I have never been more busy in my fucking life. The minute I got on antidepressants, I started working like my life depended on it. Nobody gives those things that kind of review, but for whatever reason, the one I'm on completely kicked my ass into gear. I started shitting out papers, the shittiest of which I would score at least 97% on. My room was in perfect order for a while. I was eating bowls of fruit and vegetables. I started writing emails to festival promoters, LARP-ing as a documentarian, then playing the part. I was moving like I had something to prove, because I absolutely fucking did. I feel I have something to prove to myself: things do not have to be so bad, and no amount of blood, sweat, or lost sleep is going to take me away from proving that. I will get into that in more detail over the next couple of days. But, first, a refreshing take on an old classic: Fart Wizard has a new, intensely problematic crush!
So, I got terminated from my practicum, which is a long, long, long fucking story in its own right, but where it's left me is having the tax and finals season completely free while unemployed to me. So, not wanting to spend what little I have left over from my winter of reckless entrepreneurial spending (even longer story), I decided to move my job searching operations back to my parents' house in Red Deer, Alberta. I left almost like I was leaving my friends in Edmonton for good. I got a lot of "We'll miss you." I somehow didn't cry 'til I was halfway down the QE2 (the big highway connecting Edmonton and Red Deer). And even then, I didn't as much as I usually would pre-medication. Sometimes, I wonder if it's really for the best. Anyway, here I am, in my old stomping grounds, typing this up on my new phone in my childhood bedroom. Red Deer feels alien to me now. Its nationally notorious conservativism feels unintelligible to me. Nobody knows who Northrop Fyre is. Ballet is gay again. I feel thoroughly like city folk. They got me, Madison. I swore they would never get me. I swore I would never forget my roots. I never did, but it sure feels like I did. What is this place? What am I doing here?
The only person here who truly understands my predicament is Mort. Mort went to Hunting Hills, the high school my cousins went to. Mort was the sixth person I met in Edmonton, the fifth being his now ex-boyfriend Dr. Rock, who I went to high school with. Mort and Dr. Rock had a highly publicized break-up in our friend group. Not because the cause of it was Mort's soft-launch as a trans man, but because Dr. Rock immediately started fooling around with Moopy, who I went on one or two dates with, depending on who you ask. I was one of the first to know that Mort was a trans man, being that Dr. Rock is one of my best friends. I also saw his strange entanglement with Moopy coming for the same reason. I have become the odd throuple's unofficial correspondent. I'm close with all of them, and I'm close with everyone around them. As they delve further into each other, the further away from everyone else they get (people have started cutting them off for various complicated, bullshit reasons). But I remain where I am, so information has begun to pass through me from them to everyone else. Where have you heard this one before?
Mort is visiting his family for the weekend. Mort's dad is an urban planner for the county where my parents live. Mort's dad hates my childhood neighborhood because we hate him. Mort tells me in the Clearview McDonald's, against that annoying electronic chime that everyone knows, "My dad hates you guys because you're all rich and hate anything new." I tell him, "Yes and yes, and we're never going to change." Mort is bad at eye contact. I am, too. I'm wondering whether he's rubbing off of me or if this is just how I naturally am, pretenses removed.
Mort is lanky. It really comes out in his legs. He walks with what appears to be a slight limp, which I have never bothered to ask him about as that would probably be rude. He has stringy blonde hair that's been freshly and defiantly cut short, and a septum piercing that hangs so close it makes it look like a staple. He is quiet, witty, and self-deprecating. He's a very easy laugh. He likes Cum Town, Jawbreaker, Modest Mouse, Robert Bresson, Voltron (secretly), Michel Houellebecq, and Dennis Cooper, his favourite novelist. We have a lot to talk about.
