Macleans And Best Friends

Good morning, way too early.  I wish I could get a new mattress, just so I could get through the night without waking up at a ridiculous hour feeling worse than I did when I went up to bed the night before.  Oh well, eventually things will change, I hope.

People I have talked to have remarked that they think the living arrangement in this household is a bit strange. The consensus has been that it is weird to have what they know is a common-law (for now, it will become permanent in the future) marriage, and also have a housemate living down the hall three metres from our bedroom door.  If these people knew the entire story, they might not see it as strange at all.  To that end, I'm going to explain - but why now, why am I suddenly in the mood to divulge such information?  It all started when I came downstairs this morning (at the stupid hour of 5:50am).

I don't use the upstairs bathrooms in this house.  Odd statement to start off this writing, but might as well get into it at the beginning.  See, when Andi wasn't here, sleeping in the same room as me, I had the habit of using the ensuite in my bedroom in the morning before coming downstairs and in the evening when going to bed.  The main bathroom upstairs I only really use when bathing/showering.  In fact, even though we've been here for almost five years, I can count the number of times I've used the main bathroom upstairs on my fingers and have almost an entire hand left over.  Anyway, since I use the 'guest bathroom' for most of my daily goings-on, I keep my taking-a-break reading material down here too.  This morning, I was in the loo and started flipping through this week's issue of Macleans.  For those not in the know, it is the Canadian equivalent to Time magazine.

The article I was glancing at was discussing how recent drunk driver accidents which involved people accidentally killing their best friends in a crash often have the family of the best friend pleading with judges for leniency in their sentencing.  Some of these families feel that the person responsible for killing their son or daughter are so close to their family as to be regarded as another family member, and a harsh sentence only serves to draw out even more pain over what was so obviously an accident.  One guy went so far as to say that his best friend, that person in your life who knows you better than you know yourself, who remembers things that even you don't, he's lost that forever, and the family of his friend agree that this is punishment enough.  It got me thinking about Scott, the circumstances that brought us together as friends, and the fact that I've been mentioning him occasionally to people I've met, and here in this blog, and nowhere have I really discussed who he actually is.  I'm going to rectify that right now.

I met Scott in high school.  I attended Wexford Collegiate Institute, located on Pharmacy Avenue just north of Lawrence Avenue in the city of Scarborough, a suburb (essentially) of Toronto, and which later simply became part of the GTA (Greater Toronto Area).  I was in my third year of high school, so that would make me thirteen.  It was the fall of 1986.  I, simply put, was a geek, long before that meant anything to do with computers, long before that meant anything to do with being cool in a scientific capacity.  No, I was pathetic.  I was dressing the way my mother forced me to, I was wearing my hair the way my mother forced me to; in short, I was a completely reluctant mama's boy.  I hated it.  Anyway, I had this cassette tape that I was given by some chick named Heather Irwin that I was totally trying to fuck that summer, and given that she was the town slut, she didn't take much time to get to know much about me.  She was much more interested in trying to take my virginity, something that was ultimately thwarted by, you guessed it, my mother.  Anyway, as a result of this relationship I came into possession of this tape, "Deepest Purple: The Very Best Of Deep Purple."  Now, I didn't know what type of music it was, but from reading the inlay of the tape I knew it wasn't for me.  I went to school and looked for someone to try and sell the tape to.  Simply put, I was an innocent jackass geek.  Thanks, mom, hope you burn in hell.

I was standing outside my Film Arts class when I noticed this guy with a Walkman strapped to his melon.  He looked kinda scruffy, wearing one of those t-shirts that were popular with anti-social head-bangers back then -  you know, the type with white sleeves and a great mock-up of whatever robotic demon lord was worth the greatest shock value to the 'straights.'  I'm pretty sure that it was Eddie doing something wonderful in the name of Iron Maiden that he was wearing this fateful day, but what I remember most was the red plaid lumber-jacket.  That was all I needed, this dude was a metal head, so I tried to sell him the cassette.  Instead, he asked if he could borrow it, listen to it, and decide if he liked it enough to pay for it.  Of course, in my naivety, I never thought for a moment that he would take it home, record the entire tape to another, and then return the next day and say the music wasn't his type and give it back to me.  That is exactly what he did do, but somehow from that our friendship was born.
 
Over the rest of our high school years, Scott and I spent a lot of time together.  We skipped class a lot, found ourselves playing cards in the cafeteria or Dungeons and Dragons in the halls around the campus.  Turned out that we had a lot in common.  We had the same sense of humour, we had the same taste in books and film, and those things we didn't have in common we began to influence in the other.  It was Scott who eventually got me into heavy metal, and got me to start realizing that I could be more independent of my mother's influences.  Thanks to Scott, I started to buy things for myself with my money instead of spending it on trying to buy friends, and waiting for my mother to buy me stuff.  Bought my very first video game for the NES as an indirect reflection of Scott's influence, a title called Dragon Warrior.  Trust me, it wasn't available for only $0.24 when I first bought it.  Scott and I talked nightly, wrestled at the bus stop while I waited for the Lawrence 54 to get me home, and caught an awful pile of movies together, some that even now we are the only people we know who has ever seen them.  In fact, we spent so much time together that for a while his folks thought that maybe Scott was gay.  For the record, he's almost afraid of seeing his own penis, never mind that of someone else.

Most of all, in those days, Scott was the one who kept me away from home when I needed it most.  I could virtually always call him up on the phone, tell him I needed to get the hell out of Dodge, and we'd be meeting at the Victoria Park subway station within the hour.  We'd go downtown, wander around, see a movie, check out books at the World's Biggest Bullshit (that's the World's Biggest Bookstore for all you virgins - used to be a bowling alley, two floors tall), and basically pass time so that I could get my head back together before venturing back into hell at 23 Denham.  Scott went shoplifting with me when that became the thing to do; Scott too wrote an essay for the courts when we got busted for shoplifting from The Bay at Scarborough Town Centre (I got cocky - and I STILL don't own the "Small World" album from Huey Lewis and the News).  Yeah, we were really close.  And then I graduated high school and went to University.

Scott still had a year left to go at Wexford.  See, even though we're the same age, I skipped ahead in grade school, so I graduated a year before he did.  Add to that the sudden thrust of me into a new situation, the need for a part-time job, night classes, shitloads of studying, and discovering that occasionally I could find women who would allow me to put my penis in them, and my plate was pretty much full.  This was unfortunate in many ways, especially because as far as I know, during that time was one of the few instances when Scott could have needed me to support him through a tough ordeal.  I don't have license to get into any details regarding that, except to say that he has never since then allowed himself to have a deep relationship with any woman, and I wish I had been there to help him through what happened.  Regardless, for two years there, we were not in touch.  I knew where he lived, I knew where he worked, but we just kind of fell away from each other as people tend to do.

Personally, I changed over those two years.  A lot.  I mean, I grew my hair, grew a moustache and beard, became my version of the rocker I used to hang around all the time with, and got heavily involved in Drama (originally my major was Poly Sci, in prep for a career in Law, which my mother wanted.  I chose to take a Drama class in order to acclimatize myself for speaking in public in that capacity.  I liked it so much that I dropped all my other courses, spent ALL my time backstage and on stage for that year, switched my major and moved into residence in my second year of classes - my parents never even noticed I had moved out for a month after I had done so).  I was not myself when, on a whim, I walked into the Coles bookstore in Eglinton Square to see if Scott still worked there.  He was there, took a look at me, did a double take and then goggled over what I had become - a long-haired metal head.

We started hanging out from then on, him coming up on weekends to play games and stuff in my room at the University (sacrificing cookies in order to satisfy the gaming gods when attempting particularly challenging bosses), stuffing ourselves with Creamy Bacon Carbonara and a pound of bacon every Saturday after heading downtown and grabbing breakfast at the old 54 Diner under the Bloor-Yonge intersection.  Over time, I got kicked from the University due to standing up to a professor who was dead wrong about something, and her purposeful sabotage of my mark in her class as a result, and Scott and I made plans to move into an apartment together.  We did so, but that year neither of us was ready to change the way we lived enough to accommodate the other's needs, and so he moved out after a year, and I went on my way as well a month or so later.

