Background Music III

More life lessons in the 80s.

“Shout, shout, let it all out. These are the things I can do without.”

~ Tears For Fears “Shout”

Living alone for the first time in my life was not the exciting adventure I hoped it would be. As mentioned in my previous blog post Background Music II: Forever Young, my mature parents retired from their jobs and moved far away when I was in my early twenties. It’s then that I started living pay cheque to pay cheque in a small, sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment, paying rent and bills and a monthly bank loan on a newer, more reliable car. “Why does it always feel like there’s more month than money?” I made that joke often, but a joke is never really funny when it’s the hard truth of things.

I liked my own company, loved nothing more than a solitary afternoon of reading or tapping my story ideas onto the worn keys of my electric typewriter named Dylan. But this felt very different because I was alone and lonely at the same time. All of my closest friends were married, except for one who was still casually dating like I was. Before the ink was even dry on the apartment lease, she up and moved away for a new boyfriend and a new job. She was supposed to be my roommate and then suddenly she wasn’t in my life very much at all.

My mother checked in with me by way of long-distance phone calls once a week, which always began with four words: do you need money? I never stopped telling her I was doing just fine, even when I wasn’t. The truth of the matter? I didn’t want her to worry about me because I grew up seeing life kick her down more times than you would think humanly possible to get up from. She was my best friend and I wanted her to be happy. More than anyone she deserved retirement and to finally be free of nagging responsibilities like me, her youngest child. Of course I didn’t understand until I became a parent myself that worry doesn’t suddenly disappear in the middle of reassuring chats with grown children. I’m sure part of her respected my fierce independence because she raised me to be that way. However, it wasn’t unusual for me to find a fifty dollar bill (a small fortune then) tucked inside a drawer after one of her visits to stock my empty cupboards with groceries and fill my freezer with home cooked meals. She never could take no for an answer when it came to her kids.

Out of my five siblings, only one sister still lived in the same general vicinity as me. She was very busy with work and a young family, but she made every Sunday a standing invitation for me to come to dinner and to do my laundry at her house to spare me the cost (and the sketchiness) of the basement laundry room where I lived. I had another standing invitation most Thursday nights for dinner and “Must See TV” with a married couple I went to high school with. They had cable, I didn’t, and I also had a key to their place because I was their dog sitter. I remember telling them somewhat jokingly one evening while eating pasta and watching MTV that if Bryan Adams personally sang “Heaven” to me then I could die a happy woman. I think they took that amusing confession as their direct mission to ask all the suitable single men they knew to join us for dinner on Thursday nights. Young men who were nothing like the guys I tended to date because, according to my friends, that was only ever going to keep me on the road to loneliness and heartbreak. Why do married people always think they know what’s romantically best for their single friends? Some of the worst, most uncomfortable dinner dates I have ever endured only took place because I happened to mention Bryan Adams while slurping spaghetti.

Not that I had much spare time to enjoy living up the single life. I was too tired and too broke for it. My new full-time “good secretarial job” paid better than most jobs at the time, but it was a Monday to Friday (and even some Saturdays) fast-paced walk through living hell. Rinse and repeat eight hours a day. I worked in a very busy, very prominent medical practise for five male General Practitioners, whom I was not permitted to talk to (much less look at) unless they asked me a direct question first. This was not their office code of conduct. All five of them, ranging in age from almost retired to fresh out of medical school, were always pleasant and professional, and most of them worked so many long hours that it wasn’t unusual to find one of them sleep-standing against a wall in the brightly lit corridor of exam room doors.

This particular rule (and so many others) was laid out in actual writing by the clinic’s longtime office manager, a humourless and physically imposing fifty-something mother of eight, who never wore anything but formal dress suits (because slacks were très gauche) and thick pantyhose that made a distinctive swish-swish sound when she tried to sneak up to catch the office staff slacking. Which, of course, never happened because we were too busy typing our fingers to the bone and hurrying through whispered conversations, less we provoke the fiery wrath of the Dragon Lady inside her glass-walled office across from the main reception area. Trust me to come up with that moniker my first week on the job. Even the co-workers who’d been held prisoner under her reign of terror since before I was born began secretly referring to her as the Dragon Lady (or DL for short).

