I Strive For Imperfection

My friend Boddington, or “Bods” to the few who took the time to know him, pressed his face to my ear and with mock admiration said only “Mmmm.”

Despite his many shortcomings Bods always knew how to sum up any situation with a single word or sound.

For someone named after a bitter British beer by young, unloving parents, Bods was awkwardly lovable. His impish smirk simmered below his unapologetically stubbled face. His heavy eyelids, perpetually stuck between a blink and full-on death stare, gave a sleepy look that eclipsed any interpretation of his thoughts. Again he said “Mmmm,” loud enough to be heard by all. I winced.

“You say somethin’, skinny?” asked the t-shirt woman aggressively.

“I did,” said Bods with sheepish inflection. “I said Mmmm.” His words petered off into the abyss.

It had been nine years since Bods had first turned his woeful eyes in the direction of the t-shirted woman within the current confines. Before that he had not seen her for something like seven years, the memories were fogged by time. Those encounters had been brief, sporadic and heated. In the past nine years he had never uttered a single word to her. For just under a decade he had watched her three times a day, four days a week. He was a silent son to her, his hushed love held prisoner.

Why Bods spoke to her today of all days, no matter how seemingly insignificant his words, I wasn’t sure. I felt a sense of unease. The bus that had been his life just veered to the right and he was no longer at the wheel. In truth he hadn’t been steering for years. Bods’ bus suddenly stopped, I resurfaced from my thoughts and found the woman staring at me.

“Nice shirt,” I blurted out, immediately wishing I could reel those words back and cast out something less condescending. My words were met with silence for what seemed to be an eternity.

“You like it?” the woman said with an optimistic tone and the smallest hint of a smile. Her eyes were bright but turned down at the corners.

“I do. Where did you get it?” I queried.

“I won it at bingo,” she said.

Bods allowed a pained smirk to land on his face.

I immediately knew what Bods was thinking. His eyes, as always, said nothing but his pinched smile whispered the truth. What were the odds of that t-shirt being made with that message and subsequently being won and worn by that woman? It was the perfect storm. A timely meeting of imperfection perfected, fate and fashion. As so often happened in my life a comedy was unfolding before my very eyes. My name was on the marquee in brilliant black letters next to Bods’ and the rotund, t-shirted woman’s.

What’s your name?” I said imagining a theatre employee stretching beyond the limit of a tall ladder, carefully placing her letters next to mine. A million light bulbs dancing joyously around our names.

“Marilyn,” she said. “Marilyn Munro,” before I could laugh she continued as she had done all her painful life I surmised. “but it’s em-you-en-ar-oh not like that actress with the dress.”

Bods was rigidly catatonic not believing what he had just heard. He recomposed and generously said that he once had a man named Mr.Rogers living in his neighbourhood. Bods often delivered less than poignant nuggets like that. Marilyn’s face expressed nothing at all. Marilyn, too, had known a Mr.Rogers, but haven’t we all?

“Were you named after the actress?” I said.

“I was,” Marilyn replied, “but only my first name. I remarried after a troubled first marriage that ended in my husband’s death. My new husband’s name was Munro. Funny, isn’t it?” she offered lightly.

I suppose that I saw the humour in the latter part of her sentence and in the apparent destiny which brought her two names together. I wondered about her first husband.

Marilyn’s jacket zipper caught the far edge of the long, sterile table at which I sat. The message I Strive For Imperfection was rebroadcast and, again in my mind, it appeared on the marquee above our names in the most unimaginably enormous, chiseled letters. The man on the ladder struggled to secure the final ‘n’ of Imperfection, catching himself not once but twice from plunging to the cobbled bricks below. Finally the sign was ready, our names seemed small and insignificant in comparison.

I was fixating on Marilyn’s shirt. Daydreaming. Little did I know that Bods was too.

