Aubrey McKee

by Alex Pugsley

  “And what is this place?” asks Karin. “What’s it called?”

  “This place?” I put the headphones on my ears and press play. “This is The Common Room.”

  ~

  Karin’s Reaction: “I had the best time at the movie we didn’t see, Tudball. It was the highlight of the season. That Brigid girl? Stunning. But—oh my God—Gail? I love her. Gail Gail Bo Bail, Banana Fanna Mo Mail—I love her! I do. Probably I will love her forever. She’s such a perfect little boober. And so volumptious! At first I thought she was sort of—you know?” Karin thumped her chest with a fist. “Relentless. Relentless. You know? But really she’s brave, I think. She’s so brave. I love how strong she is. I love her aggressiveness. I wish I was like her. I’m sure she thinks I’m a ditzy doodle. I’m sure she thinks I’m a dippy jockette. So we should get a cake—an adventure cake—and travel to some island in the sea. I’m up for anything, Hot Pants. We’re right beside the ocean, for flip’s sake. We must go places! Know anybody with a boat?” Karin was born in Oakville, Ontario, though her mother was originally from Nova Scotia and, the summer we met, her mother was newly divorcing and making up her mind to move back east, choosing to settle in an area outside Halifax called Fleming Park. There she and Karin lived in modest means, in a wooden bungalow off Purcell’s Cove Road, within view of the Dingle and the deep-blue sea. Karin’s relations with her absentee father were strained, distant, moneyed. I would never meet her father. Michael Friday was an executive with Air Canada in Toronto. He travelled the world and sent his only child the spoils of foreign lands—a Walkman from Kyoto, a Vespa from Milan. “He’s a little unpredictable,” said Karin. “I mean, he’s good at finding something he can be mad at you about. But then later? He feels guilty and buys you stuff. Tennis lessons was his idea. Piano was his idea. Appleby was his idea. Everything was his idea. But my mom moving here? Probably a good thing.” When she came to town, Karin was enrolled at the Halifax Ladies College where she had the distinction of being the only sixteen-year-old in the city to pilot a scooter to school. This was a time of proliferating acquaintance, the persons met were many and plentiful, and any new kid, any boy or girl, might be conscripted to your own rebel alliance. There were six public high schools, each a thousand kids strong, and dances and rock shows and football games commingled these nation states. Impounded in an all-girls private school, Karin thrilled to hear of such outings and chose to set up The Common Room as a small company of adventurers. Learning of a sleepover on McNabs Island by my high school’s Outdoors Club, Karin was determined to organize our own excursion. She recruited Brigid and Gail, with them assembled coolers of foodstuffs and wineskins of plonk, and asked me again for a boat. I knew of very few boats that could be got for free but I did remember a flat-bottom dory in the Mair house garage and, knowing my former doubles partner might be home for half-term holiday, I telephoned an inquiry. Cyrus would like to come along to supervise, he said, as one of the oarlocks was loose, he added, and, though I was wary of his nervousness, I agreed—we needed another guy anyway—and soon was helping to secure the dory to the roof of his family’s purple Mercedes-Benz, wondering how his force field of touch-me-not might spin into our venture.

  ~

  So we sail away for a night and a day, a modern day Famous Five, our craft stowed with camping supplies, mildewed life jackets, a Sara Lee chocolate cake, each of us taking a turn rowing or munching from a bag of Cheezies, Karin trading her Walkman for Gail’s paperback of Jaws and reading aloud the dirty parts, though scared of sharks all the same, watching the waves with a hand over her face. Approaching the island shore in darkness, we do not find the other campers and are too late to set up tents—ground sheets and Mylar sleeping bags scrunched on the pebbly beach, a fire in the drizzle and smores with Graham Crackers, M&Ms, and guimauves as Karin calls them, a word which passes into our shared vernacular. Words and phrases with Karin tend to assume new meanings, the sequence of her thought progressing in a free-for-all jumble without the regulations of logic or intelligibility. She uses words to suggest fondness for a person or situation and palpable in her inventions is much affection and goodwill. I am flattered she lets herself speak so freely, lapsing into a Little Kid persona in front of us all, though at one time, of course, I did wonder if such intimacies were meant for me. But Karin is the kind of person who enjoys herself no matter where she is. She simply feels at home in the world and considers every man-jack who comes into view as the playmate who might perfectly even up teams. But this outing to McNabs is exhausting for me—I am obsessively studying everyone’s reaction while pretending not to be—watching where Brigid steers her attention, when Gail’s eyes flicker with interest, who receives Karin’s most delighted smiles. We talk and drink and disperse. I don’t sleep much, afraid I’ll miss something, and rise before dawn to look alone at the green-dark sea, wondering at the ocean-going container ship just now departing the harbour. I am thinking of relations and the idea of young women, remembering how once I’d heard an older kid shout “Jennifer!” across the street at a Grade 12 girl, the name sounding like a prayer or desperate plea, and these early morning notions, and the winking lights of the container ship, and all the qualities of the isle, begin to overwhelm me with their immensity and the glimmerings of so many other ways to be.

