February 13
The next day was Valentine's Day and I had answered an ad to be a delivery driver. Stirred up by the hearts and flowers I guess, I went home that night determined to write this girl, a perfect stranger, a letter. After many drafts I was so tired that I wrote a final one so terse and abrupt it would have sounded to the the reader like I hated her, or was trying to make collections. I crumpled it up, and still slightly grumpy that she was putting me out by being hard to write to, wrote her instead a 1st annual Valentines Day fictional account of how we met, and what happened to us.
Well, goddammit, here's what happened. We started off scaring each other and it just escalated. When I met you you asked me if I knew where you could store some furniture. You didn't have any room for it, so I told you about the storeroom I rented. I told you I had to put some stuff there myself and so next time I went I would clear some space for you. Then I'd let you know.
Soon after I went to the warehouse. It was winter. I took all my Christmas decorations. I wouldn't need them for another year. I loved Christmas and even as a bachelor spared no expense. But when I was leaving the storage room, I stopped and looked back at my life-sized, almost life-like wooden cutout of Santa Claus. He had, as always, one gregarious mittened hand raised.
I'd never liked this Santa. From outside my house his chunky silhouette made it look to all passing by as if someone inside was idiotically hailing them, or just standing stock-still watching them. This representation of him was also a lot less like Santa you see at the mall. It was more like some old-country version of Santa, like a dark-skinned Turkish Santa or the Santa that brought the Moors their gifts of myrrh. It was a Santa but it was a boring one, one from the Bible, before his conversion from a spooky religious St. Nicholas to a secular resident of the North Pole.
I dragged this swarthy faker over right inside the entrance of the warehouse door. I stepped back and looked. As soon as you would open the door you would look up as you removed the key from the knob and Dark Santa would scare you. I laughed at the thought.
When I got home I called you and left a message that the key was under the rock by the warehouse door. I gave you directions and hung up happy. I was so excited I gave myself a little squeeze.
I practically waited by the phone. After a week when I didn't hear from you though, I began to mull over what it was I had expected to happen. Maybe you were mad? Now that I thought about it you were pretty hot. Oh no! Maybe you were dead?! Killed by my prank from a heart attack? Or more likely you just didn't find it funny. But my point is, through all this musing I kind of got very interested in you.
You finally called, but you didn't say anything. Not one word about the Santa! I wondered if you were Jewish and didn't know what he looked like. Or maybe you grew up in Iowa and were immune to scarecrows and their variants. I wondered to myself so hard about you that you surely must have heard my thoughts from inside my body as I listened on the phone making small talk and thought the lines were crossed.
Finally I came down from my tree about the Santa thing and actually joined the conversation. Who cares if you were scared, I thought to myself in the background of our conversation, and weren't you kind of hot after all? Maybe it was better to try to date you than frighten you with medieval religious figures.
So I called you again a week later to ask a small favor. I asked if you could drop my car off for me at the airport. You said OK. I told you where a key was hid in the garage. My car was an old style suburban that got 5 miles to the gallon, but my excuse was that I needed it for something I had bought while traveling:
It was a wax model of Ed McMahon holding a giant Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes check, and I was going to put it on your doorstep one night while you slept. I actually had to rent a seat for this thing on the plane. I didn't trust it in the cargo hold. I know those type of guys and they would strip him down naked and God knows what else. No, I draped my arm around him on the flight and tried to hold back periodic spasms of laughter as I pictured your frightened, but pretty, face.
Upon landing I walked with Ed through the airport, who you may not know as I learned from this life-size model, is six feet five inches tall, and even his wax replica smells of beer like a giant alcoholic action figure. We went downstairs and past people's stares and gloriously out of the terminal under a night sky towards the long term parking lot. I could see my old car there. Surely no one had gone to such lengths before I consoled myself proudly, keying the lock to the back compartment where I stowed some bungee cords.
I used these to secure Ed to the roof. Once in the car I sat and decided to go to your house first thing. But when I tried to start the car up I realized the battery was dead. I went back to the rear of the car and got my jumper cables, then around to the front, popped the hood, and fished for the clasp to open it. I'm not very mechanically inclined and it took a while. As I raised the hood I felt a great gust of energy from the space where my engine had been removed and a human was coiled waiting to scare me.
Three taxis told us they wouldn't give Ed a ride and then we finally traded just his giant check to an immigrant for a ride home. I looked at you out of the corner of my eye. I didn't say anything about you scaring me. You hadn't and by God I wouldn't either. But I was already thinking ahead. We began to "date."
To each their own. You tended to scare me more like an animal of prey and were often found in places like my refrigerator, dryer, and other appliances. You might tell me the garbage disposal wasn't working then hide beneath the sink with an audio tape of feeding alligators. Me personally, I didn't jump out like the bogeyman. Sometimes less is more. If I saw or heard you coming into the house we'd moved into together I might scramble to wait behind a door, and then when you had just walked past, reach out after your foot to lightly pinch your Achilles tendon and go "peep."
I'm not saying one is better than the other, just different, that's all. And it was this kind of mature give and take between us that led to me standing on the altar one year after we first met. At this point I had a patch of white hair on the back of my head from one particular fright you'd given me, and you sometimes now had a hard time entering rooms. But to this point, neither of us, by God, had ever said anything to the other about being scared. In fact, we had already agreed that would one day be on our tombstones. They would be inscribed: "We're not scared."
I was lovingly lost in this memory and others as I stood at the altar. But a couple hours later I was wearily sitting in a bar with a friend. You had stood me up. No one had heard from you. I threw back my last drink.
Back at the hotel I threw myself on the bed that would have been our honeymoon. I could have eaten my fist I was so disappointed. I went to the closet and took off my tux. As I walked naked by the bed to the bathroom I felt a light pinch on my Achilles tendon.
