Losing It

“I lost it. I lost it all- faith, dignity… about 15 pounds.”

High Fidelity, the movie, 2002.

Londoner Rob Fleming doesn’t say those words in the book. It’s in the film, rather, where his American version Chicagoan Rob Gordon mutters that pathetic line as he stumbles up a nameless street, in the rain and at night and ends up sitting, sobbing on a curb…his skater shoes soaking in a puddle.

Charlie Nicholson has just left him for Marco. Marco! Poor Robert is heartbroken, miserable, inconsolable, insecure and borderline suicidal. He writes dozens of letters, sends some of them, creeps around outside Charlie’s residence hall…even fantasizes about killing Marco. In the end, he goes off the deep end…and you can’t help but laugh.

It really isn’t supposed to be funny. But it is…in a disgusting, feel-sick-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach kind of way.

I lost it all – faith, dignity…about 15 pounds.

There’s morbid fascination in that line – in the idea, really. We’ve all been there…or we’ve put someone through that same torture. It’s fascinating (comforting almost) to see someone self-destruct knowing the same could have happened to you in that same situation – and didn’t. It’s equally fascinating to wonder: my god, could I have done that to them? Imagine. I did that to them? Jesus.

I’ve been on both sides of that particular no-man’s-land. In the first skirmish, I did lose it all. Faith, certainly – I didn’t believe in anything, anyone, any Saint, any ideal. I figured an injustice that severe could only have been brought on by the grand puppeteer…and I hated him/her/it/whatever for it. I gained, rather than lost, 15 pounds. It was probably closer to 20…but anyway, I packed on the pounds and drank away my dignity at an alarming speed.

This was my routine in October of 2005:

1) Polish off a bottle of Portuguese Green Wine.
2) Get to the pub.
3) Drink a half dozen pints of Strongbow English Cider.
4) Get violently ill.
5) Somehow, find my way to the University bar and keep going.

I did this for about three weeks from 6 in the evening to just shy of midnight every second day or so.

Eventually, I found it (whatever it was) again. Something resembling normalcy returned. I found my dignity exactly where I left it – in the porcelain throne of the neighborhood pub.

(Through this time of monstrous vulnerability and rampant self-abuse, I drank in an English pub about five minutes away from my house. It shares a strip mall with a bad sushi place, a dirty convenience store where I bought smokes…oh, and a sex shop. The sex shop is my favorite. A steel door flanked by frosted glass with a low-key sign as a crown. Ridiculous. We all know what you can buy in there so why go to great lengths to shamefully conceal it?)

At any rate, I picked myself up, dusted myself off and stumbled forward – without faith though. She, like Charlie Nicholson, was a fucking bitch…one that knew how to lie low and disappear. I was happy to let her hide.

In the second skirmish, three years later, almost to the day, I set fire to and burned to the ground a three year relationship.

I won’t get into the details. They aren’t important. Only this is important: in losing what meant so much to me for such a long time, I found my faith…or rather, I realized I’d never lost it…nor did I lose its partner dignity.

Faith is believing there is something greater. Faith is knowing we exist for a reason. Faith is understanding that reason does not include suffering perpetually for an entire, agonizing and insulting lifetime. Faith is a smile, a laugh, a kiss, the veins of a leaf in autumn, a subtle chord in a new, exciting, personally meaningful song, holding a baby, saying ‘I love you’. Faith is Neil Young in ‘Cowgirl in the Sand,’ Eddie Vedder in ‘Black,’ Carlos Escamilla tearing through the solo in ‘Carolina’ (you don’t know him but I do and that’s all that matters). Faith is flaxen hair, hazel eyes and skin the colour of a late winter dawn…for a lovely, passionate few seconds, minutes, weeks or months.

Faith is forever and that’s magical, exciting, frightening, pure, raw…that’s everything.

I lost it all – faith, dignity…about 15 pounds.

See, like most people these days, I could stand to lose 15 pounds. That wouldn’t be a bad thing. It would be great. I’d love to lose 20…even 30 pounds. Why not? Hmmm. I’d do it, yeah, but not at the expense of faith and dignity. I can’t lose that again. They are too important.

The house. The business. The money. The family. When people lose these things, they blow their brains out in a casino parking lot, they hang themselves in an upstairs closet or they go to sleep in the garage with the car running.

I don’t even want to know what happens when you lose faith…when you lose dignity.