Flyin' Home

Slinking Back Into Town
How the hell I really got to Chicago Midway Airport I don't really remember. Being in a car--yes, I was in a car. Crossing the Mississippi River. Yep, I remember crossing the Mississippi River, but then that's it. Next stop Midway. Midway! Whaaaa the hell. "Come on, Big Bad Wolf, you're off to the Big Apple and good riddance we say, too." "F all y'all--I need skyscrapers, I need billionaires, I need scumbags, sleazebags, bruisers, braggarts, muchachos machos, yarmakas, bhurkas, kufis, the long fine legs of my new nextdoor neighbor who likes to wear shorts around her apartment and that's how I know she has fine long legs--I shot that photo for my mind's collection while waiting for the elevator and she was canning her garbage at the garbage room--that's what the hell I need"--and as I boarded the plane, I howled out, "So long, you prairie hicks. I had a great time--and remember, keep reading your Ulysses, keep blowing all your money gambling on the riverboats, and by all means keep away from me...good-bye, I loves you all!" "F you, Wolfie, you blasphemer, you heathen, you conscientious objector! We loves you, too."

Hey, I was on the original Boeing airline--United--yep, I thought they went under years ago. I ask the stewardess or whatever the hell you call them now--an old hag to boot--no hottie stewardesses on this flight--if she still owned United Airlines? She looked at me like I was a cockroach.

Made me remember the woman I first married. Yep, south of La Frontera down Mexico way--and she had been a stewardess--and out of Chicago, too--first for an airline called Capitol--oh how quickly we forget--and then going over to the big time with United. Ah the stewardess stories I know. I could write a book about stewardesses, but not today's stewardesses, my first wife wasn't no hag, she was a Tarzana of a woman and I mean that complimentary, dammit, 'cause she had a body that flew through the jungles of my solar plexus and locked me into her flying vines in mad passionate worship--whew, makes me go cold hard literary to remember this creature of loveliness--I mean she was NO F-ing Jane. She was more like Tarzan. She swung, man; she swung from the ground up into the highest of flying grooves. What a woman!

And I am totally at the mercy of women and have been all my life--from the time I was born to my mom and woke up to realize my mom also meant my aunt and my grandmother--Holy Christ, I hollered at birth, do I have a father? If so, where the hell is he? "That's him sleeping under that newspaper over there," my grandmother informed me. "He could be dead as far as you're concerned--that newspaper's like a sheet up over his dead head." "Thanks, grandma." "Don't call me 'grandma,' you little pipsqueaking cub, you call me Miz Wolf, got that?" "Yes mam." "Yes mam, what?" "Yes mam miz Wolf." "There ya go. Except put a comma after 'mam' in that last statement you made to be grammatically correct--but otherwise, you got it, kid," --and I was thinking, 'Yeah, now I'm Grandma-ally correct'--and after that the word "bitch" roosted indigenously on my tongue from that day on. "Now get ready to be ruled by WOMEN," my grandmother was really telling me; WOmen--the "woe" in men."

So beautiful women have always had their way with me. I'm gullible as hell to a woman that fits my specifications in terms of looks and attraction. Hell, I really like women who wear glasses. I hate to think a woman I dig is wearing contacts. But even contacts lure me sometimes. I hate wigs, but I've dated a million women wearing wighats--my other wife wore wigs all the time. I never understood it because she had beautiful Choctaw-Mexican-Welsh dark black hair that hung down to her CMW Rubenesque behind...and here I go off on another romantic memory (my RAM)--WOMEN. The "woe" in MEN. God.

So with no hottie stewardesses to ogle, no actresses on this flight, only haggard looking salesmen types headed back to NYC either ripe with sales slips or listing excuses for their failures in their laptops and notebooks, I tried to pass out. OK, I got a brandy. Some kind of airline rotgut brandy, but it helped. Soon I was dreamin', steamin' dreamin' of flyin' down to Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, to absolutely kick out the slats and slam down hard on a heavy partying weekend in Old Monterey, several gangs of us meeting up at the California Motel, our favorite place to stay in those days in Old Monterrey. We loved Old Monterrey because to get there, you grabbed an Aereonaves Mexico DC7 at Nuevo Laredo's adobe-hacienda-shack airport and then you winged up and up, shuddering and sputtering as you headed into the clouds and into the low-level flying space just above the magnificent Sierra Madres, the foothills really as you fly the fast 139 miles, then coming upon Monterrey, first seeing just this huge saddleback-type mountain in front of you, lurching up the biggest hunk of earth in the world and then just as the plane sort of nicked the top of Saddleback Mountain, you drop down like elevator straight down straight DOWN, and wham, there it used to be, Monterrey Postage-Stamp-Looking Airport. By then our party was all toasted very well--I drinking CC and Seven and the rest of the crowd, there were six of us, three men, three women, were tanking down whatever they loved--let's see, Mooneye loved Jim Beam, Darling Doris loved her Scotch (it eventually took her over), the Ding-Dong Daddy From Dumas sipped his 5-star Cognac, Marvelous Marlene drank wine--what else, and the stewardess, who drank just about any drink you put before her.

My partner for the weekend wasn't the stewardess. She was my partner, Darling Doris's, roomate; but then so was I, so you see this history could get more complicated than I'm gonna let it--and besides, this is a dream, remember.

