Lodging

Our Honeymoon Part One: Ain’t no joke, our bed broke (Twice!!!) and I had to call a bloke who was sippin’ on a coke; All because I gave her a poke!

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When we booked our Honeymoon at a resort called The Body Holiday in St. Lucia, my spidey senses should have been tingling that something was off. I wanted to be a good sport for my wife because she was really excited about going there, but I just knew in my core that it might not be the right fit for me.

It was early April when we went and it really was remarkable. Everyone, except for me, thought the weather was fantastic, but I didn’t even make it out of the cab from the airport without completely sweating right through my linen shirt and leaving a mark on the back seat. I was literally stuck to that seat like white on rice, but I kept quiet (believe it or not) and made the best of it. Travelling with me is never an enjoyable experience for anyone, as I will readily admit, so I was really going out of my way to make this a pleasant experience for my wife. It was our Honeymoon and I wanted her to always remember these moments and have the most amazing experience.

By the time we arrived at the resort, it was dark and we were starving. They led us to our absolutely amazing suite and we dropped off our bags and went right to eat. We were seated quickly and I was so hungry and sweaty that I didn’t realize it at first, but we were outside. The restaurant was little more than a hut with no walls. It was a really nice hut and pleasant enough, but there were birds sitting on the beams of the roof. If I have neglected to mention this before, or if I am repeating myself, please accept my apology: I do not eat outside. I’m not a squirrel and I have absolutely no desire to brave the elements or fight with wildlife while trying to devour my chicken and rice. Those birds in the rafters were giving me the stare down like someone’s feisty grandmother and it’s like they knew they could take me if it turned into a fight which was very disconcerting. And do I even need to bring up my traumatizing experiences with birds anyway? There were fewer birds in the rafters at night than during breakfast the next day which was small consolation at the time.   

I will admit that it really was an amazing beach-front resort but the trouble is that I actually hate hate hate the beach. I am so pale and ill-colored that, at times, my wan complexion has been mistaken for that of an albino and I burn like a hot dog when I go outside in the sun. I actually have no tanning potential in my body; I go from zero to red-as-a-smacked-ass with no in-between. Also, beaches skeeve me out: I mean what’s relaxing about sitting in dirt? You’re sitting in fucking dirt – That’s disgusting!

As my wife went swimming in the ocean after breakfast, I was wandering around that beach all covered up under a bathrobe and Hello Kitty parasol like Michael Jackson searching for some shade. I made a bee-line to the first available beach chair that I saw with a shaded umbrella above it. There were two lounge chairs under it and I dropped into the empty chair next to the one cradling an elderly bronze woman. She looked at me and said in a very nice old lady British accent “Honey, my husband is sitting…” to which I cut her off and offered my right pointer finger along with my almost polite answer of “Not anymore!” She got mad and left in a huff, but I didn’t ask for both chairs; Screw her if she didn’t want my company.

My wife came over to me and was surprised how I got two shaded seats so quickly on a crowded beach, but I just smiled and shrugged because I just knew that she would have made me give them back to the old lady. She asked me to make sure I stayed there as she was concerned how we would find each other if we got separated on the beach. “Look around Honey – I’m like the moon out at night – you can’t miss me.” As I scanned the beach, it was almost as if I was glowing. Everyone around us had the perfect bronze/leathery skin and there was my Breyer’s vanilla complexion shining like a nightlight in the center of it all. 

The best thing (well really the only good thing if you ask me) about that beach was the drink system. Each person got a flag and when you wanted waitress service you placed your flag standing upright into the ground and they came over to take your order. Alcohol Efficiency at work and the only way to get me to stay on a beach! I actually tried to implement that same system into my living room at home, but the waitress there threatened to disembowel me if I brought that flag out again…          

After a tense situation later that afternoon, we called it a day. It turns out that taking scuba diving lessons for the first time (against my will mind you – I mean really: How many people have had these snorkels in their mouth? And can you just imagine how many filthy feet have used those flippers? All this and me without my bleach) isn’t a good idea when you have a bad stomach normally and then add a bad hangover to it. As that equipment was strapped on and we were heading under, I was getting queasy and starting sweating profusely (I know right, who else sweats in water?) and I just knew that there was no possible way that this could end well. I know those symptoms and sort of like when you hear a doorbell and you know someone’s there – I knew someone was knocking at my door if you get my drift.

