by Alex Pugsley
~
The end of that summer was full of change. We were fluctuating, life was varying, and The Common Room itself was closing. People were leaving town, travelling into the world, flying into places far flung and cities unfamiliar. We were dispersing, differentiating, disbanding. The Changelings would last only seventeen gigs, from winter Grade 11 through summer Grade 12, our last concert played at half-strength, without Karin or Gail, at a rainy talent night at the St. Mary’s Boat Club. Music was turning over. In the flicker of a few years Sid Vicious was dead, Paul Weller had become a rhythm-and-blues artist, and Jeremy Horvath, after a few detours into addiction, was on his way to becoming a real estate lawyer in New Canaan, Connecticut. The brief punk vogue in the city was done. I remember running into Robby Horvath, Jeremy’s little brother and the bassist for the Silver Hornets, as he wandered baked out of his mind from a Dalhousie orientation session, slit-eyed and giggling, listening to something called UB40 on a Sony Walkman, the device ubiquitous now, his wavy red hair done up in Rasta dreads and beads and elastics, his headphones leaking sounds of snare hits and saxophone. He was carelessly humming along to a sluggish lament about Tyler-is-guilty-the-white-judge-has-said-so and I felt a gross distortion of the zeitgeist. Mine was not nostalgia for an age yet to come, as the Buzzcocks lyric goes, it was truly for a moment that had so swiftly come and gone. Musical trends cycle fast, I know, as fast as it takes a kid to clatter through high school, but I remember a feeling of queasy betrayal and dislocation. Why should punk be so quickly dumped? And why should Grafton Street co-opt every move from Carnaby, making over our styles to fit the dubby rhythms of Reggae, the blitzings of the New Romantics, the blancmange of the Synthpoppers? Punk Rock seemed to speak to the raw contingencies of Halifax, in all its rip-roaring gritty who-gives-a-fuck wildness. And yet in its wake soon splashed a waterish New Wave, the bars and clubs flooding with do-it-yourself pop combos like Jumper, The Fade Aways, and The Thunderhouse Blues Band, this last act, created around the boy-next-door appeal of Boyden Burr, an immensely and, for some, incomprehensibly, popular bar band that would regularly headline The Middle Deck, The Shore Club, and the great Palace itself. These bands were cocky and talkative and looking to party, theirs was a music of cover tunes and happy hour, leggings and blazers, encores and last-call-to-the-bar—the good-time vibe a gateway to misbehaviour of all kinds and prejudices. It was in her paid guesting gigs with Thunderhouse that Karin Friday would become known in the province, hosting a three-night home stand over Chester Race Week, performing on morning radio, and showing up in the weekend arts sections of the newspapers. In Halifax, as elsewhere, beauty creates interest and so it went with Karin Friday. Catch-lines for these features, at least in my mind, would trend toward “Pretty Girl Travels Fast” or “Cutie Ditches Oddballs” for there was a sense developing commonly that new opportunities were opening for our lead singer. This later version of Karin would coincide with a time when the city’s downtown, once a mix of boho eclecticism and stately establishment, would develop over the decades into a theme park for university kids—essentially a movable drinking game for twentysomethings—as it remains today.
