Comes back like school cafeteria lunch.
Thought you forgot all about it.
Like everything else, it’s sitting back there, waiting to fly out of the closet.
Big, dark memory.
You couldn’t help it.
At the time you thought it was perfectly fine, innocent even. No big deal. Youth – seventeen and dumb. Social skills of dandruff.
But there she is.
Sitting across from you, holding her fork like People’s Exhibit A.
She’s smiling. Well . . .it’s THAT smile.
The one that has “it’s your lucky day and I’m going to fuck it up” look written all over it.
You would think, after 30 years – three whole reunions – absence would make the heart grow fonder.
That kind of thing. At least you hoped so. She wasn’t at those reunions.
She came to the thirty year just for you.
You clear your throat – decide that downing your Walker Black on the Rocks in one gulp would make it go away.
Nope.
You smile back – trying to figure out if sheepish, absent-minded or toothy would work.
You settle for Deer Stuck In Headlights.
She knows you know – she knows you remember.
You don’t know what to do with your eyes. You want to gaze at a napkin – you want to study chipped nail polish – you want to run; quickly.
She finally lets it out.
She announces she spent twenty years in therapy because of you.
Three divorces – two miscarriages and five years worth of cocaine stuffed up her nose.
She moved to Gahanna Ohio because of you.
You ruined her life.
Maybe if you just blew your brains out she’d be happy.
No – she wants revenge.
Former classmates sitting around you and within earshot get up and go dancing.
Your wife, who you’ve been married to since roughly 1980, gazes back and forth between you two with mild amusement and perplexity.
Putting two and two together, she realizes this is the ex he never talks about, aside from once.
She isn’t going to miss this for the world.
Having firmly ingested the contents of one bottle of Merlot, and marching straight into bottle Number two, your ex now rides a tsunami of truth serum.
With a boozy blast of accusations, she announces to everyone within fifty feet that you were the guy who chickened out at the very last minute; getting all the way to the steps of the high-end Beverly Hills church while a veritable army of friends and relatives, some who came as far away as London, watch you look, turn, run and disappear for the next thirty years.
No explanation – no sorries – no offer to chip in and pay her dad back the nearly fifty grand he sank into that maladroit love fest. Vanished without a trace.
You have no excuse – not a good one, anyway.
Getting married scared the crap out of you at the time. It was the 60s. Nobody got married in the 60s – unless you wanted to get out of the Draft.
You fix your gaze on a half-eaten dinner roll lying on the table in front of you while the ex continues her verbal assault.
Your wife is getting bored. She’s tempted to throw something but doesn’t want to turn this into an episode of Jerry Springer.
Your ex takes a turn for the incoherent and begins to weep uncontrollably while tossing words like Sperm Donor and Invisible Children around.
It’s at that moment a guy walks up behind her and lifts her out of her chair.
It appears to be Husband #4 who got to the reunion late. He tells her it’s time to go and turns to you, saying she gets that way a lot. Probably has nothing to do with you. She just left rehab. Obviously, it didn’t take.
Smeared Mascara and pointing a finger she is hustled away. Last thing she says before passing out is that She knows Rufus and he’s going to kill you!
The only Rufus you know is her Sheepdog from high school. The one who never got housebroken.
With the excitement of the Reunion now over and classmates offering condolences, you make it to the parking lot and quietly leave.
Your wife, who finds this wildly entertaining, pulls out a cassette from the glove box and pops it in the stereo.
Within seconds the car fills with the sounds of 1965.
Not one of your favorite years, but the music was pretty good – there’s that.
Here’s an hours worth of Dave Hull from KRLA on July 9, 1965
