by Arden, Jann
Colette was a big drinker, perhaps because she worked at a bar. I didn’t often see her without a drink in her hand. I was finding out things about her that were very surprising. Not just about the drinking. She was controlling and compulsive. She cleaned constantly. She vacuumed her carpets on her hands and knees using just the nozzle. Once a week she’d take everything out of the cupboards and wash it thoroughly—cups, plates, cutlery, pots, pans and ornaments—and then she moved on to walls and ceilings. It seemed completely crazy to me. She washed every leaf on every plant with soap and water. The whole process took hours. It turned out she was a pothead too. Duray smoked pot, but Colette made him look like a lightweight. She was always rolling up joints, getting high and then cleaning like a madwoman.
Colette had a secret existence. I wasn’t sure at first, but after a few weird incidents it dawned on me that she was having sex with men for money. Was Colette an actual hooker? She was some strange version of one, apparently. There was a giant Italian man who showed up at her apartment from time to time. After he’d leave, she’d have a surplus of cash, the fridge would be full of food and wine and beer and she’d act like she’d swallowed a canary. There were other men, one really old guy that she gave a bath to. I couldn’t hear everything that was going on in the bathroom, but you didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out. I wanted to run out of the apartment and just keep going.
I was pretty sure my time in her apartment was going to be coming to an end. Where else to live, I couldn’t imagine. I didn’t want to think about it. It was easier to drink a bottle of cheap wine. So I did.
After six months in Vancouver I was still spinning my wheels and wasting my time and not much else. I didn’t have much money to contribute for the rent and the utilities and food. Colette told me that I could go down to the welfare office to apply for assistance. Why would I want to do that? She told me that it was easy—that she did it every month. So she was working at a nightclub, collecting social assistance and hooking on the side. She was a small corporation.
Finally I gave in. I felt terribly ashamed going down to the welfare office. Filling out those forms was one of the most humiliating things I’d ever done in my life. I felt so depressed. A few weeks later I received a cheque for $319. I signed the back of it and handed it over to Colette. I collected welfare for three months, and then I marched down to the office and had it cancelled. I told them I had a good job and the lady said to me, “Good for you. Glad we could help get you back on your feet.” I was getting better and better at lying.
After that, I did manage to get a decent job selling women’s clothing at a store called Designer Save. A wonderful forty-year-old English lady named Jean hired me to help her a few days a week, pricing and racking and doing up the display window. I don’t think she even needed the help but she hired me anyway. Jean was married to an alcoholic named Chuck and had two kids whom she loved more than life itself. Though her mother was still alive, Jean told me she was a domineering matriarch who was practically impossible to reason with, so I think Jean felt motherless in many ways. She was convinced that her life was as good as it was going to get, and she would grin and bear it.
Jean was the first real friend I made in Vancouver. I liked working for her and she really looked out for me. She took me out for fancy dinners and let me borrow her car (it was a Ford Pinto, of all things). She had me over for sleepovers and movies at her house once in awhile. She was my little bit of sanity. Jean would ask me what the hell I was doing in Vancouver and I spent many hours trying to explain my hopes and goals to her. I told her all about my family and how much I wanted to go home. I told her all about my music and the songs I had written. She said she’d buy me a bus ticket whenever I wanted to go back to Calgary.
Jean didn’t care for Colette, and told me she thought Colette was evil. She actually said “evil.” And I do think that living with Colette was doing something to my soul. Not that it was at all her fault, but I was becoming more and more promiscuous. I’d drink too much at the nightclub where she worked, dance half the night with some guy I didn’t know from a chair and then go with him and, well, have sex. It happened time and time again, and I didn’t have a clue about why I was behaving in such a dangerous way. I was doing things I didn’t even want to do. I hated myself for it.
Every month I prayed that I wasn’t pregnant. I actually had a prayer that I recited more times than you’d care to imagine. I would make a deal with God that if he could make me not pregnant that I would never have sex with anyone again. I often thought of my mom when I was in those precarious situations. I’d picture her there in the corner of some guy’s cheap, messy apartment, watching me guzzle beer and smoke cigarettes and roll around in filthy sheets with a complete stranger. It made me cry all the way home. How had I gotten myself to this place? I had to get out and I had to get it together.
Jean kept telling me that I was going to find myself in a whole lot of trouble if I didn’t start respecting myself. She was right. I didn’t respect myself. I didn’t think of myself at all, quite frankly. I didn’t think I was worth anything good. I used to be so carefree and funny. Now I was one of the walking wounded, and it was my own doing.
I decided I was going to try as hard as I could to find a job singing in a band. If failure was the worst thing that could happen to me, I would surely be fine with that. People who were looking for a drummer or a keyboard player would place ads in the Help Wanted section of the Georgia Straight, and there was also a section for bands that were looking for singers. The ads would say something like, “Singer wanted for Top-40 cover band. Heart, Pat Benatar, Sheena Easton, Journey influenced.” Some bands were looking for a jazz singer and some bands were looking for a blues singer. I thought I was more in the Bette Midler style, although nobody was looking for that. Top 40 was going to have to do.
