The NY trip was arranged to allow plenty of time for work and visiting friends, but the primary purpose of the journey was to attend a wedding.
I met the prospective groom in 1988, when we both attended a summer leadership institute as idealistic seventeen-year-olds. One day early in the program we were all sent to do volunteer work in the Emergency Housing section of the CD, which at the time was a brutally scary place for our middle class peers to hang out. It only took about ten minutes before we lost a naive girl from a ranch on the eastern side of the state.
When the others scattered to search for her, Karl and I sat down on a boulder and stared at our feet. We hadn’t talked before then. After a long pause he asked What do you think happened to her?
I replied I reckon she’s dead.
He responded My best friend just committed suicide.
Of course, I laughed.
One day during media training we were taught how to shake hands and state our names in a persuasive way, and he insisted on using and emphasizing his middle initial. This led to everyone (or maybe just me) mocking him by referring to him as Karl T Steel throughout the summer and, as far as I could cultivate it, for years to come.
A few days after the institute ended I went on a catastrophic road trip that nearly killed three of my best friends. KTS was supposed to be in the car that day, but at the last minute I didn’t pick him up. If he had been the fifth passenger he would surely have died. The velocity of his body slamming through the vehicle might have killed the rest of us.
He doesn’t remember it, but he came to the hospital and sat with me in intensive care, listening to me talk fast against the pain of a broken face. My jaw was dislocated and I’m sure that I made no sense at all, rattling through one macabre anecdote after another. He sat next to the bed all day, patiently listening, not showing any horror over the spectacle of my smashed body. Karl T Steel won my deep and abiding loyalty that day.
With my education, friendships, and body wrecked beyond repair, I became a zealot in service to the youth empowerment movement. Over the course of the next year I traveled through the state checking on the progress of various projects, recruited for the institute, speaking to civic groups, fundraising working the media, lobbying, working ceaselessly to build something called the Youth Initiative.
KTS quite likely had more entertaining things to do but he allowed himself to be washed along in these plans. At my bidding he gave speeches to the Rotary Club (in which he falsely claimed that he had been a homeless drug addict until the institute saved him), attended countless meetings, helped run events, went to rallies, and even joined the Sea Scouts as part of my scheme to take over a warehouse on the waterfront.
Later we went to the same alternative liberal arts college, but we stopped talking because KTS got hip and I got pregnant.
I married someone KTS still claims is the scariest person he has ever met. Karl immersed himself in the Olympia scene and was a DJ at Thekla. I wandered around wearing a shirt that said One Shot, One Kill. We loathed each other on principle, ostensibly for lifestyle choices but more realistically because we were trying to grow up and needed to shed the past.
When friendships die my tendency is to quietly fade away. I do not participate in fights and confrontations. If I insult someone it is generally an accident. But whenever KTS and I met we verbally eviscerated each other: our altercations were legendary. Strangers in cafes would stare in shock.
These conversations were not even benign at the first point of contact. I would start with something like Why are you wasting your life?
He would reply with Why are you so straight?
I would counter Define your terms. Or are you linguistically lazy on top of everything else?
To be fair, although we meant everything we said, we were also laughing. KTS has a scathing wit and an absolute genius for high sarcasm. I never felt insulted by his observations; he was correct in his estimation that all my life choices were contrary and provocative. I was right to perceive that he was not doing the work that he ought to.
When we both moved to different cities and I no longer had an equal and scathing sparring partner… I found that I missed him.
When I started to write Lessons in Taxidermy I remembered the kindness of that boy who sat with me in the hospital and tracked him down. We started corresponding and the first thing he wrote was an apology for being a jerk.
I demurred and pointed out that I was just as much of an idiot (and that he did my statistics homework at the height of our supposed feud). Eventually we started visiting each other, and our friendship now is something I truly value, perhaps even more because we went through so much to get to this point.
I travelled to New Jersey to watch Karl (currently a medievalist finishing a PhD at Columbia) marry his sweetheart, a woman named Alison (a novelist). I caught a ride to the wedding with Matt, who is married to my former editor at Seal Press. I went to college with Matt, and the fourth passenger, but didn’t know them at the time – along with a whole bunch of other people I would meet later that day, thus continuing the all-Olympia-all-the-time theme of my trip.
Though to be fair, there were also a couple of people who live in my former Seattle and Portland neighborhoods, and others who know my NW friends who live in NYC. The Pacific Northwest thing functions as a sort of alternative secret society.
The groom wore the suit his father-in-law was married in forty years ago; the bride supervised an astonishing amount of the work that went into the day, including making all of the flowers on the cake by hand. Alison’s parents generously offered their home for the ceremony and then excused themselves from the ensuing debauchery. What else can be said about a wedding? The vows and toasts were both hilarious and extraordinary.
The guests, after a few rounds of drinks, split into three groups. There were family and friends of the family, all of them lovely and kind. There were the friends of the bride (and latterly the groom of course), who all appeared to have impeccable manners and interesting jobs.
Then there were the friends from the groom’s past, starting with me as the oldest vintage and unspooling outward through college (JJ, Joey, Matt) and his life in NY (Ana Erotica, Josh, Margaret). This contingent was later described by Matt as the Bad Kids.
Normally I think that I would gravitate toward the middle group; Gabriel mostly hung out with them and had a great time. But for some unknown reason I found myself claimed by the third group, troublemakers all, though a few might not see themselves that way.
Everyone in the third group had funny Bad Karl stories, but I was unique in that I could produce copies of his juvenile poetry. Also his high school graduation photograph, in which he is wearing jeans decorated with anarchy symbols and Smiths lyrics. It might be harder to locate but there is also video footage of a certain lip-synching contest many people would like to forget. Not that I would put these on display – I may be occasionally naughty but I’m not wicked.
Perhaps because I do not karaoke, I ended up hanging out with the crew who were determined to finish all three kegs, at whatever cost; the people who went on an illicit skinnydipping raid of a neighbors pool; and the couples who may or may not have hooked up somewhere on the premises.
It was my naive question that kicked off the kegstand tournament (though I refused to participate, especially when the boys offered to pay me and promised to hold my dress together).
I ran around most of the evening with the squad competing to win the Most Drunk contest, and it was our persuasive charms that convinced someone to karaoke naked to This Old Man. Somewhere in the middle of the night everyone was screaming the lyrics to Too Drunk to Fuck, which was probably an accurate assessment of their state.
At the end one of the Bad Kids tried to persuade me to get in a car with an open Tupperware mixing bowl full of alcohol. When I said no they tried to woo me with promises of cocaine back at the hotel, but Ana Erotica defended my honor. Stop! Bee doesn’t… do that.
In other words, it was a brilliant weekend, and the best wedding I’ve ever attended.
Gabriel & me having fun:
I always have to take a date to weddings for fear of, I don’t know, contamination – but on this occasion Gabriel’s presence was my gift to the couple. He filled a book with drawings of the event:
Alison and Karl changed their clothes seconds after they exchanged vows – a good thing since we churned the backyard into a muddy mess posthaste:
There was a pinata for the youngsters; Ana qualified!
Everything went a bit fuzzy as the evening progressed; Naked Karaoke was one result:
But most people kept their clothes on. And Karl was happier than I’ve ever seen him (and it wasn’t because he was drinking straight from the pitcher):
