Kaboom! Thwap! Thwap! That’s what I heard as I sat behind the polished walnut steering wheel of a brand new, shiny, black Jaguar XK convertible–an $80,000 car–a car that was not mine. I knew it. Of course, something horrible would happen if I were to get anywhere near a luxury vehicle. What fools would ever trust me with this car? I wondered. The fools at the car dealership who just hired me to sell cars, that’s who.

One of my co-workers, also a recently hired salesperson, Marcelo, sat in the soft, tan-hued leather passenger’s seat beside me. We weren’t even out of the dealership lot, on our way to get familiar with this Jaguar convertible on a test drive, when we heard the horrific kaboom! The car shook. Then another thwap!

The car shook again and again.

I sat in the driver’s seat. Marcelo sat to my right in the passenger seat. After the first Kaboom, I looked over at Marcelo, a Brazilian whose chatter was as fast and plentiful as the Samba in his home country. He just stared straight ahead, eyes wide open and his mouth closed.

“Marcelo,” is all I could say through clenched teeth, too petrified to move even my jaw.

After sitting momentarily frozen, the two of us gathered enough courage to look back through the rear window. We discovered what had happened. The guard at the gate had clumsily released the heavy wooden arm of the gate before we moved the car forward as we were about to leave the lot. The Kaboom we heard was the gate arm slamming down on top of the trunk of the Jaguar.

Marcelo and I both jumped out of the car to survey the damage. After thoroughly examining every inch of the metal exterior, we looked at each other, and laughed hysterically, the way people do when they realize they just escaped something horrible. Incredibly, there was no damage–nothing but a dusty smudge from the padding on the gate arm. After I pushed my heart back down into my chest, I looked over to the guard who was at fault. She just shrugged her shoulders and shuffled back to her booth.

It was only my second day on the job, after two weeks of training. What else could happen in the days to come?

That morning, I had awakened at five am, still in a foggy sleep state. I was so certain I had only dreamed I worked at a car dealership, that I pulled the covers back over my shoulders to return to sleep. I quickly bolted upright when I realized it wasn’t a dream–I did work at a car dealership.

Once I’d wrapped my head around that fact, I crawled out of bed and dressed myself in a gray pencil skirt, black high heels, crisp, white, a fitted, cotton shirt, and a black blazer, complete with my shiny new metal car name tag. I pulled my shoulders back and prepared to be the best car salesperson ever.

After parking, I walked two blocks to the car dealership with a bounce in my step. It began to rain. Prepared, I popped open my red umbrella. This was the new me, the new organized Michele. The old me would never have prepared for rain. As I approached three stairs, I caught the eye of a fellow car salesman. He smiled at me, and said, “Good morning! How are you today?”

I smiled back, about to answer him, when–clunk, clunk, clunk–I slid down three rain-slick stairs. “It is a good morning! I didn’t fall,” I said as I walked away, glancing back to see the car salesman’s mouth hanging open in disbelief. His expression said it all: our dealership hired her?

I entered the luxury showroom where I worked, ready for an exciting new day. Today, I told myself, would be the first day I’d sell a car, as I walked toward my office with chin up and arms swinging confidently.

The receptionist stopped me. “Uh. Your name tag is upside down.”

So began my career in car sales.

****

You can read my book, “Craving Normal,” now. I’m currently working on my second story collection, “How to Stay Broke and Influence Nobody.

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“You’ve begun to bore me,” Ian will dryly say when I’m talking about something he has no interest in. I laugh as he walks away to do things he prefers. I’ve tried this with people. But I don’t have his tact. Ian has a subtly humorous way that makes it funny. I do it, and people get pissed.

While I enjoy his droll humor, he likes my “wrong-ness.” As Ian said to me recently, “You’re the right amount of wrong.”

“That sounds like a compliment.”

“It is.

“I’ll take it.”

This explains why he didn’t flee my antics back in 1987.

We met after John Cusack wouldn’t put up with me a couple of weeks earlier. My roommate, whom I’ll call Norma, tried to fix us up. Cusack was starring in a movie called “Tapeheads.” She was dating one of the movie’s producers and wanted us to double date at the Formosa Cafe, where the Tapeheads crew were meeting for drinks. Well, I had a few cranberry and vodka cocktails and fell asleep (okay, passed out) beside John in a red booth at Damiano’s Pizza on Fairfax.

Two weeks later Norma dragged reluctant-me along to the “Tapeheads” wrap party so she could hang out with her movie producer boyfriend. John Cusack saw me and pivoted in the other direction. Soon after, King, Roscoe in “Tapeheads,” and I began talking. Next thing I know, he’s introducing me to his record producer friend, Ian Gardiner.

Ian knew from the beginning what he was getting into with me. On one of our early dates at a counter-service Mexican restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, we sat down in a booth to eat.

