Finally, one day after class, as the rest of the students poured out of the room, I noticed that The Goddess was still at her desk sketching something. She was so focused on her artwork that she didn’t seem to notice that everyone had left except me. This was my chance. Fate was my wingman. If I didn’t make my move now, maybe I would never have another shot.
With one fluid motion, I got up from my miniature desk with the chair attached (without knocking it over, thus averting Imaginary Catastrophic Scenario #1) and walked up behind her. Her perfect head was bowed, her silky black hair falling like an elegant curtain across her masterpiece in progress. I leaned over her also-perfect shoulder and only got out “Whatcha workin . . . ” before a massive pool of drool fell from my mouth right onto her drawing. It all happened in slow motion. The drawing was ruined. The Goddess was grossed out. I was too humiliated to think straight and simply said, “I’m Drew.”* Followed by an exodus so swift I could have made it the finale vanishing act in my future grand illusion show..
*I always knew you’d use the twin thing to pin a crime on me.
It took me three years to work up enough courage again to show a girl I was interested.
This time, I was going to be direct and to the point. No more mincing around. Blame it on puberty: I was a man on a mission.
The target: Heather.
The objective: My first kiss.
Heather had long blond hair and freckles. She was as kind as she was cute. Best of all, we were friends already, and I made her laugh. Obviously we were meant to be together. Obvious to everyone but Heather’s boyfriend, that is. Fortunately it wouldn’t have to come to death-by-dodgeball if my plan worked. The boyfriend was one of the popular skater kids who seemed to date a different girl every semester. Nice enough, definitely cool, but not a romantic like yours truly. Not that I had anything to base my self-proclaimed Casanova status on, but I just knew I could be more.
One day, Heather and I were out sitting on the swings in the schoolyard during our lunch break. Her boyfriend was away on a family trip. We were talking about what was likely some critical plotline in our Real Housewives of the Fifth Grade social world when my brain relayed an urgent command to my lips: YOU MUST KISS HER!!
I blurted out an 11-year-old’s version of a Shakespearean sonnet: “Heather, if you kiss me, I’ll never bother you or talk to you ever again. I promise!”
I was staring straight forward because I couldn’t make eye contact. There was silence, broken only by the rusty squeaks of the chains on our swings. Then that stopped, too. She was standing in front of me.
“How about I kiss you, and we still stay best friends?”
Only a girl with a heart of gold would have known that that was the perfect thing to say. Neither of us told Skater Boy, and I wasn’t disappointed that our friendship never blossomed into more. I would always have that gift of a perfect first kiss.
In eighth grade, the awkwardness ante got upped yet again when Drew and I met a pair of identical twins our age. Jackie and Jen were so alike, I don’t think they were even sure who was who, and we honestly didn’t have a clue. Contrary to popular belief, twins do not possess some freaky power that allows them to instantly tell other twins apart. Maybe dolphin twins can, but not human ones.
The four of us became fast friends despite the confusion. We’d have movie nights, play sports, and do just about everything together as twin-friends. I remember joking how we could never date because we’d need ID bracelets or tattoos to differentiate between us.
Jackie and Jen were pretty, athletic clones destined for instant popularity in high school, while we were the nerdy karate twins who could only hope that the goodwill we were banking in eighth grade would pay off in ninth with groupie seats at the Cool Table after their matching blond stars rose. Our odds improved considerably when the friendship segued into very low-key dating. “Very low-key” is beginner dating, so squeaky clean and G-rated, we could have qualified as gray-market Osmond brothers. “Advanced” dating was defined as hot-and-heavy, which implied that the couple in question had “gotten to third base,” though no one, including the couple, was entirely clear where that was, much less what you were supposed to do upon arrival. Eighth grade was the Year of Wild Speculation. I, for one, was happy to play it safe with Jen and Jackie or Jackie and Jen, whoever they were. I still didn’t trust school PA systems, and no way was I giving this one a chance to publicly broadcast my progress—or lack thereof—around the mystery bases.
