A year after Rick and Melanie’s wedding, Luke and I were still together, so when he was invited to another of his hometown crowd’s nuptials, it was a given that I’d go. At least I know to bring cash for the bar this time, I thought.
Luke’s friend Wookie (I swear, the name I changed it from is just as absurd) was marrying a nice but nondescript girl who I literally cannot remember anything about beyond the fact that she existed. Melanie was odious enough that she remains in my memory six plus years later, so maybe this is a compliment to Wookie’s wife (who will now be referred to as Jane Doe).
Wookie and Miss Doe were getting married in the small middle American town where Luke and co had grown up, which was exciting to me because I’d never been there. We’ll call it Springfield, to protect the innocent, but just imagine a teeny tiny town about an hour plus from the nearest (small) city. We flew to Minneapolis via Sun Country Airlines, which I think may have gone out of business shortly after this flight. Remember all the terrible things I said about the dead animal smell on Alaska Air? Multiply those by a thousand and add smaller seats and fatter passengers. We then rented a car and drove about four hours to Luke’s tiny hometown, where we were greeted like celebrities.
Luke’s most adventurous friends had ventured as far as Minneapolis after high school – here, I was hanging with the friends who’d never made it out of Springfield. They all had aspirations, sure – one wanted to be an actor and did stand-up at a local bar, one was writing what was sure to be the Great American Novel, but they all knew they didn’t have the cojones to really do anything about it. This put Luke’s situation – an aspiring writer who is incredibly funny and talented but also incredibly unproductive – in vast relief for me. Luke had already surpassed his other aspiring artist friends just by making it to LA. He worked for an up-and-coming comedy director (who now, years later, has found well-deserved success and Luke has risen through the ranks with him) and he was, you know, THINKING about writing at least. Doing all this thinking about writing in Los Angeles might seem unambitious to me (who was hoping he’d move from the thinking stage into the writing stage sometime this century), but to his small-town friends, he might as well be hanging with Steve Martin on a daily basis. I – for the first time in my now year plus relationship with Luke – understood things a lot better vis-a-vis his writing. For these guys, it seemed, better to have dreams and never fail than to take a risk. I can’t say I ever agreed with that idea, but I certainly understood where Luke was coming from much much better.
We met up with Luke’s close friend Ed and a pretty girl Ed was hopelessly in love with (you know the type: has a boyfriend but revels in the attention she gets from this other guy) and headed off to karaoke our faces off. Let’s just say that Ed’s and my rendition of “Islands in the Stream” would have even brought a smile to Simon Cowell’s face. The night ended in drunken exuberance and we all bid farewell til the wedding the next day.
Luke was a groomsman in this wedding, and was giving a toast that he was incredibly nervous about. Proving me right about all my nagging that he IS a good writer and he should freaking write more, his toast was funny, poignant, and an all-around hit with the wedding guests. I’m sure I said something pointed about how if he wrote more he would get the same reaction all the time and I’m sure it was bitchier than I meant it to be, but hey…I’M RIGHT.
This time, I was prepared for the cash bar, and ordered my boxed wine like a seasoned midwestern wedding pro. Then Luke wandered over holding a glass of champagne. “Where did you get that?” I hissed. Because there isn’t champagne at midwestern weddings, according to my long history attending them (or, you know, that one time…). “Oh, they have some here.” I was a kid on Christmas morning. Before I could rush back to the bar and rustle up some sparkly deliciousness for myself, however, Luke continued: “It’s complimentary. But only for the wedding party.”
HOLD THE F UP.
“You’re meaning to tell me,” I said to my long-suffering boyfriend, the one who had just delivered a stellar toast at his best friend’s wedding, the one who I should be showering with praise and kindness, “that I have to pay five dollars for fucking Franzia and you get to drink free champagne all night?” Luke’s face dropped as he realized that maybe he should have delivered this news in a way less likely to take me to Defcon 9. I realized I was not only coming off like a shitty girlfriend but also an alcoholic (a CHEAP alcoholic), but I RODE DEAD ANIMAL AIR THE SEQUEL NEXT TO A 300 LB DUDE I DESERVE SOME FREE J. ROGET. Luke realized the best way to shut me up, luckily, and soon returned with a glass of pilfered champagne and shoved it in my hands, heading back to the wedding party’s table (did I not mention that the wedding party sat separately for their dates? Cause that happened) with a final look of disdain at me and my snobby New York ways.
