the bride of frankenstein

At work on Friday night, I had a fucking pounding headache. The pounding part was ever amplified by the fact that unless I’m hung-over, I don’t usually get headaches. So I’m not used to the feeling of a little man on cocaine running around inside my skull, pounding on the inner walls of my brain with a sledgehammer like an ADHD child on a kilo of meth. Yeah, it hurt.

“Can you go down to the ladies room and see what’s going on?”

I looked up into the face of my manager. The entire night I had been awash in a sea of “Can you do this?” “Can you do that?” so I gave him a look like he had just asked me to extend my shift an extra 14 hours.

He sensed my pain. “Please?” he added. He was being sincere, so down I went.

My judgment was clouded from my headache, so I immediately pictured a group of women all partaking in a drug buffet in one of the stalls. (And had I still been working in South Beach, that’s probably what would have been going on.) My plan of action was to march me and my headache all authoritative-like and threaten to call the cops, unless they shared. After I had consumed every drug known to man, I’d just float home, having successfully killed that asshole with the sledgehammer in my brain.

I was confronted with something very different.

Walking down the dark stairs to the restaurant’s bathroom, you get the feeling of walking into the basement of a horror movie. The bathroom is quiet and barely lit by an overhead light, while candles eerily flicker in the corner. When i opened the door, I found a woman standing in one of the stalls. She was overweight, some sort of foreign, with an unbuttoned shirt, droopy eyes, and an agape mouth. There was probably a little drool there too, but me and sledgehammer man agreed that we weren’t about to get close enough to investigate.

Eyes practically rolling into the back of her head, she looked up at me and with a deep, almost demon-like voice asked, “Where are my pants?”

Sledgehammer man and I looked down further, and asked ourselves the same question. Because, good fucking god! Where were this woman’s pants?!

“I can’t find my pants.”

Now, one’s first guess would likely be that she was really – I mean like 87 tequila shots – drunk. But as I stood there in the dark quiet bathroom and watched the candles flicker in her bloodshot eyes, I thought I was starting into the possessed face of Damien’s much older sister.

She reached a shaking finger towards me and pointed to the pants I was wearing. “You. You have pants. Give me yours. Give me your pants!”

Me being 5’9” and 130 pounds (187 if you added the sledgehammer) and her at 5’ 2"ish and probably well over 160, I wanted to state the obvious: “My pants would only fit around one of your toes.” But given the fact that she was standing in the stall of a fine dining establishment’s restroom, inquiring the whereabouts of said missing pants, I don’t think this woman could comprehend the concept of being a fat fucking bitch.

Like a demon after my soul she started to stagger towards me and slowly chase me out of the restroom.

“Give me your pants! Give me your pants!”

I suddenly felt like I was a scared-to-fucking-death little kid in a haunted house, running from a ghoulish skeleton, who was inching its fingers toward me with a greedy appetite. So me and my pants hauled ass up the stairs back to the bustle of the Friday night restaurant crowd, safe from the monster in the bathroom stall.

“A!” I called to my manager, breathless. “A, we’ve got a…a…a ‘situation’ in the ladies room. Woman…no pants…drunk…”

She gave me a puzzled look. Probably cause I looked like I had just seen a ghost.

“Just go down there and check it out.”

My headache now miraculously gone, I walked out of the kitchen to experience the comfort of being surrounded by tables of fully dressed non-ghost like people. And I walked out just in time. Because standing in the back of the restaurant, I had a great seat to the show.

The woman had decided it was time to leave the restroom and join the rest of us. And with the speed of a zombie, she sloooowly and pantslessly walked down the middle isle of the restaurant and out the door with all eyes and snickers on her. Since staring at cellulite isn’t much of an aperitif, the management had badly wanted this situation contained. But there was nothing they could do now but ogle and giggle at the fat lady in her granny panties as she walked down the isle. In the spirit of the procession, I thought about humming a little ‘Here comes the Bride’ to the tune of her walk. It would have fit perfectly. Except for one difference. She wasn’t carrying a bouquet. She was carrying her skirt.