side a, track 9

“She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes

Singing ay, ay, yippee, yippee, ay”

Old African American Spiritual and
19th-Century American Folk Song

Day 7 continued

In Quebec for this second time I thought I’d give Izzy all my Johnnies as long as she didn’t try to woo my Hawksley. My odds were slim at best, but I was scared they’d be nil if she went up to bat. I had the dim sense that now, nine years older, we were still foolish girls. But I knew Hawksley wouldn’t approve of that negative line of thought—he would tell me to rely on my animal urges.

I wanted to make sure we weren’t late so I insisted on driving the last leg, red eye. Isobel had wanted to park somewhere so we could get a good night’s rest, but I was stubbornly against it: who needed sleep when great love was on the horizon? And so on I drove, giddy with the combination of lack of sleep and a gut feeling that no matter what, when the sun rose and the new day broke, I was going to speak to Hawksley Workman in the flesh.

No matter what the outcome—I would meet the man who made the tunes that tapped deep into my happy bone. And on and on I drove, wilfully ignoring my thinking mind and embracing my animal self.

I just needed to stay awake long enough to get us there safely. Problem was, I couldn’t blast the tunes because Isobel needed to sleep. I decided to take some of her Sudafed. I wasn’t congested or anything, but my brother told me he took it when he needed to stay up late to study for exams. I took two and washed them down with my cold gas station coffee that slopped in a Styrofoam cup wedged between my thighs.

The car smelled stale. I opened the window a crack and enjoyed the breeze on my face. It was three o’clock in the morning and quite light out. I had the big harvest moon keeping me company. Felt like an omen. I hoped I wasn’t about to get my period.

We were still two hundred-ish klicks from the lights of Montreal, thanks to some geographical noodling and bad sign reading. The highway was almost empty except for long-haul truckers, Greyhound buses, the odd car, and me. I was behind a giant beer truck. It was painted with one huge, orange wraparound ad for a classic Québécois beer called Maudite. I alternated staring at the licence plate and giant tires and the little Lucifer guy spread across the back door and the apocalyptic LA FIN DU MONDE. Gotta love how those Québécois have a beer called Damned.

My foot was committed to the gas pedal but staring endlessly at the same satanic imagery was really zoning me out. It was too easy, that was the problem with the TransCanada. There weren’t so many winding turns or narrow stretches, not like the Coquihalla, where you had to be alert like Jacques Villeneuve racing along the mountainscape while wild rivers raged with white-water rapids far below.

I tried to not get psyched out like I knew I could, but once the first inkling of fear entered my head it was near impossible to stop the panic process in motion. My heart picked up its pace.

Shit . . . here we go.

I can’t have an attack behind the wheel.

Oh NO. I’ll crash, I’ll kill us both. I visualized our blood and guts on the windscreen; imagined my head decapitated and lying beside a dead gopher—just more roadkill. I saw Isobel’s eyeball impaled on the antenna. I fought not to close my eyes to escape my gore-filled visions; I had to keep my eyes focused on the giant beer truck ahead. I saw Hawksley laying a roadside wreath for me.

Calm down, calm the fuck down, I told myself. RELAX, GODDAMMIT! You’re just driving. It’s fine, you’re just nervous. You’re not panicking. You’re holding the steering wheel just fine, you’re driving along, it’s all wonderful. Never should have taken that Sudafed! Soon you’ll be in Montreal. You’ll be talking to Hawksley, maybe even smooching Hawksley. Mmm. Concentrate on the road. Think Zen. Yellow lines, tail lights, and green signs. That’s all you gotta do. Make sure your feet and hands stay awake. Wiggle your toes. Visualize smooching Hawksley . . . straddling Hawksley . . . eating spaghetti meatballs off Hawksley’s stomach. Ooo. I wanted to lick his ribcage. I wanted him to look at me adoringly, like he couldn’t believe how lucky he was, how perfect for him I was, how he wanted me more than anything. I wanted to watch sunsets with him, have Jacuzzis together, flirt like strangers, fuck like rabbits, and hold hands like otters . . . 

What would I say to him? How would I captivate him and showcase all my best qualities? What were my best qualities? I was nice, funny sometimes, I had great taste in music, books, films. I had amazing friends. I had strong calves. Muscular forearms from waitressing. I knew how to French kiss underwater.

One thing I’d learned with the Bern interview, charm on demand was an oxymoron for me and spontaneous charm was a question of alchemy. The pressure might thwart me completely—give me charm impotence. What if I was obnoxious? Maybe I needed some mnemonic codes for conversation topics . . . 

