side a, track 7
“. . . singing is about sexual confidence,
so sing out your guts if you feel good enough
to let the moment just hit you,
if the music befits you”
By three o’clock I’d accepted that I was not getting the nuts on the tire to loosen. My hangover had overtaken my optimism. I was strong but annoyingly not tough enough to get them loose. Isobel gave it a try once or twice when it was obvious that I was getting exasperated. Every young woman should be able to do this—my mom could do it, I’d seen her do it. Smudges of grease on her face, she wasn’t going to wait around for a man. I wish I hadn’t been so busy rebelling against her and instead had learned this kind of valuable stuff. Like how to make her unbelievably delicious plum tart, sew buttons on leather jackets, and how in the heck to do an oil change and change a spare tire when the nuts were sealed too tight. Bolts not nuts, Annie, don’t be crude, I could hear her saying.
Isobel flagged down a chortling old truck full of Mexicans. She didn’t waste her time using her thumb, just some old-fashioned coquettish manoeuvre like Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. A little smile. A little thigh. A little thrusting of the lips and hips.
We could tell they were Mexicans because of the flag painted on the side of the rusty orange truck and the rosaries and plastic Virgin Marys swinging from the rear-view mirror. Three of them got out and cracked jokes while making quick work of the tire changing. Our replacement tire wasn’t in great shape, the one named Pedro pointed out. Isobel smiled winningly and practised her self-taught French-style Spanish. Grande probleme, n’est-ce pas? No habla mucho Española. They were enchanted. They told us they were migrant workers on their way to pick Ontario tomatoes. Seemed like a helluva long way to come to pick tomatoes, but they were cheerful as all heck.
I smoked my last cigarette and by accident caught the eye of the guy still sitting in the truck, the anti-social one. He gave me a lazy, conspiratorial smile. I smiled back knowingly without exactly knowing what we were smiling about. Mexicanos are so beautiful with their golden brown skin, chocolate brown eyes, gleaming white teeth. Don Juanitos all of them, no matter if short or chubby, old or young, they’ve got twinkling eyes and are ready to flirt on the spot. Not to stereotype or anything.
No mucho Englese, they said, and it reminded me of our trip to Puerto Vallarta. Looking at these muchachos, I wanted to go back to Mexico, to travel with no sweetheart at home, free to roam. They are a kindred people, exceptionally romantic, like me. Always singing about love, talking about it hyperbolically.
I wondered why Philip, Marco, Pedro, and Guillermo were so far from home. I vaguely remembered hearing about migrant workers picking fruit, I guess they were trying to make a buck to take back to their families.
We thanked them, and Isobel gave them her email address. She drove us to the nearest garage. We bought a second-hand tire, loaded up with gas, bought some cigarettes, a green-apple-scented air freshener, some hand cream, red and black licorice, a bag of Spitz, and some ChapStick.
Isobel slapped her VISA card down on the counter. The red-headed and -bearded clerk swiped it, and we waited for it to be accepted and the little piece of paper to chit-chit out. It took longer than normal to work. The beeps sounded different. Red shook his head and whispered to us what the screen said: CARD NOT AUTHORIZED. Iz laughed nonchalantly and put her second card down, her MasterCard. No go. Red shook his head again. We’d been through this before, back when we were students. Her laugh sounded more hysterical this time round. My stomach rumbled.
I put my second credit card down, my VISA. I knew my MasterCard was jam-packed.
All three of us stared at the little black machine that would decide our fate.
No joy.
Isobel asked: Do you take department store cards? The guy shook is head. Gas cards? Aha, she said: my second VISA. We waited, holding our breath while he swiped it.
NOT AUTHORIZED! And I’m gonna have to confiscate this card, the guy said unhelpfully. Isobel tried to give him the fake Tag Heur Hubert had given her. Only an expert could tell it wasn’t the real thing. This guy was thoroughly uninterested in her watch and treated us like bimbos; it wasn’t like in the movies where you could make some sort of deal, like an IOU letter. He insisted on keeping our car as collateral until we could pay for our bill. Who knew Ontarians could be such hardasses? Sure, all of our credit cards had been declined, but we weren’t riffraff! I knew from waitressing that you could just ring through a credit card manually, without calling VISA, and if it was under one hundred bucks, VISA would honour it because the customer would pay their bill eventually.
