34. how can he

written 10 months and 4 days after

Jun 20, 2021

A year or two into our relationship he told me that he had recently realized that I come from a lineage of storytellers: my mother, my father, my sister, my nan, my grandma, my grandpa, my great-grand father, and on — all of them born to tell you a tale.

“But that’s not all,” he’d said to me. “Your friends are storytellers too.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

He told me how, when we got together with my friends, that instead of small talk, instead of a random scattering of topics, it’s just an exchange of stories.

“You save them up for each other,” he said. “And then you tell a story, and then your friend tells a story, and then another friend has their story lined up and on.”

He told me that he wanted to tell stories too. He told me that, as he wasn’t used to this way of conversing, he wanted to practice. He wanted to refine and polish a story so that he, too, could join in on the exchange.

“I tend to get lost in the details,” he said. “My stories are too long and boring.”

So, he practiced.

He told me about how, once, when he was in his early twenties, he saw either Kenny or Spenny (I cannot remember which one, and that I can’t is a small but acute pain) from the Canadian comedy series Kenny vs. Spenny.

He told me how he was such a fan of the show that he knew Kenny and Spenny’s real names (Kenneth and Spencer). He told me how he went right up to Kenny or Spenny, and called him by his real name, waved so enthusiastically and fully that it took the entirety of his arm to create the motion. He told me how he gushed over how much of a fan he was. He told me how Kenny (or was it Spenny?) just stared at him, backed slowly away, and said, “Cool, man.”

“I was so embarassed,” he said. He couldn’t believe that he had chased down this person in the middle of a hardware store to be a super fan.

I laughed, of course. But he felt he wasn’t getting as BIG a laugh as he wanted. He would go on to tell me several iterations of this story, with different voices and vocal tones, sometimes zooming in and out on different details. I would laugh harder each time, not because I was pandering but because his striving honestly delighted me.

I loved the thought of him, waving with his whole body, enraptured by Kenny or Spenny in a hardware store. What a thing to be enraptured by.

Later on, during one of our road trips, he would tell me another story — not as a means of practicing, but just because he recalled it.

He told me how in junior high he decided that he wanted to join the grade seven/eight basketball team (he was in grade seven).

He didn’t know any of the rules of the game and the only time he had ever held a basketball was when he, sometimes, shot hoops on his driveway.

“You didn’t know a single rule?” I said, interrupting him. “But you thought you could play on a team?”

He shrugged.

“I figured they’d teach me the rules,” he said.

I laughed out loud, awed by this kind of confidence.

He told me how he went to try outs and, predictably (if you asked me, and unpredictably, if you asked him) they immediately ran drills and two on two games. This was, of course, an issue as he didn’t know any of the drills or how to actually, you know, play basketball. He didn’t know how to dribble or shoot or do anything except run (he was a track and field athlete).

At one point, he said, he didn’t notice a pass and the basketball bounced off his head, knocking him to the ground.

At this, I burst out laughing, uncontrollably and large, a laugh only he could draw from me.

“A BASKETBALL HIT YOU IN THE HEAD?” I said.

He grinned, nodded.

“Did you just quit right then?” I said. I would have had to change my name, transfer schools, and go into Witness Protection from the sheer embarrassment of that moment.

“No,” he said laughing. “I didn’t know how to play! I just kept going.”

He told me how his friends came to try-outs to cheer him on and I further experienced secondary embarrassment, imagining the moment of being bonked in the head by a basketball in front of friends.

In the end, he was the only person who tried out who didn’t make the team, an outcome that truly, remarkably, didn’t phase him.

“I wanted to try it and I did,” he said.

I was so impressed by that story, by his bravery. I still don’t know how he could have been that tenacious, that relentless, in the most laid back way possible.

Sometimes, his confidence frustrated me, especially when it led him to undertake things for which he was entirely ill-prepared (like the time he bought two drop cloths, a step ladder, a gallon of paint, and a roll of green masking tape, and told me he was going to paint not only the walls, but the ceiling too, of his old house, which was, yes, a WHOLE HOUSE. He had watched 1 YouTube video in preparation and felt sure that despite his total lack of experience painting a house, he could do it. (Spoiler alert: he could not and professional painters were hired a week later).

Despite his lack of prowess with home painting, he was a talented fine artist.

Three years ago, he and I thought it would be fun to taking a painting class at the local technical institute. We enrolled in what we thought was an introductory level Acrylics class.

He had taken painting classes as a kid and, obviously, as an architect, did technical drawings for a living. He unearthed, in the recesses of our storage room, a massive carrying case, designed for large scale prints and drawings.

Into the bag he piled his specialized rulers, reams of tape, paintbrushes galore, sheets of test paper, and more.

When I picked up the bag, I told him it was not only ostentatiously large but extraordinarily heavy.

I had carefully reviewed the supplies list and found the requisite paint colours and papers, piled everything required into a neat, sturdy shopping bag.

“No,” he said. “It’s not heavy.”

I watched him heft it and told him we had to go into class separately.

“I can’t be associated with this bag,” I said.

