Chasing jollies

I’ll tell you why I don’t believe in marriage anymore. The craziest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen was at a wedding. He was the photographer. A one-time high-school wrestler-looking dude with squat legs and a military haircut. He moved scrappy, like a bank robber mixed with a guy taking MMA classes. He was a tornado of a human. He made the bride’s mom faint, broke the groom’s dad’s nose, gave teenagers ecstasy, and ran from the police. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. 

We called him Riggs. 

The wedding was outside on private property overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It started at four. The day’s color was that hangover gray that beach towns like Carmel, Monterey, and Santa Cruz are blanketed in for most of the fall. There were a couple of hundred people there. Their age seemed to influence their interpretation of “formal wear.” The older attendees, particularly the men, dressed like they were dining at the local golf club. It was the young people that wore crisp suits and thin dresses. And why not? The venue was gorgeous. Flowers lined the dining room tables set on the grass, and canopy lights framed them, making the area feel like its own space. There was full catering, an open bar, and a fire pit with a six-foot-tall flame. A DJ booth was on a large deck made of wood from the property’s trees. Guests described the venue as picture-perfect.

The first time we knew something had gone off the rails was at the ceremony. We were waiting for it to start when concerned murmurs from other guests surfaced all around us. I turned to my date, and she was talking to the person next to her, trying to get information. She was outgoing with strangers, aware of her surroundings, and eager to be in the loop. It came in handy during ambiguous situations, but our relationship flamed out when I realized those same qualities fueled her addiction to social media. I can’t be with someone whose nose is in their phone. As she talked to the stranger, I focused on the couple’s family in the front row. The bride’s parents looked helplessly at the groom’s parents across the aisle, confused, shaking their heads. The photographer had gone missing. 

Five minutes later, Riggs surfaced from behind a tree no one had noticed. He was smoking a huge blunt to his face and didn’t cough once. He had a camera around his neck, and a crossbody bag slung around his torso. My date learned that he was the photographer and told me as much. Everyone was furious at him for being late, but he was indifferent. The show hadn’t started yet. 

An older guy in a golf polo shouted at him, “Is that weed?”

“It’s weed, old-timer,” Riggs replied, “And I’m not giving you any.”

The older guy’s wife said to the groom’s family, “Where’d you get this guy? He’s late, and he’s high.”

Riggs didn’t care.

The bride’s parents discussed whether or not they should fire him on the spot. I would have understood if they had. Already I could see that he was reckless. Also, everyone had iPhones. It’s surprising event photographers have jobs considering that everyone in attendance takes their own pictures. How many photos do you need? Still, they were Riggs’s employer; you’d think he would have treated the situation with some respect, but he didn’t even stop smoking his blunt. He stayed in the same spot where he had arrived, shifting his weight back and forth like he was ready to dunk on a regulation rim. I didn’t see him stand still that whole night. He was shifty, constantly releasing whatever was wound up inside. 

The parents decided he should stay. He started doing his job. At first, it went as expected; he moved around, taking pictures of guests, the alter, the roses on the grass where they’d be married, the aisle, etc. But that didn’t last long. When ‘Here comes the bride’ started to play, he dropped to his belly and held the camera against his face like it was glued onto it. He lay there like an army sniper as the wedding party came down the aisle, stepping over him when he got too close. The groom’s father lifted him off the ground and begged him to do better when his son and future daughter-in-law entered. That was the last time Riggs let anyone touch him without retaliating. 

It got stranger. The next fumble came when Riggs stopped taking pictures of the couple as they exchanged their wedding vows. No one understood why he would stop doing his job at that critical moment. We all wanted to focus on the ceremony, but we couldn’t because he started taking photographs and whispering to the bridesmaids. The groom’s dad was vexed. The guests couldn’t believe what was happening. The bride was oblivious because her back was to the guy, but the groom started stealing glances at Riggs, who was on one knee with the camera pointed at his fiancé’s sister. The sister had no idea how to deflect Riggs’s attention but somehow managed to keep a smile painted on her face. When the couple finally said “I do” and kissed, Riggs started hitting on the sister instead of capturing shots of them walking away from the altar. He talked so close to her that you’d think they were familiar with each other. The groom’s dad had had enough, and instead of giving him another chance, he asked Riggs to leave. Riggs argued that he’d been taking pictures and started to take photos of the upset man. The father yelled at Riggs, “Get out of here, please! Just get out of here!” 

Riggs demanded that he be paid first, but the father refused. Riggs paced away and then back again while looking at all of us. 