The ad I circled said, “Must be willing to travel weekends.” Well, that almost sounded like it could be fun—I could get out of Colette’s apartment. I wrote down the address in the ad and discovered that the audition was three bus rides away. God forbid I should get the job and be facing ninety minutes on a bus every time we rehearsed.
Anyway, I took the three buses and ended up with the band in a tiny equipment-packed basement. There were cords everywhere, plugged into every possible outlet. The whole place looked like it could blow up at any second. I wanted to turn around and get back on the bus. Two other girls and I sat in the kitchen waiting to sing our songs. I had practised “Beast of Burden” by the Rolling Stones, as it was one of the songs on the list the band had provided for us.
To make a long story short, I sang. They all looked at me like I had eaten a baby. They had me sing it again. Then they had me try a Foreigner song and then a Journey song. I must have sung six songs in total and finally the drummer and band leader, who was named John, said, “You’ve got the job, sweet lady.” Sweet lady? Sweet mother of God, I thought to myself. I had been called many things in my life but never did I expect to be called that. I think John was stuck firmly in 1967. Whatever, it didn’t matter—I was in a band. My very first band! It was called Executive Sweet and I had no idea what in the world that meant.
We practised twice a week and I faithfully took buses across town and back again each time. I learned about thirty songs over the next month. It was a lot of fun, actually. I felt like I was moving forward; even if it was a crap band that sounded like its four members had just gotten out of prison, it was a band just the same. Jean said she’d come and see me sing if we ever played anywhere decent. I wasn’t sure that was ever going to happen. We were terrible and I am not exaggerating. I think the guys thought that if they just played as loud as they could no one would notice they were complete shite.
Still, John got us quite a few jobs in little logging towns around British Columbia. We played B-circuit hotels, whose patrons were mainly guys who drank for a living. It was dismal. We would usually play a forty-minute set and then, during our breaks, a stripper with a nam
e like Dusty Blossom would come out and swing around her brass pole to badly recorded music by Pink Floyd. I hadn’t seen a lot of strippers in my life, but the ones that were on these hotel circuits were perhaps the worst in the world. They looked drugged out and lonesome. It made my heart hurt watching them. They were about my age, too, and I would always think about their parents and what they must think of their daughters out there flashing their bits.
The drunken men would whistle and holler and spew out the most vile things at them and stuff a handful of one-dollar bills into their G-strings and then the song would end and the strippers would slink off to the back room to put their clothes back on. They’d have to go out there three or four times a night because there were so few of them to dance. No wonder they drank and did drugs—who wouldn’t?
The patrons always seemed sad when the band would start up again. They would have rather seen the peelers all night long. Nobody wanted to hear “I’ve Been Waiting for a Girl Like You” by Foreigner or “Jump” by Van Halen. Especially the versions we did. Those people wanted to hear “Cocaine” or “The Gambler” or “Tush” by ZZ Top.
Every weekend we played in some new crummy hotel that looked exactly the same as the last crummy hotel. I hardly ever made any money. After we paid for gas and our hotel rooms and our meals, it was eaten up. I was still drinking a lot. You’d kind of have to drink in self-defence around the people who’d come to see us play. Some plastered logger was always sending a round of shooters up onto the stage. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have ten drinks a night; in fact it was the norm. Alcohol seemed to lower my intelligence to the point where I could communicate with pretty much anybody in the joint.
I got sick of working in awful places. But when I told John that I couldn’t do it anymore, he was devastated. He asked me to stay long enough for them to find someone to replace me. That could have been an entire year for all I knew. I told him that I would finish out the month and then I was moving back home to go back to school. (That was one of my favourite lies.) I felt bad about leaving the band in the lurch, so of course I got drunk and had sex with John just to show him how sorry I was. I cried all the way on the long bus ride back to Colette’s apartment. For the life of me, I could not figure out what the hell I was doing. I kept repeating slut slut slut slut in my head.
In what was perhaps my best move ever, I found, with Jean’s help, a little one-bedroom apartment just a few blocks from the clothing store where Jean, bless her heart, still let me take some shifts around my unpredictable band schedule. I was nervous, but happy to be moving into my own place, though I didn’t have a thing of my own. Jean collected all sorts of things for my big move: tea towels and plates and pots and a frying pan. She got me a few bath towels and forks and knives and a tea kettle. I couldn’t believe the huge hampers she hauled into the apartment from her car.
Jean also gave me an ironing board, which I used as a kitchen table for several months. I never did own an iron. I had a cassette deck and my guitar and a couple of table lamps that looked like baskets of lemons. I felt like I was set, though I didn’t have a bed. I slept on the floor on a big quilt until I could come up with something better, like a mattress. I found one of those one day in a dumpster. It had a few stains on it, nothing I couldn’t scrub out with a little elbow grease and some Comet cleaner. I dragged it up to my apartment and put it into the bathtub. I worked on getting those stains out for two days. I used three gallons of bleach and a heck of a lot of scorching hot water and I got them all to disappear. It took a few days to dry, but when it did it looked like new. I was thrilled to be sleeping on a real bed.
