Flipping Out

by Rachel Levine

“Why don’t you write happy stories?” my mother asks me. She’s worried about me. Everyone is worried about me. “I’m worried about you,” she says.

“Because my life is my life,” I say. Sometimes, at some of the extremely low times, not entirely unlike now, I think I want to change it. But, mostly I don’t. Of course I would like to be a happier person, a more together person. But improvement comes at a cost. It entails making lists, being on a strict schedule or trying to impose structure and regularity. At present, walking the dog three times a day, brushing my teeth, showering, and teaching my ¾ course load at a local college represent the limit of commitment I can handle before I start forgetting to turn off the stove when I leave the house or hopping on the subway before I realized I’ve left my car at the supermarket two days ago. When burdened with obligations, I go to pieces in ways that other people would at first call charming until they must pay for the five fire trucks that came to the building or discover that their car has been towed and it will cost over $500, over a week’s salary, to get it back. The economics of doing more usually results in greater expenditures. So, rather than put myself into a position of doing more, to earn more, in order to spend more, I have taken the alternate route. I do without many things I would probably buy for myself and shop at the dollar store for knock off versions of things my brother buys at Williams and Sonoma. I have yet to give up some of my costly habits: coffee in the mornings from Starbucks. But the real reason I keep my commitments to a minimum is that it claims my personality; instead of being dysthemic, I become dead and mundane.

“I feel that as a mother, if you had a boyfriend, you would be happy. It hurts me when you talk like this.”

Ah, the magic boyfriend panacea. There should be a jingle that goes along with this statement. The magic booooooooyfriend. The magic boooooooooooooooyfriend. Dooh-dah-duh-du-du-du. Dooh-dah-duh-du-du-du. I mean, come on, does she think I enjoy the solitude and loneliness of being single? Here again, I too would like a serving of boyfriend. Granted, my mother envisions a doctor or an accountant or a lawyer in a black suit waving around a cell phone in one hand the keys to his Beemer lying across my plate, with a sauce of green dollars spooned around him. The kind of dish that you eat and belch up twins, an SUV, the PTA, trips to the BWI, and an IRA. When I think of an ideal boyfriend, I am more along the lines of drunkenly and passionately making out in a washroom during a concert. But, we both want the same thing at heart, which is for me to be loved by someone. Ah, mother, I will tell you the truth – that great magic boyfriend panacea is a lie, a sham, a myth perpetuated by greeting card companies and prime time television. Because, all the boys I know -- every boyfriend I have ever had -- has left me an abandoned Ariadne. No, that is not true. I have broken enough hearts in my anhedonia to pave a long road home. The prospect of a serious emotional commitment weakens most bonds. Scientists discovered this peculiar property of proto-love when working on the Atom bomb. The secret is carefully guarded, like the aliens of Area 51.

“I date a lot of people,” I say. Kind of not really true. I did go on a date with someone from the internet a month ago. That has to count. And I had a conversation with the attractive coffee shop employee about the finer points of Sulawesi.

“Why not someone at work. How is the person who shares your office?”

“He has a girlfriend, mom.”

“I forgot,” she says. And when I don’t respond, she says what she was really thinking, “Maybe they broke up.”

“I wouldn’t like him anyway.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I know. I don’t like him.”

“You’ve never been out with him.”

“I wouldn’t want to go out with him anyway.”

“Maybe you should try to go out with the kind of person you wouldn’t go out with.”

“I think this conversation needs to end.”

“Why?”

“I’ve had enough of the abuse. Good bye. I love you. Good bye.”

I hang up the phone. I hate talking to my mother. I also hate talking to my father, who brings up a similarly painful issue: why haven’t I finished my doctoral thesis. There is always some area of my life that is failing where they like to stick the pins in. It used to be about why I haven’t filed the papers for the divorce or why I didn’t have a full time job. Fortunately, these things did come to pass and are no longer mentioned. Growing up, I remember it was my weight, my hair, my clothes. Now I live far away and they can not evaluate my shabbiness with the same microscopic fascination. I lost weight and pass for skinny on some days, average on the rest.

When people always ask me why, in spite of a myriad of accomplishments, I have such poor self esteem and such low expectations from others, I say, “It’s because I don’t have a boyfriend.” To me, it is something of a joke, but no one gets it and they feel sorry for me.

So everyone is worried about me. And maybe they should be. I wrote a story about a bad relationship. Anyone can write about a bad relationship, but to me, I used it as a metaphor for the relationship between Anglophones and Francophones in Montreal. It was inspired by a series of frustrating relationships with alcoholic, self-important artists, a summation of the more meaningful relationships I had in the last few years. So, I wrote this story and it was published within a few months in a Can-Lit magazine. People loved it and hated it at the same time. They wrote letters in to the magazine, demanding to know the ending (I thought it was pretty obvious that we broke up, but it had one of those fade to black kind of endings), demanding to know my position on Quebec sovereignty (I tried to find away to call it the disparate platform of the xenophobic, racist drivel passing as nationalism, favouring a lifestyle of self-absorbed artistic slacking but with the one merit of social awareness), telling me that the story helped them leave their sad lives, telling me that their story was about their boyfriends or girlfriends, telling me that I was self absorbed. It was pretty cool, all in all, for awhile. But, of course, the story was raw and emotive and everyone who knew that it had one foot in reality was concerned about me.

After this cheerless morning, the draw and quartering session by phone, I sit down at the computer to work, and begin by checking and responding to emails. Two hours later, I realize that I need to get started at my work. But one last thing. I Google search an old boyfriend who went on to achieve some modicum of recognition as an actor. I want to know if he is dating someone, or if he is still single, still bad in bed, still offensive and irritating. When I realize what I am doing, I am a little disgusted with myself. I don’t know why I think he would be any different.

I have to get out. Maybe go for a walk. Just get out and get some air. Maybe I will be able to work after.

I walk along St. Catherine as pedestrian shoppers walk straight into me, as though targeted for it. I am shouldered to the left, to the right, honked at by a biker riding on the sidewalk. I drift to the space between the curb and the lamp posts where the foot traffic is thinnest. A pitbull snarls at me and I turn off the main street.

I am flipping out.

Then I find it, my guitar, in an alley way.

She looks in pretty bad shape. Two of the tuning pegs are broken off. The strings are mostly missing apart from two. The bridge is popped out. Obviously, she’s kind of scratched up. This was a guitar that someone loved and cast aside. It’s name is utterly unknown to me: El Degas. She’s got the body of a Telecaster, though, with two single and a double humbucker. Two tone buttons, a volume, a tremolo. The fretboard is worn and you can see where the previous owner had a thing for frets 7-10.

“I can fix this,” I think. “I can fix this guitar.”

I bring it home. I try to tune the two strings that are still attached. I play a little bit of a bass line on the guitar, even though I can barely play.

I am going to fix this guitar.

The next day, I bring her to the shop.

The luthier, who is clearly inundated with Fenders and Gibsons and every name brand under the sun, is not especially interested in fixing my guitar. He names a price over $200 and advises me to buy a new one downstairs instead. Not only will it be cheaper, but I can trade it in when I am ready.

Fuck that.

©Rachel Levine 2006