Chapter 15
It was day ten of our crazy adventure. It was Monday, September 3rd.
Declan and I would be ushers. He was up early that morning, right up off of the carpet and bouncing around; he had gotten all dressed up with his striped Goodwill pants, a clean white button-down shirt, and an old black tuxedo jacket with tails. I had a Salvation Army white sport coat with me that Eddie Kinsley had given me back in Newport Beach that I had brought along just for this occasion. I threw on some blue dress pants and a brown button-down shirt, the only button-down shirt that I owned.
“Wow, you look psychedelic!” Lucas’s brother Kenny exclaimed as he came into the living room.
The two of us, Decky and I, surely didn’t look like we belonged to the rest of them with their rented tuxes and all.
All of us moved at once out the front door of the condo and headed for downtown Aspen. Kerry and the girls had gone off earlier to get ready somewhere private. We gathered at the same church that we had attended the day before, and as soon as we got there, we were warmly greeted by the Spanish padre who magically appeared from the side door.
The padre’s homily talked about the love story in Richard Bach’s Bridge Across Forever, quoting Bach’s line about a love that never ends.
Lucas and I were both amazed that the Spanish padre had picked this homily himself, drawing analogies between the love of two people and the love of people for Jesus Christ; plateaus of love, plateaus in life, and just like the same analogies in Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, flying higher and higher forever.
Kerry and Sam exchanged vows as about sixty of us watched in silence. Some people were in tears, some were with smiles, some of them, I imagined, reflected on other thoughts in their own lonely hallways. And then there was that one moment when Kerry and Sam kissed that no one in the whole church thought of anything more than pure love. I imagined no one was preoccupied with the complexities of life during that single moment, no one thought about having to go to work the next day. You know how that thought of having to go to work the next day always creeps in uninvited on a Sunday afternoon? The newly married couple exited the church blissfully, now as one. We all stood and watched them outside. After all of the pictures in the postcard-perfect garden with the white wooden steeple, the flowered gazebo, and the majestic backdrop of the greatest mountain range on the American continent behind them, Kerry and Sam boarded a horse and carriage, all Cinderella-like, and rode off to forever.
Lucas, Declan, Kenny, Trent, and I were among the first to arrive at the reception. A tall, blond, attractive woman, probably about forty, with a young girl beside her, sat on the patio outside the hall, close to the beer and wine table. The weathered lines of the woman’s face made her more beautiful as she sat there, I thought. She must have loved the outdoors. The little girl was blond like her mom; she was maybe ten years old, and sat attentively at her mother’s side.
“Are you from England?” Declan asked the woman promptly upon our entrance, catching that crisp British everything-about-her accent as she spoke to her little girl.
“We are headed that way, eventually, to London,” Declan told her. “Of course, after we complete our travels across America, visiting all kinds of family and friends!”
“Sounds like a good time!” she said to us. “Me, I probably will never go back to the UK,” addressing Decky. “The beaches there just aren’t that nice, and although it is mountainous in Wales, it doesn’t compare to Aspen. The all of England is no bigger than your Philadelphia.”
“Surely you mean Pennsylvania?” Declan asked. “Philadelphia is only a city!”
“Oh, yes, Pennsylvania,” she giggled. “Sorry. Of course it is!” The smack of that accent was ever so perfect as it left her sweet, pursed lips; tea and crumpets, Buckingham Palace and the Queen were here in Aspen now.
I left the two of them conversing on the patio, with the little girl at her mother’s side looking up at Decky with her big, sky-blue eyes. I veered inside the open hall, looking for food, quietly observing all of the arriving guests. I looked for the single girls, I hoped, people I had never set eyes on before . . . pretty girls in this single moment of time.
But the reception and the afternoon quickly filled up. Along the white-clothed tables, there was an abundance of food and drink: quiche, crab sandwiches, salmon, meat loaf sandwiches, cream cheese, cake, more cake, champagne, beer, champagne, beer, and more beer.
In the afternoon, Lucas took over the sound system as the grand party continued to roar on. Luke put in his own tape of The Doors and then The Guess Who from the American Woman album. I heard the electric guitar and drum beat slowly leading into their classic hit “No Time”; it was another of the many breakup songs that seem to fill up your world after someone leaves you. It was a packing-up-and-leaving song, and it made me sad for a moment again.
