The Incomplete Autobiography of
GryEyes911

WOW! I was a "Missus!" We sort of eloped. My husband was that .....nice..... young man who had managed to assist me in that leap from pads to tampons thing a couple of years earlier. He worked for his parents; they operated a Radio & Television Sales and Repair store..... (Anybody seeing a pattern here?)

My stepmother had discovered my birth control pills and she and I were "discussing the issue" when my father walked into the middle of it. I had 30 days to get married or never see my boyfriend again, since he was 21 and I was only 17. Well, you can bet Dad had the contacts to have him arrested, so we took the notorized permission slip and ran off to Lake Tahoe before the thirty days were up. We got married on Good Friday. Do you know that churches think it's tacky to get married on the day Jesus died? We exchanged our vows in a touristy wedding chapel over a ...... TV Repair Shop.

That trip to Tahoe should have given me a clue - it was certainly a precursor of Life With Husband #1. First, since he had to exercise some control over the shot-gun-like circumstances (only I wasn't pregnant - thank god!!!) he decided we were gonna sneak out of town without telling my parents That Was The Weekend he solved the Not Gonna Go To Jail issue. We "went to a movie" and I just didn't come home.

Now, first there was his bachelor party. With me in attendance, since he'd picked me up to take me to that movie we said we were seeing. At his parent's house, with his family also members of the party. His sister and her husband were to be our witnesses in Lake Tahoe, you see.

My soon-to-be brother-in-law drove with my soon-to-be-husband's sister, his wife, in the front seat of my soon-to-be parents-in-law's station wagon. The happy couple sat in the back seat, necking. Woo hoo! We're getting married!

My groom was drunk. This necessitated two or three stops along the late-night, after-party, maximum warp speed drive up through the mountains. It was April, and there was snow on the ground. Idly, I wondered if vomit would gross out the snow-plow drivers or if they'd even notice that evidence when they made their next pass.

Subsequent boozy kisses were tinged with something far less pleasant than scotch, but gosh! I couldn't turn my face away from my intended on this eve of our wedding, could I?

Our chauffer needed some sleep-it-off time, too; one stop involved curling up and napping in our coats and an old blanket. Bride and groom were granted the whole back section of the station wagon. Groom was alternately queasy and cold; I sat up, shivering, wondering what the hell I was getting into... but I was only 17, so I couldn't very well call a halt to something I guess I'd caused!

We checked into a motel; a room to each couple, with a connecting door between us. (We were smart enough to lock our side, by the way, precluding any home movies of the two love-birds in bed together.) My beloved suggested one last illicit romp before it "was legal."

Our bed had a "Magic Fingers" unit - of course he had to feed it a quarter. Not too surprisingly, it lulled him to sleep; a two hour nap alongside the road hadn't cut the edge off his alcohol-enhanced fatique. So, poor guy missed his last opportunity to "get some" before we became husband and wife.

When we got home, two days later, we discovered the bottle of champagne my father had sent over to my in-laws as our wedding gift. Thanks, dad; swell send off.

The apartment we'd found wasn't ready for another two weeks, so we lived with my parents-in-law in a room decked out just for The Happy Couple: two twin beds pushed together and a balloon bouquet of inflated prophylactics. (His two elder brothers were quite a pair of jokesters.)

Oh well, it was all in fun and I was a part of their family now... having abandoned my own.

Then we moved into our apartment and the home-cooked meals became my responsibility.

My stepmother was not a cook, I hadn't paid much attention to what my mother and grandmother had done in the kitchen, and now I had meals to prepare. Grilled cheese sandwiches and bowls of Cheerios wouldn't suffice. He wasn't fond of tuna out of the can, so there went another one of my staple meal fixins'.

The comedienne Rita Rudner is absolutely correct: Men should live in caves. Why do they bother lifting the toilet seat? They still can't hit where they're aiming! What's this thing with standing up to pee, anyway? Wouldn't it be easier and more restful and less messy if they simply sat down?

Doing a man's laundry is no piece of cake, either. They roll their socks up just so and if you don't put their shorts in the corner of the drawer where they expect to find them, they can't get dressed in the morning until you tell them where you've put their underwear. (And maybe my husband was a slob, but I'd never encountered "skid marks" before, so simply SORTING dirty clothes for the wash was icky.)

Now, remember, I was in an alternative high school program and I'd gotten married during the school year, so one of my assignments was to have the Head Teacher and his wife over to our little apartment for dinner... to prove I learned something from the experience. I chose to bake a ham, prepare Brown 'n Serve rolls, make scalloped potatoes from a box, heat up some canned peas (brown, white, yellow, green; all the food groups someone expects to see on a dinner plate) and bake a cherry pie from scratch. We're talking about making pie crust from flour and lard and that other stuff, and making sure it comes out flaky instead of "heavy." I even wove a lattice pattern across the filling for a fancy top crust, to complete the picture.

Did you know you can buy canned cherries that aren't pitted? I didn't. What the heck would you DO with a can of cherries with pits in 'em, anyway? Makes NO sense. However, it does make a very crunchy pie... But - hey, the crust came out perfect!

After graduation from High School, I registered at the local Community College and threw myself into the Arts and Humanities. Creative Writing, Drama and Life-Drawing were my favorite classes. Piano was a flop. I can't read music, for some reason. I could play a guitar by ear, but Music courses weren't designed for learning by listening and doing; you were expected to read the score. We also had to choose something, once again, for Physical Education, and I chose the lesser of evils each semester: Volley Ball, Bowling, Tennis and Golf. I have no trophies from those endeavors and to this day, the memory of someone video-taping my golf swing makes me break out in a sweat. (They do it from BEHIND!) I'm also the only person in my class that ever let go of a bowling ball on the backswing and had to chase after the danged thing into the lobby. I landed on my ass in the alley once, letting go of the ball in the right direction; even though I think I'm genetically pre-disposed to fill up a size large woman's bowling shirt, thank gawd that wasn't my destiny.

I changed my major to Administration of Justice in my second year. This startled my husband a great deal; he wasn't sure he wanted to be married to a meter-maid. ...yeah, right..... I began, at this time, to view gender roles and the relationships between the sexes with a more jaundiced eye.

I was graduated with an Associate of Science degree (if one can call it that) and a Certificate of Achievement for earning over 70 credits in Administration of Justice. I loved forensic sorts of things, like learning the classification of fingerprints and polygraph studies. I actually enjoyed the Police Defense Tactics courses, even though I had to wear a gi.

And yes, I did want to become a police officer.

College education, especially at the Community College level, really can broaden one's experiences. There were people of ALL ages in the various classes I took. I eagerly soaked up tales of their life experiences, critiqued their ability (or inability, in which case I made fun of them in my mind) to articulate their aspirations, and simply enjoyed the company of people with viewpoints different from my own. Suddenly, there was more to life than voting Republican because my husband told me to; there were also people out there who didn't belch and pat their stomachs after every meal, or wonder when I might sell some of my poetry or short stories and bring home some income. Most of them didn't work for their parents, either, so they were concerned about getting to work on time; they were taking classes to better their chances for advancement, or to change careers someday.

Yes, indeed. The loosely wrapped marital unit was slowly becoming unraveled.