Aubrey McKee

by Alex Pugsley

  ~

  Cyrus was the voice that said we could do it. All it required was our deciding to do it. It didn’t matter that it went well. What mattered was that it went at all. We turned to music to see what we could make of it without really knowing what that would be. The second-floor ballroom in the old Mair house became our head office, our home base and rehearsal space. There we played till our fingers blistered from our Fender strings. Afternoons disappeared into evenings, evenings into midnights, for no one left rehearsal till a song was written. Like Karin, like me, like all of us, Cyrus Mair had diverse versions of himself. He had different modes and humours, the pitch and rhythm and weirdness of which sometimes eluded me—manic and jokey one day, distant and sulky the next, truant another—but the guy, as in everything, was committed. He had some kind of vision, you felt that, and he kept in motion a number of obsessions. Karin became addicted to his hijinks and quizzically fascinated by Cyrus Mair. She called him Charlie Flippit and Cyprus Mail and made up nonsense rhymes about him. “Cyrus Mair is who knows where, and if you dare to breathe the air, don’t be scared to breathe it bare, once upon a Cyrus Mair.” To these she added little familiar pokes and prods of his person, and Cyrus, who up to this point in public life generally behaved as if he were trapped in a stalled elevator with a stranger, who had around him that nervous force-field safeguarding his personal space, Cyrus behaved as if this touchy-feely contact had always belonged to his day-to-day. Something about Karin opened up possibilities of engagement in him, in me, in all of us. It was a feeling of special destiny she gave us—or maybe we extended such sovereignty to her so that she might give it back to us. Over the next few years, more than a few problematics would emerge regarding this girl Friday, but in this first winter her flair and talent seemed always at the centre of things. For Cyrus, Karin was the thrillingest girl of the open era, a phenomenon beyond the range of his experience, and I think he swooned privately at each sight of her. He continued to speak of her as a genius of life and from this judgment I don’t think he ever wavered. While I thought her intuitive sense of people genuine, and was often amazed by how swiftly and wordlessly she understood a moment, I did not think it genius. If at all she had a gift, it was a knack for making a man feel most alive in her company. Whether it was tennis or penny-a-point Hearts, I was never really sure what kind of game Karin Friday was playing. But for Cyrus Mair, she was all the game in the world and I knew now what he’d wished for—of course he’d wished for Karin Friday.

  ~

  Scene. A Sunday in December, the Mair House on Tower Road. Somewhere on the first floor, Emlyn Mair, resolutely hard-of-hearing, scrutinizes both her investment statement and various university applications for Cyrus, plotting his advancement. Cyrus, Karin, and I can be located in the second floor ballroom. To relieve the feeling of darkened confinement, the ballroom windows have been stripped of their garbage bag coverings and the room glows with snow-reflected sunlight, ceiling cobwebs twinned with their own shadows. The shrouded furniture has been cleared to the corners. On the threadbare Oriental carpet is an assortment of musical equipment: three mike stands with damaged-­but-working Shure microphones, a Fender bass, three Peavey amps, a miscellaneous drum kit bandaged together with duct tape, a Sony boom box, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, several cassette tapes, and a children’s turntable with built-in speakers. The general effect is rather like a derelict historical house hosting the remains of a pawn shop’s going-out-of-business sale.

  Cyrus sits with a Telecaster in a decaying wingback chair. Near his shoes on the carpet is a speckled oak leaf, a flattened kernel of movie-theater popcorn, a plastic tortoiseshell pick, an unopened pack of chandelier light bulbs, a busted ehx Big Muff pedal, a ruptured chestnut, two tiny blots of pigeon crap, an X-acto knife, filaments of blond hair, and a half-empty pint bottle of Mount Gay rum. He is silent, listening. Karin sits at an elderly grand piano, also listening, as I drop the needle again on Love Bites by the Buzzcocks, the three of us trying to work out the guitar solo to “Nostalgia.” Karin manages the first few notes on the piano keys then slumps in frustration at the solo’s rapid cadenza. We are stubborn about performing only originals at our first real show, but cover songs for later shows and for encores, we’ve agreed, are permissible. If, that is, we can teach ourselves the chords and notes, and a few solos, “Baby Baby,” “Promises Promises,” “Nostalgia,” are proving resistant to our ambitions. “What solo do you want to do instead?” asks Cyrus, after an hour of attempts, and I know Karin will say what she always says, and what she does say: “‘I Wanna Be Sedated.’ Is there another solo?”