But the afternoon kept on burning, and we kept on dancing; we were a moving mass of people, bouncing up and down, pointing and mouthing lyrics, working our way back out onto the patio area where Sam finally got too close to the pool. The brothers Coppens promptly threw him in, with his rented tuxedo and all. Declan, Lucas, Trent, and I dove right in after him; the clothes all went in with us—the crazy-striped pants, the long tux coattails, the psychedelic suit, everything—right into the giant washtub. Luke’s brother Kenny threw their sister Anna in; everyone was laughing mouthfuls of chlorine laughter. From the pool we all swam across and spilled into the bubbling Jacuzzi (except for Sam). The regular hotel guests quickly exited when we jumped in, slipping on their pool sandals, grabbing their towels and cotton bathrobes, getting out of our way, some of them with forced smiles in the rush, pretending to be entertained, but noticeably inconvenienced.
We then exited the Jacuzzi one by one with Declan leading the way. He became a caricature of John Belushi from Animal House, with wide-open eyes as he sidestepped the hotel lawn. The six of us made our way in the direction of the hotel bar, dripping wet in formal wear, laughing, climbing a four-foot wall, all of us in a line, standing atop the wall, looking down twelve feet to the other side into another beautiful swimming pool below us, and one by one, we tried to muster up the courage to dive in.
John Belushi was everyone’s hero; he had died in that Sunset Boulevard hotel just a few years before . . . the hotel right at the bend where the larger-than-life cigarette-smoking Marlboro Man stood. It was right where Sunset Boulevard doglegs left toward the screaming façades of the West. Sunset was full of famous places, like John Wayne’s Hollywood home, and the sidewalks of the strip where heroes like Charlie Chaplin once walked decades before we all did, but after this tragedy, the sidewalks of the strip fell silent. And poor Belushi, at the peak of his career, in the castle there, purportedly overdosed on a speedball, and just like that—he was gone.
A life and a song,
The comparison wrong,
To view them from the outside we see,
That when a song ends,
It can be played again,
A life can’t be.
“Cannonball!” Decky was the first to jump in the pool. Trent Coppens, with the most perfect swan dive I had ever seen, an Olympic-caliber dive for sure, quickly followed him. Anna, Luke, Kenny, and I jumped all at the same time. Soon, we were all swimming toward the other side of the pool, laughing, gasping breaths between more mouthfuls of chlorine. Our shoes were still on as we slowly made our way toward another Jacuzzi that had a plastic partition between the outside and inside sections of the hotel. We all held our breath and went underneath to enter the other side of an indoor swim-up bar.
We crawled up and sat on the waist-high water stools. We had sat on the opposite side, the dry side of the bar, drinking Bloody Marys with Lucas’s dad earlier in the day while “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” a love song by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, softly played. The sad feelings had crept up on me even then with that music. Love songs were written in lonely desperation by thousands of others with similar stories as mine; beautiful ballads about lost love that expressed this common emotion of our ever-connected human spirit . . . the wailing, the waiting, the desires, the jealousy, the bitter feeling of not being good enough. We always wanted to be loved, and we all shared that terrible feeling of empty rejection when we were left behind.
But now at the wet bar, in the afternoon of life, I was choking with laughter, busting up at myself, so bad that I couldn’t control the snot that blew out of my nose. I grabbed a bar napkin, buried my face in my hands, and then looked up to the other side of the bar where I had sat earlier. I saw a sad person in the mirror listening to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and I felt bad for him.
The dry people on the other side of the bar didn’t seem bothered by us. Some of them had smiles, but most pretended to not even notice us; we were invisible. The female bartender, Rufus (the same bartender from earlier in the day), turned to the six of us and asked, “What’ll it be? Something wet?”
“I’ll take a dry martini,” Lucas’s brother Kenny said, and we all laughed aloud.
That night, we spent our last night in Kerry’s apartment before forever leaving Aspen. An Australian film starring Cheryl Ladd played on the television, with a group of us on the couch and floor, too tired and sleepy to even try to get immersed in the plot. No one had the energy to even change the channel or turn the thing off. We were physical zombies; all of us thinking ahead to another place and time.
I lay there on the floor and dreamed about her again. In my thoughts, I had her there for all of time. Dreaming was the comfort zone of life; it was where heaven must be, where the sun warms you and you can lie in it basking all day without ever getting burned. Pleasant, dreamful sleep; the quiet kingdom where the calming waves crash on the shores of eternity, and the sandpipers are happy to just run back and forth chasing them now, for they don’t need to look for sustenance anymore.
In that dreaming moment, I was happy and I was comfortable and I was full.
And I would hold onto that thought and the words that I had once heard her say: “I know that I may never be with you again, but I love you.”