Cadillac Couches (17 page)

“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.

side a, track 8

“I'm invincible

so are you

we do all the things

they say we can't do

we walk around

in the middle of the night

and if it's too far to walk

we just hitch a ride

we got rings of dirt

around our necks

we talk like auctioneers . . . 

we are wise wise women

we are giggling girls”

“If He Tries Anything,” Ani DiFranco

Day 7

+30 Celsius, blue sky with bonus:
super-sticky eastern humidity

drink index: Fuzzy Navel & Black Label beer

Poutine: Québécois number-one dish

 

3,326 km behind us

Wawa to Montreal

1,215 km to go

I stuck a Polaroid photo of Kerridge on the dash with a piece of gum beside pics of Hawksley and a stick-on Buddha statue. It was an epic driving day going along the coast of Lake Superior: down past Sault Ste. Marie, over to Sudbury and North Bay, down to Ottawa. We stopped for a few naps and snacks and pee breaks and stretching-our-legs breaks along the never-ending highway. At our last stop, we went off piste to go for a swim. It was super hot and sticky out and I thought it would be adventurous to go for a skinny dip, to keep up the new Kerridgean path of embracing everything in nature, particularly lakes, but Isobel got a bloodsucker on her nose and then I had to burn it off with a cigarette. So her nose swelled and chafed. She'd never had an ugly day before and wasn't happy about it.

I shouldn't have been pleased.

She was sulking and looking at herself in the rear-view mirror every five minutes to see if the swelling had gone down.

Many hours later, crossing the border from Ontario to Quebec, Isobel took a break from sulking to whoop and cheer with me. We belted out the traditional French beer anthem that we'd learned almost a decade before: “On est saoul, on est saoul, on est saoul l'effet de la bière!” Careening on and off of the rumble strips we sang the one and only verse in an endless loop, putting all of our operatic gusto into the hardcore Quebbie pronunciation of be-er. Isobel added, in her best Charles de Gaulle voice, “
VIVE
Le Québec Libre!”

I think being in Quebec makes people impulsive. I mean, there's something about Frenchness that just jazzes everything up.
Joie de vivre
. I blame what happened with Isobel and me that summer on the Québécois syndrome.

Besides being French and sexier than the rest of Canada, for me and Isobel, Quebec symbolized an emotional landmark—it marked the site of our very first romantic and boozy adventures. As we drove toward Montreal in silence, I looked at the Québécois licence plates ahead of us that said,
JE ME SOUVIENS
 . . . 

We were fifteen years old when we first set foot in French Canada. It was possibly the most exciting time of our collective lives up until that point—except for watching Live Aid on
TV
.

Back at home we went to Catholic Separate High School. Separate really felt like a giant euphemism for Lame. We were pretty much sheltered from all the glories of public school culture that we had studied like anthropologists on
TV
. We drooled over the dating and partying scene that public school kids took for granted. We managed to get to be fifteen years old without having ever kissed boys, smoked drugs, or drunk beer. It wasn't due to some shortage of enthusiasm—we were dying to be corrupted.

Our big chance finally came when we signed up for a six-week course in Quebec where we would be, as the brochure explained: “immersed in French language and culture.” The previous year's students called it Club Fed and assured us it was party central. The brochure promised we would: “live, sleep, and dream in French.” Madame Plouffe, our French teacher, thought it was merveilleux that batches of francophiles were hatched out of the program in six-week rotations.

Out of over a hundred students from all over the country, we were the youngest—there were even some twenty-year-olds in the program—and that made us feel unspeakably glamorous (relative to our peers back home) as well as slightly out of our league. But we knew how to bluff, especially Isobel.

Isobel was no longer a goofy young girl; she was a gorgeous teenager with a nice brown tan, those amazing green eyes, and Liquid Paper white teeth. She was tall and thin and her light brown hair was all one length but short-ish and parted to the side like she'd seen Ralph Lauren models do on
Fashion Files
on
TV
. I still had braces on my teeth and not a lot of confidence. Recently I'd given my image an overhaul and gotten rid of my Chrissie Hynde/footballer eye-makeup and Sid Vicious hairstyle; I felt a bit exposed without all the eyeliner and hair product, but I had to face the fact that real punk was way before my time and my parents wouldn't ever let me dye my hair blue anyway. Besides, punk boys don't necessarily go for punk girls. Look at Billy Idol's wives. Looking feminine felt pretty unnatural to me.

Montreal city, Dorval airport, was where the gong show began. We had to wait there for a couple of hours before taking a little plane up north. On the way to the Edmonton airport, Dad had said: “Now, girls . . . don't think you need to have a drink in the airport. There's no reason to go nuts now, just because you'll have no parental supervision for six weeks and you're going to a province with a more liberal approach to drinking ages. What I'm saying is:
BEHAVE
yourselves and don't act like
WILD ANIMALS
!”

