Tunesday : Goody Two Shoes

Goody Two Shoes
(Pirroni, M /Ant, A) Performed by Adam and the Ants

With the heartbreak open
So much you can't hide
Put on a little makeup, makeup
Make sure they get your good side, good side
If the words unspoken get stuck in your throat
Send a treasure token, token
Write it on a pound note, pound note

Goody two, goody two
Goody, goody two shoes
Goody two, goody two
Goody, goody two shoes
You don't drink, don't smoke
What do you do
You don't drink, don't smoke
What do you do
The subtle innuendos follow
There must be something inside

We don't follow fashion
That would be a joke
You know we're gonna set them, set them
So ev'ryone can take note, take note
When I saw you kneeling
Crying words that you mean
Opening the eyeballs, eyeballs
Pretending that you're Al Green, Al Green

Goody two, goody two
Goody, goody two shoes
Goody two, goody two
Goody, goody two shoes
You don't drink, don't smoke
What do you do
You don't drink, don't smoke
What do you do
The subtle innuendos follow
There must be something inside

No one's gonna tell me
What's wrong and what's right
Or tell me who to eat with, sleep with
Or foul up on the big fight, big fight
Look out or they will tell you you're a superstar
Two weeks and you're an all time legend
I think the games have gone much too far
If the words unspoken get stuck in your throat
Send a treasure token, token
Write it on a pound note, pound note

Don't drink, don't smoke
What do you do
You don't drink, don't smoke
What do you do
The subtle innuendos follow
There must be something inside, inside

I wrote last week about how Kasia became my best friend in grade ten, but I found it really hard to dispassionately talk about the happy times in the beginning when I know how badly the whole thing turns out. This week I'm going to give an overview of my friendships in Lethbridge and maybe then I can get back to episodic memories.

To begin with the song choice: The first time I saw this video, I fell hard for Adam Ant. I loved everything about his look and his energy and his voice. The next time I was at Kasia's, I made a fuss over "being in love", and for a while she was excitedly pestering me for details and I was acting coy, but as soon as this video came on TV, I confessed that Adam Ant was who I was talking about. Kasia was a bit annoyed: naturally, she thought I meant I was in love with a real boy, and no, she didn't think that Adam Ant was all that. I had been used to having a best friend (Cora) with whom I could fantasise about musical crushes, but Kasia wasn't going to play along; so, that was disappointing. 

Here's the story arc of our friendship: That first day that Kasia asked me to eat lunch with her and her friends, the other girls at the table were Cindy and Nancy -- two very nice girls who I would eventually get really close with because the three of us were in band together -- and because the two of them were lifelong besties, I could see that Kasia was the third wheel in their friendship and I fit right in with her and with the group. We spent grade ten going to dances and movies and football games in twos or fours; me clinging to Kasia as the best friend I desperately needed. As an aside, as I said before, I sent long and detailed letters to the girls back in Stouffville and the one time I wrote that I finally had a new best friend in Kasia, each of my old friends wrote to say that I had hurt their feelings (and especially Cora's) and I was totally confused: was I supposed to be tragically lonely and never have a new best friend, ever again? This exchange marked a change with the correspondence back home: they no longer needed manila envelopes to send me all they wanted to say.

So, grade ten was a very ordinary year with a lot of fun and a lot of laughs with my new friends. Over the summer, Kasia went on a camping trip for the month of August with her uncle's family and she came back changed: She had permed her hair that had previously been feathered exactly like mine; she had a deep brown tan; and while she had never been chubby before, she had become toned and sleek like a supermodel. I was stunned when I first saw her: suddenly, Kasia looked like a woman and I felt like a little girl. By the by: when Kasia had said "camping", I was thinking in the woods, but they actually went to Lake Tahoe for a month. When we started school, there was another change: a girl named Lisa somehow became a part of our circle, and while she was a hilarious person to be around, I never really felt close to her.

Lisa had moved down from Edmonton over the summer, and in the beginning, all of her stories were about how she had partied with Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier and the rest of the Oilers. I smiled along with everyone else (especially since I remembered how I lied and told several people the year before, when I was the new girl, that I had been to Liverpool to see the birthplace of the Beatles), but when I tried to talk to Kasia about it later -- about the unlikelihood of anything Lisa ever said being true -- she didn't like the idea of us gossiping about Lisa behind her back and that was confusing to me; didn't we have a separate bond? Wasn't reinforcing that bond by getting catty about outsiders what best friends do? Apparently not; so, that was disappointing. Lisa's parents were "cool" in that they allowed us to smoke in their house (so long as ashtrays were doused at the end of the day before the butts were thrown out) and we could have drinking parties there and her Mom wasn't against lying to my own mother when she called to ask where I was. Her father was always trying to beat the lotto and he would pore over dot-matrix spreadsheets before choosing his numbers for the week. Lisa had a younger sister (Tracey, who I thought I had more in common with, actually) and a youngest brother who was the prince of the household: all bow down to the man-child. 

