by Greg Rhyno
It’s not until a week later, during the second round of rehearsals, that I fully comprehend Ruth’s warning. It’s quarter to seven, I have a bagful of Great Depression essays I should be marking, and yet here I am listening to a prepubescent guitar player solo enthusiastically and inaccurately on an old Ibanez. The lead singer runs his fingers through his longish hair and prepares to belt out what seems like the song’s millionth chorus: “I-I-I am suf-fer-iiiin’ ...” The irony is palpable.
“Don’t these guys have some kind of time limit?” I ask Steph over the suffering.
“Uh ...” She looks over to Kirsten. Kirsten looks back at me and shrugs. The band finishes, and the three of us clap politely.
“Okay, thank you ... Katharsis,” Steph reads off her clipboard. “We’ll let you know soon. Could you tell Dave his band is on next?”
They unplug and slink back into Rehearsal Room One where the other hopefuls are congregated. There are no windows here in Rehearsal Room Two, but I know that the sun has already set.
“All right,” I announce, “we need to give these guys a signal to stop after we get the general idea. Some of these songs are going on ten minutes.” I look around at the crowded arsenal of instruments—xylophone, timpani, tuba—when I notice the heavy Chinese cymbal hung a few feet away from me. I go to the percussion rack and help myself to a mallet. When the next band comes out, I’m so psyched about my plan, I explain it to them immediately.
“Okay, guys,” I say, “we’re running a little behind, so after three minutes, I’m going to bang on that gong over there so you know it’s time to stop.”
“Nice,” the guitar player—Dave—nods.
“Totally Bonhamesque,” the drummer agrees.
I like these guys already. Dave plugs a well-loved Firebird into the school amp, and it hums with promise. He strums it a couple times to check the tuning, then nods to the other players.
“This one’s a cover,” he says into the mic.
And then something kind of strange happens. Dave starts playing his introductory riff, and I have one of those moments where I totally recognize the song but can’t place it. When the drummer and bass player kick in, Steph and Kirsten are already leagues ahead of me.
“Oh, I love this one!” Kirsten gushes. “Someone told me this song is about Thunder Bay.”
“Have you seen the video for it on Much?” Steph asks her. “The singer is so hot. I think he’s dating Emily Haines from Metric.”
“Contrary to popular belief / The heart’s not a muscle, it’s a barrier reef / and it’s home to a hundred species of grief ...”
When Dave starts singing the lyrics, it twigs, and I know I won’t be able to listen for much longer. It’s not that I don’t like this song. The truth is, I hate how much I love it.
“Just like a road that leads back to the start / There’s no cure for the common cold heart ...”
I look at my wristwatch. Dave’s band hasn’t been playing for more than a minute and a half, but I stand up, sidestep my way through the other instruments, and smash the giant cymbal. It bellows out, louder and longer than I expected. The song disintegrates and Dave looks at me with a little hurt in his eyes.
“Was that three minutes?” he asks into the microphone. “We didn’t even get to the second chorus ...”
I glance at Steph and Kirsten, who also look a little confused.
“Thanks,” I say. “We’ll let you know.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence as we wait for the band to unplug and pack up. I feel terrible all the way through it. Dave’s band wasn’t half bad, and there’s no way they could have known.
“Who’s next?” I ask.
“Jonathan Heyen-Miller,” Kirsten says. “The guy with the banjo.”
The guy with the banjo walks in with a reusable shopping bag overflowing with electronic gear. As he sets up, I explain to him the whole deal with the gong, but I’m not as excited about it as I was before.
“Sure,” he says when I stop talking, “sounds like fun.”
I’m not convinced he’s really listening. He’s all elbows, bent over an effects pedal, plugging in his cord, and adjusting the knobs. He’s a good-looking kid in an unconventional sort of way—tall and skinny, with strategically messy hair. Eventually, he looks up and seems to realize we’re waiting for him to start. He takes off his thick-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses, adjusts his keffiyeh so it doesn’t interfere with his strap, and squints in my direction.
