Falling Backwards: A Memoir

by Arden, Jann

  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.

  A pacemaker? What and why and when? That was for old people, wasn’t it?

  Dr. Wise explained that I had two unique heart conditions. I had alternately a very fast heartbeat and a very slow heartbeat—the fast heartbeat couldn’t be treated with drugs because it would affect the slow heartbeat I experienced at night. My head was whirling around like one of those dervish people sans the white flowing outfit.

  I had been diagnosed with something called sick sinus syndrome, which has nothing to do with your nose. My heart needed to be prompted to beat a little faster when I was sleeping. I was relieved somewhat that I would no longer have to be awake to keep my heart going in the wee hours of the morning. I would have a little machine doing that for me. They weren’t exactly sure what to do about the fast heart rate, but they’d figure that out at a later date. That was comforting.

  I checked into Foothills Hospital and was operated on the very next day. I was only twenty years old. I stayed in the hospital for about a week and then they sent me home armed with a user’s manual for my new Medtronic pacemaker. The nurse told me to try not to stand in front of a microwave for too long.

  Jesus.

  Leslie and the two Olympic boxers had to go on to the party without me. It had, after all, been over a week since they’d dropped me off at the emergency ward. Four years after I had my pacemaker installed, Willie de Wit won a silver medal at the Los Angeles Summer Olympics. I had been carried across 12th Avenue to the hospital by the man the papers dubbed “the Great White Hope.” Thanks for the lift, Willie.

  I thought I was going to die within days of getting my pacemaker. My dad assured me that I wasn’t. “You’re not going to goddamn die, for Chrissake.” He was very comforting. I was stupid enough to pull out my stitches because they were itchy and driving me bloody crazy. The scars became a lot bigger than they should have been. I used my mother’s sewing scissors and a pair of tweezers to cut and yank the stitches out. It felt wonderful, but the whole area ended up looking pretty terrible. It was like pulling out giant black fly legs.

  The pacemaker was the size of a hockey puck. I kept looking in the mirror at the bulge in my chest. It was visible through my T-shirts. I had so much to think about and I didn’t know where to start. The first thing I had to do was drop out of college because, let’s face it, I wasn’t doing anything but learning how to smoke and pretend I was a dancing mushroom.

  I got a job at a little restaurant in Calgary, where I was a singing waitress, of all things. I would wait tables and then go up to a small stage and sing a few songs. I was the worst waitress in the world, but I think my customers forgave me because I was somewhat entertaining. One of the men who owned the place was an alcoholic who wandered from table to table, spitting on people as he welcomed them to his establishment. It was a nightmare. I hated the job because I felt like I was actually going backwards and not forwards. I was twenty years old and still not doing anything.

  One of the other girls who worked at the restaurant, Colette, said she had a place out in Vancouver that had an extra bedroom that I was welcome to rent if I wanted to. She was going to be driving out there in a few weeks. She had come to Calgary to look after her ailing dad and, since he was on the mend, she was ready to go back. I had to think about it. I had never been away from home. I didn’t know what I would do for work. I was, as they say, unskilled. Colette seemed to think I would find a job right away. She said she knew people.

  I didn’t know Colette all that well; she seemed nice enough and was a hard worker. She was a real firecracker, that’s for sure. She could talk the leg off the lamb of God. I had two weeks to decide if I was moving or not and I had no idea what I was going to say to my parents. I kind of felt like it was now or never, and if I thought about it for too long I wouldn’t go anywhere, ever!

  I am sure I waited until the last possible moment to tell my mother that I was moving. She was speechless at first. She looked at me with this terribly sad and disappointed face and told me I was making a mistake. She told me it was my decision, though. My dad didn’t say much of anything. I think he was fed up with me flitting around and thought that moving out there would knock some sense into me. I felt so torn. I knew I had to do something to sort myself out, and moving to Vancouver seemed like something to me. My mom asked me what I was going to do out there; I told her I was going to get a job in a band. I realized how foolish I sounded, but I said the words anyway.

  A few days later, I packed up my clothes and my guitar (which I was still paying off) and rolled out of our driveway in Colette’s red-and-black station wagon. My mom stood there in the middle of the road as we drove off, but I couldn’t bring myself to look back. I was crying and I knew that she would be crying too. Colette probably thought I was being a baby. I had borrowed money from my parents to get out there too, which made it all seem even more pathetic.

  But the fourteen-hour drive through the Rocky Mountains was gorgeous. When we arrived in Vancouver the ocean was right there! I could jump in if I wanted to. Everything looked so green and lush. The sun was shining and it was warm and humid compared to Calgary. I had been to Vancouver a few times when I was a kid, but I didn’t remember it being so lovely. This city looked like it was made of glass.

  Colette’s apartment overlooked the harbour, which was absolutely stunning at night. This whole thing might just turn out to be the best idea I’d ever had.

  I needed to get a job. I didn’t want to be a waitress and I sucked at it anyway. I didn’t have a car, and I wasn’t about to start taking buses anywhere, so I needed something I could walk to. I grabbed a newspaper and started circling things I might be able to do. I started walking around the neighbourhood every day to check out employment opportunities and get to know my way around.

  I walked a few blocks down to the waterfront, where there were a bunch of shops and restaurants and a beautiful little harbour filled with boats of every description bobbing up and down in the water. There were signs in windows that said inspiring things like “Dishwasher wanted nights” and “Part-time sous-chef wanted mornings.” I wasn’t sure what a sous-chef was, but I was sure it involved some kind of cooking, which I was definitely not qualified to do. I had no clue how to land a job singing in a band. I thought that a rather lofty ambition. I hadn’t ever been in a band before and I assumed one would need some experience. But how do you get experience? You have to get a job in a band. When I stopped long enough to think about what I was up against I was really scared. I wandered around for a few weeks until I finally found something that I felt like I could at least apply for. There was a distribution warehouse close to where we lived that had an ad in their window for a sales clerk. The job didn’t seem to require any kind of prior experience, so I applied and somehow landed the job. (I think I may well have been the only person who came out for it.)

  The owners of the business were each about 450 pounds. The woman had bleached-blond hair with jet-black roots, and looked like a villain in a Disney cartoon. She had a giant mole on her chin with three or four coarse, grey hairs sticking out of it that I couldn’t help but stare at. Her husband wa
s about four foot eleven and was completely bald except for nine hairs that he combed over the top of his greasy head. Their warehouse was filled to the brim with crap. They sold stuff that had either fallen off a truck or been acquired at some dead person’s estate sale—everything from blue jeans to canned won ton soup. My job was to stand behind the cash register, ring up purchases and put whatever people had bought into a plastic bag.

  I worked Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. I was allowed to heat up my lunch—one of the eleven thousand dented cans of soup they had on the shelves—in a microwave in their office. Everything they sold out of that warehouse was generic. I had never heard of any of the brand names on any of the products we sold. I mean, Carter Klein underwear? What a rip-off.

  I lasted two months. I was so bored out of my mind that I thought I would go crazy and start shooting customers with one of the eight hundred pellet guns we were trying to flog. They weren’t happy when I handed in my resignation.

  Sylvia asked me why I was leaving and I told her that I was moving back home to Calgary to go to school. Yes, I was lying. She said she was happy for me but she still wasn’t thrilled to see me go. She told me I was the best employee they’d ever had. I didn’t do anything! How would that make me a good employee? I had no idea. I got my last paycheque and wished I were going back home to go to school. I had to stay in Vancouver, though, because I had to make something of myself. I didn’t want anybody saying I told you so, least of all myself.

  I don’t know if it was that I was so far away from my parents or that I had so little life experience or that I was depressed or what, but I started drinking more than I ever had in my life. It was a way to pass the time and have fun and feel like an adult. In Vancouver it just seemed like I was slipping away from who I was. Alcohol was creeping into my body an ounce at a time. I felt homesick and lost, but managed to bury it somewhere deep inside of my body.