Dead Man's Honda

Lying on the floor of the expansive bathroom I whimpered and held my ear.

This is not my night.

“Jacob,” I finally said to my charge when I stumbled out to the living room “I need to go to urgent care. Something is not right with my ear. And where the HECK is my stuff? What’d the cleaning people do--- eat it?”

In addition to having a mansion with a tiered backyard and a stone stairway that leads down to a fence with no gate (huh?), Mr. Kinda Crazy has a remarkably, annoyingly thorough cleaning team. After searching every crevice of the house, holding the side of my head in massive pain, I gave up.



An hour later the doctor shoved a thing in my ear to look at it and it actually felt better:

“Oh wow, yeah, that’s bad. You’ve got a really bad inner and outer ear infection. Has it been hurting for a few days?”

“No. It just hit me about two hours ago. I was completely fine before.”

I thought something had crawled in there and died. I wanted to ask him to look again and see if maybe some sort of jack-hammering elf was in my ear but I refrained.

Since I didn’t have any clothes or bath products or nigh night (my...uh...blanket) at the house now, I had to go to my apartment and pick up clothes for the next day.

“Oh you poor thing,” Des said when she saw me still whimpering and holding my ear. “Here—have a fruit roll-up. I opened them all but just to see what colors they were," she said with a sweet smile.

You are going to have lucky, lucky, kids, I thought.

Back at the house I was still in pain, still missing clothes, and had forgotten to get a top to go with the jeans I picked up at my apartment. So today I'm wearing the camisole I slept in. Special.

“You know they could prescribe you some weed for that,” Jacob said when I explained that my ear was still throbbing.

“He just gave me Vicadin,” I told him as I climbed up to the top kitchen cupboards to see if maybe, just maybe, the cleaning people thought “hey, let’s stick this blankey and these clothes in with the pots and pans.”

“I have an insane pain tolerance level,” Jacob said. “Ok ready? Watch this.”

And then he started beating the heck out of his leg.

“What are you doing?” I managed to choke out laughing.

“I can’t feel my leg any longer, but there is absolutely NO pain.”

Forty five minutes later we were still looking for my missing stuff and wound up in the garage.

“I’ve never, ever, opened this cabinet,” Jacob said intensely while holding the door of a large, wooden cupboard. “What if it’s TOTALLY filled with weed? Ok ready?”

He sounded extremely excited. I shook my head.

“It’s totally arrangeable for me to get you some pot for your pain by….tomorrow.Yeah. Totally arrangeable.”

Wow. Thank you. You’re so helpful, Jacob.

“Maybe we could get you a spiritual license for it.”

Amen.

“Would you quit with the weed?!” I finally laughed out at him. “I can’t find nigh night!”

“What’s nigh night?”

Crap.

How to explain my little blankey to a fifteen year old. Or to the cleaning crew when I call them today for that matter?

Hiii...sooo...on the bed there was this thing that looks like a silky cleaning rag...but it's not...yeah...it's for....it's for...ehh....can you tell me where you put it?

To be honest I was more concerned about nigh night than I was about my clothes.

“You’re HOW old?” Jacob said when I told him what it was.

“Oh shut up.” I answered, disgruntled as I looked inside the massive hollow coffee table.

After finding a few more Emmy’s ("how many of these does your dad HAVE?") and other awards stashed around in various nooks and crannies. We gave up and I came to a very disheartening conclusion:

My grandma was wrong. I do have fashion sense. So much so that the cleaning crew took my clothes over the mass amounts of money and valuable awards lying around the house. And they're probably using nigh night to clean someone's toilet right now.

It’s tough to be me.

I wake up in utter confusion—horrid music is not only blaring in my dreams but apparently in real life as well. I’m in a huge, soft bed, in a huge, weird, house, and I can not figure out what happened to my life. I sit up. Blink. Stare out the large window and remember: oh yes. I’m house/teenager-sitting for the Kinda Crazies. And the Mister's radio alarm just went off.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m under the assumption everyone is crazy (especially me) and so is their family (this way we’re all connected…la la la…). And I love these people, actually. Probably too much. But after two years of engaging with them in unusual capacities, I’ve started to tender name-call.

“Yeah sorry I didn’t get back to you last night—I was really drunk pretty early on in the evening and wasn’t really good for anything after that…” Crazy Dad said on the phone the morning after he forgot to meet me to go over any “instructions” for watching the house and his fifteen year old son, today called “Jacob”, whom I used to tutor and who has appeared quite frequently in this blog.