The rest of the reception was lovely: we danced, I snuck champagne, I even participated in that ridiculous “dollar dance” thing that made sense 100 years ago when the married couple walking out of the wedding with 60 bucks actually meant something but now just meant the couple had enough for late-night pizza and beers for a few nights post-wedding.
We snagged a ride back to our hotel with a couple I’d befriended while Luke was off at the special champagne table and I was stuck in the back of the reception hall – Mark and Jenny – a friend of Luke’s from high school and his girlfriend. En route, Mark uttered what at the time I didn’t realize would be fateful words: “Let’s go to Taco John’s!”
Taco John’s, for the uninitiated, is a fast-food chain that seems to only exist in the northern midwest. One of their signature items is the Ranch Burrito, which is exactly what it sounds like – a burrito with ranch dressing – and which I was talked into ordering since I was a Taco John’s newbie. To be fair, it was delicious (though after a night filling my stomach with champagne and not much else, I think cardboard would have tasted delicious as well). No one else had the Ranch Burrito, having grown up on Taco John’s and wanting to order their particular favorites from the menu.
Luke and I finally got back to the hotel around 3 and passed out. When the alarm went off at 8 the next morning – we were set to meet Mark and Jenny for brunch before making the long drive back to MN and Roadkill Air – I groaned. “I know, I’m so fucking hungover,” Luke muttered from beside me.
That wasn’t it. I ran to the bathroom and promptly regurgitated the Ranch Burrito as well as everything else in my stomach.
Some people are good at throwing up. I am not one of them. I immediately started crying out of embarrassment and misery at my aching insides. Luke, however, started laughing. “Did you get some bad Ranch?” I wanted to kill him. However, I could not stop throwing up for long enough to get my hands around his neck. The Taco John’s Ranch Burrito that my evil boyfriend had FORCED upon me was making a stand in my stomach and was not going to surrender anytime soon.
I couldn’t keep anything down. Not even water. It was a disaster. I finally pulled myself together enough to go to brunch with Mark and Jenny as planned, but as soon as we entered the restaurant and I smelled food I went right back to dry-heaving. I would say I was still embarrassed about this but I was so miserable I didn’t even feel the shame. I lay in the car while Luke had (what I imagined was) a super-fun brunch with his friends, coldly leaving his beloved girlfriend to languish in agony. (What really happened was he asked me about a million times if he should bail on the brunch and I told him no, no, you go, I’m fine here, the way that girls do when they want their boyfriends to magically divine that they are lying and then get furious when the boyfriend fails to read one’s mind.)
Finally, Luke emerged from The Best Brunch of All Time and we began the drive back to Minneapolis. Remember how I said it was four hours long? Imagine driving for four hours with brutal food poisoning. It wasn’t pretty. Luckily I had thrown up everything in my stomach so we didn’t have to stop for further indignities of that sort, but my internal organs were now waging some sort of “Screw you, we spent hours helping you barf and now we’re done” strike, so I was in brutal pain. I lay in the back seat, unable to move without cramping, and with a throat dry as the Sahara due to my inability to even keep water down.
At some point, I raised my head to look out the window and saw this gigantic tire on the side of the road. I mean seriously, this tire was enormous. Like if King Kong drove a car that was fitted to his size, his tires would be smaller than the tire that I saw. My throat too parched and brain too scrambled to put together a coherent sentence, I could only point and say “Tire. Tire!” I lay there saying “TIRE” for a good minute with my focused-on-the-road boyfriend going “What the fuck are you saying, you’re tired?” before Luke finally saw the enormous tire for himself. He started cracking up: “Oh! Tire! Yep, honey, that is a tire. Keep using your words, kay?”
For the rest of our relationship we laughed about “tire,” which became kind of a touchstone for the entire absurd food poisoning incident. I think part of the reason I’m not married is that I haven’t found anyone else who could make me laugh the way Luke and I did about “tire.” And ultimately it didn’t work out with him, of course. But that weekend I – despite the Airline of Doom, the champagne-hoarding wedding party, and some really fucking bad Ranch – couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.
Never The Bride 