recorded smartass remark as husband and wife.
“Ouch!” I say, reeling from the first recorded physical reprisal in response to said smartass remark as husband and wife.
“Callie probably had it coming,” Beth says.
“I highly doubt it.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because the Kornatowski boys are so drunk I caught one trying to hit on my mom.”
“Isn’t Aunt Joy your grandmother’s sister?”
“Yep.”
“So that means your mom and Aunt Joy’s sons are—”
“First cousins.”
“That’s gross.”
“Nope,” I say. “That’s a Catholic wedding reception.”
The DJ transitions into Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” What am I saying? Of course the DJ transitions into Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
The dance floor divides in accordance with proper Meatloaf etiquette—boys on one side, girls on the other.
Thanks to Meatloaf, the reception found its second wind. The song’s fade-out is interrupted by the high-pitched feedback of a microphone being switched on.
“I’d like to take this moment to congratulate Hank and Beth,” Mack says. The big man is sporting a full-on lather. Pools of sweat rim his shirt at the armpits and chest. He holds the microphone in his right hand, a sweat-drenched towel and a pint of light beer in his left.
Mack continues. “Darndest thing, Hank. I was sitting on the toilet just a few seconds ago, about ready to pass out, when I looked underneath the stall next to me and saw a pair of rhinestone shoes. DJ, if you wouldn’t mind cuing the music up for me. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to introduce, all the way from Memphis, Tennessee, THE KING!”
The back door flies open, and in walks Derek Candela dressed from head-to-toe in his authentic replica “Vegas Elvis” costume—a white polyester jumpsuit covered in gold and silver costume jewelry topped off by Derek’s exposed hairy chest, a butterfly collar, multiple Hawaiian leis hanging from his neck, and a white cape extending down his back.
Elvis grabs the microphone from Mack. “Hey, cameraman,” he says to Kenny Rogers, “you mind taking a picture of me and the lucky lady?”
Elvis takes a knee, offering Beth a seat on his other knee. She accepts the invitation. Kenny Rogers snaps the photo while Elvis keeps playing to the crowd.
“Oh man, oh man,” he says. “This is one pretty lady. I-I-I-I could see me leaving Priscilla for this hot number. You hear that, Hank…HUGHHH!”
Beth stands up, laughing. Everyone is either (a) laughing, (b) screaming, or (c) drunk, with most of us more like (d) all of the above.
I’m thinking Elvis might be close to a (d) himself.
“So I’m down in Memphis with Mickey Gilley and the Gatlin Brothers. Hey, can somebody get the King a beer? These peanuts here are making me thirsty. Anyway, like I was saying, I-I-I-I was hanging with Mickey and the Gatlin Brothers, about halfway through a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. Oh man, oh man, those things are so good…HUGHHH! And I said, ‘Mickey, I need to make it up to Empire Ridge, Indiana, to see my friends Hank and Beth get hitched.’ And I gotta tell you, now that I’m here, I-I-I-I feel a lot of love in this room. Put your hands together if you feel it, too.”
The crowd responds with applause, shouts, and random song requests.
The King stands between me and Beth. “I-I-I-I just want to introduce the lovely couple here. I met Mr. Fitzpatrick during my ’68 comeback album. This guy was one of the greatest bodyguards the King ever had, and he could go into a bar and pick up women left and right. It even made the King jealous.”
This is one of those offhand comments meant to be funny but inevitably misinterpreted by half the audience as inappropriate. Fortunately, the drunken half of the audience is loud enough to overcome the uncomfortable handclaps of the reasonably sober half. Unfortunately, the tribute to my pickup skills elicits a brief but obvious straight face from Beth.
Elvis picks up the vibe.
“What’s even more impressive,” he says, “is not only how Hank managed to steal away my biggest groupie, Beth, here, but how this lovely lady managed to wrap him around her finger. I-I-I-I’d like to therefore dedicate my first song today…to the crowd.”
The girls in the audience scream like inebriated, sexed-up groupies, which is cool to me in a nostalgic, perverse sort of way. I think it’s their bare, pedicured feet getting to me. I like good feet almost as much as good calves.
“And of course,” Elvis adds, “I-I-I-I dedicate the song after that to the happy couple. Hit it, Jimmy.”
The King strikes the pose, his hand in the air, knees bent.
You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog…
Elvis grabs Beth out of the crowd, twirls her a few times. The King escorts Beth back to me as the procession begins.