During grade eleven, Cindy's father died suddenly. He had been an old Dad and he worked in a flour mill, and one day at work, he simply collapsed. Cindy had a stay-at-home-Mom who had no particular work skills and the ironic part of the tragedy was that her parents had just sold a rental property in Calgary in order to pay off their home mortgage (and as their mortgage had indeed had life insurance on it, it would have been paid off anyway and the rental income might have allowed Cindy's Mom to stay at home). As it was, it seemed that Cindy's mother was never home anymore, and in her new freedom, Cindy kind of lost her mind. She had parties all the time, she started sleeping around, and it became well known that she would leave her basement bedroom window open at night for any guy who wanted to crawl into bed with her. Although I enjoyed the parties, there was always friction between me and the rest of the girls over whether or not we should have some kind of an intervention with Cindy: I thought she was out of control and needed to know what guys were saying about her (they'd sleep with her but talk about how they should have brought a bag to put over her head, har har), but everyone else, except for her bestest friend the long-suffering Nancy, thought that I had no right to judge how someone else processes loss. Okie dokie, not for me to rock the boat.

Since the beginning of grade eleven, Kasia and I were dating two guys who were friends, so when she and I weren't spending an evening working together, we were hanging out as a foursome together; usually in her boyfriend Miles' basement. We couldn't have been closer, we knew everything about each other, and yet...One day, Lisa said she wanted to go out for coffee with just me, which was unusual but not that weird. After getting there and talking about whatever for a while, Lisa took a deep breath and told me that she had been sent on a mission: Kasia had started sleeping with Miles the month before and she didn't know how to tell me, so she asked Lisa to do it. I was stunned. Why wouldn't Kasia have sex with her boyfriend if she wanted to? But why couldn't she have told me herself? I have no idea what Kasia thought my reaction to this news would have been, but in the end, my reaction was only to the way it had been delivered: I felt sidelined and betrayed. Lisa knew before I did? Goddamn Lisa? Since when am I some Goody Two Shoes that would sit in judgement of my best friend? I guess we had never discussed whether we were going to sleep with our boyfriends (and as I'll explain next week, that's probably because I had no intention of sleeping with mine), but that didn't make me a prude.

Goody two, goody two

Goody, goody two shoes

Goody two, goody two

Goody, goody two shoes

Life went on, we all worked together and partied together, and some time in the fall of grade twelve, we were all at a party somewhere after working a shift at Bonanza. Curtis' older brother Cam -- who also worked as a line cook at Bonanza -- was in the kitchen rolling a bunch of joints and placing them in an old cigarette package. I was more curious than shocked as I had gone through all of high school at this point without even hearing of anyone doing drugs, let alone seeing them. "Just say no" had been pretty easy when no one had offered me anything since the one time in grade seven when I had been properly shocked and put off: walking back to school with a couple of guy friends after lunch, we caught up with a new kid who pulled out a joint and offered it around. My older brother was a delinquent pothead at this time, and as he disgusted me, there was nothing tempting about this offer and I left them to it and walked on to school alone. Okay, so maybe I always have been a Goody Two Shoes; a prude. So we're at this party and I'm drinking and smoking and laughing in the living room (definitely not pruding around) when Lisa, Kasia, and Cindy come in, looking pissed off. I asked what the matter was and Lisa said, "Whatever Cam is rolling in there isn't pot because you sure as hell can't get high off it." I was floored. My best friends got a joint from Cam and went out and smoked it (first shock) without even asking me if I wanted in (bigger shock)? I was hurt and confused and tried to be cool, saying something like, "I've heard that sometimes you don't really get stoned the first time you smoke pot." And with an incredulous laugh Lisa said, "Oh, it's not our first time." I don't know what to make of that today any more than I did then. My circle of friends -- including my best friend -- were purposefully excluding me from experiences that I had never actually taken a stand against? Kasia and I had never talked about drugs because it had just never come up: that was the first time I had ever seen it or even heard about it; no one had ever offered me any; I would have said ours was a drug-free school (okay, I was a prude and naive). Whatever was happening between me and my friends was escalating and I couldn't tell if we were even friends any more. 

