Festival Man Read online

  (what cads!)

  But Invincible General Brock was ready when he heard the call,

  He drove them back and now he’ll chase them over hedge and wall.

  So Come All Ye Bold Canadians and gird your trusty might!

  Let’s make the American libertines regret they picked a fight!

  For Order and Good Government, we’ll fight for what is right!

  Come All Ye Bold Canadians and gird your trusty might!

  Around the world Canadians are feared as soldiers bold.

  Loyal and obedient, we’ll kill and die when told.

  (Yes, sir!)

  Liberty is not for me, I know my rightful place:

  Upon my knees before Our King whom God enthron’d with Grace.

  Come All Ye Bold Canadians and gird your trusty might!

  Let’s make the American libertines regret they picked a fight!

  For Order and Good Government, we’ll fight for what is right!

  Come All Ye Bold Canadians and gird your trusty might!

  And I was roaring along with the chorus, and soon most of my neighbours were, too, till we came to what I knew (but they didn’t) was coming, the horrifying final verse:

  No matter where they run and hide, we’ll chase them down like dogs.

  We’ll burn the hated White House down with kerosene and logs.

  A Godless slave of Liberty deserves just what he gets,

  Their livestock, wives, and unborn brats will feel our bayonets!

  I collapsed in a drunken shattering uproar of my worst barroom laughter, spluttering saliva in a generous radius with each guffaw.

  I went backstage, waiting for McGraw to be helped down the steps by a young lady volunteer. I told myself that I just had to shake this man’s hand, because he is the Real Thing, but also of course I was leaving while the getting was good, slipping into the dark, away from Mr. and Mrs. Short Chair, and marching purposefully past the backstage security sentry, waving my all-access pass.

  The young blond volunteer was laudably conscientious in her efforts to get the old feller to solid ground, letting him lean way into her when he almost missed the second to last step. “Oops-a-daisy.”

  “Thank you so much, my dear,” he said, with a kindly twinkle of his eye. “That last step was a doozy.”

  “My pleasure, Mr. McGraw. Great set tonight! I love your music.”

  “Well thank you, thank you.”

  I politely drew closer to this legendary figure, as the young volunteer gamboled away toward her next assignment. I suppose there’s just something about my appearance or demeanor that makes people comfortable enough to share what’s on their mind, because as I approached him, he looked me in the eye, grinned a crinkly grin, motioned with his head toward the departing young lady and said, “Like to get that greased up on all fours on the hotel room carpet, eh?”

  SUPERSONIC GRIFTERS

  THERE’S A POND BEHIND A HILL in the park outside the gates. It’s surrounded by a copse of pine trees. I was just gonna find myself a little silence, maybe. Get my head together before the big push to seduce Wren at the After-Party at the hotel.

  But when I was rounding the hill, I heard talking and other noises. Giggling. Snuffling.

  “Hey! What are you punks doin’ behind that tree, this is the Caaal-gary police!” I shouted in my most Authoritarian voice.

  “Jesus, fuck! DD! Quick!”

  I jumped out in front of them, tongue out, hair flying, fingers waggling. “Boo! Gabbadoo!”

  “Fuck! It’s you! You fucking gave me a heart attack,” exhaled the banjo player, the tall, tattooed guy who’d been singing outside the gates.

  “We almost threw away the drugs!” That was the little fiddler, not accusative, just cheerful that the drugs had been saved.

  They were gathered round a Crass seven-inch 45 record cover, using it as a flat surface on the banjo’s hard case to snort something white.

  The mother guitar player girl came from behind a tree, where I could see the baby sleeping in a car seat and the skinny handsome guitar kid in the top hat zipping up his pants, looking spent. “Oh look, it’s Mister Important!”

  “That’s a great Crass single. Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records. Always loved the cover.”

  “Yeah, wull, it’s a good single for doing coke off of.”

  “So you’re spending the day’s take on drugs, eh?”

  “Only half of it. We’re saving the other half. Right guys?” said the Young Mother.

