One night during my first year at
UNLV, Greg and Murphy and I were hanging
out in my room when the phone rang. It was my first
girlfriend. "Meet me at
the
Chapel of the Roses at the
Union Plaza at ten o'clock," she said. She
sounded like a little kid with a
secret, a tone of voice I had learned to
fear when we were
dating.
"Okay. Why?"
"Guess!"
"I have no idea," I said, and it was true. She was wildly
unpredictable;
the workings of her mind were a complete mystery to me.
"I'm getting
married!" she shrieked.
I looked up at the guys, who were staring at me in confusion. "She's getting
married," I said.
"To who?" they said, practically in unison. I repeated the question to her.
She told me. Oh, yeah--
that guy. They had been living together for several months. He'd
been taking care of her ever since she broke her arm, but I had no idea what
their relationship was like. "I once promised myself that I would do
everything before I turned
twenty-one, and this is the one thing I
haven't done yet," she said.
"Well. That's...great." Then on a hunch I asked, "Does your family know?"
"I'm calling them right after I get off the phone with you. So will you be
there?"
I looked over at the guys again and shrugged. "Can Murphy and Greg come?"
We stopped off at the
Bonanza Gift Shop on the way to pick up some
fuzzy
dice as a
wedding present. We were the first to arrive at the
chapel,
and I discovered that one of the two
girls working there had been in a
theater class with me in
high school. Greg really hit it off with the other
girl; her grandfather was a famous
jazz drummer, and you know how Greg is
with jazz.
The bride's family showed up a short time later, looking as if
they had set out to attend a funeral and had stumbled into this
casino
wedding chapel by mistake. They looked positively grim. The girls at the
chapel didn't know what to make of it all. Then the bride showed up, bubbling
over with enthusiasm, her arm still in a cast.
The
story sort of
peters out here; I don't remember too much about the rest
of the night except that the
ceremony went off all right and for a wonder
nobody got up and said the obvious when the
pastor asked if there was any
reason these two shouldn't be joined in holy
matrimony. My first girlfriend
and her
husband split up after a year of marriage. Greg went out with the
wedding chapel girl with the jazz grandfather for a while, but they broke up
too.
I have no idea what happened to the fuzzy dice.