So, you are here to know what happened then with Luca and his fiance, the main characters of the previous part of our story When Superman turns into Groomzilla? Don’t waste time and read the following continuation.
Before I knew it, the guest list to our engagement party had reached one hundred and was still growing. Luca had decided that our caffè was too small a venue to host the thing and had convinced our old boss, Mr. Berluti, to close down the restaurant on a Tuesday night in November (I hate November in New York! It is the worst time of the year!) so he could host our not-so-little shindig.
Luca was waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, fretting about the theme of our engagement party.
“I can’t make up my mind,” he kept saying, his voice trembling and his breathing shallow. “A costume affair so soon after Halloween? No, right? Or how about if we have everybody dress up as a character from La Dolce Vita? Or if we had a Jamaican beach party to celebrate your beautiful proposal? I know this guy that could get me a truckload of sand…”
He was definitely losing his mind… And I was just standing there, dumbfounded and terrorized, like a child with a stick who knows not to poke the bear!
“Whatever you decide is fine with me,” was all I could ever muster. I was turning into the worse type of yes man imaginable. A hen-pecked wife… and we weren’t even married yet!
Then, Luca started spending all his free time working on the “perfect words” for the gold-engraved invite card he wanted to have printed. “Shouldn’t you decide on the theme before you write the message for the card?”, I asked matter-of-factly.
That’s when I got the eyes. Those eyes that could spit out fire and burn you down to ashes because that was all you deserved for even opening your stupid mouth! I felt like time had stopped. The silence was deafening, until Luca whispered under his breath, very slowly, insisting on each syllable: “You are useless.”
I remember just mouthing, without any sound coming out of my mouth: “I’m sorry”, and backing out of the room without ever taking my eyes off my demon-possessed partner.
A few days later, with a scruffy beard and hair that had clearly not been washed or combed in over a week, Luca erupted into the caffè on a Friday morning, two hours after I had opened shop, and slammed a piece of paper on the counter, making two of our regulars jump up, startled, and a third spill his latte onto his toasted baguette.
“There!” he shouted. “Done!”
I looked into his bloodshot, sunken eyes and thought: “Oh my God! What has happened to the man I love? If this is what he is turning into while organizing an engagement party, I don’t even want to think what he’ll become when we start planning our wedding!”
He was breathing heavily, like a heroin addict waiting for a fix. I was half expecting him to start tapping a vein in the crook of his elbow!
Very slowly, my eyes moved down to the piece of paper on the counter and I saw the information for the engagement party written in fancy script across a drawing of a yellow brick road.
When I looked up, Luca spread out his arms and shouted: “THE WIZARD OF OZ!”
My heart sank and I went for my cell phone, determined to dial 9-1-1 and have my once macho, alpha-male, gorgeous, muscular Sicilian-descendent boyfriend committed to the looney bin.
If you you want to know what this gay couple decided to do next, so wait a bit for our next part of the story When Superman turns into Groomzilla.
To be continued…
