Chapter 2: Likes and DislikesA Chapter by Scott A. WilliamsIn which we learn a bit more about Mel.She liked the arrhythmic sound of hammering on her roof last summer when her mother was having it re-shingled. There was something very human and very unnatural about the sound. Ka-thak, ka-thak, pause, ka-thak. Every morning for a week and it was never the same. It was her kind of white noise, like a rainstorm or an animal’s chatter. Familiar without a set pattern. Ka-thak. She liked this sound every morning at 7:30 even though she loved nothing more than to sleep in; life is painful, and the best pain is when something you like is replaced by something else you like. Eventually it went away and she found it stayed with her, and she imagined hearing it when she was trying to fall asleep, and then one day she decided she absolutely hated it. It was the worst sound in the world. She hates the things she loves, likes the things she hates, and is indifferent about the things she likes. She doesn’t like anything that was designed for her approval. She doesn’t approve of anything but the things that spurn her. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she has a love of the Delta Blues; not that she seemed like she had anything in common with those impoverished Depression-era black guitarists, but she seemed exactly like the kind of person who would value their words and wisdom over those of her own time and place. More than that, she dug the crying guitars and low-fidelity recordings. If you’ve ever listened to a Robert Johnson recording, you know the fidelity is so low as to be nonexistent. It sounds like they were recording with tin cans and rubber bands, and that’s the only medium through which true pain can be conveyed. This is because pain is a bright, bright, blinding thing, and you can’t look at it directly, or hear it too clearly, without being damaged: like the sun, or old people having sex. And Mel was a tin can/rubber band kind of girl. It was her brother who first introduced her to these recordings by sending her a copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers: The Recordings of Robert Johnson on her 14th birthday. He was the only member of her family she could stand, in spite of or perhaps because of his absence. He was her idol. He was the one who had first convinced her to clumsily pick her way through a rendition of her favourite song, Where Did You Sleep at Night at her school’s talent show. When time came to perform, she froze and ran away, never to pick up that battered acoustic guitar again. She later said she simply couldn’t handle the idea that these people, her classmates, would hear her perform and thus know something about her; they hadn’t earned it. She loves music, though, and talks about it endlessly. She loves the blues and Motown and classic rock and grunge. She hears great sadness and loneliness in Madonna songs. She objects gravely to reggae, because if there was one statement she can’t process, it’s that “every little thing’s gonna be all right.” She’s always very quick to delineate between the things she liked and the things she hated. What she’d never tell you is that the truth is far more sinister than that, since she obsesses over the things she hates to the point where it becomes enjoyable to hate them, and thus, the lines between love and hate and blurred. Hate gives a perverse thrill love can’t provide. If you hate something, at least you feel something: most of the time she’s completely indifferent. She’s happiest when utterly frustrated. She’s a well-read girl who hates
reading. She’s a lover of classic films,
who hates “pretentious foreign movies,” but whose favourite films are The Bicycle Thief and Breathless and Die Hard. She hates authority figures, doctors, moral guardians, parents, teachers, policemen, clergy, and therapists. She hates things over which she has no control, including all other people. She hates people agreeing with her. She hates people having their own ideas, because they get so damn certain of things it makes them smug. I told her she would like Socrates, “The only thing that can be known is that you know nothing.” She told me, “Yeah, but... I know things.” Sometimes it seems like she really does, and sometimes she seems just to be good at faking it. She can listen, and she can rant, but if you ask for her opinion she’ll just shrug her shoulders and walk away. She hates physical activity. She loves clutter. She likes thunder and staying up until sunrise. She likes sleeping in school. She hates being stuck in her teen years, for now, but knows that when this time is gone, it will be something she yearns for; and that, she hates.
She likes to wear layers: slacks, hoodies, wool skirts, men’s blazers. Going to school with a thousand or so hormonal teenage boys made her extremely wary of anything resembling her figure being discernible. She has a slight build with stringy little arms. She wears Converse sneakers. She’s sneaky. She loves explicit language. I can’t legally repeat some of the things she swore she’d do to my mother. But the secret is, she’s all talk: she’s not even remotely comfortable with sexuality, but she loves the reaction foul language gets from the type of people she’s out to annoy. She has the mind of an abnormally sexually-depraved poet, and describes with vivid imagination things she would not wish upon herself. When I met her, she didn’t understand or like anything about being a girl, except not being a boy. She likes lingerie, more to marvel at than to wear as a fashion statement. As with everything else, she favours black. She didn’t seem to care about the impropriety of sharing these facts with me. “How about that. So anyway, let me tell you about this bra...” She loves the clarity and precision of the written word, but hates the permanence of anything that is written down. She loves the impulsive nature of the spoken word, of stammers and rewordings, but hates how people, you know, sometimes, like, take too long to get to the point of whatever they’re saying, you know? She likes drinking and getting drunk, but hates being drunk, and loathes sobering up. Her drink of choice is Gin and Tonic. She won’t drink anything sweet or fancy. It’s got to be sour, like her. She likes Tic Tacs and caffeine. She’s never said anything one way or the other about drugs. She hates whatever you’re watching on TV, so change the channel already. “Or better yet,” she’d say, “Go outside and get some fresh air. There’s a whole world out there for you. And let me have the Goddamn couch.” She would hate my attempt to classify her in this way, to understand and explain her. None of this is true, she’d say, and she wouldn't be wrong. This is just what I’ve seen, which amounts to almost nothing. You just have to know her. © 2010 Scott A. WilliamsAuthor's Note
Featured Review
Reviews
|
Stats
518 Views
1 Review Added on January 25, 2010 Last Updated on January 25, 2010 AuthorScott A. WilliamsGTA, CanadaAboutBorn in Toronto. Raised in the suburbs. Schooled in journalism. Lookin' for meaning in an uncertain world. I spend a lot of time writing for a girl whom I'm not sure exists, but I thought she wasn.. more..Writing
|