~
A Closing Scene: Public Gardens, Streets Various, and, finally, the Horsefield. It is the first Wednesday in September in the sun-bright hours before twilight and as near as I can determine we Common Roomers are dotted all over creation. Barbara Zuber walks along Hirtle’s Beach with her cottage sweetheart, a divorced scallop fisherman, considering his proposal of marriage. After a second summer in the Naval Reserves, Gail Benninger shops in the McGill University Bookstore in Montréal, pulling from the shelves a copy of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Tom Waller journeys toward Jadwin Hall in Princeton, New Jersey, where he will begin to pursue, as he is still pursuing, the Higgs Boson. And Cyrus Mair is—who knows where? The last I remember him was after the final Changelings gig—Cyrus on Benzedrine in the rain, lost in fury, throwing amps and gear in the back of the van. And me—I have gone on to spend the afternoon with Rasta Robby Horvath in the Public Gardens, smoking spliffies, talking music, and I walk out of its iron gates quite zonked, the world ablaze with Day-Glo pixels, creating itself every few moments, and I glimpse Karin Friday as she emerges from a press of people along Spring Garden Road. Her hair is long and loose and sun-lightened, with front-wisps pure white, eyes green-glinting in the sun. She wears a sleeveless gingham blouse, cut-off jeans, barefoot in Birkenstocks. When first I met her, a few years before, she seemed to arrive out of the world’s future. Here on the sidewalk she looks as if she has come out of the city’s past, for she has swung from Tomboy Punkette to Hippie Chick Granola Supreme—I have an impression generally of feather earrings, braided friendship bracelets, fading toenail polish. Whichever—she is in the full summer of her beauty and, as she moves to her Vespa, one hand holding her full-face helmet, the other wiping back a rush of hair, she is sort of continuously memorable. I have no idea what I say in my opening remarks, nor how floaty and spaced out are my follow-ups, reconnecting with contingent reality only after some minutes when I am behind Karin on her scooter, in her spare helmet, and listening to her Walkman as we motor down South Park and Inglis streets, Karin waving here and there at honking cars, now turning along Beaufort to race along the pavement beside the ocean inlet and railway tracks, through sleepy streets and the scent of family gardens, cooling barbecues, a sweep of darkling lawn. Everything seems a piece with summertime abundance, green leafiness all round, the city wide open, as if there are still weeks of summer on either side of us. I am listening to the final song of her mix-tape, “Why Can’t I Touch It?” by the Buzzcocks, electric guitars trading riffs amid the hiss and flutter of the old magnetic tape, and I take in a number of synesthetic associations—the scooter’s side mirrors blinking with daylight, a pink smell of shrubs and roses, the blue shale and clover of the railway cut, the fragrance of a shadowing tree as we round the corner, a flutter of loose butterflies squishing briefly into our faces, and I feel the entire evening seep and sparkle around me in a kind of fantasia all along the dip and rise of Beaufort Avenue. I sit close behind my driver, my arms around her waist, both of us happy, pleased to be with the other, and I’m aware of clean cotton and perfect girlhood and the perfume of her shampoo. Living in a house of many sisters, I know the colours and keynotes to a superfluity of shampoos, everything from Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and Wella Balsam through to Alberto-VO5, Lemon Up, and Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific. From Karin I sense the greenish smell of Clairol Herbal Essence and this coupled with her hippie chick makeover sets off thoughts of waterfalls and damsels, circlets of flowers and pagan meadows. I contemplate the lacy white bra she wears, the shoulder-straps for which are flagrantly visible against the fabric of her gingham blouse, and I remember days when we smoked dope and drank and one night we were making out on the stairs of her back porch, her mother out of town, and we’d flirted randomly, truly, drunkenly, her blouse open, Karin undoing the worn plastic button on the front-release of this selfsame bra, the swell of her breasts I kissed as she tried to calm her breathing when I was kneeling down, moving her skirt above her hips and kissing wetly between her thighs as she pushed herself closer, her hands in my hair and another midnight besides, on an island beyond Babba’s cottage, on the last of our group sleepovers, in the flaming light of a beach fire when Karin after swimming was changing from her wet bathing suit and I saw how her pubic hair had been trimmed, the shaved area provoking a few pinkish stubbles on the inmost line of her thigh and I wondered at such grownup grooming decisions, and wondered, too, what she was thinking to show such sights to me. For she was aware of it, I’m sure, we were aware of each other in most moments, and now stopping her scooter within the greenery of the Horsefield, removing her helmet, and fingering some hair from her eyelashes, Karin turns away from me, almost as if she is privy to my run-on ideas and uncertain of their consequence, closing her eyes to angle her face toward the warmth of the setting sun.
I c
lose my eyes, too, letting the sun blaze the insides of my eyelids scarlet, and for a few moments I feel as if I am thinking back on this person from a time when I will no longer know her—sensing a time in the future when I would be recalling these very scenes.
“You ever been to France?”
Opening my eyes, I say, “I was just thinking that.”
“If you’ve been to France?”
“If you were going to ask me about France.” Pulling from my pocket the remains of the joint I smoked with Robby Horvath, I light it and offer it to Karin. “You?”
