Tunesday : Everybody Needs Somebody

Everybody Needs Somebody

(Edge, G/Gurvitz, A) Performed by The Blues Brothers

Everybody needs somebody
Everybody needs somebody to love
Someone to love (Someone to love)
Sweetheart to miss (Sweetheart to miss)
Sugar to kiss (Sugar to kiss)
I need you, you, you
I need you, you, you
I need you, you, you in the morning
I need you, you, you when my soul's on fire

Sometimes I feel, I feel a little sad inside
When my baby mistreats me, I never never have a place to hide, I need you!

Sometimes I feel, I feel a little sad inside
When my baby mistreats me, I never never have a place to hide, I need you,
You, you!
I need you, you, you!
I need you, you, you!
I need you, you, you!

You know people when you do find somebody, hold that woman, hold that
Man, love him, hold him, squeeze her, please her, hold, squeeze and
Please that person, give 'em all your love, signify your feelings with
Every gentle caress, because it's so important to have the special
Somebody to hold, kiss, miss, squeeze, and please.

Everybody needs somebody
Everybody needs somebody to love
Someone to love (Someone to love)
Sweetheart to miss (Sweetheart to miss)
Sugar to kiss (Sugar to kiss)
I need you, you, you
I need you, you, you
I need you, you, you in the morning
I need you, you, you when my soul's on fire

So, as promised (threatened?), this week will be about the anticlimactic end to my relationship with Glen. Although he had no post-secondary education or a lifeplan when I knew him, Glen had big ambition: He told me more than once that he knew he would be rich some day; that he wouldn't get married until he could afford a down payment on a big house; until he could afford to give his wife diamonds and furs and a fancy car. He was very interested in kit cars at the time -- if you can't actually afford a luxury ride, I suppose it makes sense to pretend you can; fake it 'til you make it and all that -- and he and I would look through kit car magazines sometimes: there was a classic Porsche that he dreamed of building for himself; I chose a sporty Jag for me. We went to a fur show once at the Lethbridge Lodge Hotel, and after getting me to try on a bunch of different coats, he decided that the red fox would be best for me; I knew it was all pretend, but I was still a kid and happy to play along. I also knew that I didn't need furs and cars and a fancy house; all I ever wanted from Glen was love.

As I ended with last week, when Glen and I had been together for over a year and a half, he was asked to travel to Toronto with his older brother as the brother prepped for a double lung transplant to address his Cystic Fibrosis. After having a rather unhappy summer together, I pretty much figured that Glen moving away -- no matter how temporarily -- would be the end of us, but this relationship had fangs and claws; I wasn't through with him yet. 

After spending time with his family back home for some weeks, Glen called me one night to ask what I was doing and I said, "Not much". He then told me to look out my window in five minutes, and there he was: parked across the street in a rental car; he had come through town to check up on me as he made his way from BC to Ontario -- to make sure I wasn't out with someone else, I'm sure -- and had called me from a payphone as some kind of test. I guess I passed because we went out for a drive (he had allotted me a ridiculously short amount of time) and that was the last time I ever saw Glen in person.

But it wasn't the last I heard from him: so far as Glen was concerned, we were still together, even if I had no confidence that he could stay faithful to me while he was away. Meanwhile, school had started up again and I was able to spend more time with my friends; more time on my studies. Glen would call me at least once a week and tell me what he was up to, and even though he was in Toronto to take care of his brother pre- and post-op, nearly immediately, Glen started working. I never understood exactly what it was he was selling, but when he'd call, Glen would be very excited about this "opportunity" he was in on the groundfloor of; but as he described it, even I could hear that it was some kind of a pyramid scheme. But, like with all such dodgy business opportunities, I guess it can be lucrative if you get in at the right time; and apparently Glen had.

It was probably around Christmastime that Glen called to tell me that he had spent every dollar he had made so far at this job on a ring for me (and he did mean every dollar as some foundation was covering their living expenses), and he had bought an antique box for it, and had shipped it through Greyhound; I was to wait to hear from Greyhound and go pick it up. I was so conflicted by this news: I had spent a couple of months on my own now and was relieved by the breathing space, but I still loved Glen and was thrilled that he was committing to me like this. I waited and waited to hear from Greyhound, and when I didn't get a call, Glen sent me to go look into it. Greyhound, as it turned out, had no record of receiving the package on the Toronto end, and ultimately, Glen made an insurance claim and got some of his money back. Now this felt like fate; I wasn't meant to get that ring.

Soon after Christmas (at around the second anniversary of us meeting), Glen called to tell me that the company he worked for had presented him with an amazing opportunity: they were transferring him down to Virginia to take over as a Regional Manager. Well, excuse me? I thought he was in Toronto to take care of his brother, and while I don't now remember at what point in his brother's journey this opportunity came up, I do recall that Glen ended up making the move and another brother had to put his life on hold to make the move to Toronto.