His “instructions” turned out to be a fifteen minute discussion on the air conditioning.

Okaaaayyyy….

So today I get ready in a bathroom with an Emmy in it and dressers covered in all kinds of other TV awards and can’t find an iron for my easily-wrinkly pants. With only a few minutes left before I take Jacob to summer school I come up with a brilliant plan:

The shower is extra large so I put my clothes on, turn on the water as hot as I can get it, and then step inside-- but against the door so as not to get soaked.

I look like I’ve been dry cleaned in my clothes. Yeah, baby. Genius.

to top it off we found out my three year old nephew threw back a few...

When we arrived at the dimly-lit chapel Sam’s welts had gone down significantly but his eyes were still swollen and he was definitely doped-up on medications. A few people I didn’t know milled about at the front of the church. My oldest sister was busy working away at decorating the chapel. If Martha Stewart had a nice, selfless, not-likely-to-commit-purgery-or-do-time twin, it would be my sister, Delissa.

“So, I guess the groomsmen know you,” my brother said to me obliquely while we stared at the Church’s Wedding Coordinator. He had an expression like it was possibly a bad thing.

“Huh?” I said, completely confused since I really didn’t know more than two of them and those two wouldn’t have said anything about me. Disregarding that I became enthralled with the quiet, yet deadly movements of the Wedding Coordinator.

“I feel like she comes with the church or something— she's crazy intense and pervasive,” I said to Landon as the soft-spoken woman commanded her audience to sit down and pay attention after she had gone from group to group giving whispered instructions.

Once everyone was in attention she began to speak…ahem….I mean SQUEAK. Immediately my body tensed. I don’t take direction well as it is—but when it’s coming from a soft-squeaky woman who glares down with an intensity of a thousand suns….well….I start to foam at the mouth. It gets worse if the squeaking is drawn out unnecessarily.

“Let’s talk about food.” Pause. Pause. Pause. “We all want to be sure and eat some the day of the wedding so that no one passes out.” Pause Pause Pause.

Thank you, Stephen Hawking, my hungry, tired, not-enjoying-this-at-all-obnoxious self was thinking.

“I once had a bride who couldn’t fit into her dress…so she didn’t eat the whole day….and then…she went up on the altar [like Isaac??!!] and she completely passed out in front of everyone. So we all know that if you don’t eat, I have to get up in front of everyone and fan you back to life.”

Seriously?!Seriously?!Back to life?!What are you, Jesus?!(totally starving at this point and therefore losing it)

Pause.Pause.Pause.

“Let’s talk about tuxes. Now.” Pause Pause Squeaky Pause. “Where is Travis? Travis? Travis? Where is Travis?”

He was very confidently raising his hand but she still wanted to say his name thirteen times.

“Ohhh…that is such a lovely name. You know I knew a Travis once who…”
And off she went on another story.

I started turning to people near me and making choking faces. I was going to die if this frigging thing didn’t get moving. I half expected her to quietly, laboriously say:

“Now let’s talk about shoe laces. Do you have shoe laces?”

Instead she moved on to what color foods we were allowed to eat the next day. Clear foods. How many clear foods exist in the world, might I ask? Besides water? Some sort of gelatin made out of nutrasweetener/chrystallized fructose? Eyeball gel?I wondered if Sam’s rash was growing worse under the sheer length of detailed minutiae….I was certain I was getting one from that woman.

“Hi, I’m Leizel,” I said to the groomsmen escorting me down the aisle.

“I know who you are, I’m Peter*, friends with your friend Lacy*.”

Wait. THAT Peter? The one that…..

See, it would be really cool if I said that in my head.

But I didn’t.

Yeah, I said it out loud:

“You’re THAT Peter?”

Aaaaawwwkkkwwaaarrrrrd.

Quite a few great stories and perhaps a few not so great popped into my mind and I wondered, at my comment, what popped into his.

A few hours later at the dinner I finally recognized one of the other groomsmen and the reason why my brother had made his remark: years ago apparently there had been some bad blood between me and that guy, but I honestly can’t remember what about. I do remember disliking the fellow, but I have no idea why. Perhaps he said something truly cruel or unkind or totally degrading…..

“I think he said you were too much of a feminist or something,” my friend Lacy said when she arrived late that night as we were setting up.

Oh. Ok.

Either way, it was slightly awkward but not nearly as awkward as:

The woman who royally effed up Lindsey’s hair the MORNING OF her wedding.

To be continued….

*Names have been changed from here on down to protect the innocent. And my nephew is holding a glass of cider.