So on Saturday it looked liked it was all over except for the crying between Candace and Ben. There were words. Candace asked Ben for the spare keys to the apartment and her car. Arrangements were made to meet and give her the keys.

Coincidentally, Candace’s friend, we’ll call him Ed (since that’s his real name), decided to drive up from San Marcos to Austin to visit Candace and cheer her up. Candace and Ed start the cheering up process with tequila at 3pm in the afternoon. Later, Candace and Ed meet Ben at a restaurant where Ben gives Candace the spare keys and then goes off with his buds to 6th Street for his own personal alcohol-assisted cheering up sessions.

Candace and Ed proceed to a strip club called “Perfect 10” to continue cheering up.

Okay, just a brief editorial note here. Candace likes to party and it seems to me she does an awful lot of it in what they call “gentlemen’s clubs” these days but back when I was in college and frequented them, we called them “strip clubs” or “topless bars.” I think both bar owners and patrons are going for more legitimacy today, as it SOUNDS more acceptable to take a business associate to a “gentleman’s club” than to a “strip club.”

Anyway, my point is this. When I went to that type of establishment, it was primarily to watch a dizzying variety of lithe young women dance nearly nude. Also to consume alcoholic beverages but the consumption of alcoholic beverages could be done elsewhere at more reasonable rates. So, I go there to girl watch. I would never go to a strip club with Candace, because it would be distracting. When I’m with Candace, I’m watching Candace. I’m talking to Candace. Candace is my focus, and a gratifying and delightful focus she is. Why would I pay good money to sit in a room surrounded by beautiful naked dancers when I would rather watch Candace? It’s like a waste. Save the strip club for the many, many Candace-less evenings.

But that’s me.

So Ed and Candace get to the strip club and Ed discovers that he left his credit card back at the restaurant. They are in Candace’s car, so he can’t just drive back and get it. Candace is being contrary (have I ever noted that “Contreras” was a dangerously descriptive surname for Candace?) and does not want to leave the club and drive all the way back. So Ed asks to use her car to drive back. He PROMISES he is okay to drive. He PROMISES he won’t get in an accident and wreck her newly restored car. He PROMISES he’ll be right back. By my calculation, this is six hours into alcohol assisted good times and no one is really thinking straight.

But Candace believes him when he says that he’s good to drive and he won’t wreck her car. He takes her keys and leaves. But he leaves her his cell phone. I don’t know whether it is collateral for her car or what, but I prefer to think it was just a moment of sanity in a highly questionable night.

Two hours later, Candace is wondering where Ed is. The restaurant wasn’t that far away. Ed’s cell phone rings. It is a cop, informing Candace that Ed was arrested for DUI and her car is impounded. So Candace is stuck at a strip club without a car to get home. In fact, she is stuck without keys to get into her own apartment. This could be a problem.

Candace calls Ben and relates her tale of woe and asks for help. Ben laughs, says they just got to 6th Street and hangs up. Okay. Now, I just lost the last teeny-weeny shred of sympathy I ever had for Ben. If even my worst enemy called me up and asked me for help because I was his or her last resort, I wouldn’t be able to say “no.” I would be massively gloating on the inside, but I would do whatever I could to help. I’m not a tool.

Candace makes a few more calls. Since she got married, Candace’s pool of friends has dwindled. Mainly because a lot of Candace’s friends were guys and her marriage pretty much ended any reason for them to continue a relationship with her. It is Saturday night and no one is home, or answering the phone.

Fortunately, Candace has my number memorized. So as a last resort she calls me and tells me the story. She is crying and quite upset. I ask her what she needs for me to do and she asks if I can come get her. This I am glad to do. I know without question that Candace could “get a ride” with any number of guys at that strip club. In fact, she has a guy nearby during this call, whom she describes as a bouncer and he is all sorts of helpful. When I asked her for directions to the club, he speaks up in the background and tells me exactly what I need to know, with the specific I-35 exit and landmarks and the cross street.

I remind Candace that it will take me almost 2 hours to get there. It is a little past 11pm now. The clubs close at 2am in Texas. I should be there in plenty of time. I tell her to stay put and I’ll be there as soon as I can get there. I ask if she has my cell phone number, which she doesn’t. (At least she has my home phone memorized.) So I call her back on her cell phone so that she has my number on caller ID.

I start driving, with a brief stop to fill my van up with gas. Candace calls just as I am finishing filling up. Fortunately, despite the dire warning on the gas pump, I don’t burst into flames when I answer the phone as I am putting away the gas nozzle. Candace has re-remembered that she does not have her apartment key and re-wonders how we will get in. I tell her we will deal with that once I have her safely picked up. She says okay and tells me to hurry. I say okay and tell her to stay right there.