I psyched myself out so easily; it was my fundamental problem in life. Like the last time I was shooting stick and I tried to hit the eight ball and I got in the zone and all was quiet around me like it was supposed to be right before you hit and everything slowed down and I was ready to shoot. Then I had the stupid thought about distracting myself and I blasted that eight ball right off the table. Airborne. On bad days, I was Woody Allen. I couldn’t shut up about my neuroses, peccadilloes. When the self-loathing bastard in my head woke up for the day I felt like that person in the painting The Scream. Maybe a lot of people feel like that.

Let go, Annie. Let go. This is one of those things you gotta just trust in the universe.

It was amazing how big Isobel’s snores were for such a graceful girl. She sounded like a goddamned rhinoceros. Jesus. She needed to do something about her adenoids. Maybe they could be lasered out or something. I thought about sleeping.

One thing I was sure of, I didn’t want to be Isobel. I was comfortable in my skin, despite the demons. They were my demons. I didn’t like the look of her demons.

I had been noticing lately how she ate vicariously through me. She was always buying me food, encouraging me to have desert, but she always had an excuse why she wouldn’t indulge herself. It was getting on my nerves. My jeans were getting tighter. For years I’d have burgers, and she’d have a leaf of lettuce and a Diet Coke, always saying she’d eaten at home. Now that we were on the road I was noticing more and more how she had more chewing gum than actual food. But she did drink loads of booze, diet pops, and coffee.

Maudite ahead seemed to have picked up his pace. I stepped on the gas, I couldn’t risk losing him. The lorry had Montreal listed in its address and I was gambling on it being my guide into town.

I thought of this movie where this beautiful brunette girl approached a stubbly strange man in a bar. His novel had rocked her gypsy soul, so she followed/stalked him and then pitched her love to him in a café one night. He was so touched by her bravery that he fell in love with her on the spot and they went off to celebrate and have sex that same night. Surely it could happen for me just like that. It seemed realistic in the movie.

Wasn’t Priscilla just a big Elvis fan at the start too? And I think I read Paula Yates was a girl just hanging around the music scene when she hooked up with Bob Geldof. And that was in real life, not just in the movies. I bet there are countless unions between fans and stars. I wondered how groupies shook off their groupie status and became bona fide girlfriends.

Someone told me every author needed only one perfect reader. Every singer surely needed one true listener. I was his listener. I understood his lyrics; I lived them. His lyrics were true and, like sexy Keats said, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

Checking the rear-view mirror to look at the state of my hair, I saw a guy in the car behind us wearing some kind of funny hat, not quite a cowboy hat, a cross between cowboy and sombrero? Weirdly I was almost sure that I’d been seeing him at night, every night on the road. But not during the day.

My first thought was that it was Finn in disguise.

My second thought was that it was an agent from my VISA credit card company come to throw me in debtors jail.

My third thought was that it was road-trip déjà vu.

He was nondescript and so was his car. His hat was a little unusual, but angles and shadows were surely doing their bit to distort my view.

I looked at the speedometer. I stared at it until it made no sense. I didn’t look in the mirror again.

After more and more and more and more kilometres of staring at the LA FIN DU MONDE banner ahead and the yellow highway lines passing underneath us, Isobel’s three-octave snore calmed me and diffused my paranoia. I was just a bit jittery still. It was getting lighter outside too. I had another gulp of cold coffee. I think the Sudafed was kicking in and making my eyes feel more open. My heart felt like it was part of a Latin percussion ensemble. I stretched my fingers on the wheel and tried to sit up straight, working on my breathing and my game plan.

Day 8 Dawn

4,541 kms!!!

We pulled into Montreal at dawn. I felt like I’d been assaulted by the challenge. The only way I managed to get us through the clusterfuck of terrifying overpasses and bridges and confusing signs coming into Sin City was because Maudite’s driver was indeed going into town too. Guardian Angels come in funny disguises. My heavy eyelids had long ago lost sight of the Man with the Strange Hat’s car. It was 5:00 AM, and the big fat orange sun was rising in its full glory on the quiet but funky streets of downtown. We were too early for bagels, too early for coffee, but perfect for flower raiding. I felt funny. A bit dizzy, almost seasick. Izzy woke up grumpy, dehydrated, and badly needing to pee.

