The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of

-Pascal, Pensées.

Love me
Love me not
You’ll be my Valentine
No matter what!
-1980s-era Flintstone card with Pebbles and Bam Bam on it.

 

This is a Valentine’s story. It is from like ten years ago. It is not romantic.

Me, my (then)partner, and his friend Braddo moved into an old house on Black Creek Avenue at the beginning of February.

An unforecast snowfall took place the day we moved. The flakes started out dreamy and fat, but as evening came on they began falling with more vicious intent. They soon turned into a no-nonsense storm that made the roads icy and painted everything white.

The heat was turned off in the new place and even indoors our breath smoked faintly, as we carted boxes in. Ex hit the thermostat and distantly, somewhere in the depths of the basement, we heard the slumberous rumble of a furnace stirring to life.

Ex said, “This is going to take a while.”

Braddo was moving in with us because he’d tried to hang himself after his girlfriend Marla broke up with him. Marla’s 7-year old son had caught him in the shed, standing on top of her Pontiac Sunfire, tying a rope to a cedar beam. Braddo had tried to act all casual, but he was in a bad state. There was a note. It was a sordid scene.

Marla threw him out anyhow. My Ex took pity on his friend. Ostensibly it was a generous act, but I boiled with private resentment. We were already having “relationship troubles.” I wanted him to myself. It seemed like for the past few years we had been pulled in so many different directions – school, jobs, the various emergencies of our insane relatives, and physical separation as he traveled for his career, then the bonerkilling aspect of living in a Winnebago. We weren’t sharing much. I wanted “a real life,” a mutual life we both contributed to and benefited from. I wanted to feel like a girlfriend and not like someone just tagging along providing background commentary.

I hated Braddo anyway. What a dumb shit! Getting busted tying his neck to a beam by a 7-year old? Braddo didn’t even have money to fill up his rust bucket Econoline van that ran on propane and smelled like farts, let alone cover that kid’s inevitable therapy bills.

And I was jealous of my Ex’s pity for Braddo. I was secretly suicidal too  – I had been since BIRTH! Where were the kid gloves for old Hunter? My ex treated me like a stray dog, something cute enough to feed and pet when you noticed it, at other times you’d shout at it to go back where it came from.

It says a lot about my mindset at the time that at that stage, having my partner’s pity would have been good enough for me.

We finished moving in the boxes. Me and the Ex had the most crap. Braddo had a hockey bag and some musical equipment that he said he’d leave in his van for now.

I walked around the house finding the light switches. Ex and Braddo drove to the liquor store on the corner and came back with a case of Canadian. We all grabbed a beer and sat on the twill couch, our shoes and jackets still on.

We clinked bottles.

“Woooh!”  Braddo said. “Here’s to the new place.” His pointy Adam’s apple bobbed as he chugged from his can. If you ever looked him in his eyes dead-on it was clear that despair still churned sickeningly inside him. But at least he was putting a game face on his wretchedness by staying mostly drunk and smiling.

“Got everything in just in time,” Ex said. The windows were rattling in the gusting wind as the snowstorm got uglier outside. The furnace had kicked in and the curtains wafted in the streams of forced air. The heat smelled like dust. “It’ll warm up here in no time.”

“This is cool, like moving in with brothers!” I said, trying to articulate the vague “Swiss Family Robinson” element of our communal endeavour. I immediately realized comparing my then-boyfriend to a brother was a definite faux pas. Ex cast me a poisonous look, then looked away, sipping his beer morosely. Those days, he was always looking away in disgust.
We only had a few months left in us.
*
For the first few weeks it felt strange to be living with another man around. It was my boyfriend’s longtime pal, sure, but Braddo was as good as a stranger to me. Sure he lived in the basement and we had the upper floor, but he had claim to the kitchen and bathroom upstairs with us so he was always around.

Ex and I had been together for a long time and accordingly had the weird habits of all domesticated couples. In his effort to make Braddo feel welcome, not a third wheel, my ex was behaving even coolly toward me, less familiar and more businesslike. The things he said to me included Braddo, or were not of an overly familiar tone or content that would exclude him.  Ex said I should be nice to him and not a bitch, because Braddo was now marked Fragile. Fucking Braddo.

So it didn’t really feel like my home. And it’s not your home if you can’t safely ramble around in your underwear, munching a toasted Eggo Waffle and listening to Mahalia Jackson records! This is the definition of a home. What we had was just a boarding house.

plus

plus

equals

I’d walk into the kitchen in the morning and Braddo would be there rolling a joint, sleep gummed in his eyes and his hollow cheeks bristling with white-blonde stubble. He liked boasting about his family’s Viking heritage. It got a bit boring, hearing about Vikings and their derring-do from a guy who smoked weed all day and called himself a carpenter just because he owned a van and a bunch of crappy tools. A guy whose basement lair was starting to smell bad, who borrowed money, who tried to hang himself in front of little kids.

“Breakfast of champions!” Braddo would laugh, lighting up, and I’d hrrummph as I leaned by the fridge eating toast before leaving for work.

I had a prestigious job at the local convenience store, a small building attached to the neighborhood strip club. I would spend my shift mopping up tracked snow and putting on fresh pots of coffee, and sitting on a stool writing in my journal or reading.
At that time I was reading a copy of “Mystic River” I’d found in the laundromat and it was taking a long time because stupid customers kept interrupting me to buy cigarettes or Keno. From 1 o’clock onwards I’d listen to crappy electronica burble through the wall as the afternoon act got started.

I had also discovered that the security camera hanging in the corner was fake, so I would help myself to chocolate bars without paying for them, munching slowly through Kit-Kats and Caramilks as the day passed by outside and my life slowly but surely lost all meaning.

“I’m so sick of this bullshit!” my boyfriend sighed. It was Valentine’s Day. I forget what we were fighting about. Everything and nothing. I loved fighting because it meant I was at least getting his attention. I was twenty three years old, a very annoying age in woman-years.

I seem to recall in this fight I was standing on the bed, to make my yelling seem more domineering. I might well have been yelling that I wanted to get rid of Braddo and his annoying, lurking presence. I hated living in a house with weed all over the place. I hated the creepy feeling of the Braddo-domain, in the basement. Plus he did sneaky shit like stash bags of garbage in the car port when he promised he’d drop them off at the dump. He cut up lines of coke on my beloved 1965 edition of “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”, scratching up the plastic dustcover. He was a bad influence on my boyfriend, who already had tendencies toward dissipation.

“Why are you always mad at Braddo?” my boyfriend said. “We never even know if he’s home. He doesn’t bother us.”

That was part of the problem though. You wouldn’t think Braddo was home and then suddenly the basement door would creak open and he’d come in the room, scratching. He’d ask if it was 5 at night or 5 in the morning, go to the fridge and crack a beer. He spent longer and longer downstairs, listening to music and wrapped up in his sleeping bag like a huge overgrown teenager.

In any case, we hadn’t made dinner, there was nothing in the fridge, we were exhausted from being furious at each other, and we were both starving.

“I don’t wanna fight with you anymore,” my boyfriend sighed. “Can we just fucking call it a day and get something to eat?”

Food. Yummy. Eat. I stopped pointificating about my miseries and agreed. “I’m starving.”

But oh shit, finding a restaurant on Valentine’s Day!! Well, we liked a disgusting little Mexican place that was decidedly unromantic. Surely we could squeeze in there. Plus it was like 10 o’clock at night. By now the mass-scale wooing had probably moved from restaurants to more intimate environs.

“See if Braddo’s hungry,” my boyfriend said. “Ask if he wants to come. Poor guy shouldn’t be alone today of all days.”

I frowned mightily at Ex.

“Oh, come on. Go ask him along. I’m gonna go shave.”

Seething, I threw open the basement door. “Braddo!!! We’re going to get food. Wanna come?” I shouted into the darkness. I could hear music. I knew he had to be down there.

“Stop YELLING! Be civilized, and just go ASK!” my boyfriend yelled from the bathroom.

I thundered down the steps to give Braddo fair warning of my approach.

“Knock knock,” I called. Then I did knock, on his half-open door. No answer, but the weighted silence of human presence. If Braddo had one of his swirly-eyed rebound girlfriends in there I was going to barf.

“Braddo?” I said, and popped my head in. He wasn’t there after all. Just his fucking stereo going, and his sleeping bag tossed in the corner, and trash everywhere, and — oh Jesus, Braddo in the corner by a pile of dirty laundry…

His arm sticky with blood! His sleeping bag stained with it. His eyes closed!!! I picked Braddo up from uner his armpits and shook him to ascertain liveliness.

“Marlaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!” he sobbed, his head bobbing to the side. Oh, the pathetic bastard. He’d cut his wrist like a tempermental teenage girl. I shouted for Ex, and my voice must have had a tone in it not present during my general shouting. He blundered in, gasped, and in a few minutes we were at the Emergency Ward with an ashen-faced and stoned Braddo.

“Call Marla, call Marla,” he moaned.

“Fuck this ‘Marla,’” said the nurse on duty. “No woman is worth this! Nobody is worth this!”

Braddo was dumped into the psychiatric ward and we had our privacy back. One day I threw a waffle at Ex like a frisbee when he told me to put some pants on. And a month after that it was all over.