I had this friend named George. Not talking about your grandfather, who is awesome and you’re very lucky to have, I’m talking about a very strange and wonderful person I knew some time ago.
In my late teens I had a band. I played drums, Rob played bass, Jodi played rhythm guitar and sang, Clint played lead guitar, and George just hung around. We weren’t that great, but George was a dedicated follower. Like us, he was about eighteen or nineteen. Unlike us —and this blew my mind at the time— he had two young boys. He shared the kids with his on/off girlfriend. She was crazy and violent. But with George, this perhaps can be forgiven.
He was a difficult guy to understand. Not only because he had a tendency to mumble, but because he was wracked with a terrible stutter. This combination can be deadly in terms of coherency. He was a heavy smoker and occasional hare-brained philosopher. . . when you could understand what he was saying. It must have been frustrating for him; having all these incredible thoughts and having them torpedoed by his unreliable mouth. At times, when he mumbled and stuttered, he did it enthusiastically.
Truth is, at the beginning I didn’t think much of him. People claimed he was hyper-intelligent, and there were moments when that would shine through, but for the most part I thought he was in idiot. He was easy to make fun of, and we all did. It wasn’t born of some cruelty. The fact of the matter is that he did stupid things — like use my father’s university scarf as a baby-wipe, or dive head-first into nearby lake and emerge, his head covered in feces.
The years went on, alliances in the band shifted —I started dating Jodi’s ex-girlfriend, Devon. Devon and I had been friends prior to this and she turned to me romantically, I think, out of the shear neglect she experienced from Jodi. While “the boys” ignored us due to heavy involvement in a role-playing game she and I were left to our own devices. Long eye-contact changed to soft touches. We fell utterly and hopelessly in love.
Devon is easy to love. Warm, sweet, caring, tomboy, stunning, she is gifted with wonderful attributes. For me, it was two things: I’m a sucker for red-heads — she is as beautiful a ginger as they come, and she has the voice of an angel. I have never heard something that sounded so beautiful. It’s the only voice that can move me to tears. She has a lot of other great things going on, but I suspect it’s her gregariousness that caused men to fall in love with her. I personally know quite a few of them, and I think that many still do. George did at one point. But, it never got in the way of our growing friendship.
I started to realize that George was, in fact, a kind of tortured genius. His personal life was a train-wreck; the kids, the crap jobs, the social blunders, getting kicked out of his house. It went on, and on. He was always a guy that demanded a lot from his friends because of acts of utter stupidity and weird twists of fate.
The night before I was going to move to Montreal with Devon I got desperate 3 am call from him. It turns out he had run out of gas two hours out of town, and he was in the middle of nowhere. He wanted me to fill a jerry-can and drive it out to him to refill his tank. After cursing him for several minutes I got in the car to find him. When I finally did I asked him what happened. He stuttered that he got lost after being convinced he was going in the right direction. I said, “That’s how it usually happens, you idiot.” Our relationship was filled with these kinds of moments.
And those moments continued even when I was living in Montreal and my emotionally-charged relationship with Devon started to careen out of control a couple years later. It happens, you know? I was too jealous, she was kind of an unconscious flirt. She liked attention, I didn’t give her enough. The lines of communication between us became pinched and atrophied. I can turn to ice when I want to. For someone so warm, and in need of warmth, this was difficult for her to deal with.
My few relationships tended to be very long, and very intense. My relationship with Devon was no different. This made the long drawn-out break-up incredibly difficult for both of us. We were still living together, we were emotionally immature and knew each other well enough to pick and choose fighting words with intent to destroy.
She would probably claim that it was more difficult on her. That may be so, but I can only see things from one perspective. Mine. The long terrible nights waiting to hear the door of our Montreal apartment open and close, as she came home from a night of carousing. The ignoring. The tears. Division lines between shared friends. Watching men fall for her. Picking up our relationship by the scruff of the neck to try to make it work, and then beating it senseless because it couldn’t, again, and again, and again. The same incredible energy that fuelled our fantastic love was the same energy that we used to tear it apart.
Like I said. It happens.
Sitting here now, in Denmark, looking at the inches of snow out my window it’s hard to believe that I was so wrecked about that break-up so long ago. But I was utterly mangled; negative emotions amplified by teenage testosterone running amok. A general despondency tweaked because we didn’t have the distractions then that we have today. We had a television but no cable. It’s hard to focus on a book —of which I had many— when you’re feeling that black. We had movies we’d already seen a thousand times. Not many people had Internet connections in their home. We certainly didn’t. Ironically the very thing that Devon taught me to do was the very thing that kept me moderately sane throughout that long terrible time; I chose the most complicated guitar piece I could think of, and I learned it.
I also went to Ottawa a lot to escape from the toxic atmosphere of the apartment. George, by now had been kicked out of the house he shared with his girlfriend and two kids. He was living in the basement of his mom’s place on Bronson, North of the Queensway. The band was long defunct, but I still spent a lot of time with Rob and George. George had taken up weightlifting along with “the boys” but like everything he did, it was adapted and made “Georgified”. I remember walking down the stairs to his damp dark basement and seeing him with a pillow attached firmly to his back with a belt you normally see worn with business suits. He was doing standing curls with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I asked him about the pillow and he mumbled something about “back support”.
We got to talking, and he could see that I was dark, grim mood. I tried to explain in a fumbling way about what I was going through and that’s when he stopped me. He stammered that we should go outside. It was night as we stepped out into the parking lot between the buildings. Autumn had set in and the sky was clear.
The thing about George’s stutter, or anyone that stutters for that matter, is that you’re tempted to try to fill in the words that the person is trying to get too. Otherwise you either stop paying attention, or the stammer takes on a hypnotic quality as you’re drawn into each painfully executed word. When George speaks I learned to just listen. If he’s passionate about something his voice takes on tenor of wonderment, he gets excited and words tend to bottleneck in his mind as they scramble to get out of his mouth. When I recall what he said that night I don’t remember the stammer. I remember the kind of subdued elation that occasionally overtakes him.
“Look up at the sky. See all those stars? There’s millions of them, and each one is a galaxy with any number of planets revolving around their own sun. This planet is a rock spinning through space, just like millions of other rocks doing the same thing. Think about how small that makes you.”
And suddenly I felt better.
Looking back I think two things happened. First, in the grand scheme of things I realized my break-up with Devon was pretty weenie when you think of the scale of the space that we occupy. And secondly, what he said didn’t shrink the significance of my existence, it shrank the significance of the problem.
George and I lost touch, and Devon and I share a special kind of bond now. It's no longer romantic, but perhaps more pure, because of it. Whatever it is I care for her deeply and wish her all the happiness she deserves. And, I still carry that night with George on me and recall it when I’m feeling low.
Everything gets better if you keep going.