Goody two, goody two

Goody, goody two shoes

Goody two, goody two

Goody, goody two shoes

On New Year's Eve of that year, I was at another party with the Bonanza crowd, while Kasia was spending the evening with Miles. Cindy left to have sex with some guy in a bedroom and I made a comment to Lisa about how Cindy was getting more and more out of control; didn't we have a duty to intervene? Next thing I knew, Cindy was screaming at me to mind my own business. And the next thing I knew, Cindy was shoving a cordless phone in my face and Kasia was on the other end yelling at me, telling me that I had hurt Cindy's feelings, and who was I to judge, and couldn't I find compassion for an orphan and...and I knew these were no longer my friends. I was halfway through grade twelve and I had lost my tribe. I hung up the phone, returned my attention to my new boyfriend and my work friends and knew that I would never speak to Kasia, Cindy, or Lisa ever again. And for the most part, I didn't.

But that wasn't a total tragedy. Like I said, I had work friends like Curtis, I had my new boyfriend Doug, and I had the old school friends who hadn't been tied up in the feud that I hadn't known I was fighting. Kevin and Mirella were still by my side, and in kind of a sad way, Nancy -- who had been Cindy's best friend since kindergarten -- was also shut out on this New Year's and she and I became very close; just not best friend close; I didn't have another best friend until I moved to Edmonton. This would explain why it was me, Kevin, and Nancy who planned a European backpacking adventure together over the following year (even if, in the end, Nancy couldn't come). And it was no coincidence that it was Kevin, Nancy, and Curtis who were at the core of the big gang of university friends that I eventually thought of as my new tribe.

This tribe -- which we named V.O.M.I.T. (or the Victorian Order of Many Intelligent Trendies; totally ironically) -- was full of strong personalities. We had preppies, and queers, and freaks. We wore trench coats and Value Village vintage and teased our hair and listened to indie music. The guys all wore eyeliner (even the ones who weren't gay) and the girls all wore pointy black shoes and ridiculous amounts of costume jewellry. We partied hard, we all did well at school, and we were completely ourselves when we were together. While it would have been years since he was relevant, the Adam Ant from this video would have fit right in as a member of V.O.M.I.T.; it had taken years, but it felt like I had finally found my proper place.

We don't follow fashion

That would be a joke

You know we're gonna set them, set them

So ev'ryone can take note, take note

One night in my second year of university, I was at some school party with my boyfriend Glen (a piece of fine redneck manmeat; definitely not V.O.M.I.T. material). The event was at a hall and there were drink tickets and a dance floor, but I don't remember what the party was for. I would have had my pink fauxhawk spiked up, and was probably wearing one of my favourite vintage polyester sleeveless dresses, and while I was walking back from the bar with some drinks, I saw Lisa and Kasia for the first time since we graduated high school. They looked exactly the same -- wearing jeans and blouses, conventional hairdos -- and I was surprised to feel zero animosity towards them. I went over and said a big and genuine hello and asked what had brought them out (neither of them were students at the university), and after a bit of chitchat, I went back to my table and my gorgeous man. I knew at that moment that I felt absolutely nothing for my old friends; not anger, not jealousy, not pining. I had a new life and my new life was better than it had been; if they were looking at my outlandish outfit and judging me, I didn't care: this was who I had always been, and if I had had the self-confidence -- or the support of my best friend -- when I first lost my mind over Adam Ant, I just might have spent all of high school in military jackets and kneeboots. If they were watching, Kasia and Lisa would have seen me laughing my head off with friends who looked like me; they would have seen me slow dancing with a hot guy who loved me; they would have seen me happy. 

No one's gonna tell me

What's wrong and what's right

Or tell me who to eat with, sleep with

Or foul up on the big fight, big fight

It turns out I never knew what was really going on in my friendship with these girls, and perhaps because it was never as deep as I had thought, it was simply easy for us to let go of each other. To be clear, we didn't end as enemies; we ended as nothing to each other. When I have sketched out this story arc for Dave before, he thought it sounded like Lisa had been trying to take Kasia from me from the start, but I don't know if that's fair; I wouldn't have lost Kasia if she had been all that attached to me. I think I should have seen the problem that Saturday afternoon -- long before Lisa -- when I told Kasia I was in love: she totally didn't understand what I was trying to say; and there was definitely a misunderstanding if she thought I was nothing but a Goody Two Shoes all along.

Me, Lisa, Kasia, Miles, Cindy