Once, Twice, Thrice, Four, Five Times a Lady

"Another whiskey, bartender," the young soldier called across the bar. I could tell he was a soldier because he was wearing a helmet. I could tell he was young because I saw an issue of Young Soldiers Monthly rolled up in his back pocket. Frankly, that may have been what clued me on to his being a soldier as well.

"You're slugging them down pretty quick there, partner. Why not try a Sprite?"

"I said whiskey, and that's what I want," the soldier said bitterly.

"What's the problem?" the bartender inquired. "It's a lady, isn't it?"

The young man looked surprised. "How did you know?"

"I've seen that look on a young man's face a thousand times. Come on, out with it. Tell me what's she done to you."

"Well," the kid began, "I'm goin' off to war in a couple of days, and I get the feeling that if I go, my girl Sue-Ann is gonna start goin' 'round with another fella. I really love her mister, and I think the only way I can keep tabs on her is to go ahead and tie the knot." He downed his whiskey in one go. "And she's dyin' to get hitched."

The bartender shook his head solemnly, and finished polishing the glass he had in his hand. "I can't tell you what do do son; that's a difficult situation you've got yourself there."

"Ah, I shoulda figured."

"But I can tell you a story of someone I know, and maybe that story will help you make up your mind. The story goes like this . . . "

I had an aunt when I was growing up--for anonymity's sake, let's call her Aunt Elizabeth Taylor. Now she's my father's kid sister, so she was a bit younger than my dear old dad--she was only fifteen when I was born. That same year that I was born was the year that she was married for the first time. It was to a man named Steve, if memory serves, and Steve was as sleazy as they come, even from the very beginning. He picked her up at Chuck-E-Cheese's, for starters. 'Cept back in those days it was called Showbiz Pizza.

Auntie Liz always had stars in her eyes, and when Steve saw her standing there idolizing Chuck E. and his gang of robots as they sang their pre-recorded tunes on stage, he knew just how to approach her. He asked her if she was a model, told her he could make her big, and they were married just six weeks later. Lied on the wedding certificate of course so's he wouldn't be arrested for pedophilia.

Anyway, Steve's promises didn't come through, and he got to drinkin' and not paying as much attention to Auntie Liz as he should've. The fact is that he got himself a side piece down over at the Gymboree that looked cute in pink overalls and plastic barettes. Lizzy was heartbroken when she found out, and she left Steve for good. It was then that the downward spiral started.

Auntie Liz moved from one marriage to the next--not for love, but to suspend what she was sure to be a terrible fate if she stayed in one marriage for more than ten years. Steve broke her heart; why wouldn't they all?

There was Tony, a control-freak who Liz originally misdiagnosed as just being very, very loving. In the end he wouldn't let her leave the house let alone have a job, so's he could always know where she was. When he held a gun against her head after she answered a phone call from a man trying to offer the couple a better deal on their long-distance rates, she ran away to Greenville, Alabama.

In Greenville, she quickly started to feel a longing that she knew could only be filled by one thing: marriage. To a man. Rebounding off the relationship with Tony, she found Lloyd, a mildly retarded farmhand who she thought she could care for, and who she just knew would never be able to even handle a gun, let alone put one to her head. He would be her baby, she thought, and she could take care of him.

Things went OK with Lloyd for awhile, with the exception that he kept giving away or trading their household items for items of much lesser value. She came home one afternoon from her shift at the local Sonic to find that old Lloyd had traded the lawnmower for a handful of gravel, and a closetfull of her clothes for a half-eaten jelly sandwich, which Liz herself had made for Lloyd that morning for lunch. It seems the neighbors tricked him into believing the jelly sandwich was originally theirs.

When Lloyd sold their trailer-home for a packet of chiclets, she knew it had to stop. So according to family legend, she crept into his room one night when he was asleep and cut him into pieces, bagging each piece carefully, so as not to wake the neighbors, whom she traded the pieces to for a rusty 1978 Trans-Am with mag wheels.

She fled the state, and moved to Arizona, where she married Gary, a cockeyed airconditioner repairman with a bald head and a big savings account. He'd never spent a dollar in his life, mainly due to the fact that he lived in his mother's basement. He loved Liz with all his heart, and from the moment he met her, he pledged to spend every dollar he could to buy her love, or at least buy her body, which by the way was quickly going to hell due to years of eating chili-dogs and pep-r cheddars, you know, those stuffed jalepenos at Sonic?

Anyway, things with Gary went along alright for awhile, except for his mother hated Liz. One of them "I hate my son's wife because he's taken him away from me" kind of things, I'd suspect. In response to the constant haranguing she got from the mother, whose name was Sarah, Liz burnt down the house one evening while she was sleeping. She did this as quietly as she could, because she suspected that there was a few people in Greenville that she could trade the ashes to for a good set of needle-nose pliers.

After that she found Bobby--

Just outside, a camel's back broke as a man wearing a beard stacked bales of hay onto its back to trade at the market. The camel made a noise that sounded like a combination of a wheeze, a moan, and a cry for help

"Wheeeeeooooooooaaaaaahhhheeeeeeeeellp," the camel said.

The soldier snapped up. "That does it! Now that just tears it! That's the last straw!"

"What is?" said one of the bar patrons. A man with a trucker cap, worn non-ironically.

"I get it! I get it, goddamit! You're trying to say I shouldn't marry Sue-Ann!"

"No," said the bartender, still peering out the window at the paralyzed camel, "I'm saying that you should marry her if you want to spend the rest of your life with her, and if you love her, and if you think that the two of you can make something good happen in this crazy world, and not for any other reason besides."

The kid looked down. For some reason he had a huge erection, and he realized it was because Sue-Ann had been denying him sex as a result of his indecision on the marriage question.

"Bartender, a whiskey please."

"A whiskey?"

"That's right. I've got an important question to ask, and I'll need all the bravery I can get."