  “Ye-es, Amy.” They sing-songed, like dutiful children.

  “They’ve been running on trucker’s speed for the last ten days, so I thought they deserved something a bit nicer, since we did so well out there.”

  “Calgary’s an amazing coke town,” observed the pretty, tough, gutbucket-player girl. The reluctant, rueful tone with which she delivered this remark implied that she of course despised Calgary, but nevertheless, you had to respect the quality of its blow.

  “It’s all those oil dudes. They got more money than they know what to do with. And they demand the best,” said the tattooed banjo player. “That’s the Alberta Advantage,” he intoned in a deep TV announcer voice. Then he sucked up a line.

  “Where are you guys staying?”

  “Mostly in the van. I try to get them to take a hotel room once a week, to try to make them shower.”

  The fiddler smelled her own armpit with relish. “Mmmmmm. I stiiiiiink.”

  “Where you parked? Denny’s?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “But of course. So what’s it like in there? Any good music going on?” asked the Mother.

  “I wanna see Paddy McGraw,” said the fiddler.

  “Fuck, that fucking dinosaur?” was the pretty gutbucket girl’s response.

  “He’s good,” was all the fiddler said to defend her opinion.

  I played my Mister Important card. “I just met him.”

  “No way!”

  “Uh-hunh.”

  “Did you get a look at what kind of bow he was using?”

  “Uh, no. But you’re right. He’s good.”

  She took up a big, long line. “Woop!”

  I turned to the Mother. “So you and your child ride along with these miscreants? Aren’t you afraid for his welfare?”

  “We have very strict rules.”

  The band recited: “No drinking whiskey while driving.”

  “No eating the baby’s food.”

  There was a pause.

  “Those are all the rules, eh?”

  “Yep. And they’re strictly enforced.”

  “Well, I don’t know if most people would consider those the only rules required for raising a Stable, Secure Child.”

  “I need the music to live. So the child can suck it if he doesn’t like it.”

  “Hunh. You said suck it. About a baby.” The big tattooed banjoist sniggered.

  “Hey, kids, why don’t you offer Mister Important some of your nice cocaine? Then maybe he’ll like us more and want to help our ‘musical career.’” It was clear that although this Amy girl was about the same age as the others, having a baby to lug around had thrown her into the default role of the Responsible One. She was trying to cloak her anxiety about it in an Ironic Grown-up Voice. Straining to stop Motherhood from robbing her of her Cool.

  “You want some coke, Mister Important?” offered the handsome skinny fellow, with a close, eyeball-to-eyeball stare. He was challenging me. Or he thought he was.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” As I hoovered it up, I wondered if Richard Wren would be willing to go this far to scout new talent. Maybe at one time, in the Psychedelic Era. Now? Please. This here was part of what I could bring to the table in a co-management arrangement.

  “Offer him some of the screech, too.”

  “Oh, do we have to?”

  “Yes, you do. Real Newfoundland screech? Where’d you get that?”

  “Newfoundland. We were just there.”

  “
Wow. You must have a better van than I thought you’d have.”

  “It’s pretty good. Seventies Econoline. Don’t need a computer to spot what’s broken. Easy to get parts.” This was the little fiddler.

  “You repair it yourself?

  “DD says she was born with a crescent wrench in her back pocket. I have no idea what that means.”

  “Bet you’d like to find out what I mean.”

  “Shut up. Goofball.”

  “How long have you horrid people been out on the road?”

  “Five months. We went down to Santa Cruz, across to New Orleans, up through Maine to the Maritimes, took the ferry to Cornerbrook.”

  “We almost hit a moose this one time on the drive to St. John’s.”

  “Three times! Three meese!”

  I turned to the fiddle player. “Where the Hell you learn to play like that, son?”

  “Port Alberni, British Columbia.”

  “The fuck you say.”

  “The fuck I do say. Fuck. I said it.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Me, too, if you ask my German mother.”

  “Port Alberni. Your dad a fisherman, or a mill worker?”

  “My dad’s a drunk.” She took a no-nonsense pull on the screech and passed it to me.