In no time at all, the double-twin thing became more of a nuisance than a novelty, though, and waaaaay more complicated than any very-low-key-where’s-first-base-again relationship should ever be. It was awkward enough to lean in for a kiss hello only to realize too late that this one was your brother’s girl, and it should’ve been just a hug.*
*Me standing right there holding her hand should’ve been a clue. LOL
It’s even worse to find that you’ve become a social experiment that everyone feels entitled to observe and discuss. Including your social studies teacher. “You realize if you marry, your kids will all have the same DNA and look alike,” he said, easily winning the How Much More Awkward Can This Possibly Get? challenge. Nothing can quash young love as horrifically as learning that your future children will be assembled from a communal pile of similar features like a Mr. Potato Head game. We were starting to feel like more of a gimmick than a romance, anyway, so the four of us beat a hasty retreat back to the safety of the friend zone. (Jackie and Jen did, in fact, advance to the cool crowd in high school, but they were still always nice to us. Twin code.)
I never dated in high school. I had girls who were friends, but never an actual girlfriend. Chrissy fell somewhere in the maddening middle. I’d been attracted to her for a long time, and we’d become close pals, but never a couple. Unlike swing-set Heather, Chrissy wasn’t someone else’s girlfriend, though, which gave me a sliver of hope. I finally made my move in senior year and asked Chrissy* to go to prom with me. She laughed.
“No, that’s not going to happen,” she said. If this was her idea of letting someone down gently, she had a bright future in pro wrestling. She had always been reserved, so the smackdown was even more stunning. I was really upset: How could someone be so rude, especially when they were supposed to be your friend? It turned out that she meant no way did she think her strict parents would let it happen, but that’s not what my sensitive, inexperienced ears had heard.
*Chrissy? The girl I went with to prom?
You didn’t “GO” with her.
Yeah, actually, I did. We went in the same car, and I gave her the corsage. You do the math. I also remember thinking how funny it was that Mr. Suave Magic Man got rejected.
Either I blacked it out of my memory, or you’re messing with me. Prove it!
. . . I legit don’t remember this. But I’m over it because I went with my best friend, Michelle. And we had the best PG-rated time ever.
By the time I met my ex, I had gained some recognition as an illusionist, and found I could tap into some of the self-confidence I had as a performer when I ventured into the dating world. If I spotted a woman I wanted to meet at a party or bar or some event, I didn’t approach until I had thought of something funny to say. Comedy was always my icebreaker. Then, if she laughed and seemed interested, I would bring on the magic. Ask someone for a coin, then make it vanish and reappear in a beer bottle, and there’s a good chance you’ll grab her attention. There was an even better chance I could hold onto that attention for the night if I folded her paper cocktail napkin into an origami rose and made it levitate.
The woman I married was easy to be with from the start. She was sociable, and always up for fun, whether it was going out with a bunch of friends or just the two of us packing up to jet off somewhere together. When we first met, I was working in the emergency response department for WestJet. Getting to fly almost-for-free was the best
job perk ever, and I took full advantage of it. We would take several big trips a year—island-hopping in the Caribbean, exploring some romantic city in Europe, or maybe chilling out on the beach in Mexico.
Even after I quit the airline to tend to my growing real-estate business full-time, we’d get away as much as we could, even if it was a quick weekend jaunt. Las Vegas was a favorite destination: We loved going to the shows, hitting the hottest new clubs and restaurants, and meeting up with my magician friends based there. I could easily picture myself living in Vegas someday, fulfilling that lifelong dream of following in the footsteps of the greats like David Copperfield. My girlfriend could envision relocating there, too. The sensory overload of the Strip’s glitz and glamour was thrilling compared to Canada’s quiet, natural beauty.
