Jesus, Coke

cw: substance abuse/suicide

I dreamed about him all the time, dreamed that we were in school together and that our teachers were endlessly separating us. Owen and I weren’t friends and he’d never been a crush. We had the tenuous small-town connection of having parents who were acquainted with each other, if only tragically.

When I was six, I discovered an envelope of photographs shoved in the back of the silverware drawer in our China cabinet. Inside I found a collection of snapshots of a long-haired pirate with the same almond-shaped eyes and cut-from-glass dimples as my mother. Okay, he wasn’t a pirate, but he had a Long John Silver thing happening. He rocked a mustache the way George Harrison wished he could, and bell bottoms the way an entire generation would collectively regret. Nearly every picture featured him holding an acoustic guitar and a cigarette, except for the ones where he had his arm draped around a pretty redhead. 

I didn’t tell anyone about this discovery, not even my sister, but I returned to the envelope when I needed to escape. I created an entire universe for these people I didn’t know, full of pirates and swords.

Eventually I learned that in addition to her younger twin brothers, my mother had an older brother who died by suicide in 1969. He’d shot himself in the head, and the woman who found him, his pretty redhead girlfriend, later became Owen’s mother. There was a six-page police report and an unspeakable sadness linking our families. Our skeletons shared a closet.

My mother processed most of the grief through her liver. She’d been a happy-go-lucky eighteen-year-old when it happened, and she responded by adopting a fatalism that only the devil could reckon with. She never said no to a dare or a drink, or any substance. By the time I was old enough to pay attention, chardonnay was her poison of choice, and she killed at least two bottles every night. It’s hard to say exactly what killed her. She had a stroke at fifty-six, and was expected to make a full recovery, but she died a few weeks later. Her heart just stopped. It had certainly been broken for long enough.

With my mother dead for three years and my last year of high school fifteen years behind me, I didn’t have much reason to dream about Owen. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen each other or spoken, and it annoyed me tremendously that I kept thinking of him, but I couldn’t summon a dream for the many people I had once cared for instead.

They weren’t bad dreams either, not like the ones I had about university or drowning off of the Canadian Pacific Railway bridge. I’d been having it since I was five, and it made an appearance every few years, just often enough to remind me of how small and helpless we all are. The university dream was a graduation gift. I had six more science credits (the impossible!) to complete. I didn’t finish my undergrad until I was twenty-eight, and the whole time I thought those six credits would end me. Clearly, it was a mistake to enroll in astronomy, but it was a curious dream to keep having now that I was finally teaching. It was as if I imagined my degree could be revoked.

My dreams about Owen happened more often, and they were more confusing. With the bridge I knew I was going to drown and with university I knew I was going to fail, but with him I could never quite remember what went on. We were in school, but the rest was a little hazy. Our teachers tried to keep us apart, but we had never spent any amount of time together. He sat behind me in English one year, and that was the peak of our proximity.

“That’s creepy,” my sister said when I finished telling her over Sunday brunch. It was my week to host, and I’d gone all out and served bacon with eggs and French toast. We were sitting in my improvised breakfast nook at a table I had rescued from the dumpster. It was the perfect size and I didn’t mind that it was badly scratched. Amidst all the curses a heart was etched into one corner. It read Suzy + Dan = forever. It would have been a shame to let such love decompose on a garbage heap, so I brought it home and covered it with a lace tablecloth so the graffiti and their eternal commitment could breathe.

I rolled my eyes at Angie. “I know. I’m the worst.”

“No, I mean, it’s spooky.”

“How so?”

“He’s in a coma.” She poured herself some juice. “Aren’t you on Facebook?”

“You know I am. You created my profile. What happened?”

“Apparently there was a car accident.”

I put my coffee cup back in its saucer. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“He was alone.”

“You mean there wasn’t another vehicle?”

“No. He crashed into a concrete overpass.”

“Shit. That’s awful.”

“Awfully suspicious.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder in a way so familiar, so like our mother that it made me queasy. “They say alcohol wasn’t a factor. You’d think he tried.”

“Don’t say things like that. Someone might repeat it.”

“Too late. Everyone’s saying it already.”

I used my fork to push the last bite of toast around on my plate. “Doesn’t he have a wife and kids?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Well maybe they don’t need to hear that shit.”

“What if it’s the truth?”

I stood up and scraped the toast and some egg yolk off my plate and into the garbage. “The truth is overrated.”