I stopped at a gas station. I loved seeing French signs for everything, French people everywhere. Getting out of the car we must have looked like arthritic oldies, all gimped up from sitting in the same position for six hours. We snuck into the bathroom and tried to clean ourselves without touching any of the grim-looking surfaces.

“This is totallement dégoutant! Cochons pissing all over the floor. And let me tell you, it’s a special kind of imbécile that wets toilet paper and hucks it at the ceiling. Don’t these cochons ever think about the poor people who clean these places, and they’re usually immigrants, it’s terrible!” Ever since we’d crossed the border Isobel had ramped up her Franglais.

“You could fill out the customer complaint card. C’mon, let’s just get out of here and find some coffee and bagels and a park to sit in.” I wanted to protect the mood of the day. It had to be right. Not tense.

“Oui!” said Isobel.

The downtown streets were empty. We parked the car and walked around looking for a place to hang out until we stumbled onto the grounds of McGill and parked ourselves under a giant cedar tree until it was coffee time. We figured nothing would open until at least 8:00 AM. It was heaven being out of the car and in the fresh air.

After a good rest, we got back in the car and somehow navigated our way over to Fairmont Street to pick up some bagels. We had never forgotten the sublimeness of proper Montreal bagels when we tried them all those years ago. The bagel makers were up early shovelling the glistening white dough with their long spoons into the dark womb of the huge, crackling wood-burning oven. Isobel reckoned we should get a bag of twenty-four because they were so goddamned delicious. They could be our sustenance for the whole way home. The difference between these lovely skinny and airy Montreal bagels and the rest of Canada’s doughier ones is that you can taste water in these ones. According to some random guy at the store it had something to do with boiling them and baking them at sea level.

We drove over to a coffee shop on St. Urbain, the street I’d read about in Mordecai Richler’s longwinded but gut-bustingly funny novels. The view now before me was so exotic for my Albertan eyes: the two-storey red and brown brick apartment suites with their long staircases down to the front path, like big inviting tongues. Sure we had the odd old building in Alberta; they called them character apartments, but they were freaks and were mostly being knocked down. This was like the Europe of my imagination—or even better, a fabulous fusion of old and new worlds.

The owners of the coffee shop were old-school Italian men in their late sixties. There were soccer posters on the wall, Italian flags and photos of famous Italians: Pacino, Sophia Loren, Pavarotti. Before I could order anything, the elder man behind the counter sized me up and instructed the guy on the chrome espresso machine beside him: Cappuccino. The machine was regal-looking, with a silver eagle perched on top, extending its full wingspan.

Gramps looked at Isobel and said: Espresso, double. He had a white, short-sleeved shirt on with a blue-and-white tea-towel swung cavalierly over his shoulder. I think every major town in Canada had the same version of this kind of bare bones Italian coffee shop. I’d been to one in Vancouver on Commercial Drive, Joe’s, the little pool hall with velour wall hangings of matadors and elderly cappuccino makers. E-town had one over in Little Italy where Isobel and I sometimes went to scope all those Euro-hotties.

We found ourselves a nice spot on the patio and sat down with our coffees. It was prime people-watching territory. My cappuccino was gorgeous. Not too much milk, just a creamy, slightly stiff cloud of foam on top and a strong dose of espresso. This was the kind of coffee that tasted just as good as freshly ground beans smell. Out of three hundred and sixty-five cups in a year, you might remember less than a handful—this one was in the top three.

To bagel purists, it might have seemed like sacrilege, but I went all the way and slathered a bagel with cream cheese and blackcurrant jam that we’d also bought in little tubs. Then I dunked the bagel in my coffee. Bliss, happiness. I could feel Isobel watching me. She picked at her bagel in between puffs of her cigarette. She shot back her espresso and went to order another. By this point in our road trip, we weren’t speaking much; we’d run out of topics.

I watched the other customers. I was so attracted to Montrealers; they were a sexy bunch. It’s not that they dressed fancy, they just seemed to have a just-rolled-out-of-bed innate chic. Our classic Albertan men with their baseball caps and Oilers sweatshirts couldn’t compete romantically with the Québécois men in their loose blazers and woolly turtleneck insouciance. Theirs was a nonchalant elegance. Not pretentious, just distilled Euro flair. Think Leonard Cohen. Plus they had that whole bilingual thing happening; they could woo in French and English.

Isobel came walking back over to the table with a latte. She looked a bit like a flapper with her sleeveless, jade green short dress and her Cleopatra haircut. “The old man thought two double espresso back to back wouldn’t be idéale.”