Red was unimpressed by my inside knowledge. “Maybe that’s what you do in Alberta, that lawless province, but here in Ontario, we like to play by the book, eh.”
I don’t know if Red was being ironic or what, but screw him anyway. Isobel and I were experiencers, not savers. Go Hard or Go Home. This was our anthem. But now we had no wheels, no bucks, and we were stuck in a province that started with a vowel and ended in one but wasn’t our Alberta.
I couldn’t call my parents—I wouldn’t—I didn’t want a lecture on living beyond my means. Of all the lectures, that was my least favourite. What about my dreams, I’d argue back. Isobel’s parents had already given her three hundred bucks for the trip. Who knew that gasoline could cost so goddamned much! We could call Finn, he would for sure help us out, but that would be so wrong on so many levels. Between us, we had ten bucks left. We could maybe hitchhike to Montreal, but we couldn’t just abandon my car in Ontario. Plus, we needed to be able to get home. We walked the rainy streets of Wawa, destitute and lame. At least Red had let us leave our luggage there so we didn’t have to schlepp it around town. Almost made up for him confiscating my keys.
It was a pretty place with loads of beaches around and an amazing super-hero-sized Canada Goose statue. I could add that sighting to the world’s largest perogy I saw in Glendon, Alberta, a few years back.
“Aw merde alors, let’s go to a movie, this is depressing!”
I loved that Isobel wanted to spend the last of our cash on a movie.
“Matinees are cheaper anyway, aren’t they?”
So we found the local art-house cinema, but it wasn’t open yet.
Needing to revive ourselves we headed to the grungiest bar we could find.
It had cheap decor of dark grey and black upholstered couches and ratty chairs stained from years of beer spillage. Mysterious abstract paintings of ominous blobs that looked like crows hung on the walls. Hundreds of empty beer pitchers sat stacked on the bar, for the evening ahead. Our table had a plastic black ashtray with an old butt squashed into a piece of green bubblegum on it along with one of the neon yellow flyers that lay on every table advertising The Hard Rock Miners.
On the back of our flyer we made a list of our options: camp, hitchhike, make friends. Fuzzy Navels and extra spicy chicken wings were on special, so we went for broke. Two Fuzzy Navels later, with my peach schnapps wisdom, I had written a postcard to Finn, asking him to get me an advance at work on my paycheque. They’d done it before. My bosses were good guys, fairly tolerant of their young staff’s dramas. Isobel had a stamp left in her wallet and went off to post it.
Later on after endless noodling and wandering around, we found a park and sat on a bench. I felt bad for Isobel. She looked a little demoralized as she fished in her bag for cigarettes. There was nothing to do but sleep in the park, like a couple of hobos. We lay head to toe on the long bench. “Isobel, this is just like a Tom Waits song, we’re actually living it.”
“I’d rather just hear about it in a song.”
“What song?”
“‘Cold Cold Ground’?”
Thank God it was a warm summer night.
It was four in the morning and here we were on a bench in small-town Ontario. At least it would make a good story. At least we were having an adventure. And then the rain started. I heard Isobel say Zut! She put her purse on her face to shield herself from the drops.
I let it splatter on my face. It was only a gentle rain. I imagined I was kissing Hawksley, and we were laughing in retrospect over my epic mission to get to him. We were a couple. Madly in love. Having sex at every possible, sneaky chance. Kissing in car washes.
He was busy with his rock-star lifestyle. But he made time for me. He needed me. I inspired him. I was the listener he’d longed for, his muse. And so we smooched and smooched.
Woke up five hours later. Nine in the morning and only a buck fifty between us. Hungry bellies, full bladders, and damp clothes from dew and drizzle.
Isobel looked gorgeous as usual, despite having slept in these conditions. She looked in her compact mirror and cleaned up her eye makeup, brushing on more mascara and slapping on some lipgloss. I looked in my mirror. I had bench imprints on the left side of my face. There was a weird look in my eyes. I snapped the mirror shut.
