Breaking Up Is Hard To Do [part I]

I've just come from my friend and neighbour Zee's place. She looks just awful, and that's tough for her to do. She's a mess because she just broke up with her boyfriend again. She also broke up with him on Sunday, and had tried to on Friday night. So I'm going to walk her up to The Banknote and get her drunk.

This is what women do. What men do in these situations, I do not know.

The last time I got dumped Magda did the same for me, and a few weeks later it looked like I was about to be called upon to return the favour, but it turned out not to be necessary.

It's definitely necessary for Zee, though, even though she was the dumper, not the dumpee. Breaking up is hard to do no matter how it's done, and so alcohol is required to dull the pain and open the vents.

Zee and I are just going to change out of our work clothes, and then we're going.

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they're always glad you came
You wanna be where you can see
Our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows your name.

* * *
Andrew, my dragon-slaying bartender whom I told you about here, is engaged at the other end of the bar with a pair of scissors. I know what this means, but Zee isn't a regular here, so she doesn't suspect a thing when Andrew comes around to our side of the bar, greets me, introduces himself to Zee, and touches us lightly on our backs.

Zee left a message in my voice mailbox on Friday afternoon: "Hey, it's me. I was hoping you'd be able to take Gracie out at suppertime. I'm in Mississauga, on my way to Darryl's to end it once and for all."

Gracie is Zee's dog. A Weimaraner.

Darryl is Zee's boyfriend. A whiner.

"Is he the one you were telling me about?" asks Zee, indicating Andrew.

"Yeah. He's married, though, and just had a baby boy last fall."

"Damn."

"Yeah, I know."

I turn away from her for a moment, so she can see my back.

"Hey, you've got something stuck to your back!" Zee exclaims. "It looks like a newspaper headline."

"What does it say?"

"SASS IS IN."

"Must have come from the fashion section. Turn around, let's see what yours says."

She turns. Hers says MUST DO BETTER.

"Welcome to The Banknote."

"Every time I get too close, he pushes me away," Zee told me, later on Friday night. Darryl wasn't home when she got there. She let herself into his place, called his cell and left a message, but she couldn't find him so she came home. "This has been our problem all along. He doesn't want to take a risk. In anything. His whole life has been very structured; he was raised to believe that for every effect there's a cause. We've been together over a year and, you know, it's time to move forward, but he's afraid because he doesn't know if I'm the one. He says he needs to know, for sure, that I am. He needs a guarantee.

Andrew's gone out for a smoke break. I take the scissors to the front page of the Toronto Star



and prepare to tape TERRIFIED PATRONS FLEE to his back when he returns.

"Darryl's mother died when he was 11, and it was never talked about. To this day, he doesn't know what she died of. Cancer, that's all he knows."

"He never asked? Not even when he got older?"

"No. No one in their family ever talks about it. His father remarried the wicked witch. His brother and sister are more fucked up than he is. Everyone he knows who's married has had an affair. Either the husband or the wife. Even his older brother, married for twenty years to his highschool sweetheart."

"Sounds like he's never been happy, so now, with you, he doesn't know how to be."

Dimestore psychology, to be sure, but that's what you go to a bar for, isn't it?

"Everyone he's ever loved has abandoned him, starting with his mother, so he's afraid that everyone he loves will eventually abandon him. And so it's easier for him to push me away; to make me angry; to give me a damn good reason to break up with him, so he can say to himself, well, there you go, I behaved like an asshole so she dumped me, and I deserve it. That's easier for him to deal with."

What he did, by way of giving her a damn good reason to break up with him, was spend the weekend with another girl. That's why Zee couldn't find him on Friday night.

Mridul, the Air Canada pilot, has come in and taken his usual seat in front of the taps. He's not wearing his uniform tonight. Andrew pours him a Guinness and tapes a headline to the glass: FLIGHT OF FANCY.

Lulu is sitting directly across from us, along the other side of the bar. I peel my headline off my back and tape it to my glass, then hold it up for her to see. She laughs. Hers says MIRED IN SCANDAL. Lulu is a securities trader by day, and a bartender at the after-hours joint up on Dundas by night.

"I like this place," says Zee. She moves her headline to her glass. She's drinking gin and tonic, in an Old Fashioned glass. Her headline, snipped from the front page of the business section, is in 80-point type, making it difficult for her to handle the glass.

She bends her head down to the glass and takes a sip through the straw.

"What would you do if you were me?" she asks.

To be continued tomorrow.