Nurse the Hate: Hate Florida Weddings

Out of nowhere I was reminded of a crazy story yesterday that may or may not be my memory combining 2 crazy stories. It actually is a better story if it is all becomes the same story, so I'll present it here as such. Let's say there is a guy named Mike. Nice kid that is fresh out of college. He leaves his small Midwestern college town after graduation to go to Florida. He has no real plan except trying to stay out of the cold, and maybe figuring out what to do with his apparently useless college degree.

Mike gets a job bartending at one of those shitty little Florida beach towns. It's the kind of place where there are two "fresh seafood" restaurants that both serve everything battered and deep fried for the few tourists that somehow stray into town. This is the kind of place where the same families have run the same old "rip the tourists off" businesses for a couple generations. Mike meets a girl that is the daughter of a real Florida blue blood. Her father owns The Car Dealership, and is a real player in town. Sponsors a little league team, and has a full page ad in the high school football program. He's a "big deal".

Mike and the girl have a whirlwind romance. Mike is a pretty charming guy, so it's easy to see why he and the girl became engaged so quickly. Pretty soon, this lower income Midwestern kid is driving around in a loaner Audi from the dealership, and is on the fast track to be an assistant manager at Dad's dealership. Dad wants to make sure his daughter's husband is making enough to keep his girl comfortable, and besides, he likes the kid. Sure, he's paying for most of the condo they are living in, but after a few months, they'll be able to pay him back. Mike made his daughter happy, and if his daughter is happy then he's happy.

Mike's friends are all pretty surprised to get the wedding invitations. Hell, most of them didn't even know he had a girlfriend. Whatever the circumstances, this was going to be a weekend down in Florida and it sounded like it was going to be a pretty plush affair. All the guys from the old fraternity head on down from Ohio, and all bring their various girlfriends/wives for the whole weekend of rehearsal dinner at the boat club and wedding/reception the next day at the country club.

Most of the guys hadn't seen each other since graduation a couple years ago, and certainly they ALL hadn't been together since college. The guys hit the bar hard during "cocktail hour", and well into dinner. Mike and his lovely fiance look great together, and a few people make nice speeches. Then the dinner breaks apart into the post-dinner heavy drinking. The guys are doing shots at the bar. Then some more shots. What happens next becomes a great controversy in various social circles for years.

Someone at the bar asks, "Where is Mike?". Nobody seems to know, but there was definitely some chuckling among the fraternity crowd. Unfortunately for Mike, a small search party was dispatched to find him. They found him. He was making out with a server from the dinner in the parking lot. The fiance was obviously not pleased. Her brother wasn't either, as I believe he delivered to Mike what one would call "an asskicking" in the parking lot in front of most of the guests. In a single moment, Mike had totally torched it all. Instantly he had no fiance, no car, no place to live, and no job. Poof.

Most of the guys from the fraternity sort of hung around town the next day after the wedding had been cancelled. As you can imagine, there was plenty of "Postgame Show" discussing what the hell happened. Turned out Mike had never even met the server girl before that night. The guys stopped by his place to give him a pep talk, and helped Mike move his shit out into a trailer. The following day, Mike had to drive the trailer with all his stuff in it back to Ohio with the ex-fiance's mother riding shotgun. (Yes, you read that correctly. As he had no money or car, someone would have to take the car and empty trailer back to Florida. Wow, that must have been a really long drive. What do you do, talk it out with Mom, or just listen to oldies on the radio? Somehow the Isley Brothers "Shout" might not have been the song you wanted to hear right then.)

The real interesting part of the story is that Mike and the server get back in touch somehow. He can't stop thinking about her, and calls the restaurant to find her. They're now married and have a kid named Dylan or Radley or something. Crazy, isn't it? Depending on how you tell the story, you have a great chick flick (from the waitress point of view) or a boozy black comedy misadventure (from Mike's point of view). If you do the film like the chick flick version, Mike is a guy played by Matthew McConaughey that falls madly in love with waitress Kate Hudson and throws all caution to the wind for romance. In the boozy misadventure version (played by Ben Stiller no doubt), Mike is a guy that apparently loses it all but in a tacked on Hollywood ending gets the smiling Jennifer Aniston waitress. It's probably a 1960s French film if told from the jilted fiance's point of view, but let's not dwell on that.