The two of us kept in touch after that, but only intermittently and over the phone.  I don't know how much he'd say the same for himself, but I personally needed to mature a lot, and did so by going though a period of working for my bitch mother, and then starting and failing a store.  When I found myself forced to move back into the house at Denham (minus the bitch mother, who by this time was fucking my so-called adopted brother in Campbelford), Scott and I began to tentatively re-build the friendship that was so seriously strained by our year being in each other's faces.  We began to once again do the weekend thing, but this time it was at his place rather than mine, for by this time I actually had wheels.  We had a great time, playing through the original Silent Hill, he doing the killing, me figuring out the diabolical puzzles.  Things had fixed themselves and, barring a practical joke gone wrong, we were right as rain.

Things took a bad turn for Scott not long after that.  He had been working in the mortgages department of CIBC for a few years by that point, and they were trying to force him out before he had been there long enough to be eligible for certain benefits.  They did so by increasing his workload to an impossible amount, and thus succeeded in being able to fire him for not keeping up.  Scott spent a year on unemployment, taking the first real break he had ever had since high school, and spending a lot of time with me.  Unfortunately, during that time he couldn't find anything he cared to do, and when the unemployment ran out he was going to lose his apartment.  It was a fairly shitty apartment, but it was his and I felt for the guy.  I had gotten married earlier that year to my first (ugh) wife, but it didn't stop me from getting Scott to move in while he got back on his feet.  He did so, and the wife left once I was diagnosed with the heart condition.  This left me, my father, and Scott in the house at Denham.  Scott eventually did find work in the motorcycle retail industry, and he has been happy as a pig in shit since doing so, despite the first place he was at closing down without warning one day, and him scrambling to find another job in the industry, which he has at Kahuna Powersports at 5243 Steeles Avenue West (west of Weston, on south side of Steeles).  He's the manager of the accessories department, upstairs.

My mother died in 2003, but that wasn't before she switched the ownership of the house into her name behind my father's back.  As a result, the guy she'd been fucking decided he wanted to sell the house in 2005, so we had to find a place fast.  I found the house we're in, in Ajax, and in August we moved.  The following Spring, Scott spoke to his father on the phone (his folks had moved to Nova Scotia after the kids had left the nest) and was worried because he didn't sound like his usual self.  He got worried he wouldn't see him again before he passed away.  I took it upon myself, heart condition and all (diagnosed in 2002, remember), to drive him out to see his folks in August of 2006.  The day after we got back, we were hanging in our pool, and my father went to do something on the driveway of the house.  He fell, bumped his head pretty bad, and his immune system went to fix that problem, leaving the as-yet unknown cancer he was carrying to go through his body like a wildfire.  He was given until early 2007; he died at midnight on October 6th, 2006.  Since then, Scott has been covering the mortgage on this place, while I've been trying to put the pieces back together.  My heart condition has made it impossible for me to handle stress, so most of the big decisions have been left to others for the last five years.

Andi answered an ad we had put out to find a housemate to ease the costs of the sudden financial elephant we found ourselves under, and we've been together since about four months after she moved in.  We plan to marry, and we all plan to be in the Dominican Republic in the next few years, as soon as possible actually.  Scott has stated repeatedly that he has no intentions of buggering off and leaving me this mortgage to pay, and thusly we have the living situation that we have.  I wouldn't trade Scott for all the rest of the friends I had in high school combined, and consider him my brother after all that's happened over the years.  I love him dearly, as he is (in the words of Jay, of Jay and Silent Bob fame) my heterosexual life mate.  This post is in tribute to him, and if he ever wonders what I think about him, this will be on the intertubes until the world comes crashing down around everyone's heads, so he can always look here to figure it out.  The bitch.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll be posting at least one entry on my other blogs, probably one on all three (not the same one - I'll post one entry on each of the blogs, you know, based on the theme of each particular blog...you know what, shut up and wait until tomorrow).  Until then, Good Readers, have a good day.  I know I will; Scott and I have some CoD planned...