07.16.2001
Senior Fernandez was having a slow couple of weeks when he booked my best friend's wedding at his chapel. My friend hadn't had any luck when he inquired about space. His finance - a fine woman who also happened to be my sister - was not happy about any of it. Nothing was going as planned.
The three of us had grown up watching movies in the 80's about people and their botched weddings. To me it seemed only fitting that things shouldn't go right, but since it was my sister's "big day" she either failed, or didn't want, to see the humor inherent in the situation. Sometimes, it really did seem as though life imitated art. When told about where the ceremony was to take place, I balked, asking about if he knew exactly where he had decided to hold the biggest moment of their lives. He smiled – that boyish smile of his that convinced my sister she should date him after a childhood of torments and pulled hair – and laughed to me that at least two out of the three big moments in life would be held in the same place. He asked what I thought but I was only able to nod my head back and forth in some kind of inebriated lazy agreement.
The way I saw the impending wedding was that it would mean an evening of free drinks and an excuse to be that way. My sister didn't even want me there, or such is what she would tell me on the rare occasion that we would talk on the phone. I wasn't so much as down on my luck as I was out of it. With the exception of the times spent with my friend, I didn't even pretend to be sober any longer. In the past two months I'd lost as many jobs and been reduced to a dishwasher at a local bar that also had a kitchen in which they served chicken "fingers" and other assorted breaded and deep fried foods. I was close to losing that and ending up just plain unemployed, I figured, but that time not for the drinking and instead my pilfering dozens of those tasty treats they charged seven bucks a basket for. Totaled in my head, it must have been hundreds of dollars in lost revenue.
Somewhere along the line my sister had become the responsible one. Only two years younger than I, she had succeeded professionally in every way that I had failed. She was a PR spokeswoman for some large company that had recently moved its headquarters back into town and had become something of a zealot for them. There was always some government regulator that was trying to screw over her company, or an environmental group that complained of their emissions, and no one ever seemed to care that they tried as hard as they could, and though there were a couple of bad apples – but aren't they everywhere? – the company really cared about what was best. She didn't even want to get started on the exploding gas tanks. She figured that people should just learn how to drive better.
Of course, none of this was explained to me directly, thanks to her friend Jamie. Jamie was a bitch, and I'd thought so since we first met at my sister's company holiday party that I was snuck into a few years ago. Jamie, understandably, had a problem with men. She was a Jersey girl if there ever was one. Obnoxious beyond belief in that overbearing way only Jersey girls seem to have. She wore two huge hoop earrings from each ear that dragged her lobes down to elephantine proportions, exaggerated further by the close cropped bob she kept well moussed at all times. People talk about whining little princesses from Long Island, but they don’t have anything on they who hail from the Garden State. Jamie was the worst of those: pushy, demanding, and just mean. My sister liked her though, for a reason that perhaps only the two of them would ever know, but probably having something to do with one being a sad excuse for a human being and the other being too nice a person to admit so.
At the party, I wanted nothing to do with either of them, heading straight for the bar, empty glass in hand, but brimming with intention to fill it. Jamie ambushed me, screaming how happy she was to finally meet the older brother and how my sister had said that the two of us would make a great pair. Already the thought made me grimace as only thing I felt she needed was to be sterilized and all I needed was a drink. Such became the pattern for our six month "relationship" that ended in her telling my sister that I was nothing than an abusive drunk. The former I denied knowing how I was when I was with her – unconscious in all ways but actually, unfortunately – but the other I had no choice but to own up to and which I figured my sister was smart enough to know already. For the last few years I'd seen my sister only at family functions, and my friend could only come out to see me since it was made clear to him that I was not welcome in their apartment.
That Jaime was also her maid of honor apparently also meant I was going to have to dance with her at some point at the reception. The trouble was, though I was no Fred Aistare, she had all the rhythm of a cattle stampede. Of this, even my sister had to have been aware, because she begged my friend, my best friend whom she planned to marry, to have Jay as his best man. Jay, for sheer dance reasons, was a good choice as sobriety rarely interfered in dance steps, and, as rumor had it, was also in a dance company back in his school days. Jay denied everything, and upon learning who the maid of honor was, declined the offer, pleading to not let his name arise in future discussions on the topic. Jay was a smart man, I had to give him that much. So it remained that I was to be his best man and I only heard the stories of how my sister burned.
The Buen Pastor Funeral Home, a quiet dark wood paneled room on Second Avenue, probably would have been the perfect place for a wedding were it not for an unexpected heat wave in the city the week before. The walls were well lit by mounted fixtures of brass blooms that held the light bulbs and fake crystals dangling from the sides, and the alter – after having been moved from its normal position on the right, leaving neat indentations and dust where the vacuum cleaner could not quite reach – stood over the center isle of folding chairs. Littered everywhere were matching white flower arrangements that gave a room for the dead more life than it had seen in a long time. I was there early, as my friend requested the night before. My sister seemed somehow certain that I would not materialize on the actual date necessary unappreciative of the fact that I attended all the practice dinners and other pre-wedding functions. Upon sight of me, I saw even her breathe a sigh of relief, though she still kept what seemed like a distance reserved for a stray dog that may, or may not, be frothing at the mouth. Her future husband was apparently my handler.
