you can’t spell funeral without F-U-N
24 March 2006My family and its surrounding parts are slowly disintegrating. We’ve hit a very disheartening and freakish streak of bad luck–not just “I can’t believe that rubber band broke and snapped my arm like that” or “I can’t believe Duke lost” bad luck, but large scale, life-changing bad luck that I won’t get into here for more obvious reasons than I don’t want to start crying at my desk. The consolidation of events into such a short span of time has me asking myself ridiculously stupid step-on-a-crack type questions (“is it because I haven’t gone to church since Lent started?”) and made me incredibly paranoid that the people I love are being karmically targeted. If I could, I would lock all of your guys in your respective closets to keep you safe until this blows over. I’d give you flashlights and batteries and nutrigrain bars and I’d slide notes under the door telling you that I missed you. Maybe this is what it feels like to be Jack Bauer. However, though, I know we’re all made of tougher stuff than we think we are, and I know, as many people have told me, that this, too, shall pass. I knew I was going to be able to get through this crap (in all fairness, I haven’t been directly nailed by this hail storm of misfortune so it should be easier for me by any account, but I have to watch everyone around me go down from an arms-length distance, and it’s sad and infuriating and makes me want to kick things. kick.) but I was worried about my family, until they proved to me how silly that was, and how foolishly weak my faith in their ability to cope was, and how we are, in total, much stronger than the sum of our parts, when they closed out a Hooters on a wednesday, the night before a family funeral.
I was a little deceived here- I was told the funeral was in Philly. Score! brotherly love! the liberty bell! Brian Roberts! No, none of these. It was really in Bensalem, PA, also known as the town where fun when to die. I took the path to the ‘Boken so that my mom could pick me up (PRAYING along the way that I would run into some douche I went to high school with just to make things a little more interesting) and strapped myself in for a whirlwind tour of the NJ and PA turnpikes. My mother is filled with stories of how the girls in her high school are engaged in some competitive tanning for the Prom, so that filled the time nicely. She also teaches a classes for parents of difficult teenagers (not difficult the way I was, with the eye rolling and the B+s in Algebra, but difficult in the truancy and prison time way) and she has long been a champion of the Wait Until They’re In The Car And They Can’t Escape To Talk To Them school of thought (so much so that my parents informed me they were getting divorced while in a moving vehicle, perhaps thinking that any other venue would cause me to pack up my Pound Puppies and 3 apples and run away from home, most likely to the playground of my elementary school two blocks away) so she grilled me on anything she wanted, which mostly boiled down to the Boy, and since we’re all grieving and I’m doing everything short of tap dancing in a penguin costume to make my mom feel better, I talked about him without pausing to breathe for about 15 turnpike exits (which equals roughly infinity in actual distance), which means, naturally, that he will find some reason to truncate our union in the next two weeks and I’ll have to make the “just kidding, mom, turns out he wasn’t that great” phone call, which really pumps me up. But I hope not. Anyway. We get into PA and are informed that our group (3 mommies, 6 cousins) is at a neighboring hotel to hang out with the mommies’ cousins. We cruise there. Bensalem, PA, looks like NoVA only with more chain restaurants and about 45% more crappiness. (If you can believe that).
We walk into the hotel and are greeted with the sight of Cousin Erin and her mom buying about 18 snack-sized bags of chips from the “market.” Turns out they won some kind of hotel play money with which to buy things and, well, now we were swimming in sour cream and onion. I asked if they knew we weren’t check in at this hotel and was greeted with a SHHHH! Proceeded to the bar where the rest of the family was corralled, and was told that the hotel manager had announced it was open bar until 8pm. I again asked if they knew we weren’t staying here, and again got a loud SHHHH! All I know is, that was the worst decision of the manager’s “career.” Specifically when my gigantic cousin Matt kicked into a rotation between the table and the bar that involved drinking so speedily that he never seemed to actually sit down. At 7:58 he was on trip number 16 to the bar when his mother called him back to partake in a toast to our recently passed Fr Bob, and a look of panic and conflict crossed Matt’s eyes like nothing I’d ever seen. Also, Fr Bob was a big fan of the Manhattan which, despite being named after a place way, way, way better than Bensalem, is disgusting. And yet my family was getting them 11 at a time as a tribute. I had white wine as a tribute instead. Any port in the storm, as they say.
Highlight of this stop included (a) one of my cousins entering a raffle for hotel guests and marking his room down as ’6B’ (b) the same cousin, remaining nameless for a reason, telling me that he recently started plucking his eyebrows, and my responding “it’s a little thing that makes a big difference. More ernie than bert, I always say.” to which he came back “Two brows are better than one.” Also, I don’t know if anyone saw it, but there was a really, really kick ass car chase on TV that night. I mean, it was amazing. And it was in LA, so he had to do a lot of ducking and weaving in and out of traffic, causing all of the hotel bar to gasp along with his every move. I tried to find the story online but Google Newsing “car chase LA” gives you eleventy billion results. Anyway, it was awesome. Until some thoughtless bald fellow decided to stand in front of the big screen and not respond to my cries of “Hey, BUDDY. DOWN IN FRONT,” forcing me to run across the bar to ask him to move just as things were getting good. And by “getting good,” I mean, the guy had gotten out of the car and was running, clutching his khakis at the waist with one hand (to keep them up…?). He briefly ducked into some kind of warehouse before coming back out, prompting a slew of suggestions on structures that would provide him better cover. “A mall!” “a mannequin factory!” “a Gap warehouse!” (he also had a white Tshirt on) “The Small World ride at Disney World!” Anyway, he got tackled. But it was awesome.
