By the winter of 1998, my niece, who had lived with me in Reno, was now living with me in Abington while she pursued a master’s degree in Library Sciences from Simmons University. It was nice to have family so close by—especially one that made gin and tonics with only the best gin. Plus, it was very helpful to have someone around to take care of Giselle on the weekends I would head west to see my girlfriend, which was happening more frequently now that the holidays were rolling up.
The Friday night flights from Boston to Las Vegas were always a treat. Although the planes were never so full I couldn’t get a seat, they were usually packed with very excited, very drunk—already—passengers eager to keep the party going for another six hours at 35,000 feet. Despite the volume level of dozens of drunkards shouting over each other, everyone was always affable. They just wanted to maintain their blood alcohol levels until the plane landed and they could continue on at the hotel-casino. Not once in all of my Boston to Las Vegas flights did I ever see anyone throw a punch in anger. I did see some aggressive hugging out of Southie love and camaraderie. The only problem on almost every flight was what happens when regular smokers drink but can’t smoke. Some genius tries to smoke in the bathroom—but not before tampering with the smoke detector in a futile attempt to cover their tracks.
Airflow on a plane is suspect, but there’s no possible way to keep cigarette smoke contained within a lavatory. Sometimes the smoke was thick enough that I’d flash back to the 1960s when smoking on the plane was allowed, and seating was divided between smoking and non-smoking sections—or, in the case of anyone smoking, the entire flight smelled of cigarette smoke after about a minute. Some of the much older planes still in service have little ashtrays built into the armrests. Anyway, more than once every flight, we would be reminded that the plane was non-smoking, including the lavatories, and tampering with a lavatory smoke detector was a federal offense. Despite the threat of fines and possible jail, these announcements were always met with a round of boos from the passengers. There are a lot of things you can’t say on an airplane, but it turns out “booooo” isn’t one of them.
My girlfriend would pick me up at the Las Vegas airport, and depending on how tired we were, we’d either power through the two-plus hour drive to St. George, Utah, or spend the night at her dad and stepmother’s trailer. With the help from gas station coffee that had spent the entire day on the burner boiling down into a fine poison of coffee-flavored battery acid, most times we made the drive.
As we got closer to the holidays, more often than not, we’d spend the entire weekend with her dad and stepmom. He was a retired butcher, and unlike the father of every other woman I ever dated, he seemed to like me—or at least not hate me—which I was happy for, since he undoubtedly knew dozens of ways to carve me up so the authorities would never be able to identify my body. This was Las Vegas, after all. There was other family in Las Vegas, and my favorite by far was my girlfriend’s uncle. He was a retired short-haul truck driver and married to my girlfriend’s aunt. I always absolutely loved visiting with them. He kept a bottle of good tequila and shot glasses on an entryway table by the front door And nothing but, If you walked into the house, you didn’t make it past the table without first having a shot. Time of day or day of the week didn’t matter. You wanted in past the foyer, you had a shot of tequila. He also had something very attractive at the house: a swimming pool. Even in the winter, it was seldom too cold for a quick dip to get out of the heat.
My first time in Las Vegas was the mid-1970s for a bowling tournament. Other than two very long bus rides, I don’t remember much about the tournament or Las Vegas—other than I bowled like a chump, and the Strip only went as far as Circus Circus. Being all of 12 at the time, the arcade games around the Carousel Bar at Circus Circus were as close to gambling and drinking as I was going to get. But now that I was dating a local, I got to see the non-tourist Las Vegas with its grocery stores, and casinos, and restaurants tourists knew nothing about. Living in Las Vegas meant you wouldn’t be caught dead on the Strip unless it was for work. The other bonus was no matter how cold the winter was in Las Vegas or St. George, it was always way warmer than Boston.
I spent Thanksgiving that year with my girlfriend and her extended family at her dad’s house. The food was amazing—a mix of traditional Thanksgiving fare and Armenian delicacies that helped me forget this was the first Thanksgiving since 1990 that I didn’t celebrate at my parents’ house. For the last few years, I’d been wondering when I would get to celebrate my own Thanksgiving and Christmas someplace other than my parents’ house. But now that I wasn’t at their house, it felt like something wasn’t quite right. When I called to wish them a happy Thanksgiving, everyone else in the family was there. It was only me that was missing, so my absence hardly registered. No one grudged me for doing my own thing that year. Then again, maybe I was persona non grata for my hasty decamping from Reno for Boston, and luring away my niece as well. Couldn’t blame them.
