On Friday, January 14, 1994 my girlfriend and I hotwired a car and held up a record store to get all the used tapes we could for our trip. Some people put pantyhose on their heads for robberies but we wore fishnet stockings, me in the left leg and her in the right. That’s love. We covered 650 miles that day, made it to Salt Lake City by midnight, got married at the Mormon temple at noon on Saturday. A woman came by our Motel 6 that afternoon to make the bed (which was, by that point, sheetless and propped up against the bathroom door) and we decided to marry her, too, since it seemed to be standard practice in Utah. By 2:30pm the next day she had tired of us and said she needed some time to think so we left her with these key grip wannabes waiting for the Sundance Film Festival and hightailed it back to the southland, just in time for the earthquake. We lay trapped under a chest of drawers full of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books for 17 hours before an ecstasy-driven band of volunteer firewomen showed up to rescue us. But those 17 hours, trapped there with her, singing the chorus from “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” during every aftershock, wooden knobs digging into my side, the smell of a dozen shattered bottles of light rum rich and heavy in the air…those were the greatest 17 hours ever. We were both sorry when the power came back on and the paramedics re-set our shattered legs. That’s love for you: it smacks.