The Long and Convoluted Story of Sam & Liz

It all started in 1989. and I drove down to Orlando to see Motley Crue for the Dr. Feelgood tour. In the crowd that night was a young girl, 14 years old, chaperoned by her mom. As you might guess, that girl was Liz. What a coincidence.

I moved to Orlando in the fall of 1992. Just before my move a new little coffee shop, the first of its kind in Orlando, opened in Wall Street Plaza. I didn’t know it at the time, but this little coffee shop would have a profound impact on me several years later.

Yab Yum, the coffee shop, was a mecca for all of the disgruntled kids that just didn’t fit in anywhere else. Now, I wasn’t exactly one of those kids, but I was close enough in a lot of ways that I felt more comfortable around them than I did around other folks. Yab Yum simply provided a place for all of those oddballs with weird haircuts and tattoos to find each other in one way or another. I was definitely an oddball, but I lacked the weird haircut and tattoos.

Unfortunately, my work schedule didn’t allow me to hang out at the new coffee shop nearly as much as I would have liked. I made an appearance here and there. Even on the somewhat dreadful open mike nights, but I must admit that I was never a “regular” in the classic sense.

At some point, Yab Yum spawned a bar next door named Go Lounge. Three words can describe Go Lounge. BEST BAR EVER! Suffice to say that the little watering hole was witness to many nights of debauchery the likes of which I will not detail here for fear of offending you, my gentle reader.

I was attending UCF, the main reason for my move to Orlando, and working diligently toward a degree in English. If you take the meaning of diligently to be something more akin to wasting as much time as possible doing all sorts of unseemly acts at all hours of the night and somehow miraculously still keeping my grades up, then you’ll have a much better understanding of my years at UCF. And the less we say of that, the better.

At any rate, there was a coffee shop and a bar… and you’re wondering what the heck does this have to do with meeting Liz? We’ll get to that eventually, I promise. Just sit tight and enjoy the ride. Again, there was a coffee shop and a bar that I loved and didn’t spend nearly enough time at. It wasn’t so much that Yab Yum and Go were places I hung out at for hours upon hours, but they were my mental and physical anchors. Whenever I was wandering through downtown, just knowing they were there was comforting to me. If I stepped too far down the path of bacchanalia, these two places were there to give me succor and set me straight (well, straighter than I was before and that’s pretty good).

A couple of years passed. Yab Yum spawned another bar: The Kit Kat Club. The space had been a small theatre (with live actors) and an after hours rave club. So now the crazy haired weirdos and oddballs had a place where they could more easily mingle with the more straight laced folks that were then just starting to move to downtown Orlando from the suburbs. At the time we didn’t see it, but it was truly the beginning of the end. Enough of that… back to the story.

Kit Kat had been open a while when the Yab Yum folks hired a young woman named Elizabeth Marie Abrams to work as a server. She would eventually become a bartender and even a manager. She would eventually even meet me… more on that later.

I finished UCF soon after the young woman started working at Yab Yum. A year later I also started a new job at USA TODAY. I was hired as an Accountant/PC Coordinator. Eventually, my title would go through a series of contortions and permutations that would result in its current form: Regional Systems Analyst. It’s fairly a dry and boring title. It’s the sort of title that puts people to sleep. Again, the less said about that, the better.

I’m not sure what was going on for the young woman around that time… but I was just learning how to be a human being. Let’s just say that learning to be human requires that you make a lot of mistakes from which you can gain valuable life lessons. The mistakes you make often end up hurting other people (and sometimes you too). In the long run, however, the mistakes make you a human being. It’s important to note here that I am, in fact, an alien. I have always been an alien, but I didn’t realize it until around this time when my first human being lessons began.

By the by, those lessons took several years. I must admit now that throughout my human being lesson years, I spent very little time at the places spawned by Yab Yum. I might have popped in every couple of months just to see what was going on, but the decidedly small amount of time I spent there explains in part my not having met the young woman sooner rather than later.