  Although she has natural talent as a pianist and vocalist, Karin is shaky on guitar and the Ramones solo just mentioned is probably the only solo she knows how to play. It is, very probably, even if you have never held a guitar, the only solo you know how to play, because the solo for “I Wanna Be Sedated” is pretty much just one single note double picked as the rhythm section slams through the changes. That song closes out the first side of Karin’s mix-tape, a copy of which I have in the tape deck of my family’s car outside, and I volunteer to retrieve it for the key reference. Out on Tower Road it has begun to snow, a light dusting that thickens into flurries. From the second-floor windows I begin to hear the ringing one-note solo of “I Wanna Be Sedated,” as played by Karin and Cyrus, and looking up at the darkened house through the snowflakes softly falling, within the single-lighted room I can see them madly pogoing up and down, their bodies jolting in and out of frame, the moment gorgeous and surreal, like an advent calendar window opened to reveal a shining scene, a signature postcard moment from The Common Room in December of our first year together.

  ~

  The Common Room Presents Four Bands for Five Bucks. This is the announcement we poster all over the city—that we tape in elevators on the Dalhousie campus, tack on the bulletin boards of the six high schools, and staple into the plywood walls around construction sites everywhere. It is a first concert, a first not-in-a-basement-but-a-real-club gig, and we are sort of terrified, sort of whatever-let’s-do-it. The bands this night are Scum, the Swankers, the Submissives, and us, the Changelings—Cyrus, Karin, Gail, and me. Held on a frozen night, two days after Valentine’s, the show begins with very few in the audience. I remember Torben and Orville in Scum, the sloppy art-punk openers, fighting over their single microphone, gobbing on each other, foreheads bumping, petty gods of misrule, during their encore the room finally filling up with the all-ages crowd, kids pre-drunk, front-loaded and tipsy, confused by the Fludd brothers who, for their finale, hacksaw a feedbacking Stratocaster in two. More appreciated are the Swankers and their raw covers of “Substitute,” “Strange Town,” and “Something Else.” Next are the Submissives, a ghostly trio of damaged sisters from Kline Street, gothy and glossolalic, their three-part harmonies sweetly setting up the crash of our arrival.

  We come on last, the monitors broken and torn from the earlier bands, stage lights blinding, the place low-dangled with cables and cords, the room now chockablock with folks—Gina Sleath, Bunker Burr and his little brother Boyden, Ricken Philips, my sisters Faith and Katie and their friend September Abbott, and at the back of the room Jeremy Horvath in a smart suit, slinking, intent. We don’t care, we’ve shorn our hair, all of us in black, me in zippers and chains, Karin in a catsuit with silver spiked hair, green eyes kohl-rimmed—a Tomboy Punkette. Gail on the drums is remote and intense, her silence belied by a constant jagged energy, keeping time with wicked impulse, as if this is what she has been seeking all along. Cyrus himself a demented choirboy, vicious and vulnerable, nothing short of spastic, surprising everyone with what is released in him, slam-dancing on and off the stage as if the concussiveness of each shoulder bump will bust him out of some cocoon, his eyes madly gleeful. I’m on vocals for the first of our songs and I swear furiously, uttering every foul word in my young mind, feeling soundly right in my temper and tantrums, in this profane invention, for there isn’t anyone there
to kick me off the stage or out of the match. For we are the match. Our songs zip by faster than imagined. No sooner am I jumpy about the bass runs in “Sudafed” than I am charging into and out of them and we rush into what is next on the set list, “Head Tripper,” “Clanger,” “Ace Face,” “Head Case,” “Broken Steven,” “Fandroid,” “Dead End Ends,” and then we are gasping, damp, looking around for an encore, knowing we’ve arrived at our final song, “Changeling Girl.”

