Cadillac Couches

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

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&M
s. 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: