[pause for applause]
by Dominic Hilton
July 2024
A masterclass in speech-making, by the Best Man. In the World.
My Lords, Ladies and... the rest of you,
[clear throat. Crack neck, carefully. Also, knuckles. Roll shoulders. Loosen belt]
Excuse me while I whip this out.
[whip twelve-inch scroll (wrapped in tin foil?) out of your (unzipped?) fly. Ignore admiring gasps/screams. Unroll scroll. Hold it in front of you, ready to read]
Allow me to introduce myself—on the off chance that anyone here hasn’t seen the private, homemade videos that some bastard…
[spin sharply on heel, glare angrily at groom]
… posted to PornHub.
My name is YOUR NAME, and I’m the Best Man.
In the world.
I know. Settle down. I’m sure that probably…
[place scroll on lectern, do air quotes with fingers]
… “sounds”…
[pick up scroll, right way up]
…conceited. But go ahead, ask around.
[pause. shout]
GO ON!!
[wait while guests ask around. Shout again]
IT’S NO USE HOLDING IT AGAINST ME!!
[pause. Lick lips. Waggle eyebrows]
… as the GROOM’S MUM said to me last night!
[soak in sustained laughter. Violently thrust hips back and forth, re-enacting previous night’s rancid sex marathon with groom’s mum. Make animal noises as you thrust hips. Finish with O face. Get breath back]
What can I say? I can’t help being universally revered, like some sort of muscular, vengeful god. Or one of those golden fertility idols. Have you see those things? With the giant hard-ons?
[scan room over top of scroll]
I see you asking, with your eyes. And the answer is no, ladies—and you in the kilt—I am not married.
[place scroll on lectern. Waft hand towards your assigned table]
And don’t worry about my date: the blonde, with the implants. She’s a professional.
[off their reaction]
What? You think talent like that comes to a wedding like this for free?! Look at the underpinnings on that thing!
[gesticulate]
Krystal, honey, hitch up your dress a little—what there is of it, at least. Ha ha! Am I right? That’s it, don’t be shy. There you go. Show these slobbering peasants what I mean. Oh, look at that: she’s not wearing any underwear! I guess that’s my fault. Ha ha! We screwed in the limo on our way here. Twice. Cost me a small fortune, of course. Plus, a pair of ripe Cubans—which as you can see, she’s still wearing.
Alright, that’s enough. Everyone get a good gander? You enjoyed that part, didn’t you? You filthy perverts!
[return to scroll]
My point being, once I’m done up here, entertaining you…
[lower scroll, frowning dangerously]
… for free…
[raise scroll, shaking head]
… please form an orderly queue. Nobody likes a stampede.
And while we’re on the subject, might I direct your attention away from Krystal’s legs and towards the venue’s important fire safety codes, which I’ve been asked to remind you must be adhered to at all times, on pain of death. It’s always possible that somebody—I’m not saying who—decides they’ve had way more than they can stand of this two-bit circus and torches this dump before driving off in my car, with my prozzie, and also maybe you.
[place scroll on lectern. Point at hottest woman in room, if there is one. Then suavely remove thick stack of business cards from jacket pocket; wave them around, sling a few into the audience]
I brought business cards with my new phone number on them. Also, my email address—in case you haven’t got a tongue.
[pretend to think]
Although, come to think of it, if you haven’t…
[jazz hands]
… I really wouldn’t bother.
[off audience murmurs of approval]
To be clear, as great as it would be for you—
[point at random hot girl, grin toothily]
especially you—I’m not looking for a wife. Not one of my own, anyway.
[turn to bob eyebrows at bride. Wink. Lick lips?]
And frankly, after witnessing today’s embarrassing debacle, I can’t imagine anything worse than getting married—can you?! Besides, as you’ll have heard, or more likely seen on Pornhub, I’m more of a…
[stare off into space, pretending this time to think really deeply]
… well, a casual, hog-wild-sex kind of guy, is I guess how you’d describe me. Right, Krystal? Yeah, I definitely like to keep things real casual. And hog-wild. I won’t even ask your name, let alone forget it the next morning, while you’re in your kitchen, nude, making me a stack of blueberry pancakes.
In short, I don’t care what your name is. Who are you anyway? And why are you emailing me?
