It’d be easier to judge this moonshine still harshly if my daughter hadn’t helped build it.
The next day Victor drove to my parents’ house so that we could celebrate our anniversary, except I don’t celebrate anything with that certain unlucky number in it, because I’m still OCD. I made him swear to just tell people that this was simply “our second twelfth anniversary,” which would have worked perfectly if Victor took my phobias seriously and didn’t have a death wish. Instead he kept saying the unlucky number over and over, and I was all, “This is exactly why I didn’t want to celebrate at all this year, because if you don’t stop saying that number I will divorce you, and that’s totally the kind of thing that would happen on an unlucky year, so fucking stop tempting fate.” Then he raised an eyebrow and said innocently, “What number? You mean, ___?” AND THEN HE SAID THE NUMBER AGAIN. This is when I decided I would just cut one of his testicles off sometime this year, because that will take care of all of our bad luck in one fell swoop, and then we’ll still stay married, because all the unluckiness will have been used up in an intentional ball-removal accident. Victor explained that there was no such thing as an “intentional accident,” and was a little baffled that I’d jumped right from divorcing him to removing one of his testicles, but this is our second twelfth anniversary, so he really should be used to that sort of thing from me by now. Plus, you don’t even need two testicles. Lance Armstrong seems to be doing pretty well with just one.2 And also, I’M SAVING OUR MARRIAGE, ASSHOLE.
For our anniversary my mom babysat Hailey so that Victor and I could go to Summer Mummers, a melodrama-vaudevillian play that’s been going on every summer since the forties in Midland, Texas. There’s lots of booze, and you’re encouraged to scream for the hero and boo at the caped villain, and to buy bags of popcorn to throw at the stage whenever the evil mustachioed bad guy comes out. Unfortunately I have a weak arm, and so I ended up just throwing it at the people directly in front of us. They turned around, and Victor surreptitiously pointed at the people sitting next to us as if to blame them for it, but our neighbors noticed, and then a terrible popcorn battle broke out. Then Victor stood up on his chair and yelled, “I WILL END YOU PEOPLE,” and bought three hundred dollars’ worth of popcorn. It was one of those moments when I realized how lucky I was to be celebrating a second twelfth anniversary with someone willing to spend all the money we’d planned to use on a fancy hotel room in order to buy pallets of popcorn just so he could bury perfect strangers in a drunken, Napoleonic endeavor. We fucking destroyed those people.
The evening was perfect, except for the one time when Victor went to reload (buying another pallet of popcorn) and I was attacked by a guy who looked exactly like Sam Elliott, and I got so much popcorn down my dress it looked like I’d developed a series of horrible tumors. Also, you know when you get that annoying piece of popcorn stuck in your teeth but you can’t get it out because it would be too embarrassing to dig it out in front of strangers? Imagine that happening, but instead of it being in between your teeth, it’s stuck in your ear canal. And by “ear canal” I mean “vagina.”
Then the cancan girls came out and everyone sang along to “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas” with the live orchestra. Then a man onstage quoted Sam Houston, saying, “Texas can make it without the United States, BUT THE UNITED STATES CANNOT MAKE IT WITHOUT TEXAS!” and everyone in the entire fucking audience yelled it along with him, and I thought, “Wow. It’s really no wonder that the rest of America hates us.”
After the whole play/melodrama/burlesque thing ended, I looked down and saw these small patches of blood on the floor, and I was a little unsettled, because Victor had been threatening to put rocks in his popcorn in order to take out the front row. But it turns out that the carpet was red, and that was the only part of it you could see under the piles and piles of popcorn.