God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (8 page)
10
Marriage—If You Must
O
ne of the Queens, Tammy, and I were discussing the seemingly endless problems in relationships—relationships with guys, of course, since we all get along perfectly well with one another. As a matter of fact, the happiest couples we know are either gay men or lesbians. This is discouraging to us since we don’t appear to be about to fall in love with each other. I mean, we think it would have struck us by now if it was going to. It is our apparent misfortune that we like sex with men, and only men, and we like it a whole lot, which means it will be necessary for us to be involved with them, and therein lies the problem. Lately, they all want to marry us.
We spent a substantial portion of our precious youth desiring, achieving, and dissolving marriages. Now we are old and have acquired good sense. After years of trying to have deep, meaningful relationships with men, we find that now we are constantly seeking shallow ones. We used to think of relationships as being some kind of rock, permanent, solid, immutable. And often we were right—except upon close examination, we found that we had somehow become lodged under the rock and it was pretty dark under there. And if you happened to roll that rock over, you discovered that all manner of crawly stuff you didn’t really want to see was living up under there with you.
Nowadays, we are looking for something more along the lines of Formica. You can get it in a variety of colors and patterns, there’s a never-ending supply of it, and it comes in a big roll: You just lop off the amount you need. It’s inexpensive, easy to install, wipes clean, and is very easily replaced. Now that we are seeking shallowness, however, everybody wants to marry us. We chalk this up to the perversity of men, and it’s apparently just further proof of the Treat ’Em Like Shit and Never Give ’Em Any theory. (It is fast moving from theory to law.) The more you try to get away from them, the more hotly they will pursue you. And if you want to get rid of a guy, you have only to act like you are really crazy about him. This means that when you are young, and possibly interested in marriage, you can never sleep with a man you really like. As soon as you do, he’s headed for the door. You can sleep only with men you never want to see again. Once you and your men get old, you can sleep with them, but you must refuse all offers of marriage if you want the relationship to flourish.
The Queens are not unanimous when it comes to marriage. Some of the Tammys are, in fact, married, and to men they actually like. And while we are ecstatically happy for them in their good fortune, the rest of us have been so blissed out by the wedded state that we just don’t think it would be fair to partake of any more of it. Not wanting to appear greedy, we will let somebody else have a turn at it. Some of us would go so far as to opine that marriage should be avoided if at all possible. The only way I can envision myself getting back into it would be if it was an old-fashioned shotgun wedding, and even then I might be tempted to size up the marksmanship of whoever was holding the gun—and maybe make a run for it.
Every year or so, somebody does a survey, and each and every time the results are the same: The happiest people on the planet are married men and single women. Now, why do you reckon that is? One report that I read said that virtually every divorced woman interviewed—even ones who had lost custody of their children—testified to “feelings of euphoria” after the proceedings were over, whereas among divorced men, the suicide rate is through the roof. We detect a pattern here.
I personally think the problem lies in too much proximity. Shared space is just death to most relationships. That old guy who got beaten to death with a shoe would probably be alive today—and perhaps even happily married—if the couple had just had the good sense to live in a duplex. Think about it: If you never had to pick up after him; never had to struggle to get up out of an icy toilet bowl in the middle of the night; if you never had to wear an overcoat in your own home in the middle of summer; if you could watch
White Palace
without someone farting and laughing during the tender moments; if you could sleep without earplugs to drown the foghorn snoring; and also if right next door lived the sweetest, funniest, most considerate man in the world, who came over on a regular basis (when invited) for dinner (followed by breakfast on many occasions), helped with the dishes, took out the garbage, brought you soup when you were sick—all the stuff he used to do before you married him—now tell me you wouldn’t jump at the chance. That is my idea of true wedded bliss: close enough to be of use but not constantly underfoot. Find and marry the Right Guy (on the list of Five Men You Must Have in Your Life at All Times—see the glossary), make sure he can pay for things, and make sure the wedding is as simple and quick as possible, go on a fabulous honeymoon, come home, and move into a duplex. I guarantee you’ll be happy forever.
My friend Don Yaeger said that he and his wife, Denise, had both been married before to other people, in the traditional $800,000 wedding ceremonies; after dating each other a good long while, they upped and ran off to Las Vegas and got married by an Elvis impersonator. They have the tape of their vows, which included promises to “always be a hunkahunka burnin’ love” and to “never take each other to Heartbreak Hotel.” Although they don’t live in a duplex, he does travel in excess of two hundred days a year, and that, in my opinion, is just as effective an arrangement for achieving endless love.
A good friend of mine, longtime-divorced, recently passed what would have been her thirty-year wedding anniversary had she remained married. I could not tell how she was feeling about it. I said I knew twenty-five was silver, but what was thirty? Completely deadpan, and with no hesitation, she replied, “It’s either steel wool or handguns, I forget.”
