Two Weddings and a Restraining Order

Two Weddings and a Restraining Order

It was a marriage made in ... adolescence...  I started hanging out with Gary when he was 17 and I was 18.  I had returned from Berkeley for the summer and had managed to dislocate my hip while riding a recalcitrant horse.  I saw the horse pick out the tree he was going to slam me into, unfortunately, rusty after a year of college, I didn’t lean away in time.  Three months on crutches was my reward for this little miscalculation.

I went everywhere on those crutches.  I hiked on those crutches.  I danced on those crutches.  Sometimes I threw them aside and danced on one leg.  I wasn’t going to let anything slow me down.  I wasn’t by god going to be left behind!

I met Gary at Lexington’s famous head shop The Great Bananafish, run by Joey, known as Joey Bananafish to his friends of which, being the only head shop near campus, he had many.

Gary and I fell for each other right away.  I mean right away.  I took him home with me (and I lived with my parents at the time...  Hey, Mom! He followed me home! Can I keep him?)

Gary had a father, (sadly as it turned out), who was determined that Gary would stay at home.  He used to track us down wherever we went – my house, a friend's house, Xenia, Ohio.  Morning, noon, 4am,  John would turn up.  “You about ready to go?” he’d always say.  We called him “Search and Destroy”.

The lucky guy

At some point in this romance we decided to get married.  Don’t ask me why.  I have no idea.  We knew we’d never get permission so we waited a few months until Gary turned 18, and we got the license on his birthday.

We weren’t the crispest cookies in the box, or we’d have known that all marriage licenses are published in the paper.  John apparently read very carefully.

Our wedding party met in the back foyer of the courthouse.  In that space there’s a little alcove behind a pillar.  John was already there, handing out pink bubble gum cigars that said "It’s a girl”. – apparently this was the only reason he could imagine why people would marry.  Since his wife had their first child at 16, (and her dad was a war hero who still possessed a gun) he may have been drawing on his own experience.

John didn’t want me to marry his son, I guess.  He hauled me into the little alcove and grabbed me by the shirt, his fist pulled back .

I had already had it up to here with Gary’s father, so I said “Please - go ahead and hit me, John!  I’d love to see you in jail.”  At that moment the Justice of the Peace,  Prather Walker came around the corner.  Walker was an enormous African-American who drove a red Caddie – the front license plate read “Here Come De Judge”. 

For all that he had a silly car, Justice Walker was a man of commanding presence.  He glared at John who promptly let go of me and did a quick fade into the woodwork. Gary and I  went upstairs with Walker.  We said our vows and at Walker’s suggestion, signed out a restraining order on John at the same time.

But that was only the civil ceremony.  Later in the day we had a real old fashioned hippie wedding – the kind you cringe to recall in later life.  The kind your kids cringe to hear about in later life.! 

We didn’t send out invitations.  We just let it be known that the big event would be happening at the Mushroom House one day in February.  If you didn’t know where the Mushroom House was, you probably didn’t belong at this wedding.

I had a dress – a rough brown thing bought in a Persian (no, not Parisian) boutique in Berkeley.  We had rings made with strange elfish writing all around them that said … nothing.  At the last minute I thought of flowers.  Since it was February (and the day before the wedding), there wasn’t much the florist could do for me, but they did make me a wreath of baby orchids to wear in my hair.  We got out my mother’s family punch recipe (tastes like ginger ale when in fact it’s mostly vodka…), found our all-important copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (I told you it was a hippie wedding!) and we were all set.  Perhaps there was a cake, but I don’t remember it.

First, we prepared ourselves in the manner that seemed most fitting at the time.  This explains much about the rest of the wedding.

Then we opened the windows onto the porch and locked the front door.  For some reason we decided it would be cool if everyone went ‘in and out the window’.  My first memory of the wedding was seeing my friend Karen staring open-mouthed at this arrangement.

Karen was a sixth-generation Kentucky witch – read Wiccan – and she’d held a séance the night before.  She told me “All I could see was a window that was a door and people were going in and out”…WOo-ooo-Oo-oooo!!!…I was skeptical, but 2 other attendees backed her up.  She’d "seen" my wedding.  Yikes!

My only other memories are:

1) Realizing that we hadn’t actually ‘planned’ this wedding.  And that in retrospect, with all these people waiting for us to DO SOMETHING, maybe a little planning would have been a good idea.
2) My ex-boyfriend holding my mother’s Steuben glass punch bowl over his head to drain the last drops.
3) Sitting on the steps to read The Prophet because my vision was kinda swirly and I was none too steady on my feet.
4) Dancing around a tree.  This is when the only photo of the wedding was taken, apparently from an upstairs window.  I’m behind the tree.

Later, when we were getting our divorce, a friend commented in surprise “You mean y’all actually got married???”  “So did you!” I said.  “Nah, she replied “None of us did.  We just held the weddings…  I mean, what’s the difference?”

In the State of California, about $200 + filing fee.