Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Married (2 page)

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OZ. TUB OF OUR PATENTED

“NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO TAN” SUNSCREEN

•
RAPE WHISTLE

•
GROOVY “WALKIN' WITH THE J-DOG” FLIP-FLOPS

 

TRY JOY-GA

NON-SATANIC YOGA!

YOU'VE STRETCHED WITH THE DEVIL . . . NOW REACH FOR THE
LIGHT!
DAILY
/10
A.M.
/JOY-GA
STUDIO (BEHIND DUMPSTERS)

 

FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND SUNRISE BEACH WALK!

IF
HE
CAN GET UP EARLY, YOU CAN TOO!

 

VISIT THE HOLY WATER PARK . . .

WHERE FUN IS CONTAGIOUS!

SO ARE GERMS! DON'T FORGET TO APPLY BLEACH SOLUTION

BEFORE YOUR SWIM!

 

Worse than all this, however, worse than the heat, the enforced fun, and the number of judging Christians all around me, was that to my complete dismay the resort was 100 percent alcohol-free. There was not a drop of liquor anywhere on the premises. Nor was a drop allowed to be brought on. An hour after we arrived, I looked at my new husband and said, “Darling, get me a drink or I won't be held responsible for my actions.”

Brad paid the guy at the front desk ten dollars and he told us there was a bar just down the road that stayed open until about two
A.M
. We found the bar, which had no name, and it was a small plywood hut with teal-blue walls, metal road sign tables, and a rotating fan nailed to the ceiling. Nobody was there but the bartender. He made us cocktails, a rich touristy drink for me, with Appleton rum, canned pineapple juice, and room-temperature cream, and a virgin Bloody Mary for Brad, who doesn't drink anymore. He poured our drinks into two beat-up-looking coconut shells. I loved them. Brad did too. We clunked our coconuts together and kissed. This was the moment I'd been waiting for. We were newlyweds in paradise. We were happy. Our romantic honeymoon had finally begun.

Mistake #5
:
Accidentally going to a sex club
. On the way back to the resort, we passed a sign on the road that said
CHICKEN
. The sign had an arrow pointing up toward a white stucco building with dark windows and a muscle-bound bouncer at the front door. “Are you hungry?” Brad asked, and I said, “Famished!” So we went into what we
thought
was a restaurant that served chicken. Inside, the music was low and thumping. Figures moved around on the dance floor. We found an open booth on the far side of the room, and I peripherally caught the strange shapes and jerking motions occurring at the tables and booths we were walking past.

“Did you see that guy wearing a mask?” Brad whispered when we sat down.

“What guy?” I looked around as our waitress arrived and asked what we wanted. Having no menu, I shrugged and asked if they had chicken. She nodded and said it was ten dollars for ten minutes. I didn't understand her. She repeated herself. “Ten minutes of . . .
chicken
?” I looked over at Brad, whose eyes were suddenly wide, wide open. “Hon,” he said. “We're in a sex club.” I scanned the room and forced my eyes to focus. It was true. People were screwing all over the room. On the tables, in the booths, against the walls. My horrified eyes accidentally locked on the pear-shaped ass of a big chubby white guy wearing nothing except a fanny pack. His fat rolls jiggled as he banged a corpulent black girl, whose ass was lodged in the salad bar's lettuce bin. It was like watching giant lumping albino walruses slapping squid-bits together. I will never get the images out of my head.

Mistake #6: Forgetting our ID cards.
Our walk back to the resort took forever. Traffic whizzed by, kicking up gravel and dust and skittering beer cans across the road. Then the resort's front gates were locked. We hollered until the front desk guy came out and said we needed our ID key cards to get in. We'd left them in the room. After twenty minutes Brad wadded up a hundred-dollar bill and chucked it at the guard's little hut. Moments later, the gates swung open and Brad started to argue with the guard, threatening to tell management.

I calmed Brad down and steered him toward the restaurant, promising we'd both feel better after we finally ate. Unfortunately the restaurant was closed and the kitchen staff had all gone home. Room service stopped at eleven
P.M
. I told the front desk guy we were really sorry to inconvenience him, but we were really hungry and could he heat us up some soup? He agreed, after I gave him twenty bucks, and asked what kind of soup we wanted. Spicy black bean or creamy crayfish bisque? Well, anyone who orders beans before their first night on their honeymoon is insane. We ordered two bowls of the crayfish bisque and the desk clerk smiled and bowed his head. “The bisque,” he said. “Excellent choice.”

