freebird

I was killing a bit of time at work yesterday (it was during my lunch hour! I swear!) and I had a sudden masochistic urge to see if Trevor, my first "real" boyfriend, had his profile listed on Facebook. I plugged in his name, and there he was on the second page of results.

Holding a baby.

If ever there were someone who SHOULDN'T contribute to the gene pool, that would be Trevor.

I met Trevor a month before the end of my first year at university. He was the friend of a guy my friend Jenn was seeing at the time. His main selling point was that he was interested in sleeping with me more than once -- sometimes even while sober! And that was pretty much it.

Trevor was an 18-year-old high school dropout whose mission in life was to shock and offend as many people as possible. (In retrospect, I suppose that going out with me must have figured into his grand master plan in some way.)

He enjoyed doing things like: spitting half-chewed food into my mouth while we kissed, climbing construction cranes while stoned off his gourd and terrifying the onlookers below, and "dining and dashing" from restaurants for kicks.

Yep, he was a real charmer.

"Then why did you go out with him???" you might be wondering. Did I mention he was interested in sleeping with me more than once? That made him a prince among men at that particular point in my life.

( Needless to say, it wasn't a particularly HIGH point in my life.)

Despite the neon-billboard warning signs, I decided to spend the summer with Trevor tree planting in the northern wilds of British Columbia. Why? Mostly because my family scoffed at the idea. My brother had spent the last couple of summers tree planting, and based on his stories my parents didn't believe I'd be able to endure the hard work and harsh conditions for longer than two seconds.

Well. If there's one sure-fire way to get me to do something, it's to tell me I'm not capable of it. ( Unless you're talking about brain surgery. Or pulling off a chemical experiment without breaking something or blowing something up. Those things, I cannot do.)

And so, despite my parents' misgivings, I hopped on a Greyhound and went to Prince George, where I hooked up with Trevor and the rest of our tree-planting crew -- most of whom were Alberta boys who all went to the same bible college.

Well... you can guess what they thought about the one girl on the crew who -- gasp! -- was sharing a tent with a boy who wasn't her husband!

WHORE.

What little respect they might have had for me plummeted once they got to know Trevor and discovered exactly what calibre of guy I was willing to share a tent with. They didn't talk to me much after that.

That made for a pretty lonely summer. Especially since Trevor decided soon after we got into the bush that he didn't really want to be my boyfriend, after all. The novelty of screwing a socially awkward university girl had apparently worn off.

Being Trevor, his break-up strategy was to repulse me so badly that I would flee back to civilization, screaming.

He started off by eating live tadpoles. He'd reach right into a muddy puddle, scoop up a handful of wriggling creatures, and pop them in his mouth -- then wait for my shrieks of disgust.

It was, indeed, a very effective way to make me stop kissing him. But it wasn't enough to get me to crawl back home to my parents.

And that's what Trevor hadn't bargained for: my stubborn refusal to admit defeat.

I soon became numb to the sight of Trevor eating tadpoles. My lack of reaction disappointed him, and so he upped the stakes. He started eating actual frogs. I turned around one day after he'd called my name and saw him stuff one into his mouth. He watched me, grinning, as one little frog leg kicked feebly between his teeth.

I heaved a long sigh. "Trevor," I said, fighting to keep my voice calm, "Please don't eat that."

And then he did.

It's amazing, the things to which one can become acclimatized over time. Like watching your boyfriend eat live frogs, for example. I soon became desensitized to it -- after all, how much worse is eating a frog than playing "frog baseball" -- smashing defenseless frogs into a million pieces with a shovel while shouting, "Batta batta batta SWING!" -- like all the bible school boys did? (Putting their God-given dominion over the natural world to good use, of course.)

Not so much worse, it turns out.

At any rate, I became increasingly bored with Trevor's amphibian-eating antics, and he became increasingly bored with me. After all, what good is a girlfriend if you can't make her yell or scream or cry?

Trevor was the one who finally ended up caving. He woke up one morning, rolled over in his sleeping bag and announced to me, "That's it -- I'm outta here."

As he packed his bag, he explained that it wasn't ME -- it was him. He was like that guy in Freebird, he told me. He wasn't made to stay in one place with one woman for too long. And that bird, I could not change. Lord knows, he could not change.

And so he left.

At least he didn't take the tent, I thought.

The last time I saw Trevor was the following summer. For obvious reasons, I decided against tree-planting that year, choosing instead to spend the summer at my folks' place in Chilliwack, waitressing at a Greek steakhouse.

Trevor blew through town one day on his way to Vancouver with one of his stoner buddies. He found me through the phonebook (there were only six Whalens in Chilliwack at the time).

I had to work the night he called, but agreed to meet him and let him drive me to the restaurant, "for old time's sake."

He showed up in an orange VW bus. Turns out he didn't look me up simply to get some ex-girlfriend nookie. He and his pal were funding their cross-country tour by selling acid, and he wanted to know if I could hook him up with any buyers.

I told him no.

Undeterred, he asked if he and his pal could do a dine and dash in the restaurant where I worked. I turned down that request as well, even though it was clear that both Trevor and his friend were in desperate need of some decent food. But hell, it wasn't going to come out of my pocket.

That was the last time I ever saw him.

Over the years, I've morbidly wondered whatever became of Trevor. Honestly, I would have put money on him ending up in jail -- or the morgue -- by his 25th birthday.

Yet there he was on Facebook yesterday, balding and pudgy, and holding a baby.

Heaven help us all.