Foof...

Helotes, Texas

Once again we were all shooed away as the wedding party was likely to spill over at any moment into the courtyard where we had posted up. So we took our drinks and headed out back behind the catering tent where the workers party was still going strong around my car. And at some point during our backwoods party as we continued to get drunk Marie ended up with a full bottle of Tequila in her hand and one of my amigos prompted me to express to Marie how I felt about her. I told her that I loved her and that I wanted to marry her. To which she stood up, indignant, and said in a French accented fury “Oh! You shut up! You are crazy!” then opened the bottle of Tequila and began to pour it over my head, telling me to shut up as everyone howled with fits of laughter at the scene.
But I wasn’t deterred or to be outdone. And as I took my Tequila soaked t-shirt off I remembered the handcuffs that I had stashed away in my car from my days as a Corrections Officer and went to get them as I threw my Tequila drenched shirt over a tree limb to dry out. I’d show her who was the fucking boss, I thought, as I pulled the cuffs out of the middle console and latched one end on to my left wrist and walked back over to sit down next to her on the ground as the music blasted and the commotion of conversation distracted everyone from me. As I sat back down on the ground I immediately slapped the other cuff on Marie’s right wrist to which she jumped up screaming “Oh! You did not! Oh! You did not! What are you doing?! You get this off of me right now!” And everyone screamed with laughter.

I wasn’t going to stop.

I loved her.

And I told her that I did. I told her that she wasn’t getting away, that I was going to marry her, and that the cuffs weren’t going to come off until she said that she would marry me and that she loved me too! To which she finally consented after much protesting and shrieking in French.

As I took the cuffs off of her as my Asa pronounced us man and wife.

We all continued to drink and get stoned as the wedding party wound itself down and Marie and I decided to go and take a look at what remained. There wasn’t much left. A weeks worth of work was abandoned and forgotten in a few hours. There was impermanence to it all that I despised.
And as Marie and I walked backed towards my car under the full moon, past the catering tent we stumbled and fell into a tarp that was laying next to the industrial sized dumpster that had collected the trash of the week. We began laughing as we tried to free ourselves only to get more and more tangled up as we rolled around on the ground and finally began kissing. She kissed me like no one had ever kissed me before, long kisses pressing her mouth against mine, threatening to suffocate me. She kissed me with an intensity that bordered on desperation. And as I tried to figure out how to get her clothes off and had my hand up her shirt Asa and his girl pulled the tarp back to see what was going on. They laughed as I told them to go away and pulled the tarp back over our heads.
And that was it.

The next morning as I left her Motel room I told her that I’d love her forever to which she shrugged her shoulders and said “Foof…”

Love