We left without mentioning that I was actually biologically female. It just didn't seem appropriate to spoil it all for Karen like that.
Only the bride and groom-to-be are allowed into the actual marriage license office. The hall outside of the office was chaos, small children running amok and relatives of happy couples sweating in their Sunday best. We were ushered through a metal detector, my pocket knife was confiscated and we got in line to wait.
All the other couples were staring at us. I presumed it was because I was wearing shining silver pants and a metallic blue cowboy hat with a dalmation fun fur hat band, and she was stunningly beautiful in her sundress.  My palms began to sweat and for the first time I wondered how the state of Nevada really felt about same-sex marriages. But we had come so far . . . I took out my B.C. driver's license. The only thing identifying me as female was a tiny capital "F" on the back. I removed some lucky wedding day dirt from my pocket and began to rub the grains of sand over the "F" with my thumb. It quite easily disappeared.
It seemed simple enough. I would just let her do the talking.
The woman behind the counter took our thirty-five dollars without a second glance. She filled out both our names on a form, and then a marriage certificate. Things were running smoothly, until she asked me what my middle initial, E, stood for. My middle name is Elizabeth. "Uhh . . . Elliot." I had hesitated, and she looked up, her eyes narrowing.
"I'll be right back." She scooped our IDs and paperwork up, and disappeared into a back room with them.
She returned minutes later, accompanied by a woman with even bigger hair than hers, her supervisor. The supervisor came out from behind the counter and walked slowly around me, scrutinizing. I felt her eyes cross over my chest (I have no breasts to speak of; well, none that a good sports bra can't render harmless) and then down to my crotch. I was, as usual, packing. Still she was on to me.
"Well, I am afraid I cannot issue you a marriage license. Both of you . . . appear to be female, and this identification," she paused to look over her spectacles at me, "appears to have been . . . tampered with. Two people of the same gender cannot be married in this state. I will thank you both to leave now."
The beefcake security guards didn't look too interested in hearing me pontificate about my theories refuting the binary gender system, they just pointed at the door.
We left, and as we walked past the gauntlet of staring couples, I felt something I thought I had grown out of: indignant rage. Or to be more accurate, it was foot-stamping fury. "How come that guy behind me can get married?" I wanted to rail at someone in charge. "He doesn't even look happy to be here. How come he can? And that other guy doesn't even have any teeth, and he's scoping out all the women except the one he is standing with. And how about whassisface over there? He is wearing acid wash jeans, for chrissakes. The injustice of it all."
We walked back to the van. My ears burned, and my lovely bride to be placed a cool palm on the back of my neck. "We were so close. You just about gender-fucked the state of Nevada."
Any doubts I may have previously had were gone. This was Las Vegas. Someone was going to marry us. We were still booked at the Candlelight Chapel for 7:45.
"I'm afraid we can't perform a ceremony without a license here." He looked freshly scrubbed, and sincere. "I don't understand what the problem was, you're over eighteen, aren't you?" His desk in the chapel office was spotless and spit-shined. "Just try again, they change shifts every four hours, you'll probably get someone else, sir, and we can just move your booking ahead."
"I really don't think my age was the issue. Apparently two women can't be wed, I think that's more the problem."
His jaw dropped, and again I felt his eyes: Adam's apple, chest, crotch. It was beginning to get tedious. "Well, then, we certainly can't marry  you here, uhh . . . ma'am, we can't, umm . . . help you at all."
He was nervous now. I had messed with something sacred regarding how he saw the world, I looked like a man but wasn't, and was probably dangerous. I asked him for our deposit back. "Well, I don't know anything about a deposit, you'll have to go back and talk to Karen about that." He moved things around on his desk, then moved them back.
There were two fags in tasteful blue suits opening the oak doors out front. Both were sporting conspicuously new-looking wedding bands. One winked at us on our way out. "Best of luck to you, girls." He lisped and gave us a limp-wristed salute.
I sat in the van and smoked, sadder than a sun-faded fun fur skirt, while she went in and tried to get our deposit back. I watched her return empty-handed, the wind wrapping her dress around her thighs. "No dice, cowboy." She shrugged and climbed in. "Karen went home. It's a different woman, she's not all that sympathetic."
I took the receipt from her. I was getting our money back. Starry-eyed lovers get ripped off in Las Vegas? Whoever heard of such a thing? "I'm gonna give it a try." I kissed her, and tasted tea tree oil and honey. "Cover me, I'm going in."
The woman I found inside was older than Karen, with tired eyelids and lipstick escaping into the lines around her mouth. "And you must be the groom. I can see why they had trouble with you at the courthouse, you don't look a day over sixteen." Her gold tag proclaimed her to be Rita. "I told your lovely bride, and I'm telling you, I can't give you your money back. Karen has it." Rita's voice sounded like gravel rolling over gravel.
"I'm not asking you for our money back. I just want you to find someone who will marry us without a license. Come on, Rita, just help us out."
"She pregnant? Is that what this is all about?" She looked at me sideways.
"No, nothing like that. We're in love."
"Love," she repeated, like she had finally heard it all. She took a deep breath and picked up the phone. "I want you to know this is coming out of my own pocket, Karen and I, we run a separate thing here, we're not partners, I just taught her everything she knows."
I imagined there wasn't much Rita couldn't teach.
"Zat you Greg? Yeah, it's me. Yeah, he's fine, stitches come out on Thursday, ornery as ever, but what else is new . . . listen, can you marry a young couple I got here without a license? I dunno, some trouble down at the courthouse."
She coughed and almost dropped the phone. "No . . . he's old enough . . . " She looked at me like I was a shoplifter. "Well, it's hard to tell these days . . . he's wearing a cowboy hat."
I removed my hat and stood tall in front of her, palms up. "What do you need to see, Rita?" I was almost ready to give up.
"Yeah, I gotta couple of ladies here for you, Greg, can you still do those? Kay, I'll send them right down."
Rita scribbled an address down for me, shaking her head. "They can take you at the Shamrock. You should have come clean with Karen in the first place, you got yourself into this, kiddo, you're lucky old Rita is helping you out at all. Bet Karen liked the looks of you though, huh?" She laughed, bringing on another cough. "Be careful out there, don't go getting yourself beat up now, you hear me?"
I thought I loved Karen, but I loved Rita more.
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