We occasionally saw each other in the halls and would say hello, but that was the extent of it. He was under the misguided impression that I was dating another security guard and he was dating one of the admitting clerks.
Eventually, the stars aligned.
One night in October 1997 I ended up at a function I didn’t plan on going to and his BF Patti dragged him to the same function. The function was the Cold River Cattle Company, a popular club with great drink specials! After quite a few drinks a bunch of respiratory therapist decided the party must go on, so we all went to Patti’s apartment.
At some point during the evening going swimming seemed like a fabulous idea! Of course we didn’t have swimsuits; we were all in our club gear. Who cares when you’re in your early twenties! So off we went to the pool and for a very drunk & brave few of us, off came the clothes! Jerry quietly observed with some other not so drunk people from the comfort of a lounge chair. After a while we retrieved our clothes from the various bushes upon which they’d been strewn and returned to Patti’s apartment. I ended up sitting with Jerry looking at something in his wallet, when we come to our second disagreement. I say he kissed me, but he says I kissed him! Whoever initiated it, my knees started knocking and I thought I would faint.
The party started breaking up around 4 in the morning so we headed to our cars. I was wearing a little tank dress (can’t believe I thought I was fat then!) and started to shiver so Jerry actually took the shirt off his back and put it on me. A relationship was born!
Not wanting to wait until the next time our shifts overlapped to see him again, I proceeded to drive to the hospital, still drunk, bad idea. I marched into the security office drunk, still wet from the pool wearing Jerry’s shirt and demanded the guard on duty give me “that Lineberry guys phone number”. When he refused, I told him to call him for me, that I had just left him so I knew he’d be awake even though it was around 4:30 in the morning. So the guard called Jerry and told him “some drunk chick was looking for him”. Needless to say I got his digits and they got the drunk girl out of their office.
I went home and called him right away. We talked until long after the sun came up (and the booze wore off) and made plans to see each other that evening. After that, we never spent a day apart. Working overlapping shifts we didn’t get to see each for long periods of time, but every day when Jerry came to work at 2:00 he’d bring a soda to my office and say hi before his shift started and every night when he got off at 10:30 he would come by my house and lie down with me until I fell asleep.
We’ve been together ever since.
We had planned on just flying off to Vegas but decided to have a small wedding for the grandparents and stupid me thought my father might actually want to walk his oldest child down the aisle. He sent a card (which being the hopeful , naive, optomistic daughter I still have) with $50.
We had a small wedding on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1999. Unbeknownst to us at the time, our venue was neighbors with O’Malley’s Irish Pub which led to a lot of Irish Whiskey Shots! It was one hell of a party! People kept dragging us over to the bar for shots because they thought it was so cool to party with a bride on St Patty’s Day! All the bar patrons were great, no one got obnoxious and they didn’t bother our reception.
Jerry and I never got to eat dinner. Every time we got a bite we had to get up for something and the wait staff was too efficient and kept clearing our plates. Our wedding dinner ended up being the Las Palapas drive through on the way home. We were in my little S10 pickup still wearing our wedding garb, and with Jerry in his tux and my petticoat filling up the entire cab of the truck, the cahier actually asked if we had gotten married. One of those moments were you just want to say something like, “No, we ran out of clean clothes, so we pulled these out of storage”. Duh, here’s your sign! At least the manager did give us our food for free!
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