The morning got hotter and hotter as we sat there sipping coffee and eating bagels, reading newspapers until lunchtime. By noon it felt like +40 and humid. Steam-room humid. I took some more cold medicine. I was surprisingly alert for having not slept yet.

We took off down Mont-Royal East, needing to find a flower shop or a well-stocked flowerbed in a public park. It was imperative that I found a red flower so Hawksley would be able to recognize my signal like I’d told him in my letter. After milling up and down the streets for a while, and seeing no flower shops, Isobel pointed at a flower box in someone’s front yard. A whole box of red snapdragons. I looked in the windows, saw no one, and so bent down and struggled to break off one from the bunch. I had to shimmy it from side to side and then yank it out from the root.

I wasn’t sure how good it would look in my hair, this snapdragon with its puffy petals that looked like painted earlobes on a stalk. I felt shame for stealing it and leaving a flower tomb in the soil. A flower robber. “Come on, Annie, we’re going to be late, what are you doing? Why are you sticking a bagel in the dirt? Those bagels are precious, Annie, Montreal bagels, for heaven’s sakes.” The bagel felt like the right thing to fill the gap. Maybe the flower bed owners would understand the swap.

Isobel helped to secure the flower properly in my ponytail’s elastic band. She said it looked a bit like I was wearing an Indian headdress, but not to worry Indian chic was all the rage. I had been aiming more for flamenco dancer.

When we got back out on the street we saw it was much more crowded. Downtown Montreal and the streets were now heaving. People of all ages strolled everywhere. I wondered if there was a parade or some kind of protest. It was mad. People were barely clothed. So much flesh. God I loved summer!

Summery people in their light clothes, all just sliding along in rivers of summer sweat. We joined the crowd and walked for a block. I hoped we could get off the main road, but when I looked down the other street, it was packed, feeding onto Saint-Laurent. I felt nervous in the crowds, claustrophobic. I hadn’t experienced a heat wave in forever. My heart pounded; I was definitely overheating.

Unlike me, Isobel could see over most people’s heads. “I could lift you up on my shoulders, if you’re feeling claustrophobic.” The fact that she knew me so well mellowed my mounting fear. We considered slithering across the car roofs to get to the gig on time. I stood up on a bumper of an old Citroën to see ahead. All I could see were swarms of more people.

And then it hit me.

Everyone was headed to the mountain that day for the free concert.

They were all headed for my Hawksley.

We were but two in a sprawling, buzzing mob.

He had become, without my noticing, a megastar, no longer an indie fave with a cult following; the masses were involved. My stomach forecasted doom.

When we got to the mountain area, we saw an outdoor stage. I did a double take. Hawksley was walking on stage! It was too early, surely. No, it was Him. But it didn’t look like we could get anywhere near the stage. I felt sick realizing I’d driven red-eyed to get to the city early and somehow, lost in coffee land, I had messed up and now we were late. My eyes welled up. My nose felt stuffed. I felt Isobel looking at me.

Isobel rose to the challenge. “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll get you to him, ma chérie!”

She grabbed my hand and shimmied us through the crowd, “Excuse me, excusé moi, merci, nous sommes Albertaines!” and wandangled us to the front. At one point she even hoisted me onto people’s arms. I was crowd surfing, which would normally have deeply embarrassed me, but here I was an anonymous Albertan. It was just a little ticklish.

Hawksley was alone on stage, without his disciples, the Wolves. He cleared his throat. With Isobel beside me, now up close to the stage, I waited anxiously, my heart pounding. Sick with anticipation. He closed his eyes and looked like he was meditating. My salivary glands spurted as if there was a chocolate eclair within my reach. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and worried about my blood pressure dropping.

“Salut, Montréal! Ça va? Ça trippe? Ça gaze? Eh oui, j’espère que toute la gang icite se sent fort fort sexy aujourd’hui! J’en ai ben des chansons là pour vous autres, si vous en désirez?”

The crowd roared and clapped and wolf-whistled. The grass was lovely and green, the sky was blue, the woods were full of bouncing life. Summer, Montreal-style, hot and sweaty.

He was wearing a fetching, episcopal purple blousy shirt underneath a suit vest and he had on matching pinstriped trousers—vintage shop chic. From a distance, it looked like he had safety-pinned his fly together; I was intrigued. I admired his sideburns and roguish black curly hair. His beauty was frightening, almost too much for me to bear.