  Further along the beach, Karin wriggles out from under the upturned dory where the girls have been sleeping. She ambles over, her blonde hair stringy from sleeping outdoors. “Hey there, Tudball.” She sits on a beach stone with the bag of Cheezies. “What’s happening?”

  “Thinking of the sea. Shanties, bilge. That sort of thing.”

  Lowering her voice, as if she is sharing something confidential, she says, “Can I ask you a question—”

  “Flotsam. Yardarm—”

  “If it’s not too personal.”

  “Boom vang. Wait—why isn’t it personal?”

  “You know your friend Cyrus?”

  “A little bit.”

  “I think he likes me.”

  “Why not? You’re kind of cute and he’s a demented person.”

  “I know! He’s like this complete freak of nature who’s always—”

  “Who is—Cyrus?”

  “—talking because he has to learn everything for himself and tell you about it.”

  “Tell me about it.” Off to my right, the sky begins to pastel with colour and in morning dimness I see the shape and contour of Karin’s cheek.

  “But sometimes,” says Karin. “Sometimes his ideas are sort of like teleportals into another universe where everything—boop-de-doop—transmogrifies into some flipping boondoggle.”

  “Totally.”

  “Yeah,” says Karin. “It makes me cry a little. I don’t know why.” She checks the fingernail of her middle finger. It’s bruised and empurpled. Rowing the night before, she crushed it between oar and thwart. “My fingernail can’t decide to fall off. And it stinks something terrible. Like the inside of someone’s gym sneaker.”

  “Probably it got transmogrified.”

  “And, fuck, it’s cold. Feel my hands. Isn’t it supposed to be summer?”

  “Not in October, Wiggins.”

  “Plus everything’s covered in cheese dust! Probably we should tidy up before we get attacked. God knows what’s roaming around out here.”

  “In case of attack, it’s best to be tidy.” I reach for the Cheezies. “Then what? Every man for himself?”

  “Oh?” says Karin. “I like every man for himself.” The sun flares above the treetops and Karin on the beach examines the day’s first shadows. “Even if I’m just some floofy girl.”

  When talking at close quarters, Karin has a habit of staring clean over your shoulder, as if she’s noticing a stranger who is just now walking toward her—for various reasons she is judicious about prolonging eye contact—but as she glances at me here, in the first morning light, I feel the verve of her d
irect gaze. Karin’s eyes to all of us are a shifting wonder, delighted, ironic, and perplexed as they may be, but it is the colour that dazes you. Her eyes are green—absurdly green, mallard duck green—it’s a green that has a way of fading to grey as her thoughts move on but in the first moments of effervescence her eyes flash with fresh emerald amusement. That autumn, and in the seasons to follow, and if you follow Babba’s line on this, it often feels as if Karin is investing each of us with a talent, an intelligence, a cleverness we may not actually have, but we seem to have, when Karin confers it upon us, staring with her very green eyes into our own. Many years later, when I date someone who will become a movie star, I will be acutely reminded of the smile-with-your-eyes sparkle of Karin Friday. It is a somewhat dazzling smirk, conscious of many angles, and absolutely aware, I think, of its own phenomenal appeal.

  ~

  The morning sun gleams a few minutes before disappearing in fog, then drizzle, then rain. At noon, having searched the island, to find it empty, and sensing worse weather to come, we begin to pack the dory. “Cyrus Mair,” says Karin. “Are you there? Are you coming?”

