Missed Her, page 8
I reckon that’s a pretty good start.
Uncle Ivan’s Broken
Hearts’ Club Plan
Years ago I decided to do myself a favour and quit trying to figure out what she sees in him. You know her, too. You probably know several hers. The beautiful, talented, productive woman with all of her shit together, except for the lump on the couch she calls a boyfriend. She somehow manages to get both kids dressed and fed and off to school with their lunches packed, just in time to wake him up for the third time before she leaves for work, so he doesn’t sleep in and miss his job interview that her friend lined up for him. You know and love some version of her. You’ve met and tolerated at least one or two variations on him.
For some reason, over the last two months or so, I know of at least three cases where he, for some unfathomable reason, dumped her, and here is the real mystery for me, she is left broken-hearted. Devastated even. I am not even going to get into a feminist analysis of why she still believes that she deserves no better than him, or that she feels undesirable unless he says otherwise, or why she has been socialized to take care of things that he should be man enough to do himself, because that has all been done. What I am going to do is write down the steps to heart recovery that she (and she, and her) and I came up with on the road to repair.
Step One. Get up. Do it now. There you go. I know he is a prick who called you from the airport to tell you he wasn’t coming because he decided to take the Greyhound south with the singer who hired him to do the guitar tracks on her new record and now you have a matching tattoo with no match, but get up. You have important things to do.
Step Two. Go out and buy yourself the nicest matching bra and panties set you can afford. Yes, they must be matching. Yes, they must be sexy. You are going to see them, that’s who. And if that isn’t good enough, please refer to step five.
Step Three. You need new sheets. Yes, you do. Brand new sheets that have no memories in them. Again, get the best that you can reasonably afford. My friend Mary highly recommends the bamboo sheets; though pricey, she maintains that “they give you the silkiness of satin without all that slip sliding of pillows, and the bunching and wrinkling.” Lucky for you, the sales bins at the Bay are full of sheets on sale after the holidays. I just saw a real cute set of flannel sheets with a vintage flower pattern for twenty bucks. Why? Because if you are going to lay in bed soaking your pillow with tears (also a part of this process, though not listed here as a step) then it should be in no less than 450 threads per inch.
Step Four. Get some exercise. Ever wondered why the words exercise and exorcise are only a vowel away? Think about it. Not only will this make you physically feel better and help stave off depression, but in six to eight weeks when you accidentally run into him while he is coming out of the liquor store and you are returning with fresh kale from the organic foods market, you will be glad you did. Because when you turn on your patent heel and walk away, he is going to be sorry for himself because he is no longer tapping that beautiful ass. I know he broke up with you so he could pursue his spiritual path, which turned out to be code for fucking his twenty-three-year-old yoga student, but believe me you, six weeks is more than enough time for him to figure out that it doesn’t matter that she can put both legs behind her ears when she still keeps her stuffed animal collection on her futon and she is leaving him for a girl in her second-year women’s studies class anyway. But guess what? It is too late. You look fabulous, and you are going to take that beautiful ass and sashay away with it, all the way back to your apartment, where you finally got the smell of skunkweed out of the drapes.
Step Five. Get some beautiful new cock up in you. Preferably one attached to someone who is leaving town tomorrow. Do not date this cock. Do not give this cock your cell number. Do not get to know this cock’s hopes and dreams. Ideally, this cock and you do not even speak the same language. In a perfect world, whoever owns this cock has to be on a plane within twenty-four hours, to a place you have no interest in visiting. Good. Now only remember this cock when you are practicing to become a professional masturbator. In your brand new sheets, of course.
Step Six. Do that one home renovation that you have been meaning to get around to for years. Paint that bathroom, or clean out that closet. Transform at least one thing in your living space. Do it alone.
Step Seven. Go to the hairdresser. Then, manicure, pedicure, facial. I have never done this last bit myself, but I have it on good authority that this is a crucial step. This can be done alone, or with up to twelve girlfriends. Libations to follow.
Step Eight. Take up a new hobby. Yes, in addition to masturbation. This is a great time to take that quilting class, or motorcycle maintenance course. Buy art supplies. Use them. Learn how to play again.
Step Nine. Call up all your old friends. Especially the ones who you quit hanging out with because he didn’t like them. See them. Let them remind you how awesome you really are. Laugh about some stupid shit you did in high school until you snort bubble tea out of your nose by accident and you almost pee a little.
Step Ten. Be sexy. Whenever and wherever you want. For you, this time.
The Butch Version
Recently I wrote a piece for my (mostly) straight lady friends, listing the top ten steps to getting over your ex. This was an entirely communal endeavor: earlier that week I had solicited ideas through an open call on my Facebook page, so much of the advice came from recently single women themselves. This is a relatively new method of research for me, and a fascinating one, because like many folks who work in the public eye, quite a few of my Facebook friends are people I have never actually met in real life. Some I have now developed online friendships of a sort with, others not so much. This made me wonder: when it comes to human heart related stuff like community, or support, or advice, or friendship, is the quality of the connections forged between people any less real life if it happens online? Is the advice given by one stranger to another online any less helpful than it would be if delivered by a neighbour, or an old friend? Is face-to-face consolation somehow more tangible and meaningful than it is on Facebook, or from a phone call? All this got me to thinking. I haven’t come up with any brilliant insights really, but still, there was a bit of thinking happening.