In a panic he rushed up to me and took me aside to the coatroom that was barely a walk in closet, explaining to me the cause of his state. It would seem that over the last week there had actually been a fairly astonishing run of dead people due to the slightly warmer than usual temperatures. Humidity and old people tended not to go well together, Senior Fernandez explained that morning to my friend and, as it was Saturday – the prime time for the funeral business – and that weddings weren't his bread and butter after all, the ceremony would have to be cut short by a half hour so poor Senora Somebody could be wheeled in and the room rearranged in a properly somber manner. I agreed with my friend's angst explaining that I also thought that it was a dire turn of events, and asked whether he protested it based on the paid previous agreement. For a second I was prepared to catch him should he take the spill he looked ready for. Apparently there was no convincing the good owner, the wedding was to be cut short.
From out of his pocket, my friend produced my sister's tiny cellular phone and placed it in my hand. Would I be kind enough to call the guests who had not already arrived and inform them that we were beginning a half hour early? I looked at him, my friend – the man who doomed himself to a lifetime with my sister – and I looked at the phone – a clever little gadget that folded itself in half so as to be a size smaller than some flies I'd taken a swing at and with more buttons than my word processor at home. I couldn't say no. I was going to require a lesson on how to use the thing, but I couldn't say no.
Armed with my newfound knowledge and with the portable gadget in hand, I stood making calls from the sidewalk in front of the Buen Pastor Funeral Home, speed dialing numbers from the internal memory of the phone my sister had couriered to me. While the phone rang for the two-dozen numbers I was assigned to call, I looked up and down Second Avenue for a place to sit. A smile crept across my face and the feeling that my luck was changing struck me when a block away I noticed an empty yet open bar. As I walked toward the saloon, an answering machine picked up and I left my sixth brief but informative message. "Hi, Aunt June. I was asked to call you this morning and inform you that the wedding ceremony is going to start a half hour earlier which means," I said as I paused to look at the time read out on the phone, "that we'll start in a little more than twenty minutes. Hope you can get here Aunt June." Twenty minutes left me with enough time to get a beer, two if I was fast.
In life, I've found, that it's the small good things that make me appreciate even the big bad things. That was always the smell of a bar in the morning hours to me. There was something about the smell of the old beer stained wood being gently warmed with the morning sun that just seemed to make everything all right. I loved the bottle and the long soft shadow it cast across the room. Everything felt all right and somehow it made it seem like all would just work its self out. While I dialed the numbers, I occupied the time it rang by carving my friend's name into the bar with the sharp end of a key. The bartender – a woman no older than forty but wearing her years like most would wear a sack of potatoes – stretched and pulled her stringy blond hair, saying nothing about my diversion but watching it with interest. I must have looked a sight in the tailored black suit I was ordered to wear, hunched over the bar like I knew what I was doing, gouging a name of someone who was important to me.
Of the people I'd been asked to call, I'd reached no more than six and, by the sound of their voices, most of them were still in bed. My newfound involvement with the wedding started to leave me with a sense of unbearable dread that nothing would go right, much less according to plan. I found myself not wanting to go back to the chapel, but stay where it was warm, where it was comfortable, and where the drinks were only two dollars a piece even for Bass which I could only assume they made a profit on via bulk rather than individual sale. I didn't want to see my friend married. I wanted him single and free and unencumbered by the complexities of marriage. I wanted to protest the whole idea that a man such as him should get hitched to a sister like mine. There was nothing that could be done however, and I knew this better than anyone else.
I dropped a couple of bills on the bar and lifted myself off the stool to begin what seemed like a death march back to the chapel. I was ready to drop into a box and let them wheel me down the aisle so that the kindly pastor could say a few words over my freshly fallen form. It was the toughest block I'd ever walked because I knew that, for all the rumors that people loved repeat, I wasn't gaining a brother so much as losing one I already had. I was the bad kid in my sister's neighborhood who had to sneak to his buddy's window and ask if he wanted to go outside, quiet, so as not to be overheard by his chum's mother. What did he see in her, I couldn't even guess. I never did get the straight story as to who asked who out first. He had to have known that when she set her sights on him, he was hers from then on. She always got what she wanted. Well, except for me out of her life.
I was greeted by a mean, teeth-clenched scowl as I opened the door. My sister, dressed in white with two little girls – whom I'd never seen but who I was told I was related to – who carried her tail, pushed me by pointed finger back out the door and cursed in a hiss of rage at me through her locked jaws. She accused me of trying to mess up her wedding. She wanted to know how many people I'd reached, if any. She didn't know where I'd been but, that if it was at a bar, I was going to be dead after the ceremony. I attempted to calm her by telling her that I'd reached quite a few people but that most were still in bed. I wanted to laugh at her and the silly notion that a wedding ceremony actually meant anything since, by law, they had been married for a little over two weeks. I didn't say a word though. The possibility of it making things any better was too slim to chance.
