Chapter 1: Marty & Doc Brown
This is a pretty shitty way to spend a honeymoon. No, shitty isn’t the right word. Too strong. Crappy? Yeah – I know – it means the same thing, but crappy seems less harsh. That’s not right either, though. Let’s just go with bad. No… very bad. This is a very bad way to spend a honeymoon.
It’s not his fault. It’s not even my fault. Well, I’m the one that picked our wedding date: October 24, 2020. It was the perfect date. Perfect.
We met at Janet’s Halloween party, five years ago. He came dressed as Marty McFly from Back to the Future. He was the fourth Marty that I saw that night. All the other guys were decked out in their jean jackets and puffy orange vest – so proud of themselves.
“Listen, I just got here from the year 1985,” one guy said as he approached me. He pulled out a copy of Grays Sports Almanac.
“It says here…” he’s pointing to random page. “That… um… what’s your name?”
“Kate.”
“Last name?”
“No.”
“It says here that Kate No and I have sex tonight…”
“It says that?”
“Yeah, right here.”
“It says in your sports almanac that you are going to have sex with me. Your sports almanac?"
“Um, yeah, I mean, no. Um… It says I’m gonna reach third base… You know… baseball… right?”
“Okay, well, the Cubs were also supposed to win the World Series in 2015 and their asses just got swept out of the NLCS. So I’ll make a deal with you. Next time the Cubbies bring the Commissioner's Trophy back to Wrigley, you can give me a call, McFly.”
How could I have known that they would win back-to-back titles in ’16 and ’17? I wonder if he tried to find my number. I hope he did. I hope he spent hours online searching for Kate No.
No, my future husband was too clever. His costume was a thing of beauty. And it worked. I was instantly drawn to him. I couldn’t even see his face. Didn’t matter. This was my kinda guy. I walked up to him.
“Who are you?” I asked, playing my part.
“Silence Earthling!” he said. He was covered head-to-toe in a yellow hazmat suit.
He pointed his hairdryer at me. “My Name is Darth Vader – an extraterrestrial from the Planet Vulcan!”
Forgive me, I’m leaving out an important detail of this story. And – look, I’m not proud of this – but it was a Halloween party and I was in my twenties. I was dressed as Doc Brown. Not a regular Doc Brown, but a – ugh – sexy Doc Brown, which is really a lot like Doc Brown but with a hell of a lot more cleavage. Nope. Not proud.
God, did we hit it off. Fate, right? It had to be fate. What are the odds that Marty McFly and a boobalicous Emmett Brown would both show up to Janet’s party? Well, pretty good I guess. There were three other Martys and another guy did come as Doc Brown. He had a pretty good rack too, if I remember correctly.
Who cares? It felt like fate. It felt like God, or gods or Mother Earth or whatever the fuck brought us together that night. It was meant to be. Destiny.
I like to say that I fell in love with him before I saw him. It was just icing that he looked like Chris Pratt when he took off his hazmat helmet. And I’m talking about Parks and Rec Pratt, not Jurassic Pratt. Parks and Rec Pratt is the best Pratt.
Heh, it’s ironic to talk about fate and destiny, considering where I am. Considering the fact that I’m spending the second day of my honeymoon in a hospital waiting room in Bangor fucking Maine. Busy day too. Doesn’t help that their entire system crashed this morning. I guess it just couldn’t handle the sheer amount of patients… is patients even the right word? I mean, nobody in here is sick. Not even a cough.
Let me rephrase that… Nobody in here is physically ill. But me? Mentally, I’m about as fucked up as they come. And I must not be the only one. Why else would everybody be in here?