Last year, over the summer, in the same streets him and I now walk, his now ex-boyfriend Dr. Rock told me, "I want to marry her. I'll have to figure out what I'm doing for school, whether I'm going to grad school or getting an after degree. But I think I could make either work. Married people go to school all the time." The sun was red from the smoke of distant forest fires, and I remember being mesmerized by the image Dr. Rock had conjured in my mind. True love exists, and this guy has that, I thought. How lucky. How truly lucky. I'm so happy for him. He later described it as "the greatest experience of his life." If only we had any idea what was coming for both of us in the winter.
Soon, I would have a dream where I was fucking Mort while Dr. Rock watched indifferently. It was in the style of a Francis Bacon painting: everyone had limbs that flailed in a hundred different places at once while I penetrated Mort with prompt, hydraulic precision, being met with the soulless, painted eyes of everyone. I woke up mortified, pun intended.
Months later, we were at the Room At The Top, the considerably nicer campus bar than our regular, where a friend of everyone I know works. This is back when I drank (I have since quit). Moopy was trying to fuck me. I didn't really know it. I mean, I did, but I converted every one of her signals to delusions that I would dismiss in my mind, which was often addled by alcohol and/or worsening symptoms of clinical depression in those days. Moopy pointed at successively at each person at our table: "The Buck? The Buck? Are you guys thinking The Buck?" I answer: "I'm thinking the fucking Buck!" Three beers and one shot deep, we make our descent into the basement of the Students Union Building (SUB), where the bathrooms are: the first stop in a longer journey into the night. Under SUB's sterile, airport-glow, Mort and Dr. Rock prance like circus clowns to one of the multi-faith prayer rooms. "This is where we first met! This is where Fightback used to meet!" Dr. Rock shuffles to one end of the glass wall, "I used to sit right here," and shuffles again,"and you would sit right here! I fucking hated going, but I would go every Wednesday. I would go just for Mort." He chimes in, "Because I was the only girl at Fightback." I thought it was unbelievably cute for a couple to meet at a communist student organization. I kept trying to imagine their children and how they would be told that story. Maybe I could be their honorary uncle: their dad's college buddy. I'd come over to help him with the plumbing or the transmission to the Rock family SUV, which they would pay me in a single beer that I would have in the kitchen. Their kids would be in junior high, and they'd go to one of the better schools in town where the band budget is provincially competitive, and there's a single Mandarin bilingual teacher. Their kids would have ADHD, which Mort would get right on top of treating, and I would tell the two of them (yes, there would be two), "I knew your parents in college. Take it from uncle Ben. They were cool. But, of course, you both already know that."
Mort and I walked along the road on the first hot day of this year. One of too God damn many, I thought to myself. It was so hot that he took off his pink hoodie, revealing a Godzilla t-shirt. He asks, "Too much T-Boy swag?" "Maybe," I say. "Damn," he concides. We make it to a mound in a park I used to bike in and stare at what should be the horizon. Traffic, trees, and suburbs crowd our view. Mort's hair blows with every gust of wind, and I crouch down to see the sun shine behind his face. "We're going to get slutted out this summer. You, me, Moopy, Anna. We're going to go to The Buck and crush," Mort tells me. "Oh, you God damn know it. I'm trying to get inna somethin'!" I reply.
"I'm just too romantic to actually do it. I'll write a poem."
"Me too. I decided that after I had first sex with R-d-ta."
"Relationships are awesome, though. You get to watch movies together. You and someone else on the couch. They're hard to beat."
"I guess you would know."
"Yeah. Fuck me, dude."
In that instant, I imagine a life with him. A life I could have lived if I had come Fightback every Wednesday instead of Dr. Rock, if I transferred to the University of Alberta. I get that warm feeling that has escaped me for all these years. I drive home with it. I go to bed thinking about it. I suddenly fully understand Dr. Rock, why he felt the way he did, and why he feels the way he does. I knew this was bound to happen, getting so wrapped up in their shit. Never get into something you couldn't walk out on in thirty seconds flat. I'm like a detective who falls in love with a suspect. But there's nothing that can be done about it now. It's certainly not my first rodeo. It's one of those things you just have to let pass you by. All these moments will be lost in time.