My parents – two people who had hated each other since as far as I could remember – peeked though the stained glass windows set into the oak front doors. They mumbled little phrases back and forth like betters giving odds on two boxers and it seemed funny that I probably had the losing odds. The girls who stood behind my sister looked genuinely frightened and glanced at my parents hoping for one of them to rescue them from their beloved whatever-her-relation. I just stood there with my sisters rage funneled through her pointed finger that started to hurt my chest. It was the pastor who stopped what could have been my eventual murder at the hands of my sister.
He rushed out, knocking my father to the ground in the process, onto the street waving his arms that it was time for her to be walked down the isle and that I should have already been up there behind my friend. I looked at her for permission, which she gave in the form of a nod, and I stepped past her careful not to tread on her dress and headed up to my spot at the alter, picking up my father in the process who flailed on the ground like an over turned beetle. He didn't say a word to me but I could tell that while he may not be on my side, he thought that my sister ought to have given me the benefit of the doubt.
In the chapel the march had already begun. I wanted to call it the death march, especially since this would probably be the last time I saw my friend with anything resembling my sister's blessing and felt inside as though someone I knew had died. I took my place beside my friend at the alter, straightening out the tuxedo jacket and pulling on the sleeves. It was a good fit for a rental mostly because the shop's tailor actually knew a thing or two about sizing and my sister was paying enough money that he could put his children through college on it. I smiled at my friend and he smiled back, nervous as to what the whole ceremony meant and I nodded grinning – from the alcohol I realized – but trying to say with expression that everything was alright and that, in a strange way, I was almost proud what he was doing. I didn't agree with his choice of wives nor her choice of friends, but it was a brave step he was taking and I respected that.
I stood across the aisle from Jaime and tried to smile at her but knew only too late that it looked condescending. It was the wrong expression to give her. She would undoubtedly let my sister know exactly what it looked like and what she though was behind it. It was also wrong because inside I knew that, given the way my life was heading, I had no right to be condescending towards anyone. It was difficult though. There was nothing that was good, in the normal sense of the word, about her. Though I stole chicken fingers from the bar I washed dishes for, it still seemed as though there was more going for me than she would ever have. I watched her large hoop earrings, the accessory she was to never be without, swing in sad little circles under her lobes and a part of me almost found it endearing when she wiped a loose bang away from her forehead. I wanted to apologize and explain that I was sorry for everything, for being a drunk, for being mean, that even though I would never respect her, I felt sorry enough for her to want to try and make her feel better.
I wasn't able to say a thing.
Just when I was about to try to catch her eye and tell her the things I wanted to say, my sister walked through the door beaming with pride in her white wedding dress that was made of enough to hide an elephant. The two girls that trailed behind her looked tired as though they had been unwilling, formally dressed participants in a medley of ten-yard dashes. One of them had acquired a pronounced limp in the intervening minutes since I'd last seen them but my sister was clearly not cognoscente of it as she blew kisses to her friends and family in the aisles of folding chairs. Jaime, catching site of my younger sibling turned and smiled at me with squinted eyes. In such a simple gesture she told me that I was wrong about wanting to apologize.
I tried not to look at her and instead focus on my beaming friend and my proud sister who with each step seemed to say, "Look, I did it. I'm getting married" as though nobody ever believed she would go through with it. She had a little checklist she kept as a little girl inside of her sticker collection book and she would proudly point out each time an event or deed occurred so she could mark something over and done with. After a while she ceased collecting stickers but the checklist continued moving to a spiral notebook, an honest-to-god journal, a day planner, and then eventually to her Palm Pilot. I always laughed when she checked something because when she held up her list it always seemed to grow by two for everyone done. I didn't know much about computers and even less about her "Palm" but I wondered how much it could store and what percentage of it her list took up. I wondered whether getting married was equal to the item "buy new shoes - Prada" or if it was some how denoted as more important. I didn't believe that it was and I doubt she thought it should have been. It was just one more thing she had to do before she checked out.
I felt a pang of envy for my friend as he stood there, his shoulders pulled back with the grandness he felt. I wondered what it was like to actually start what people expected to be a normal life and was jealous that he knew. I wondered when our paths forked and why I hadn't noticed until now. I tried to guess when the two of them would move to the suburbs, Connecticut or Long Island, but please God not Jersey, and tried to gauge how well he would re-acclimate to the surroundings we thought we had escaped from not ten years prior.
When the pastor had said his piece and the vows were exchanged and the kiss was given I knew why I was asked to be part of the ceremony. In much the same way as my father had walked the bride down the aisle to symbolize that he was giving away his daughter, I was doing the same for my friend and my agreeing to be best man was my acquiescence to this fact. My sister didn't speak to me and now neither was my friend. It didn't matter what we were before, boyhood chums who had done everything together, he was now and most importantly my sister's husband. As the two of them walked between the rows of folding chairs while the music played its happy song, I stood in place next to the woman who had ruined me in my sister's eyes and said goodbye.