Last weekend I was a hero. Well, not an actual hero—I didn’t save anyone’s life, solve world hunger, or eliminate email spam. I was simply a hero to my wife, whom I love. This was a big deal since it isn’t often that I get the chance to be a knight in shining armor and to impress my sweetheart.
She disagrees with those chances. She says every night after dinner I have the chance to impress her and be a hero if I just got up and do the dishes. But that isn’t the sort of heroism I’ll break my cape out for. I want to save the day, not save my children from the opportunity to earn their allowance. But last weekend, while we were visiting San Francisco to see a Giants baseball game, I had the opportunity to step up and be my baby’s champion.
I should probably take this moment to disclose that this story of imitation heroism, like many similar to it, began with alcohol. In order for the story to make any sense, you have to grasp the concept that one of the players in this story (spoiler alert: my wife) had a few adult beverages. I use the terms “a few” loosely because on four separate occasions during the game she told me, “This is my last drink.” Then she had another last drink and another last drink.
It is safe to say Mrs. Krider was feeling pretty good. I, however, was not feeling all that good. I wasn’t feeling as good as my wife because one of us has to be responsible. A long time ago, to ensure neither of us ended up in embarrassing situations or the state penitentiary, we created a sobriety pact. The pact states that only one of us can get stupid (or, to say it more nicely, sloppy) at a time. This means one of us becomes “The Party” and the other one becomes “The Handler.” As the names indicate, being The Party is a lot more fun than being The Handler. Handling drunk party people is not a fun job, therefore I wasn’t really having any fun. My wife, on the other hand, was having a fabulous time.
The Giants won in a comeback ninth inning walk-off hit, which was awesome, and the entire city erupted into a party. My wife was into it, which meant I had to be into it not as much. In fact, since we had to drive back to our hotel, I didn’t drink at all. Since I was handling, my wife was free to party hardy. We have the routine and roles down pretty solid, but we didn’t always.
In the past, the sobriety pact wasn’t discussed at the beginning of an evening. Sometimes the night was a race to see who could get sloppy first and thus default the other person into becoming The Handler. After an evening in Las Vegas during which we looked at each other around 3 a.m. and realized we were both sloppy and neither of us could handle the other (or ourselves) we knew we needed to pull the ripcord and get ourselves back to the safe haven of our hotel room. This proved to be quite difficult in Las Vegas because neither one of us could remember which floor we were on, which room we were in, or which hotel we were actually staying at. To complicate matters, our hotel key didn’t have any of this information on it. The key didn’t say Room 138 Tropicana or Room 200 Bellagio (please, we couldn’t afford the Bellagio anyway). The key was just a credit-card-looking thing with an advertisement for Domino’s Pizza. At that moment, I thought it was a gift card for Domino’s and I was suddenly hungry. Note to readers: It turns out Domino’s will not accept this card for payment.
At 3 in the morning, confused and with an insatiable need for pizza, my wife and I played a game of “guess which door is the door to our hotel room.” With 62,000 rooms on the Las Vegas strip, this was a long process. My wife, who is smarter than me, finally suggested we go to the check-in counter (of three separate hotels), hand them our key, and ask them, “Are we guests here?” So, long story not so short, we now discuss who’s going to be The Party and who’s going to be The Handler before our evenings begin.
Back to San Francisco, where we were enjoying the victory of the game: My wife wanted a Giants T-shirt, so we bought one from a guy on a street corner for $20. I would like to publicly apologize to the Giants organization right now, as I am pretty sure the guy who sold us the shirt is not paying the licensing fees for use of their logo. My wife didn’t care; she was sloppy and she wanted that particular shirt immediately. She threw the shirt over her shoulder and we walked (well, I walked and she stumbled) to the car, and I, The Handler, drove us to the hotel.
When we got to the valet and started getting out of the car, my wife couldn’t find her brand-new Giants T-shirt—the most important shirt she had ever purchased. The valet was trying to take our car away, but my wife was holding him up while searching every inch of the interior for the greatest counterfeit Giants T-shirt ever. She couldn’t find it. I told her not to worry about it and handled her up to the room.
In the room, she began to obsess, “What happened to my shirt?”
“I don’t know how you lost your shirt.”
“Honey, I’m so sorry I wasted $20. I feel foolish. It must have fell off my shoulder while I was walking. I loved that shirt.”
“Don’t worry, baby. It was just a T-shirt.”
“Let’s go look for it!”
“Let’s look for it in all of San Francisco?”
This is when I had the chance to be a zero or a hero. Part of me wanted to say, “Go to bed!” But I thought about it and told her, “Well, let’s go on an adventure!” I got the car back out of valet (more tip money required) and we drove around San Francisco retracing our steps on a search for an imitation Giants T-shirt. I went back to the area where we parked the car, somehow found the exact spot, and sitting balled up in the gutter was the greatest gift I’ve ever given my wife: a dirty Giants T-shirt that she lost but I found. That night, I was her hero.
The last time Rob lost his shirt, he was at the craps table in Vegas. Send him comments through the executive editor at rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 19-26, 2014.