After my advice to recently single ladies came out, I received quite a few requests for a butch version of the ten steps to getting over the ex, so I put out another call on Facebook. I am going to pass on the most often repeated tips, and the steps that general consensus revealed to be helpful. But given the nature of some of the comments I received, I guess I need to include a bit of a disclaimer. When I say going to the gym and or getting some exercise will make you feel better, both physically and mentally, I am not insisting that everyone conform to mainstream advertising’s ideal body type, nor am I eschewing any kind of height-weight-specific standards of what is sexy. I mean that going to the gym or getting some exercise will make you feel better. And when I say going out for libations with your pals can help you renew old friendships that might have gone to fallow while you were in an unhappy relationship, I am in no way making light of the seriousness of substance abuse, nor am I maligning anyone in recovery. I simply mean that going out for a beverage of your choice with other consenting adults whose company you might enjoy could be a pleasurable alternative to staying home by yourself and staring at the dents in the rug where the furniture used to be. So here are some of the tips to getting over a breakup, butch style.
Get a haircut. A fresh three pack of white T-shirts and new boxers were also popular suggestions. Other butch accoutrements can help, too: vintage cufflinks, a pocketknife, or a fountain pen can put a little bounce in your step and a sparkle in your eye.
Road trip. This one is a must. There was some debate over solo versus with the buddies. I think this is a personal choice. Whether it is a train ride through the prairies alone or five fellows piling into the van for a three-day, mostly naked camping trip, everyone agreed that a change of scenery is in order.
Messy food. Barbecue, crab, lobster, corn on the cob, fondue, fried things in general. Food that gets on you while you are getting it in you. Food that involves fingerbowls, rolls of paper towels, bibs, or even a hot shower afterward.
Going places with your dog in your truck. The hardware store to buy building supplies is a great idea. This is also the precursor to one of the most important steps of all: building something awesome. Shelves. A woodshed. A loft bed. A combination couch and bench press station. Doesn’t matter what it is, it just matters that you build it. Nails should be pounded. Things should be sawed. Small amounts of blood need to be shed. This is a rite of passage, a vital ritual. Building something is also an excuse for another important step, which is:
Buy something pretty. Such as anything made by Bosch or Snap-on. This is where the discussion got a little heated: Milwaukee and Dewalt fans had to get a word in. Again, I believe decisions like this are a personal choice, and I for one would never get in between a brother and his or her tool preference. Some things are just too sacred.
Music. The stuff you want, and loud. Set up the subwoofer you found in the alley or at that garage sale and crank it. For me, this step is all about the classic rock, but that is just me. The same guidelines stated above for tool preference also apply here. What is important is that you create a new soundtrack for your life, starring you. Singing in the truck is also necessary. When the teenagers at the stoplight point and laugh, roll the window down and explain that your stereo is in fact yours, not borrowed from your mother, so you are inherently cooler, even if you are rocking out to Fleetwood Mac.
Manage what you say about your ex. This will affect the way things go for you. Be a gentleman, no matter how hard she makes it for you. This will pay off in the long run.
The most important step, in my opinion, is also the hardest. Build the brotherhood of butches. Reach out to your butch and trans male friends, and consciously seek out new ones. This is not a tired and sexist “bros before hos” thing, not at all. I am talking about building a strong, healthy community who can be there for each other. We have been taught to see each other as competition for too long, and we have suffered for it. We need to learn to stick together better. Because single is not such a bad thing to be, when you are not so alone.
She Shoots, She Scores
I’ll admit it, I had a tear in my eye when the Canadian women’s Olympic hockey team won the gold medal in Vancouver. I am not ashamed to tell anyone I spent a good portion of the Canada-US Women’s game on my knees in the living room in front of my television, that I spilled my Diet Coke on myself when we were killing a penalty, and that I didn’t miss a single game the whole series. I am a hockey fan, like so many Canadians are. We take our hockey pretty seriously. But I also take women’s hockey personally.
I started playing hockey in the boy’s leagues in the Yukon when I was six. I had played a couple of months of ringette, which is kind of like hockey but “for girls.” You play with a rubber ring and a sawed off hockey stick without a blade and usually in your figure skates. Ringette is kind of … well, not quite hockey. The coach of my ringette team happened to be shacked up with the coach of a boy’s team, and when he happened to see me play he realized I was better than a couple of the boys on his team, and my career in the boy’s league was born. I was the only girl (for lack of a more appropriate word) in the entire Whitehorse Minor Hockey League until I was sixteen. I was a decent player, not a star, but quick on my feet and a good passer. Foreshadowing for a future life of passing? Perhaps.
