that he “runs like a deer.” I felt a surge of confidence, as well as a surging boner.
She wouldn’t talk about her boyfriend, though she did mention that things weren’t going in the right direction. (They were both master’s candidates in the same health science program. His name was Laird.) But instead of taking the men-as-stepping-stones theme as an early sign, I egomaniacally interpreted the declining Laird chapter as an invitation and opened my lonely heart the same way seventh graders thrust their chins heavenward and free their tender souls after a hoped-for love note is discovered in a homeroom locker.
Sheila Anne followed us to Cleveland and Chicago, shooting our shows and helping us manage the merch table. Morris was cool and slept in Glose and Kent’s room, and Sheila Anne and I made love for the first time in Chicago, at the Days Inn off Clark Street—appropriately a legendary rock ’n’ roll hotel—with a Lake Michigan wind rattling the window like intermittent applause.
Miraculously, those brief seven minutes—perhaps the most perfect seven minutes of my life—produced simultaneous orgasms, yielding zoological noises from us so hilarious that upon completion we were immediately seized with hysterical laughter. Someone on the other side of our door might have thought we were watching Monty Python. There’s nothing better than coming and laughing at the same time. It had been a first for both of us.
The following morning, while I paced along the carpeted hallway outside our room, Sheila Anne called Laird and, through a long, teary phone conversation, ended their relationship. Over the course of the next few days I asked her repeatedly if she needed time to recover/decompress/heal from her breakup. Nobody worth his salt wants to be a rebound lay. But she insisted that we dive right in, headfirst, eyes wide open, and continued from these clichés to her platitudes about how we only lived once and life was too short and we had just a few tragic years to flop around and be foolish and dare the gods of love.
Again, I should’ve taken note.
A few days later we got married in Branson, Missouri. Branson was the next leg of the tour. It’s situated in the Ozark Mountains. The Third Policeman got booked to play a Journey tribute set at the God & Country Theatre. This was the kind of gig that would essentially pay for the entire tour. Somehow, Morris can hit all of Steve Perry’s impossible high notes, a challenge for any man who still possesses testicles.
High on Vicodin after the gig, I took a knee in front of a packed house of die-hard Journey freaks, professed my love to Sheila Anne, offered her a braided cocktail straw arrangement as an engagement ring, and asked for her hand in marriage. She accepted, laughing, no doubt equally high on Vicodin, and pulled my head into her midriff. She then kissed me so passionately and fully that I could have died right there.
The following day, a Monday, after I had passed the aforementioned kidney stone and sprained my ankle (were these not omens?), we obtained a marriage license from the local recorder’s office, a document later signed by Morris and Kent in the back of B. T. Bones Steakhouse after a municipal judge named Lester Moncrief, a half-blind, wheelchair-bound albino whose business card we’d found resting on a little shelf beside the marriage-license window, solemnized our marriage.
While my marriage to Sheila Anne was in full bloom, Kent was heading in the opposite direction as he and his girlfriend, Caitlin, a professional quilter (meaning she hand-made and sold quilts on consignment) as well as our minitour merch manager and occasional head barbecue chef, were about to go through a painful breakup.
Caitlin Carr of Indianapolis joined the tour in Pittsburgh, five days after the Branson show. Little did we know that she was less than twenty-four hours from leaving Third Policeman bassist and my best friend since sixth grade, Kent Orzolek. She
She wouldn’t talk about her boyfriend, though she did mention that things weren’t going in the right direction. (They were both master’s candidates in the same health science program. His name was Laird.) But instead of taking the men-as-stepping-stones theme as an early sign, I egomaniacally interpreted the declining Laird chapter as an invitation and opened my lonely heart the same way seventh graders thrust their chins heavenward and free their tender souls after a hoped-for love note is discovered in a homeroom locker.
Sheila Anne followed us to Cleveland and Chicago, shooting our shows and helping us manage the merch table. Morris was cool and slept in Glose and Kent’s room, and Sheila Anne and I made love for the first time in Chicago, at the Days Inn off Clark Street—appropriately a legendary rock ’n’ roll hotel—with a Lake Michigan wind rattling the window like intermittent applause.
Miraculously, those brief seven minutes—perhaps the most perfect seven minutes of my life—produced simultaneous orgasms, yielding zoological noises from us so hilarious that upon completion we were immediately seized with hysterical laughter. Someone on the other side of our door might have thought we were watching Monty Python. There’s nothing better than coming and laughing at the same time. It had been a first for both of us.
The following morning, while I paced along the carpeted hallway outside our room, Sheila Anne called Laird and, through a long, teary phone conversation, ended their relationship. Over the course of the next few days I asked her repeatedly if she needed time to recover/decompress/heal from her breakup. Nobody worth his salt wants to be a rebound lay. But she insisted that we dive right in, headfirst, eyes wide open, and continued from these clichés to her platitudes about how we only lived once and life was too short and we had just a few tragic years to flop around and be foolish and dare the gods of love.
Again, I should’ve taken note.
A few days later we got married in Branson, Missouri. Branson was the next leg of the tour. It’s situated in the Ozark Mountains. The Third Policeman got booked to play a Journey tribute set at the God & Country Theatre. This was the kind of gig that would essentially pay for the entire tour. Somehow, Morris can hit all of Steve Perry’s impossible high notes, a challenge for any man who still possesses testicles.
High on Vicodin after the gig, I took a knee in front of a packed house of die-hard Journey freaks, professed my love to Sheila Anne, offered her a braided cocktail straw arrangement as an engagement ring, and asked for her hand in marriage. She accepted, laughing, no doubt equally high on Vicodin, and pulled my head into her midriff. She then kissed me so passionately and fully that I could have died right there.
The following day, a Monday, after I had passed the aforementioned kidney stone and sprained my ankle (were these not omens?), we obtained a marriage license from the local recorder’s office, a document later signed by Morris and Kent in the back of B. T. Bones Steakhouse after a municipal judge named Lester Moncrief, a half-blind, wheelchair-bound albino whose business card we’d found resting on a little shelf beside the marriage-license window, solemnized our marriage.
While my marriage to Sheila Anne was in full bloom, Kent was heading in the opposite direction as he and his girlfriend, Caitlin, a professional quilter (meaning she hand-made and sold quilts on consignment) as well as our minitour merch manager and occasional head barbecue chef, were about to go through a painful breakup.
Caitlin Carr of Indianapolis joined the tour in Pittsburgh, five days after the Branson show. Little did we know that she was less than twenty-four hours from leaving Third Policeman bassist and my best friend since sixth grade, Kent Orzolek. She
Similar Books
The Marriage Machine
Patricia Simpson
Life Goes to the Movies
Peter Selgin
Chosen
Chandra Hoffman
To Marry A Matchmaker (Historical Romance)
Michelle Styles
With This Collar
Sierra Cartwright
Taste It
Sommer Marsden
Year Zero
Jeff Long
Bleak Spring
Jon Cleary
Blind Date
R K Moore
Need
Sherri Hayes