Falling Backwards: A Memoir (28 page)

I lay in bed that night, shaking and upset, and more or less whimpered until I finally fell asleep. I felt tears roll down the side of my face, most of them winding up in my eardrums. I went over the whole thing in my brain. Not one thing about it made any sense to me. He seemed like such a decent person. I knew him. What did he think he was doing? Why did he do it? What did I do to make him behave like that? I was so ashamed and so depressed. I was worried about my mom and dad finding out. I needed to take the whole night and put it away somewhere that nobody would be able to find it. Not even me.

I
was glad to finally be starting at Mount Royal College in the drama program. I had to do something with my life. My mom told me that if I didn’t like it I could just switch and take something else. She always put my mind at ease, even if she didn’t mean to.

The first few days were a bit daunting. I had never seen so many crazy hairdos and strange outfits in my life. Everyone looked like they were going out of their way to be different from everyone else, which kind of made everyone look the same. It wasn’t anything remotely like little old Springbank High School. The place was huge, and everybody rushed about with purpose and determination. I wondered where they were all going and why they were running to get there.

My classmates ranged from seventeen to forty-five years old. Clarice, who had two grown kids and a failed marriage, had decided to go back to school to become an actress. She spent all her time memorizing monologues and auditioning for plays. I was arriving mid-year and she had attended for a whole semester already, so she knew many important things, such as who I should and should not
hang out with and where to eat lunch. We became friends right away, and I was grateful to have her showing me the ropes.

I hadn’t ever thought about being an actress, but that’s why Clarice and most of these people were taking drama. They wanted to act. I wanted to be a teacher. Oh well, I thought. I have to make the best of it because my dad paid for six months’ tuition and I can’t quit and take anything else until then or he’ll see it as one more of my flighty attempts to waste time.

I spent most of my days doing really bizarre things. Movement class basically entailed my donning tights and leg warmers and leaping around a large, mirrored room pretending to be a butterfly. The class was all about being in touch with your body and, therefore, the entire universe, or so said our instructor, Mrs. Grey. Part of me wanted to light myself on fire. Another of my classes had me learning how to speak properly for the theatre. I likened it to controlled, articulate yelling. Always concentrating on projection, diction and enunciation, we basically made a lot of motorboat sounds and those raspberries you blow on a baby’s bare stomach. I was really glad my dad wasn’t sitting in the back of any of my classes. He would have had me committed.

I don’t know if I was learning anything but I was certainly meeting some incredibly nutty people, many of whom I came to adore. One girl named Dallas came to school every day in dresses from the fifties. She had cat’s-eye glasses and a wonderfully fluffy hairdo. She must have gotten up at 5 a.m. to start combing it all into place. Sheri D. was an incredible poet and writer. Everyone listened when she spoke and heeded her every whim. She had a deep voice that made me think of John Wayne if he had had a sex change and was a lot prettier. Sheri showed me what confidence looked like.

I hadn’t really met any gay people before, and there seemed to be a heck of a lot of them in my college theatre course. The gay
fellows were so flamboyant and vocal and bold. They let you know exactly who they were and what they were all about. They dressed in scarves and hats and tight jeans and leg warmers and headbands. A few of them wore mascara and lip gloss. I thought they were marvellous. I am sure we had a few gay kids at Springbank, but they were in the closet so deep no one knew who they were. I’d see the lads holding hands in the hallways at Mount Royal. They taunted the straight boys by blowing kisses and patting bums. Nobody seemed to mind, not even the straight boys whose bums they were swatting.

I loved being exposed to so much diversity, but drama wasn’t for me. I bought a guitar and brought it to school, playing it in the changing room whenever I could. I wrote a new song every day and made the best of my weird situation. At least I was learning about myself and how much was out there in the world. Springbank was looking smaller and smaller to me with every breath I took.

I was learning that college students drank a lot. On many occasions, seven or eight of us would stay after school to have a few drinks in one of the many lounges on campus. You could make an entire night out of drinking beer, chain-smoking and talking about nothing. Yes, I too was smoking now. It was hard at first but eventually you catch on and you’re buying your own cigarettes in no time. It was beyond stupid.

One of the quirkiest girls I met at college was Leslie. I noticed her the first day Movement class. She was wearing an all-blue dance outfit that looked like she’d stepped right out of a Jane Fonda workout video. She was tall and pretty, and rumour had it that she was a part-time model with a local agency in Calgary. (I didn’t know Calgary even had models, but I guess Leslie was one of them.) She was outspoken, even brash. When she walked into a room, she filled it up with her pure Leslie-ness. She flirted with the teachers, which I found unbelievable, but she pretty much flirted with
anybody within arm’s length. She and another girl named Wendy went out of their way to gather as much attention as humanly possible and hoarded it as if it was a drug. They couldn’t get enough stares and glares. Wendy looked like a Playboy bunny in drag. She told everybody she had a sugar daddy named Floyd. I had heard about sugar daddies, but I didn’t think for a minute they were real people. Wendy was only nineteen years old and she showed up at school in the middle of May in a full-length mink coat, so I guess she really did have a sugar daddy.

Leslie’s parents were divorced, and she had one brother she was close to. She still lived with her mother and she had invited me over a few times. Her mom seemed like a really nice, albeit slightly off-kilter, lady. She always offered me a glass of wine out of a box she kept in the fridge. That made me feel grown-up. “Do I even need to ask if you’d like a glass of Chardonnay, Jann?” she’d enquire, with one eyebrow raised. No, she didn’t need to ask. I always accepted.

Leslie and her mother were more like friends than they were mother and daughter, which I found odd. My mom was my mom, period, but Leslie talked to her mom like they were roommates and buddies. Some days I thought Leslie’s mom was more like the child in the relationship than Leslie was. Leslie was always telling her mom what to do. They argued often and things became heated very quickly if they didn’t go Leslie’s way. Leslie had to have her way—end of story. Their house felt a bit like a three-ring circus, but I liked hanging out there. My own world was expanding, just like my dad had said the universe was.

Leslie had lots of boyfriends. I couldn’t quite keep track of them all. She had a few guys she was stringing along at school. I watched them fall over themselves trying to woo her. She thought of it as a game more than anything else. I don’t know where she learned all her little tricks, but she had a bag full of them. It was like watching
an opera—they couldn’t help but fall madly and hopelessly in love with her, only to have their hopes dashed and then they’d plummet to their deaths. I wanted to be able to do that to men. Yeah, right. Me? Not in a million and one years.

One day after class, Leslie had me and a few other girls over to her house. She was making lasagna and watching some show on TV. Her mom was going to be working until midnight so it was supposed to be a big girls’ night in. Everyone she invited seemed so much more mature than I was. First we drank all of Leslie’s mom’s wine, and then we broke into her Grand Marnier. (That stuff could give a headache to a tree.) Around ten o’clock everybody started to head home. Leslie asked me what my rush was and told me to stay for awhile. I didn’t see why I couldn’t. For one thing, I needed to drink nine glasses of water and wait a little bit before I could drive home.

Leslie put on a Nina Simone record and fetched me a big glass of ice water. She had her Grand Marnier swirling about in a giant snifter and said that we could share it. I told her that I had had enough to drink, and she left it at that. She was singing along to the music with her eyes closed and her head swaying back and forth; she said she felt drunk. She started asking me all sorts of embarrassing questions about sex and what I had done and what I wanted to do. I was starting to feel like I was in some kind of foreign movie. My face was so red I thought it was going to melt off. Question after question, and each more intricate and personal. I felt like I didn’t know anything. I wanted to tell her about my ride home with Conrad but I decided not to. I just blushed and answered no to almost everything she asked me. I felt very inexperienced and shy.

Leslie took a big sip of her drink and then leaned over and asked me if she could kiss me. Um … kiss me? She said she wanted to know what it was like to kiss a girl. By this time she was mere inches away from my mouth and before I had a chance to say anything, her lips
were very gently covering mine. It wasn’t a long kiss, it was just very sweet and kind. Leslie said, “Wow, that’s so totally different.” She took another sip of her Grand Marnier and kissed me again. Her lips tasted like oranges. I asked her if she was gay and she declared, “Oh God,
no
!”

Leslie told me she was “tri-sexual,” which I thought was
very
Leslie. She told me that she’d try anything once, and if she liked it she’d try it twice. I will never forget that moment. She told me that she wanted to try everything in the world, as she swirled her Grand Marnier around. She asked me if she could kiss me again and I said yes. I didn’t have to think about it. It seemed completely harmless. It was very easy to kiss her, although I didn’t really know what I was doing. I felt like I was in a foreign movie for sure at this point.

We lay on the floor and listened to Nina Simone singing the saddest songs I’d ever heard in my life. After awhile Leslie made us some Kraft Dinner, which was odd because we still had half a giant pan of lasagna. We ate it silently and then I got up, said goodbye and drove back home to Springbank. Everything in my body was starting to tell me it was time to get out of that small town. I didn’t want to wake up one day and discover I was forty years old with nothing to show for the time I’d been on the planet. It was my worst fear.

When I went to class the next day, Leslie was flirty and silly and friendly and acted like everything was as it had always been. I was relieved about that. She wasn’t aloof and she didn’t ignore me. This was definitely not like high school. We remained friends all through the rest of that year. I often remember her carefree spirit, her ability to just chase life and not worry about where it takes you. She was on to something.

One night near the end of term, Leslie and I were heading out on a date with two of her pals who were boxers from the Canadian Olympic team. For some unknown reason, my heart went completely
bonkers. It was fine and then it wasn’t. That was more or less how things were going for me at that point where my heart was concerned. Willie de Wit, one of the boxers, had to carry me to the emergency room at Colonel Belcher Hospital. I could not get my heart to slow down no matter what I tried. Willie picked me up like I was an empty milk carton and ran a few blocks down the street with me dangling from his giant arms. Had I not been so scared, I might have actually enjoyed the ride; he was after all, an Olympic heavyweight boxer …

Everybody thought I was dying, myself included. As things happen, my heart went back into rhythm as soon as we walked in the front door of the emergency room.

The intern who was on duty that night at the hospital ran lots of tests, and asked a whole bunch of questions that nobody else had asked me before. She was very interested in my odd heart health history, which took me ages to explain. But she listened patiently and was determined to figure out what was happening with me. Finally she said there were a couple of things she wanted to look into and that she’d be back in an hour or so; I was to “hang tight.” Emergency rooms are not conducive to hanging tight, as far as I am concerned. On the contrary, they are breeding grounds for paranoia. But she did come back as promised and said there was one more test she wanted to perform, and that I would have to stay overnight. The test involved putting a wire inside my heart to assess some sort of electric waves. I had no idea what she meant, but I was willing to have the test done. By this point I was thinking that I should probably call my parents. I felt like I was finally being taken seriously by someone other than my mother. It’s hard having something wrong with you that nobody believes you have. I didn’t know what to believe anymore.

A few days later, another doctor performed my heart catheter test, and it came back showing some interesting results. Apparently
they weren’t good interesting results but, rather, bad ones. Everybody in the room looked at me like I was an old dog that was going to be put down. The nurses had expressions on their faces like they had just come from their grandmother’s funeral. Thank God I was stoned out of my ever-loving mind or I would have started crying. Part of me was hoping they’d find something and the other part of me was praying they wouldn’t. While I was being wheeled out down the hallway back to my room, the doctor leaned over to me and said he was sorry. I was so high on whatever they’d given me to relax that I had absolutely no idea what he was sorry about. I’m sorry too, I thought, sorry I’m feeling like I’ve been in a dentist’s chair for sixty-seven hours straight.

When I finally came around from the sedatives they’d given me, the cardiologist told me that I would require a pacemaker. Just like that. He didn’t decorate his words with anything the slightest bit flowery or delicate. He just blurted it out like a fart.