I must have passed eight DPS (Highway Patrol) stops on my way south between Waco and Austin. And that was just on MY side of the interstate. I saw hints of flashing lights on the other side, but I couldn’t be sure because there’s also an awful lot of construction going on and highway department trucks also have flashing lights. I’m wondering if Texas has a quota for traffic tickets, and it being the end of the month (April 30th) all the DPS guys were trying to make their quotas. I kept up a steady 70mph, which is 5mph over the 65mph nighttime speed limit, but I kept getting passed by enough people going even faster that I figured a measly 5mph over wasn’t going to be a big deal. Fortunately, I was right.

When I was in Georgetown, probably 20 minutes out, Candace called again. Two hours is a long time and I’m betting that naked dancing girls wasn’t as soothing or pleasing as it might have been if she was, say, a guy. She is getting restless. I tell her I’m in Georgetown, which gives her a visual of my progress. She is in Roundrock, which is between Georgetown and Austin. I’m almost there.

I find the right exit, drive a mile up the access road, and catch a red light that must have lasted 5 minutes. It felt like hours. And I was sure that it was NEVER going to change until I saw another car approaching the intersection with the green light, and knew that would trigger the mechanism to turn red to stop the car. That’s the way traffic lights in the middle of nowhere work in Texas. They hold a car prisoner at a red light until another car comes up to go through the green light, then it changes in order to stop the other car. It’s an art, the way traffic lights are programmed in Texas.

The landmark is there. The crossroad is there. The club’s neon sign is there up ahead. Candace calls again, REALLY anxious, just as I pull into the parking lot. I see her standing outside the door, next to the guy I figure is the bouncer, because he’s built like a bouncer. I pull around through the portico and the bouncer opens the door for Candace and she climbs in. I thank him very much for all his help. He seems like a nice enough guy, although I would bet dimes to donut holes that he was secretly wishing I would have an accident or a flat tire or something so that he could have given Candace a ride instead. But honestly I can’t hold that against him.

Candace gets in and the bouncer closes the van door, but not completely. Candace sits sideways, facing me, with her back up against the door. I calculate the odds that the door will spring open while I’m driving down the highway, sending Candace flying out backwards and considering the evening so far, decide the odds are not in my favor. So I pull over before we leave the parking lot and walk around to re-close the door. I open the door, and Candace sticks her foot out like she’s getting out. I push her leg back to close the door, and she sticks it back out. I look up at her and she asks with undisguised pique if I MIND if she throws out her gum.

Candace has two modes of inebriation. One is Maudlin mode and the other is Mad mode. In Maudlin mode, she is sad and needs support and care. In Mad mode, she is looking for any reason to let the flames of anger engulf her and lash out. Mad mode Candace is Candace at her worst, when all of her wonderful qualities hibernate so deeply that you wonder if maybe she hasn’t been replaced by her evil twin. I don’t like Candace in Mad mode because I have to treat her completely differently; instead of being truthful with her I generally tell her what will satisfy her for the moment. I prefer truthfulness.

So, Candace is in Mad mode. After the throwing out of the gum, I get the door closed securely and we begin The Adventure of Sunday Morning in Austin. Candace again asks me how we’ll get into her apartment. Her keys are locked up with Ed. Her spare key is sitting in the console of her car, which is impounded. I’m thinking the apartment complex will have an emergency contact number posted somewhere at the office. It is an expensive apartment complex in an upscale area, so I’m hoping some of that rent money goes toward customer service. Really. I mean, when I lived in an apartment, there was always an after-hours contact number in case of emergency. That was only about 10 years ago. And it was in Waco.

About halfway there, Candace throws up. A lot. For an awful long time, although there’s an awful good chance that a lot of it was just dry heaves after the initial activity. I feel badly for her, because she sounds like she is having no fun. She finishes that and decides that she wants her boots off. She presents me with one booted foot, which I manage to unzip and remove all while driving down the road. The other boot, however, along with the entire pants legs from knee to foot, is covered in vomit. We decide that boot can stay on for the time being.

Next, Candace proclaims that she needs food and directs me to stop at Taco Cabana, which is right there next to us. If Candace had been in Maudlin mode, I would have attempted to explain to her why Mexican fast food was probably not a great idea under the circumstances. But Candace in Mad mode does not respond well to reason and logic, so I drove through and placed the order and we waited. . . and waited. . . and waited for the food. It took so long Candace got even hungrier and when the guy finally brought the order she added another taco to it. Which took a lot longer than I thought it should take. How hard can it be make a taco? You don’t even have to wait for it to cook. All you have to do is put the already-heated components together and wrap it. Making change was also a challenge for this guy, who was no high school or college student. He was old enough that making change should not have been difficult.

