Stalking Robert Smith

I'd made up my mind to dislike Sara before I met her.

This requires some explanation, which involves a small (admittedly vague) slice of my life story.

I met Chris more years ago than I care to admit.  I have no memory of our actual first meeting*, but the circumstances were this:  I was in grade 10 or 11.  For reasons I won't go into, my friend Jen had decided her home life was intolerable and left.  For other reasons that I won't go into, Chris, though still in high school, was living on his own in a bachelor apartment.  And Jen, who was very petite, took up residence in his closet. 

Not that Chris and I made fast friends.  Jen moved out of his closet within a couple of months and after that, we didn't see each that often.  We moved in similar, but not the same circles, so our paths would cross sometimes, and we were friendly, but it didn't go any further than that.  Our paths continued to cross, very occasionally, after we were both finished high school and moved away.  He was an on-again-off-again resident of Toronto.  I would visit my grade-10-boyfriend-turned-regular-friend Edwin in Toronto every few months.  Edwin and Chris would hang out sometimes, so sometimes when I came to see Edwin, Chris would be around.  But then I moved out west, and these visits stopped.

Fast forward several years.  I was fresh from a series of personal disasters, needed a new scene, and picked TO because I had two friends here.  I was not including Chris in that number.  I was flat broke with a delinquent student loan.  I found a low-paying, nine-to-five job.  I found a low-rent basement apartment, which was about 250 sqaure feet, both smelled and looked musty (moss green paint), and never got any natural light - I mean, none at all.  It could have been miserable, but it wasn't all bad**.  I considered the work and home situations temporary, and only a couple of months went by before I took up with a boy.  He had a lot of friends who all loved music and drinking.  I was like a fish in water, busy doing something fun 3 or 4 nights a week. 

A  year went by, that relationship turned sour, and things took a turn for the lonely and discouraged.  I was over a year into my "temporary" job.  Still living in the basement apartment, which Edwin had started calling "junky hole".  Without access to my now ex-boyfriend's social circle, I was virtually friendless.  I still had Edwin, but that was all, my other friend in the city having decamped for Vancouver not long after I got here. 

So when Edwin called me up and asked if I wanted to go for drinks with Chris, I jumped.  A friend!  Never mind that we didn't know each other all that well and I hadn't seen him in several years.  We'd not known each other all that well for such a long time that it was good enough for me.  Edwin called me on the designated Saturday night to remind me to come.  And told me that Chris would be bringing his new girlfriend.  I was not pleased.

It seems to have evened out over the years, but for a long time I got along much better with men than women.  I didn't relate well to other girls for several reasons that would be too time consuming to go into.  I didn't get them, and I accepted that as the way it was.  My experience with the girlfriends of guys that I was friends with had not been positive.  I won't try to travel back in time to get into any of their heads.  I'm going to assume that they didn't relate to me any better than I did them, so a big part of it was just that they didn't understand me and/or like me very much.  Add that to a bit of insecurity/jealousy/suspicion when it became clear that I had much more fun talking to their boyfriends than talking to them.  It never went well. 

Plus, I'd known a couple of Chris' ex-girlfriends, and had no faith at all in his taste in women.  My happy reunion with fellow Chathamite/potential person to hang out with was going to be ruined by some stupid girl.

I don't precisely remember thinking "I'll show her" when I started to get dressed.  I remember assuming that things were not going to go well, but that maybe Edwin could be convinced to go out after and I'd pick up - and I dressed appropriately.  Not appropriate for a couple of casual pints at an Irish pub, in retrospect.  After I was ready to go, I remember some satisfaction in the likelihood that I'd make the girlfriend uncomfortable.  I arrived at the bar about half an hour late, dressed in a purple corduroy mini skirt, bright orange Converse high tops, and a very form-fitting Go-Go's T-shirt.  Slurping on a Push-Pop***.  Chris, Sara and/or Edwin would be better people than me to describe the impression I made.  I wasn't paying much attention, since I'd convinced myself that I wasn't trying to make any kind of point but that this was just me on a Saturday night, and that anyone who thought anything of it was stupid and annoying.  I sat down, ordered a pint, continued sucking on the Push-Pop, and pointedly ignored Sara, the girlfriend. 

Had Sara been your usual kind of girl, things probably would have gone the way I thought they would.  I would've left the bar thinking that it was a shame that Chris' girlfriend was so stupid and annoying, honestly believing that the social failure had everything to do with her and nothing to do with my mini-skirt or the fact that I'd just spent two hours talking to her boyfriend and pretending she wasn't there, except for when she tried to speak and I replied to her, indirectly, with something both condescending and sarcastic.

But you can only ignore one of the people sitting at a table for four for so long.  I learned later that Sara thought I wanted to sleep with Chris, which she found hilarious.  My recollection is also that she saw right through me, knew that I'd hoped to make her uncomfortable, and decided to one-up me by being especially friendly.  Sara has a scathingly mean sense of humour.  Sara being friendly involves her letting you in the joke****. 