Bods had the kind of childhood that you all too frequently read about in the newspaper. The sordid details often buried deeply in the seventh paragraph, hopelessly trying to shed light on the situation, far from the sensational headline. I’ve read those stories, shaken my head in disgust and imagined tears flowing from my eyes. Bods had a childhood that, in essence, wasn’t a childhood. His conception was as unplanned as the life that followed. His life was a map without contour lines, no chance for elevation. Like many boney, neglected children he amused himself but it wasn’t long before the trouble began.

Bods looked troubled now. He no longer seemed to fit into the hard plastic chair in which he had been sitting and he struggled to find comfort. It was the t-shirt that drove Bods’ bus off of life’s cliff. As a child Bods constantly sought the love and attention of his elusive parents. He strived to be perfect for them. He did well in school, at least in the early days. The world outside saw a happy child but Bods more often drowned than bathed in the daily circumstances that were his life. At the age of fourteen Bods unconsciously halted his quest for perfection and began his descent into the ugly, imperfect world.

Marilyn’s t-shirt or more specifically the message it carried had unearthed something that Bods had buried a long time ago. Its importance was clearly monumental. Something that had been simmering since Bods’ youth had been brought back to boil. The t-shirt spoke to Bods. It hurt him deeply. Why would Marilyn wear that shirt in front of him? She must have known how he felt.

The t-shirt reminded him of how brilliantly he had ruined his life.

Dr.Freeman Keppt knew how Bods felt. Dr.Keppt had been lurking cautiously in the shadow of our conversation. He had a knack for showing up at the most opportune times. As always he wore an earth-toned suit. His snow white shirt was adorned with an optimistic looking tie. The tie, it should be noted, was pristine and perfectly knotted. His greying beard and moustache smelled of bookish knowledge. Hiding behind thin, designer glasses were eyes dark like the night ocean, both inviting and mysterious.

“Did Boddington speak to you, Marilyn?” asked Dr.Keppt.

“Sort of,” Marilyn unconvincingly affirmed.

Dr.Keppt tented his fingers with his two index fingers propping up his lower lip.

A man wearing a nylon jacket and nothing else streaked past our table. He was pleading for salvation from unseen demons. Dr.Keppt blinked twice but was otherwise unfazed.

“Do you wish to speak now Boddington?” said Dr.Keppt.

“I can’t,” the words slipped past Bods’ constricted throat.

Dr.Keppt spoke to Bods as though they were alone in his office but today the walls had many ears.

“Do you remember our many conversations about perfection?” asked Dr.Keppt rhetorically of Bods. “We wrote an imaginary play where the actors portrayed life in a perfect world. The actors on the stage lacked personality and their sameness scared both of us. There was no beauty. It was the worst world imaginable, full of bland, cookie-cutter people. I remember that it made you think about heaven and whether such a place could really exist.”

I shot a glance towards Bods. I saw someone I no longer knew. Then again, what did I know about anything? I wasn’t sure why I was in the room. The room itself was large and devoid of any real personality. Attempts had been made to give it character from our shadowy predecessors. The paintings on the wall, although luminous, were uninspiring. There were 756 vanilla ceiling tiles above my head. A dust ball waltzed in the corner by the rusted vent. The imperfect grey flooring dared to call itself granite.

Dr.Keppt turned to Marilyn. “Marilyn, does perfection exist in your opinion?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she offered.

“Why do you believe that people pursue it with such passion?” Dr.Keppt continued.

“I really don’t know,” was the only answer Marilyn could give.

“Do you love yourself, Marilyn?” probed Dr.Keppt.

“Most of the time,” she replied with little hesitation.

I felt a wave of guilt pour over me. I had been judging Marilyn for two years using society’s preconceived notion of perfection which I clearly had adopted. I had never even taken the time to speak to her. I felt ashamed. Marilyn was probably as close to perfection as anyone. In time I would learn to admire her greatly, considerably more so than the well dressed climbers of society who do everything wrong by striving to do everything right. Marilyn was true to herself and I clearly wasn’t. Marilyn was Marilyn. I wondered who I was.