“I did,” says Karin, squeezing the roach between finger and thumb. “I just asked you.”
“I mean are you going to France?”
“It’s a plan, obviously.” She sucks on the roach, one eye squinting from the smoke. “As one does.”
“So who were those guys you were waving to?”
“Oh,” says Karin, exhaling a single plume of smoke. “Just some guys who think they know me. Happens a lot now.”
“Totally. Guys are noticing me a lot now, too. But whatever. Not important.”
She swings her lower jaw to one side, quizzical, regarding me as if I might be someone peculiar, then returns the roach to me. “There was a psychic at Babba’s craft fair today.”
“A real psychic?”
“She said I was a very new soul.”
“Where were you before that?”
“Um, on another planet.” Karin touches at a red blemish beneath her eye. I am perversely grateful to see this blemish, an incipient pimple, on the edge-point of her cheekbone. “Probably you were, too, Tudball.”
“Probably. And Kelly Gallagher, what’s she?”
“Oh,” says Karin. “She’s an old soul. She’s a restless old soul, that Kelly.” Karin shakes her head when I offer her a last toke. “So can I ask you a question? You know your friend Cyrus Mair?”
“He’s so unfair, that Cyrus Mair. That psychotic scheming freak.”
“That’s the one. Have you seen him?”
“Not so much. I think he’s in an attic somewhere, you know, biting the heads off pigeons. I called him a couple times.”
“Yeah,” says Karin. “That’s a little iffy considering he hasn’t answered his phone in three weeks. As one does.” Karin tugs on the frayed hem of her cut-offs so that a loose and flapping front pocket is properly covered. Then she glances at me, her eyes revealing some concern. “Everything’s a little drastic at the moment. Not that it hasn’t happened before. There just seems to be a bunch of extenuating circumstances this time around.”
“He’s good at those.”
“He doesn’t really talk to you and then maybe you’ll get a long, weird letter from him in a year explaining it all.”
“He’s a weird guy.”
“Oh,” says Karin. “Everyone’s a weird guy. And I’m not sure how everything works, okay? I don’t always have the right Super Decoder ring.”
I am nodding, thinking what to say next, when I simply return her Walkman. “Your mix-tape, Madame.”
“Thank you, kind sir.” She reaches for it. “What would I do without my mix-tape?” Her hand closes around the Walkman, by chance her middle finger pressing the rewind button. There is a sound of high-speed whirring, a sharp click, and then the spools abruptly slow and stop. Karin opens the casing to see the worn-out tape twisted off the capstan shaft and coiled beneath the pinch roller. “It’s busticated?” Karin picks at the damaged tape. “Crapsticks. It got eaten by the machine. I guess it was going to happen sooner or later. It’s just—that was my favouritest thing.” With a shrug, she closes the casing, a ribbon of exposed tape trickling in the wind, and drops the Walkman in the front basket of her scooter. Karin gazes at the cassette, abstracted. “I know this sounds silly. But all my life I’ve wanted big boobs.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Oh, Aubrey, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s better when it’s just me and Babba and Boober. Not that we’re always having, you know, life conversations but I think I understand things better with girls.”
“Boys are gross?”
“Oh, girls aren’t so great either. I mean you can tell a lot about a girl by how she gets you out of the way to put on makeup at a mirror—” Karin wipes at her eye, boldly, pushing a finger deeply into its socket, then, as if she feels she can’t sustain such boldness, she loops a tress of hair behind her ear. “And boys are their own thing. But you guys are different. Most guys are usually scared to commit to stuff. Because what if it doesn’t work out? Then they look bad. Then they think they suck. I know I do.” Bending forward, she pulls again on the hem of her cut-offs. “Like the guy in Toronto who made that mix-tape. He talked about doing lots of stuff. But he never did any of it. You guys did.”
“You did, too, Wiggins. You were there.”
“That’s not what I mean. Because you guys keep turning yourselves into so many projects and I’m always trying to be as good as you. But you’re always so much better at everything. And I’m not. I mean I know you guys can be a little woo-woo but you’re still out there trying all your spiffy balls and—I don’t know—maybe I fucked up all my gizmos because I’m not always as together and with it as you guys think I am.” She sighs. “Plus the whole love-sex-babies thing? I’m not really as up on that as I should be.”
