Chapter 36
Saturday the 22nd of September. It was Billy and Christina’s wedding day. As I awoke, I tried to remember what I had just found in my dream. It was something peaceful; it was hidden in plain sight; it was beautiful.
I wondered if heaven was like this, when the sun warms you, a place where you bask all day in the light without ever getting burned, a quiet kingdom where the calming waves crash on the shores of eternity, where the sandpipers are happy to just run back and forth chasing the shoreline, a place where they don’t need to look for sustenance anymore. I didn’t want to leave Lowell but knew I had to. We had two more days here before we would have to leave for London. The sand was slipping through the hourglass more swiftly now; at least, it seemed that way, for there was only a little bit left in the picture I saw. In London, we’d surely have to flip the hourglass over again.
After breakfast, Luke, Decky, and I headed out to Gage Field, where we met up with all of the others. We began drinking beers at nine in the morning. We stayed there awhile, a group of about thirty of us, and filled up that big oil drum trash can near the basketball courts with lots of aluminum can empties, making one-handed basketball shots from several feet away. It had always been a tradition for us, going all the way back to high school days, to drink heavily at Gage Field before the big event. These were the flowing fields of our youth that we had grown up in, filled with green, green grass and wild dandelions. Across the horseshoe road that held all of the playing fields, right near the baseball diamond, sat the bubbler of eternity. Outside the basketball courts, near our parked cars, we spilled warm bottles of Budweiser everywhere and celebrated passages of time; these were our fields of succession. After a few hours had passed, we collectively planned our drive to the wedding ceremony, for it was a long drive to Danvers. We loaded up the cars and began the parade. The old Fairlane fit right in, with her stoic surfboard still attached, finding her place in the gala procession of Mustangs, Buicks, Chevys, and Cadillacs; it was a caravan of cars leaving the horseshoe-shaped road that was always turned upward. We headed by way of Andover, toward the North Shore of Massachusetts and eventually arrived in Danvers.
We found the church with minutes to spare and as the cars pulled into the parking area, people began to file in. I couldn’t hold my kidneys any longer and ran through the backyard of the church to take a leak on the ten-foot high row of bushes that surrounded the property. Timmy Finnegan was doing the same thing when I got there, watering the shrubs in a circular motion and seemingly deep in thought; he was singing a song and looking up at the perfect sky with its perfect puffy clouds moving slowly across the blue backdrop of the upper atmosphere of the whole world. The sweet smell of stargazer lilies came from the church’s surrounding garden. Suddenly, coming right through the bushes, an older man with silver hair appeared. He had come from the adjoining yard.
“Oh-oh,” I heard Timmy say as he quickly zipped up. I danced around a bit to cut my own stream short, wetting my psychedelic suit pants in the process. After that, I turned quickly to make a clean getaway, but I was stopped by the older man’s words.
“No, it’s all right, I am not angry,” the man spoke out at us both as he stood there. “People relieve themselves on those bushes all of the time. Are you in the wedding party?”
“Not in it, but going to it, yes,” Timmy said to him. “Thank you for understanding. We had to really go!”
“Enjoy the ceremony,” the man said to us as he walked away, quickly retreating back through the bushes that he had come from.
Timmy and I quickly ran to the front of the church to go in. We slipped by the assembling bridal party and quietly hustled halfway down the aisle to join the rest of our large group on the right-hand side of the church. When we sat down, the minister entered from a side door and walked over to stand at the head of the church with the groom. I looked over to Timmy Finnegan in amazement. The minister was the same man we had just talked to behind the church! Timmy’s eyes were as wide as mine, and he shook his head with a silent grimace.
The traditional bridal chorus from Wagner’s Lohengrin began, and the march was underway. This was the bridal song of 100 years, I thought. I transgressed time seeing Frank and Theresa, my grandparents, great-grandparents, and people all the way back to Jesus getting married to this song.
Billy stood there up at the altar. With everyone situated up there, the minister began to speak. In his sermon, he talked about the everlasting bond between two people, a bond that could transgress all of time.
A young woman with two young children sat two rows in front of us, both of the kids were about four or five. The little girl yawned while the boy crawled around on the floor. The mother looked straight-ahead. An olive-skinned girl, tall and attractive, probably in her midtwenties, sat further on down in the same row with a teenage brother on her right and what appeared to be their parents at the far end. The pretty girl cast several smiling glances toward the playing children.
I watched them all as the service drew to a crescendo. I was outside looking into a beautiful world, this ritual of Western life that had been with us forever. I was a movie director again, sitting behind the camera as it rolled with a rock-and-roll ballad all too familiar in the background of this crazy dream. The ballad started soft and slow. I dreamed that it was me and Colette up there. In my mind, there was a soft guitar riff, and then the electric guitar came in with a sound akin to the pinging of water. The sound became a visual of ripples in an open mountain pool, followed by the beautiful tenor sounds of Marty Balin and the harmonizing backup from Grace Slick as they sang “Today” in my head. It was such a perfect song for a wedding. I could hear the words . . .