[sigh heavily, blowing out air so that your lips wobble and make that funny fart sound]
A-n-y-w-a-y… seeing as how this HIDEOUS FIASCO is a wedding…
[roll eyes; look utterly put out as you pick up scroll and disappear once more behind it]
… there are, sadly, certain “traditions” to be upheld. For some reason it is now incumbent upon me—the Best Man. In the World—to say one or two honest words about the groom and that morning in Cairo when I caught him “milking” those camels.
Oh, what a day that was! I recall creeping up behind him, making delicate toeprints in the sand, before tapping him tenderly on the shoulder. He whirled round to face me with all the force of a diseased Tasmanian Devil. With a sticky hand clasped to his breast, he proceeded to gasp through his shrubbery, managing to stutter something pitiful along the lines of, “I thought we—er—we would need some—er—refreshment… you know, for our… erm… treacherous exploratory sojourn into the desert?”
[read ahead, then place scroll back on lectern]
I punched a hand on my hip, just like this, and said…
[act real sassy here]
"What treacherous exploratory sojourn into the desert?” In exactly that voice.
[pick up scroll and proceed with true story]
He looked mortified—I mean, who wouldn’t?!?—but eventually, after weeping like a hag mother over her son’s charred, lifeless body, and begging me to never ever share the photos we’ve all seen, he shook it off and confessed to possessing a feeble, near imbecilic mind, as well as a perverse attraction to all four-legged beasts. I nodded at him in a way that the hopeless thicko somehow interpreted as sympathetic, then we linked arms and skipped friskily over to the old quarter, or whatever they call Cairo’s red-light district, where we smoked a highly-dressed and splendidly-flavoursome hookah.
[stare wistfully over the top of the scroll and above everyone’s heads. If you can, adopt a warm, nostalgic smile]
That’s one of the things you should know about us: we always share hookahs, dressed or otherwise. Come to think of it, our hookah-sharing one of the things I love most about our groom. That and his shapely thighs.
[look back down]
Or thigh.
[if possible, tug at lips. Otherwise, just chew at them, or something]
I’m not sure, to be honest, that I can be said to “love” his left thigh. There’s something not quite right about it. Have you noticed? Take a look at it later, when he’s blacked out. He’ll be glad to show you.
So anyway, when he first told me he was going to marry…
[pretend to look up name, unroll scroll to full capacity, then roll it back up to current place]
… BRIDE’S NAME, naturally I was shocked. “SINCE FUCKING WHEN?!” I screamed, threatening to disembowel his entire family after castrating his dog with my teeth. “Since, like—er—yesterday?” he mumbled, adding a loud and sudden “ARGH!!” as if he’d immediately regretted telling me the truth.
It was unsettling, but I composed myself in that famously regal way of mine and said in effulgent tones that his account of events sounded mighty strange to my widely celebrated ears, as yesterday he had asked me to marry him. His garbled retort, which I recorded for legal reasons, went as so: “Well, ahem, yeah, sure—but that was AT LEAST HALF A MINUTE before I agreed to marry her!”
I said, “You mean thirty seconds?”
There was a long and awkward pause before, finally, he stopped counting his fingers and confirmed my calculation.
We squabbled a bit after that, as I told him I’d never heard anyone refer to thirty seconds as half a minute before, adding that I thought it was a deeply peculiar way to express oneself. “Borderline special needs, if you ask me,” is what I said. He disputed this reasonable suggestion with an unnecessary wealth of delinquent profanities, then eventually I asked him to clarify the timings of his shock engagement for my memoirs, and he went on.
[place scroll on lectern. Remove intellectual-style spectacles from jacket pocket and slip onto face. Pick up scroll again and read so closely that your nose is touching the parchment. Maybe even make nose visible from the other side of parchment. Or even punch nose through parchment. Assess mood of room and improvise]
“It’s simple enough, you shapely, musclebound Adonis!” he screeched. “BRIDE’S NAME woke me up, handed me a cup of lukewarm tea, or some bilge, then before I’d even had time to pacify my morning glory, out of nowhere she asked me to marry her! I of course spilt half my tea all over my favourite flowered nightgown—the one that Mother lovingly hand-stitched for me, with the gazanias—then bunged the dregs into BRIDE’s face, before requesting she give me a minute or two to think things over. She stormed out of the room like a 25,000-pound pregnant elephant, and I scrambled desperately for my phone, effing and blinding like a squaddie. I fired you that misspelled text message begging you to marry me, again. Then, when you told me to go rot in Hell, again, I fell out of bed, clambered to my feet, and sloped towards the kitchen where, broken-hearted, I re-boiled the kettle and accepted BRIDE’s proposal, because, you know, I was feeling rejected and why the hell not?”
