Large Lardo and the Costco Belly Flop

I've been asked by a couple of people to explain the story of the Large Costco Customer in more detail, so here goes.

Please bear with me as I spend a little more time on the story than I really need to.

Let's start at the beginning (ish).

I met Natalie on a blind date and quickly fell in love with her. After a few weeks of dating, she felt I was ready to be introduced to her family, the Barneys. Now the Barney's are a magical people. I could write an entire blog post on how amazing that family is, but I will save that for another time. Suffice it to say, one of the most incredible groups of people ever assembled was willing to let me join their family. (What were they thinking? I guess I'm just lucky) Ever since then, the Barney family has been incredibly generous. Natalie's Mother and Father bought us a bed as a wedding present. They ordered a very nice bed for us, and had it waiting for us at Costco in Saint George, UT.

It's important to note that, in my wifes eyes, this bed represented more than just a piece of furniture. This bed was a symbol of our a new home and a representation of the new life we were about to start. At this point Natalie and I weren't married yet, but she had already moved into our new apartment while I was still living with my roommate. At the time I was sleeping on a 25 dollar mattress I bought at a yard sale. Despite the oldie's stain-free status, I was pretty excited about the new mattress.

So we set off to Costco (aka Adventureland theme park). Even when we aren't picking up our Serta symbol of unity, going to Costco is an event. Costco is such a big deal that I think I'll start calling it THE Costco. We walked in, and after the long and winding road through The Costco's level-5 security we picked up our bed without a hitch. I was planning on just taking a couple trips and carrying the bed and box springs out to the truck we borrowed, but The Costco provided us with one of those ten-ton-capacity, fill-up-your-suburban orange flat bed carts. Seriously, you could hit one of those carts with a tank and it would still be in good enough shape to move your TV out into the parking lot.

We plopped our bed down onto the cart and started to wheel it squeakily out the door. The mattress was on top of the box o' springs, which hung about a foot off the end of the cart. We had had just made it past the receipt checker (Bouncer) when all of the sudden a massive, fat, sweaty, forty-something Large Lardo dashed out from behind one of the concrete pillars, leapt in the air, stretched to spread eagle, and belly flopped on the symbol of our new life.

I was completely stunned as I watched this red faced king kong slowly roll off my mattress, causing one side to shoot up in the air and dump him onto the sidewalk. I just looked around, dumbfounded... where was the hidden camera? Was Ashton Kutcher or Johnny "Jack A--" Knoxville going to pop out of a bush somewhere? And then the decision hit me: what was I going to do? Well I wasn't going to attack this man. It's true, he barely had the arm strength to pick his mass off the ground, but his eyes, neck, and private parts were well protected by layers of gelatinous bio-armor. Or I could verbally abuse the man, but I doubted the effectiveness of this method, seeing as he'd probably been verbally abused by EVERYONE his entire life... why else would he be leaping onto serta sleepers in the middle of the day. So I hid my ego and with one hand on the cart, and the other 'round my wifes waist, I walked to the truck. I was too confused to know what was going on, but my wife recommended that we check our new equipment for damage. This mattress is incredibly well made, but unfortunately it would have required NASA grade titanium to survive a blow like that, and the one foot hang-off of the cart didn't help either.

My wife wasn't going home. She was indignant. The blob just tried to obliterate our love symbol. This is a Woman who won't even honk the car horn when she gets cut off, and she was ready to put this guy on a spit and roast him over a fire pit (The Costco probably had one)

My wife is of angelic beauty. She's got the kind of face that causes men to forget their own names. And even though she doesn't realize she has such a weapon, she often uses it unintentionally.

She stomped back toward costco as I chased after her with our broken bed, and as we passed Large Lardo, still catching his breath, she just gave him a heartbroken look, and I could tell he was done. He would have done anything to make it up to her. I wanted to say some zinger like "did you think you saw a donut?" or "I didn't know they fed people that much in mental hospitals" but all that came out was "Dude... you broke our bed".

We went right through the "Out" doors without protest from the bouncers and up to the service desk. The service rep was a woman, but even she realized that something as gorgeous as my wife should get whatever she wants.

The Costco employees all seemed to get a pretty big kick out of our story, and they all tried to hold back the laughter when they saw Fatty Fatty two-by-four walk through the Costco door to apologize.

We walked back out into the beautiful fall weather with a new bed on our cart. I made like Jack Bauer and stood ready to protect my cargo at any cost. I knew it was wrong, but I wished harm upon Large Lardo... I wanted some sort of revenge above and beyond the ear lowering guilt trip my wife had dealt him. And then I saw his embarrassed and terribly angry wife in their reinforced SUV... She was going to make him pay in more ways than I ever could.

I'll never forget that day, and I'm sure his wife won't let him ever forget it either.

The End.