My wife and I celebrated our nineteenth wedding anniversary yesterday
as we do most every year – on a long drive in the car with our kids and her mom.
Don’t be jealous just because we know how to party!
In honor of another successful year of marriage (and another
successful summer road trip), I thought I would once again regale you with the
heartwarming tale about the night after the night I met my wife.
Unfortunately, the night I met my wife was fairly uneventful.
(Besides the fact that I met the love of my life, of course.)
So instead, I will tell you the shocking, explosive,
frightening, and downright weird tale about the following night. It’s a tale of
a dive bar, a truck, a barefoot man, a policeman, a bathrobe, and a shotgun.
A guy walks into a bar. It was me. I met my wife in a bar.
That’s not the whole story. It gets better.
It was only my first or second time at this particular bar,
but she had been there for thirty-two nights in a row. She and her best friend
were going for a combined personal record. It was her initiative and dedication
to the endeavor that drew me to her. We were both college students in San Luis
Obispo, CA, and she was working at a pizza place that summer. She would get off
work at midnight and meet her friend at Bull’s Tavern to shut the place down.
We met one evening, talked until closing, and said goodnight.
I thought she was really neat-o, so having heard about their
record-breaking attendance goal, I had a good idea of where I might find her
again the next evening. After missing her a few times, between the bar and the
pizza place, we finally connected, and had another delightful evening of
bar-booth conversation. This was the kind of bar where “delightful
conversation” means you sat in a red Naugahyde booth, taking turns shouting
into each other’s ears, in an attempt to carry on a conversation over the AC/DC
blaring out of the jukebox.
After the last-call light came on at two A.M. – this was
back when we could stay up until two A.M. – we walked back to the pizza place
where my truck was parked, and carried on our conversation in the cab of my
Ford F150. By about three A.M. I had convinced her that kissing me wouldn’t be
so bad, and just when I was about to plant one on her, a sonic boom came
rolling down the street. It would have been much cooler if we had heard the
explosion as we kissed, but you just can’t plan for these kinds of things.
She said, and I quote, “That sounded like a twelve-gauge!”
I replied, scoffing-ly, “There is no way that was a
twelve-gauge shotgun. It was probably just a car backfiring.” In my head I was
thinking, Cool. She knows her shotguns. But that couldn’t have been a
shotgun.
Roughly four minutes later a barefoot man in a bathrobe came
walking down the street carrying a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Now, if I can paint the scene for you - It is past three
o’clock in the morning, and the town has completely shut down. We are the only
car parked on the street, directly across from the pizza parlor. The only other
car that we can see belongs to a police officer who is parked in a parking lot
across the intersection from the pizza place. The police officer is standing
outside of his car, chatting with a man on a bicycle. They have apparently not
heard the big bang and seem very relaxed. The pizza place is located on the
corner of the intersection, and the man in the bathrobe with the heavy
artillery is walking past the pizza place, toward the cop, but neither one of
them can see the other yet. We are parked across the street and have a clear
view of both of them, and a pretty good idea of what is about to happen.
Between the five of us, we are the only people still awake in the whole town,
and two of us are a whole lot more awake than we were a minute ago.
The bathrobe-clad gentlemen rounded the corner and came into
view of the police officer, and they saw each other at about the same time. We
were positioned at just the wrong angle, so when the cop drew his weapon, he
was pointing it right at us. We both did that thing where you slide down below
the dashboard in case the bullets start flying, but foolishly keep your head up
high enough to see, because you don’t want to miss the action.
The policeman immediately started asking the nice man to
kindly set his shotgun down. By “kindly asking,” I mean he instantly began
shouting, “Drop the #$*%&@ gun right now! Drop it, #$@*&%!!!” I thought
he was handling himself very well given the surprising circumstance he had just
found himself in. The bicyclist he had been talking to before the rude
interruption did something that still to this day I cannot believe, even though
I saw it with my own two barely-visible-above-the-dashboard eyes. He dropped
his bike to the ground and fit himself completely underneath the front bumper
of the police cruiser. Next time you see an old 1990s police cruiser, take a
look at the ground clearance. I think it might have been Houdini himself in
that bike helmet.
Well, the nice man with the twelve-gauge didn’t drop his gun
right away. He just sort of stood there, trying to have a conversation with the
cop. He was holding the gun at a forty-five-degree angle toward the ground, not
exactly pointing it at the cop, but not exactly pointing it away from him,
either. As the police officer walked closer and closer to the man, yelling
commands louder and louder, I was sure we were about to witness something very
unpleasant on what had, otherwise, been a really nice night.
Thankfully, for everyone involved, the man finally decided
to set his shotgun gently on the ground, and seconds later, the police officer
set his knee not-so-gently on the man’s neck, and the standoff was over. As
Captain Bathrobe was led to the police car and Harry Houdini extricated himself
from underneath the Caprice Classic, I started the truck and drove my date home
in stunned silence.
Fortunately, she didn’t hold the incident against me, and we
continued to see each other. We searched the local paper for two weeks straight
after that night for some mention of the incident, partially to prove to people
that we weren’t making it up, but mostly to find out for ourselves what we had
seen. Why was there a man firing a shotgun in sleepy, downtown San Luis Obispo,
and why was he then walking the streets with that shotgun, barefoot, in a
bathrobe? We never found a single mention of it, and to this day, have no idea
what happened.
We graduated, parted ways, and met again six years later at
a mutual college friend’s housewarming party. We have been together ever since.
After meeting her father, I finally understood her knowledge
of shotguns. And after getting to know my father-in-law, I had a strong
suspicion that he and my wife might have known more about that night than they
were letting on. He was a great guy, and he may have been accused a time or two
of being “slightly overprotective” of his only daughter.
Now, he certainly wasn’t a bathrobe type of guy, but he did own
a number of twelve-gauge shotguns, and if he was in town visiting and staying
at a hotel, he would have had easy access to a nice terrycloth robe.
Where exactly was he that night? Out looking for his little
girl, perhaps?
She still claims it wasn’t him, but she always smiles when
she says it. And after questioning, he was never able to produce a good alibi. I
remain skeptical.
I also remain very thankful to have lived through that night
and been able to celebrate nineteen amazing years of marriage.
Happy anniversary, baby!
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen
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