“Aren’t you my brother’s Civics teacher?” he asks into the microphone.
“Oh, yeah,” I remember, “you’re Marshall’s brother.”
“Do you teach music as well?” he booms.
“No, just history.” Unmiked, my voice sounds weak, unauthoritative. Instinctively, I clear my throat.
“Oh.” He raises his eyebrow in a faint gesture of disapproval, and for a minute, he reminds me a little of his father, Dr. Michael D. Heyen, MBA, PhD, and Professor of Economics.
When he begins to play, his confidence is unnerving. The other acts so far have been a little tentative and inexperienced, uncomfortable under our scrutiny, but Jonathan’s fingers move with an easy boldness and his foot taps out perfect time, like he’s played in front of countless crowds. Like we’re not even here. His music is a glassy pointillism at first, minimalist and clean, and I’m reminded that when you take away all the backwoods sodomy, there is something really beautiful about the banjo.
After he builds a good rhythm, Jonathan steps on his pedal once, and then again to loop it. He starts to sing, and while his voice isn’t as trained as his hands, it’s got this fragile quality that complements his playing. He finishes a verse, loops in some layers of vocal harmony, and continues with a second. The song is a little precious, but not without its charm.
“Usually,” he says into the mic, as the music circles around him, “I’d add in some minor chords on the Micro Korg here. Maybe a little violin. I figured it was just an audition, so ...”
And then, as if to compensate, he begins to add more layers of banjo. Soon, he’s looping in pentatonic scales and percussive thumbing. What started out a simple melody has transformed into a swirling monsoon of self-indulgence. It’s been almost three minutes since Jonathan started, and the mallet is weighing heavy in my hand. I look over to Steph and Kirsten, who seem enraptured by what they’ll surely describe later as “completely brilliant,” and decide I’ve had enough. I jump up and hurry through the crowd of instruments. I swing the mallet back and then bring it home.
Lost in his genius, the banjo player is startled by the brassy explosion. He stops playing and steps on his effects pedal a couple times to stop the loops. The song dies abruptly. Steph glares at me with unveiled teenage annoyance, but it’s the look on Jonathan’s face that I find the most disconcerting. His expression changes from mild irritation, to wide-eyed anticipation, and finally to smirking glee, as he watches something just behind me. I turn around to figure out what he’s looking at and discover that, in my eagerness to end the song, I’ve managed to topple the gong somehow, and its metal frame has fallen over and sliced right through the school-crested skin of the marching band’s bass drum.
Jonathan lets out a solitary low whistle. “Nice one.”
I curse, hopefully under my breath, and get up to assess the damage. Steph, Kirsten, and some nosy parkers from Rehearsal Room One gather around the damaged drum. I’ve already started composing the email I’ll have to send to the head of the Music Department when Lois Kimball herself walks into the room with a conductor’s impeccable timing.
“Hi, Peter,” she says. “Thought I’d just come and check on—” In a flash, her cheerful façade fades. “How did that happen?”
“Lois, this was my fault,” I say. “I’m really sorry. I’ll totally pay for it.”
But Lois has something else on her mind.
“You Students’ Council people,” she begins. “Every year, you come into the music room and use our equipment. You don’t
put anything away. You break things. This—” suddenly there’s a tambourine in her hand “—do you have any idea how much this tambourine costs?”
For the record I do. I have the same one at home.
“This is a sixty-dollar tambourine, and I found some ... some joker in Rehearsal Room One banging it off the head of another student!”
“Like I said, Lois, I’m really sorry, but I’m not really a part of Students’ Council, I just came to judge the—”
“And now this!” I cringe as she points toward my fresh damage. “This is a custom-made, twenty-four-inch bass drum skin. Do you have any idea how much this costs?”
I’d say about two or three hundred dollars.
“Our department doesn’t have the budget for this!”
