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.
Chapter sixty-five
“These things are good,” Beth says with her mouth full. She’s wearing a bright yellow bikini and picking brownie crumbs out of her navel.
“Probably my favorite wedding present,” I say, my mouth also full.
My sister Jeanine made a batch of fun brownies for the honeymoon. We baked them together the night before the wedding. She had held court in my kitchen, channeling the illegitimate daughter of Julia Child and Jerry Garcia.
“The key is to mix your weed in with the butter reduction,” she said while stirring the pot of melted butter and marijuana with her right hand and chain-smoking Marlboro Lights with her left hand. “Too many people just mix the weed in with the brownie mix and throw it in the oven. You know what that does, right?”
“Uh, sure?” I said to her, not having a fucking clue.
Jeanine pointed at me, smiling. “You’ll thank me for these tips someday.”
“If you say so,” I said. “But just for kicks and giggles, remind me again what’s wrong with mixing the dope into the mix.”
“Pretty basic knowledge, really.” Jeanine poured the hazel-colored gelatinous ooze in a mixing bowl. She grabbed the dry brownie mix and dumped it into the bowl. She added an egg and about a third of a cup of water, stirred the mix with a wooden spoon. “You only get a fraction of the THC if you just cook the weed into the mix.”
“Basic knowledge indeed,” I said. “What’s THC again?”
“Come on now, Hank,” Jeanine said. “Tetrahydrocannabinol. It’s the shit that gets you high.”
“Oh, so you’re saying cooking weed in the brownies gets you less high?”
“Bingo.”
“We don’t want that.”
“Hell no, we don’t!”
Beth and I couldn’t afford a honeymoon. We were up to our eyeballs in student loans, and Dr. Burke’s beach house was booked through the end of the summer. At the last minute, Dr. Burke’s partner offered us a three-day weekend on his houseboat on Lake Cumberland, free of charge. The eighty-foot-long houseboat is more like a condo on water, with six bedrooms, plus a full wet bar and hot tub on the roof and a two-story curly slide extending off the stern of the boat.
With over twelve hundred miles of shoreline and a maximum depth of 250 feet, Lake Cumberland in southern Kentucky is the largest lake east of the Mississippi. The great thing about Cumberland is that no one west of the Mississippi or east of the Appalachians seems to know it exists. The man-made reservoir is a vast flooded valley, surrounded on all sides by public parkland. Dr. Burke’s partner told us we could quite possibly go all three days without seeing another boat on the water.
It’s a theory I’m prepared to put to the test.
We finish our last bites of brownies. I smile. Beth is lying on a sun lounger. I’m sitting at her feet. The Divinyls’s “I Touch Myself” starts up on the houseboat sound system, which immediately compels me to massage her calves.
“Freak,” Beth says.
I give her calves a good squeeze. “How stoned are you right now?”
My bride giggles. “Way stoned.”
Beth and I have spent the past half hour taking turns coating one another from head to toe with Palmolive—softens hands while you’re doing your wife—and sliding down the curly slide. Montell Jordan reminds us both that “This Is How We Do It,” although I can’t imagine many people in South Central do it this way.
“I’m over the slide,” Beth says, climbing out of the water. She grabs a towel, wraps it around her hair.
“What do you want to do now?” I say, stepping aboard the boat’s deck.
Beth removes her towel from her head, throws it at me. “I want to fool around.”
“Uh…” I wipe my face with the towel. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?”
“No, I mean really fool around.”
“If you insist.” I throw the towel on the ground. I rush to Beth, my left hand on her right breast. My free hand, seemingly of its own volition, reaches between her legs.
Beth pushes me away. “Easy, tiger.”
“But I thought you said—”
“How about a little foreplay before you go stampeding toward the clitoris?”
“I can do that, too,” I say, sprouting a full tripod at this point.
“Then go up top,” Beth says, pointing at the aluminum stairs next to the slide. “I have a surprise for you.”