[place scroll back on lectern. Remove spectacles, smiling. Pick up scroll. Resume]
“You thought it would spite me?” I asked, glowing inside.
“Yes!” he squealed, like a schoolgirl who’d seen a mouse. “I wanted to make you jealous, didn’t I!” His breathing grew louder as he contemplated my unrivalled beauty, then he said, “Did I?”
“Did you what?” I asked, clipping my fingernails.
“DID I MAKE YOU JEALOUS?!” he bellowed.
I believe I scoffed as loudly as I’ve ever scoffed. Kind of like this.
[scoff loudly for the guests]
“Jealous?!?” I guffawed. “Me? Jealous of you?!? As if!!! And anyway, I think you might mean ‘envious’.”
He sounded disappointed, deflated even, like all vestiges of life spirit had whistled plaintively out of his orifices. So, being the sensitive guy that I am, I backtracked a little, saying, “I tell you what would make me envious, though: if you wrote a book that sold tens of millions of copies and you had a hundred million dollars in the bank and lived in a sprawling mansion with a hareem of supermodels and a fleet of supercars.”
He laughed uncontrollably for a whole minute. We both did. Then he said, “Like I’d ever write a book!”
Well, that did it. As you can imagine, we laughed and laughed together for no small amount of time, only stopping at intervals to dry our gushing eyes. I mean, the idea was just so utterly absurd. Later, I realised that I’d gotten caught up in the moment, carried away, out of hand, worked up and, to all intents and purposes, mentally spasmodic. But really, who could blame me? I mean, just think of it. Him! Write a book!
[place scroll on lectern. Re-enact wiping away tears of laughter. Pick up scroll. Resume]
The first time GROOM’S NAME asked me to marry him we were visiting an amusement park. I remember we were sat side-by-side on one of those popular log rides that plunge into a messy splash, which I suggested was germane, in a poetic sort of way, and he insisted was…
[place scroll on lectern. Slip spectacles back onto face. Pick up scroll. Resume]
… “gags."
[place scroll on lectern. Remove spectacles. Pick up scroll. Resume]
We’d reached the largest drop in the log ride when, as is the tradition, your log squeezes out of a narrow tunnel and rapidly drops into a waiting pool of water, and you take the opportunity to pose for a once-in-a-lifetime photograph with your arms in the air, or a funny look on your face. I pulled a really funny face, like this…
[lower scroll. Show guests “funny face”. Raise scroll. Resume]
… but GROOM produced a sign he’d made earlier from between his legs and held it above his head.
When the ride was over and we were both soaked to the skin and I was looking really sexy and buff we went over to the little wooden booth where a disgusting little fat man was flogging the souvenir photographs from the log plunge. I stared at ours, squinting handsomely as I tried to read GROOM’s sign. It read, "WILL YOU MARRY NE?"
“Ne?” says I, baffled. “Who’s Ne? And why do you want to marry her/him/them/other?”
I turned around to find GROOM on one knee, which I mistakenly interpreted as him either making a pun on "Ne" or wringing the water out of his socks. “It says ‘Me’!” he claimed stoutly.
I scoffed another of my legendary scoffs and turned to the photograph. “Does that look like an M to you?!” I yelled, pointing.
“M-my pen slipped!” GROOM cried. “It’s not easy making a good waterproof sign, you know?”
I told him it was too easy to make a sign, waterproof or otherwise, and reminded him of the large and colourful placards we’d made for that historic march on Parliament, demanding a higher standard of free wine at London book launch parties.
[stare wistfully out of the nearest window]
It rained that day, too.
GROOM’S NAME now curled into the foetal position and started to wail. A large crowd gathered around us, mistaking us for amusement park entertainers. They whooped and guffawed and applauded resoundingly every time I punted GROOM in the kidneys with the special hard-toed shoes I'd worn in anticipation of this entirely predictable turn of events. After a good half an hour—I mean… thirty minutes—of sustained, relentless slaughter, during which the crowd swelled and several home movies were recorded for posterity, GROOM caved, admitting with a whimper that our signs on that trailblazing march had been of a superior standard to the other guy’s.
So, I won that round!