We walked back into town looking for somewhere to eat and pee. It was a sunny, blue-sky day. I didn’t know how we were going to get to Hawksley in Montreal in two days’ time, but I had hope. How could you not, on such a beautiful day? I ignored the tickle in my throat that hinted at a cold on the way.
“Do you think we should just go home?” Isobel asked.
My heart sank. We’d never given up on a mission. The thought that she didn’t want to carry on made me feel desperately sad. Down I went into a pit of self-loathing and pity pity pity.
“Annie?”
I looked at her, trying to suss out whether she was fed up with our mission. “I’d really like to see him, Iz. I really would. I know it’s stupid, but I think he could change my life.”
“Okay then, let’s do it! Oui. We’ll find a way. Let’s go to that café over there. It looks nice.”
“We don’t have any money, Isobel. Remember, all of our credit cards are up to their limits.”
“Look, we’ll go in, order food, use the bathrooms, eat, and then we’ll be able to think clearly, I don’t know, maybe they don’t have a VISA authorization machine, maybe they just imprint the cards. We’ll case it on the way in. Baby steps. Petits pas.”
I didn’t really think it was a good idea. I didn’t want to get sent to the clink in small-town Ontario. Plus I was a waitress, I had honour. I couldn’t possibly do a dine and dash, the last refuge of the lowest of the low.
But I was hungry and I had to pee like crazy, so I acquiesced.
I waited at our table while Iz went to the can first. I saw her looking all around the place, trying to figure out what their credit card payment situation was. It was a tiny café painted a light lemony colour. Blond wood tables. Georgia O’Keefe prints on the walls. Fresh orange tiger lilies in a vase on top of the cake display. A bookshelf overflowing with paperbacks with a sign above saying, TAKE ONE, LEAVE ONE. A menu written in electric blue chalk.
There were a lot of customers: a smattering of twentysomethings, families, a few professor-looking types. Isobel came back and it was my turn to go and freshen up. “Did you see a machine?”
“No, it’s too cluttered by the till to really see anything.”
She was right, the till area had dirty plates all around it. It was an impromptu bus station for what looked like a large party that had just left. Weird that this place was so busy at nine-thirty on a Wednesday morning.
I came back to the table, and we scanned the menu. I felt better after having brushed my teeth and hair and put on some lipstick. My stomach was worried, wondering how we were going to pay for this, but my appetite was blithely panoramic.
Isobel was annoyed that the place was non-smoking. I thought it was good for us to have to conserve our supplies.
The menu seemed way more sophisticated than anything back home. I felt that my body might even forgive all the debauchery if I cleansed it with this healthy food. I ordered a fruit soup of puréed cantaloupe, nectarine, and raspberries, a tofu and veggie bacon English muffin, and gyokuru Japanese tea to drink. Isobel ordered pan-fried portobello mushrooms filled with organic pesto and caramelized shallots.
“What a menu!”
“I think this place must be for vegans, I just wanted some damn eggs,” said Isobel.
I was so hungry I felt faint.
Just then, we overheard the waitress say to another customer, “We don’t accept credit cards here. Sorry, there’s a bank machine around the corner.”
“What are we going to do?” I whispered.
“I know for sure there’s no money in my account, or yours, is there?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe we can argue about the fact that we didn’t know.”
The waitress arrived with our food. It looked beautiful.
“Sorry I just overheard, you don’t do credit cards? In this day and age?”
I cringed from the rudeness of Iz’s tone. The waitress sighed. “Look, these credit card companies charge a huge fee for us to be able to use them, and for a small place like this, with gourmet food at reasonable prices for the customer, we just don’t want to pass on the costs to you, so we thought, ‘Hey let’s simplify this, let’s be old-fashioned and just use cash.’” And she walked off.
Isobel snorted. “Well, it looks like we might have to do a runner.”
How horrible is that? In this nice place. I put the first spoonful of soup in my mouth. It was a kind of heaven. Beautiful fruity, tangy flavours erupted in my mouth. I had a sip of the tea, that was delicious too. I leaned across the table and even had a piece of Iz’s mushroom. Wow.
“Let’s just eat first. Then we’ll worry. Meanwhile this is the healthiest food we’ve had this whole trip. Think of all those Husky greasy-sausage–fried-egg assembly-line breakfasts.” As I said that, I noticed a blond man in his early fifties sitting at the table next to us, peering over the book he was reading, which was something about eco-criticism.