In this dream we stood at the altar, Colette and I, as the camera moved out to a wide-angled shot of the whole congregation around us. My whole family was there, but then it all rolled back in a snap and faded away. Like a passage stolen from Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I couldn’t stop dreaming of how wonderful my world could be.
I woke up to the sounds of clapping hands. Richie had started the clapping and the whole church followed his lead. Cheering, we all watched the new couple and the wedding party pass, and we slowly spilled out of the church behind them into the warm and comfortable New England sun. It was, after all, such a beautiful life.
Of course, our Christian Hill group of thirty or so went back to the church parking lot to drink again. Surprisingly, we had gone the whole service without a drop! In the parking lot, some of us now jumped into O-Dog’s van in order to escape the gaze of the Protestant traditionalists getting into their cars around us who scorned the simultaneous cracks of the aluminum can tabs in the open air. Billy’s pretty sister joined us for a time in the van while we drank. I had dated her in high school, but she was married now. Her newlywed husband Jack was with her, but soon was giving her the eye roll to leave. They both had to catch up to the rest of the wedding party to partake in Billy and Christina’s wedding pictures.
After a few more beers, Luke, Decky, and I, along with the others, disembarked from the van to head for the reception hall for more celebration. The place was a few miles down the road, adjacent to a country club, with the perfect green golf course spread out behind the golf pro shop and restaurant. Billy, Christina, and the whole wedding party were all out on the surrounding grounds when we arrived; Billy looked over and laughed at his crew of drunk friends while the fidgety photographer moved them all around, trying to get the perfect shots that would last for all of eternity and transgress all of time.
Inside, I looked around at the large room dressed with several round tables, each having centerpieces of small glass bowls with three or four goldfish swimming in them. You see, Billy’s parents owned a pet store on Market Street in downtown Lowell. The fish bowls were his mother’s idea. It was a great setup before we got there.
We were all only seated for a few minutes when my friend Dukie reached into the bowl at the center of our table and handed me the poor little flapping, floundering fish.
“I dare you to swallow it whole, Mikey,” he said to me.
My sister Kate (with Sully beside her) and all of the other girls at our table began to wince with disgust as they looked at the poor little fish. I popped it into my mouth, closing my eyes at first. I thought back to my chewing on the carnations at the Lo Kai just days before this. I grabbed my open beer, took a big gulp, and with it I felt the unfortunate fish wriggle past my Adam’s apple and go on down. There was a mixture of loud laughter, amazement, and total disownment coming from everyone who had witnessed it. The sad thing about it all was this now caused a ripple of cause and effect throughout the whole room. A pebble had just been thrown into a calm pool of water. We were Gage Field people from Christian Hill. We ruined weddings.
Dukie laughed at my actions affectionately. “Mikey, I know I can do one too ’cause I swallow cling peaches like that all of the time!” he screamed aloud.
With that, Dukie pulled another fish from the small glass bowl and put it in his mouth. Everyone in the whole room was either aghast or laughing at us now. I grabbed for the last fish in our table’s bowl, because now it was a competition. Dukie had opened it up. I gagged as the small fish slithered down this time. One table over from ours, Richie had watched us both and decided that it was his turn to do one.
“Waiter, there’s a bone in my fish!” he yelled out to Dukie and I before putting the small fish in his mouth to swallow it down.
“Whooa!” He shook his head, closing his eyes as he did so. “At first, I thought I was going to barf!” He laughed to his whole table.
The madness ignited around us. Everyone had a Gage Field joker at their table that wanted to try it. A small growing group of us began moving to the adjoining tables, reaching into the centerpieces, trying to eat them all, beat the others, grabbing the orange, black, and white fish, and putting them into our mouths one by one.
“How many can we do?”
“I didn’t know the dinner today was going to be surf and turf!” someone yelled at us from one of the distant tables. We continued laughing. Decky and Luke tried at least one on their own. I continued to move about at the back of the room, looking for fish, disrupting the whole order of things, right as the wedding party came in and began to assemble at the head table.
Like a wave of lost karma, the dark skies opened and all of the spontaneous laughter switched to silence at once. It wasn’t funny anymore. I stood there with a goldfish in my hand, three tables from where I was supposed to be seated. At the head of the hall, Billy’s mother was angry. I was eating up her centerpieces; I was ruining the special day for everyone. This wasn’t funny. She stood up to look at me and then to Richie and just shook her head in disappointment at both of us.
“Oh-oh.” I looked over to Richie. We both scattered back to our seats and sheepishly sat down.
I had just made an ass of myself in front of everyone. I wasn’t sober. All the while in my head, The Stones and Mick Jagger raged with the “Monkey Man” soundtrack. Did other people have songs constantly playing in their head?
I was the monkey man.