[place scroll on lectern. Swig generously from personal bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne someone has brought you. Wipe lips on sleeve. Pick up scroll. Resume]
GROOM’S FULL NAME INCLUDING EMBARRASSING MIDDLE NAMES was born in a stable somewhere in BACKWARDS RURAL COUNTY in an unspecified year. It has been said that he was born fully bearded, to a virgin, but I’ve looked into it, and can confirm these rumours to be entirely false. What I do know, from close study of his family’s denture records, is that by age fourteen he was able to read comic books unaided, and by age eighteen was almost able to speak in fully formed sentences littered with swear words, like “twanger”.
For this, and his angelic singing buttocks, he was sent up to PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITY where he spent three glorious years as a janitor, cleaning my gold-plated latrine. That’s where we met, him with his head in my toilet bowl, earning thirty British pence a day, and me beating him with champagne bottles that my vast circle of upper-class friends and I had emptied while streaking naked across quads with parsnips rammed up our bottoms and desecrating gargoyles amid incessant toasting to the Queen and all that sort of everyday PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITY stuff you’ve no doubt heard about and spent your miserable lives envying.
[look momentarily uncertain]
Or being jealous of.
Halcyon days they were! I remember one particular occasion, when I was dining in typically grand fashion with my fellow members of the elite Ballbag Club, and GROOM’S NAME was brought to our table like a suckling pig, an apple stuffed in his mouth, and what I suppose was a sprig of wild thyme poking out of his other end. How we whooped and cheered at his entrance! And his unfortunate exit.
[cough in a posh sort of way]
I am, of course, not at liberty to discuss with the likes of you lot the gruesome details of what occurred that dark and fateful night, which is fine as I can’t remember anything, except that a lot of vintage port was consumed, much of it spilt down our traditional white tie, and GROOM’S NAME was hospitalised, right before we trashed the private room we’d hired from the restaurant we then burned down.
As you may have heard, it was kind of my fault when he got canned from his janitorial position. I’d arrived home one morning from yet another depraved, clergy-filled orgy at PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITY COLLEGE to find GROOM perched on my golden toilet—the very same golden toilet he was supposed to be polishing! Enraged, I flogged him to within an inch of his life with one of my many double-ended hunting crops, then made him clean my toothbrush with the toilet. (That confused him!) He begged for mercy, as per, promising to do better or try harder next time, or something similarly cloying and pathetic. “Do I look like a man to be trifled with?” I said, before developing a sudden and inexplicable craving for trifle, and demanding he fetch me some, booting him in the nose with my heel for good measure. He disappeared to the mess, then crawled back with the trifle, which I enjoyed immensely, after which I reached for my red telephone and woke the Dean from what he pretended was a deep sleep. “That GROOM boy has been using my crapper!” I exclaimed. “I demand that you fire him NOW! If you refuse to obey me, I won’t take your wife out on any more romantic punts so that you can be alone with the Provost! Plus, I’ll have you killed by my Uncle Salvo, who’s connected.” (This last part just came to me. I don’t have an Uncle Salvo. And he’s not connected to anything.)
The Dean had no choice but to meet my demands and GROOM was hurled by giant wooden slingshot into the WELL-KNOWN RIVER (an ancient PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITY tradition). When he didn’t drown, he was granted leniency, which is a word they use at PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITY to mean having your skull cracked open by rowing oars. And I don’t mean the women’s crew—ha ha!
I’m told he somehow survived and returned to his native BACKWARDS RURAL COUNTY, where he became a drunken tramp who penned unreadable poetry about my eyes. Have you read any of it? Oh no, I forgot—it’s unreadable!
According to the court records, it was while he was begging for change and spewing into his vile facial foliage in a hedgerow in a rancid country lane somewhere that GROOM was press-ganged into the army. When he woke up, two days later, covered in vomit and loose coinage, he asked the shadowy figure looming over him what planet he was on and why it was so arid (or maybe he used a similar word, like ‘dusty’). “You’re in NOTORIOUS EASTERN HELL-HOLE, son!” came a booming Geordie voice. And that’s when GROOM’S NAME realised: he’d been press-ganged into the Army and been mobilised against his will to a place called NOTORIOUS EASTERN HELL-HOLE NAME! To maintain his honour, he tried to shoot himself, but he didn’t have a gun, and besides the gun he didn’t have wasn’t loaded because of the first shoot policy in the British Armed Forces, which states that when you are fired upon by marauding maniacs you first have to ask the King/Queen for permission to load your weapon, and if he/she’s sleeping, or busy opening a hospital or consecrating a ship or something, well, tough luck, you just have to let your brains get blown out by maniacal marauders.