We proceed on the apartment, with Candace refilling her stomach and me hoping this food does a better job of staying down.

The apartment complex office had nothing but a sign indicating office hours. I pull out my cell phone and call information and ask for an emergency number for the apartment complex. There is no emergency number, but they give me the main number. I call the main number, and the answering machine is glad to tell me what the office hours are and that I can go on the web to see the floor plans and rental rates and I can leave a message for a salesperson to call me back. Useless.

A car pulls into the apartment complex, so I flag it down. The driver’s window buzzes down about three or four inches, then buzzes back up to a half inch, then back down in fits and starts until there’s about an inch and a half and the guy looks at me like I’m some grave threat to his existence. Okay, so it’s 2am in the morning, but, I mean, HE’S out, isn’t he? And I am dressed in a dark blue t-shirt and khaki Dockers and a khaki Old Navy vest. I am not an imposing figure. What he’s afraid of I have no idea. I ask if knows of an emergency contact number or anything. He says no. His girlfriend/wife says no. They speak in monosyllables and I’m really beginning to wonder whether Austin is not really all that safe or whether I just picked a frightened wimp.

I return to the van, where Candace asks me what I thought of that girl who was checking me out. I professed general ignorance that anyone was checking me out, much less a girl. She doesn’t believe me. I’m wondering if the girl was riding a pink elephant.

Having failed miserably to find any help at the office, I drive to Candace’s apartment and park across the way. Candace remembers that she left the sliding glass door on the patio open, so if we could find a way to climb up onto her second-story balcony, we could get in. We troop around to the back, which is muddy, naturally. Candace is walking strangely because she still has one boot on and it has a high heel, so she’s up, then she’s down, then she’s up, and so on. When we get to the back and she can sit down, the other boot comes off.

The balcony is way high. There is no easy way to scale it, naturally. Candace climbs up onto the metal railing of the apartment patio below hers and I am frankly amazed that she was able to do it in her condition. At one point she did have to snap me out of my incredulousness with a sarcastic “a little help, please” comment. Candace stands up and tries to reach her balcony.

I note two things. One, Candace looks mighty fine from my point of view. Two, she is way too low to reach the balcony. In fact, judging from how low she is, I would also be too short to reach it. Candace is ready to come down and I am wondering how best to help her when she falls back into me for me to catch her. I am unprepared and honestly possibly under muscled to pull that off, but I valiantly break her fall. And end up flat on my back, smacking my head into a concrete retaining wall. I am also laughing my butt off because the only other alternative was humiliation and embarrassment. Candace is less than impressed with my catching abilities.

Candace obviously wants me to try next, but I can judge heights and distances and I can tell without climbing up there that I wouldn’t be able to reach either. So then Candace proposes that if she could stand on my shoulders, and then I could climb up on that railing, then she could reach. She is absolutely right, if there was any way in the world to accomplish that. But I am thinking it would be a challenge for the Flying Wallendas even on one of their best days. Candace is also unimpressed by my lack of enthusiasm to even try it. I hate to disappoint Candace, but my sense of self-preservation took precedence over my desire to impress her. She’s probably thinking that the BOUNCER would have been able to climb up there for her, and wondering if she made the right choice.

Suddenly, the downstairs neighbor’s dogs figure out there are two people out back at 2:30am in the morning and start barking at the patio door. Bad as things are, I am convinced that a confrontation with the police under the circumstances could only make them worse. So I convince Candace to come back to the van. She is cold anyway, so it doesn’t take a lot of persuasion.

I can see that a car has just parked nearby and three girls get out and start walking in our general direction. Candace proceeds to the van, shouting in an irritable manner about being cold. I smile and ask the girls about an emergency number. One of them offers to check her apartment information sheet and call me back on my cell and let me know. I thank her. Okay, so maybe if three girls aren’t afraid of talking to me in the middle of the night then maybe that first guy really was just a scared little wimp. When she calls me back, she tells me the apartment complex policy is that if you have trouble after hours, you are screwed. Don’t bother them.

So I grab a sheet and blanket from the back of my van and make up a bed for Candace. I tell her we will wait here for a few more hours until the morning, then find a ladder to scale her balcony or call a locksmith to get us inside the apartment. Candace crashes almost immediately. My van is a very comfortable place to sleep in a pinch.