Mistake #7
:
Ordering the crayfish bisque.
The cramps didn't set in until we were asleep. After wolfing down two large bowls of crayfish bisque and then adjourning to our honeymoon bed, we passed out. I woke around two
A.M
. feeling hot. There were frogs outside our window, croaking through the slats, sometimes in unison, sometimes in a baffling cacophony of independent sounds. They dominated the world, it seemed, controlled the airspace in our heads. (Brad said he liked the sound, it was soothing. It made me feel insane.) I lay there and listened to them while I stared at the ceiling fan and wished it was on. Suddenly my stomach gurgled. A stabbing sensation tore through my bowels and felt like a saltwater-taffy-pulling machine had hold of my intestinal tract and was now twisting it into loops. I doubled over in pain. The frogs outside croaked louder.

When the first wave hit, I managed to make it to the bathroom . . . but barely. I rivaled any Olympic gymnast as I bounded across the room and planted my posterior on the bowl just in time. Brad, however, was not so lucky. Twenty minutes into one of the most violent bathroom episodes I've ever experienced, Brad started pounding on the door. He was shouting something desperately at me; I couldn't say what, because for once in my life I'd had enough sense to lock the door. He begged me to let him in, but there wa
s no way
. Unable to stand, I was only able to shout through the door in short telegram-like sentences. “
Can't . . . move,
” I shouted. “
Can't stand . . . up. The crayfish did . . . it. Oh . . . Jesus.
” I doubled over in pain. Eventually, the pounding ceased. Brad bolted for the nearest toilet, which was downstairs in the lobby.

That night, we hardly slept. We just lay there groaning and gurgling and cramping up and wanting to die and listening to the death frogs, all the while intermittently lunging for the bathroom. I took carefully worded guesses at what had caused our gastric distress. There were the turbulent flights, the mismatched alcohol, the
warm
dairy products. Upon hearing those words, “warm dairy products,” Brad groaned loudly and gripped the bed.

“No crayfish bisque ever again,” he said. “No crayfish
anything.
”

We lay there and panted as we speculated and sweated and tried to keep still. Moving was tricky; roll too fast or far and the crayfish insurgency was right there to rise up and meet you. Fail to shift the voluminous gas building up inside you and it stabbed like a knife. This is how we spent the first night of our honeymoon. The smell alone made it something we'd want to forget. Around dawn we fell asleep in twisted-up, foul-smelling, and sweaty sheets.

The next day we staggered downstairs pale and weak, our bones like sharp glass. We went to the resort's mirth-free brunch, with virgin Bloody Marys and the “no-touch conga line.” I ordered weak tea and dry toast in the dazzlingly bright dining room, which, judging by the sudden sharp warning gurgles in my stomach, was already pushing it. Then my brother-in-law, Lenny, and my sister, Hailey, came bounding toward our table. I'd almost forgotten they were there. My mother-in-law had sent them along with us. They had more energy than golden retrievers and were so tanned and smiley I wanted to vomit. They'd caught their flight and gotten in early. They'd already been snorkeling and had seen dolphins and a huge sea turtle.

Rage.

I listened to them as long as I could, but when the sadistic calypso band started up in the lobby, I said I needed to go back upstairs, before a gastronomic event happened. We passed a smattering of joyless Bible Scrabble players sitting on the sun-dappled patio. A man nearby let out a sigh. “Goll darn it,” he said. “Almost had the bonus word. Look at my board. I had ‘pro-lice.' ”

We stopped at the front desk and discovered our luggage was still missing. The manager was apologetic but wholly unsympathetic, especially when we told him we might've gotten food poisoning from the soup we ate last night. He found that unlikely. None of the other guests had complained. In fact the kitchen was serving it again that night, and he directed our gaze to the nearby menu board. At the mere sight of the words “crayfish bisque,” Brad fled up the stairs. I smiled politely and asked where the nearest bathroom was.

There, I pondered my clothing situation, which was dire. The outfit I'd worn on the plane could be washed in the bathroom only so many times and I didn't dare send it to the cleaners. I didn't want it out of my sight. Hailey offered to lend me clothing, but she was two agonizing sizes smaller, and so I declined. But I had to do something, so I decided to brave the resort's gift shop, Onward, Christian Shoppers, a tacky crap emporium filled with cheap plastic and neon colors. You could buy a lime-green bucket of bleached starfish for twenty-eight dollars or a king-size Snickers bar for six. I wound up buying two muumuus at eighty bucks each. One was neon safety-orange; the other one was bright Day-Glo pink. I donned my new tent-size attire in the room and Brad said, “What . . . what are you wearing?”

He looked horrified.

“This is a muumuu, darling,” I told him, and climbed into bed. “It's the official attire of women who've given up. Get used to it.”

He laughed. Sort of.

I also laughed sort of and we lay there, assuring each other that the worst of the food poisoning had surely passed and we'd feel better soon. An hour later there was a horrible gurgling in my stomach. Gurgling with intent. “It's
happening
!” I shouted, and flew from the bed to the bathroom. The bisque was back. The next wave hit Brad a few hours later. This wasn't some shitstorm that would pass over with a handful of Tums. No. We named it the Crayfish Jihad. The concierge gave us the number for a doctor, who agreed it was either food poisoning, a virus, or a bacterial infection. So basically, he didn't know what we had. He called in a prescription at the local pharmacy and said for insurance reasons the hotel would be unable to pick up the prescription for us; we had to get it ourselves. An eighty-dollar cab ride and several sudden stops for the bathroom later, we found the pharmacy, which informed us they only had enough antidiarrheal medication in stock for one prescription.

We were quiet on the ride home and decided to split the medication, ensuring that neither of us got better. Not completely. You'd think the trouble was gone and then
pow,
you were sprinting for the bathroom. Our recurring episodes of gastric distress continued to alternate throughout the remainder of the trip and were obviously present to one degree or another in every photo we took. In all our honeymoon photos one of us looks worried. Either Brad has a deep crease in his forehead and is poised at the edge of the photo to sprint for the bathroom, or I have a panicked smile on my face, saying,
“Hurry. Take the damn picture.”

Meanwhile Hailey and Lenny were having the time of their lives, surfing, swimming with dolphins, dancing to that damned calypso music. (They bought two CDs of it to bring home.) We, on the other hand, were still terrified to venture too far from indoor plumbing. Our honeymoon was almost over and we hadn't had sex once, which didn't upset Brad nearly as much as the fact that he hadn't been scuba diving once. Stubbornly, he donned a snorkeling mask and went for a short paddle around the reef, while I sat on the beach with Hailey and Lenny reading magazines. I seethed with rage at my copy of
Cosmo,
which was brimming with gorgeous supermodels who aggravated and vexed me.
We're perfect and you are not.
Whatever you have, it's not enough. Whoever you are, you're not who you should be. Whatever you want, it's just out of reach and always will be. You will never be finished, fixed, or free.
They should just call the magazine
You Will Never Be Happy
.

Suddenly Brad came roaring out of the water like a wet moose, bellowing and stumbling toward the beach. I was afraid it was a level-six crayfish insurgency. He charged toward us, his howling louder and louder. Lenny put down his copy of
Crappie Fisherman
and told us that if a man hollered like that on the Iron Range, he'd find his snowmobile spray-painted pink by morning.
“Pee on it!”
Brad shouted, hopping on one foot.

I tried to comprehend his gestures. (I
knew
hand gestures were important.)

“I stepped on a freaking sea urchin!”
Brad howled.
“Jesus freaking Christ, somebody pee on my foot!”

“Pee on your what?” Hailey squinted at him.

“Pee on my freaking foot!”

Lenny finally stood up, muttering, and unzipped his pants. “Shit,” he said. “I'll pee on your damn foot, all right? Why dontcha quit hollering? You're scaring the damn seagulls.
Shit.
Peeing on a grown man's foot. I don't know what to think anymore.”

Mistake #8: Getting lost and winding up on the kitchen loading dock
. I got lost while trying to get back to the room and wound up wandering down some employee-only service hall and turning down another service hall, and then I was in the kitchen. Through the steamy racks of stainless steel kitchenware I saw a loading dock and sunlight pouring in through a partially open garage door. I headed for the light, thinking I'd get my bearings more easily outside. Ducking under the door and stepping into the blinding sunlight, I found myself standing outside on the loading dock with three young men, presumably members of the kitchen staff, judging by their dirty white aprons.