“Take that back,” I teased Ian after he made some silly joke at my expense. I picked up my plastic spoon, packed it with rice, and pulled the spoon bowl back with an index finger as if I were going to catapult rice toward him. “Take it back, or you’ll get a face full of rice,” I joked, not really intending to shoot him with rice because mature people don’t shoot their dates with rice.

My finger slipped. And, as if it were happening in slow motion, like a football flying over a field, I watched my ball of rice skim the top of Ian’s head and land on the head of the woman sitting in the booth behind him.

The woman’s husband stood up, red in the face, and screamed in my general direction, “What the hell is going on here?”

Having already paid for our food at the counter, I grabbed my purse and ran out. Ian ran behind me. We burst through the back door as if we were Bonnie and Clyde running from the scene of a crime.

Quite a few men would have left and never called me again. But Ian kept calling. We laughed for a long time about “the rice incident.”

Things escalated quickly after my roommate’s boyfriend ate my leftover kung pao shrimp. That did it! I packed up my car, strapped my 1950s amoeba-shaped coffee table to my car’s roof, and landed on Ian’s doorstep. Unlike many other people, Ian accepted purloined kung-pao shrimp as an acceptable reason to leave my roommate and move in with him.

Soon, we planned to elope, just the two of us. We made an appointment with a Justice of the Peace for April twenty-sixth, 1989, and reserved a room in a yellow and white Victorian Inn with a view of the Pacific Ocean.

“Who needs the stress of planning a wedding?” Ian said

“Yeah. Why spend months planning a guest list and seating arrangements?” I agreed.

We felt so smart for avoiding the stress of wedding planning.

Two weeks later, we left for Pacific Grove, arriving at the often foggy beach town around two in the afternoon. But that spring day, there was no fog to be found. The sky was turquoise and cloudless. The sun sparkled on the ocean, and the water looked like it had been strewn with diamonds. We couldn’t have planned for better weather. But then, as I said, we really didn’t plan much at all. With only a couple hours before our appointment with the Justice of the Peace, we still didn’t have a wedding ring or a bouquet.

We walked through the coastal town, passing cottages and Victorians until we found an antique shop where Ian bought a delicate gold band engraved with intricate leaves for my wedding ring. After that, we found a florist who put together a bouquet of white and pink roses surrounded by baby’s breath.

With an hour to spare, we returned to our inn with the incredible ocean view. As the golden sun poured through our room’s windows, we dressed and took goofy photos of ourselves; the last images of us as single people.

“And now I’m off to apply the ball and chain,” Ian joked—or maybe he wasn’t joking—as he buttoned his shirt.

Fifteen minutes to four o’clock, we walked along Ocean View Boulevard to Lover’s Point.

Once there, we stood on a cliff above the ocean as a breeze blew through our hair. A serious-looking man in a dark suit, who we realized was the Justice of the Peace, approached us. After quick introductions, he looked around and asked, “Where’s your witness?”

“Witness?” Ian and I asked in unison.

“Yes. You need a witness.”

That might’ve been something he could’ve mentioned when I spoke with him on the phone. I mean, I wasn’t exactly the wedding professional around here. My husband-to-be and I looked at each other. I hadn’t planned much, but a witness would’ve really come in handy at that moment. Our stress-free wedding was just about to cause me to hyperventilate. How did such a perfect day go so horribly wrong? And then, on a nearby path—where no one had been the entire time we stood there—a man in a gray sweat suit jogged into view. Ian looked at me. I looked at Ian.

“Excuse me!” I yelled to the jogger as he came closer.

He jogged over to me, sweating and panting, “Yeah?”

“We’re trying to get married, but we don’t have a witness. Could you be our witness?”

A smile stretched across his red and sweat-beaded face. “Yeah. Sure!”

“Uh . . . and”—I held my camera out to him—“would you mind taking pictures?”

Only after I developed the film, did I see our wedding photos were blurry, badly exposed pictures of our feet. We think it’s hilarious that we have wedding photos of our feet and that we’re together after I annoyed Cusack, allowing King to play Cupid, and that filched kung-pao shrimp changed the trajectory of our history.

We’re two people who happened to find the person who doesn’t just accept the other person’s quirks but adores them, things that make us laugh and bring us joy other people might find odd. But it works for us.

Hey Ian, you knew what you were getting yourself into. Now we’re together 36 years and married 34. That is hilarious.

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I awoke to this thoughtful review of my book, “Craving Normal,” from a man I don’t know, a former hippie.

I appreciate people are getting some laughs–those come from my kooky experiences and my need to highlight the humor of those experiences. But I was trying to make some points. This man heard me. I especially appreciate his comments as he comes from the generation I lived in the shadow of and wanted to be heard by.

His review:

Also, while the focus of my stories occur during a specific time, I’d like to think some of the feelings (not fitting in, parental/childhood issues, cultural changes, school issues) can be relatable even to those who weren’t raised in the same era I was.

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