He opened with “Bullets,” which he spiced up with a four-minute tap-dance solo that made the crowd swoon. While he tapped away, he held an angelic high note and kept us all in breathless rapture.

Following his spectacular opening feats, a girl in the audience with pigtail braids, who was balanced on top of a guy wearing a vintage military green jacket, pitched a handful of flowers on stage: blue, purple, red, yellow, and orange African daisies. He bent down to pick them up one by one and blew the girl a kiss.

He gathered the daisies together, arranging them into a bouquet, and then held it with both hands and pretended he was holding a bat. He swung them luxuriously in the air, hitting an invisible baseball. It was beautiful. So beautiful that the cynical thought crossed my mind that he’d arranged for the girl to give him the flowers; it was hard to imagine he could improvise such poetic elegance.

But I dismissed the thought pretty quickly; the man was an Artist.

He rested his arms over his left shoulder, daisies dangling, and sang a vaudevillian number about a man named Johnny.

He then ripped off a few petals and ate them.

Stopped to put on some lipstick.

Sang a song about stripping for your lover while he licked out sharp 1970s electric guitar riffs.

The crowd went nuts.

I could see his tonsils wiggle.

I felt hot.

The crowd pogoed up and down.

As always, his shtick brought everyone together, like we were in on the joke. Everyone around me was fanning themselves. Couples danced lewdly. His spooky aphrodisiac effect had kicked in: girls smiled, purring like cats; boys puffed out their chests like peacocks. Winks and bashful nods. These uninhibited Québécois made it feel like one big summer festive mating dance.

A man beside me turned to me and said, “I’ve got the shivers.”

I nodded knowingly.

Hawksley was a joy peddler, a love promoter, a bliss manufacturer. I could feel the endorphins releasing wave after wave in my brain, my mood elevating, my spirit soaring, my libido roaring. Love for everyone and everything, compassion, forgiveness. Serotonin was dancing in my brain. I had the feeling of pride when I saw him play, even felt a surging of corny patriotism: Canada produced this guy, we could hold our heads high as a nation.

Isobel turned to me and yelled, “YOU’RE RIGHT, HE’S SO MUCH MORE DIVINE LIVE.”

I KNOW, HE’S SO HOT-BLOODED!” I screeched just as the music died down. Hot-blooded and Poetic.

He let out a moan, the kind you might do when your toes are curling from your lover’s caresses. The crowd hollered.

He moaned again.

The crowd cheered.

He shook his hips Elvis-style.

The crowd whistled.

A girl on Isobel’s left kept repeating, “Fabulous. Fabulous. Fabulous . . .”

He moaned himself into a frenzy, playing his guitar like he was in love with it. He threw himself down on the ground. A fan jumped up on stage and mopped his brow.

I almost forget from gig to gig how goddamned gorgeous he was. How over-the-top sexy he was. How he flirted, lamented, crooned, and seduced. My arm hairs stood up, like a strong breeze had blown them. My smile was hurting my face it was so intense.

I could see that I wasn’t the only one smiling, the whole crowd was high, girls and boys.

Business owners on the streets opposite the park were out in front of their restaurants, corner shops. People on balconies in high-rises waved and clapped. In the distance, I saw a deer coming to the edge of the woods. Were there even squirrels standing to attention? Could have been Sudafed hallucinations.

We were all enamoured with Hawksley’s lust for life. His every yip revved up the crowd. He flattered. He flirted. He made fun of himself. He played matador, teasing an imaginary bull with a faux-fur red coat that he pulled out of a costume trunk on stage.

Between songs, he drank tea from a pottery mug. He said he liked it with lots of honey, like his grandma used to make for him. He spoke of his grandparents between songs, retuning his guitar. “My grandpa was a farmer, he, like, loved birds . . . you know what I’m saying? This one year the drought was so bad, he couldn’t sleep at night ’cause he worried about the birds not being able to make nests ’cause it was so dry there was, like, no mud. None. So I go to visit him, right, and he’d be there—watering a patch of dirt. And I’d say, ‘What are you doing, Grandpa?’ And he’d say, ‘Just making the birds some mud.’ Every day for the whole drought he’d water that patch. You can see why Grandma was crazy in love with him . . . Now Grandma . . . she taught me how to put on lipstick and play poker. I love visiting them . . . They’re in a different lane than everyone else . . . you know what I mean?” When he was done tuning and talking he launched into “Striptease,” an anthem call for primal sex.