So, here we were in Old Monterrey at the California Motel and so let the party begin and it did. Friday night passed into and out of Saturday night and late Sunday morning I woke up and I was in bed with both Darling Doris and the stewardess--and the stewardess was wide awake and she said, "Let's go for a walk, feel like it?" I was like a puppet; she moved her hand, I followed; so hand-in-hand we headed out into the late-morning heating-up streets of Old Monterrey. Soon it got very romantic. We started kissing and making out like we were Liz Taylor and Richard Burton who were the Hollywood idols of the time--pre-Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf--this is like the Cleopatra days (one of the only times Liz ever posed nude--for little Rodney McDowell, who was Gay so she saw nothing wrong in letting a Gay dude take a few titty shots of her--and Jesus, she had...oh well, kiddies may be reading this post--yeah sure--so I'd better clean it up). We started making out right on the streets of Monterrey. Then we turned down this street we really didn't know and while we were kissing in one block, she said, "Jesus, look, what the hell is that?" "What?" "Look, across the street in that window." "Hey, yeah, a burro. Is he alive?" "How do you know it's a he?" "I just assume it is." "I don't see his pecker." We walked over to this window and yes there was a burro in the window--a dead burro, sure enough, but stuffed and grinning like a possum eating shit looking back at us. "It's like he's real," she said, getting sentimental. "Hey, we probably ate him at dinner last night." "I don't remember what I ate last night." "I know one thing you ate." "Shut up, you bastard." "Yes, Liz." And we were making out again in the sun's reflected off the silvery mule.

Then it was my time to get excited. "Hey, Liz, look, the burro is in a funeral home, la funeraria." We kept kissing.

I was facing across the street now the opposite way from the mule in the funeral home window and I looked up from her lips and ding-dong, there was a sign that said, "Consigamos rapido y santo casada via El Pastor Bill Gonzuaga y Maria." "You wanna get married, Liz?" "Why not?" "Across the street from the mule and the funeral home, look, there's a wedding chapel." Yes, neon lights of sparse but alluring temptation still blinked out wedded bliss in the brightening up sunlight of the day announcing "a quick and holy marriage." From life to death in just the crossing of a street; Calle Styx I decided to call it.

So we went in the little chapel and this very haggard looking guy with an obvious phony moustache came through a sordid-looking cloth curtain with a big moon on it that obviously separated the tiny, gaudy, Mexicany chapel from Pastor Bill and Maria's living quarters.

Pastor Bill Gonzuaga. He spoke English, he said, but he refused to speak English during his wedding ceremonies. Were we interested, marriage was $20 Norteamericano--and it included a tiara for my wife to wear and a cigarette lighter for me that had a picture of a naked girl on it.

OK, so far so good.

He positioned us in front of a big poster of Senora Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, with a Mexican flag on a pole by the Senora on one side and a US flag on a pole on her other side.

"OK, Bill, go ahead, marry us."

"This is my wife, Maria, but she can't speak a lick of English so don't even try it with her."

Liz spoke Spanish--after all, she had been a stewardess on flights to South America.

She spoke French, too. And Italian. Flights to Paris and Rome, dig?

So Liz spoke to Maria in Espanol, while I paid Bill in English. "Here's your 20 smackers, Bill old buddy, so give her her tiarra and give me my cigarette lighter and let's get on with the marriage so I can make it with my wife legally tonight."

Maria went and got a beat up guitar that had the word "FOX" in big red letters on its body and she started singing--I heard Senora Lupe in the lyrics several times--and then Bill said to hold hands, face him, put our hands on the Biblia Santa (I swear there was a photo of Pancho Villa on one of those tin altars a lot of Mexicans keep in the homes. Pancho, not Senora Guadalupe or Hay-suss Crisco, as my little nephew used to call Jesus X) and then he began the ceremony.

He began speaking in such rapid Spanish I didn't even catch a "si" or a "no" or any "mas dineros, por favors" or nothing--just a rattling off of a babbling Spanish-- and then it was over just like that--he had married us.

Soon Maria struck up another song--by God, it was the Mexican Hat Dance--I swear--"Isn't that the Mexican National Anthem?" I asked Bill and he said, "No, it was a hymn Maria had just written that morning." I swear it was the Mexican Hat Dance.

Soon Maria produced a massive scroll, all in Spanish, with gold seals with red ribbons hanging off them and under it all was an embossed stamp that made it official; the document was all in handwritten script, very delicately done and signed by what looked like El Presidente and Senor Papa together, the signature being both pompous and holy at the same time.

"Sign it here and here," Bill ordered me and the stewardess. We signed. "Gracias," Bill said, "now you are legally man and wife in Mexico."

So the stewardess and I got married at the capilla de la union that was right across the street from the funeraria and the stuffed mule.

As we walked back to the California Motel, excited at being married, still stopping and seriously kissing along the way, we went in a wine shop and bought a huge bottle of San Tomas wine, my favorite Mexican wine.

Back at the California, we uncorked the wine and unscrolled our marriage license and showed both off proudly. Darling Doris was truly pissed at me beyond recall. She dumped me right then and there and went over and into my friend Mooneye's arms.

"Jesus, Wolfie, you think you guys are seriously legally married?"

"Hell yeah we are. Here, check it out." I handed the marriage license to him.

"Come on, that looks like gibberish. I think you guys got screwed."

With that the stewardess came alive and took her clothes off while she danced our wedding dance. We decided we would have a wedding party...and we did.

That was my first marriage ever.

The United stewardess had to wake me up at La Guardia when we finally landed back in the Big Apple. I was groggy as hell as I ran off the plane and quickly over to catch a Carey bus back into Manhattan. It was after I got back in my apartment that I realized I'd left my two bags at the airport.

In the middle of the night I thought about calling up my ex-wife and reminiscing with her, though by now she's many years older and has been happily married all those many years to--my best friend, the Ding Dong Daddy From Dumas--who became a millionaire and my stewardess wife and he now live down on the Main Line in Philly, right next door to where Grace Kelly used to live. I fell asleep before I could even remember where I had last placed her long lost telephone number.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler