Asklemmy

It was fifteen years ago today!

I had gone to ride the Critical Mass two days prior on a whim, where I ran into a friend of a friend from college and we ended up riding home together and getting to know one another. He took a bomb picture of my skinny ass having pensively out over Lake Michigan under the lamplight. We split up and I thought that was it, other than him messaging me the photo.

It was not it! April 27, I'm sitting outside Bridgeport Coffeehouse, trying to get some work done on my laptop. Who comes up behinde but this very guy! He explains that he and his girlfriend were supposed to be going on some kind of tour of the stockyards for a class, but couldn't find it and they happened to drive past me, and could they check their email on my laptop? Of course I said yes, but it turns out they had very much missed the tour. So they invite me to hang out and I jump in the car with them.

And we're driving around just exploring the South Side, stopping whenever we see something interesting, talking and giving and having a great time. The last thing we stopped for was some guys painting a mural on the side of a bar. The artist and his assistants and the film crew recording them explain that the mural is part of a local art festival (Versionfest, for those familiar with the Chicago arts scene) and there's a whole expo of artists around the corner, and a party and concert to close out the festival that evening.

And this was no highschool art fair. There was some great stuff on display, printers and tinkers and jugglers and painters and the kind of people who generally know where to get heavy-duty explosives at any given time. My new buddy and his girlfriend split back home and I go back to my house, just around the corner at this point, to eat something and put on party clothes.

We've all been to that party, right, where everyone seems to know each other but you don't know anybody? Some hate it, some thrive, and me? I was already having the best weekend of my life at this point, I'm absolutely jamming. I meet all sorts of cool toms and mollys in this rambling old house-turned-community-centre and finally I step out onto this giant porch on the upper level.

And there's this one young woman, all by herself, smoking a cigarette while everyone else is huddled in little groups having animated conversations. I think to myself, Hey.

I bet I can bum a cigarette off her.

I swear to you that's all I had on mind. At this point in life, I was barely out of homelessness, all my friends had dated each other and broken each other's hearts; and I had gone from being wrecked by my own exto failing to date a bunch of friends of friends, to finally getting ready to move away to another city and form a new, hopefully less incestuous, friend group and, more importantly, swearing off women.

That's always when I meet the next one.

So anyway, I swagger over to her and say, Hey, I was over there not talking to anybody and I saw you were over here not talking to anybody, and that just seemed awfully ineffecient.

Now I'm going to backtrack and tell her side of the story. It starts when she was six years old but that's personal and not mine to tell, but cutting a long story short she saw Grant Lee Phillips in concert and the opening band was a local singer-songwriter who she instantly became a huge fan of. He was headlining the concert at the art festival and she was there to see him, thinking it was at a normal venue with a bar and not a weird house with two guys selling loose high lifes out of a cooler. She was the only other person there who didn't know everybody else there, and had already called her best girlfriend to come hang out and maybe hit on the musician.

And they she saw this gorgeous, cool-as-hell guy step out onto the porch. He looked around, then walked straight up to her and said, "Hey. I was over there not talking to anybody and I saw you were over here not talking to anybody, and that just seemed awfully ineffecient."

Swoon city, she told me later.

So she texts her friend with new mission parameters. No more concert buddy, it's serious wingwoman time. By the time the girlfriend gets there, we're deep in conversation, and my blind ass is just happy to have made a new friend my own age.

To spare the more personal details, the wingwoman winged it, we all ended up back at my place, the girlfriend and the musician split off after we all broke into a construction site at one am for giggles, and my new friend let me know she wanted to be more than friends. She had ogled my Chekov's profile pic with the brooding and the lakeshore and the lamplight while surreptitiously scoping my socials and liked what she saw.

The next day we had our first date. The next week our second, seeing the same band that brought us together. Three months later she proposed; a year after that we were married. It's been a hell of a ride.