“So did you guys all see the full moon last night? I mean WOW, I don’t know about you, but I felt a bit hairy. I started scratching and sniffing and, man, pretty soon I was a werewolf. I sat on that little balcony and did some howling, because . . . well . . . it felt good! I think us humans are too caught up in our minds, we need to get back to our bodies, back to our animal desires. You know what I’m saying?”

The crowd cheered and barked and howled and honked up at him.

“And you know for some weird reason the moon makes me think about Christmas . . . you know, in that kind of holy way that I think we should see more of all year-round. So in between howling at the moon, I sang a song, maybe you know it . . .”

With no other instruments he started singing “Silent Night.” It was so surprising, like eating strawberries with ground pepper. And so even though it was a super-humid August summer afternoon with a blue sky and green grass, the crowd joined in.

It didn’t feel odd or wrong to be earnestly singing “Silent Night,” it felt wonderful.

By the final chorus, I opened my eyes and felt sick with love for him. It was almost too much pleasure. I couldn’t go outside to get some air, this was outside. But I knew I wasn’t going to pass out this time—I was beyond that.

Isobel turned to me, wiping the sweat from her brow, still singing, “Ho-oh-ly Night, Si-eye-lent Night, All is calm, all is bright . . .” Once she realized that everyone else had stopped singing, she stopped and said, “Wow!”

Behind her then I saw something that jolted me out of ecstasy. I caught sight of the Guy from the Rear-view Mirror. Was he wearing a red jacket? In this heat? He had no hat. Why did I think he was the same guy?

I dismissed the paranoia by switching channels in my brain and visualizing Finn. I wondered how he was doing. I wished he was here for our impending rock-star encounter Number 3. After Hawksley graciously and deliciously played five encores, the crowd reluctantly let him go, only because he was sounding a bit hoarse.

It was time to go backstage.

Finn had doctored our media passes from the Bern caper so we would be able to have access to the green room. Except there was a lineup as long as the North Saskatchewan and it serpentined forever through the park. An infinite tail of girls and women from early teens to the seniors. Big ones, little ones, spiky-haired, curly-haired, big-hatted, small-skirted, tight-T-shirted, boob-tubed, gum-snapping, perfume-wearing, eyelash-batting women! All of them were flushed and had that just-got-Hawksleyed look. And they were meandering all the way from the stage to the St. Lawrence. The seagulls were hovering above the queue, like they were lined up as well.

The disturbing thing was, when I looked closely, it looked like several of these women had media passes just like ours. I could make out bits of plastic in their hands and T-shirts with newspaper logos on them. Low-down, stinking Liars, all of them. And their faces, their blushing red faces. We were all interlopers.

I had allowed myself to forget how ridiculous a mission this was. How being a fan among thousands is unpleasant. How degrading it was to realize I really was just one in a desperately long line of Hawksley-eyed gaga women. I looked them up and down. I couldn’t possibly muster enough superiority to rise above them all. He belonged to all of us.

I knew I had allowed myself to get wooed. Wowed and wooed. But I don’t know when exactly I got reckless and pelted myself across the line from normal listener to girl chasing boy. Willingly letting myself fantasize about Hawksley and me together, of the possibilities. Once I was on the other side, there was no going back. Being delusional was enjoyable. He was a love evangelist, and I was converted. I had given up on love after Sullivan, and Hawksley had saved my soul.

I watched them fanning themselves. I felt like throwing up as we waited in line. I looked at the sky and concentrated on cloud-sculpting. My epic delusion was revealing itself to me, I could now imagine an advertising blimp trailing a banner across the sky in upper caps: GIVE IT UP, LET IT GO, HE’S JUST A ROCK STAR, YOU’RE JUST A FAN. He would never be mine alone. It was wrong to try to hoard him. But I didn’t even like sharing him with Isobel, let alone all of these strangers.

But we were finally here, so I had to go through with it, for the sake of resolution. I needed closure, goddammit.

My stomach was all nerves, still jumbling and rumbling, and my heart was still pounding too fast. I ignored the chorus in my head saying, WALK AWAY, LET GO. There were only thirty more women ahead of us in the lineup to speak to him.

Two hours later, and with hope now in the minus department, I felt like we were all a herd of baby turtles making our way to the big sea trying to avoid being attacked by birds knowing that once we arrived, any number of predators could drown us. The line was barely advancing. I was worried about heat stroke, and Isobel was worried about lipstick melting. I was grateful she hadn’t run out of patience. Our media pass hadn’t helped at all.