I’d never been a planner, and my relationship with the girlfriend was no different. If anyone would have asked me what I thought our relationship would look like in three months, six months, or a year, I wouldn’t have had a good answer. And for whatever reason, no one ever asked. I guess everyone assumed I knew what I was doing and had it all figured out. This was completely undeserved credit. I was too busy living my life to worry about the future beyond the next few months. My job wasn’t really a career. I still hadn’t finished an undergraduate degree. And I was content with a very long-distance relationship. I don’t think it was a lack of ambition, but rather, there was nothing in my life I felt ambitious about. In a little more than 30 days, I would rationalize a wildly bad idea into something that seemed like the best idea at the time.
Christmas 1998 came and went with the usual flurry of activity and days off from work. Not wanting to make a repeat of my Thanksgiving location debacle, I spent Christmas with my parents and family. It was nice to be around the familiarity of how we celebrated Christmas. Mom’s homemade spaghetti, salad, and garlic bread on Christmas Eve—a tradition that was at least as old as I was, and started because we always opened presents on Christmas Eve, and my mom needed a meal that was easy to make for a lot of people but required very little prep or clean-up. This way, she wouldn’t have to listen to four kids clamoring to wrap up dinner now so they could open their presents. Once the presents were distributed, it was a free-for-all to tear them open and see what we got. This tradition changed little over the years. As I got older, I still enjoyed opening my presents, but I really enjoyed watching the younger kids open theirs. Let’s face it, at this point in my life, I was down to mostly utilitarian clothing for gifts. Not that I didn’t appreciate or enjoy them, but they didn’t elicit the pure joy of a child unwrapping a much-wanted toy.
After Christmas that year, I flew to Las Vegas to spend New Year’s with my girlfriend at her apartment in St. George. Not going out to celebrate suited me fine. I’d have to return to Boston on the 3rd, and since I really didn’t know when I’d be back, I was good with spending a quiet New Year’s Eve in.
I’d had years of experience making questionable decisions when I was drunk, but I don’t have that excuse for what I did next. We watched the new year arrive across the time zones. And now it was a little past midnight in St. George. We wished each other a happy new year, then I said, “I’ve got a really great idea!” Instead of asking what my bright idea was, my girlfriend started guessing. While all of her guesses sounded interesting, she never landed on my idea. “We should get married!” I blurted out. “Will you marry me?” I asked, hoping for a quick and enthusiastic, “Yes!” Instead, I got silence I had only ever experienced doing open mic stand-up. Seeing that an affirmative answer was not forthcoming, I hedged a little with, “What da ya think?”
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I gotta think about it.”
“Oh, yeah. Okay. I get it.”
How could I have been so off on my predicted outcome of the question? Was it really not the great idea I’d envisioned? I took solace in the fact that she didn’t say no, and let it drop. Maybe she really did need time to think it over. What seemed to me like the next logical step in our relationship was obviously not something on her relationship radar. As taken aback as I was, I still held out hope that she would say yes, and we would spend most of early 1999 planning a wedding and honeymoon.
New Year’s Day around noon, I got my answer. “Yes. Let’s get married.”
I was ecstatic! After a poorly thought-through first marriage in 1989, I was ten years smarter, ten years more certain about what I was getting into, and ten years older and more mature. Time would show that the only thing on that list I was right about was being ten years older. But for now, I was officially engaged. True, I didn’t have a ring yet, but we were going into Las Vegas to have New Year’s lunch with her family. If we left a little early, I could look for a ring before lunch and have it on her finger in time to officially announce our engagement.
The news was well received and celebrated with several toasts and shots. And I was happy too. Sure, I hadn’t thought through what life would look like post-wedding, but that was a problem for future Martell. At this point in my life, I was a firm believer in not worrying about a problem until there was a problem. No sense in excessive hand-wringing looking for problems that may never materialize. This narrow mindset also conveniently kept me from having to really plan for the future. Not only did I not know what I didn’t know, but I didn’t even care. But soon enough reality would snap my head around—just not on New Year’s Day 1999.