“Sorry for being so terribly rude, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been dying to have some classic, greasy-spoon breakfast like you see in American cinema but to no avail. Do you know of such diners in town? I’m dying for a steak ’n’ eggs breakfast!”
He had a BBC accent, which of course made us both sit up in our chairs. He must be an expert of something.
“Well, if you get out of town to the highway, you should be able to find a Husky. But it’s nothing special,” I told him.
“Do they give you endless coffee refills, in fact leaving a thermos on your table?”
“Sure do, and there’s a phone on every table so that truckers can call their wives,” Isobel added.
“Thanks for the tip.”
“Are you from England?” I couldn’t believe I’d just said that, of course he was.
“Yes indeed, I’m a Somerset man.”
“Like Sting, and Tears for Fears, Peter Gabriel and Joe Strummer and Van Morrison sometimes and . . .”
“Yes, it’s an attractive region. Draws a lot of rock stars and birdwatchers, burnt-out Londoners and farmers. Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill,’ I go there all the time for picnics.”
He couldn’t have impressed us more.
He was hugely boyish despite being in his fifties. Super red-faced, very fair. Looking like he might burst somehow. I hoped Isobel wouldn’t try to seduce him, just for sport. He looked vulnerable. And sweet. The more he talked, the more it made me think of George Emmerson, cups of tea, Billy Idol, crumpets, and all good things English.
“So, I really am not generally an eavesdropper, but how about we create a diversion for your little problem,” he suggested.
“I don’t know, I don’t feel right about it, I work in restaurants.”
“Oh . . . I took you for radicals, bohemians, revolutionaries. Isn’t property theft? . . .”
“Well—”
“Okay, when you’re done eating, on the count of four, I’ll spill my coffee and you two get up and leave. Don’t look suspicious, just head out the door as if you’d already paid. I’ll meet you around the corner.”
Pretending to try to scratch his ear, he swiped his coffee cup, spilling it all over the table. To make matters worse he instinctively jumped up to avoid the lake of coffee but managed to tip the table so all the coffee spilled over his lap definitely making a bigger mess than he’d intended. It was an incredible act of kindness, I thought as we walked casually out of the place.
We hid around the corner. He came out in a few minutes.
“That was just like in the movies!”
This guy had a bad case of movie-itis, I figured, possibly worse than ours.
“I don’t feel good about this, I gotta go back and confess.” I stormed back in. “Wait—” I heard behind me.
When I walked up to the counter I said to the woman that I had forgotten to pay and I was sorry. Before I could start my negotiations of how I might pay, she said, “Don’t worry about it, honey, that English dude paid your tab.’’
Gobsmacked, as they say in England. That’s what I was.
“Kerridge,” he said, “pleased to meet you both! Mind if I walk with you?”
We headed back to our bench. Along the way, we told him our story, the Hawksley mission, the mushrooms, Rosimund in captivity, Sullivan, Finn, Ani DiFranco, and a little about Hubert. He told us he was a visiting professor/poet here for two months to host a spoken word festival at the local arts centre. He was here to slam poetry!
“My God, you girls are living in a Don Quixote saga. He expected the inn he stayed in to accept his credit, but they wouldn’t. You’re sort of on this Thelma and Louise homoerotic psychedelic landscape picaresque of the big Wild Wild West/East. Yes, of course, of course—this is too perfect . . .”
His eyes looked dreamy, maybe he was composing one of his poems about us.
“So you’re saying we’re a couple of sirens?” Isobel asked.
“Well that’s one way of putting it. So tell me, what’s the next chapter of your saga, how are you planning to get to Montreal? I’d drive you myself, but I need to be hosting this poetry-off. I could give you some cash, I’ve got fifty quid in my pocket.”
“Whoa, monsieur! No way, no how. We’re adults, we need to find a decent way to get ourselves out of this mess that doesn’t include les shenanigans with older British men!” Isobel laughed.
“Do you have anything you could sell or pawn?”
“We just have our car, and Finn’s guitar and we can’t sell that,” I said.
“Why would you sell it? You could busk! Of course, that’s it . . .”
“We are huge music appreciators, Isobel and I, not musical at all sadly . . .”
“I’ll help, we’ll busk together! Seriously, it’s a great way to make a quick buck. I haven’t done it in years, but I’m sure it still works the same.”
This was just so weird. A fifty-year-old English man trying to convince a couple of twentysomethings to busk. Even more weirdly, I was up for it. “Whatta we got to lose?” I realized.
“Dignity,” Isobel answered.
“Oh c’mon, no one knows us here in this town. Look, Isobel, it’ll be just like karaoke, only with more creative freedom. Please.”
We headed to the gas station to get the guitar from the backseat of the car. I worried about the potential bad scene awaiting us back at the station, but Kerridge said he would tell Red he’d vouch that we would be back to pay the bill.
“These two minstrels here are going to give an amazing concert this afternoon that you really shouldn’t miss. Main Street in three hours,” he told the bored clerk.
So we headed back to the park. I was glad I’d had the cantaloupe soup, but I was still a little hungry. The sun was really in full form, beating down on our heads. Luckily there were giant, old maple trees lining the streets giving us some relief.
It happened so quickly I didn’t have time to warn them.
Something was tickling my nose. I opened an eye, Isobel was tickling me with a blade of grass. Kerridge was holding my wrist, checking my pulse. They stood me up and walked me over to a water fountain. He wanted to know if this was normal behaviour for me, sudden drops to the ground. I told him yes.
After the water I felt better. I needed more food. We went into a 7-Eleven and he bought me a hamburger in a bag that we nuked in the microwave. I ate that in two seconds. He bought me another, and he and Iz had one each. God bless North America, he said as he got us a round of lime-flavoured Slurpees and a couple of lottery scratch cards.
Isobel used the 7-Eleven bathroom to change into a red dress she had got out of her bag from the car when I was busy negotiating with Red. She came back looking like a Spanish diva. I was as jealous as usual of her perfection. She handed me a bandana.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Eh ben dis-donc, you’re not really one for dressing up, are you?”
I was annoyed. She always got to be the goddamn beauty queen. I tied the blue and white bandanna around my neck, trying to feel rock ’n’ roll, but felt more like an angry punk. It was the wrong vibe. We sat in the hot sun, waiting for Kerridge, who was using the bathroom. I put on some more lipgloss and some shimmering eyeshadow to soften my look. At least I was wearing a decent gypsy cotton top with my best pair of cutoff shorts. Isobel trumped everything by taking off her bra, saying she was too hot. Next you thing you know, she’d be pouring water down her dress.
“Let’s go find a good bench. We need to work on our shtick,” Kerridge said.
He didn’t seem to be ogling her obvious nipples. After we’d scratched our tickets and won nothing, we brainstormed for an hour going through all of our favourite songs, singers, lyrics. Kerridge practised on the guitar and managed to perfect a two-chord riff that he figured we could use all day. He taught me it, and my fingers struggled to bend in the right way. I figured I could ultimately go in for loud and vigorous strumming, doing only the most basic chord progressions. Isobel shook the ice in her Slurpee for a percussive element. This inspired Kerridge to go on a mission to find a pawn shop to get a tambourine.
He came back singing “A Day in the Life”; he was thoroughly embracing the adventure. Super keener. Not only had he scored a tambourine but also a Beatles songbook in the adjacent music store.
My doubts about the success of our busking were so enormous I’d been trying to come up with other ways to get our car out of hock and get us to Montreal. Selling the guitar wasn’t really an option, that would just be appalling, considering the autograph and Finn’s gesture. My grandmother’s opal ring was my prize possession and not an option. I couldn’t bear phoning my family and feeling like a schmuck. Maybe I could phone VISA and get my credit limit extended . . .
We decided on doing Beatles’ songs because we had the book and also partly in honour of Kerridge’s Britishness, and also—who doesn’t love the Beatles! Plus, when I sing along to their music I actually feel like I’m doing it right.
