The Going Away Party That Wasn’t… or

Marti Goes to Germany and Mike Moves Melissa

One day Marti tells me that she’s going to visit her mom in Germany. She’d be gone for about a week but she hadn’t seen her mother since she moved overseas and really wanted to go. Since we had separate finances at the time and I wasn’t paying I was agreeable to the arrangement.

Marti has been known to get selective amnesia, so I guess I should forgive her when she volunteered “us” to help her friend Melissa move on a weekend when she would be in Germany. She knows that there are elements of Melissa’s personality that rub me the wrong way, so at least she was appreciative when I agreed to help.

A few days later, we were walking down the main drag in town when I asked Marti if one needs to get shots or anything else when one travels abroad. She laughed a little at my naiveté and said, “No, you just need a valid passport.” Then she stopped dead in her tracks with a pained expression on her face.

I won’t go into the details of how we got her a passport before her trip. Suffice it to say it involved Federal Express, a Notary Public, reckless driving at excessive speeds, and much colorful language.

After dropping Marti at the airport, I was then left the task of helping Melissa move. To say that this was inconvenient is to make a bold understatement. I was awfully poor at the time and was known to work as long as a month without a day off. This left the game plan of me helping her move in the morning and going to work in the afternoon.

I would like to take a moment to give some advice to those asking their friend’s boyfriend to help them move. First and foremost, pack your goddamned shit before he shows up. Second, consider whether it is necessary to hang on to 10 years of fashion magazines – how many times can you move a magazine you’ve already read? Well, I don’t fucking know, but at least I carry my boxes of pictures of hot chicks myself – you should do the same. Lastly, a thank you would not kill you and a lack of one should.

Since she “forgot” to pack, I got the job of carrying all the large and un-packable stuff like the dresser and bed. While she stayed in her room packing, I hauled roughly half of her stuff to her new place and then took off to work an eleven hour shift making and delivering pizzas.

The next morning I had to get up extra early because there was a going away party that night for my best friend from college. I was making the food, but since I was going to be helping Melissa move and working my pizza job I had to get it all done before about 9am. This is how I found myself doing some bleary-eyed shopping at six in the morning.

I was really looking forward to this party and I was planning on cooking Focaccia bread, making some vegetable dip and hummus, cheese fondue, and so forth. I needed to get a lot of stuff and I was in a big hurry, so I raced through the store – inasmuch as my sleep-deprived state allowed. Eventually, I got all of the groceries into my cart and headed for the ATM.

I am not, by nature, absent-minded. However when I surveyed the contents of my cart I was rather shocked to find it empty. Absolutely and completely – unutterably – empty. Somewhere along the way I had been looking for something, didn’t find it, and then picked up some hapless shopper’s empty cart instead of my own. And thank god it was empty. I don’t know what I would of done if it had a purse in it or something!

In any event, I did the right thing. I pushed the empty cart around and pretended to shop until I found my cart. Then I went and got something from the shelf, placed in my rightful cart and left the empty one fitting there. Well, maybe that’s not the right thing but it worked.

I have always felt a little sorry for the person who returned to where they left their cart and found that it was gone. How long did they wander around looking for it? Did they search for it at the exact same time I was getting to the ATM? Perhaps I got back to my cart and dropped off their cart just as they were returning from getting a new empty cart. Would they have come across the empty one I had just left and question their own sanity? I imagine the poor guy thinking “I just fucking looked for it right here, how did I miss it?"

In any event, it taught me one important lesson. Namely, the potential power of a ladies handbag in a grocery cart. Imagine this – you go to a store and receive terrible service. Easy enough to imagine, right? So then you swing by the Goodwill, pick up a $3 purse and go back to the store. Grab their circular, rip out a few coupons and place them so they are sticking out of the purse. Drop the purse in a cart and cruise the store for frozen items which are either expensive or messy when they melt (e.g. frozen lobster, ice cream). Once the cart is full, park it in the “seasonal” section and pretend to be looking for something else. Don’t head straight for the door or someone might notice. Take your time, then slip out quietly. Never do this, you didn’t hear this from me, move along.