Montell Jordan defers to TLC. Beth walks downstairs. She turns up “Waterfalls.” I peer down the steps. “Can I come?”
“You stay up there,” Beth shouts back. TLC is cut off in midstream, replaced by the beginning of Van Halen’s “Summer Nights.”
Fuck yeah!
Beth just put on the Super Sexy Six Metal Mega Mix. It’s a six-song “boner block” of music that gets me going: Van Halen’s “Summer Nights,” Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls,” Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” Jackyl’s “Dirty Little Mind,” and Scorpions’ “Tease Me, Please Me.” Beth made the mixtape for my twenty-fourth birthday back in April and proceeded to do an eighteen-minute striptease that quite nearly made my dick explode.
“Close your eyes,” Beth says.
I close my eyes. I can hear her coming up the steps to Sammy Hagar’s scratchy serenade.
“Okay, you can open them.”
I open my eyes. Beth is standing in front of me. In place of her bikini bottom, she’s wearing a multilayered silk skirt fastened low on her hips. She is topless, save for two small, golden teacup-like pasties.
“Oh my God,” I say. “Are you a…a belly dancer?”
Chapter sixty-six
The conservation officer seems like a nice guy. He speaks with a lazy southern drawl, and he keeps the back of his squad car exceedingly clean.
“That thar wuz uh sumthin’ I ain’t uh never seen.”
His name is Don. He arrested us on charges of indecent exposure. Our houseboat was tucked away in a fairly isolated cove, but our music had attracted his attention. I was having sex with Beth—still wearing her belly dancer costume and Scorpions’s “Tease Me, Please Me” echoing in my ears—when Officer Don tapped me on the shoulder.
Beth sits in the front passenger seat, trying to talk Officer Don out of taking us to jail. For being eternally mortified and braless, wearing a belly dancer costume covered only by one of my V-neck T-shirts, she’s amazingly composed. She asks Don about the fishing on Cumberland, about where he’s from. She looks like she’s getting somewhere. It’s time for me to step in and close the deal.
“Flossie!” I blurt out, less sober than I expected to sound.
“’Scuse me, son?” Officer Don says.
“Aunt Flossie,” I say. “She lives, or should I say lived, in these parts. Campbellsville, or was it Mannsville?”
Officer Don nods. “Both those towns ur in this county.”
I pretend not to notice Beth shaking her head. “My aunt Flossie lived there her whole life. We used to come down and stay on her farm. There was this huge barn across the street where they’d hang tobacco leaves to dry.”
“Makes sense,” Officer Don says. “Tobaccuh’s a big crop ’round here.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Big crop.”
“Son?”
“Yes sir.”
“Your aunt Flossie. She got a last name?”
“Last name?”
“That’s whut I said.”
“She was my great-aunt, my dad’s aunt.”
“Great-aunts don’t have last names?”
“I’m sure they do,” I say. “I just can’t remember mine.”
For all my earnestness, my name dropping goes about as well as if I had told Officer Don that Jesus was a black homosexual democrat who hated Adolph Rupp. He escorts us into the Columbia County Jail.
Beth and I had to wait to be processed after a three-hundred-pound bald man who was arrested for a DUI on a riding lawn mower. The lady who books me, an old, haggard, Bea Arthur look-alike, speaks with an accent bordering on indecipherable.
“Have uh seat,” she says, nodding to the chair beside her desk. “Nyeeem?”
“Hank Fitzpatrick,” I answer.
“Birth-dye?”
“Four, twenty-one, seventy-one.”
“White?”
“Huh?”
“White?”
“One more time?”
“White?”
“Uh, yeah, I’m white.”
“Weight, Hank,” Beth says from the other side of the room. “What’s your weight?”
“Oh, sorry,” I say. “One seventy-five.”
I haven’t been one seventy-five since the eighth grade, and Bea Arthur notices. “You show ’bout that?”