  The song in its first iteration is built around a descending progression from E to E-flat to C-sharp minor and back to E-flat, all played as barre chords sweat-sliding down the fretboard. Cyrus’s notion is to make two songs into one, fitting this first progression inside the chorus of “Dead End Ends,” which, once transposed in key, proceeds from E to E-flat to C-sharp minor to B major. “Changeling Girl” starts fast, establishes its hook, then the chorus slows and falls apart, depriving the audience of its bedlam energy, as if the song has faltered to some random ending. Then with stray notes still sustaining, Gail kicks the drum and I down-stroke the bass, the two of us locking into groove, and the vocals resume, Cyrus screaming into a microphone and playing the transposed chords of the previous song, the B string now open as a dominant drone, the sections combining so Karin can sing the chorus of “Dead End Ends,” floating her vocals over “Changeling Girl,” all the while our tempo rising, Karin finally ripping into the only guitar solo she knows, twangling the open E string, the combined effect jangly and eerie and perfect to me. It is an idea of perfection at the same time it is a perfection, a pandemonium, the stage busy with feedback and distortion, the crowd pogoing, and I can feel the wooden floor sagging and springing, flimmer and thud, kids bouncing into the air, what is happening in the room a kind of metamorphosis—it is a glorious moment, berserk and unbounded, one of the great events of my young life, and there is Karin in centre-stage communion with the crowd, her guitar still ringing, her voice leading the audience in singalong, and finally it’s done and I am wandering off the stage, wet with sweat, the windows streaming with condensation and Karin bumps through the ecstatic noise and crowd to stare at me, glaring at me almost, as if I might be responsible for the crowd, the music, everything. “McKee!” she screams into my temple. “Who did this?” “We did?” “We did, though,” says Karin, hugging me close, our chests pressed together, her arms tight around me and between her shoulder blades I can feel her heart beating, Karin kissing not my face but my neck a little below my ear. “We did this!” And as I look to Karin, her smile to see, eyelashes wet-pointed, I feel we really have done it, we’ve conjured a concert out of nothing, produced a night, and I realize, all the notes and chords from this sequence fading, that Karin Friday is magic and everyone in that room is in love with her.

  ~

  We were famous in the city, we were Halifamous, we were the punk band with the gorgeous lead singer, and kids from all over—suburban preps, heavy metal sluggards, bluegrass hippies—came to see our shows. What thrilled me about a Changelings gig was the realization of the event, the arrant circumstance, the doing of the thing. In the crash and splendor of our shows, we transcended the grubby circumstances of Grafton Street, creating moments which at once matched and expressed a restless-in-all-directions punk wonderment. There was a Kraftwerk lyric from Karin’s mix-tape, “We are the robots,” but in the world of Halifax, we were the robots. We were the clash and jam and damned, we were the Generation X—those were our stiff little fingers on the vibrators and sex pistols, that was Karin wearing the x-ray spex. For Karin Friday was a magical name in the city now. She was the girl dancing on the first English Beat record, the comic book sweetheart of a Roy Lichtenstein print. She was that girl you remembered forever and many were the nights you might linger solitary in a car to listen to the end of a radio song because it reminded you of her. She seemed a shooting star who streaked across the sky, fixed in no one’s orbit, and aspirants several and assorted were drawn into her gravities. She was eighteen, no longer a tweenster kid but a maturing adult female and probably fully aware of herself as gorgeous. Karin was luminous, she owned any stage she joined, if she wanted, and wild was she to hold, though she seemed tame. “And so it begins,” said my older sister. “The Karin Friday Invitational.” And Babba Zuber: “If you look like Karin, you can pretty much go out with whoever you want.” This being Halifax, there were differences of opinion. Mosey and Posey and the hardcore followers of Scum would have allowed that Karin was a dreamy vocalist but I’m sure they dismissed her as some dilettante tennis girl playing at anarchy. Howard Fudge, a hulking endomorph drug-dealer and my one-time mentor, famously did not care for Karin Friday. “That scooter girl,” he said to Gail and me on the afternoon I bought a last dime bag from him. “The chick with the eyes? She’s a little heartbreaker, no question. But she’s just too much.” Gail asked what he meant—too much what? “Too much bullshit.” “Bullshit comes in many forms, my friend,” said Gail, quick to defend a pal and confidante. But Howard Fudge, whose Fudge-headedness over time often proved relevant, may have construed something for I have not really detailed those instances when Karin was too much, when she seemed to force her giggles, when her girliness became presentational and semi-annoying, when phone calls to her were never returned or never referenced, when her impromptu talk-backs to the movie screen felt disingenuous. Of course there were some young women, those who moved in different circles, who risked harsher interpretations.