Anyway, contrary to his own rambling fireside stretchers, in which he claims to have routinely displayed the sort of devil-may-care heroism one might expect from the lovechild of Beau Geste and Mr Midshipman Hornblower, in fact, Private GROOM’s tour in NOTORIOUS EASTERN HELL-HOLE mostly involved cleaning latrines—though, to be fair, sometimes they were officers’ latrines, which tended to be cleaner, and better smelling. It was in HELL-HOLE, I believe, that he met the mysterious Asmaan, a giant hulk of a warrior who’d disguised himself as a dancing girl from one of the local tribes. According to established local folklore, GROOM and Asmaan are said to have spent countless romantic hours together, strolling the sand dunes, not listening to music, and fumbling awkwardly under each other’s burkhas. When GROOM was dishonourably discharged for molesting a stableful of mountain goats, Asmaan was rumoured to have taken her own life by jumping into a fire then blowing herself up with an IED. But who cares about that? GROOM’S NAME was back home! It was a fresh start, and his parents even agreed to pay for electroshock therapy for his dishonourable discharging, which—as BRIDE’S NAME posted on Facebook the other day—has been successfully reduced by something in the region of thirty per cent!
[pause for unabated applause. Resume if applause abates]
GROOM’S NAME and I were reunited one day in St. James’s, when I tripped over him as he was attempting to garner sympathy and money out of charitable, hard-working Londoners by pretending to have been dismembered by a BAD GUYS FROM NOTORIOUS EASTERN HELL-HOLE cannonball. I immediately reported him to the Metropolitan police, who after a thorough and humiliating public strip search involving rubber truncheons, discovered that, contrary to his loud and bogus claims, GROOM was still in possession of both arms and legs. An angry mob quickly gathered around him, as they always do in these situations, and demanded he refund their spare change as they attempted to string him up from the flagpole outside my club. I managed to capture the entire episode on my iPhone while munching on my pain au chocolat, which miraculously was still warm and delightfully buttery.
His parents bailed him out of jail, and two months later he came looking for me again, this time at my place of work. How he got through security I’ll never know. The usual traffic in sexual favours, I’d imagine. Anyway, there I was, oiling up the dancing girls, when he burst into the dressing room with all the dignity of a wailing dervish, crumpled to my feet, and in a woeful mishmash of iambic and dactylic pentameters attempted to declare what I assume was his undying love. I instinctively started stomping on his head, but as luck would have it, the strippers all remembered their self-defence training and proceeded to ply this unwanted backstage intruder with pepper spray and mace and something else that made him roll around the floor screaming at everybody that his skin was burning. Then one of the girls—Krystal I think it was, coincidentally enough; though it’s hard to tell them apart when they’re naked—shot him. At first, I thought he was dead, and resumed my oiling routine. But then Krystal said it was merely a stun gun, and that the only chances of his dying were either of a heart attack—which I did wonder about as his diet consists mostly of TRAIN-STATION-TYPE FAST FOOD OUTLET burgers and FAMOUSLY MANKY CHAIN PUB’s fish and chips—or choking on his own vomit, which I considered unlikely as he’d survived that thousands of times before.
GROOM wrote to me ad nauseam from his hospital bed, though I never got around to actually opening the letters as I was really busy that year. And it wasn’t until much later, while I was ordering another gin and tonic from a flirtatious stewardess on the late-evening flight to Cairo that somebody sitting behind me started kicking my seat. I turned around to punch the kid in the face, or something like that, and who was I greeted by? Yup, you guessed it!… Krystal!
“Krystal!” I said. “What are you doing here on this flight, sitting behind me and kicking my seat like a child who needs punching in the face?”
I can’t remember her exact response, but it had to do with her craving a fortnight of very passionate and very violent lovemaking, with me, in Egypt, and involved her dressing up as Cleopatra and us doing it in vast baths of asses’ milk filled with poisonous asps.
“Well,” I said, with a shrug, after thinking it over and weighing up my options and checking my diary for scheduling conflicts, “alright then.”
Little did I know that GROOM’S NAME was on the flight too, freezing to death as a stowaway in the cargo hold. I only discovered this when I mistook him for an item of my baggage and lifted him—effortlessly—off the carousel at the reclaim area. A big melee erupted, as they tend to in these Middle Eastern hotbeds of filth and insanity, in the midst of which I somehow misplaced Krystal. As I listened out for her cries, the Egyptian authorities swooped onto the scene, mercilessly beating GROOM with the butts of their Kalashnikovs before carrying him away. By this point, he had of course wet himself several times over, which I thought was particularly unsightly, not to mention unBritish.