  Back at the sodden fire pit, Cyrus sits unmoving in the rain. He’s been listening for some minutes to the cassette in the Walkman, his hands held tight to the headphones.

  “Cyrus?”

  “Just second,” he says. “Stop talking.”

  “Stop talking?” Gail in rubber boots is pushing out the loaded dory. “Why—so we can hear ourselves get soaked?”

  Cyrus has gone very still so he might listen to “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones. Finally he glances up to say, “We could do this.”

  “Do what?” says Karin. “Make tapes or get soaked?”

  “Make songs.”

  Karin looks at me, perplexed, then to Cyrus, whereupon she is provoked to ask, in a tone both charmed and frazzled, “How can we possibly do that?”

  ~

  The next montage, in my mind, explodes with the rackety audacity that starts up a Clash song. It’s the moment when some crumb-bum kid in a basement finally solves the opening chords of “Clash City Rockers” and plays them over and over, fast and fuzzy, astonished to generate in her basement the same charge of energy she has so far experienced only from the recording itself. As her strummed chords propel us forward, heedless of wrong notes or screeches of feedback, I will hurry over times, turning the happenings of many months into a few paragraphs. There we are, looting the Mair family library for its overflow volumes, driving them downtown, and hawking them at the used bookstores on Hollis and Barrington streets, with the proceeds purchasing a scrappy old Telecaster at Herb’s Music on Gottingen. There we are again, in cross-dissolving one-shots, phoning to arrange weekend rehearsals, picking out chord progressions from vinyl records, learning bass lines, gamely loading our second-hand gear into car trunks on snowy streets, setting up at someone’s house party, bouncing off the drum kit, knocking a floor lamp into a living-room wall, sweaty with encores.

  A case could be made that Karin’s mix-tape, which was copied and recopied and passed from hand to hand like a sacred relic, was the ur-artifact of the Halifax punk scene—that some rough magic migrated from inside those songs to inside ourselves. And in certain drunken moods I have attributed the city’s entire alternative-rock renaissance to that single cassette tape. But the truth was that kids everywhere in Halifax-Dartmouth were swapping tapes, forming bands, and putting on shows. Rising in the city generally was a reaction against the soft schmaltz of Boston and Kansas and Chicago. Across the sea, London was calling—and we lived for their gods and voices. Punk galoots soon sprang down our sidewalks in safety pins and chopped green hair. Poppets lolled in fishnet stockings, spiked bracelets, black-eyeliner. Skinhead yobs spouted Crass and Kafka.

  Who would you have met—and how would they have looked—if you were walking these weeks on Grafton Street? There were two brothers, Torben and Orville Fludd, who were English punks, transplanted from Bethnal Green, and famed in Halifax as the real deal. The brothers Fludd were in perpetual sibling skirmish—they slam-danced with their hands in their pockets—and formed a thrash-punk band called Scum. They were slight and feisty, obstinate about dark vinegar on their fish and chips, and spoke in working-­bloke slang: “The Silver Hornets, they’re bloody brill, yeah?” “There you go again, talking shite and banging on about the Hornets. Basically playin’ wif your generals is what fat is, you fucking plonker.” “No, mate, they’re pure dead brilliant so whyn’t you fuck off?” There was Beamish Mingo, a hulking guy I’d known in Boy Scouts, balding at seventeen, who made himself over into a skinhead, cleanly attired in a singlet, suspenders, black jeans, and gleaming Doc Martens. He performed as Eins Zwei Drei! and would later move to Winnipeg to follow a career in art history. There were New Wavers—Jimmy Lavender Boots, Gina Sleath, Angela Silver, Helen Hopday—and a slew of hardcore punkers like Mosey and Posey and a kid with a Mohawk who called himself Gash Ragged.