Anyway, with the shopping done I was free to get started with the next part - the cooking. I rushed back to my apartment and got started. It was not pretty. Not that I suffered from skill in cooking so much as I was working alone in a galley kitchen the size of a coffin. Since I was unsure of the number and nature of the attendees outside my own personal friends I wanted to be sure there was quantity and diversity. Hence my plan to make two different variations on Italian foccacia bread.

Bread has to rise, so I did that first. I used the Frugal Gourmet’s excellent recipe for it and it worked two of the three times I tried it. That is no reflection on the Frugal Gourmet though – it worked so well the first time that I got distracted and fucked up along the way on the second. It was damned humid and that lulled me into adding just a few too many tablespoons of flour.

Anyway, the schedule was ambitious and I spent many hours in food prep. During the first risings of the bread I made the vegetable dip and hummus, during the second I cut the vegetables and prepared the tomato sauce for one of the focaccias. I don’t remember if I even prepared all the food I had purchased and it got too late to even worry about that.

I dropped off the food at party headquarters on my way to help Melissa move. I was late, but unpaid so also unrepentant. I was unable to get the rest of her stuff moved before I had to go to work, so I knew I had one more day of moving ahead of me. I worked another shift at the pizza shop but managed to get to the party just as the band was firing up. I was very excited about this party and I had a lot of friends there. I was feeling so magnanimous that I had even invited Melissa.

Within fifteen minutes, Melissa was waging a ruthless campaign to destroy my good time. The first bit of news was the best. In less than 48 hours she had managed to get kicked out of her new place. Her explanation was priceless: “They didn’t like how I talked to the dog.” What!?!? I don’t know what the fuck she said to that dog, but it must have been harsh. Or maybe she struck up a conversation by barking, I don’t know. All I know is that this was the perfect setup for the next part. She needed a place to stay until she worked the situation out. Now, not only was she at the party, but I was taking her home with me too.

As quickly as possible I began pouring cold beer into myself in a reckless attempt to quash the fire fueling my rage and increasing my blood pressure. I told myself that I wasn’t going to let her ruin this for me and that if she slept on my couch for a few days and ate every edible thing in my apartment that surely I would survive. I knew the party would go for many more hours before the cops shut us down for the noise, so I sat back and enjoyed myself. For about 45 minutes.

Melissa then began to complain that she wasn’t feeling well. I did my utmost to care, I really did. Well, no I didn’t – instead I nodded politely and tried to ease away. She was persistent and so it was that shortly after getting to the party I had to leave to take her to the medical center. The waiting room at the center was decidedly less enjoyable than the party but perhaps no less crowded. If memory serves, we were there for most of the early nineties.

It was about five in the morning before we got out of there. I won’t go into the details about what was wrong other than to give yet another piece of advice. If you think you have a urinary tract infection, see a doctor. If you KNOW you have urinary tract infection, definitely see a doctor. It would be a real shame if you just left it untreated so long that it spread to your bladder causing it to “twinge” which is apparently rather uncomfortable.

By the time we got back to the apartment I had been up for nearly 24 hours and was only about 4 hours away from needing to be back at work. I had shopped, cooked food for a party, helped someone move, worked a full shift at a pizza shop, gone to a party for a nanosecond, and spent an unpleasant night in a medical center waiting room. Within moments of coming through the door, Melissa began a systematic, and frankly disturbing, orgy of consumption in an effort to completely denude my apartment of food.

After a few days of being an unpleasant lump on my couch, she found a new place on the third floor of a building with no air conditioning. It was summer and the weather was hot but at least it didn’t rain. Luckily for Marti I was able to get all of Melissa’s stuff from the two former places into the new one before she got back from Germany.

This is another example of the consequences of not following my core rule: “Never help anybody at any time for any reason.”