  “Fair enough.” I raised the bottle to that and we locked eyes, for a moment, to signify our connection as drunk children of serious drunks. “My old man got hurt by a cow, once. Lost a lot of blood. There was so much alcohol in his system that when they gave him a transfusion, they had to pre-mix it with rye whisky in a special machine, or his body would have gone into shock and shut down.”

  The skinny handsome fellow suddenly got in my face again.

  “So, you’ve had our cocaine, you’ve had our rum. Do we have to give you a fucken blowjob before you do something in return for us, eh?”

  This felt like it was either a joke or serious depending on how I took it. The kid was grin-grimacing at me, pulling his lips back over his gums like some neglected horses we used to see come in to the ranch. “Cribbers,” they’re called. They chew on fences and suck wind to give themselves some kind of horsey thrill. They even chew on their own fucking legs, sometimes. It’s awful to see. People try to cure it with round pens, electric fences, or a tight strap around the jaw, but my old man and his brothers were all of the opinion that you could never really break them of it. It’s a mercy to shoot them. Maybe I could talk the others into kicking Skinny Top Hat Boy outta the band, eventually.

  “Look at it this way, Tweekey — I was doing you a favour, sucking up some of that nose powder. That means there’s less of it laying around to make you even more squirrel-like.”

  Tweekey’s eyes widened in anger.

  “Jacob, turn yourself down a notch for chrissakes. I just gave you a blowjob. Can’t you relax a little? He’s not going to get us in if we threaten him, sillypants.”

  Here was the Little Mother, shepherding her flock again. It worked. Jacob did a pirouette, like there was never any doubt that he was just funning.

  “What would you people do if I got you past those gates, anyway?”

  “We’d become international celebrities.”

  “Kidnap Jimmy Kinnock and sell him for ransom to the Manchester Guardian.”

  “There is no Manchester Guardian anymore.”

  “Then he’s a dead man.”

  “Light off my cherry bombs in the merch tent.”

  “Bum smokes off [censored] then fuck her in the A-hole with a dildo.”

  “Steal all the Inca Crafts from the craft tent and take them back to Inca-land.”

  “I’m ’onna get me one of those golf carts they got —”

  “Me too! I’ll race ya!”

  “— and see how many hippies I can run over.”

  “Wheee! Two hundred points!”

  “Hold up the guy from Junkhouse for his blow stash and do it all in the handicapped porta-potty.”

  “I wanna meet Rosalyn Knight.”

  “Yeah, because you loooooove her. You wanna mar-ry her. But you ca-an’t, ’cause sheeeee’s fucking straiy-yait.”

  “That never stopped me before!”

  “Fuck you, bitch!”

  “No, fuck you!”

  “Wanna scrap? Let’s go!”

  The pretty tough girl went after the little fiddler with open handed slaps from above, but the little fiddler deftly dodged the blows, leapt surprisingly high and pulled the tall girl’s leather jacket over her head like a hockey goon grabbing a jersey.

  “Hey, no fair!”

  The two of them went down together and started to roll around.

  “Come on, fight, you fucking pussy!”

  This was amusing and stimulating, but I had to get back to work.

  “Thanks for the horse brutality. Here’s my card. Bomb-Smuggler Entertainment. Drop me a line. We’ll see what we can do about getting you in for next year.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Important.”

  “I gotta get to the After-Party.”

  MID-REPORT ASSESSMENT

  HOLY SHIT, I JUST LOOKED UP from my scribbling for the first time in a while. There’s yellow paper everywhere. It’s like some giant twelve-foot canary stepped on a landmine or something. The plan was I was just going to write something clear and concise, to drive the point home about how if you really look at things from the right angle, with all the information that I was privy to, that I am not the villain of the piece. I think I said it was only going to be about twenty-five pages, and it’s certainly a fair bit longer. It’s gonna be a bitch to collate. Clearly gotten out of hand, like everything else in my life. For that I apologize.