The whole set up wasn’t how I’d imagined it would be. I wasn’t going to be spending the night with Hawksley somewhere. I wasn’t going to entertain him with my funniest jokes, perform my entire repertoire of good stories, or impress him with how wild and charming I was. He wouldn’t care that I was his biggest listener, how I was the one for him. He wasn’t going to fall madly in love with me. The more I looked at the other women, I saw that they were fans in love with his Hawksleyness, just like I was.

Tears streamed down my face. A girl beside me said, “He’s going to love your panda eyes, darling.” Her friend, who was also crying, told her to shut up.

I didn’t want to share him anymore with these crazy chicks, but I felt my motivation already leaving me, saying, See you later, cowgirl. I was going through the motions, but I knew I would just keep doing that because there’d been too many kilometres; Alberta was too far a place to come from to stop now. Like when I was with Sullivan, a part of me needed the humiliation of rejection to truly put my obsession back in perspective, maybe even squash it forever. I drummed up the last of my delusion to fire myself up—I pictured kissing him in a bubble bath.

I stared at the backs of two heads in front of me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Hawksley was laughing and they were swaying. Sounded like one of them was reciting a poem. Talented cows! How was I going to vie for his attention?

The girls ahead of us said their goodbyes and smiled smugly at us as they walked dreamily away. Isobel lunged forward. I felt venom rising up in me as I watched her arch her back coquettishly and purse her lips in that new way she’d been developing lately à la French actrice (like a slow-mo pout).

I hadn’t said a word, and she was already chatting him up in her strange-bordering-on-offensive way: “Can you believe all this?!” she said, gesturing to the crowd of people surrounding him and the lineup, including me. “I mean, what’s the fuss all about—it’s just you!” she said laughingly like they were old friends. It was classic Isobel behaviour; she resented anyone else’s fame.

But she went too far when she had leaned toward him, offering her hand like a princess for him to kiss. She was taking over. She didn’t possess the grace to not be the centre of attention for once.

I decided violence was the way forward.

With as much subtlety as possible, I put a big smile on my face and simultaneously crashed down on Isobel’s cranberry-painted toes. It was my most assertive act ever. Izzy stifled a screech and backed away gracefully, understanding the code.

At last, there he was . . . in front of me . . . alone in all his curly-haired glory.

He looked strangely smaller, subdued, and tired; this was him offstage. But he was so familiar to me. I ran through all the things I wanted to say to him in my head, how I loved him madly, how in “You Me and the Weather” I know exactly what he meant, how we could have a great time together, how . . . But what could I say that was any different from the fifteen hundred girls behind me?

“Is, is, is that episcopal purple you’re wearing?”

He leaned forward and giggle-whispered, “Actually, I think it’s more of a penis purple.”

Oof—I didn’t know how to respond to penis talk! I didn’t have anything rehearsed so I did the only thing that came to mind.

I got down on one knee, and, offering him a bagel (which was the only thing in my bag resembling a ring), I said: “Hawksley Workman, you don’t know me yet, but I’ve got a confession to make. I feel that you would soon realize how I am your listener, the one who gets everything you are saying . . . This obviously isn’t the time to get into it. But do you think you might like to marry me?”

He laughed.

A gorgeous, kind laugh that ended with a smile. It warmed my heart and deflated the whole situation. He cleared his throat and said, “Oh, honeysuckle, that’s a charming offer . . . Come here . . . I need to tell you a secret.”

I crawled over and leaned close to him. He smelled like leather, sweat, and honey.

“I’m pretty much very married already and I’m mad about her. I’m sorry,” he said as he kissed my cheek. I got to my feet. Then he gestured to come closer again. I approached. As I leaned toward him for the second time, it dawned on me: he looked a hell of a lot like Sullivan. The hair, the sultry eyes, the full lips. Weird that I hadn’t noticed that before.

“Nice snapdragon!” he said to me, winking.

I walked away with Isobel limping along beside me. She threw her arm around me in solidarity. “Chin up, mon p’tit coeur. You might not think so right now, but that was a magnifique thing you just did there. And the bagel thing, pure brilliance! No one would have guessed what you said to him.”

“Come on, that was the most teeny-boppy thing I’ve ever done, Iz. This beats it all. I was crawling, for fucksakes . . .” I pulled out the snapdragon from my hair.