The last time I talked to Glen on the phone, I think we both knew it would be the last time. He told me that being apart and having time to think about everything had shown him how badly he had treated me; if he had it all to do over, things would be different. I had had my own opportunities to think about everything, and by this point, I was feeling a little bitter about it all; I didn't quite let him off the hook in this conversation. What a lame way to fizzle out after years of charged emotional highs.

Sometimes I feel, I feel a little sad inside

When my baby mistreats me, I never never have a place to hide, I need you!

So, to the why of this week's song choice: Just a couple of months ago, a Blues Brothers song came on the radio as Dave and I were out driving (something silly like Rubber Biscuit) and when I joined Dave in singing along, he said, "How do you know this song?" Yikes! Could he and I have really never sang along to the Blues Brothers before in 27 years of being together? The truth is that Glen had a couple of their cassettes that we'd listen to as we drove around in his Spitfire, and even though it would have been easy enough to answer with the truth, I just said something like, "Oh, everybody knows this song. It was always playing in the background at parties in high school". Why wouldn't I answer with the actual truth? When Dave and I first met, we had briefly sketched our romantic pasts out to one another, but the longer we stayed together, the more I thought that I should be a bit more specific about Glen; about how his controlling treatment of me seemed to be having a lasting effect on my psyche. In order to talk about myself, I asked Dave a question about his first, great love Karen and he replied, "I don't think there's any point in talking about old girlfriends or boyfriends. That's the past." And so they have been left in the past and not spoken of again in all these years; I couldn't bring myself to say Glen's name to Dave, and there's something strange about that, and I'm using this song to note that fact.

Back to Lethbridge and the timeline: by the following fall, my parents had moved back to Ontario and I had moved up to Edmonton. I was relieved to feel like I had gone into hiding; it was extremely unlikely that Glen could ever find me again even if he wanted to. And that should be the end of the story, and yet...

When I first joined Facebook, I didn't really think of it as a way to reconnect with old friends. But after finding Delight, I started wondering what other old acquaintances might be searchable, and in the end, I realised that it was easier to find guys because they wouldn't have changed their names over the course of the years. Glen wasn't the first guy I looked for, but as his last name is unique, I did eventually try. It wasn't unique enough to figure out who he might be on Facebook without a city however, and when I did a Google search, I got a lot of odd results: from IMDB to wedding sites. It wasn't until I clicked one of these that I realised this was indeed the same Glen, and when I clicked through to his own website, I was fascinated by his "About Me" section: Apparently, while down in Virginia, he decided to take some photography courses at the local college. This became his passion to such a degree that he then spent a couple of years teaching photography at this college, and the IMDB results were actually him, too: he had been the official photographer at a series of pornish vampire B-movies. Eventually, he and his "beautiful wife" had moved to the Caribbean to start a destination wedding photography company, and according to these wedding websites, he was considered one of the best in his field. That's not even close to what I would have expected for Glen, but in the end, that's exactly where he should have ended up; it sounds like the kind of glamourous lifestyle he had always wanted. Good for him. And that should be the end of the story, and yet...

When I started writing about Glen here, I went to look for his website again (honestly, for the first time in five or six years) and he's no longer in the Caribbean but back in the States; and his website no longer has his full bio or a mention of the wife who had acted as his assistant on wedding shoots. There is a picture of Glen on this website and he just looks...old. 

One last thought: my mother once said to me that she thought I should be careful about getting too serious about Glen because she thought he was too much like my father. Now, I didn't see that, for sure, and I was totally offended. She had spent very little time around Glen (what did she know about him?) and she had spent a lot of my life fighting with my father (what did she know about relationships?). But dammit, I think she was absolutely right; and my father probably recognised it too the first time he watched in fear as Glen rolled up to the house in his first ridiculous car. And to think: if the ring had been on the Greyhound, I probably would have ended up marrying Glen. 

At this point, I feel about as much nostalgia for Glen as I do for anyone from the old days, and yet, it doesn't feel right to go poking around the internet looking for him; I'm done with that now that I'm done with writing about him. Dave was right that all that should remain in the past; Dave himself has been my present for over 27 years, and without a doubt, he is my future, too; I'm almost at the point of writing about him; the real love of my life. 

You know people when you do find somebody, hold that woman, hold that
Man, love him, hold him, squeeze her, please her, hold, squeeze and
Please that person, give 'em all your love, signify your feelings with
Every gentle caress, because it's so important to have the special
Somebody to hold, kiss, miss, squeeze, and please.