For Those Who Can’t Resist
When you’re young, you can’t wait to get married. Notice I said “get” married—no mention of “being” married. That’s because you can look at gorgeous magazines and try on amazing dresses, attend other people’s weddings and see close-up and personal what it is like to
get
married. Nothing on this earth can prepare you for the reality of being married. You won’t listen to anybody who’s done it. Don’t feel bad: None of us would listen, either. However, once you have been married, if you ever do decide to get married again, it will be a whole different deal. You will know that all that money can be better spent on just about anything—a lifetime supply of chewing gum or a house or something—than a wedding. A wedding is the—well, maybe not
th
e—
but certainly one of the stupidest financial decisions a woman ever makes in her life. (There are many more to choose from and some of us have chosen them all, but we’ll get to that after the wedding.) I don’t know of even one single woman—certainly not one who is single again—who is glad she spent a bazillion dollars on her wedding. Everybody now wishes she had even half that money for plastic surgery or something else that might bring long-lasting pleasure.
Occasionally, one of the Queens will up and get married. I say “up and” because we have learned that that is the best way to do it. One day you’re not married, the next day you are. Just do it, if you’re so determined; don’t be pussyfooting around at this stage of life. If you’re contemplating marriage for the first time, you might as well skip this section. Those dresses are some powerful juju, and once you try one on, you’re a goner. Of course, you could get married in whatever and then spend five thousand dollars on a few things you could actually wear in real life; and one day you will wish you had, but you don’t believe that now, so go on. Just remember: I told you so.
When one of the Queens, Tammy, recently pulled the “up and get married” deal, we made notes for her, which we will now share with you. As soon as you get the proposal and acceptance part out of the way, your first concern should be: “How can I manage to pull this off without running any errands?” Impossible, you say? Well, you’re right, there are inescapable errands involved in getting married, which are built in to keep people from getting a wild hair to enter into a completely binding, insoluble contract (my God, it’s till you die!) and then wishing they’d just gone to the mall instead. No, they have it fixed where you cannot “accidentally” get married. You have to do it on purpose and you have to hassle.
You can manage to beat the marriage racket out of a significant number of errands, though, if you will just eliminate excessive prep time. Just call your friends and ask them to be bridesmaids—all of them, guys included. This precludes any thought time whatsoever. Just issue a blanket invitation: Tell everybody to wear a wedding dress, a bridesmaid’s dress, or a Hawaiian shirt. Give these people five days’ notice, at the most. If they get too much advance notice, they will have better outfits than you. Give the preacher three days’ notice. This way you can avoid the four mandatory two-hour prenuptial counseling sessions. He or she will still try to snag you for forty-five minutes or so, but even at that, it’s quite a savings.
The most important thing is to work out your own prenup agreement and get it carved in stone and signed in blood. The main thing you need to iron out is that you and your friends may do whatever you wish forever and that he has to do whatever you say and like it a lot. Many heartaches and divorces could be avoided if only couples would work these things out prenup. Once you’re nupped, it’s too late.
My favorite prenup agreement is the one I entered into with one of the main most loves of my life, Michael Rubenstein. We took a solemn, holy vow that we would never, ever, no matter what, marry each other. I credit that covenant with the fact that we are still in love to this very day—from a very comfortable distance.
Paperwork, blood tests, his ring:
blec
h—
errands, all, but alas, inescapable. Trust me, if you could get out of them, I would know about it. You have to get a license and it’s a pain in the butt, especially if you don’t give them seven or eight months to type it. If you want to get married this year, let alone this week, you have to know somebody who can pull some strings. You have to go to the health department and get a blood test for all the curable STDs (I’m not sure what the thinking is here; no one seems to care if your gene pool is infested with tadpoles). At any rate, it is worthwhile because when you do finally complete all the papers and tests satisfactorily, they give you a Newlywed Kit with your license. It contains, I swear to God, samples of Tide, Woolite, and Massengill, plus a discount coupon for Frederick’s of Hollywood. I am not joking. Go get a marriage license and see for yourself.
Re: his ring. It’s round and gold. Get it and go. Spend all available time and money on your ring.
Re: the ceremony. Let the guests choose their favorite songs and have a hootenanny. The bride or a close friend of hers should sing “My Way.” Keep the vows to an absolute minimum. Don’t go promising a bunch of stuff you have no intention of doing—it will come back to haunt you. Or at least cut yourself some slack. Don’t be booming out these “Yeses” and “I swear to God, I wills.” Smile sweetly and promise to “try real hard.” The groom, on the other hand, makes another set of vows entirely. He must promise to carry you around on a little satin pillow and cater to your every whim until he is, in fact, dead as a boot.
Location can really set the tone for the whole ceremony as well as for the wedded state to follow. If I ever get married again—I won’t say never because every time I say that wretched word, I end up eating it—but if I ever do, I have already picked the location. I would most definitely do it on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at a place Tammy and I found. It is right on Highway 90, easy in-and-out access, right across the street from the beach, and the sign, big as the sun, says,
JOE’S TEXAS BARBECUE AND SNO-KONES! GETTING MARRIED? MINISTER AVAILABLE!
Now, I ask you, what could be more perfect? You’ve got your reception just ready-made for you right there, and two of my very favorite foods, too. I’d a lot rather have me some Texas barbecue and a big ole sno-kone than a hunk of dried-up wedding cake any day of the week—you?
