How I Met My Wife

The Motorcycle, The Elks Club, the Mortician and Me

How I Met My Wife

One of the reasons I believe people are interested in how Brenda and I met is that my wife is native Irish, Dublin born, with a lovely Irish lilt in her voice, and she definitely carries the culture in her bones.

I always start the story by listing the elements that comprised a meeting of souls I had no way of anticipating. The story involves my brother who was a motorcycle gang member, a motorcycle accident, the Elks Club, Octoberfest, a dance band, a mortician, and my family.

One late summer day in 1981, my brother was driving his motorcycle with fellow members of the outlaw Vagos gang, a group fashioned after the Hells Angels. They were a gang of hard drinkers, dope dealers and thieves. The FBI identified them as an "organized crime syndicate." As the group of riders took the off-ramp from the San Gabriel Freeway in Pico Rivera, my brother failed to see the stopped cars, and rear ended one, sending him flying through air and landing on his helmetless head. I got the call at my house in Oakland from my distraught mother that my brother was in a coma, and I should come immediately. 

I left for LA that same day and spent several months traveling back and forth to support my parents in their grief. Otherwise I had no desire to go back to LA except to see my parents. We spent many anguished hours in the hospital, with friends of my parents and members of the gang. I met one of my brother's fellow gang members, Chainsaw, and his woman, Country. Chainsaw was a classic biker type -- with grungy clothes, a big beard and stringy hair, leather and tattoos. Country was also a classic, good looking and sexy in a hard bitten, hard talking kind of way. As we talked quietly and companionably in the hospital waiting room, Chainsaw disclosed he had been in prison and had been out for several years. I offered him a cigarette, but he told me he'd given them up in prison. He also calmly disclosed that he was due to appear in court the next day to be tried for a murder he claimed he didn't commit. I saw a news article later reporting that he was found guilty and sent back to the pen. These were my brother's friends. 

My brother persisted in the coma, and the doctor described the extensive cone of brain damage radiating from the wound, giving us little hope that he would ever recover. My parents were despondent to have lost a son, but in a way they had already lost him to a life of crime. He was in the coma for nine years before dying. 

On one visit weeks after the accident, while we still held hope that he might recover, my sister Pat asked me if I wanted to go the Elks Club Octoberfest dinner.  I asked my sister if there would be any eligible women at the festivities. She said, "Oh yes, but they'll all be over 65." I was 39, single and out of the market for a partner or dating, having had a string of short, failed relationships. But I decided to go. The only reason she was going at all was because her husband, John, was a mortician and manager of the mortuary at the Oakgrove cemetery in Glendora, and the Elks Club supplied a steady stream of customers.

The Monrovia (CA) Elks Club building, like many social/charitable clubs, has a large plain hall, a well-stocked bar with bartender, a stage and a kitchen. The cook had prepared a fine Octoberfest meal of Jaegerschnitzel and German potato salad, but the beer was unfortunately Budweiser. The hall was set in a festive German theme for at least a hundred diners, but only about 25 people showed up. The little dance band of piano, bass, guitar and singer, old guys with string ties and shiny suites, played some standards in a very ordinary way which only added to the disheartened feel of the festivities, with so few people in attendance. The band's attempt at a few polka numbers fell pretty flat. The dance band music was not very danceable. However, the food was excellent. I, along with my sister and brother-in-law and my father, had a good feast.

But I was getting restless and bored, and asked if we could please leave. But we didn't. John the mortician was a regular at Elks events, and was very sociable. He was my sisters second marriage, and I'd gotten to know him a little. He'd given me a tour of the mortuary, shown me several bodies he was working on. For me, seeing bodies laid out on metal tables was a little disconcerting. John was a heavy drinker, and obsessive about everything being clean and orderly. I always attached that trait to his job of handling cadavers. 

Two waitresses served the little crowd of diners and John knew them both by name from previous events. As one of the waitresses cleared dishes, John the mortician and sociable guy that he was, suggested to the waitress and me, that we dance. The waitress, wearing a little party hat like a german mountaineering hat, seemed embarrasses and said she couldn't do that, she was working. I wanted to crawl in a hole, although I did take note of her slender figure and pretty face. After she left, I again broached the subject of leaving, but again, no takers. So we drank and talked. The dance band played on:  tunes like Come Fly Away With Me, Blue Velvet, Twist, Queen of the Hop. Nobody danced and few listened. 

Finally after one more futile attempt to leave, I noticed that the waitress who wouldn't dance was sitting at the bar, apparently off work. What the hell, I thought, it's boring sitting here, so I'll go asked her to dance now that she's off. Screwing up my courage, I went to the bar and asked for a drink, sitting down next to the waitress. After making some conversation, I asked her to dance, but she said, "No, I wouldn't dance to that band, their terrible, but I know a good place not to far that has good music." 

So off I went with Brenda in her car, telling my family I'd be home later. Brenda and I danced the evening away, even though I lacked much dancing ability, at a country and western bar. We talked the usual where we were from, worked, lived, and I was smitten by her. She was lively, talkative and good looking. We enjoyed each other, I think I was falling hard even in those first few hours. The next day, a Saturday, we met again. That day in November I fell in love with the Irish lass with the lilting voice. 

After one divorce and years of being alone, depressed at times, fairly aimless in my life, these strange confluence of events brought me to the most important event and transition ever, allowing me to grow up, commit to another soul, and experience life in a new and profound way

We carried on a long distance romance, Oakland and Pasadena, for nine months, and got married by a guy in a green suit at the marriage commission in Las Vegas, on our way for a camping trip in the Southwest.  All this happened because of my brother's misfortune and our introduction by a mortician at the Elks Club Octoberfest.