Suddenly we make it to 1999 (2000 zero zero, party over, oops, out of time) with all of our fingers and toes intact. Amazing really, considering all of the various opportunities for a digit to become disconnected from the body. I had slipped into the comfortable, but often lonely, life of a bachelor. I went out a few nights a week with friends, but I mostly kept to myself. I had learned a lot on the way to becoming a human being and it was nice just to exist for a while.

The way I remember it is that an old acquaintance of mine, Alena Citro, had started working the beer tub at Kit Kat right around that time. Every time I stopped by Kit Kat, I would chat up Alena and discuss beer and other various and sundry topics of the day.

It got to the point that I was becoming a regular at the three Yab Yum establishments once again. One slow evening happened along that found me sitting at the bar at Kit Kat sipping a tall cold one. I was rolling along minding my own business when unbeknownst to me this conversation happened behind the bar…

El Pidio “Rey” Huerta: Hey Leesee (nickname for Liz)
Liz: Yeah
Rey: You ever notice how that regular Sam always gives “you” his credit card?
Liz: No
Rey: I think he likes you

So while Rey was filling Liz’s head up with these fantasies of me wanting to date her, I sat oblivious to all of this and continued sipping my beer. I hate to say it, but I honestly hadn’t even thought about it. As a general rule I do not date people at establishments that I frequent for fun… It just never crossed my mind to talk to someone serving me drinks at my favorite bar. I’m odd, I know. Just remember that I’m an alien and everything will be OK.

At any rate, the decidedly middle school conversation behind the bar continued…

Liz: No way… well he is cute.
Van: What are you guys talking about?
Rey: I think Sam likes Liz
Liz: No way…
Van: Why not? He’s cute. I’ll ask him for you!
Liz: Va… No!

Right at that moment I was no longer sitting at the bar. I can’t remember if I was in the bathroom or if I just happened to be wandering around the back area of the bar, but Van found me walking back toward the bar and asked me point blank, “Hey, Sam, what do you think of my girl Liz?”

“Uhm… Wha?” (marvel at my witty repartee)

“Liz. What do you think of her.”

“I don’t understand. What about Liz?”

“Exactly! What about Liz?”

“Oh! I don’t know. She seems OK, I guess. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

As you can see, I was more than confused. Van was attempting to tear down the wall I had placed between me and the people that provide the beer. My brain wasn’t functioning in large part because of the beer I had already consumed (and other assorted chemistry experiments).

I was bound and determined to get another beer so I made my way back to the bar. Liz is a take charge kind of person. She’s not the kind of person that will just let a co-worker do the job for her. She’ll walk right into the line of fire and take care of business. Fearing that I would think her a middle school dropout due to Van’s verbal assault, Liz came straight up to me and asked me out.

That’s right ladies. If you want a man, just ask him. At the very least, he’ll listen politely. And that’s exactly what I did. She invited me over to her place to hang out a bit after work. I didn’t have anywhere special to go, so I agreed.

At that point, I wasn’t sure what had just happened so I made a mad dash for Alena. Surely she could help me set this straight in my head. Nope. Alena made it worse. When I asked her what the deal with Liz was. Her response was… and I quote…

“Oh Liz? She freaky! She got jewelry!” at which point Alena started pointing out various body parts that had jewelry attached. Here, there… everywhere. For the slow people out there Alena meant that Liz had piercings in places most people don’t have piercings. If you know what I mean (and I think you do).

Most men my age would hear news like this and praise some deity for the luck they had just been bestowed, but not me. My heart sank. Here I was thinking I would just hang out and maybe meet a cool person. Now my brain was working overtime trying to think of ways to cancel my rendezvous. I simply wasn’t interested in “freaky”.

We eventually hung out at her place. Nothing happened. She was actually more “normal” than “freaky”. Sure, she did have all the piercings and whatnot, but that’s not where she was at mentally. Even though our conversation veered in and out of coherence, I felt a spark. I knew I wanted to get to know her better. I called her the next morning. The rest, as they say, is history.

–sam