Cadillac Couches Read online

  For Françoise and Garfield

  with gratitude

  and

  To the memory of two super-Edmontonian

  loved ones and great music fanatics!

  Vanessa Hughes (1968–2009)

  Lorne Johanson (1964–2011)

  mixed tape: side a, track 1

  “When I tell you that I love you

  Don’t test my love

  Accept my love, don’t test my love

  Cause maybe I don’t love you all that much . . .”

  “Jerusalem,” Dan Bern

  Bern Baby Bern

  I let them help me up. The security people and accident groupies dispersed. People probably assumed I had eaten too many magic mushrooms, a common festival mistake. Finn gave me some ginger ale to sip. I guzzled it back and Isobel gave me some comforting pretzels to munch on.

  I was a goof—who fainted at gigs? It wasn’t like we’d been watching Elvis performing “Suspicious Minds” in his full leathers and gyrating himself into a frenzy (now that would be enough reason to faint). How was I gonna cope when we met Dan Bern later?

  Finn looked a bit weirded out. He had those cartoon eyes that bulged during normal times—possibly a thyroid thing—and in heightened times, they looked like two big sunny-side-up eggs with black olives for pupils.

  “I saw the whole thing. You were staring at the stage, smiling. I mean, beaming like someone who’s touched and about to speak in tongues. And then the longer he dragged out that ‘messiahhhhhh’ note in ‘Jerusalem,’ you looked like you were going to scream, or cry. You got quite red in the face and just, just as the cymbals started clashing at the end of the drummer’s solo, you went down hard, but with a smile on your face. Boom!” Finn demonstrated with his hands the kind of splatting effect my body had on the ground. “I mean, I can understand the excitement. They were rocking all right, but I’m not that sure it’s healthy to pass out at gigs. That’s twice now. You sure you’re not allergic to something, like patchouli . . . ?”

  “No, it’s totally ridiculous . . . I know . . . I know. I’m some kind of train wreck.”

  One word lodged itself in my brain: defeated. And so I rushed toward it, open-armed. Hugging it.

  Defeated.

  So Defeated. Could be a chorus.

  “Ma chérie, you’re très sensitive. Think of Teresa in The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Isobel said, inhabiting one of her bilingual moods. It always got on my nerves that she got to be the self-possessed Sabine character and I was always cast as the insecure Tereza.

  “You’re not a weirdo, me ducky,” Finn soothed. “We’ve all got our strange stuff. I get so nervous on escalators, I almost always feel like throwing up in random women’s purses. It’s like that writer says, you know who I’m talking about, whatshername, anyways: life screws up everyone in some way. You just need a nice cup of tea.”

  I should’ve brought my smelling salts with me—bath salts worked well enough. When I got the woozy feeling, I just needed a snort of something strong, like Ocean Mist, to bring me back to my senses. Ironically, my dream had come true: I was at last living in a Victorian novel, but I wasn’t a burgundy-velvet-cloaked heroine with long curly locks, roaming the Yorkshire moors on a black horse. I was one of those swooning characters, a histrionic whinger like those Jane Austen invented as a warning to flaky women throughout the ages. I didn’t want to be confined to bed, even if it was a canopy one with billowing sheets and elaborate linens. Surely I was destined for a more rollicking ride of a life. I rallied my spirits by thinking of Hawksley’s words of wisdom: “Don’t act broken, even when you’re broken . . .”

  Despite everyone’s better judgment, including my own, I went to get myself a Big Rock Grasshöpper wheat ale and had another cigarette to revive myself. I sucked on it indignantly, puffing out angry clouds of Benson & Hedges white smoke. But taking super-extended drags like that finished the cigarette off too fast. I needed more nicotine right away but didn’t dare light up again with Isobel and Finn staring me down.

  Isobel insisted on walking me around the grounds for a few laps to make sure I was steady. She let me bring my beer, expertly pouring it into her antique silver flask. She stashed the flask in the alligator green, vintage Prada purse that she was never without. Her favourite aunt had given it to her on her twenty-first birthday. Despite our differences, mainly her being into haute couture and me into hippie grunge, she was how I imagined a sister to be. Iz and I had been best friends since we were fifteen—nine long years of capers and larks.

  We met each other for the first time at our most cherished place in town, the Princess Theatre on Whyte Avenue (it was our Cinema Paradiso). The red velvet curtains and lush, old-style red velvet upholstered seats were more like armchairs than theatre seats. The whole place pulsed with a vaudevillian red glow and smelled of magic: salty butter and stale smoke mixed with a dash of Chaplin-era mould. It was a Saturday matinee in autumn. We were the only two people there and I recognized her from my school. We had never talked before. The Princess was a cultural gateway—it gave us the world beyond our mind-numbingly boring urban prairie; it gave us European cinema. Brooding men, smoking women, grand tours, sad endings, great styles, shocking discoveries, unbearable romance, lewd sex—real life! Betty Blue, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Diva, La Femme Nikita, The Big Blue, Merchant and Ivory. When our schoolmates were smacking pucks around the local hockey arena or sipping hot chocolate at the world’s biggest mall, we were busy trying to emulate Emmanuelle Béart’s pout in Manon des Sources.

  That Saturday the strange girl and I were both there to see A Room with a View, again. Walking in, I felt awkward, like when you’re only one of two people on a bus, do you sit near or far apart? I felt it would be even more awkward not to acknowledge her, so I introduced myself. She suggested we pool resources: I had popcorn and she had M&Ms. We both had braces on our teeth and great expectations.

  She’d seen the film six times and I’d seen it five during its two-week run at the Princess. Since then, over the years we’ve probably watched it together hundreds of times. Once we met Finn, we made him watch A Room too. He confessed that John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off had dominated his romantic psyche until we introduced him to the thrill of George and Lucy’s turn-of-the-century highbrow tennis romance. He loved the idea of us being these foul-mouthed Albertan-wannabe-Edwardians drinking Pimm’s whenever we could. We studied the characters’ every moves, both of us desperately wanting to be Lucy Honeychurch, all three of us swooning over the pair’s kiss under the baking sun in the poppy fields overlooking Florence—what could be better? We vowed we’d make it to Florence one day.

  Finn was a new Edmontonian, all the way from the Maritimes via Toronto for a few years. He had the true Maritimer spirit, all warmth, Celtic strangeness, and gregariousness; he played guitar not fiddle. Over the past year we had become friends at Rigoletto’s restaurant where he and I worked, serving up gnocchi and Grappa to downtowners. Isobel had never dated someone from the Eastern Seaboard before and hadn’t been able to resist sampling him. He didn’t realize he was only an amuse bouche on her menu of men. She had an anthropologist’s approach to dating, with categories ranging from geographic, cultural, aesthetic, to occupational. She was proudest of having dated a postcard publisher—very few people had the inside scoop on that scene.

  Meanwhile, I had declared myself out of the dating/mating game for a few months. I was in a reinvention period and on a dating diet. On my new romance-free regime I allowed myself to lust only after rock stars and actors. Reverting to virginal adolescent habits seemed a good way to cope with premature celibacy. Because, really, you should be spending your twenties shagging your ass off, it’s
almost like an obligation.

  Love with regular guys had done me no good—and none of them came close to the firecracker love-of-my-life Sullivan. We rolled around for two years. It had been three years since we stopped. By the standard mathematical equations for healing, I had now spent more time without him than with him and so was scientifically guaranteed to be over him. Hallelujah. Though the fact that no one excited me as much as him, since him, worried me. It kept me up late when I wanted to have a dark and brooding night with red wine and Jacques Brel crooning about settling for being the shadow of someone’s dog.

  Our Bern Baby Bern operation was conceived because Finn was constantly trying to impress Isobel. Isobel adored me like I adored her, and we all loved Dan Bern. She and I had discovered him together, smoking doobies and listening to CJSR one Monday afternoon a few years back. As all three of us were arts graduates with no serious career prospects, the idea of being rock journalists was obviously appealing. Plus, Finn had actually majored in journalism. Isobel had vague notions of fame herself and viewed any opportunity for hanging out with celebrities as good research. I saw the operation as an emotional dress rehearsal for my eventual encounter with Hawksley Workman, my most poetic hero. I believed he would be my soulmate once he had the chance to meet me. Hawksley would forever cure me of any residual Sullivan-ness in my head and heart. I chose him because he had somehow psychically mined my soul to write his lyrics, like we’d been cross-pollinated in the wildflower fields of love. My latest journal entry about him:

  Sweat drops flew off his taut body. His curly black hair was slick with more sweat. His stubble pricked out of his face like a forest around his strawberry-red lips. His pirate earring shone as he belted out his flirtatious lyrics. My whole body vibrated with his sounds. I am madly in love with this gorgeous, sexy-ass troubadour of an incredible male. He is almost too sexy, his lyrics too romantic for me to bear. And as he clutched his mike and sang the last line giving it all the air left in his body I felt all woozy and lightheaded. And then I swear to God he looked right at me with his sultry eyes. Right at me!!!!

  He kept looking right at me as he dragged out that last note . . .

  And then it was all over, five encores was enough and he wasn’t coming back from behind the stage. The long-haired roadies were grabbing the instruments and setting up for the next act. I was so excited, so bursting, so high, so . . . I ran to the Sidetrack’s bathroom as fast as I could, barely making it before I barfed up that Kraft Dinner and everything else I’d eaten that day.

  Since that gig, since that look we shared, and since that portentous vomiting—I have a feeling about Hawksley and me. It’s goddamn cosmic.

  Getting back to capers: since Isobel and I hit our almost mid-twenties it seemed to me there’d been a shortage of them. We no longer tripped on mushrooms through the streets in the middle of the night or gallivanted around water fountains, stealing statues of Virgin Marys to put in our living rooms. Seemed like mostly what we did now was watch movies and watch other people have way more fun than us. Granted, I loved our times on my couch. We called it the Cadillac. It was vintage ’50s: navy velour upholstery, shaped like a spaceship from The Jetsons, with stumpy wooden brown conical legs. I got it for twenty-five bucks at the Salvation Army on the north side of the river one lucky Saturday.

  Eating popcorn and chocolate. Smoking smokes, drinking diet pop. Everything happened on the Cadillac. What larks! But like Bob Geldof asked in one of my favourite books—his autobiography Is that It?—was that it?

  I wanted to camp. I wanted to travel on the back of motorcycles and truck cabs. I wanted to have sex under waterfalls with exotic men with tanned bums. I wanted to make movies, paint pictures, go on road trips, have hot affairs in hot-air balloons. Living, not watching. I had extended fantasies of making unforgettable movies, operas, ballets. I had all sorts of enthusiasm but no focus or obvious talent. If it weren’t for Cadillac-induced inertia, I was convinced I could participate somehow.

  Music was my religion.

  More than movies. More than romance. When I went to gigs and watched musicians, I felt the bass in my loins, the melody soaring in my chest, harmonies in my heart. I shared their high as they belted out their lyrics, shook their hair, and thrashed their guitars. I felt so connected at last to humanity.

  And all I really wanted in life was to “only connect,” like E.M. Forster wrote.

  I got this euphoric relief, reprieve, from feeling alone and existential, from staring at the lonely abyss. Life with a soundtrack was so much better than without. So from my perspective, boys with guitars were the luckiest people on earth. I lapped up what they strummed and I wanted more and more while their hands galloped to musical Nirvana. But I didn’t know an arpeggio from an armadillo—I was doomed to be forever a fan, not a player.

  Music was also my medicine.

  I needed some strong medicine post-Sullivan. Something to make me forget how he had claimed the soft places on my body with his lips on those hot August days we floated naked on lilos around our own private lake in southern Alberta. More than drugs and drink and smoking cigarettes and more than sex, I needed new music. Dan Bern and the others were a salve. They sang about angst like mine, universal love angst, and elevated it to a thing of glory and beauty. When I saw Bern play for the first time the year before at the Sidetrack Café, I felt queasy. After his twelve-song set I had to go outside to get some air. He was full of irony and rebellion and big-time boner sex appeal.

  It wasn’t just me, the music press had been all over him: likening him to Dylan, the Gandhi of Folk, a gift from Iowa. So when I heard he was coming to town for the annual Edmonton Folk Festival I was practically delirious with lip-smacking anticipation. Isobel and I had rhapsodized for so long about him that Finn used his limited connections, from his intern experience at a Toronto magazine called Tilt, to wandangle us an interview.

  It was true that Finn had genuine rock journalism ambitions, but the lengths he was prepared to go to orchestrate such a potentially massively embarrassing stunt impressed me. I felt a little guilt over the fact that by pleasing me, I knew he knew he was somehow pleasing Isobel.

