05.26.07

How We Met

Posted in husband at 7:09 am

It was a Sunday night in January. I don’t remember the exact date, but I have always remembered it was a Sunday. If I hadn’t just quit the job from Hell, I never would have gone out on a work night.

A night or two prior, I had been chatting online when the conversation was hijacked by a young woman named Monica with low self-esteem. She was sending a JPEG of herself to everyone in the chat room and asking all, “Am I pretty?”

In a rare display of Internet affection, many of the chatters were agreeing that yes, she was pretty. The more honest people in the room were diplomatically suggesting that the photo was bad and they really couldn’t calculate how attractive she was.

What Monica lacked in self-esteem, she made up for in perseverance. “We should all meet up! And then you guys can tell me if I am pretty or not.”

I agreed to join in this ludicrous undertaking, mostly out of unemployed boredom. As I wouldn’t be working the next day, when Monica suggested meeting on Sunday at a Denny’s in Pacific Beach, there wasn’t any particular reason to say “no.”

Several people in the chat room began begging for a ride to the meet, and I offered my services. A guy named Jay and I sent private messages back and forth for a few minutes to nail down the logistics. He wrote that he needed to talk to me on the phone before he would accept a ride, for safety reasons. This seemed sensible enough to me, so I got his number and called him up. Jay and I talked on the phone for a few minutes until he felt assured that I possessed a vagina. Thusly assured, Jay felt comfortable enough to ride in a car with me and to also offer the news that he and his wife had an “open” marriage.

Thusly discomforted, I yelped into the phone, “Dude! All I am going to do is drive you to Denny’s!”

“All I am saying is… you know… hey, if you don’t believe me I’ll put my wife on the phone and she’ll tell you tha…”

“DUDE! You are married and I am not cool with that! Not that I wasn’t even thinking of this as a date!”

Finally realizing that I was serious, Jay defeatedly said, “Okay! okay! Are you still gonna give me a ride?”

“Yah, I guess so…”

Before I started my car on Sunday night, I reached under my seat to make sure that my five pound Maglite was still there. Just in case Jay wanted to discuss in person his marital situation.

I drove to Jay’s house in Mira Mesa and pick him up and then we headed to Pacific Beach. The particular Denny’s in question was located at the end of Garnet Avenue and about a block from the ocean. It featured an outdoor patio where diners were bathed in the glow of the green neon that lined the perimeter of the restaurant’s roof. The effect of which made each person look about twenty seconds from upchucking a “Moons Over My Hammy.”

Several other people from the chat room were already seated on the patio. However, Jay was the only one I knew in person and I was already giving him the cold shoulder. Everyone say around the long table in complete silence. The social strategy of the evening seemed to call for staring at your knuckles or winding plastic straws around your fingers. The gentleman to my right declined either option and began trying to set the soles of his shoes on fire with his Zippo.

I sat in silence for a few minutes. I heaved a sigh and asked my neighbor to the left if he had a pen I could borrow. He handed me a blue ballpoint. I wrote on my napkin, “Meretrice: A/S/L? :)” and handed both pen and napkin back.

My neighbor laughed and wrote something on the napkin and passed it to his left. Soon the napkin made a complete circuit back to me. Everyone at the table was laughing at making small talk. Several “private messages” were also being delivered as individuals took their own napkins and passed them around — folded, of course.

About the time my disposable chat room had complete its second circumnavigation of the table, I looked up from my knuckles to see that someone new had arrived. Without saying a word, he went up to the guy sitting across from me and thrusted out his tongue. The tongue was decorated with a freshly installed piercing.

I hindsight, I wish I could say that my reaction was something along the lines of, “There is the man I am going to marry!” or even “You so crazy! I wanna have your baby!”

Rather, I rolled my eyes and muttered under my breath, “Oh, that’s mature!”

Nonetheless, the skinny man with piercings would indeed become my Husband. Almost exactly two years after that fateful Sunday night, I gave birth to his Daughter. Today is our fifth wedding anniversary.

Happy anniversary, honey. I love you.

Postscript: Monica never did show up that night.

Postscript 2: Edited to correct some horrendous grammar and to add a picture from about the time we met of Husband looking thuper thexy. THUPER!

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