  “I hate that perfect girl Karin,” Kelly Gallagher confided one night. “She would never be my friend. Even for a second. You can just tell.” For some dissidents, the impulses that motivated Karin Friday’s magic and charm were not so far away from vagary or some strategic thoughtlessness. Later that afternoon, after the purchase of the dime bag, I made some mention of these discrepancies to Gail, musing on Karin’s shape-shifting unpredictability, her flights and quirks, and made the mistake of using Karin’s nicknames for me and Gail. Walking along Summer Street, Gail abruptly stopped and chose to stare at the sidewalk. Every few months Gail had begun delivering once-and-for-all sidewalk pronouncements. These rulings were often introduced by a quick shake of her head, as if to first clear her eyes of delinquent hair, but Gail had been serving in the Naval Reserves for some weeks that summer, sporting a three-quarter-inch brush cut, and in this particular moment there were few curls to shake away. “All you guys are in love with Karin,” she said, finally, conclusively. “You and Cyrus and Jeremy and everybody. You say you aren’t. But you are. And you always will be.” She marched on—she wore that day a frayed cameo choker, vintage dress, and military boots, boots she clomped with authority along the sidewalk. “And the name is Gail. Not Gorbals. Or Birdy. Or Boober. It’s Gail. What are we—the island of misfit toys? No more baby talk! It’s like you doing drugs all the time. When are you going to grow the fuck up?” I knew from last month’s pronouncement that Gail had decided there was within The Common Room a troubling subtext of sexual repression—though, to be fair, a troubling subtext of sexual repression was Gail’s assessment of any number of situations—and she thought our cutesy affinities an exercise in avoidance behaviour. “The Common Room is totally fucked up and incestuous,” she said, speaking, as ever, as if the rest of us were failing to confront some crucial social truth. “There’s some weird fucking telepathy between us, maybe, but I’m not sure I like it. Because it feels like some retarded exercise in group dating! And the Changelings? I don’t know. Everything’s always Cyrus, Cyrus, Cyrus. And I’ll tell you something about that guy. He’s never fucking satisfied. Cyrus Mair? He’s never fucking satisfied with anything. He has to be this little manic-depressive type who goes off hibernating and having nervous breakdowns in his Never-Never Land, thinking everyone’s going to feel sorry for him and all his precious ideas, but excuse me they just aren’t. He’s an enigma. Right. I get it. Whatever. He certainly works pretty fucking hard at it.” Anyone who has been in a band will recognize these intervallic hissy fits and I knew, from pre
vious exchanges, that it wouldn’t matter what I said next—the mere mention of these names had made Gail fretful and reactionary—and, in these moods, Gail could not be argued out of her verdict or position. “And you?” she said. “You’re obsessed with him. In fact, your compulsion-repulsion, thank you very much, is that you’re in love with her and obsessed with him. So—here’s an idea—why don’t you figure out this shit, quit doing drugs, and then talk to me.” Gail and I were phasing in and out of a rather undefined relationship at this time, in the same way Karin and Cyrus were phasing in and out of similar undefinables, and I will add, without whipping out too much detail, that Gail had disencumbered me of my virginity a few weeks before. Although that conjunction, very much an expedient, get-it-over-with affair, was organized by Gail in a spirit of gratuitous experimentation—she was purportedly mixed up with another boy she’d met at Camp Kadimah—I was beginning to understand that very little was gratuitous in modern life. Somebody or other ended up paying for it.