#

The dreams were kind of bittersweet. I woke up calm and peaceful, and all I could figure, if I had to analyze it, was that I missed being a kid. Didn’t everyone long for the innocence now and then? Why Owen happened to be my dreamscape companion didn’t seem important because he didn’t ruin anything, and I didn’t care how often I had the dreams because they were pleasant. I always felt safe, and the teachers who tried to separate us never succeeded. Nothing could break us apart, and that was fine, until I learned he was in a coma. Then understanding my dreams became of paramount importance.

The possibility of a collective unconscious that warehoused shared memories and trauma had always seemed doubtful to me. Since it wasn’t logical or measurable, I dismissed it onto a pile of theories I called total horse shit. The pile was mainly composed of Freud and old wives tales passed down from my mother, like needing to wait an hour after you eat to go swimming. There was just a dash of Jung for good measure. 

I wasn’t expecting to have the dream again, now that I knew about the accident, but a week later I woke up at four am, half sure I was still eleven, and of course Owen was with me.

Why couldn’t I just dream about my teeth falling out like everyone else?

#

“So I Googled what it means when you keep dreaming about the same person.” It was Angie’s turn to host and we were drinking mimosas on her balcony.

I groaned. “This should be good.”

“Turns out it’s all about unresolved stuff,” she said stirring her drink. “Like if you keep dreaming about the same ex, you’re probably dealing with the same issues in your current relationship.”

“Directly quoted from a peer-reviewed journal.”

“Don’t be such a snob.”

I sighed. “Owen is not my ex. He wasn’t even my friend, and there’s nothing unresolved between us.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Didn’t he ask you out in like seventh grade?”

“It was sixth, and how did you remember that?”

“Why’d you shoot him down? He was the best-looking ginger in school.”

Owen resembled his mother, minus the celestial nose. He had the same deep set, blue-grey eyes and a jawline made for a Gillette Mach 3 commercial. It was a little hard to imagine what he saw in me, buried in lumberjack shirts and hiding behind wire-framed glasses. Back then, all the girls were stumbling around in platform shoes and baby tees. I was the only one who didn’t smell like Love’s Baby Soft perfume and watermelon Lip Smackers. I was the girl stuck on Hole and Nirvana in the era of Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears.

Angie tapped a nail against her glass. “Well, why did you say no? He wasn’t an asshole like all those boys grabbing our asses and snapping our bra straps.”

I smiled. “He was nice. But if I’d said yes, he would have wanted to break up with me in two weeks.”

“You think he would have given you the full fourteen days?”

“Fine. Four. Whatever. You know what I mean.”

“So you liked him?”

I paused to drain my glass. “No. Worse. I respected him.”

“How is that worse?”

“I was too distracted by the assholes snapping my bra straps to realize it.”

“So there’s your unresolved conflict.”

I shrugged and held out the glass for a refill. “Google solved it.”

#

I have a profound understanding of what students are meant to take away from high school English because I teach Introductory Composition. I expect my students to come to me knowing certain things, but they rarely do. I’m disappointed, if not surprised. But I shouldn’t be. When I think about what I retained from my own experience, it wasn’t fanboys or transitive and intransitive verbs. Much to the chagrin of my teachers, I consistently misspelled separate, and I used American endings for words like colour and odour.

I recall how Mr. Graves leaned against the chalkboard, acquiring a white stripe across the seat of his navy trousers, earning him the nickname Chalk-Ass. I remember trying to read The Taming of the Shrew and my sister renting me a VHS copy from Blockbuster. I turned in the first of many papers about a book I didn’t finish. I remember cutting class to get stoned beside the dumpster that said Fuck The Patriarchy in fluorescent pink paint the fresh coat of green couldn’t quite cover and making out with Josh Hendricks beside it. I remember walking into the boy’s washroom on my first day of ninth grade and wondering when they installed the urinals before staring directly into the eyes of a goth dude coming out of a stall.

And I remember clearly how one day we hijacked the conversation about advertising and media literacy and turned it into a debate about which was the superior beverage, Pepsi or Coke. I remember a voice behind me muttering, “Jesus, Coke.”

At the time I hardly drank soft drinks, but with a little experience I can say it was the right answer. I wouldn’t waste my rum on Pepsi.

Was it the invocation of Christ in the name of brand loyalty that made an impression on me? Or just the absolute certainty? How did I forget the periodic table and retain Jesus, Coke? More importantly, how could that be the only thing I knew about someone I went to school with for twelve years?