I obviously couldn’t really play the guitar properly, so Kerridge was to be the guitarist, me the percussionist, and Isobel the front woman. We had the book open on the grass in front of us, and if we stood in a horizontal line, we could pretty much all read it. The book turned out to be just a prompt really, lyric-wise, because those lyrics seemed already naturally emblazoned on our psyches. We practised two goes of the book. From “Oh bla di o bla da” to my personal favourite, “Amsterdam.”
It was so much fun to be in the middle of small-town Ontario with this crazy Brit, jamming. We were jamming! Kerridge and I alternated between the guitar and the tambourine, while Isobel jiggled and sang like a cockatoo. We practised for a couple of hours. He told us stories from when he was our age in the 1970s. How he’d worn purple pants and orange tops and gotten arrested for doing acid and roaming around an owl sanctuary in Sussex. How he went bird watching with his older sister and lost their money in the woods and how they had to busk in a small, posh village just to get enough money for the train fare home and how they hitched a ride home in the end with hippies who smoked them up. One guy had question marks on the front of his sunglasses. It also sounded so romantic, like A Room with a View fused with Withnail and I.
Surely we could make up for our lack of technique or polish, in fact our whole raw thing, with sheer summertime enthusiasm. We jammed until it was time to scout our location. Downtown in the main square there were some real musicians so we went away from the centre where we found a lane that had three coffee shops with patios full of mostly empty tables except for a couple of readers. It was two o’clock, people reluctantly strolling back toward their offices.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please bear with us. We are a new band. Very new indeed. Blushingly new. So forgive us our transgressions. We hope it isn’t too painful.” Kerridge said his piece, then backed up into formation with us. I felt sick, queasy. There were only three people sitting on the four patios. Did Dan Bern feel this way? Hawksley? Ani?
“Right girls, imagine we’re in Paris in the 1960s, Situationists, rebelling against elitism, reclaiming our right to be artists!” And with that he launched into “Paperback Writer.” I didn’t need to look down at the sheets. No, it wasn’t remembering the lyrics, it was the sound of our voices that freaked me out. I tried to move my body in a dancing kind of way. Two people from the patio got up and left. With the sun beaming down on my face and just the one guy there busy reading a newspaper, I felt my self-consciousness start to slide away. When the reader got up to go to the bathroom, Kerridge chucked a five-dollar bill and a handful of loonies in the guitar case.
“Monkey see, monkey do, works every time.”
So we sang and we sang for an hour and by that time we’d perfected some of the songs. We were now competent on “Paperback Writer,” “Revolution,” and a medley of five other songs. The waiters and waitresses were finishing their lunchtime shifts and their replacements were strolling on in. Some smiled as they passed us, a few tossed in coins.
We smiled back. All of us. Big. The Beatles were obviously a massive crowd pleaser even from our bumbling selves. And there were some points where I felt like Kerridge and I actually reached some gorgeous-sounding McCartney/Lennon harmonies.
It was four o’clock and my throat was sore, but a pile of money was growing in our case. I couldn’t believe it. We were halfway through the songbook. (We had to skip any of the more experimental songs; they were just too tricky.)
The patios slowly started filling up again for Happy Hour. Strawberry margaritas were being served and ice cold schooners of honey-coloured beer. Nachos dripping with sour cream and cheddar cheese and guacamole plunked in the middle of truly happy people. There was other music playing on café stereos, but not so loud, and people still seemed to be enjoying us. In fact, the longer Happy Hour went on, the more beer was guzzled, the more applause we got. Gooners sang along with us.
One sly waiter brought us what looked to be coffees to go but turned out to be beer! I sang and sang and shook that tambourine for all I was worth. Kerridge was thrilled banging away on the guitar. He was even redder in the face than before, and I was worried that delicate English skin of his might be getting burned. Isobel was happily strutting around as if she was dancing in the shower, belting it out.
The sun pelted down on me, and the beer collided with sun spots; we bellowed “Love Love Me Do.” I felt love and forgiveness. As if I could ever stay cranky at this girl, this co-pilot of my life. What a muchacha she was! I was proud. We were a great team, the best buddy sisterhood. Forget Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. We were way closer. Thelma and Louise, the Golden Girls, Laverne and Shirley.