Bods began to cry gently. I put my arm around him to remind him that his bus had at least one other passenger. Bods’ head rose slowly from the table like a boxer craning his head off of the canvas after a horrific knockdown. He looked around, took a deep breath, slowly exhaled and then began to speak. His words expressed no emotion for the first few seconds and then they began to gather strength.

“When I used to break into people’s homes looking for money to fuel my addiction, I took particular pleasure in destroying their perfect worlds. I wanted more than just money, I wanted balance. If I saw a neat little row of family pictures on the wall, I’d knock them down and stomp on them. I hated the perfection in which others seemed to bask.”

I wanted to inject something to lighten the mood, anything to calm Bods down but there was no stopping him. Bods was experiencing a garage sale of his mind and, amid the clutter, it was long overdue. The thought of being so close to him left me quaking. I took my hand off of his trembling shoulder and allowed him to carry on.

“If I needed money I’d steal a television and hawk it. If I couldn’t carry the tv then I’d knock it to the ground. If my world wasn’t perfect then I was quite content to have some company in the gutter. Unhappy strangers made for happy bedfellows. I wanted them to savour the taste of imperfection, to let the bitter taste of disappointment slide across their tongues, get rammed down their throats and rot in their stomachs.”

Bods spoke with a seething fury. His eyes met Marilyn’s and he stopped cold.

“I knew Boddington back then,” said Marilyn, offering no more.

This came as news to me as Bods had never mentioned Marilyn during my two years of befriending him. He never mentioned any friends or acquaintances at all. No one ever visited. No one knew Bods. This was becoming painfully apparent.

Bods had romanced both sides of perfection, the dark side as well as the mythic, unattainable side. All around him, on television and in the magazines, the pursuit of perfection was evangelized with dizzying regularity. The canyons in which his mind roamed had steep walls and on these walls the towering billboards goaded him. Porcelain smiles emanated from glossy lips. Velvety, airbrushed skin beckoned. Smiling, happy people, delirious from their utopian lives, begged him to be one with them. It wasn’t so much the physical aspects of his culture’s relentless and shallow pursuit of self-glorification that haunted Bods as it was the mental stigma attached to simply being your self. The message sent by society, or its mouthpiece, was that it wasn’t good enough to be yourself anymore. You had to strive for perfection and this mindset, although clearly a goldmine for the corporate rapists, was a battlefield for the troubled. Bods lay mortally wounded in the trenches while the war waged on. He was, most simply put, a forgotten son.

Bods lay his forehead on the table, his arms dripped lifelessly toward the floor. His torso shuddered gently now.

Marilyn skirted the table and gathered the plates and glasses onto the trays as she always had. Carefully she carried them in her creased arms to the brushed metal trolley. Slowly the cart filled with the remnants of breakfast until the table was cleared of all but Bods’ head. Marilyn wiped the table clean, providently avoiding the prone head. Her free hand briefly and awkwardly caressed the hair on the back of Bods’ head. This apparent display of affection lasted under two seconds by my count. To Bods it took a lifetime. He began to weep.

Marilyn withdrew her hand and placed it on the idling trolley. Like clockwork she carried on down the lonely hallway toward the daunting doors. Her silent flight was punctuated by the chime of the security door keypad and the cold clanging of the locks. She would return to the psychiatric ward in four excruciatingly long hours.

Bods continued to sob. I asked if he was okay and heard only a faint ‘Mmmm.’

“Are you sure?” I said, not convinced of anything anymore.

The sobbing was steady. Again Bods said something. From his trembling mouth I thought that I heard him say “Mmmmom.” The room fell eerily silent. Time seemed to stop.

“What did you say?” I gasped.

There was an infinite pause. Dr.Keppt looked at me and smiled knowingly.

“Mmmm,” was all that Bods could muster. The word lived and died on his lips, never to be heard again.