You can call me Steve
Part 1: We meet again....
“Glen?!”
I looked up from the rack of vacuum-packed strudels, and saw a face I had not seen in many years. It was C, an old girlfriend from a few years back.
But she wasn’t just any old girlfriend. She was my first major university girlfriend—an influential position, indeed. Together, she and I embarked on innumerable physical and interpersonal explorations. Once upon a time, she meant a great deal to me. She was also the chief architect of the worst breakup I have ever had to endure.
Cue flashback!
Hoo boy, what a relationship that was. Like any pair of eccentric, inexperienced youngsters, we certainly had our personality flaws. She was insecure, high-strung, and had catastrophically low self-esteem. I was stingy, self-centred, and remarkably tactless. But we were crazy about each other, and our relationship flourished.
Then, at the height of our passion, C moved away to Ottawa. It was a painful decision, but she had opportunities there she couldn’t pass up. She went with my blessing, and although the move officially broke us up, we kept in close touch. We even had a torrid affair when she came back to BC for a short vacation. Eight months after our breakup, our feelings for each other were as strong as ever.
Then she found someone new in Ottawa, and things between us abruptly changed. Where once I was a cherished friend and lover, she now declared that I was, more or less, an evil bastard. This rather hurt my feelings, seeing that I still deeply loved her at the time.
But she wasn’t through with me yet. The next thing I knew, she mailed me a parcel of letters I’d written her, all torn up. On the back of one of the crumpled pages was written a message: “I know you don’t understand now, but maybe when you grow up you will.”
I can remember snorting through my tears. Yeah, I thought. The day I mutilate my ex’s mail and send it back, I’ll know I’ve reached maturity.
It was over. And so I was depressed—in mourning, really—though the summer of 1994. I didn’t go out much. I failed all my classes. It was a classic case of teenaged, end-of-the-world heartbreak.
I cursed myself for falling in love with such a head case. First she idolized me as a perfect, ideal man, which I’m not. Then she vilified me as the Devil incarnate, which I’m not. She never saw the real me... the utter futility of it all taxed my poor young psyche to its limits.
After that unhappy summer, I moved on. I hadn’t heard from her in five years, except for a single letter, a couple of years after our breakup, in which she tried to make friends with me again. In this letter she basically thanked me for being such a shitty boyfriend, because fighting against my constant tyranny made her a stronger person. Needless to say, I left that one unanswered. I was over her, and saw no reason to recreationally reopen old wounds and pour jalapeño-laced salt into them.
But now, five years later, in the grocery department of the New Westminster Army & Navy, we had met again. And, facing her in person for the first time since our breakup, I was overwhelmed by a curious emotion: the distinct feeling of not giving a rat’s ass anymore.
Now, don’t get me wrong. On some deep, barely-conscious level I was reminded of my feelings, the breakup, the pain. But on a more important level, I really didn’t give a shit about it any more.
Neither did she, it seemed. So we happily hung out and reminisced for a couple of hours.
We got to talking about how we dealt with the breakup. It turns out that sending me the mutilated mail wasn’t the only thing C did at the end. She also destroyed most other evidence of my existence, re-named the lovely mechanical cow I gave her, and besmirched my name to everyone who would listen. But that wasn’t all. In her final, tour de force expression of post-breakup animosity, C actually wrote, produced and starred in a play about what a loser I am.
Wow.
Let me tell you, it feels very strange to find out someone has, without your knowledge, produced a play about your personality flaws on the other side of the continent. It makes you feel very odd about your relationship with the universe—and very aware of just how limited one’s sphere of awareness truly is. Every day, over six billion people wake up, do something or other for 16 hours or so, and then go back to sleep. How many of these people are you keeping track of? And how many of the rest might be writing plays about YOU?
Naturally, I was curious about this play, it being the first major work based on me, yet not written by me. (At least, that I am aware of.) So I petitioned C with an informal Freedom of Information request, and she quite affably handed over the script. It is called I’m Sorry That You’ve Gone, and portrays the disintegrating relationship of two oddly familiar young lovers.
The protagonist: a lovely, tender, sensitive, thoughtful, mildly insecure young woman known as “Allie.”
And the antagonist: Allie’s boyfriend. An outrageously stingy, unbelievably self-centred and astonishingly tactless asshole. A man who is not only an incorrigible jerk, but a fundamentally pathetic human being. A miserable, heinous, twisted shell of a man known as... “Steve.”
Next week: Damning excerpts from C’s play! Watch agape as slander, libel and artistic license collide in the shocking conclusion to “You Can Call Me Steve.” Be there!
Originally published in The Peak, June 19 2000.
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Part 2: The man, the myth, the margarine
Last week I wrote about how C, one of my ex-girlfriends, wrote a play about our relationship after we broke up. This week we look into the play itself, and meet its two characters: a nice girl representing C, known as “Allie,” and a demented prick representing me, known as “Steve.”
When one reads C’s play, I’m Sorry That You’ve Gone, one is immediately struck by what a piece of work that Steve guy is. Indeed, he is such a jerk that it is hard to believe he isn’t fictional. For example,
He is insensitive, arrogant and argumentative to the point where you question his mental health;
He makes cruel sport of Allie by maliciously taunting her about her weight;
He has a childish snit-fit whenever Allie reminds him of any of his past girlfriends;
He mutters unimaginative chauvinist comments when Allie becomes angry, such as “Geez, aren’t we moody. She must be on the rag”;
He buys Allie a $75 anniversary present, then becomes furious when he learns she didn’t spend as much on his present.
The plot displays similar depth. Steve is a jerk to Allie for a while, then Allie finally assaults him with a pasta dinner and leaves, but not before indulging in an extended, self-affirming diatribe about how she’s too good for him. The play closes with a glimpse into Steve’s post-breakup spiral into misery and poor personal hygiene. Without Allie, Steve is reduced to a pathetic, broken man... and he’s still a jerk. The end.
Now, I could spend the rest of this essay dissecting Steve’s behavior, separating fact from fiction and defending myself from the play’s hideous character assassination. But I won’t. Let’s just take it as read that Steve’s character contains a few grains of truth, wildly exaggerated and embellished with large doses of pure fantasy. In reality, I, Glen Callender UFA, am not perfect. In fact, from time to time I can even be a bit of a bastard. But a rat bastard? That’s a damn lie.
Now that that’s over with, I would like to focus on a pivotal issue discussed in the play—the issue of whether margarine has fat in it.
Steve: You know, there is no fat in margarine.
Allie: What?
Steve: I said, there is no fat in margarine.
Allie: You’re really funny, Steve.
Steve: What do you mean?
Allie: I mean you’re doing it again. You’re purposely trying to convince me of something that is not true just to get me mad enough to argue with you.
Steve: I am not. I am trying to teach you a valid fact so we can have an intellectual conversation about it.
Allie: Oh really.
Steve: Really.
Here, C gets one crucial fact wrong. It is true that throughout our relationship I insisted that margarine has no fat in it, and this drove her nuts. However, I wasn’t doing this just for the sake of argument. In fact, I truly believed that margarine has no fat in it. And I continued to believe until I read this:
Allie: You are an idiot, Steve! Here, I’ll prove it. [Gets up from the couch, picks up a dictionary, thumbs through it] Margarine, margarine... here! “Margarine: a butter substitute made from vegetable fats.” Take a look, Steve!
Steve: It must be a typo.
Allie: What? A typo? How could a dictionary be wrong!? You are wrong, Steve! Admit it!
When I read this bit, I groaned loudly and pulled out my dictionary. How dare C claim that a respectable dictionary would support her fat-in-margarine nonsense? Then I read the definition.
margarine n. a food product made usu. from vegetable oils churned with skim milk and used as a spread and as a cooking fat.
Hmmmm. I didn’t like the way the word ‘fat’ popped up in that definition. So I marched to my fridge and pulled out a tub of margarine. I stared at it, stunned. In large block letters that I had never noticed before, was a damning inscription: “LOW IN SATURATED FATS.”
I slumped to the floor, defeated. After all these years, it turns out there is fat in margarine? This came as a bit of a blow to my ego. You see, it is all well and good to be arrogant and argumentative, which I am, but if you are, it is of critical importance that you be right. If you aren’t, you just end up looking like a big, margariney idiot.
So, kudos to Steve for knowing the truth about margarine. This is, in fact, the only thing about my fictionalized self that I respect.
In the spirit of fairness, I must confess that C was not the only one to put pen to paper after our breakup. I in fact wrote a song about what happened between us. It was called Throw Me Away.
I never finished it. And I never will. I can’t find it right now, so I can’t quote from it. But the last time I saw it, I was overcome by an urge to buy a paper shredder, shred the song out in the middle of a field, and then set fire to the shreds. And the shredder. And the field.
Yet, in retrospect I think there is something profound about our efforts. C’s crappy play—and my lame, unfinished song—stand as vivid symbols of an important time in our lives. They show that our doomed relationship was more than just a pair of immature youths searching for happiness and hurting each other in the process. It was a union from which bad art was born. And I think that’s something we both can be proud of.
But do you know what the weirdest thing about this whole story is? It turns out that writing this play was C’s ticket to true love. Why? Because the man C got to play Steve in the play is the man she ended up marrying.
Ironic, hm?
His name is Sean. But hey, she can call him Glen. •
Originally published in The Peak, June 26 2000.
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