I throw my thumb over my shoulder. “If John Deere over there can get away with saying he’s two forty, I can get away with one seventy-five.”
I swear Bea Arthur smiles. “Y’all kin go now,” she says.
“What?” I say, looking at Beth. She shrugs her shoulders. I look back at Bea Arthur.
“Your bail’s posted,” she says, enunciating for my benefit. “Wuz only five bucks uh piece. Officer Don went easy on y’all.”
“Define ‘easy,’” Beth says.
“You two ain’t hurtin’ nobody, so we’re giving you deferrals. Long as y’all pay a seventy-five-dollar fine within the next sixty days, we’ll just say today never happened.”
“And that’s it?” I say.
Bea Arthur shakes her head. “Not exactly. Y’all are on probation. Best keep your noses clean for the next eighteen months, and then we’ll forget about today.”
“Sounds good to me.” I stand up. “Now, do we pay you the ten dollars for bail, or do we pay it on the way out?”
Bea Arthur shakes her head. “Like I said, your bail was posted. Paid for a half hour ago.”
“By who?”
“He’s outside uh waitin’ for y’all. Says he’s your uncle.”
Chapter sixty-seven
“What the fuck are you doing here?” “Please, Hank, let me explain.”
I stand in the middle of the Columbia County Jail in a tie-dyed tank top, swimsuit and flip-flops, my fists clenched. Uncle Mitch stands opposite me, unshaven and smelling like body odor, still in the same pitted-out button-down and blue jeans from our wedding two days ago.
Beth grabs my elbow. “Hank, let’s just leave.”
I yank my arm free of my wife. “Answer me, Mitch. What the fuck are you doing here?”
He steps tentatively toward me, his outreached hand nearly touching my arm. “I couldn’t let things end like they did the other day. I had to see you. I overheard someone going into your wedding say where you were going for your honeymoon, so I got a room at a motel down here and just waited things out. The moment just kind of presented itself when I was having a cup of coffee on the t
own square and saw you being taken in handcuffs into the police station. Indecent exposure? I can only imagine what you were—”
I poke him in the chest. “You can only imagine what, Mitch? Being there with me, just like old times, so you can grab hold of my little pecker?”
Uncle Mitch stumbles backward. “Hank, I—”
“You what?”
“I only want your forgiveness.”
“Never.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t?”
“You are your father’s son. His capacity to forgive is inside you. I know it is.”
“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You don’t think he knew?”
“Knew what?”
“About me?”
“Fuck you!” I shout. Officer Don walks back into the station just as I pin Uncle Mitch against the wall, my elbow in his throat.
Beth is crying. Uncle Mitch gasps for air. “W-we were teenagers. He caught me with another guy, one of his bandmates. I swore to him it was a one-time thing. He promised to never tell anyone, but he had to have known. He just had to have known, Hank.”
I knee Uncle Mitch in the groin. He falls like a sack of potatoes. I reel back my foot for another blow. Just as my foot connects with his exposed ribs, Officer Don checks me into the wall.
He spins me around, pins my arm behind me, immobilizing me. “Mr. Fitzpatrick, that’s enough. There’ll be none of that in my station, yuh hear?”
Both of our backs are turned away from Uncle Mitch. Beth is the one who sees him reach into his pocket.
“Gun!” she screams.
Bea Arthur is already on the com in the other room. “We have a four-seventeen in progress at the Columbia County Jail. I repeat, a four-seventeen. Officer on the scene. Request backup.”
Beth drops to the floor. Officer Don lets go of my wrist. We both turn to the assailant.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to put that gun down,” Officer Don says. “We don’t want to see anyone get hurt here.”
“Spare me your bullshit, officer,” Uncle Mitch says, waving the handgun in our faces. “I know how this works. I just pulled a loaded gun inside a fucking police station, plus I’m a convicted sex offender. The math just isn’t working in my favor on this one.”
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