And oh, hey, someone casually mentioned that our actual hotel (not the one at which we were mooching free manhattans and removing actual patrons from their viewing spots) was next to a Hooters. Oh, cool, let’s pack everyone up and move there. At this point, we now have 7 mommy/daddy types and 7 cousins, ages 19-60. So, yeah, Hooters is perfect.
Bud and I get there first and the music basically shuts off when we walk in the door. “There aren’t any other girls here,” I whisper. I don’t know why this shocked me. Does no one else appreciate the sweet, sweet irony of being in the Bensalem Hooters the night before a hardcore Catholic funeral? Eh.
Our table is shaped like a baseball diamond and it makes me happy. When asked how large our party is going to be, I make a comment about how we’re about to totally screw up the age demographic by hauling in our parents, and our waitress’s eyes get cloudy at the long “d” word. She also uses the word “yous” to Bud when asking how much beer we need. A: A lot. We drink beer. The grownups and other cousins show up. There is a lot of screaming of lines from team america and old school, and one set of cousins takes their Christmas Card picture with the Hooters girls. (Shit. how am I gonna beat that?) One of the mommies foregoes the beer and starts sucking down tiny bottles of Sutter Home Chardonnay. At some point, a Hooters The Magazine is purchased. I point to one of the girls and ask my mom if she’s sad I didn’t turn out just a little bit more like her. Bud responds for her: “I thank god for that every day.” I make a mental not to stop emailing him pictures of me standing on bars.
At some point Cousin Danny decides to relive his High School musical fame (which was epic) and sings the title track to Oklahoma! very, very loudly. I do backing vocals. The mommies are all drunk and singing a patriotic medly including You’re A Grand Ole Flag. I look up and realize there is no one left on our side of the “restaurant.” An hour later I look up and realize there is no one but staff left in the “restaurant” at all. I tell myself that this is because it’s a school night and not because Matt and I sang all of Don’t Stop Believing very loudly. very. The Hooters girls tell us that there’s a bar a stones-throw away that will be open later than the Hooters (they’re a family joint, you know, as we obviously proved) and they have– wait for it– Karaoke. We pack up in a hurry. Mommies go to bed, the under 30 crowd goes to karaoke.
Bar 2 looks like a set from a movie where a steel worker has big dreams of overcoming his genetic wiring and finally Getting The Hell Out of this town when he knocks up his wife for the 6th time and they start doing big layoffs up at the corporate office and he needs someplace to go to slowly trace the condensation on the neck of his Bud Light and think about his days as an All-County baseball player back in high school, when life was all about drinking on the flat bed of your pickup truck and swiping lawn gnomes and picking a lucky member of your giggling fan club for the winter formal. They are doing karaoke, but they’re three songs away from closing that portion of the evening down, so we mostly just heckle the people singing. They leave abruptly.
At one point I go to buy a round (BTW- 6 bud lights…. $18. I wanted to cry. I can deal with NY prices as long as I never leave the town and see how the rest of the world gets drunk. Seriously, why is it so rough here? Why is my life SO HARD?) and the bartender tells me that my cousins have taken care of it. I look around: Erin and Janelle are next to me, shooting the shit, and Matt’s wandering around being 6’5 with an afro and making strangers afraid he’s going to crush them with his giant man fists, and Danny and Brendan are playing the game of “pool” we modeled off of “Horse” wherein you threw the pool ball at odd angles and tried to get it into a pocket and the next person had to follow suite or earn one of the letters in “G-O-D.” This also involved doing stuff like rolling the pool ball down your chest and onto the table, or laying on the table on your back and shoving it over your head. Anyway, all of my cousins were occupied so I told the bartender it couldn’t have been us. “Those four people at the end of the bar say they’re your cousins,” she shrugged. “It’s an expensive round, they wouldn’t buy it for no reason.” (It was $18, fyi). I immediately start assuming there are some terrifying gentlemen around who coincidentally picked the worst pickup line ever to get back into their love shacks covered in John Deere propaganda, because, you know, people lie in bars a lot. I am constantly telling people I am related to anna. This is not true.
Where is this story going? They were our cousins. More accurately, our mommies’ cousins. When we rolled in they were able to accurately tag us because there is literally only one face to our family and we are all exact replicas of our parents, who are exact replicas of theirs, etc etc, which is why I didn’t worry about stuff like people thinking Bud had brought me to Hooters on a date. The Grownup Cousins observed us like anthropologists for a while at bar 2 before deciding “Know what those kids need? MORE beer.” After that things got cloudy, though I do know we did tequila shots and matt and I played Journey on the jukebox.
The next day at the funeral, I was telling the peej (who missed the fun, because he’s a loser) about how I sometimes have a problem when I’m drunk that makes me want to take things that aren’t mine, and how I woke up in possession of: a doorstop from Hooters, a Hooters calendar, the drink menu from the second bar, a #7 billiard ball, and a foam soccer ball. Peej quickly tacked on, “Oh, you forgot the plank from that orphanage you burned down. And the IV your ripped from the terminally ill patient’s arm.” Okay, I’m a bad person. I’ll never do it again. Gosh.
In the end, we all made it to the funeral in various states of drunkeness. I felt bad before I thought– you know what, fuck it. We’re all alive, together, and happy, and that’s exactly what he would have wanted.
2 Responses to “you can’t spell funeral without F-U-N”
March 24th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
I didn’t know you took all that stuff… That’s not wrong its actually quite Amazing
March 24th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
i. want. in. to your family. work on it.