I’ve never been a big spender. I’m not a guy who needs fancy, expensive toys. I don’t care to own enough clothes to open a department store. My ex had more discriminating taste, though, and I did like being able to indulge her. Okay, so maybe I did have a secret, shameful obsession with women’s handbags and, since it wouldn’t be prudent for me to carry them, maybe I did use my girlfriend as an excuse to keep buying them. She enjoyed getting more shoes and accessories to go with the designer bags, of course. What can I say? If we were headed for Hoarderville, I knew from years of flipping people’s houses that there were worse routes for getting there. At least she didn’t collect dryer lint* or taxidermied squirrels or something.
*But dryer lint smells so good!
Business was thriving, but I didn’t have to be a self-proclaimed math genius like Drew to know that we were overspending, and it was starting to make me nervous. Cutting back on the travel seemed like the obvious solution. It wasn’t just the expense that was causing stress: The fun getaways were so frequent they’d become the expected norm. Some couples went to the movies on the weekend; we went halfway across the country for dinner on Vancouver Island. It was a letdown if I couldn’t pull away from the job to take off somewhere. My hours may not have been as structured as a nine-to-five boyfriend’s would have been, but I only had to put in an average of five hours a day. I told myself that my girlfriend wanting more time together just underscored how in love we were. After all, we never argued.
She wasn’t shy about reminding me that the wedding date of her dreams was July 7, 2007. What could be luckier than 7/7/07? When she first mentioned it and I joked that 10/10/10 sounded good, too, she made it clear that this was no laughing matter. I got the message: That date was important to her.
Even though I felt like I was still discovering her, I didn’t put up any real resistance to the deadline. Maybe I wasn’t experiencing that overwhelming sense of this is perfect yet, but I was certain that what we had was a good, solid, healthy relationship. Why are you taking your time? I chided myself. You’re in love, why not?
With the summer of 2007 looming, I decided it was time to propose and, since we both loved Vegas, I knew I wanted to pop the question there. I called the hotel to let them know I wanted to do something memorable. What were the possibilities? They suggested dinner at their restaurant and having the engagement ring hidden in the dessert. What if she choked on the diamond? That wasn’t the kind of memorable I was going for. Besides, that proposal was so old, Eve probably would have found a solitaire in the apple if she’d taken a second bite. I didn’t want generic . . . I wanted epic.
I came up with my own plan, and on a Wednesday afternoon, the plot was unexpectedly set in motion. “Hey, some friends are heading to Vegas for the weekend,” my soon-to-be-fiancée told me. “Wanna go?” I smiled calmly and agreed, but it was panic in the streets inside my head. I had so many calls to make and so much to do if I was going to pull my plan together in 72 hours. Fortunately, I had already done a lot of the legwork and really just had to knock over the first domino.
When we got to Vegas, I created a plausible ruse to break away for a stealth meeting at Tiffany’s. I had sent advance word of what I was looking for, so they had different stores around the country pull a selection of rings and send them by courier to Vegas for me to choose from. I had always loved the beauty and simplicity of the Tiffany’s solitaire, and we both loved the film. So for me, this was the only way to go.
I love to plan special dates, so she was excited but not at all suspicious when I surprised her one evening with a champagne helicopter tour to see the city lights. What she didn’t know was that I had planned my own little light show, too. As we swept over the neon fantasyland below us, I kept my eyes peeled for what lay ahead.
“What’s that down there?” the pilot asked with fake curiosity as the helicopter flew out of the city and over the surrounding desert. She turned to look, then did a double take. “What the . . . ?” Projected in light across the desert floor was my proposal, spelled out in letters 40 feet tall:
MARRY ME
When she wheeled back around to look at me, I was as down on one knee as you can get in a helicopter, waiting to put the ring on her finger. (Her “Yes!” was a relief in more ways than one: I had kept the ring hidden in my sock for hours, which had proved to be incredibly uncomfortable.)
We exchanged vows on 7/7/07.
But the marriage was in ruins before our second anniversary.
