Losing my job at KSYY-FM freed me to spend Christmas 1988 with my family. We had planned a trip to see my Aunt Cind and her family in Missouri. My girlfriend Bez had gone with her family to Lincoln, NE to take her grandmother back home. I didn't like the idea of spending Christmas apart from her and I wondered if we were going to drive right by each other when we were going through Nebraska. That didn't happen.
Nothing really eventful happened in Missouri, but this would turn out to be the last time all of my immediate family members would be together on a trip for several days at a time. We started back to Denver the day after Christmas. When we got home, I took Loyd with me to meet Bez, but as I mentioned before, he wasn't too impressed with her. However, he could tell that I liked her very much.
Her parents decided they needed to go to Los Angeles to pick up the rest of Bez' stuff that was being stored at her grandparents' house. (They would be her mother's parents.) They invited me to go along, if I didn't have to work. I asked the office manager at my job if she was going to need me for the next week or so. She said she didn't, so I was free to go. (But I didn't like the idea of not getting paid, so it wasn't really free.)
We took two separate cars because Bez had THAT much stuff in LA. I only got to ride with Bez for the first part of the trip because her parents (who were driving the two vehicles) decided later that they both needed someone in the car with them to keep them awake while driving and take over driving once in awhile.
Another bad thing was that her parents wouldn't let us sleep together in the same bed at the motel. Her father said that if we paid for the room, we could share the bed. We stopped somewhere in Utah and spent the night. The room had a double bed and two single beds. Crisis averted.
The next morning, we drove through Las Vegas. This was the first time I had been there since I was 14 years old. But this time, I was over 21 and I could sit at the slot machines and the tables. We drove through Downtown and the Strip. We decided to go into Circus Circus. Bez and I played a couple of slot machines. I got a winning spin, but no money came out. I was expecting to hear the chink, chink sound of the coins going into the hopper. Somebody walking by heard me say something and explained that I had to push a button to receive my winnings. Well, that's not the way things were 20 years earlier.
Then we went and sat at a Blackjack table. I got a seat at a $1 minimum. That was good, because I only wanted to bet $1 at a time. I won some, I lost some and got about three Blackjacks dealt to me. Each time I got one, the dealer gave me a 50 cent piece (because you win $1.50 with a natural). I put the 50 cent pieces in my pocket. Then they raised the minimum on the table to $2. I left after that. I counted the money I walked away with. I broke even. Then I remembered the 50 cent pieces. I actually came out $1.50 ahead! I was GOOD at this Blackjack thing. Bez and I found her parents. They had been paging us, but neither one of us could hear the address system at the table. They were kind of mad because they were ready to leave. We still had another six hours before we got to LA.
It was Friday, 12/30/88, when we drove the rest of the way to LA. Along I-15, there was nothing but traffic coming in the opposite direction. Bez explained that was all the people from LA coming to Vegas for the weekend. For years in college, I would read the Calendar section of the Sunday LA Times and wonder why they had several pages of advertising related to Las Vegas. I suddenly understood why.
We got to her grandparents' house. They had enough bedrooms for everybody, so Bez and I got our own separate rooms. However, that didn't keep us from starting to do activities of a sexual nature when we were alone in her room.
We went over to Pasadena, where her sister and brother-in-law lived. We got to see some of the floats that would be in the Rose Bowl Parade. We also went to the Norton Simon Museum. The exhibits that astounded me the most at the museum were the works by Van Gogh. I'd only ever seen the paintings in books, but seeing them up close was an entirely different experience, as his brush strokes have a dimensional quality that cannot be viewed in a photograph. More than anything, you truly feel the artist's presence in those painting.
I got into a little trouble at the museum. I was showing Bez something and I touched the glass covering a painting. (It wasn't a Van Gogh, and I was only touching the section where the label was.) Within 10 seconds, a curator came up to me and calmly requested that I refrain from touching the paintings. I apologized and complied. I'm glad I didn't get thrown out. Later, Bez and I went into a phone booth in the museum and made out for about ten minutes. We didn't get caught.
Sunday was New Years Day 1989. Almost all of Bez' cousins (10 of them) came over, so I really got the family onslaught. Everybody seemed to really like me. But an unusual thing happened during the gathering. The phone rang. Bez' father came in and told her that someone was on the phone for her. She asked who it was. Her father replied, "A friend." She told me, "Oh, it's probably my old boyfriend" and went to talk on the phone. One of her male cousins made a comment about her getting back with the old boyfriend. Another cousin accused him of trying to stir up trouble. Someone else said it wouldn't be a family gathering without him doing just that. I laughed. It kind of made me feel like part of the family.
When Bez returned from talking on the phone, she told me that her old boyfriend asked to see her and wanted to meet me. After my experience with Marz and her former boyfriend Nid, I knew I didn't want to put up with any dirty glances during what's supposed to be a "friendly get-together." I told her she could go see him if she wanted, but I didn't want to meet him. She wound up not seeing him. (HA! I win!)
There was a little bit of drama one evening. I had been out running an errand with her father. When we came back, Bez was in her room. Apparently, her grandmother said something that upset her, possibly about her inability to hold a job or a boyfriend. (I didn't really get the full story from Bez.) I knocked on the door and asked if I could come in. She agreed. She was sitting on the bed. She had been crying. I did what I could to be the supportive boyfriend, but I wasn't really certain that anything bad had happened. I just let her vent for a bit and that was it.
While I was at her grandparents', I created a kind of minor disaster by breaking the clip on their showerhead. I'd never taken a shower using one of those hose showerheads and I broke it because I didn't know how to remove it from the clip. (You're supposed to pull it up, not out.) I was embarrassed and told them that it just broke when I accidentally backed into the showerhead. I think her grandparents got upset about it because they don't sell those clips as spare parts. They were probably going to have to buy a whole new showerhead.
We came back a different route, through Arizona and New Mexico. We got caught in a bad snowstorm and had to spend the night in Williams, AZ. The motel room where we stayed only had two beds: a medium-sized bed and a king-sized bed. I had to share the king-size with Bez' father. I didn't remember signing up for this.
We were able to make it back to Denver the next day. I was looking forward to getting home and enjoying a little alone time, but there was a lot of snow on the ground and Bez' parents didn't think it was safe for me to drive home that night, so I had to sleep on their couch. I did get to go home the next day.
But for all of this, I thought it was moving toward something, like me becoming a part of their family. As I explained earlier in my diatribe on Bez, that just didn't happen, and I never saw any of those family members again.
And I never had to pay the consequences of breaking that showerhead.
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