The Explosions Before the Fireworks

A Louisiana Saturday Night

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I was not raised to crawl around in somebody’s yard like a worm being electrocuted. At that point in my life, I was introverted, focused on school, and generally built for a booth in the corner, a small group of people I already knew, and a reasonably clear exit plan. Then I started dating a man who was outgoing enough for both of us and had the deeply dangerous gift of making absolute nonsense sound like a confidence-building exercise. He could look at me with enough certainty that, for a brief period of time, I would forget I had free will and agree to things that should have required a waiver.

That is how I ended up doing the Louisiana Watermelon Crawl.

To be clear, I do not mean a line dance. There was no standing upright, no neat little side step, no opportunity to clap politely and retreat to the safety of a lawn chair. This version involved getting down on the ground and moving around in the grass with the general appearance of a worm being electrocuted.

I do not remember the exact rules, because I was too busy trying to understand how an adult woman who had educational goals, a future, and at least some level of common sense had wound up on her knees in somebody’s yard, wiggling around while strangers watched.

I was trying very hard to be fun. That is the part that gets me now. I had started seeing someone who could walk into any room, know everybody within ten minutes, and somehow persuade people that doing something humiliating was really just being spontaneous.

Meanwhile, I was the person who normally needed several business days to decide whether I wanted to attend a birthday dinner.

Yet there I was, dirty, embarrassed, and committed to the bit because apparently I had decided that being a good girlfriend meant moving through grass like I had been hit by a defective extension cord.

That boyfriend had a twin brother, and the twin brother was dating my best friend Rachel. This matters because Rachel had her own very specific way of responding when she had gotten slightly beyond the point where a responsible adult should stop drinking.

Someone came to find me one night and said, “You need to check on Rachel. Something is wrong with her.” There are certain things you expect that sentence to mean at a gathering.

You expect crying. You expect somebody to have lost a purse, a shoe, a phone, or the ability to stop texting someone who should have been blocked years earlier. You do not expect to walk into a house and find your best friend running around chattering her teeth like a beaver in a hostage situation, yelling, “My teeth hurt!” Surprise: it was dental chaos.

I had no idea what I was looking at. Rachel was not just saying her teeth hurt. She was announcing it like her mouth had declared war.

She would chatter her teeth, holler, “My teeth hurt,” and then look around at all of us as though we had failed to arrange emergency dental coverage before attending the party. At the time, I thought something had happened to her mentally, physically, spiritually, or all three. I thought we were going to have to call somebody’s mother, a dentist, a priest, the holy ghost, or possibly all of them.

Eventually, I thought I had gotten her calmed down. For maybe thirty minutes, there was peace. I was inside the house, standing somewhere near a window, when I heard this little tapping sound against the glass. Not loud. Not urgent. Just a small, patient tap tap tap.

I looked over, and there was Rachel outside the window, tapping with her little fingers like a child who had been locked out after bedtime.

“Judith,” she said. “My teeth. Judith, my teeth hurt.”

I remember putting my head down and thinking, oh my God. Not because I did not love her. I did. But because there are moments when you realize you have somehow become the emergency contact for a grown woman whose body has chosen midnight at a party to begin a dental rebellion. I did not sign up for oral emergencies.

We learned later that Rachel is one of those rare people whose body reacts to drinking a little past sensible by giving her the sensation of tooth pain. That is apparently a real thing for her. At the time, however, none of us knew that.

We just knew that Rachel’s teeth had become haunted. The next morning, she had a headache large enough to require darkness, silence, and an apology from the entire sun, but her teeth were perfectly fine. Her body had simply chosen the most dramatic and inconvenient way possible to register a complaint.

Somewhere in that same era of young-adult chaos, two grown adult best friends, one of them my boyfriend, decided they needed to determine which one was “less drunk enough” to drive the five-mile trip home on backroads.

Not sober. Nobody was aiming that high. We had apparently lowered the standard all the way to “less drunk enough,” which should have been the exact moment every person with sense in the room took the keys, pointed to a couch, and ended the discussion.

Instead, these two men decided the grout lines in the tile floor would settle it.

They stood in the kitchen and tightrope-walked the lines in the floor, each one taking his turn like he had been called before a judge. One would wobble, step crooked, regain his balance, and immediately begin explaining why that still counted. The other would take his turn, lean sideways, nearly collide with something, and insist he had been straighter. There was no shortage of confidence. There was no shortage of argument. There was, however, a complete shortage of anyone willing to acknowledge that a person who needs kitchen grout as evidence of transportation fitness has already lost the transportation argument.

As far as I was concerned, the driving conversation was over the minute tile became evidence. Nobody needed to be on a backroad.

Nobody needed to prove anything. But I will say this: watching two grown men treat a grout line like it had legal authority was one of the more serious hearings I have ever witnessed. They cross-examined each other’s balance. They challenged the accuracy of the line. They acted as though a crooked step might be the difference between honor and disgrace instead of a very obvious sign that everyone needed to sit down.

Somewhere after Rachel’s dental rebellion and the Tile Floor Sobriety Hearing, somebody hurt my feelings. I do not even remember exactly what was said, because those moments are rarely about one sentence. It is usually seventeen small things, one badly timed facial expression, a song that does not need to come on, and the fact that your emotions are already operating without supervision. I ended up sitting in the bathtub crying while my boyfriend sat beside me and petted my hair like I was a child who had fallen down at a birthday party and needed to be reassured that the world had not actually ended.

Then Romeo arrived.

Romeo was my three-year-old Maltese, and Romeo did not believe in a soft entrance. He heard me crying, decided every human being in that house had mishandled the situation, and took a running start from somewhere down the hall. Before I could even process what was happening, he launched himself straight into the bathtub with me like a tiny white cannonball. He did not gently climb in. He did not pause to assess whether there was room.

He hit me with his entire little body, started trying to sit in my lap, and looked at everybody else like he had been sent by 911.

So there I was: crying in a bathtub, with a hyper Maltese trying to perform emotional rescue operations on my lap, while Rachel was somewhere nearby recovering from what we believed had been a full dental catastrophe, and two grown men had recently used kitchen tile to determine who was least disqualified to make a bad decision. By the time actual fireworks ever started at a Fourth of July gathering, I was usually relieved. Fireworks, at least, are honest. They come in a package, they tell you they might explode, and nobody expects you to crawl around in the grass to prove you are fun.

That is why I have never really worried much about the fireworks on the Fourth of July. The fireworks are the scheduled portion of the evening. The real danger is giving people heat, a cooler, old history, a charmingly persuasive boyfriend, a friend whose teeth occasionally stage a rebellion, and a dog who believes he is certified in crisis response. The fireworks burn out eventually. The stories about what happened before anybody even touched a lighter are the ones that follow you for twenty years.

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Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm