Friday, April 11, 2008

My Teenage Years

It took a long time to get over Neve, about two or three years, but eventually I did.

The summer before grade 8 my parents divorced and my father moved out. It was a big relief when he left. He was one of those nasty pricks that goes through life with a chip on their shoulder, looking for any and every excuse to argue or fight. I went from living in absolute fear, to living in absolute freedom overnight.

I put my new found liberty to good use in grade 8. I had two best friends in junior high, Shawn and Ivan.

I also had the sweetest girlfriend of my life that year. She was born Stephanie Lee Woods, on February 8th, 1976. She was originally from Danville, Quebec before she moved to Meadowvale. She was everything. I loved that girl.


Stephanie


Ivan lived with his father and older sister. His mother had past away. Ivan’s father was something of a workaholic and was seldom home. His father owned three businesses and one of those businesses was a bar. Just before the beer taxes went up in Ontario on January 1st, 1987, his father went out and bought an outrageous quantity of beer. Most of the beer was put in storage, but a truckload had to be brought to their home and stored there. Ivan’s basement was wall-to-wall cases of beer.

Since Ivan was the eldest son still living at home (his older brother Vlad had moved out), his father made him the man of the house and put him in charge of the beer. Ivan, Shawn and I drank virtually every day in grade 8. Ivan would bring three bottles of beer to school and Shawn and I would bring rolls of BreathSavers. We would go to the forest for lunch and crack them open.

One time a guy in our class named John Bradshaw got caught with a Mickey of vodka in his locker and got suspended. I still remember the day that the three of us were at the forest drinking Amstel at lunch and laughing ourselves silly that Bradshaw got caught with alcohol in his locker. Ivan was a straight ‘A’ student and nobody would have suspected he was bringing beer to school.

That was the happiest year of my life.

The summer after grade 8, things began to fall apart. Grade 8 was the last year of junior high and Shawn was headed for a different high school than we were.

Stephanie and her parents moved to a small town outside Barrie, Ontario. We tried to keep a long distance relationship going, but it slowly faded away.

An interesting thing happened around the time that Stephanie moved away. A girl on my street named Laura Hammond needed a dance partner. Her mother was a dance instructor and Laura’s competition dance partner was Larry, the same Larry that kissed Neve and went to school with us at Vista Heights. Larry and Laura were cousins.

For some reason Larry couldn’t team with Laura so she hoped I would take his place. I was in Laura’s kitchen talking to her mother. Laura went upstairs. Laura’s mom put me through all these tests, to check my rhythm and so on. I felt really uncomfortable, but I humored her at first. Then she wanted me to try some dance moves and she crossed my comfort level.

I told her flat out, there was no way she was going to turn me into a dancer. I apologized, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was determined. The memories of Neve trying to get me to join her ballet school came back that day. Then I wondered, “What is it about girls that they have this desire to turn me into a dancer?”

By the time I entered high school my mother was growing more insane by the day. She developed some kind of crazy variation of the Oedipus complex where she figured that with my dad gone I was her new boyfriend. I was big enough by then that she didn’t push it too far. I spent most of my time avoiding her like the plague. I was seldom home. I stayed with friends whenever I could, but I really needed to come up with a permanent way to get away from her.

I had other girlfriends after Stephanie moved including a French fox named Andrea Steen. Andrea lived in Meadowvale, but she moved to Brampton around age 15. It was while she was living in Brampton that we dated.

Dating Andrea was not fun. On one hand she was so incredibly hot it was exalting to be with her. The downside was that she knew just how hot she was and she flaunted it. We would go somewhere and she would be wearing a short skirt and a tube top. Every other car would be honking, guys would be shouting out of the windows as they drove by. She would wave back with me standing right there. It was not fun.

What made matters worse, was that I kept hearing about her ex-boyfriend. What I kept hearing had me thinking that relationship wasn’t completely over. I’m not sure if I was the guy she was cheating on him with, or if he was the guy she was cheating on me with. Either way, there was way too much background noise.

I heard all the horror stories about her ex-boyfriend. I was told he was a jealous freak. I heard about his violent temper, he was a bad guy, he didn’t treat her right. I heard that he got so jealous one time he took a baseball bat and destroyed his own car. I could picture that happening. This girl seemed to have no respect whatsoever for your feelings. She kept telling me she was done with him, but I didn’t want to be involved with someone that was committed to someone else, no matter how zany he may have been. It wasn’t my place to interfere. I ended things with Andrea.

Apparently she patched things up with her ex the next day.

At the end of grade 10, I decided to drop out of high school for a year and work, with the goal of getting out on my own before going back and finishing high school. My timetable got moved up shortly after I turned 16 when my mother asked me to move out. That’s when I moved in with my sister.

I was relieved to be living away from my mother. She really belonged in an institution for the criminally insane.