“Probably you have to figure it out tonight. Before it gets dark. What’re you doing later?”
“Tonight?” With a backward toss of her head, Karin indicates the ocean behind her. “Some wingding with Boyden. His pals at the yacht squadron.”
“Extenuating circumstances. Hog roasts. I see.” I have noticed a butterfly, faintly flapping, on the Vespa’s front fender. Squatting to examine it, I see it’s full-grown, mustard-coloured, and likely from the swarm we motored through.
“Tudball,” says Karin. “Tell me something. And I know this shouldn’t be a big, giant mystery but—Aubrey—are you even listening?”
My outward attention is still on the butterfly—its thorax has been dented into an edge of the steel fender—but inwardly I am considering Karin and all her queries and variables, her unisex flirting, her sundry sense of humour, her responses to life, these really have been like revelations to me, the way her eyes gleam with girliness, seeking to share the moment with you—and all through this evening I have been grateful to feel the joy of her looks—but ultimately I am sort of glum and disappointed. What bothers me is that she is able to smile so easily—and they aren’t dishonest smiles at all but they come so quickly, so reflexively, they seem a reaction to almost everything and I want, finally, to be on the other side of the smiles that matter. For I feel as if I am just one of several young men she keeps in motion around her, the rest of whom are all taller and more striking than I am. And to learn that she is going around with Boyden Burr and his crowd—the great fraternity of popped collars and backward baseball caps—more than dismays me. It seems a betrayal of genius. All the different guys who drift in and out of Karin’s life, some in a platonic, recreational way, many not, the transience of the relations, the almost disposable quality of the social life, I find curious, beautiful, and appalling. And kneeling in the Horsefield with a jammed-up butterfly I realize that not only will I never sleep with Karin Friday, and of course this has been something I have thought about—a lot—but I feel I will never really know her again at all.
“When I was little,” says Karin, watching me as I begin to softly blow on the butterfly. “I thought butterflies were flowers that escaped.” With these words, the creature slips off the fender-edge. Alighting briefly on Karin’s elbow, it rises above our heads and follows an erratic up-and-down flight pattern before gently floating off toward the sea and horizons unknown. “You have a big heart,” says Karin, staring after the butterfly. “Aubrey McKee.”
“Got to start somewhere.” I rise to her. “Now what was it? Wha
t’s your big, giant mystery?”
But Karin has shifted into daydreaming quiet, her face half in shadow, the sunset off her right shoulder, and though she is still vaguely smiling at me, her smile seems to have lost some force around its edges, as if her thoughts have moved on but her expression hasn’t quite caught up yet. She takes a step forward and lays her forehead on my shoulder, resting it there a second or two, as if out of respect, or pretend respect, I’m not sure. “Not important,” she says, taking the spare helmet from me and plopping it in the basket with the Walkman. “That was my moment and I lost it.”
She pulls on her own helmet, swings her leg over the scooter, and spins the key in the ignition. For a half-second I see my own face—sunburned, scruffy—in the fleeting world of one of her side-mirrors. And for a last time I consider the charms of Karin Friday, an enchantment of spiffy gizmos, crumpled butterflies, crapsticks and budding zits, blonde wisps and bright green eyes, though I am reminded it’s a green that sometimes fades to grey, as it fades now, and, not knowing what next to do, I push a swoop of hair off her eyebrow. “Funny little world we live in, Wiggins.”
“Mmm-hmm,” says Karin, closing her helmet’s visor and soon to vanish in a slanting shaft of light. “Everybody does.”
~
It was many years later, very much ex post facto, when I’d passed into other vernaculars, when my connection with these associates was mostly attenuated and the Common Room demolished, that I received an anonymous-looking package in the mail, forwarded to my new address, half a world away from Halifax, containing the letter at the end of this section. It was never a candidate for “The Halifax Book,” in fact it dates from a few years after that endeavour, but I include it here because, in many respects of mood and fluency, it seems an essential document of our life and soft times. It was written in blue ballpoint pen on nine pages of a yellow legal pad, dashed off the summer of the writer’s third year at Queen’s University, and shown here for the first time.