OK, enough of the guys for a while, time to hit a hard one. Besides, I gotta get this one down before it gets paved over with false memories brought on by all the similar things that have happened since it. OK, the guys have been fun, but feel I’m risking being falsely identified as the faggot [and you KNOW I mean that politely], the craptastic sapalicious anal-izer of all things that happened last night at yesterdays bathhouse… Anyhow, this is an avoidence, you see me avoiding this, why am I avoiding, well because boys and girls, this is the big one, the extremely personal one. Actually…
I’ll preface this ‘part one’ prologue this with a couple of warnings for the squeamish amongst you. Firstly, turn back now or cover your ears and duck; if you do decide to proceed, do yourself a big favor and download a big old load of big assed gee-tar ballads. Vintage 70’s super groups would likely serve you best, launch them, crank it and, well well well just sit back and enjoy a tale so wo-full, well, it’ll just break your heart.
Fooling with you, really it’s just the standard fare tale, young man moves to the city, meets young girl, takes young girl for a wife then proceeds to hang with the transsexuals as the young wife begins fooling about with her art/business partner who just so happens to share the same name as the young man who moved to the city. You’ve heard it, lived it all before, it’s a story told day after day after day in all those books you see the secretaries reading on the subways, on the way to and from work, dreaming of Fabio, settling for guys like me. Avoiding it still, see that, yes, I am avoiding it still, but, well here we go…
Part One –Mushy Meetings:
Part one starts out in the usual place. A guy with an open heart, waiting to fill it with the excitement of a movie and a first kiss. It had been two years since the end of what he thought should have been that previous thang that shoulda just kept right on going. Two years, two problems, firstly, I believe we are meant to bond, so an open heart creates a sad loneliness that just aches day in and day out; secondly, as my buddy Rick said so eloquently once… two years, “I had stored up enough god damned jizz to shampoo a small brown bear”. Two years, is a very long time in your twenties [of course, now in my forties, two years is barely enough time to read the paper and gulp down a coffee for breakfast].
So, there I was, all lonely and horny, beginning to shed my flea bitten artist habits… still living like and with a couple of artists but focusing more on money making, and obviously, money spending. I am pretty sure money plays a big part in this one…
I had been working at this place that colorized black and white movies [dare to jar that memory open and I'll be sitting at this here computer, typing furiously for the next seventeen and a half years]… Colorization, I was changing Jimmy Stewart, Orson Wells, Emory Parlle and Peter Lore from beautifully toneful bits of black and white history into mushy noise reduced globs of ill picked and poorly placed colorfully soulless saps that were to dance dollars into the hands of the folks who then would re-secure the rights to these now brutalizingly colorful ’shows’ that were once old movies that had fallen into public domain.
A full 75% of my co-workers were either Ontario College of Art grads or Ontario College of Art dropouts like myself. I had worked my way up to upper management, one L Michele became an Art Director. In other words, she picked the colors and I told all my old art school pals where, when and how to stick them.
There’s a side story here… Before taking the plunge, I had been eyeing one L Michele for quite some time. I was ready to ask her the scary question, but then she applied for a promotion, a promotion to that Art Director gig… It being mostly my decision on who would get the gig, I felt it highly inappropriate to ask one of the candidates out on a date the day after I had interviewed her. It took a god damned month for me and my partners in this crime to come to a god damned decision, a whole month on top of those danged two years… run little brown bear RUN.
So there I was, ooogling a gal, AND getting good advice from her pal that I was, indeed being ooogled back. Couldn’t ask her out so what to do, what to do but what the heck, throw a party. Money was good, it was time to show off that this hunter and gather at the young old age of 24 or something had hit the nutpot, sorry, had, nut the jackpot and had enough extra dough-ray-me to invite the gang over and feed them from the cooler he filled mostly himself. By the way, sorry kids, this is actually how we all spoke back in Canada a way back at that turn of that century we called the late 1980’s, early 90’s. We wuz speakin’ post punk hallalua glory be god that the cowboy didn’t blows us all ups before weze all got the chance to make and spend all this money talk.
Relatively, I had it good, I was living in about 2000 square feet with a couple of pals; the sign on the door of these 2000 square feet read “The Parkdale Sports Fishing and Hunting Club”. Indeed, what else to do but throw a party, invite the gang, invite the job candidate, play it coy but get and give some insider info so that when the decision had been made, the question could be asked… The party ended up being the weekend before the Friday we finally hired one L Michele for the job.