I got that equipment off of me like it was on fire and ran off like a flash of lightning only to find the Housekeeper in our room cleaning. I begged her to get out immediately or at least step aside and let me into the bathroom, but something was lost in translation and she wouldn’t get out of the way. What wasn’t lost in translation was me speeding off and clenching the whole way back down to the restaurant bathroom before I caused a St. Lucian mudslide. I made it just in time and Thank God I didn’t have to sneeze or there would have been a whole new trail to follow down from the bungalows. My wife was actually mad that I left her in the water with a French speaking couple that she couldn’t understand, and she said that almost shitting my pants served me right. I caught a quick-hitter during scuba and almost shit my pants because of a rogue housekeeper yet she’s the one who’s mad?

Dinner went without incident and then we went to the Piano Bar before calling it a night. I will be a gentleman and kindly use the Fast Forward Pass and skip ahead to the midde of the night when I had to call the Front Desk because our bed broke. I will admit that at first, there was a little part of me that was arrogantly beaming with macho pride that we had just broken our honeymoon bed, but that part was quickly smacked down by the bigger part of me that was mortified as I tried to explain it to the Front Desk Agent on the phone. I’m not sure if it was me talking too fast, his heavy island accent, or more likely, me being drunk – but I just could not for the life of me explain it to him clearly so I finally just blurted out “Dude, it’s our Honeymoon – How do you think the bed broke?” Yep, cleared that right up!

Think there's any way that we can pretend it was like that when we got here?

The agent called the hotel carpenter at home to have him come and fix the bed immediately. St Lucia must be smaller than a legal sized envelope, because that carpenter was there so fast that I really couldn’t believe it. As soon as I opened the door to let him in, he gave me a knowing look and he then asked me (in his really heavy Island accent) how I could have broke the bed as he was glancing around the room. In my stupor, I had no idea what he was looking for until it hit me like a truck: He thought I was there alone and broke the bed by myself. My wife was nowhere to be found (she had locked herself in the bathroom because she was embarrassed) and there I was making small talk with the carpenter and the shit-eating grin on his face. I could have just been a mature adult, but I got embarrassed and blurted out “My wife is in the bathroom – it’s our Honeymoon you know” which I’m not quite sure he believed anyway. After what felt like an eternity, he finally fixed the bed and my elusive wife appeared from the bathroom ONLY after he left the room so she could go to bed.  

Don’t you know that the very next night, that bed broke again! I‘m not sure if it had anything to do with my training as a college gymnast or if that carpenter jimmy-rigged the bed with scotch tape and paper clips, but it was ten times more embarrassing calling the second night (to the same exact agent) than it was the first time. Forget the ten shades of red that my face was when the carpenter showed up again, and focus on the twenty shades of red that my face got when he said in his island accent while pointing at the bed “Tomorrow, you go easy on this man!!!” Needless to say I was ready to put that freaking mattress on the floor or sleep out on the balcony instead of risking that frame collapsing again…

Senior Year at regionals in college – That’s me in the scarlet unitard!

 Coming up on Thursday:

Our Honeymoon Part Two: Forget Finger Lickin’- My Masseuse was Testicle Flickin!!!

The upsides to living in a condemned building…

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Off-campus housing in college is always a challenge.  For some reason, I always seemed to wait until the last-minute to finalize and during my second senior year, I mistakenly let my friend Weezie handle everything. I should have known something was up when we got a prime spot on Clayton Street across from the bars, but who thinks like that?

School was starting in two days and Weezie called to tell me that we had somehow “lost” our apartment because other tenants were showing up and moving in and we now had nowhere to live for the school year. Apparently, the two landlords that owned the building had a parting of the ways and both of them had rented our apartment out to separate tenants. They both took the money and ran, so they were suing each other – which forced the court to appoint a Trustee to handle everything relating to their properties. Here it is two days before school starts and it was like musical chairs – the music stopped and there were not enough rooms for every one of us that was still dancing. 

It is probably my fault for planning on living with a lunatic, but Weezie was a close friend and we were together almost daily – so who better to live with?  She called and explained to me how people kept showing up and claiming rooms, but no one could find either one of the landlords. The Trustee finally showed up to help settle the situation, wanting to keep the peace and he offered to find us other housing since the other roommates had already shown up and were getting settled. Not gonna work buddy – we had to live there.

That apartment was a wreck; It had only one heating vent in the living room for the whole apartment, so no other room had any sort of heat and the winters in upstate NY are brutal. There were four bedrooms and my tiny little bedroom had a door leading out to a metal fire escape that wasn’t fully attached to the building – it actually used to bang against the building during storms. That wouldn’t have been so bad if there also wasn’t a ten-inch gap between the bottom of the fire escape door and the door frame which allowed the wind, rain, and snow to come in if there weren’t towels and blankets jammed in there. The furniture was old, mismatched, wobbly, and disgusting (even before my roommate that we liked to affectionately call “Unibrow” (for obvious reasons)  pissed all over the couch like a stray cat one night when he was drunk), the windows were broken or wouldn’t stay open unless propped up with books, and the stove didn’t always work.

