My Buddy Tom Waits Wedding

"When they were first falling in love, they used to drive wildly around L.A. at all hours and she'd purposely try to get him lost, just for the entertainment value. She'd tell him to take a left, then hop on the freeway, then cross over Adams Boulevard, then straight through the ghetto, then into a worse ghetto, then another left... "We'd end up in Indian country," Waits remembers. "Out where nobody could even believe we were - there-. Places where you could get shot just for wearing corduroy. We were going into these bars -I don't know what was protecting us- but we were loaded. God protects drunks and fools and little children. And dogs. Jesus, we had so much fun." They got married at the Always Forever Yours Wedding Chapel on Manchester Boulevard in Watts. ("It was planned at midnight for a 1 A.M. wedding." says Waits. "We made things -happen- around here!") They'd known each other, what? Two months? Maybe Three? They had to page the guy who married them. A pastor carried a beeper. The Right Reverend Donald W. Washington. "She thought it was a bad omen that it was a $70 wedding and she had fifty bucks and I only had twenty. She said, "This is a hell of a way to start a relationship.' I was like, "C'mon baby, I'll make it up to you, I'll get you later....'" There wasn't much of a honeymoon..."