There’s a sweater, a drafting table and phony ploy from a great old friend mixed up in this story as it heads off to the in-between time between Saturday’s party and Friday’s decision… Let’s see if I can remember which came first and who did what to who now. But first, an intermission, an interlude and a bit of advise to those twenty something year olds who might be planning to throw thier own party… One, plan your parties in early spring so the chicks wear, then discard their sweaters strategically about the house; Two, be sure to invite all peoples who have spoken kindly, highly and often about all the goodness you have offered humanity; and thirdly, if you have a microwave, hide your alarm clock, otherwise, drunken experiments that destroy both may easily ensue. Fucking Twenty Something Year Olds… that was a perfectly good alarm clock!
More on parties in the late eighties, you gotta know the context kids. Remember at this time DJ’s hadn’t yet been invented. Most of the good ones were still tossing the ball on whatever playground it was they grew up on. Club drugs were still being prescribed as relaxants to couples undergoing marital counseling, heck there really weren’t any clubs, well at least not the hanger sized snake pits full of hopped up happy kids that came a few years later. OK, OK, ya ya there were clubs, but to us these were just fading sweaty places, uptown, halls full of aging Ginos and Ginettes, drinking happily named drinks and dancing to tired out old disco dreck. This was a moment in-between. This was the time that all the stuff I had come of age with, stuff like punk, [I mean real punk, not this emo crap the kiddies swoon to these days], stuff like heroic painting and The Dukes of Hazard etc…. This was the exact moment all these things dried up and blew away. My hog hair bristles sat idly glued into each of their individual paint pots. We had grown up and grown out of a whole big bunch of things; conversly, we hadn’t quite grown into something else, quite yet.
Our party was mus-ikked by pre-recorded mixed tapes. Songs would have easily included our old favorite punky-dunkalicious standbys [I'm so bored of the U.S.A], and the stuff we were listening to, in this in-between time; Hank Williams, Ema Sumac, maybe some Roy Orbison. To old for the Smiths, to young, well too fucking young and fucking meaninglessly few in fucking numbers [fark you I AM gen-X], to have anything that was really fuckin’ ours. I do recall it being a really good party though.
So yes, one L Michele dropped by to pop a few beers from that cooler. She came wearing a light blue sweater, I spoke with her and her friends a few times, I kept an eye on her to make sure none of the other hunter gatherer types were angling in on what I wanted quite badly at that time. Ways back then we were a much more polite lot, at least my gang anyhow. Oh, there were a few, lte’s call ‘em, young Turks, jerks who had histories of bagging and bragging, but it just didn’t seem to be “the thing” with my crowd, my polite crowd. Maybe it was just the Art Schoolish overly read overly left pedigree and/or the fact that sexy feminism hadn’t quite percolated itself into the form of lipstick lesbians and lady friends who NOW like to bag and brag like the big boys themselves. I had wary eyes on one “bag and bragger” who was spending attention on one L Michele; one L Michele handled herself quite handily…
When the party was over [most likely sometime early Sunday afternoon], amid the beer bottles, cigarette butts and the usual layer of post party scum, we found, a nice light blue Sweater.
It’s always fun to be picked up. Matter of factly, I think this is the case in most cases. Oh I don’t know, I have on occasion, thrown my growl into the ring, I have gotten all he-manny, attempting to snag the “what I wants” from moment to moment, but honestly, growing up with punkish childhood angst and Art School ethos, just didn’t leave me with the tool required to dive into the frat boy pool and compete for the super lovelies. Stick with what you know, let them come to you; uber passive aggressiveness; sickly charm a little compassion and a little empathy… I had one L Michele in the bag, I was now in possession of her light blue sweater.
…AND with that, this is the END of part ONE of many… Tune in next time, when the we’ll examine just how the light blue sweater, drafting table and phony ploy from a great old friend lead us directly to the wasted, or rather the years of growth and experience, eight great years, eight years that I will just have to ask you… just WHAT did you do… Eight years, was a vey long time, I think it may deserve Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and, maybe 7 and 8, and in all likelihood… 9.
My god, NO, we’re not talkin’ “best years of your life”… just good years that helped fill the gap between, well between then and now.
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