Face it, there are some basic inequities in these vows. The only hope you have of pulling this thing off is finding Mr. Right. Mr. Right is that man who believes that the sun shines brightly from your every bodily orifice. This man will eat dirt, run rabbits, and howl at the moon for you. He will tell you you are gorgeous when you aren’t wearing any makeup and you know perfectly well you look like whodunit. He will say that you have the most beautiful legs, when the mirror and everyone else in the world says your knees look like globs of biscuit dough. He must be heart-stoppingly handsome, smart, funny, and a snappy dresser. All your friends and family must adore him. Otherwise, when he turns out to be an ax-murderer, and so many of them do, you will be forced to stomach endless “I told you so’s.” Okay, you say, these guys are a dime a dozen, and right you are. So how do I pick the right one and how do I keep him down on the farm, so to speak? Well, as you know, Tammy says to treat him like shit and never give him any and he will follow you around like a dog. And it certainly does work like a charm. However, we have noticed that whenever we don’t give them any, we, at the same time, are not getting any. This is a problem.
As to making that final determination on Mr. Right, here’s a suggestion. Say you have four possible suitors meeting the aforementioned criteria and grovel-potential—how do you pick one? Easy. Pick the one who doesn’t have a job. This will leave him endless time to run all your errands. Trust me, this is the only satisfactory reason to get married—to get your errands run. The only way marriage can succeed is for one of the partners to commit to a lifetime of fetching and toting. Really, there is documented proof, statistics and stuff. The normal divorce rate is, like, one out of three—pretty grim, huh? But when one of the parties is not gainfully employed and spends every waking hour running errands, the numbers are one out of seventeen hundred. So if you hate errands as much as I do, and I know you do, take it from me:
If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never be a normal workingman’s wife; so from my personal point of view, get the unemployed to marry you!
A really, really good friend of ours just loves to get married. I’m not sure how much she likes being married, but getting married just tickles her no end, apparently, on account of she has done it so many times. We keep trying to tell her, “You don’t have to marry them anymore, Pam!” but she just keeps right on doing it. Whenever we get word of the latest husband, we just say, “Well, you know our Pam, she just loves a spring weddin’!”
One of her former husbands was an Elvis impersonator—well, not really, but after they split up, that’s what we told everybody: most gratifying. Pam is one of the smartest women we know, who is, on occasion, just dumb as a sack full of hammers. She and Elvis were looking into buying a farm. Big yard, as in lots of grass. The Realtor suggested, laughing, that they might want to get a couple of goats. Elvis laughs, too, and says, “Yeah, and a couple of bush hogs.” They walk on. Pam is standing there, mouth-breathing, her thoughts in a maelstrom. “Bush hogs!” she’s thinking. “My God!” She could just see them rooting around in the front yard, all hairy and nasty. “What will the neighbors think?” she’s shrieking inside her head. She is in a positive frenzy. Finally she gets up her nerve. “How big
is
a bush hog?” she asks. They tell her and she starts stomping around, waving her hands and rolling her eyes. “Will they run at me and jump up on me and run my hose? Can we just get some little bitty ones?” The two guys now realize that she is thinking of a huge, living mutant pig-thing instead of a tractor. They just let her go right on, getting more and more worried, asking more and more stupid questions with every panicked breath. Only when she finally asked, “What do they eat besides grass and how much?” did they show her the John Deere.
Sometimes people really do take my advice, and I must say, few things in life can make me happier. My friend Fran just did everything I said regarding her wedding to That Guy. (He had a name, John, which soon was lengthened to Poor John, but early on none of us could remember his name and would always ask if she was still dating That Guy, and it stuck.) I told her a hit-and-run wedding was the way to go. She gave everybody about thirty minutes’ notice, and we met at City Hall—“we” being Fran, That Guy, Wilson Wong, and me. Wilson’s main job in life is official consort to the Sweet Potato Queens in the persona of Lance Romance, but he is also an architect, restaurateur, professional photographer, corporate trainer, and I don’t know what else; pretty much whatever we need done, he can do it. We needed him to take photos at the hit-and-run wedding. As you may know, I like themes a lot, and the theme for the hit-and-run wedding was Schnozzes and Rubber Chickens; Wilson brought both. We all met up at the appointed hour in Mayor Dale Danks’s office in City Hall, and Hizzoner himself performed the nupping. I gave the bride away. When we were asked the question re: objections to the nupping from outsiders, we replied that they had plenty, so we didn’t invite them. I gazed fondly at the happy couple, clasping the rubber chicken to my bosom while Wilson snap, snap, snapped away with his Brownie camera. Postnup, the three of us posed in the Wedding Schnozzes, doing a three-hand grip on the rubber chicken, grinning maniacally, much to the puzzlement of Hizzoner. He willingly posed for his own photo with the rubber chicken, however, never being shy about photo ops of any kind. (In my opinion, he is still the cutest mayor we ever had in Jackson, and no one can dispute the quality of his tan).
Anyway, then we went to see about getting the chicken baptized, but the priest, Jerry McBride (whom I have known since shortly after the earth cooled), said na-a-a-a, we couldn’t do that, but we could hold the chicken between us when we took Communion, so we settled for that. After that we put on the big rubber noses again for more pictures.