When Canada’s economy started wobbling in 2008, Drew and I were spared the devastating blow a lot of people in real estate suffered because we weren’t over-leveraged and in fact were only upside-down on my marital home. We’d realized it was too risky to do any more flipping until the market stabilized. The Great Recession had hit the U.S. before it reached us, which meant our neighbors to the south were farther along in the recovery process. Bearing that in mind, we felt the time was right to expand Scott Real Estate, and Las Vegas was high on our list. Vegas had been ranked one of the world’s fastest-growing economies in 2007. During that boom, the demand for housing was so great and the supply so limited that developers were actually selling lottery tickets to buyers clamoring just for the chance to even bid on a place. When the bubble burst, lots of new construction projects were left half-finished, and scores of existing homes went into foreclosure when owners couldn’t make balloon payments on their mortgages. It was a good time to invest in fixer-uppers.
Drew was living in Vancouver, working on his acting career and paying the bills with his roster of real estate clients, so JD came along for the adventure when we moved to Vegas at the end of 2008. I was looking forward to the desert sun when I left Canada behind that December. It was just my luck to arrive in Las Vegas in time for a rare snowstorm that all but paralyzed the city. It dumped less than 4 inches just outside downtown, which saw no accumulation whatsoever. Still, the snowfall shattered a thirty-year record of less than 3 inches. I was dismayed but hardly discouraged: I’d accumulated more snow than that in a single boot back in Alberta. Seriously? Call me when you’ve got enough for a drift.
My visa allowed my wife to live and work anywhere she wanted in the States. We both had high hopes for this big move—for me, it was as much about magic as it was real estate. Vegas is paradise for anyone passionate about live entertainment. Even if I weren’t performing full-time, the sheer number of venues, events, and potential opportunities to do magic was energizing. My wife, meanwhile, was offered a job as a poolside waitress/model at the “day club” of one of the big hotels, where the booze flows like water and the tips are high.
And things started going downhill from there.
Hotel-casinos in Vegas are obviously hyper-competitive, and the bars were prime feeder-chutes for the gaming tables. The pressure to create the hottest bar scene on the Strip was especially intense as the tourist-dependent town struggled to its feet after the crippling blow of the recession. The hostesses, bartenders, and servers would get off work from the day clubs, then be expected to go out partying together from rival bar to rival bar in an attempt to lure wide-eyed tourists to their employer’s property. It was survival o
f the fittest, dirty with extra olives. The high-decibel buzz at a bar impossible to get into on a random Tuesday night could become the sound of crickets by the following week if they weren’t playing their recruitment cards right. My wife was out every night, coming home later and later. She had a whole subset of friends now that I barely knew, and I was rarely invited to join them. “It’s work,” she would sigh wearily. Work seemed to be putting more and more distance between us.
Our first fight happened the day I discovered my wife had scrubbed me from her Facebook page, changing her relationship status from Married to blank. What had I done to be publicly disowned as her husband? Surprised and hurt, I confronted her.
“I don’t want people at work or customers knowing about my private life,” she explained. I’d been a server back in the day, too, and I knew full well that charm and connecting with your customers is what brings in the big gratuities. I didn’t begrudge my wife that, but I couldn’t pretend I liked the idea of trolls who checked her out later on FB getting the false impression that their hot cocktail waitress was single. “It’s not a big deal,” she tried to placate me.
“It should be important to you because it’s important to me,” I argued. This felt foreign to me. Fighting was just not something we did, but not emphasizing that had already cost me a treasured moment on our wedding day, and I wasn’t going to swallow the hurt again. She would not agree to have bagpipers play at the ceremony in honor of my family’s Scottish heritage. All the men in the wedding party did wear kilts, but the Scott clan still felt wounded by the bagpipe ban, and I regretted not holding my ground about something so important to me. I guess that was a yellow traffic light that I blew right through.
It Takes Two Page 11