“D’you see this?” He asked us, “Aren’t I trying to help?”  

He didn’t have much time to argue. The largest men from the venue’s staff and six groomsmen ushered him off the property. The father led up the rear giving the final words when Riggs exited and walked down the street, “Don’t ever come back! You’re not welcome.” 

An hour later, we’d sat down to eat dinner, and I noticed that the teenagers were acting weird. They were all at one table, laughing all over each other, more obnoxious than usual, and they moved their hands rhythmically to the wedding’s background music like they were dancing to techno. It was clear they were all high. One of them, a Barbie-type girl with a poor complexion, was rubbing on her date's jacket sleeve like she wanted it to ejaculate. My date and I watched them make fools of themselves but didn’t call it out to the other guests, who were too busy getting acquainted with their respective tables to notice the teenage ravers. 

The dinner had the makings to be magnificent. The lighting twinkled and sparkled and was perfect, like in a movie. A few sprawling redwoods that edged the property stood like giant statues casting shadows against the Pacific Ocean. The ocean air was refreshing, and the staff passed out blankets for people who got cold. A woman with a pink mohawk and thick glasses came up with a solution to the missing photographer. She provided an email address where people would send pictures from the night that they wanted to share. She’d consolidate the photos and put them on a website. It was a generous thing to do and helped lift people’s spirits until Riggs showed up again. He was drinking from a bottle of wine, taking pictures of the bridesmaids. He was three car lengths away, and people started yelling at him to leave. He shouted back, “I’m the photographer!” 

The groomsman assembled like the Avengers and cut him off from getting closer to the wedding table. They ordered him to leave, but Riggs didn’t retreat. Instead, he dropped to a drunken knee and took pictures of us.  

The groomsmen tried to grab hold of him, and then all hell broke loose. Riggs pushed them off and broke away from them. Guests near them got out of their seats and moved away from wherever Riggs was headed. If Riggs had stopped, he’d have been caught by one of the groomsmen, but he wasn’t worried. He was laughing during the chase like it was a game of tag. As he ran, he shouted to all of us, “I have ecstasy! I don’t want to fight!” The teenagers applauded. The venue’s staff and three meathead groomsmen ran him off the property like a punk from a basketball court. When he was finally gone, the staff apologized to everyone and promised Riggs wouldn’t be back. 

The promise fell through twenty minutes later when ‘WAP’ by Cardi B, blaring on Riggs’s portable bose speaker, interrupted the bride’s sister’s speech. Riggs had the speaker on his shoulder at full volume and danced up to the party like he was auditioning for a music video. He did the vogue, the Carlton, the floss, and twerked, all while moving towards us. No one stopped him from boogying right up to the teary-eyed sister, who was paralyzed by Riggs’s dance moves like the rest of us. He was so good that we thought we were on a prank TV show. Yelling over the music, he asked the sister what she was doing later and if she had a boyfriend. When the groomsmen approached him, Riggs took pictures and backed away. He reiterated that he didn’t want to fight as they once again chased him off the property with the help of the staff, whose next apology came with a different promise: they were calling the cops. 

Then we’re on the dance floor. The long-planked wooden deck held sixty. There were about forty-five of us dancing on it, your typical wedding crew: wedding party, parents with kids, teenagers, post-mid-life crisis folk, retired folk without a care, etc. Guests who weren’t dancing were enjoying s’mores and trying not to fall into the massive campfire. Others were exploring the edges of the grounds for the best view of the sea. Someone spotted Riggs in a tree with a new bottle of wine, soliciting ecstasy. The party’s attention went to him. His dark clothes blended in well enough, but he left a trail of trampled branches behind him like hair beneath the bristles of a boar's brush that gave him away. He hung about seven feet off the ground, straddling the redwood’s thickest branch. 

He was coaxed out of the tree by the staff and groomsmen, who were at the front of the half-circle that welcomed him when he came down. Riggs was unlike any man I’d ever seen and wasn’t afraid to take on the ten or more men that waited for him. The men ready to fight him thought he’d be an easy mark. It all changed when he jumped down from the tree. It was acrobatic. He dropped the bottle of wine to the ground, and in the way of trickery, it landed straight up, and not a drop spilled. Then he lifted his body from the branch and flexed his legs straight out like a gymnast on a balance beam. He bent his arms and ejected himself to the tree’s trunk, ran down it, and took a final leap, landing on one knee like a superhero in front of the shocked guests. 