But it was the only thing I knew about Owen, and feeling like I should do something to honor him, I purchased a six pack of votives and a can of Coke at the dollar store, and I cleared a space for them next to the stack of books on my bedside table. I lit the candle and let the Coke sweat and grow warm, unopened. I said what religious people might have called a prayer. I kept up the routine for a week.

#

I made a lasagna for Angie just so I would have an excuse to drop by her apartment and ask, “Do you know what happened to that envelope of pictures of uncle Jeremy?”

“It must be in a box somewhere in the spare room. Why?”

“How old were you when you found out about him?”

Angie scrunched up her face. “Seven, maybe eight. I was with Mom at a Christmas market and we ran into Owen’s mother and they stopped to talk. Afterward, I asked who she was and Mom said she used to date your uncle. I asked if it was Sean or Pat, and she said no, your uncle Jeremy.”

“She actually said his name?”

“Yeah, but she refused to answer my questions, so I bugged Pat and he gave me the Fisher-Price Coles notes.”

“What did that sound like?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Our older brother died when he was young and your Mom doesn’t like to talk about it because it makes her sad, so don’t ask. Then he told me about how Jeremy and his girlfriend would take him and Sean to the movies. He said she had a really great voice and that she and Jeremy would sing Bobby McGee all the time in the car.”

It was easier to think about pirates and treasure than to wonder what happens to young love prematurely terminated by death. Break ups were hard enough. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t forget Owen. I didn’t know him and I still knew way too much. And how much did he know? Was his mother more open than ours? Who sits their kid down to say this super traumatic thing happened to me when I was seventeen? But why shouldn’t Owen have had an uncle Pat to give him the details: Your Mom’s first boyfriend died “unexpectedly.” She found his body. That’s why she doesn’t sing anymore. By the way, you go to school with his nieces. Not likely. Who would say that to a kid? No wonder my mother didn’t discuss it. 

I did a few of my own Google searches about dreams. I tried picking up Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, which I quickly exchanged for a copy of Jane Eyre. I’m not sure why because I liked Austen better than all the Brontës combined, but it was very much a book I wasn’t finished with, even though I’d read all of it. It hinged on the idea that we had souls that could be eternally damned and that we weren’t just empty vessels escorting each other through life. I didn’t accept Jane’s reason for leaving Rochester, and if she really forgave him, on the spot, as she said, she would have acted accordingly. It seemed like an avoidable tragedy. I kept returning to the part where she said it was her spirit addressing his, as if they’d passed through the grave and stood at God’s feet. Why didn’t he tell her she wouldn’t pass through it, that it was where she would stay and rot? He must have loved her. And maybe that was the part that pissed me off. I don’t think he would have left her for anything. Certainly not the mere promise of an after-life.

The next time I saw Angie she told me Owen was dead.

“I know. I had another dream.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “What happened?”

“I was waiting for him on the bleachers on the soccer field and he never came. I fell asleep.”

“That was it?”

“That was it.” I didn’t tell her about the kiss. 

I’m not sure why I lied and told her it was a soccer field. It was a basketball court and he was playing one-on-one with my dead uncle. I think I was meant to be keeping score, but I fell asleep and when I woke up it was dark in the gymnasium. He was beside me and he took my hand and he led me out, past all of the boys who taunted and groped me, and we went back to the playground and sat on the swings.

When I opened my eyes, daylight had just begun to spill over the horizon. I brought the can of warm Coke with me to the kitchen and poured it into two glasses and downed them both. I sat down at my rescue table and peeled back the lace on the corner where the heart was etched. Tracing my finger over it, I wondered how eternity was working out for Suzy and Dan, if they had upgraded their table to solid oak, or if they had slowly forgotten each other the way I had forgotten the meaning of all those symbols in the periodic table.

I took my copy of Jane Eyre, tore a page out and crumpled it in my fist. The sound of the paper rustling against itself was like music. I tore out another and another until I was left holding a spine joining two covers. I sat down in the middle of the scattered pages and shuffled the pile with my feet. I made a paper fan and a fleet of airplanes that I sent flying around the room. I lay back and pretended to make a snow angel. Then I got up and threw away the whole mess. Or I thought I did. I found a page under the couch when I was moving out of the apartment. It was the one when Jane hears Rochester calling her name.