...and the law won

An hour later, I had called myself into a circle. I was cross-referencing and calling back and call dropping until my head throbbed. One particularly nasty bitch in Mineloa answered the phone and talked me through the familiar spiel I'd gotten from two other places.

"You have to have two pieces of ID." she ticked off the pieces and then said, "You have to be in possession of two pieces of valid ID...which you're not."

I wanted to ring her sagging old neck. I knew she was a spinster of a bitch and it satisfied me a bit to hang up in her insolent, old ear. Thoughts of riding the LIRR, hopping on a bus and paying that hag a visit did nothing to fix our current problem. Did she have to be so RUDE? I thought, and shook the venom off...kept calling.

My soup was just a puddle of yellow gravy at the bottom of a ceramic bowl pushed off to my left. I didn't remember eating it. I had picked at the squid and shrimp, slurped at the tasty soup, but I couldn't recall doing it. I was in damn autopilot again. Every few minutes I declared I'd lost my pen and Sonny would produce it from across the table. I would snatch it away from him, scowl at the small square of paper and scribble down the next number. I don't know what I thought I was doing. I guess I was doing what anyone would do in that situation: trying to find the loop hole. Looking for the merciful entrance into the garden of matrimony. Hey, if He closes a door...doesn't He open a window?

We convinced ourselves that Long Island was our only hope. But we needed two pieces of ID. Neither one of us had that. I only had my permit and he had his drivers license. From there it just got mucky. I'll spare you the tangled and very maddening details. Cut to Sonny and me in our hotel room that night, draped across our huge bed, staring with dry eyes at the ceiling.

"Alright, so tomorrow we'll ride out to Connecticut on the train and bring Rob and Lisa to be our witnesses. We'll just get a civil ceremony there. That way we'll be legally married at least. Our friends and family can't know about this."

We repeated the deceitful mantra to ourselves, the one that conditioned us to believe that this would work. By 10:30pm we had thoroughly convinced ourselves that deceit was our only hope. The State of New York had beaten us into submission. We spent an entire day chasing our collective tails and succeeded only in biting ourselves in the ass each time. So fuck em...

TO BE CONTINUED. . .