Last weekend was my very first time ever going to a wedding.

"Matt, are you really that much of a shut-in? You're such a fucking faggot." You're probably saying to yourselves while doing something sweet.

But you're wrong. I'm not a shut-in. I've just never really had the opportunity to ever go to a wedding before. All of my cousins are about my age, give or take a few years, and it was only a matter of time before one of us finally got married. My older brother lives in San Francisco, so it's a little hard for him to meet women. The rest of my older cousins are engaged, so that leaves me, my little brother, and my younger cousins whose combined age equals roughly six or seven.

Even in my inexperience with weddings, though, I knew a few crucial things before I went:

1) It is always acceptable to get completely trashed at the open bar.

2) Don't ask for Schlitz at the open bar.

3) Don't ask for "whatever's free" after the open bar tells you that they don't have Schlitz.

4) Don't rely on Super Troopers for your jokes about wedding etiquette.

5) Get a female family member to sign your card. If you're a man, your handwriting sucks, no matter what you may believe.

6) It doesn't matter what you get the bride and groom for their wedding present. Even if it sucks, they'll tell you how much they love the bath towels you and everybody else got them.

With that knowledge under my belt, I thought I would be just fine. In fact, I was actually right for the most part.

An open bar is fucking awesome. Especially when your cousin is a beer connoisseur and he happens to know about every possible existing beer, and chooses each one he believes is brewed with a heap full of awesome. I've had great beers before. I'm a big fan of Belgian beers myself, but holy shit, I've never known beer could taste like liquor.

Maybe I am a shut-in after all.

Either way, after tasting all the beers and drinking a few too many (five or six...... I'm just a little guy) me and the family started dancing.

Italian weddings are the shit, by the way. I know I don't have much room to talk since I've only been to one wedding in my entire life, but I'm more than certain that my family just kicks obscene amounts of ass. What's cool about Italian weddings is that all the people who are drunk (which is the majority) ends up trying to dance that stupid Cha Cha Slide while wearing a sombrero and spinning an umbrella without puking. If you can pull it off, everybody hails your drunken multitasking.

Puking means you're an asshole.

But something happened that I had never seen before. Soon after the bride threw her flowers at the small crowd of giggling women, something else landed in front of me. It kinda looked like a scrunchie. Out of curiosity, I figured I would pick it up and see which one of the bridesmaids lost her scrunchie.

She was probably gross. No woman over the age of thirteen wears a scrunchie.

Suddenly, the room exploded around me. People started pushing me, and somebody grabbed my beer out of my hand.

"MATT GOT THE GARTER!!" People started cheering gleefully.

One of my cousins pointed at a little old lady sitting in a chair with her legs crossed. I recognized her as the bride's grandmother. I immediately knew what I had to do.

"Here you go." I said as I handed her the garter and walked away.

"What the hell, Matty!? You've never done this shit before!?" My cousin Mike asked me as he grabbed the back of my neck and headbutted my forehead.

"What the hell do you want me to say? I was polite!" I exclaimed.

Mike started to laugh.

"Nobody picked that thing up for a reason, you stupid shit! You gotta reach up her skirt and put that thing high up around her leg!" He said excitedly.

It would've felt creepy hearing him say it in the way he did if I hadn't felt so nauseous. I swallowed the lump in my throat and waited for it to crash down into my stomach before I turned around to face her.

She must have been at least eighty.

The skin on her arms and legs looked as if it was coming off in sheets. She had those blue veins and those milk-white legs that made me immediately think of some sort of really bad seafood dish. Like.... some sort of mutated fish with clear skin that had been left out in a desert sun for a few hours.

She smiled, and curled her finger to try and beckon me to come forward. Everybody thought this was hilarious because the poor thing was too senile to realize that she's at that age where she had nearly broken her own finger trying to do it. Come to think of it, it WAS pretty funny. I started to laugh, but nearly threw up at the same time, so I figured I should get it over with as quickly as possible and then go somewhere quiet to empty my stomach that had been filled with my shattered soul.

I knelt down and started to slide the garter up.

"Higher!" People chanted.

The garter reached her ankle.... it made its way up her calf.....

"Higher!!" People kept chanting.

Moving up her calf, I felt something horrible and began to shudder. I had either felt up one of her tits, or I had a big piece of really loose skin with a mole on it.

Judging by her reaction, I think it was her tit.

But the chanting grew louder and I decided to keep going. I was almost there. It was when I hit her knee that the unthinkable happened:

She slid down her chair towards me in this strange sort of slouching/falling motion.

I'm going to pause here for a moment. In many of my stories, I'm prone to embellishing certain events that occur. Most of the time, I'll flat-out lie about things just to make it a bit more interesting. However, it is at this point in the story where people would naturally begin to doubt the veracity of my claims. I wish that I could say that I'm doing a bit of storytelling, but I feel that the situation itself is so unbelievable that I can't feasibly expand on any of the events from here on. Sometimes life itself is so unbelievable in itself, you almost wish you could just pass a story like this off as a fairy tale.

For once, I'm not that lucky.

She slid down towards me with my hands still up her dress. When you see a senile old lady begin to fall towards you, you begin to lose focus of the situation you're in. The only thing you can concentrate on is helping this person. I gasped and gave a sympathetic "Oh no" and supported her in the only way I could.

The room went deathly quiet, the only sound being Jet's "Are you Gonna Be My Girl" playing in the background. In my drunken haze, I had realized too late where my fingers were and the dictionary in the back of my head suddenly opened to the only word to describe my plight:

"Beefy"

For the remainder of the night, that word was stuck in my head. Nobody was quite sure what to say to me. On the one hand, I had the bride thanking me for making sure her grandmother didn't fall and break something. On the other, there was a hideous unspoken truth.....

I had fingered the bride's grandmother, and probably made the old bag's entire night.