We didn’t wrap it up until just after midnight when last call had come and gone for the patio and people had gone inside to finish drinking. We walked inside the first one and got more applause. It was really a bit embarrassing. They gave us a pizza on the house, and we counted our earnings: one hundred and fifty buckeroos!!!! Kerridge insisted we keep it all.
“That was so brilliant! I’m reliving the youth I never had. I always dreamed of being a musician in America.”
“This is Canada.”
“Sorry, yes yes, of course.”
We would be able to pay off the gas station bill, get the car out of hock, and have ninety bucks left over for gas, it was a great start to fiscal rectitude and recovery. Amazing. And we’d earned it ourselves. Finn would be so proud. And God how I’d loved being in the middle of the music and not just watching it. It was a high I hadn’t experienced since I did that air-guitar performance of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” at talent night in Grade 4.
After the bar finally closed, we were still all high from our day as rock stars. Kerridge said he had a VW van he’d rented that was parked on a campsite in front of a lake near town. He said it was a birdwatchers’ paradise. A free place to crash was a great bonus, so we all piled into a taxi to drive us out there.
Inside the green van was a shambolic arrangement of piles of books and binoculars and poems written on Post-it notes attached to the walls. Beside a picture of an Ontario green tit, he had a quotation from Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
We made a fire on the lakefront and toasted the Beatles and talked and talked. And smoked a little pot. He talked about England and E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, and we listened to him rhapsodize late into the night about the North American robin versus its tiny English counterpart and Canada in general as a hotbed of not just culture but hummingbirds too. He was so goddamned enthusiastic for life, it was fun just to be around him. And he had a big brain. A big English brain.
“Though I am a doctor of literature, and not a doctor doctor, I do have a hunch about your lapses in consciousness, young Annie. Let me feel your pulse.”
I gladly gave him my wrist. He was my new guru.
“Yes, I thought so, you’ve got low blood pressure. And dope, well I’m afraid you’ll need to cut it out, your pulse is slower than after you fainted. Annie, you need to take actual care of yourself, you are a beautiful young woman with such a life ahead of you.” He was quoting my mother.
“You also need to pursue this music thing, rather than just the musicians. It’ll be good for your health! If you take singing lessons, they will teach you how to breathe properly.”
Isobel spoke up. “C’mon, Kerridge, you’re bullshitting. A slow pulse does not mean low blood pressure! I failed math, but I do know that.”
“Okay, that’s true, but singing lessons would definitely help. Go forth, you young women, conquer the road, bring that Hawksley to his knees with your obvious charms! And try to ease off the hedonism, just a little.”
In my post-busking euphoria and stonerness, his one-liner solutions for my life felt like the most genius wisdom I’d ever heard. There was no way we were going to sleep that night. It was so light out, we just kept talking bullshit. He was over the top with his take on us: “You’re rebels, you’re outsiders—practically lesbians, for all intents and purposes, rejecting men and seeking life and art on your own terms, grabbing the balls of your own adventure, saying ‘up yours’ to suburbia, to empty consumerism and, goodness gracious, to Céline Dion, you are like the first great women pioneers. Reject the status quo, embrace all experience! God, I wish I was your age again! Let me tell you, I’m not bullshitting you, as you would say: this trip, these kind of times are the times that will live on in your life well after it’s over and winter has come and you’ve got arthritis. You are living!! And you must, must, must do more canoeing! Absolutely, this is the Canadian advantage, all the canoeing opportunities that simply don’t exist in Britain. They just don’t . . .”
“Oh la la, you’re really stoned!” Isobel said.
I was with him on his same infectious wavelength. We ate hot dogs at four in the morning. By six, we were delirious. Fish were jumping, birds had woken up and were in the midst of their dawn chorus. We decided to go skinny dipping in the lake as the sun rose.
I swam underwater and surfaced again and dove down again like a dolphin—I felt strong. Kerridge swam along beside us, doing his own aquatic whoops.
I made vows to myself at this new dawn. No more Sullivan, no more dope, no more smokes, less decadence. Just the beautiful dawn. And my best friend and new guru. What could be better?
Now I could meet Hawksley as more of an equal, a fellow troubadour. And Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen. Kerridge said life is all two steps forward, one step back, and if I needed advice from now on, listen to Springsteen, dammit.
We crashed asleep for a few hours on the floor of the van.