The fight that ensued lasted six men. It took the rest of us, witnessing Riggs handle those half-dozen men, to decide we wouldn’t get involved. He was adept at combat, and even the best fighter, a promising hockey player from Canada with a missing tooth, got laid to rest. He knocked the wind out of three of them, broke the groom’s father’s nose, sent one to sleep, and kicked one in the nuts. It was all over within a minute, and when it was, and he sensed that side of him was no longer needed, he went back to acting the other way he was toxic. He saw the sister in the crowd and said, “Can’t you see what I would do for you?” 

The bride’s mom fainted. 

Then he took pictures of her, the sister staring at him, and the injured groomsmen on the ground. 

People were screaming for the police. One of the staff confirmed they were called. A couple of dishwashers were summoned to try and help contain Riggs, but when they saw the six groaning men, stunned, they refused to get involved. All the while, Riggs kept taking pictures and moving around the party. No one would chase him then, so he had free reign of the place, and he skipped from group to group, taking pictures of us. It was strange that we didn’t run away, but he didn’t seem like he’d hurt us. It was like we were animals, and he was visiting the zoo to take photos of us in our invisible cages. The DJ had stopped playing music, and though some people talked about trying to contain him, no one seemed capable. As much as we were uncertain of what he might do next, we were compelled to watch Riggs. His power over us evoked a range of emotions like we were living in an art exhibit. If he had a pallet of paint and were throwing acrylic at a canvas, we would be no less impassioned. 

When the two police officers arrived and tried to detain Riggs, he scaled down the side of a cliff at the edge of the property, which was impassable to all of us. The last time the police saw him, he was running south down a stretch of beaches without access points. The parents were livid that the police had let him get away. Riggs had made the perfect escape, and he captured all of it with his camera. He was the only thing anyone talked about. We predicted what was going to happen to him and made up stories about what could have triggered him to act in such a way. People kept mentioning Riggs’s athleticism, saying no one with his ability should be a wedding photographer. The bride and groom rose above the Riggs experience and laughed at the absurdity, joking that they should win an award for the wedding of the year. Their bond as husband and wife seemed already forged by what they’d gone through. There was no doubt that they’d be happy together. At the end of the night, people left happy. Even the groom’s father was jubilant. Perhaps because of all the attention he’d got for his bravery. Riggs had stolen the day from the bride and groom, and the occasion was more memorable. 

After that night, we all sent in the pictures we took to the lady's email address, and by the end of the following week, she’d made a website where she posted the photos. Inexplicably, there were no pictures of Riggs. I submitted pictures that had Riggs in them, so it must have been a conscious decision to exclude any image he was in. I couldn’t believe that the thing that made the wedding what it was was absent from any photograph. I wondered if the other guests felt how I did when I looked at the site. By excluding Riggs, they hid the beauty of what made that night what it was. It was like a lie. The woman in control of the website had treated it like social media and curated a particular set of images that didn’t match reality. The pictures were incomplete and bored me. I only looked at them that one time. 

I thought that was the end of it; I had my story of that night and the website with pictures. I also had the hope that the married couple was happy. I didn’t know what happened to Riggs, but I stopped thinking about him as much as the days passed. Three weeks went by. Then, the bride and groom emailed us saying that Riggs gave them a link to access all the pictures he took that night. When I got the link, the email chain already had a dozen or more responses from guests. Everyone was shocked by how well Riggs’s pictures had come out. One bridesmaid wrote, “He made us look like actors in a play.” I scanned through the images with the same excitement a kid gets looking at the pictures of himself after exiting a roller coaster ride. The photos were professional-grade, touched up, and edited. The colors were vivid and rich, and the expressions on peoples’ faces were honest, albeit often confused, shocked, or afraid. Unlike the guest-sourced images on the website, Riggs's pictures displayed the evening’s truth, and I loved them as much as the other guests. The funny thing is that Riggs, the bastard, knew it. He charged for them, and I bought a couple. 

But get this: the bride and groom are divorced now. She had an affair with a twenty-something-year-old fresh out of college and disappointed her whole family. I don’t agree with that. What Riggs gave them at that wedding, they had a singular experience. The problem with people is we keep looking for ways to get jolly. Now, I’m not saying the groom didn’t have some part in it because I’m sure he did; we don’t need to get into that. The point is, I know people get divorced, but if that couple couldn’t stay together after the lesson Riggs gave them, maybe there’s no hope for marriage. There’s no honesty in it.