I was the newest and one of the youngest employees, and I was positive the DL hated me the most. The feeling was mutual and up until then I hadn’t ever found a reason to hate anyone. Once she called me Irma La Douce when she came upon me leaning tiredly outside an exam room door waiting to get a doctor’s signature on an important document before I could go home. I snapped to attention, even though I couldn’t tell by her normally snide expression if it was an insult or not. It seemed nobody else knew either or if they did they weren’t telling. Of course there was no Internet to reference, so I later called to ask my mother. Turned out Irma La Douce was a French prostitute played by Shirley MacLaine in a comedy of the same name that was coincidentally, according now to Google, filmed around the same time I was born. How delightful to be compared to a funny hooker by your supervisor, which was actually one of her milder insults.

I told my mom every harrowing detail of the DL’s verbal abuse during that phone conversation. She listened for a long time, first responding with a string of expletives and ending with a detailed account of what she’d do if she had five minutes alone in a room with that you-know-what. Then she told me something I hadn’t really understood until that moment: not everyone I met was going to like me. Rise above it. Don’t ever let someone like that see you crumble because they tend to thrive on weakness. And when things got too hard, Mom advised me to do what she’d been telling me to do ever since I was a child—find the nearest outdoor open space (preferably far from the family home) and yell my frustrations straight into the wind. As strangely freeing as yelling into the wind is for a kid, a young woman screaming anywhere publicly tends to get the police involved. So shouting the words along with Tears For Fears’ “Shout” in my car during the drive home from work became my fight song. Even hearing it today stirs my inner prize fighter.

There was no human resources department back then. Even if one did exist, no doubt the DL would in charge of that too and it would just be her word against mine. I won my very first round with her by making a fashion statement. Office staff were permitted only to wear white medical dress uniforms, even though none of us were nurses. The doctors had a team of nurses who efficiently assisted them in the exam rooms at the far back end of the clinic. My job was to take care of the mounds of paperwork, billing, and the scheduling of both clinic appointments and hospital surgeries. The front reception desk was the first point of entry for patients and because we were wearing uniforms we were always mistaken for nurses. If I got through a day without fighting nausea after being forced to take a closer look at someone’s enormous boil or bleeding open wound, then it was a blessed day indeed.

At the time long pencil skirts and white high neck Victorian-inspired blouses with romantic lace details and loose, billowy sleeves were in style. I managed to find a pristine white denim calf-length pencil skirt to pair with my new pretty blouse and dangling white shell earrings, and then I dared to wear the blindingly white ensemble to work one morning. I know I turned heads walking into the building—admiring glances for my cool sense of style, but mostly wide-eyed trepidation for the storm that was about to blow through the office. No sooner had I sat down at my desk, then I was summoned by speaker phone into the DL’s office. She was so livid that she forgot to ask me to close the door. I was told later that pretty much every person in the clinic, even patients in the waiting room, stopped what they were doing to listen to her (literally) dress me down. She finished off her raging rant by telling me the doctors were going to fire me on the spot once they saw my attire. My face burning with embarrassment, I somehow found the gumption to dig deep and calmly inform her that one of the doctors had just told me I look like Stevie Nicks and he didn’t seem mad about it. I kept my job, my style, and I learned how to lock and load my backbone that day.

My only escape from office politics was an hour-long lunch break that we all had to take at the same time while the doctors were off doing their hospital rounds. I began eating my sandwiches in my car at the furthest spot in the clinic’s parking lot the moment I discovered that the lunchroom was where the Dragon Lady continued to hold court like she was Marie Antoinette looking to cut off the head of any lowly serf who dared to interrupt her running commentary on world events and her brilliant children. Sometimes I read or went for walks. Sometimes I knitted a few rows on the sweater a co-worker paid me to make for her. Other times I listened to music and danced a little inside my head while staring at the cement wall of the building next door. Is there anything worse than being stuck in a job you hate because there’s no other immediate alternative? “Manic Monday” was my theme song because I was relieved to know I wasn’t the only one perpetually wishing it was Sunday. “Kissing Valentino by a crystal-blue, Italian stream” sounded pretty nice too.

Whenever I needed a hug more than I needed to shake a fist at the world, I’d pull out something a little stronger from my glove compartment for the drive home—my Tom Petty cassettes. I don’t know exactly what it is about Tom’s voice and music that makes my heaviest emotions feel about a thousand pounds lighter. All I know is that Tom Petty is still my favourite balm for the blues. You don’t have to know someone personally to mourn their death. The songwriter in him sure seemed to know me and my heart broke a little the moment I heard he died. Many times his soothing lyrics have saved me from making rash decisions in the heat of the moment, like a pep talk with an old trusted friend over several cups of coffee.

One warm Spring evening at the end of a hard work week, I was sitting in backed up traffic at a red light with the car windows rolled down, thinking about plans for the weekend and seat-dancing along to Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ cheeky “Here Comes My Girl“. I know it was that song because ever since high school I used to play it, rewind and replay it, repeatedly telling “the whole wide world to shove it” right along with him. Distracted, I took a quick glance to my right at the car next to me and then did a double-take. I’m not sure if things happen the same way for everyone, but for me, more often than not, the universe likes to cast me a hi there, look what I’ve got for you now line whenever I feel like I’m sinking.

I hadn’t seen my first boyfriend since the day we broke up when we were nineteen. Now there he was four years later in the driver’s seat of his same car, looking exactly the same himself, with a stunned expression blinking back at me that wasn’t all that different from the one he had when I left him. I remember feeling a flash of uncontainable joy and then I started waving at him a little too enthusiastically, until the passenger to his right suddenly leaned forward to take a look at me. The passenger was me! Well, not me. A girl who looked very much like me. The senior high school version of me. It was unsettling, to say the least. I saw his mouth tighten as he dropped his arm out the open window to give me a small wave. Then traffic began moving and he was gone.

Once I recovered from the surprise of it, I had to laugh because, seriously, what were the odds? My amusement quickly spiralled into one of those stop-and-start fits of the giggles that lasted for a ridiculously long time. By the next morning I had overanalyzed the situation to the point of convincing myself there had to be a cosmic shift happening and I wished I had a crystal ball to figure it out. Don’t get me wrong, I suffered no residual teenage heartbreak over him, other than the usual nostalgic pangs of first love. We broke up after three years of going steady because we both agreed we were too young to get married and so much alike that even at nineteen we already seemed like an old married couple with not much left to learn about each other. While that might feel comfortable or comforting for some people, for me it felt stifling. Still, how could I not consider the what-ifs after that?

What if we were still together? What if we actually were married? Would I be happier than I am right now? Perhaps more settled? Or would there already be small cracks in our relationship, similar to the ones I was beginning to detect in some friends’ marriages? There was so much emotional unpacking going on with the help of Tom Petty that weekend, well, it was almost a relief to get back to work on Monday. Yes, Tom. “The Waiting” truly is the hardest part.

I had no clue then that this time was a significant milestone for me because I was learning how to keep my footing while taking a few solid punches along the way. Somewhere in the middle of all those what-ifs I developed a strong inkling that significant change was about to happen in my life. I worried about it too. I’ve always had a hard time dealing with change, even if it’s orchestrated by my own choices. Turned out I was right. Not long after that weekend’s existential crisis, I quite by accident met the guy I was going to one day marry. Problem was, I didn’t start off liking him much.

Stay tuned for more 80s stories, coming soon!

Below are the Youtube links to the songs or music videos mentioned (or thought about) during the writing of this post. If you only have time for a few, then make them Tom Petty’s recordings. You may visit the 70s and early 80s in my previous posts of Background Music.

Shout – Tears For Fears

Everybody Wants to Rule The World – Tears For Fears

Heaven – Bryan Adams

Manic Monday – The Bangles

Addicted To Love – Robert Palmer

Don’t Do Me Like That – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (My favourite Live version of a very young Tom Petty)

Here Comes My Girl – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

The Waiting – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

Refugee – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around – Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty

Later Tom Petty recordings that I’m including because I love them too.

Free Fallin’

I Won’t Back Down (Some familiar faces in this one)

Handle With Care – Tom Petty with the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys

Wildflowers (Home recording & video) This is the posthumous release of the home recorded and filmed version of the song—joyful for me to watch and at the same time profoundly bittersweet.