  “We could meet him, I mean, why the heck not? No, really . . . we’ll get an interview,” he told us the week before the Folk Fest.

  “Ça va pas arriver. Pas possible,” Isobel warned. I half believed he might come through though. The month before he’d grown a beard after Isobel casually observed that all intelligent men had beards. Plus he was always threatening to dye his hair blond and have it straightened so he could look like George Emmerson in A Room with a View.

  Earlier That Day

  Saturday Morning, Edmonton Folk Festival

  +25 Celsius, blue and cloudless = full-on big prairie sky

  mosquito alert = big batch of little fuckers, big but slow

  8:00 AM: We waited on the exit side of the entry gate. We hadn’t arranged for the press passes early enough to get them by mail, so we had to wait for the girl to find the girl who knew the guy who talked to the girl about our Tilt passes. We were the Three Stooges.

  9:30 AM: “LADIES, we are in the GATE! Woowee, these press passes are SWANKY,” Finn said. “Now, Annie, if you feel faint or nauseous, let us know, babe.”

  “Finn, I’m sorry, but I think you should perhaps tone it down un p’tit peu,” Isobel said, demonstrating lower volume with a hand gesture.

  I would never have had the nerve to say it. But it was true, his loudness could blow our cover. Before he had time to feel wounded, we high-fived to celebrate free entry onto the grounds.

  I felt mighty in my new persona as big-city press photographer. Isobel seemed to be relishing her role as enigmatic assistant, and Finn, I think he was running on nerves spiked by gasoline. Like if I smoked too near him, he might combust.

  We made our way down grassy Grassy Hill, toward the depths of the city’s river valley. We wove our way around the hundreds of blue, yellow, and orange tarps, Mexican blankets, plastic flower
markers, backpacks, rainbow-coloured tents, camping chairs, coolers, stoners lying on their backs making daisy chains, and hippie toddlers dancing in the buff. It was a steep hill, so you had to navigate strategically, walking down switchback-style, like a goat. In winter it was a ski hill. Our descent was toughest for Isobel, who was wearing high-heeled wedge sandals—her response to Birkenstock fever.

  “Look, j’arrive and this is as political as I get,” she said when I complained she was slowing us down with her glamour.

  On a good festival weekend, the hill could seat up to ten thousand Edmontonians. This one was cracking up to be a big one, with not just Dan Bern, but Elvis Costello headlining and Joan Baez and loads of African bands in the mix. Mainstage was at the bottom of the hill, which meant every seat had a good view of not just the stage but also of the strong and steady North Saskatchewan River below, with the city’s downtown skyline framing the whole vista. As we walked through the crowds, I told Iz, “I hope we don’t make such asses out of ourselves that we have to leave town and never come back—I’d miss this festival too much!”

  “I know. It’s great, isn’t it? The cute boy-to-girl ratio is unparalleled.”

  Fiddlers, drummers, dulcimer, washboard and spoon players, viola aficionados, steel guitarists, and big names from all around the world collided in a musical jamboree for three and a half days every August. Here at the Folk Fest, our city reached heights of coolness that it never matched the rest of the year; except maybe during the odd gig at the New City Likwid Lounge or the Sidetrack Café. It was the one time of year when Isobel and I didn’t talk about moving away for good. Edmonton was the kind of place that most young people longed to leave (like New Zealand but without the epic beauty). But in this parkland of grassy fields, balsam poplars, trembling aspen, and eastern cottonwood trees, muddy hills and multiple tents, a kind of utopia exploded every summer.

  Everyone remembered the years when it rained too much and the hill morphed into a mass of slip-sliding muddy mayhem. But today was looking like a perfect Big Sky Alberta day. Even though it was still early morning, most of the prime spots for sitting were already taken; the hill looked like a patchwork quilt in progress. I’d never made it up that early, but I’d heard that the tarp run happened every morning at sunrise. Once the gates opened, super-keen folkfesters charged down the hill, toppling over one another, doing accidental roly-polys to get the prime locations for stargazing. We laid our tarp on some free grass mid-hill to the far left of mainstage, beside a wholesome-looking family who seemed like they would defend our tarp and maybe share snacks.