I don't know whether there's been much evidence of my scathingly mean sense of humour in the blog - given that I'm generally discoursing about people that I like.  Regardless.  I was like a fish in water.  Sara and I made fast friends.

Why does this matter today, you may wonder?

It could be that I'm running out of material and that after spending more than a year writing about them, their family way, and how it all relates to me, I figured it was time to shed some light on how/why I know these people.  But that's not it.

The truth is that the winner of the 2011 3 Day Novel contest***** was recently announced.  A tale of an aging rock journalist who spends the novel following around a band under the pretext of writing their biography, but which ultimately turns out to be a chronicling of himself. 

To backtrack, one of the things that Sara and I bonded over the night we met at Murphy's Pub was the fact that we'd both majored in creative writing in university, a bachelor's degree we both knew was not going to lead to any kind of career offering enough income, literally, to buy us lunch.  We've planned several collaborative writing projects over the years, mainly a screenplay for "Pump Up the Volume II", the story of Mark Hunter/Happy Harry 20 years after his pirate radio project was shut down by the FCC and he was arrested.  In our story, Happy Harry is just out of jail, moves back into his parents' basement, and tries to relive his glory days by getting the radio thing going again.  Which is both sad and inappropriate since he is now a 38 year old man hoping to captivate a teen audience by masturbating on air.  This project never came to anything, mostly because, as Chris pointed out, we had much more fun making fun of Christian Slater and how we could probably get him to reprise his role for cheap since he no longer had a career than actually putting pen to paper.

The one project****** that Sara and I did follow through on was entering the 2010 3 Day Novel contest.  The tale of an aging rock journalist who spends the novel following around - or trying to follow around - Robert Smith - but ultimately telling the story of herself.  We did not win.  We were both unimpressed, to say the least, with the synopsis of this year's winner.

I won't deny that when re-reading our manuscript, it is very obviously the product of a semi-delirious 72 hours fuelled entirely by coffee, vegetarian lasagna, Space Pops and hard cider.  But I also know that there's some really good material in there.  After it was over, Sara and I agreed that it was a gruelling, but cathartic experience, and we should do it every year.

The following thoughts may seem disjointed, but they make sense to me.

Sara had three week old twins on her hands which precluded her from this year's contest.  I entered on my own.  I gave up and went drinking about 36 hours in, when it became apparent that I was not going to be happy with whatever I managed to produce.  I didn't feel the weekend was a failure, though, since it motivated me to come up with a concept I might not have otherwise, and am still actually working on.  After a decade-long dry spell, I think I might have something good.

But that's not exactly the point, either.

One of the reasons why I've tried so hard to avoid the entrapments of full-on adulthood - and that would include children - is the belief that that kind of responsibility would spell the end of any chance of following my misguided muse.

But since I've not personally done anything to propel me to full-on adulthood, that's not really the point either.

I spent many years doing no writing at all apart from largely illegible, vodka-soaked journals bemoaning my unhealthy relationships and overall position in life.

I think Margaret Atwood is a tad pretentious, so I hate paraphrasing her, but when talking about writing, she said something to the effect of, "anyone contemplating writing should go and stand in the middle of a library and ask themselves whether they have anything to say that's different from what's already been said".

It took Sara (and Chris), and their leap into full-on adulthood, to get me going again.

Not that I'm garnering enough income from my blog to buy me lunch (aka: nothing), but it's more than I've done it years, and I feel good about that.

Sorry in advance for being sentimental, and not that you did it on purpose for me or anything.

But thanks.


*I was possibly really high at the time.  We liked to smoke up every day after school.

**I can't and won't deny that I spent my first few months listening to Phil Collins (this was my "sad" music) and drinking alone in the basement.  But it didn't last so long.

***As accessories go, I switched back and forth between Push-Pops and Blow-Pops.

****I have no doubt that I was the brunt of these jokes for awhile.  Actually, I know for sure that I was - and still am - I'm okay with it.  Edwin made it really easy for our mean streaks to come out, however, when he invited his friend Vivos and didn't tell anyone.  Or suggest that we find a bigger table and/or an extra seat when Vivos arrived.  When Vivos announced, 3/4 of the way through a bottle of Heineken,  "you know, I think this beer is bad", we thought it was the random announcement of a completely random person who'd been hovering over our table for nearly an hour*******.

*****http://www.3daynovel.com/

******I almost forgot.  Sara and I collaborated successfully on the lyrics for a song called "Pocket Mullet Man"********, a song now performed by indie Toronto band When We Was Young http://www.myspace.com/whenwewasyoung/music.  (I particularly like "Two Feet", "Out of Place" and "Itch", in that order).  They sadly do not include a recording of Pocket Mullet Man on their MySpace.  Nor do they include their cover of Kriss Kross, which is amazing.

*******Vivos could always be counted on for something completely random.  "Sneakers are really making a come-back" (out of nowhere), "I like the white ones" (about 90 minutes after a conversation about jelly beans), and, my favourite, "lesbians always pick fights with me" (out of nowhere).  Where is this guy?  I kind of miss him.

********Pocket Mullet Man, his favourite colour is beige. Pocket Mullet Man, likes his girls under-age...