Wired Mesh

Go to Huntington

I have returned from Huntington, West Virginia, and Jarrod Taylor's wedding all in one piece. Which is remarkable, when you think about it.

I arrived in Huntington at 1:30 Friday morning, and met up with Jarrod's bachelor party at a club called Fluid. I had been driving for eight hours, and in my exhaustion the night took on a surreal quality: I walked up to the club and a massive football-player type was projectile vomiting out of a pickup truck and I walked inside and Jarrod was lifting me into the air and loud 50 Cent-beats were beating and a well-proportioned waitress was feeding me jello shots out of syringe and the bouncer was throwing some drunk frat boy out of the club and the frat boy was saying he'd call his dad who would sue and the bouncer was pushing the frat boy about ten feet down the sidewalk and the frat boy was trying to recover his shoe and the bartender who looked like Vin Diesel was threatening to kick the frat boy's ass and the frat boy was retreating across the street and was smoking furiously while staring in Vin's general direction and Jarrod's wedding party was standing around and drinking and taking bets on the standoff and trying in certain cases not to throw up.

So that was the first half hour.

I would like to say that the morning continued in this pleasantly debauched fashion, but unfortunately I was one of the only sober guys around, jello shot notwithstanding, and it became my task to chaffeur the bachelor party to the World's Worst 24-Hour Restaurant. That wasn't what it was called, of course. It was called Dwight's, and if you are ever in the area I highly recommend that you not eat there. There were about 30 people in the place, including our 15-person party, and we sat for an hour and a half waiting for our bacon and eggs. At which time the waitress emerged to let us know that the kitchen was about to begin working on our order. We passed the extra time escourting Jarrod's brother-in-law, a seminary student with a low alcohol tolerance, to the bathroom. By the time we got back to the hotel, the sun was up.

A large crew of post-Covenant sorts piled into two rooms at the Ramada Inn off I-64, about seven to a room. The hotel's front driveway became home office for the men's side of wedding preparations, which for most of us consisted of sitting on benches and smoking. At regular intervals one of us would wander across the parking lot to the Chevron to buy more Kamel Red Lights. Eventually the front courtyard was no longer able to fill the smoking needs of a dozen twenty-something men, and Sammy Glaser taped a plastic bag around the fire alarm in room 328. It is probably still there.

We spent the Fourth of July at a pool party thrown by a grandmother named Jean, a wonderfully tough old Southern woman with an alarming penchant for gin and tonic. We then returned to our office to await three Papa John's pizzas which took, in good Huntington fashion, two full hours to deliver. John Perkins remarked that hell was probably much like waiting for food in Huntington, West Virginia.

"No," Dan Polk opined, "Hell is dating in Huntington, West Virginia." (Two nights spent observing the opposite sex at bars and pool parties had led most of us to conclude that Huntington women combined the qualities of spoiled Southerner and skanky lack of modesty in measures rarely seen. Some of us were trying for digits anyway.)

"Perhaps," I offered, "Hell is just Huntington, West Virginia."

So eventually there was in fact a wedding. And it was quite lovely, if a little broiling inside the church. The reception was held at a Golf and Country Club, which provided smoking tables right next to an unlimited supply of margaritas and gin and tonics. So we had that going for us, which was nice. There was much kindness, camraderie and falling into the arms of friends, which the cynical might argue tends to happen when you drink at 85 degrees, but which I chalk up to closeness and honesty among that crowd of men. It was nice to be a part of, even on the fringe.

This was followed by a trip to another dance club, which involved a lot more 50 Cent and a good deal of ass-shaking by bridesmaids. It was a striking shift to come from a ceremony centered on the exclusive commitment of two people to each other, only to end up at a joint dedicated to hooking up. This was depressing to think about, so I tried not to.

Sunday morning I drove four of the guys back to ChattaVegas, an unremarkable trip highlighted by a lot of smoking and my realization that Peter Gabriel is a highly underrated artist. That about brings the story up to the moment. Jarrod is married, and has left Huntington, both of which seem like good things to me.

Posted by mesh at July 7, 2003 01:51 PM | TrackBack