The building I’d moved into was really old. My door could have been smashed down by a two-year-old with a plastic Fisher Price hammer. There was always somebody screaming in the hallways. There were loud footsteps constantly running up and down the stairs, fists pounding on doors and thumping walls wildly. It was a scary place in a sketchy part of town, but the rent was incredibly cheap.
I wanted to find a job where I could sing my own songs, but I didn’t know how to go about it. I needed to find a gig in a lounge somewhere, but how? I met a young woman named Marion at a café and she told me that a person could make really good money busking in Gastown. Busking? I could probably do that. All I would have to do is stand there with my guitar case open and sing songs for a few hours. It couldn’t be that hard. Marion had told me that she’d done it quite a few times and made some pretty good cash. Gastown was a really touristy area and it had a lot of pedestrian traffic going through it. It was full of shops and bars and restaurants and, presumably, folks with spare change to throw at me. It was right on the water in a beautiful part of town, so I assumed it was fairly safe.
The first day was the hardest. I took the Seabus across the harbour from my apartment and found a little niche to set myself up in. There seemed to be quite a few people milling about, and it looked bright and sunny. I would execute Operation Sing for Your Supper and see what happened.
I stood there alone in the sun and started playing my songs. It felt really strange. I felt very exposed and vulnerable. Everybody simply walked by as if I was invisible. Once in awhile somebody would dig into their pocket, toss two quarters into my case and keep right on going. That wasn’t so bad, I thought to myself. I could build up a fairly good stash if I stayed out there long enough.
That first day I made about forty bucks in five hours. My fingers were ready to fall off my hands and I couldn’t feel my fingertips. They were completely numb from strumming so long. I went home and soaked them in warm water and salt.
I counted the money out on the bed. It was mostly quarters, so it took me awhile to sort. I thought it was marvellous. I went back to my spot almost every day for two months. It was summertime and the entire area was bustling with people shopping and drinking beer on outdoor patios. I had regulars who came and sat in front of me to eat lunch while I sang. I was even getting applause once in awhile. Some people dropped five-dollar bills into my case and told me how much they loved the music. Busking was so much easier than lurching around in hotel bars in the BC interior with a bunch of stinky guys in a van. I was glad to have that behind me.
All I wanted to do was perform my own material and I was more or less doing that now. It wasn’t the perfect situation but in my mind it was an improvement. I was writing new songs while I stood out there. In eight weeks I must have written about thirty of them. And I thought they were getting a lot better—they were more economical and straightforward. My confidence had grown noticeably. It was getting a lot easier to stand in front of people and sing. I pretended they weren’t there at all; that helped. I didn’t think anyone would notice me singing my own stuff. People came and went by me so quickly they’d never figure it out. I was making my rent money and writing new material. Things were looking up.
One Saturday afternoon I went over to Gastown, as I had been for months, and started playing. I might have been standing there maybe a half-hour and had a whopping three or four dollars in my case. It had been raining a fair amount, and so there weren’t a lot of people around. They were inside somewhere keeping themselves warm and dry, right where I should have been. I was thinking about quitting and just calling it a day. I was gathering up my stuff when all of a sudden, I turned to see a very large person was rushing towards me. Before I could react he punched me in the side of the face so hard that I saw not only stars, but planets.
All I could make out was a large man hovering over me, picking the money out of my case and cramming it into his jacket pockets as fast as he could. I would gladly have given him all my money and spared myself the fist in the head. He didn’t say anything to me. When he had every penny fished out, he walked off as if nothing had happened. I just stayed down on the ground and watched him disappear down an alley.
I felt like bawling, but I was too upset to shed a single tear. I could hardly pull a breath into my lungs. Maybe I was in shock. I was soaked from being on the ground, and freezing, and by no
w I was shaking so hard I could barely latch up my guitar case. I had a forty-five minute ferry ride across the harbour to where I lived, but the guy had taken all my money so I didn’t have the fare to get me there. I would have to sneak on and hope I didn’t get caught.
What kind of person can just punch you in the head and steal your money? My face started to swell up into a bruised and bloody mess. The blood vessels had been broken in my right eye and it looked awful. All night I felt like throwing up. I thought that maybe I had a concussion or a blood clot. I hardly slept, fearing that I might never wake up again. I would have called my mother, but my phone had been cut off. I didn’t want her to know what had happened anyway so it was just as well. I should have gone to a walk-in clinic but decided not to. I didn’t quite know what I was going to say about what had happened. I was embarrassed and very shaken up.
My career as a street performer was over. I didn’t ever go busking again. I was too scared. I kept thinking that, had he hit me any harder, he could have actually killed me.
I laid low for at least a week. I stayed in and read books and slept and ate Kraft Dinner, which had become a staple at this point. I could buy three boxes for a dollar, so it was an affordable meal. I didn’t want anyone to see me with my head banged up so I didn’t go anywhere except to 7-Eleven to buy more Kraft Dinner. One half of my face turned green and yellow and my blood-filled eyeball took two weeks to clear up.
In every letter my mom sent to me—and she wrote every week—she begged me to come home. She knew I was miserable and she knew I was stubborn. She tucked twenty dollars in each letter and I was so grateful to get it and so sad at the same time. Sometimes it was all the money I had to last me until the next letter came. I had to find a way to make ends meet.