Isobel figured out we had to go to
Gate
10 to board the next plane in four hours, so we thought we'd follow Dad's advice and try our luck out at the lounge. We sat down, trying to look as sophisticated as possible. I kept my jacket on so they wouldn't see my Billy Idol White Wedding Tour T-shirt. I stopped smiling so nobody would see my braces. On our table beside the peanuts there was a card featuring a cocktail special:
Fuzzy Navel (Peach Schnapps and Orange Juice)
. The waitress didn't blink when we ordered a couple of those. They were fizzy, sweet, and delicious; we got wazooed pretty quickly. It was our first major drinking experience. At home we'd only sampled the odd beer or sipped our miniscule quota of Christmas cava.

Three hours later and three Fuzzy Navels each, we realized standing at Gate 10 that it was Gate 32a we needed to get to—it was obvious to me then how bad Isobel's French was (she'd been in charge of listening for the gate number while I was on peanut refill duty). We ran at least three laps around the airport: north, south, east, before running down the right conveyer belt. Hallelujah—drunk, huffing and puffing, we made it on to the little passenger plane: destination Jonquière!

Once on board, we sat in the last row. Right from the get-go, Isobel caught sight of her dream boy sitting adjacent to us in a window seat. He was sexy in that boy-who-listens-to-the-Smiths kind of way. He had tortoiseshell glasses, Jesus sandals, and a James Dean hairdo. He sat on my right and Isobel on my left. She spent the whole flight leaning forward, making me sit back so she could check him out at her leisure. I had a peach fuzzy headache and felt a little uncertain about everything up in the sky in our little tin can of an airplane.

In the Lac-Saint-Jean region in northern Quebec, Jonquière was not far from the aluminum capital of the world where they made
ALCAN
, the tin foil our moms used to wrap leftovers. The factory gave the area a smell that was noticeable right off the bat, a bit like the pulp mill pong in Hinton, Alberta. On the plus side, it made for some crazy-gorgeous-coloured sunsets.

When we landed it was a rainy night and there were definitely no parents in sight. We took a taxi to the residence and checked in and dropped off our suitcases. After the success we had had at the airport ordering drinks, we figured we were brave enough to hit the streets of small-town Quebec.

Our first stop was at the dépanneur to buy some gum. I noticed right away that there was beer in the fridge. In Alberta adults had to go to a government store to buy booze. Unparalleled freedoms! Isobel brazenly walked over, opened the fridge, and picked up a couple of Budweisers. The guy at the counter was very friendly: “Salut, les filles? Ça bouge?”

“Uh, bouge?

“Et oui, Ça gaze?”

“Uh, oui . . . wee wee wee!”

“Ah, vous êtes des anglophones la! Pis ba . . . Je comprends . . . ow are you? You've just arrived ear in Quebeck and you tought you'd get some Buddy-wisers, asteur la, ahhhh!”

We laughed with the guy. He reminded me of my friendly postman from back home. I put the beers in my bag for later, and off we went clunking up the street. Chez Max's neon blue sign featuring a large-sized man with a chef's hat looked appealing as a first stop. We walked in and headed for a booth table. There was only one other customer in the six-table place: the James-Dean-hairdo guy from the plane.

We sat down at the booth beside his. Isobel was trying not to smile too much, but her voice had gone up three octaves: “Poutine, what's that, do you think?”

The waiter came up saying something about us being square heads. “Poutine is de food of de people, it iz frites with fromage and sauce. It is essentiel for all Québéçois people.”

“S'il vous-plaît, oui . . . Je suis nouveau ici . . . Je suis faim, eu, non J'AI faim!” I said.

The waiter walked away, shaking his head.

“What did he say was on top?” Isobel asked me.

“It's topped with squeaky cheese.” The James-Dean-hairdo guy turned around. “Cheese curds from the region. This cheese is famous for squeaking when you put it in your mouth. Ça chante.”

I found it hard to believe that cheese could squeak.

He held out his hand to shake mine and said, “Enchanté. Idaho.”

“Nice to meet you too. Alberta.”

Isobel elbowed me in the ribs. “It's his name, not where he's from.”

“Idaho?”

My first Québécois morning I woke up sleeping top to tail with Isobel, with a pounding in my brain, feeling like an aluminum factory had been built on my head. There was also a dangerous rumbling in my guts. I looked down the bed to Izzy, who was holding her hand against her forehead. “Annie, a great illness has befallen me.”

“Me too, girlfriend, me too. Good God! Maybe we got some kind of poisoning, maybe we got alcohol poisoning!”