The apartment was on the second floor in a condemned building that was scheduled to be torn down after the semester to make a parking lot for the YWCA next door, but it was on the bottom of Clayton Street steps from the bars and my friends were living in the houses next door, so I never gave it a second thought. Clayton Street is a long steep hill with the college campus at the top of the hill and the bars at the bottom of the hill and the apartment was in the last house at the bottom of the street across from the bars which more than made up for not having heat, working appliances, or a sanitary environment. You know what they say – location, location, location (so you can understand the importance of us not losing that apartment).

So the Trustee “worked everything out” with Weezie  as the two of them had now become friends. She was to live out in the back building, which was literally an old garage that was crudely converted into separate upstairs and downstairs apartments. Another feature of the apartment was that it was actually on an incline; if you put a basketball on the floor and let it go, it would roll towards the corner. It was so dingy in there that the Trustee gave us a case of beer if Weezie and I agreed to paint the inside of the garage (I mean apartment) so you can just imagine what it looked like. A case of beer is hard to pass up and I wasn’t that invested since I didn’t have to sleep out there, so we painted it.  Also, keep in mind that she was living with two strangers in there and didn’t have a door on her room. These apartments were also illegal so Weezie couldn’t get a phone out there, couldn’t get cable, and couldn’t even get mail delivered back there; but as I said the location more than made up for any negatives the place might have had.  

The window to her “living room” was about twenty-five feet from my bedroom fire escape door, so she would throw things at my door or scream HOOKA!!! out her window to get my attention and see if I wanted to go get lunch at the Grill Room or watch a movie. Since she didn’t have cable, she’d have to come over to watch anything or borrow a movie. One day I came home to find Smokey missing and a screwdriver rammed into my front door with a note saying “Walter, I have your dog!” which is a quote from The Burbs. 

I thought she was crazy to live out there, but I didn’t really argue with her because I still got to live in the apartment that we were originally supposed to, although with two strangers. It was awkward – they didn’t like that I had a dog that kept shitting in Unibrow’s bedroom and used to chew his books and piss on his bed, but like I said – location made up for a lot. I also didn’t like that Evan would order food and then go have sex with his girlfriend and of course when the food was delivered – they were still going at it. It actually isn’t as awkward as you might think to answer the door to a pizza delivery guy to the sounds of Evan’s bed banging against the wall, him moaning and his girlfriend screaming as you might think.  You might imagine that Evan’s girlfriend would be embarrassed when she dismounted and came out scrounging for food when they were done, but you would be mistaken for thinking that. She’d come strolling out of his room with him following shortly after like they just got back from running an errand, making small talk as if he hadn’t just pounded the shit out of her and everyone in the building had heard it. 

Here I was thinking I made out better than Weezie and then she started getting hand-written notes from the Trustee with cute stickers on the envelope. Now, ponder that for a second because what man in his mid fifties sends hand-written notes with stickers on the envelopes to a random girl he just met? My thoughts exactly. I only knew she was getting hand-written notes because she had to use my address as she couldn’t get mail out back. I also came to find out that Weezie was paying hundreds of dollars less than me for the rent. When I questioned the Trustee, he told me that Weezie had been through a lot. As if I hadn’t? Unless by being through a lot, he meant him hitting that…To this day, Weezie denies that there was anything between her and the Trustee besides friendship, but I am still not convinced. It could have all been innocent, but all those visits from him and the stickers and notes were pretty odd if you ask me…Also, this is the same girl who still denies that there was almost a fist fight in her sorority house because someone ate one of her frozen eggos, but I digress…In her defense, I must say that Weezie will admit to coming home to her sorority house one night and  finding a bowl that she had made in Ceramics class that had been used as an ashtray and went to Sara‘s room pounding on the door (Sara was being pounded by her boyfriend at the time, but it didn’t stop Weezie’s pounding at the door) and when Sara answered the door in just a towel, Weezie attacked her and almost beat the shit out of her too…

So over winter break, the pipes out in Weezie’s apartment/garage burst and she couldn’t live there anymore. A studio apartment opened up in the main house on the second floor, so the Trustee brought Weezie over to see it. She took one look at the rickety loft bed with desk under it and told the Trustee “I can’t have sex on that thing – it’ll fall apart and will never hold me.” Who says that? She still denies that she said that, but like I said these stories are all made up…She ended up moving into the studio and the chaos just kept on going…

More on that apartment and that glorious street later…