Cadillac Couches (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music was my religion.

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

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

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

Music was also my medicine.

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier That Day

Saturday Morning, Edmonton Folk Festival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were families who had been coming for twenty-five years, since the very first festival. Singing “Four Strong Winds” on closing night at the top of your lungs was practically a universal Edmonton experience. Once you got past the mosquitoes, toxic porta-potties, mud, and patchouli miasma, the Edmonton Folk Fest was the best of its kind Canada-wide. Admittedly Vancouver had the ocean, and the North Country Fair in northern Alberta had the homegrown, middle-of-nowhere bonus, but E-town really had the perfect combination of river valley, prairie sky, and grassy hills.

The beer garden, a central feature, was a cordoned-off section of the park with picnic benches and canopies, for shelter from sun or rain, where you plowed through beer and scoped cuties. The danger was going in for one and then staying there all weekend and never seeing any music. Two beers into our first beer garden shift we perfected our plan. Finn was the chief of operations. An unassuming
CEO
, he was endearing in his standard gear: a New York Rangers baseball cap, vintage Hawaiian shirt, ginger stubble, and freckles. His plan was two-pronged: 1) impromptu all the way 2) imagine we are Hunter S., Annie Leibovitz, and Tallulah Bankhead (H.A.T.). Isobel's role was clearly the best: she just exuded her natural air of importance and decadence.

9:35
AM
: We reported to the sterile, khaki, safari-looking media tent. In my pre-interview day scenario-izing I had envisioned a gigantic tent full of press people milling about, where nobody would notice me and my straw hat. But this tent was the kind you go camping in with your boyfriend (maybe) and dog (possibly), if it was a small dog, or small boyfriend, for that matter. The tent was full of hardcore types, looking like foreign war correspondents in their khaki multi-pocket pants and utility vests carrying tripods, bipods, pods, and fifteen hundred lenses. They were screamingly legitimate-looking. It must have been the khaki. Us though—the Bern Baby Bern Operation, with my orange overall shorts, blue bandana around my neck, and general ironic cowgirl chic and Isobel's high-heel disaster—looked at worst like hacks from a small-town weekly or at best university journalists (neither would garner a lot of respect from the Khakis). We hadn't scripted anything beforehand, having agreed we would leave it all to our natural wit and alcohol.

The only reason I was pretending to be the photographer and Finn got to be the writer was because I might suffer from stress muteness during the interview. Finn, after all, had actually worked for a real magazine, and Isobel didn't have a nerve problem. To calm down and stop myself from flailing my arms in anticipation, I strolled around the tent while Finn lined up to talk to the coordinator girl with the hippie skirt. Isobel got busy looking bored and sexy. Unfortunately a lap took almost no time in this pup tent—if I circled more than three times, they were going to think I had a disorder of some kind—so I concentrated on looking serious, ready to speak journo at any point. As I stared at a map of the river valley, Finn stepped up to bat.

“Finn Hingley,
PLEASED TO MEET YOU
.
JOHN,
from
Tilt
in Torono, got in touch with
CINDY
last week and told her he'd be sending myself, my colleague, and my photographer to do a think-piece on
DAN BERN
.”

Coordinator Girl: “Hi, I'm Ursula . . . Ya, I think I saw you on the list . . . so, you guys from
TO
?” I could recognize a bit of that small-town defensiveness that all we E-towners have.

“
YUP, JUST FLEW IN
.”

“Great, well, just pick a time on the board where that girl with the huge hat is and sign up. I think he still has a slot open.”

When I looked under Dan Bern's name, every slot was checked off; he was full for the day. I felt winded by the blow. Finn came up beside me and smiled like I was a stranger. He saw the look of despair on my face, looked at the board, and lightning fast he grabbed the Jiffy marker and made a whole new row. He wrote
Tilt Magazine, Toronto
and put two serious-looking asterisks beside it. We now had the new last opening of the day.

He walked back over to the girl and reached out his hand to shake hers. “Hey, thanks a lot, we really appreciate the last-minute thing—
YOU'RE DOING A GREAT JOB HERE
. Are you going to be able to catch Bern's set? You really should, ya know.”

“No, I doubt it, I'm committed to Stage 5. Ron Sexsmith. Same timeslot, you know how it is. But, uh, listen, do you have a card or a copy of the mag?”