He just laughed.

The day of the first class, he picked me up from the house after work. He was often running late and so now we were too — it was an evening class — and since it was the first class, this especially stressed me out.

I snipped at him in the car about time management but he assured me that he knew the campus well and we would be “right on time.”

Instead, we parked in the wrong lot, walked around and up stairs, and down corridors, only to realize we weren’t even in the right section of the campus.

All through our wanderings, he had to haul the cumbersome, and, as he finally admitted, heavy bag. I couldn’t decide how I felt: my teeth were gritted because we were late, but the bag was so ridiculous, and he was so out of breath, heaving it about, that I was also cackling with amusement.

October 2018, the bag he brought to the first art class

By the time we staggered into the large, open concept studio room that was the classroom, we were the last two to arrive and class had started. I did, as predicted, enter ahead of him because in the final turn into the class, he’d gotten his bag caught on the door and looked down. He didn’t see me disappear into the room and somehow managed to walk by the door twice before he heard the sounds of the class.

We had missed the introductions but we would glean, over the course of those first three hours in class, that something had gone wrong.

We were not in an introduction to Acrylics. We were in Acrylics IV.

“What happened to I, II, and III?” I said, deliberately saying the phonetic sound of the letters instead of the Roman Numerals, as they were on the website.

In the end, when we spoke to the instructor, we realized that there was an error in the online registration form. It designated the class as part of the Introductory classes but failed to mention it was the fourth in a series of four. It also failed to mention that it was a class to which prerequisites applied.

“You should never have gotten in,” the instructor said, eyeing me, in particular, as I swirled paint in my new palette. “This is a class largely for working artists already.”

He advised us to drop the class, that we were out of our depth. I know he meant me because he had already praised Kurtis’ work, something that made him beam.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I hissed when the instructor left.

“It’s just for fun,” he said.

I pointed out that it was all good to say that standing where he was — with experience in the art form and talent to boot. I, on the other hand, was hopelessly, visibly, and embarrassingly behind.

Ultimately, he switched out his insanely sized bag for a shopping bag like mine, and we stayed in the class.

I stayed because Acrylics I wasn’t being offered for a few more months and because he wanted to stay. I didn’t really want to but I resigned myself to being not just the bottom of the class but the bottom of all the classes.

At one point, during the final half of our course, the instructor urged me to consider incorporating writing into my work (somehow, it had come up that I was a writer). This was the nicest possible way he could have said: stick to your own art.

By the end of the course, we had an open exhibition of all our finished works. Mine was terrible. There is no other way to put it. If my sweet man was here, I know, because I’ve heard him say it before, he would pipe in, tell you that my “color theory was really, really good.” This was the only thing I proved to be more naturally good at then he in the class: creating and pairing color.

Still, even my eye for color couldn’t rescue the travesty that was my piece.

We had to all sit in a circle, our canvases on easels beside us, and go around the circle and share about our piece, and then listen as the floor was opened up for questions and consideration.

Three people in our class were showing pieces that they were planning to include in their solo art shows. Naturally, too, Kurtis’ piece was extremely cool. Everyone loved his.

Someone said mine was was “medically inspired” and “anatomic.”

No one asked any questions, except, of course, my man — my inquisitive, sweet, persistent man.

During the quiet of question period, he crept out of his chair, bent over at ninety degrees.

“Excuse me,” he said, still hunched over — I think he thought it made him seem less intrusive, even though he was literally being entirely intrusive; no one else had any questions.

Everyone’s heads turned to him.

“I just think,” the hunchback that he was moved across the entirety of the circle and pointed to an element of another student’s painting, “that this could be refined, or pushed, a little more?”

I say ‘refined’ or ‘pushed’ because I can’t quite remember the words he used, just the polite but very critical spirit of them.

Internally, I was trying to tunnel into the ground, embarrassed by relation that he was being so hard on the painting. Everyone was quiet, listening to what I knew was a classic Kurticism, what his peers in architecture called the emergence of the ‘Young Contrarian.’

The artist bumbled through an answer, while my sweet man crept back to his chair. As he settled down beside me I looked at him, tried not to smile, somewhat unsuccessfully.

“Are you happy now?” I said.

He just looked at me, triumphant.

After, the artist shook his hand. Thanked him for his feedback. The instructor personally invited him (and me, somehow too!) to the next advanced class which was running in the spring.

We drove home, our paintings carefully laid flat in the back of my SUV. We talked about the class we would take, in the spring — we mentioned maybe doing an oils class too. I borrowed a bit of his bravery and said I would do both. Even if I was the worst, I figured it would still be fun to be with him. Streetlight flashed over his paint-flecked fingers on the steering wheel. He talked about hanging his painting in his study. I talked about running mine over with our car. We stopped for take-out.

Somewhere, in the storage space of our apartment, both of our paintings are still there, side-by-side. Our bags of supplies are there too. When I think about it, I think the same question, the one I ask multiple times a day, on a loop. How is it that he can be gone?

How can he?

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At The Bottom Of Everything