“No, trust me on this. You were very brave. You took a risk you knew would probably result in a crash and you went for it! Besides, he’s not that cute close up. He kind of looks like Sullivan. Did you notice his bald patch?”

“It’s hardly a bald patch, just a mild thinning in the clearing. How are your toes?”

“Let’s not speak of it. It’s a shame you wear those clunky boots, not just from a fashion perspective, the stomp factor is high—sweet Jesus!”

“Sorry.” I didn’t feel that sorry.

“Shush! Now let’s go shopping at the merch table. A nice concert T-shirt might make it all better.”

We made our way past the still-long line of girls anticipating their Hawksley blessings. I think Isobel knew she’d been offside when she’d quasi-flirted with Hawksley, so she wasn’t angry about my toe-stomping outburst. But when I noticed the blood creeping up her toe I felt bad.

“Isobel, stop walking, we need to fix that.”

“Mon Dieu, it’s bleeding! It’s fine, I’m fine, I’ll rest it in the car. We’ll get a little ice and it’ll be healed tout de suite.” She gimped along cheerfully.

The guilt added to my general feeling of self-loathing. I needed redemption. I wanted to go home and sleep for a week and then get up and start again, put it all behind me. There was no more anticipation left to fire me up, just thousands of kilometres west to be travelled.

We stopped at the merch table. Previously I’d always avoided these tables, somehow feeling holier-than-thou and not wanting regular fan merchandise because I was much much more than a fan. Those pretensions were long gone.

I fondled the T-shirts and CDs and book of poems that I already owned and then I stumbled on a miniature Hawksley statue with a bit on the bottom that you could peel off and stick to the dashboard of your car! I grabbed two, one for my mantelpiece at home. It was liberating not being proud and too good for this stuff.

Choosing stuff at the table made me think of choosing in general and how I chose this infatuation. I chose to use delusion to get over Sullivan. And my fan worship wasn’t much different than my love worship I’d felt for Sullivan.

Isobel chose a pair of thong panties, which she could wear because she was tall and skinny. I tried not to think of it as blasphemy; Hawksley on her crotch. Then I saw a shadow on the table of a giant fried-egg shape. I turned around.

In full bright red Royal Canadian Mountain Police regalia stood a determined and boiling-looking man. THE GUY FROM THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR!

Oh crap, now we were going to get arrested.

“Young ladies, do you own a pink-coloured Volkswagen Beetle?”

“Uh . . . maybe,” I said, imagining horrible fines for the foul fumes it had emitted across the country or for parking badly in Montreal, or maybe we’d trashed our hotel room more than I realized back in Wawa, or, worst-case scenario, for hitting something and not realizing it? Or maybe VISA had called him?

“Take me, officer. Annie has a future, she got much better marks in university than me and is super kind and has great potential as a future singer/songwriter guitarist or DJ! Take me to jail if you have to, let her go free!” I was touched by Isobel’s sincerity. DJ, could I be a DJ?

“Hey, take it easy, I’m not a real RCMP! I’m wearing a bow tie! You guys must have watched way too much Due South; I’m just a singer in a band who dress like Mounties. RCMP don’t actually dress like this on regular duty. You’ve maybe seen a few of us around? I was on the highway too and saw you girls a couple of times.”

“Officer, I have a minor toe injury,” Isobel said as she lifted her tanned leg up for him to see the wound. I think she might have flashed him a bit of panty and a whole lot of thigh. Bless her.

“Oh crumbs, that looks terrible! How’d it happen?”

“Well, c’est ridicule, but I actually stepped on myself, moi même. It’s these high heels!”

“You know, you don’t even need to wear high heels, miss. I mean, gosh, you’re very tall as it is. You might intimidate people if you tower over their heads. I bet if I didn’t have this hat on, I’d even be shorter than you.”

I couldn’t believe it, even this quaint RCMP guy was falling for her! It never ended. Surely the guy could see through the ditzy chick routine? Maybe he didn’t want to see through it.

He took us to his car where he had a first-aid kit. He had her drape her leg over the seat so he could clean and dress her wound. He also managed, she told me later, to give her a sneaky little foot rub.

“Bye bye, officer!” Isobel said as we walked away.

“You know, I’ve never dated a cop before!”

“Isobel, come on, don’t be obscene. Let’s Get Pimmed!”

It was time for a Pimm’s session. We were going to stay overnight at a hostel. Drinking myself to oblivion on a funny old-fashioned English drink loaded with a bunch of cucumbers and fruit was my plan.