Biting the Bullet (Part II)

Well, how do I put this? Sigh.

Dressing up as a slightly dodgy-looking feminist militia was as far as we got. The gun club wouldn’t accept a foreign passport as a valid means of identification. And Gary on the desk said he had no other way of proving I wasn’t an ‘undesirable’. I told him I was highly desirable and that he could check for himself, but he wasn’t for turning. Gary was also unable to tell me whether Ireland was part of the Axis of Evil, as he didn’t have a current list, but he said he couldn’t rule it out. And, to be honest, neither could I, because it had never occurred to me to check. Indeed, I still haven’t.

As a consolation prize, I was told I could watch The green-carded Lovely C fire off a few rounds from a safe distance (safe for them, I reckoned, as opposed to safe for me), but she, understandably, had been more interested in watching me accidentally shoot an instructor than shredding a paper target I thought looked suspiciously like Maximus without the hair.

This was a darn shame, I thought, as how often does a woman have an opportunity to eviscerate a life-sized silhouette of her other half, then keep it tucked away at the back of the wardrobe for that one occasion on which she can say: “You did what? Okay. Let’s look at the kind of damage I can do to you in a matter of seconds and talk this through.” But, hey.

So, we gave up and went for Chinese food and cocktails instead.

Locked and loaded

In the end, it was probably just as well, as my US visa application form later asked if I had had any specialist firearms training and I was in the happy position of being able to report that I’d never even shot tequila, let alone a bullet. I assume this is the sole reason that this marvellous country is now allowing me to enter as a legal alien to take up a real job, as opposed to signing me up for freelance sniper duty in Albania. And I must say, the Chinese margaritas were pretty good too.

All this meant in terms of my bid to do something constructive in California, though, was that it was back to the drawing board, yet again. And at this stage, the drawing board was looking pretty full. I couldn’t learn to drive. I couldn’t learn to shoot. I couldn’t be bothered to stalk the governor. The Iron Man museum was about as scintillating as roadkill and my Church of the Chocolate Nut Martini had yet to receive its first donation. What’s more, I was starting to run out of time.

Thankfully, I still had four glorious days in Hawaii to look forward to. Where better to ponder my state of inertia than face down in the middle of the Pacific with a snorkel up my nose, or wherever you put it. Even better, I’d convinced my extraordinary friends, Maximus, The Lovely C and Le Grand Belge, to tag along for the ride as a kind of belated bachelor-ette-stag-hen thingy for the wily Walloon, who had managed to coerce someone into marrying him the previous December. The lucky lady, at this point, was still pondering said luck in Belgium, at what we canny single folk call “a safe distance”. So, one word: party.

The best laid plans ...

We were due to fly out on the Thursday morning and back overnight on the Sunday. And as I was scheduled to return home just a day later, we decided to throw a little going-away bash for the rest of the crew on the Tuesday evening prior to our departure. This basically meant that Maximus would do manly things at the barbeque while the rest of us depleted his wine stock. Perfect.

I should add that we had a pretty slick catering operation going during my stay. I’d pootle away many a happy hour by ploughing through, say, a pictureless Greek cookbook written in Swedish, then conjure up an approximation of what I thought it might or might not be in a quantity fit for a military campaign. The Crew would arrive back from work and proceed to eat this concoction for about three days and, bless them, even make appreciative noises. Eventually, the remnants would disappear into the unfathomable freezer to come back and haunt them on those days when I was missing in action and they could microwave it into tasty oblivion.

So, I spent the afternoon throwing together the makings of side dishes to make Nigella wince, then parked myself on the terrace with Le Grand Belge and a glass of wine to mull the meaning of life and the metaphysics of being a global bum, while Maximus lugged around bags of charcoal and waved very big pronged instruments in our general direction to emphasise his culinary machismo.

It was at this point that the Swedish chef and his damsel decided to drop the bombshell: “You know, we were thinking we might get married.”

Yeah, right.

“In Hawaii.”

Sure.

“On Friday.”

Well, paint me blue and call me Mary. Things were about to get interesting.


© Poilin Breathnach 2009