I let down the back of my chair and get comfortable. But since I can’t hear Candace breathing I suddenly remember there’s always a danger of vomiting and choking in the night and decide to move to one of the captain’s chairs in the back so I can hear better. I take another sheet and wrap up and sleep about an hour at a time until 8:30am. I slip out of the van and walk to the office and note with no surprise that Sunday has no hours of operation. Naturally. Walking back, I hear the whir of an electric cart and follow it to two women and a vacuum cleaner. One of them speaks English. (One of the women, that is.) I relate my tale of woe and wonder if I could get a ladder from maintenance to get onto the balcony so I can let Candace in her apartment. They call a maintenance guy.

The maintenance guy listens and tells me it would be against the law for him to help me get into her apartment. I tell him I have her in my van. He asks if she is coherent. I tell him that she is asleep, but I’m betting she would be coherent if we woke her up. We drive to my van, I unlock it and climb in and wake up Candace. I tell her there’s a guy here who can help us get in the apartment if she can prove who she is. Her driver’s license with her picture and her address are proof enough. The maintenance man and I walk back and look at the balcony. Then we walk up and look at the apartment door. Then he says he’ll just go get a key and let us in. What a nice guy. He also asks me what is my involvement with Candace, possibly trying to decide if she is ask-out-able. I relate that I’m the friend who drives 100 miles to help her out, which probably isn’t a discouragement for potential future dating with Candace. Am I surprised? (No.)

He gets back and he and I collect Candace and he lets us in. Candace goes straight to the bathroom. I take her dog, Crickett, out for her morning constitutional, then collect boots and stuff from the van, then collect Candace’s discarded clothes (and other piles of dirty clothes) from the bedroom and start a load of wash immediately to erase all physical proof of the preceding events. Since I didn’t have anything else to do while Candace was ensconced in the bathroom recovering herself, I cleaned up the kitchen and started a load of dishes in the dishwasher as well.

Candace comes out of the bathroom, dressed in comfortable clothes and with her blue facial mask on, and checks messages. The bouncer has already called and left a message for her. He isn’t really a bouncer, she tells me. She just thought he was because of where he was sitting and what he looked like. He is actually a fireman. And I think he asked her out or was going to but she mentioned that she was still married (for what THAT was worth) but might not be for much longer. I’m guessing he’s following up on the “not for much longer” part of that. Candace settles onto her comfy couch and I get her some water and get her settled and she drifts off. I camp out on love seat, change the always-on TV from the country-western digital music channel to an alternative rock digital music channel, then sleep off and on for another couple hours.

About 10:30, Candace is ready for the next challenge, The Retrieving of the Impounded Car. She calls around and finds it in Roundrock, where it will take $183 to get it back. She tells the guy we’ll meet him there in an hour. She washes off the blue facial, dresses in some other comfortable clothes, and off we go. We arrive first. It is a nice morning, weather-wise. Candace is back to her beautiful although still slightly tired self. She is recriminating herself for letting Ed take her car. She is listing the terrible things she will do to him if her car is damaged.

This would be a good place to relate a brief Tale of Ed in Lock-up, as I heard about it later. Ed found himself locked up with a lot of other guys. He was upset and scared that Candace would never speak to him again because of the events of the night. He’s talking to other guys. They listen and tell him to FORGET about the girl, because he has a DUI and BAD THINGS could happen to him. He tells them Candace made him promise not to get in trouble in her car, and he got arrested and left her stranded, without her car. They are about to tell him he has bigger problems, when one of them asks: Is Candace Mexican? He says “yes.” They all agree that yes, he is in big trouble. You just don’t mess with a Mexican girl’s car like that. Suddenly they are all in agreement that he has really screwed up big time. Heh.

The tow guy arrives and takes Candace’s identification and registration and her money and we walk back to her car. It is fine. She doesn’t have all of her keys, because those are still locked up with Ed. But she has her car key and thankfully the spare apartment key is still in the console where she left it. Candace is hungry again, so after we get back to the apartment and lock the door, we go back out in her car and pick up some food at Sonic. We get back to the apartment, she eats half of her sandwich, and then tries to find out where Ed is being held. She finally finds him, but it sounds like there’s nothing she can do for him. She is bummed. She has no way to help Ed. Oh well. (I have little sympathy for Ed, but then I don’t know him.) Candace tunes into a movie on HBO and falls back asleep while I watch the movie. And I watch Candace sleep. She looks so pretty and peaceful when she’s asleep, so I let myself believe that the worst is over and this was her hitting bottom when she realized that divorce is imminent and now she can just rebuild. It’s a comforting thought, even though I know deep down it isn’t exactly true.

But at least THIS weekend is over. And it had a happy ending. I left for Waco about 5:30pm. Ed showed up later, profusely apologizing. Candace did not kill him. I attribute that to my rescue and help in resolving the situation he left her in. He repaid her what it cost to get her car out of impound. Hopefully they didn’t go out for a drink before he returned to San Marcos.