  I took a few minutes to look out the window just now. The sun is going down here again. Living in Vancouver these past years, I do miss these golden prairie sunsets, with their long shadows and magic light. Unless you’re rich enough to live near the water in Vancouver, sunset is just like some hippie got ahold of the city’s dimmer switch and the place goes from light grey to very dark grey. And nothing ever gets dry there. I have the same itching west coast fungus between my toes that I acquired when I moved out there. I know because it gets mail at my address. It sends away for homeopathic cures to try to get rid of me.

  It strikes me how my life in Vancouver, with its off-kilter, sporadic rhythm of all-night deadline grant-application-writing, long jaw sessions of drinking beer out of coffee mugs at cafés on Commercial Drive, the necessary gig attendances of various artists I have an interest in at various booze-cans, nightclubs, and theatres, the sudden naps that come on like heart attacks in the afternoon and last till the next afternoon — it’s both decadent and impoverished, compared to how I grew up. When I was a kid, till my mom took us to the city, I got up at 5 a.m. to do chores: letting the chickens out, feeding and brushing the horses. I had to come home from school and do more chores. It made my body hurt. It made me very tired at the end of the day. But to and from school — and you probably won’t believe this — I got to ride my own horse. That’s a luxury that even a rich kid in Vancouver wouldn’t be allowed. And those toffee noses are the only kids allowed to ride horses at all in that city. I’ve seen those private-school girls out in their English jodhpurs and hoity-toity hats on the trails near the university, the horses with their manes in cute braids, Jesus Christ. What a way to humiliate a noble, beautiful animal, making it all nice like that.

  In Vancouver, it’s true I get to do whatever, whenever, and I get to follow my muse and really make things happen. And I do relish that. I’m a scavenging urban animal now, like a raccoon. But in my first life, when I wasn’t free, I was a different creature. I was fitter. I got more fresh air. Life had an even-ness about it. Even my dad’s temper was tied to the seasons, the days of the week, the time of day. People who only know me the way I am now are always shocked when I reveal my rural skills. I think that’s what won Colleen over to trusting me, back in the late eighties. She invited me out to her shack, an hour and a half out of t
own, to play me some ancient vicious Scottish postpartum depression ballads she’d just dug up from some archive and learned by heart. After I chopped about half a cord of wood for her stove, I went over and put in some braces on the corner posts of her sagging fence. Then when she was playing me the songs, right there in the middle of singing about wishing she was deep, deep under the soft, dark moss in the churchyard, sleeping close with her bonny, bonny baby, she brought out a big red vibrator with the face of a devil and did a buzzing guitar solo with it. I guess it’s overly sentimental or romantic of me to say this, but at that moment, I somehow just knew that sooner or later that day, that thing was going to wind up inside one, or both of us. The answer was both. And sooner. Good days.

  What was my point in that? It might just be that I’m sitting here, writing all this, partly just because I’m not ready to go home. Does that make sense? Probably not. I guess I’d better get on with the damn story.

  HE QUIT DRINKING

  I WAS AT THE AFTER-PARTY. I was in no rush. I didn’t want to look desperate. Buckwheat Zydeco wasn’t even playing yet. I was just subtly, easily, socially working my way across the room towards Wren. He didn’t look like he was going anywhere.

  I spotted Keith Krapp. He was our go-to soundman when we first started putting on punk rock shows at the Russian Hall in Edmonton. Then when he moved to Vancouver he helped me out a lot getting the contacts I needed there. Good man. Not like other soundmen.

  SOUNDMAN’S GUIDE

  I ALWAYS WONDERED WHY in God’s name soundmen in Canada were always the way they were. Then one time, I barged into the chickenwire booth at a place called Call the Office, in London (Ontario, emphatically not England), and found this strange document, in the form of tattered, faint photocopied pages bound together with masking tape. By the looks of it, it was a photocopy of a photocopy of a carbon copy, some kind of Canuck samizdat whose origins were lost in the mists of time. I’ve copied it out best I could here from memory. I tell, you it explains a lot.

  “What The Fuck Do You Want?”