The locker room situation was always an issue, especially on game nights, when one change room was occupied by my team, and the other by the opposition. Game nights I changed alone in the janitor’s room, lacing up my skates by myself in the tiny, too quiet closet, usually next to a stinky mop bucket, in between a stack of puck-smeared pylons and a pallet of cardboard boxes full of plastic beer cups for the concession stand. When all the boys on my team were suited up, someone would come and knock on my door and I was then permitted to join my team in the locker room for our pre-game pep talk. I always felt like I wasn’t quite invited in, like my presence was just being tolerated. One of my coaches nicknamed me “Token.” I did not play hockey on a boy’s team because I wanted to be a boy. I played hockey on a boy’s team because I loved to play hockey. There were no other options available. When I turned sixteen, I was forced to quit playing with the young men. The guys my age were now substantially bigger ad heavier than me, and due to the threat of serious injuries from body checking and liability issues, the minor hockey league decreed that I go play on Whitehorse’s fledgling and only women’s team. This would have been in the mid-eighties, and although there were several excellent women players, there were also some who were just learning to skate. There was only the one team in town, and we had to travel to Alaska for an actual game. Coming from the competition and speed of the boy’s games I had left behind, women’s hockey was no comparison. I played ice hockey for a total of eleven years, and never once did I truly get a chance to really play with my own peers.
Now when I watch the Canadian women play, it somehow soothes an old slapshot sting left on my soul. I watch a full team of world champion calibre women playing my beloved game in front of a capacity crowd of screaming fans, and truly it makes my heart pound with new possibility. What I am witnessing now simply did not exist at all when I was a young player. I hear a little girl in the huge Olympic crowd being interviewed on the CBC. What does she want to be when she grows up? A women’s hockey player, she answers, without a heartbeat of hesitation. This is no longer a crazy dream of a lonely kid in a northern town. This is now a good answer.
My Grandma Pat turned ninety on the day we won that gold medal. I called her that night. She had been glued to the television for the entire Olympics, she told me, which I found surprising. She confessed that she had been a speed skater when she was a little girl, which I had not known, and that even now she still remembers how much she liked the feel of having strong leg muscles.
I told her I knew exactly how she felt, that one of the things I liked about sports was that it was one arena where women were rewarded for speed, strength, and even muscle.
She turned down the volume on the television so we could really talk. “When I watched those girls win that hockey game today, I sat here and felt a remarkable thing. I have always thought life would have been better if I had been born a male. I could have made more money, done more things. I could have had more sexual freedom, or at least not have been judged so harshly for the sexual freedoms I took. I turned ninety years old today, and for the first time in my life I felt proud to be a woman. I watched them take their helmets off and they were ladies underneath, and I felt so proud of us.”
I agreed with her. I didn’t tell her that I suspected the US team in particular had been directed to wear makeup (my femme friends tell me the eyeliner jobs were obviously amateur work, performed by beginners) and grow their hair to straighten up a little. I didn’t comment on how the American coach could barely bring himself to shake hands with the unflinchingly butch coach of the Canadian team. I did not bring up the fact that one of the American players had made the international lesbian sign with both hands directly into the camera shortly before begrudgingly bending her neck to accept her silver medal. I agreed with my grandmother, and reveled in my own remarkable sensation. Saying the words women, hockey, and myself in the same sentence, and for the first time in my life feeling included. Like I could belong there.
Only Two Reasons
Ever heard of a place called Pink Mountain? Population 100, maybe, and that is in the summer. About 180 clicks north of Fort St. John. One of those places on the road north that sells gas and propane and bad coffee and T-shirts for tourists. It was the morning of day three of the drive home from Vancouver to Whitehorse, and I pulled over in Pink Mountain for breakfast. Nothing much doing there, even by northern standards. You can get a tire fixed and buy an Alaska Highway hunting knife with a fake bone handle made right there in China and enjoy a burger with gravy from a powder and mushrooms from a can and cheese from a wrapper and fries from a freezer bag. The kind of place where they turn old bald truck tires into a flower planter and nail up licence plates for wall decorations.
I used the pay phone to check my cell phone messages because I hadn’t had a signal since two hours outside of Prince George, and then slipped into a squishy booth and ordered breakfast. My neck was sore from sleeping sideways in the cab of my truck and when I rubbed it I discovered a crunchy spot of dried blood behind my ear from a black fly bite. Two truckers leaned back from their dirty plates, thumbs hitched behind belt buckles, toothpicks bouncing as they bullshitted back and forth across the table, a halo of cigarette smoke swimming in the sunlight above their heads. Sound of air brakes on the highway, and somewhere a dog barked, and another answered him from farther off in the scruffy pine trees. Smell of bacon cooking and wood smoke.
The waitress slammed into the dining room through the swing doors with three plates balanced on one arm and a coffeepot in her coffeepot hand. She deposited two of the plates in front of the tourist couple in the corner, and the third she slid on to my table while she simultaneously topped up my coffee and dropped three more creamers into the bowl next to the sugar jar.
“Can I get you anything else, honey?”
“Just the road report.” I squinted up at her.
“North or south, darlin’?”
“North.”
“Ten clicks or so of new pavement going in this side of Watson Lake, fifteen-minute wait for the pilot car, maximum, and other than that it’s pretty smooth sailing, from what they tell me, anyway. All the way to Whitehorse, far’s I know. Where you headed?”
