Miserable Love Stories
Page 14
Things you will never hear in your lifetime: Wow! You are SUCH a good driver! So smooth! Not too slow, not too fast! Just perfect! Bravo!
More Wedding Pictures I’ve Ruined through Inappropriate Facial Hair
A few years after Dave’s wedding, my Mom got remarried and asked me if I’d give her away at the ceremony.
“I’m ready to give,” I said.
I glanced through the wedding pictures recently and, for some reason, I wore huge—I mean huge—mutton chops. Something I’d never worn before and haven’t worn since. It’s almost as if I had grown the things overnight simply to ruin her wedding.
I’m also a little surprised that my girlfriend, who wouldn’t let me leave the apartment without changing shirts fifteen times, let me appear at the wedding with those monsters. To be fair, she’d just met my family. So, maybe she thought kooky hair and outfits were appropriate. Or maybe she knew it would be a good laugh years later when we looked at the album.
An Interfaith Wedding
My wife and I had an interfaith wedding. My parents were also interfaith as were all my grandparents. So, I come from a long line of religious ambivalence.
It’s a real commitment being interfaith. Finding that fence, parking yourself on top of it and defending your goddamn right to stay there balancing smack dab in the middle. There’s tremendous pressure to pick sides. But, to this day, we remain fanatically indecisive.
For the wedding, we knew we wanted a priest and a rabbi to perform the ceremony. And we considered throwing in two judges and a monkey just for good measure. The ceremony was held in a church and it was quite difficult to find a rabbi who would perform the ceremony there. We finally found an incredibly reformed rabbi on Craig’s List. He said for two grand he would not only perform the service in a church, but if we wanted, he could do it on a unicycle juggling fire sticks. So, that was a great deal and at the service only a few missalettes caught fire.
Our Diet Adventure
My wife and I have been dieting together. And it’s been great. But when you diet alongside a loved one you should determine right at the beginning if you have the same goals or if they diverge at some point. So, when we first started, my wife said her goal was to stay on the diet—forever! Forever!! She wanted to get back to her birth weight. And so, what was my plan? And I said, my plan was to drop a few and then get back to Taco Bell as fast as humanly possible. So, it’s a good idea to know your Diet Exit Strategy.
We argue about the diet a little bit. She goes—you should drink more water! I’m drinking eighteen gallons of water an hour! And I say, no, I’d rather drink eighteen gallons of Taco Bell hot sauce. But thank you.
We’ve been doing it for a while, and it’s been awesome because we discovered that we’ve both been mutually psychotic about almost everything we’re doing. Like, we went to our favorite restaurant the other night—Diet Date Night!—and our favorite waiter said, would you like your usual? The filet mignon drenched in butter? And we said, no, no—just bring us a small bowl of raspberries and eighteen gallons of water. Each. And of course, our favorite waiter looks at us like—eff you—because the tip on a bowl of raspberries is much much less than on two filet mignons dripping in butter.
Then, after our meal—how do we end the perfect Diet Date Night? We go home and watch The Food Network. We watch Guy Fieri inhaling deep fried mac and cheese wrapped in pork rinds. And to set the mood, my wife lights one of her scented candles. And what’s the scent? Baked cookies! Baked chocolate chip cookies. Hey honey, how many calories is the candle?! Can we maybe just eat the candle?
Random Thoughts
Tis better to have loved and lost than to do flood repair work in New Jersey.
I like to think I’m Woke, but I’m probably just napping.
My wife’s heart is in the right place—on the left side of her chest—unlike mine which is down below my kidneys.
My wife and I discovered that whenever we get in a big fight, we immediately clean the house afterwards. So, now we try to get in a big fight at least once a month. We want to kill each other, but damn, you can eat off the floor.
If Burger King married Dairy Queen would they live at White Castle?
Don’t Veer
My wife and I flew to Cincinnati for my nephew’s bar mitzvah. We got in very late and by the time we got to the hotel the rent-a-car had completely broken down. So, my wife says go back to the airport and get a new car. It’s around midnight and a forty-five minute trip back to the airport. But whatever. She stays at the hotel and I head back. But when I get to the rental car place, the replacement car they give me is new. Like new new. Like the newest car I’ve ever been in in my life. It’s a 2021, Tesla/Prius super, triple-bypass hybrid that runs on electricity and liquid nitrogen and cocaine and tiger’s blood and Altoids.
I get on the highway and the car has switches and dials and digital readouts—basically it’s Speed Racer’s Mach 5. And I’m trying to figure out how to pop out the buzz saws and the homing pigeon, when this incredibly sexy voice comes on and says, my left rear tire could use just a little more air. It’s not flat—but it’s not perfect. And the car wants to be perfect.
My car, I discover, is a bit of a diva. But I love this car—this sexy voice car. I’m essentially having an affair with my car—and I want to make the car happy. I’m not even driving back to the hotel—I’ve just been circling the airport for fifteen minutes. So, I find an all-night gas station with an air hose and I fill the tire and the car likes that. I like that. Thank you. That’s . . . nice. Please continue driving. And I get back on the road.
And after a minute the voice comes back on—you’re veering slightly to the left. Please correct your alignment. Don’t veer. Please don’t veer. On the dashboard there’s a stick figure picture of the highway with a line running down it, and the car is slightly to the left of the line. I feel like I’m Luke Skywalker unsuccessfully trying to stay in the Death Star trench.
And I realize I can’t not veer. At this point, my entire life is about slightly veering one way or the other—and that’s not going to change in the middle of the night, when I’m already exhausted. Don’t veer. Please correct your alignment.
I realize my sexy new car is not the Mach 5. The car has become my second wife. And now I have to pull over and figure out how to turn all this helpfulness off before my real wife gets in the car—because if my real wife gets in the car, then she and the car will double-team me.
Car: Don’t veer!
Wife: See, that’s what I said! You’re veering and you’re being defensive!
So, I pull over onto the shoulder and start looking for the kill switch. Because the rental car guy said there was a switch that would turn the voice off. But on the other hand, this was a guy whose necktie only came halfway down his shirt, so who knows how reliable he was.
So, I’m looking for the switch and suddenly the car becomes suspicious. What are you doing? There’s nothing wrong with the car. And suddenly, I’m in the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. There’s nothing wrong with the car. Nothing under the dashboard. Please get back on the road.
But I find the switch and I hit it. What—what are you—what are you—Daisy, Daisy . . . And my super-advanced, sexy car becomes just another regular boring car. I’m so relieved, and I pull back onto the highway just barely sideswiping an airport shuttle. I get all the way back to the hotel and park the car in the lot. I get into the high-tech hotel elevator and the doors shut. The elevator goes up half a floor and lurches to a stop.
And a sexy mechanical elevator voice says
I know what you did.
In Closing
Good night. Get some rest.
Don’t forget to turn off the lights.
About the Author
Alex Bernstein is the award-winning author of Miserable Adventure Stories and Plrknib. His work has appeared at McSweeney’s, NewPopLit, The Big Jewel, The American Bystander, Gi60, Yankee Pot Roast, Swink, Litro, Back Hair Advocate, Corvus, BluePrint
Review, Hobo Pancakes, The Rumpus, The Legendary, MonkeyBicycle, and PopImage, among numerous others. Please visit him at www.promonmars.com.