Have you ever stepped in dog shit in the dark in the middle of the night? Under the right circumstances, it can be hilarious.
A bit of background:
– It was Mother’s Day, 1988, the first of several memorable – or infamous – Mother’s Days.
– Marianne had a new puppy, a Christmas present for Kristi, and only about five or six months old at the time. We thought she was housebroken.
– I had been separated from my wife, fell in love with Marianne, reconciled briefly with the wife and left again for good.
– While I was out of the picture, Marianne scored a new boyfriend, a rather chunky fellow whom one set of her friends referred to as “The Beef” and another set referred to as “Butt Crack.” He had about the same mental development as eight-year-old Kristi and they shared a love for children’s cartoons and “Alf.”
– Kristi was off in Hawaii with Daddy Dearest and Marianne was bummed. She had never been away from her daughter on Mother’s Day before. So we went to Napa Valley for the weekend.
When we came back after a most perfect weekend and drove down Marianne’s street, we saw The Beef’s car coming in the opposite direction, leaving her house.
“Oh, God,” she moaned. But we did make it to her driveway and were able to unload the luggage into her living room before Butt Crack pulled up again and knocked on the door just as Marianne’s telephone began to ring. She answered it and got trapped on a long call, leaving me to answer the door.
“Oh, hi, Ron. How ya doing?” I stammered as I let him in and led him to the dining room, detouring around the suitcases sitting like a roadblock in the middle of the living room.
Butt Crack wasn’t the most observant of suitors and we made idle chit-chat for about ten minutes while Marianne tried desperately to get off the phone while wishing, as she said later, that she could stay on the line forever.
This was no place for me to be, so when she finally hung up I whispered to her that I would go spend the night at a mutual friend’s house. “No, go to the office,” she whispered. “I’ll call you.” So I picked up my suitcase and left.
Did I mention that he wasn’t very observant? He evidently missed the whole suitcase thing, having come with but one thing on his mind: a marriage proposal.
I waited at my office for almost two hours while Marianne tried over and over to explain to him that she and I were a couple and that she didn’t want to marry him. Finally, I got the call from an exhausted Marianne. It was safe and I should come home.
It was a long post mortem but we finally fell into bed – exhausted from a day with an incredible high and an incredible low – only to be awakened about 3:00 a.m. by the roar of a car speeding away from in front of the house.
I looked out through the blinds. Nothing. But was that a package on the porch? I got up to investigate, naked, and opened the front door only to see The Beef striding down the driveway toward me. What could I do but slam the door shut again? (He saw a naked body open the door and quickly shut it again and later asked Marianne why she had slammed the door in his face. Did I mention that he wasn’t very observant?)
The next morning we retrieved the package from the front porch to find an Alf watch, a monstrous creation that resembled a dead fox bracelet. You had to peel the fuzzy alien’s head back to see the watch itself. Even Kristi found it embarrassing. I think it later brought about twenty-five cents at a garage sale.
But on the way back to bed, I stepped in something soft. And warm. And wet. Courtesy of the dog who wasn’t, as it turned out, quite as housebroken as we had thought.
As I hobbled into the bedroom, Marianne asked, “What was that? Are you okay?”
“Well,” I said, starting to get the silly giggles, “Other than the fact that I just stepped in a pile of dog shit…”