Pop was getting married, and there was no way I was going to miss it. Weddings are the best place in the world to get laid.
Mary, Pop’s fiancée, was fooling around on him, and everyone knew it, even Pop. When I caught her in my car screwing the bums who were living in it, even though I didn’t have the heart to tell Pop at first, I eventually did.
“Pop,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Do I look fucking deaf?”
“Well?” I said.
“If they fuck around and they come home,” Pop said, “it’s different than if they fuck around and don’t.”
Some of the guys in the neighborhood who’d boinked her told Pop. Mike, who worked mornings at the Mohawk, once caught her playing naughty with one of the waitresses who worked at Dick’s, and he told Pop about it, and Pop said, “She’s always back by morning. Where’s your woman right now?”
And she was always home by morning—at least we could say that for her. If she was screwing around on Pop, he figured it was the best he could do, and he was probably right. Mary was loyal to Pop—if someone ever messed with him at the restaurant where she worked, she’d run around the bar and smash a bottle on the dude’s head for messing with her man. She loved Pop, and Pop knew it and he was relieved. Pop had given up on fidelity long ago, having lost two cheating whore wives already.
He set the wedding for Saturday so no one would have to miss any ball games on Sunday. Pop hadn’t shown up yet, but from where I was, sitting in the cab of my garbage scow at the Oakland dumps, I could see the wedding crowd assembling on the big lawn in front of the General Electric plant. Nights I slept in the cab of my scow, saving up for an apartment deposit.
The GE lawn was a magic place. When we were kids, my brothers Clyde and Kent and me used to play football on the lawn. We’d play all day long, and other kids played there too. The schools’ lawns weren’t lawns at all, just dirt and weed clearings that weren’t good for anything except blowing up firecrackers. You get tackled on a school lawn you’re likely to get your face broken and a mouth full of rocks. The GE lawn, though, the GE lawn was always green, even in the summer, and it was moist and cool from being watered every night. My brothers and I would come home to the trailer next to the Mohawk station where Pop worked wet and muddy and laughing and listen to the A’s on the radio while Pop barbecued burgers on the pit.
The street was lined with cars and work trucks from nearly every business in the neighborhood. The Clausi brothers were there, and all their drivers, a long row of white Clausi Carpet vans lined up on one side of the street. Joe and Frank Clausi opened the back of one of the vans and pulled a carpet out and carried it on their shoulders to the center of the field, and then they unrolled it and it was red as blood and long and beautiful against the green grass. The Yandell Trucking guys were there, and some of them had even brought their shiny big-rigs to add to the spectacle. One of them was blasting on his airhorn and I could hear it loud and clear all the way to the dumps. Seagulls rose into the sky like sheets of paper and shat confetti. The Markstein Beverage guys brought a beer truck that was no doubt loaded with cases of Budweiser that were about to be reported stolen. You could see the Concrete Wall Sawing guys and their pasty brown trucks, demolition men with arms as round and solid as telephone poles from running jackhammers all day long, bearded and walking around slow and limping from getting slammed by falling cinder blocks and slabs of concrete. Neighborhood kids played football on the lawn and a short fat kid dragged three other kids all the way to the endzone and scored a touchdown and everyone cheered. One of the Markstein guys opened the back of the truck and started handing out the beers.
I’d just finished dumping my last load of the day and there wasn’t time to go find a shower and then get my station wagon, so I just changed into some clean duds and drove my garbage scow right on up to the wedding. When I pulled up and the guys saw it was me they all held their noses and laughed. I took a bow.
The band pulled up in two old Cadillacs. One was a hearse with plenty of room for drums and the electric Hammond organ. The band was a bunch of players I didn’t know, black dudes and white dudes both, probably fancy guys who played San Francisco. How Pop got them I didn’t know. They looked like pros, though, had that walk that says, Hey, I don’t sit around wishing I were playing—I play.
And there were people I didn’t know, that no one knew, relatives no doubt of Pop’s fiancée, Mary, and they didn’t look like the rest of us. They were either skinny whelps with pockmarked faces and long hair, junkies and cranksters, or they were fat chumps who wore plaid shirts and khaki slacks like Baptist preachers from Mississippi or Texas or even worse, and the fat dudes and their blimpy wives with birdish haircuts looked like they spent all their time shaving and plucking nose hairs and waxing their blackheads off so that their faces looked doughy and pink like the feet of pigeons.
Granddad Murphy trotted over to me on his club feet. His hair was wild and gray and his teeth shone like he’d buffed them with a car-polisher.
“Playing?” he said.
“Lost my teeth,” I said. “Not playing much now. Was, though. A lot.”
He shook his head in sadness, then shrugged. “With the coloreds?”
“They do it better than us white boys,” I said.
“That they do.”
“That they do,” I said.
“They let you play with them?” he said. “You must be pretty good. They never let me even sit in. Not even once, those coloreds.”
“I’m using the family trumpet,” I said. “The one you and Pop played. When he’ll let me.”
His new wife rolled over to us. She was fat and blind. But he said she was a great lay. The best fuck of his life, he’d told me, was one time when they’d pushed the single beds together and been humping at it so hard they’d split the beds apart and ended up on the floor bucking like mules and nearly broken their backs. “That’s the way to fuck,” he said. And his shit-eating grin told me it was true.
Granddad Murphy pinched his newest wife’s ass and she giggled and the soapy rheum in her eyes glowed as if she could see something. He leaned close to me. “Weddings,” he said. “They’re great places to get some fuck.” He winked.
He was right. The women who aren’t getting married get gooey and drunk and I’d seen it hundreds of times before playing wedding gigs on my trumpet. When that bride throws her bouquet, there isn’t a one of the babes who isn’t wishing they were going off on some romantic week-long fuck-fest camping in every National Forest in California in some swank rented motor home off the Courtesy Chevrolet lot.
And if you’re in the band, if you’ve got a horn up to your lips and you’re breathing your soul through the silver pipes of a trumpet or vibrating your lips on the gin-soaked reed of your sax, the curve of the tenor up against your crotch all night long and all the gals just a-watching you writhe against it, the bass guitar slung just below your nuts or your fingers tripping and stroking the ivories of the Hammond—if you’re in the band you’re guaranteed the bitches are going to be all over you by the end of the reception, especially right before the bride and groom take of for their night of bang-bang. They envy the bride, and they know what she’s going to spend the night doing, and they’ll be damned if they ain’t going to get banged and give the dude a better show than the bride will give her groom. After the wedding is over, when the divorced dudes are whaling, harpoons poised over the cows, the band dudes are running lines and blowing smoke with the babes, who always pretend that their ride home has already left. Man, you could be playing in the corniest Cumbia and Ranchera band, the lamest Salsa or Merengue ensemble, and as long as you’re up there on stage, you get first dibbs on the goodies. You could be up there doing nothing more than playing the cowbell with a drumstick or stroking the wooden fish and all you got to do is stare into the eyes of one of the bridesmaids a few times and the first time you get a break, the first time you don’t have a part to play in a tune, she’s tugging you out to the dance floor and mashing her titties against your chest and doing the grind thing to check out your package. I’m not kidding. Check it out for yourself.
So Pop’s wedding—What I’m thinking? Get laid. Get laid. It’s time for your balls to drop, young man. This time I’m not going to chicken out, and I’m not going to get so drunk that I don’t know if I got any nookie or not. Pop’s getting married, and I have a better job than he does, and he shouldn’t be the only one around here who can nab some pussy.