I stayed in Cairo for six months, collecting ancient and mysterious diseases, and then one day I happened to be walking past the giant prison in the centre of the city, ironically nicknamed the Museum for State Terror and Atrocities, when who should saunter out of its gates but Krystal, closely followed by a hobbling hobo, whom I later recognised as my old friend Abdullah the Hobbling Hobo. Behind Abdullah, screaming my name in Arabic, was today’s groom.
“Quick!” I yelled to Krystal, who by this stage was looking immaculately emaciated. “You still owe me a fortnight of very passionate and very violent love-making with you dressed up as Cleopatra and us doing it in vast baths of asses’ milk filled with poisonous asps!”
“Wait for me!” GROOM cried as we legged it to my suite at the Ritz-Carlton on the Nile. When Krystal and I jumped in a taxi, GROOM somehow managed to grab onto the bumper with his fingertips, and we ended up dragging him for several miles along the dusty and rock-strewn streets. Ha ha! You should have seen how much skin he lost! He looked like that patient in that film he likes!
Out of supreme compassion, I permitted our third wheel to sleep out on my balcony as Krystal and I broke several world records for very passionate and very violent love-making over the course of two highly memorable weeks. When hunger caused him to topple over the edge and plunge fifty stories to his certain death, I schlepped over to the bolted French windows and pressed my forehead lightly against the glass. The golden sunlight bathed my golden skin in that golden way the golden sun does in Cairo. I looked great. Really great. Golden great. And I was as amazed as everyone else to watch GROOM’s pasty, cadaverous bag of bones drop like an expiring albatross into the hotel’s Olympic-size swimming pool. “Lucky as ever!” I shouted, but I’m not sure he could hear me as he was already ordering several rounds of drinks at the poolside bar, no doubt charging them to my suite, the bastard!
In prison, when he wasn’t being ritually tortured or homosexually abused, GROOM’S NAME read a book about Egyptology, which means the ological study of things to do with Egypt, like sand, belly dancers and cursed mummies. He found the book very interesting and pleaded with me to accompany him on a desert expedition to find something he called ‘The Cave of Slimmers,’ where ancient Egyptian Neanderthals went to lose weight and chart their progress in primitive finger paintings they painted on the walls of the cave, like deranged special needs kids in the bottom set at school. I agreed to tag along on the expedition, sensing a privileged and singular opportunity to wear a really cool outfit involving billowing desert khaki shorts, and also to leave GROOM’S NAME to die a cold and lonely death in the cave, like that woman in that film he likes.
We found the cave after getting buried in a massive sandstorm that engulfed all the natives we’d brought with us to cook our meals, drive our trucks and carry our parasols, forcing us to walk the rest of the way, for at least half an hour. As he carried me into the mouth of the cave, weeping uncontrollably, GROOM’S NAME declared his eternal love for me, promising never to marry another. I said, “Whatever you say,” then asked if he had a cold beer on him. He didn’t. It was warm, so I threw it in his face, causing him to drop me and topple into a canyon I hadn’t noticed was right next to us.
I called an Uber and made it back safely to the Ritz-Carlton, where unfortunately Krystal was waiting for me, naked, in her milk bath. (I was bored of her by this point and so invited her out on a pretend romantic dinner date, where I sold her to a local human trafficker for way less than her market value.) A week later, GROOM showed up at my suite, on crutches, disguised as a bell boy and—as Samuel Pepys said of Major-General Harrison as he was being hung, drawn and quartered, "looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition"—and I suppose that must have been when we went out and I caught him “milking” those camels. Although, wait, no. That must have been before we went off into the desert, so I may be wrong about everything. But the point is we do share our hookahs. It’s one of the things I love most about him.
Other things have happened in my life that involve GROOM’S NAME, like the time he got horribly burned in that plane crash, and when we discovered the Lost Ark before losing it again, and how he coined the phrase “archaeological dig” as code for banging crusty old Egyptian GILFs, but I haven’t got time to bore you with those anecdotes right now as I ate too much of the special goat curry earlier and badly need to drop the kids off at the pool.
Ladies and gentlemen: the bride and groom!