  We played these first years at Woden’s Nog, one of the few places downtown that booked non-union music. It was a second-­floor coffee shop, a bohemian embassy of sorts, managed by Astrid Whynot, ex-girlfriend of Theo Jones. She was a noted balladeer and lighting designer who taught part-time at the Halifax Folklore Centre. In those early years, Woden’s Nog fit into an expanding calculus within the city. I remember the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium showing Amarcord in their Sunday night film series. Down the street, on the third floor of the Student Union Building, was the Dalhousie fantasy role-playing society, home to stanky war gamers happy to clear up the difference between a trance state and astral projection. At Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Cinema, you might be disturbed by Eraserhead or Kagemusha. Deep downtown was the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where Yankee profs practised conceptual frottage and the student body hosted droning noise-rock bands from Toronto. And soon to open was Backstreet Amusements, a hole-in-the-wall arcade of video games, alterna-misfits, and all-purpose punk mojo. Red Herring Cooperative Books, the Khyber building, the Seahorse Tavern, the college radio station ckdu—all of these contributed to a counterculture musically presided over by the bands from those years: the Flipperbabies, the Clap, the Swankers, Scum, Headless Inchball Blue, 12XU, Straight New Blister, Murder and the Cats, and, of course, the Silver Hornets, who were fronted by singer-songwriter Jeremy Horvath. With Liz, his art college girlfriend, Jeremy moved in beauty like the night, sharply solemn with his Fred Perry shirts, punk-pop riffs, a Rickenbacker Capri.

  We in the Common Room were aware of these older kids, we were learning the sets of the city, but no one really knew us or who we were. We were at once within and without the scene. In the space of a winter we came together, a set unto ourselves. Recruited into our ranks were Babba Zuber, because she had a van, and Tom Waller, because of his electro-­technical meticulousness. We thought we could do anything—we had fantasy conclusions for our projects—we thrilled ourselves with our hope. The Common Room became a place in our collective head and we were all learning how to get there. We had something more in common: we didn’t care if we were misunderstood. As adolescents, each of us was contending with a jumble of conflicting personal conceptions, but the Common Room liberated us from these conflicts—or at least freed us from having to worry about conflicts—because within it we were simply contagiously happy to learn what one another were thinking. And as interests became apparent, our jumbles were given direction. We became sarcastic and assured and worked up vocabularies and amusements all our own. We understood certain kinds of experiences in the same way, and we were willing to consider other kinds of experiences in new ways, even ways that hadn’t yet finished developing. We filtered details out of the world—details from movies and songs and books we liked—and mixed them into forms of meaning beyond the assumptions of our classmates or parents or teachers. It was all a newness, I recall how fresh everything seemed—how the world seemed to assemble itself for our exploration—and a fragile-but-­growing sense of
possibility. Essentially, we sought forms and structures by which we might understand the world and articulate ourselves, and one of these forms and structures, I was sensing, was this very group of friends itself.

  So let me say why the Common Room meant so much to me. My early years had been shaky. By the time I was in kindergarten I was aware my family had fault lines that would result in my mother splitting from my father. I was able to deal with this because I could jump higher and run faster than a lot of kids. Then I could no longer jump and run and I was put into casts and crutches for two years. Mobile again at eight, at ten I would lose my uncle—my closest ally in the house—and my parents would separate again. My family divided into two households: Mom-Faith-and-Katie versus Dad-Carolyn-­Bonnie-­and-Me. I would then be grateful for the kinetics of tennis, but would come to realize, like Karin before me, that many of my competitors had little life outside tennis, and that some—even the high achievers—were considered gorky and socially dubious. During middle adolescence, I was coping by doing massive amounts of drugs and disconnecting from my family, from school, from all regularly scheduled programming. Why? My notions of myself, and my own possibilities had always been very different from those my family, my friends, and most of Halifax had for me. This identity dissonance disappeared, of course, as it did for most teenagers, when drunk or stoned, but I was conscious that continuing with such procedures invited predicament. I really do think it was only through my friendships in the Common Room that I was successfully reintroduced into mixed society. These fabulists seemed like the only people who might possibly understand me. My friends were giving me a new identity—or they were giving me a new way, in fact multiple ways, to think of my identity, and my inside hunch was that such coevals would help me better become myself. Cyrus once remarked on the irony that, no matter how we might carry the world around in our heads, the world would never carry us around in its head. But I knew my colleagues and comrades in the Common Room would in their thoughts carry me, like Saint Christopher carrying travellers across a river. My God—to have a circle of friends within which my fledgling thoughts might find expression, discover their balance, and take wing was a tremendous deliverance for me. Cyrus and Karin, Gail and Brigid, Babba and Tom—they were highly cherishable items in my world. I gave my heart to them because they gave the possibilities of my life back to me.