The next day was Valentine's Day and I had answered an ad to be a delivery driver. Stirred up by the hearts and flowers I guess, I went home that night determined to write this girl, a perfect stranger, a letter. After many drafts I was so tired that I wrote a final one so terse and abrupt it would have sounded to the the reader like I hated her, or was trying to make collections. I crumpled it up, and still slightly grumpy that she was putting me out by being hard to write to, wrote her instead a 1st annual Valentines Day fictional account of how we met, and what happened to us.
Well, goddammit, here's what happened. We started off scaring each other and it just escalated. When I met you you asked me if I knew where you could store some furniture. You didn't have any room for it, so I told you about the storeroom I rented. I told you I had to put some stuff there myself and so next time I went I would clear some space for you. Then I'd let you know.
Soon after I went to the warehouse. It was winter. I took all my Christmas decorations. I wouldn't need them for another year. I loved Christmas and even as a bachelor spared no expense. But when I was leaving the storage room, I stopped and looked back at my life-sized, almost life-like wooden cutout of Santa Claus. He had, as always, one gregarious mittened hand raised.
I'd never liked this Santa. From outside my house his chunky silhouette made it look to all passing by as if someone inside was idiotically hailing them, or just standing stock-still watching them. This representation of him was also a lot less like Santa you see at the mall. It was more like some old-country version of Santa, like a dark-skinned Turkish Santa or the Santa that brought the Moors their gifts of myrrh. It was a Santa but it was a boring one, one from the Bible, before his conversion from a spooky religious St. Nicholas to a secular resident of the North Pole.
I dragged this swarthy faker over right inside the entrance of the warehouse door. I stepped back and looked. As soon as you would open the door you would look up as you removed the key from the knob and Dark Santa would scare you. I laughed at the thought.
When I got home I called you and left a message that the key was under the rock by the warehouse door. I gave you directions and hung up happy. I was so excited I gave myself a little squeeze.
I practically waited by the phone. After a week when I didn't hear from you though, I began to mull over what it was I had expected to happen. Maybe you were mad? Now that I thought about it you were pretty hot. Oh no! Maybe you were dead?! Killed by my prank from a heart attack? Or more likely you just didn't find it funny. But my point is, through all this musing I kind of got very interested in you.
You finally called, but you didn't say anything. Not one word about the Santa! I wondered if you were Jewish and didn't know what he looked like. Or maybe you grew up in Iowa and were immune to scarecrows and their variants. I wondered to myself so hard about you that you surely must have heard my thoughts from inside my body as I listened on the phone making small talk and thought the lines were crossed.
Finally I came down from my tree about the Santa thing and actually joined the conversation. Who cares if you were scared, I thought to myself in the background of our conversation, and weren't you kind of hot after all? Maybe it was better to try to date you than frighten you with medieval religious figures.
So I called you again a week later to ask a small favor. I asked if you could drop my car off for me at the airport. You said OK. I told you where a key was hid in the garage. My car was an old style suburban that got 5 miles to the gallon, but my excuse was that I needed it for something I had bought while traveling:
It was a wax model of Ed McMahon holding a giant Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes check, and I was going to put it on your doorstep one night while you slept. I actually had to rent a seat for this thing on the plane. I didn't trust it in the cargo hold. I know those type of guys and they would strip him down naked and God knows what else. No, I draped my arm around him on the flight and tried to hold back periodic spasms of laughter as I pictured your frightened, but pretty, face.
Upon landing I walked with Ed through the airport, who you may not know as I learned from this life-size model, is six feet five inches tall, and even his wax replica smells of beer like a giant alcoholic action figure. We went downstairs and past people's stares and gloriously out of the terminal under a night sky towards the long term parking lot. I could see my old car there. Surely no one had gone to such lengths before I consoled myself proudly, keying the lock to the back compartment where I stowed some bungee cords.
I used these to secure Ed to the roof. Once in the car I sat and decided to go to your house first thing. But when I tried to start the car up I realized the battery was dead. I went back to the rear of the car and got my jumper cables, then around to the front, popped the hood, and fished for the clasp to open it. I'm not very mechanically inclined and it took a while. As I raised the hood I felt a great gust of energy from the space where my engine had been removed and a human was coiled waiting to scare me.
Three taxis told us they wouldn't give Ed a ride and then we finally traded just his giant check to an immigrant for a ride home. I looked at you out of the corner of my eye. I didn't say anything about you scaring me. You hadn't and by God I wouldn't either. But I was already thinking ahead. We began to "date."
To each their own. You tended to scare me more like an animal of prey and were often found in places like my refrigerator, dryer, and other appliances. You might tell me the garbage disposal wasn't working then hide beneath the sink with an audio tape of feeding alligators. Me personally, I didn't jump out like the bogeyman. Sometimes less is more. If I saw or heard you coming into the house we'd moved into together I might scramble to wait behind a door, and then when you had just walked past, reach out after your foot to lightly pinch your Achilles tendon and go "peep."
I'm not saying one is better than the other, just different, that's all. And it was this kind of mature give and take between us that led to me standing on the altar one year after we first met. At this point I had a patch of white hair on the back of my head from one particular fright you'd given me, and you sometimes now had a hard time entering rooms. But to this point, neither of us, by God, had ever said anything to the other about being scared. In fact, we had already agreed that would one day be on our tombstones. They would be inscribed: "We're not scared."
I was lovingly lost in this memory and others as I stood at the altar. But a couple hours later I was wearily sitting in a bar with a friend. You had stood me up. No one had heard from you. I threw back my last drink.
Back at the hotel I threw myself on the bed that would have been our honeymoon. I could have eaten my fist I was so disappointed. I went to the closet and took off my tux. As I walked naked by the bed to the bathroom I felt a light pinch on my Achilles tendon.
