All about mom's boyfriends

>> >> Brett Leveridge tells the truth and nothing but mostly the truth

by JULIET WATERS

Even though Brett Leveridge calls Men My Mother Dated and Other Mostly True Tales fictional, I'm still going to ask if anyone out there has ever heard of Russell "Rusty" Sims. Apparently, after being jilted by Leveridge's mother, nine days before their scheduled wedding in Oklahoma, Sims moved to Montreal where he started a chain of discount pet stores. There wasn't anything seriously wrong with Rusty. It's just that Mrs. Leveridge found she couldn't stand the intermingled smells of cat litter, fish food and dog hair.

It's quite possible that Rusty actually does exist. Leveridge qualifies "fictional" by claiming he means it only "in the legal sense", i.e. "the reader is advised to think of the accounts in this book as one woman's recollections of dates that occurred many years ago filtered through the over-active imagination of her no-account son, the author."

Mrs. Leveridge did date men who are known to have existed. Jack Kerouac for one. She met Kerouac when he and Neal Cassidy stopped at the diner where she worked, en route to Mexico City. They watched the sunset together and she's sure he was about to ask her to go with him, except that her boss suddenly returned and kicked Jack and the drunken Cassidy out.

And, although she didn't technically date Bob Wills, the king of western swing, he did spend an evening stalking her on the dance floor.

These anecdotes have the feel of a very real, very ordinary, very average life. But read together they merge into a blur of weirdness. In her dating career, Mrs. Leveridge dated: a much older man (59 to her 22); a much younger man (17 to her 23); a con-man; a sword thrower with less-than-perfect aim; a probably gay man who shared her passion for musicals then, after five wonderful months of dating, dumped her for no reason; a college roommate who misread a brief bitter spell against men as a sign of lesbianism; a black transfer student who was driven out of town by rednecks; a mechanic whose hot rod she drove in a race when he was disabled by a sudden nosebleed; and five men in one night as part of a bet.

Most of these stories appeared first as columns in Dave Egger's first zine, Might. Their quirky charm depends largely on the combination of mid-western innocence with the hint of Oedipal complex. Whether they are true or not, the fascination Leveridge maintains for his mother's romantic exploits gently and subtly corrupts this small-town virgin's innocent life story.

But another part of this book's charm is that her life as a young June Cleaver type is actually so much more interesting than his life as a single, reasonably successful 42-year-old writer in New York.

If one believes the "Mostly True Tales" that make up the second half of the book, Leveridge is something of a dud. Averagely attractive, generally assumed to be gay, though he isn't, he seems unhappily doomed to heterosexual singlehood. He holds a fairly tedious job at a Web design company. And he devotes a bit too much brain power to crotchety Andy Rooney-ish rants about stupid TV ads.

The only obvious untruth he writes is a short bio that comes with the book. "Brett Leveridge was born at the Route 66 Lanes bowling alley in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, between the 7th and 8th frames of his mother's third perfect game in a four day stretch. He saw very little of his father, a travelling Druid evangelist, during his childhood; as a result, he grew up rough and he grew up wild and when he was only fifteen, he shot a man in El Reno just to watch him die."

We know this to be untrue because never once in the book does his mother go bowling. :

Men My Mother Dated by Brett Leveridge, Villard, hc, 187pp, $26.95