Pink Flip Flops

In the summer of 1980, my heart was slowly mending from a seven-month-long love affair that went up in flames and fireworks, Fatal Attraction style without the bunny stew. There were no emotions that were not plumbed to their depths throughout those months, love, passion, lust, envy, jealousy, fury, misery, anguish, and regret.

I lie. The one emotion that had not been accessed during this affair was happiness. None that I recall. One evening, as I sat, pensively chain-smoking and sipping my Johnny Walker Red at the bar I worked at, an older friend of mine made this peculiar suggestion, "If this man makes you happy, you should find a way to make it work."

That hit like a bolt of lightning. No, the man in question did not make me happy. He had never made me happy and the future wasn't looking too promising either. He was married and shortly after our messy break-up, another woman was occupying the same side-chick position as I had occupied for the previous half a year.

It was as if, to be one of his women, you had to trade in your shits and giggles for a pallid mask of gloom and doom. Depression and aggression were his best traits. If you weren't angry with the same world he was angry with, you couldn't come with. Honestly, it was the most depressing affair I'd ever had. Even the most monstrous men I'd been with had at least some spark of fun and life in them, or I wouldn't have wasted my time.

I began rolling that thought around in my well-lubricated brain. 'Why', I thought, 'am I working so hard to get back together with a dull, bleak, despondent man, who was never going to be happy no matter how many clown noses I wore to cheer him up?'

Never one to go half-assed on anything, I ordered more Johnny Walker and let my mind wander back on all that had gone wrong with our affair, and all the destruction it had caused in my life. The party went on around me as usual in the bar until my friend, the barmaid whispered in my ear, "John is down the street at Pal Joey's with his new girlfriend."

As if a switch had been thrown in my whiskey-soaked brain, I slipped off the bar stool, pulled myself up to my full, formidable 4'10" height, and marched, or rather, tilted my way down the street to the bar where my ex-paramour was busily swapping spit with the new chick. Having never met the woman before, all I knew was her name and the color of her hair. Armed with that knowledge and a snoot full of whiskey, I crashed through the door of the bar like the Kool-Aid man on crack and punched the first blonde I saw.

My victim slowly rose up off the floor where she had landed, and I realized, too late, that she was over 6 feet tall and was not the side chick. When this Amazon got through cleaning the bar floor with me a male friend of mine tried to get me out of the place while I was still in one piece. Bless his heart. I fought him like a tiger, kicking, punching, and biting. He finally corralled me and hustled me out to the parking lot, where I went full Carrie Underwood on my lover's car. Well, my lover's wife's car.

Hey, I might have saved a little trouble for the next girl. Or something like that.

I started on the inside upholstery, shredding what I could with my fingernails and teeth. Then, I yanked wires out from under the dash and bent the pernundal stick almost in half. You know, the park, neutral, and drive thingy. I was like an angry orangutan on illegal drugs. Speaking of which, the illegal drugs, not the orangutan, my good friend, who was trying to calm me down, had a felony quantity of illegal things in his pocket during my antics.

I didn't know much about that stuff, so it didn't slow me down one bit. I exited the vehicle and began tearing at the outside of it, beginning with the radio antenna, the headlights, and, finally, the windshield, which held fast despite my most strenuous flip-flop-armed kicks. At that point, some monster had called the cops and a cruiser pulled into the parking lot as my friend caught me and pulled me off of the vehicle, grappling me in a wrestling move to keep me from going off on the policeman.

"There was a complaint about vandalism here," the ossifer proclaimed, pretending not to see a very angry, disheveled Tasmanian Devil breathing fire under the auspices of a renowned illegal substance merchant.

My good friend, sweating large beads of perspiration from the workout I'd given him and the fear of ten to twenty working on him said calmly, "No, sir, we chased those people away."

"Well, good," the policeman said, relieved of the chore of doing boring paperwork that day. Off he drove as my friend tumbled to the ground hyperventilating and thanking God for the break he had just gotten. My ex-lover was surveying the damage to his wife's car and the large blonde was looking for a rematch.

I managed, with the help of some other partners in crime, to get back to my apartment, where I flopped into bed and fell into a stupor until the next morning when someone was relentlessly pounding on the door. Oh, wait. Nope. That pounding came from the inside of my head and the people knocking wouldn't go away.

When it all slowly came back to me over a cup of coffee, my only regret was my choice of footwear the previous day. 'Why on earth was I wearing flip-flops? Next time I'll wear my red high heels and really do some damage!'