Callie jumps onto the middle of the dance floor. For someone so recently victimized by my Polish cousins, she seems to have recovered to the point where she can hump the King’s leg. She stands and backs up into the crowd.
Elvis gives the ladies what they want: more pelvic thrusts. Aunt Joy is the next to respond. It’s the first and hopefully last time I ever see dirty dancing by a couple separated by a half century.
Aunt Joy cedes the floor…to my mother. The screaming is deafening. I shield my eyes for fear of reopening the psychological scars of a son still holding fast to the image of his mother as an asexual being.
The song ends abruptly. The girls can’t get enough.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve done a live show,” Elvis says. “I-I-I-I was screamin’ for that teleprompter. But I’m going to do a romantic number to close things out today. I’d like the women to all come gather around me.”
Per the King’s instructions, all the women at the reception surround him. “Okay, Jimmy,” Elvis says. The DJ cues up the song.
Wise men say only fools rush in…
“Why aren’t you out there?” I say to Beth, her head leaning on my shoulder.
“I got my king right here.”
I shake my head, somewhere between embarrassed and appreciative of the compliment. I push her onto the dance floor. “Get out there!”
Kenny Rogers stands with his camera between me and the King. “Wait for the bride!” someone shouts.
Beth lifts up her skirt. Her eyes scan for an opening in the King’s harem. She shrugs her shoulders, saying, “Here goes nothing.” She slides in front of the group while flashing the peace sign and doing the splits.
Again, the screams are deafening. Beth smiles as the cameras flash. It’s the best picture of the day, no doubt destined for a shelf in the Fitzpatrick household for years to come. But the picture will only tell half the story. The picture won’t tell you a third of the girls in the photo are under twenty-one and sauced out of their heads. The picture won’t tell you the girl to the left of Jeanine and right above Beth is the only twenty-year-old I know with double-F breasts and that she plans to get a breast reduction. The picture won’t tell you that even though Claire is on the King’s arm and laughing out loud, she just wishes Derek would propose to her already.
Someone grabs at my shirtsleeve. I turn around. No one is there. “Down here!” the voice says.
“Hey, little bro,” I say.
Jack is the cutest person in the room. People call him Dad’s tow-headed clone, but only because they don’t know any better.
The fact Jack even comes out of his room is a minor miracle, let alone the fact he’s as well-adjusted as any six-year-old on the planet. After the accident, Mom held him back for another year of kindergarten. The teachers said “he couldn’t concentrate” and that “he lacked focus.” On behalf of all the sons in the world whose fathers were gored by a Ford Bronco’s front bumper, allow me to say to those kindergarten teachers, go fuck yourself.
“Hank,” Jack says, “I wanted to tell you something.”
“Go for it, buddy.”
“Uhhh…” He rolls his eyes, like he’s lost the words and is trying to find them. In one breath, lacking any inflection or pause between words, he says, “I-just-wanted-to-say-congratulations-I-love-you-and-I-hope-you-have-fun-on-your-honeymoon.”
Rehearsed? Probably. Prompted by Mom? Undoubtedly. But the tears start to well up in my eyes nonetheless.
Let’s get one thing straight. I have not been a second father to Jack, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I’ve done my best. I lift him in the air and pull him into my chest. I give him a big wet kiss on the cheek that he of course immediately wipes off. I set him down, ruffle his blond mop with my hand.
“Hey, Jack, I want to ask you a question.”
“Okay,” Jack says, his face flushed with the typical embarrassment of a kid who realizes he’s about to have a conversation with an adult.
“Where do babies come from?”
“That’s an easy question.”
“Then tell me,” I say. I grab a random full beer off the table next to me, take a sip.
“Babies start in the mommy’s esophagus,” Jack says, “then they grow in the Eucharist, and then they come out the mommy’s butthole, as an egg.”
The beer shoots out my nose. I laugh. I laugh hard. So hard that I nearly miss seeing my mother-in-law being held upside down by Mack over the newly opened fourth keg of beer.
Aside from our parents and the Kornatowski boys, there are maybe a handful of people left at the reception over the age of twenty-four. The DJ cues up “December, 1963 (Oh What a Night)” by the Four Seasons. I stand up, pulling my wife out of her chair and back onto the dance floor.
“One more dance?” I say.
She takes my hand in hers. “How about we keep that number a little more open-ended?”
“Forever then?”
“Forever it is,” Beth says.