As I promise again to pay for my mistake, and as Lois continues to scold me, Steph, Kirsten, Jonathan, and a few members of a gloomily clad emo band watch our conversation like the world’s most awkward tennis match.
Eventually, Lois leaves, mumbling something about having to speak to Mr. Trimble, and once again, I’m the only adult in a room full of uncomfortable silence.
“Okay!” I say clapping my hands together in a sudden gesture of forced enthusiasm. “Who’s next? Blank Society? Great! Let’s hear it.”
The auditions finally end around quarter to eight. There’s a bit of a bottleneck in departure when the singer from Katharsis gets a nosebleed. As I’m the only one with keys, I have to wait until it’s under control before I can lock up. After the debacle with Lois, I’m not taking any chances. A few other students stay, either out of politeness or because they’re waiting to get a ride from the nosebleeder. We stand around and make small talk as he stems the flow with coarse brown paper towel.
“So ... Mr. Curtis,” a bass player from one of the earlier bands says, “do you play any instruments?”
Steph and Kirsten, the only students with any apparent knowledge about my musical past, are long gone.
“I used to play the drums,” I admit.
“Oh. Cool. Anything else?”
“Nope. Just drums.”
“Oh. Cool,” the bass player says again. “I guess it’s good just to focus on one instrument. You ever play in a band?”
“Not really.” I’m just about done with this line of questioning.
“What kind of music do you listen to?”
That one catches me a little off guard. What kind of music do I listen to now? I know I’m not really old, but when I think about music these days, I start to feel my age. I still love music, but God, do you ever love music the way you did when you were a teenager? When you’re fifteen, you’ve got all these fucked-up feelings and no place to put them, so you pour them into music. You find a song or a voice that says exactly what you want to say, only better and louder. And maybe that voice doesn’t really have all the answers, but for a little while, you believe in it. You trust it. Now that I’m almost thirty, I’ve got more than enough places to put all my fucked-up feelings. I don’t need some twenty-year-old guitar player speaking for me. I don’t trust that voice anymore. I outlived Kurt Cobain.
“I’ve really been into Hank Williams lately,” I tell the bass player, “and Johnny Cash.”
He looks at me the way I imagine he looks at his parents. Admittedly, I’m one of those Johnny Cash fans who can only sing along with ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (the part about shooting a guy to see him die, specifically), but nothing scares off a teenager faster than country and western. The interrogation coagulates just around the same time as the nosebleed, and I herd the kids out of the building.
It’s pitch black already. I haven’t had any dinner yet. As I walk, I weigh my options. While I know there’s some leftover stir fry in my fridge, I’m pretty confident I’ll wind up ordering pizza for one and eating it in front of the television. I think about grabbing a movie on the way home. It’s been a long day, one that cost me a little more than I made, but I feel like I’ve finally escaped.
Video Hutch is one of those independent video rental places that’s become accidentally hip since all the Blockbuster franchises descended upon the city like a plague of blue-and-yellow locusts. Video Hutch employees don’t wear dorky shirts or nametags, and the owners use the somewhat alienating system of alphabetizing by director instead of title. How it’s survived in a cultural wasteland like Thunder Bay is beyond me, but I’m glad it has.
“Jim Jaramusch fan?”
I don’t recognize the woman behind the counter who’s reading the back of my movie pick, Down By Law.
“Kind of. I liked what I saw of Dead Man.”
“Oh, yeah,” she remembers. “Johnny Depp? And that score by Neil Young?” She gives an enthusiastic whistle. “What’s not to like?”
She’s cute, in an unintentional slacker kind of way. Sandy brown hair and pale blue eyes. She’s wearing an old Pixies t-shirt, and I wonder if she’s a grad student at Lakehead. She’s vaguely familiar, but if I ask her if we’ve met before, it’ll come off as a pick-up line. Of course, I want to pick her up, but I don’t want her to think I’m picking her up. Maybe I could ask her about school. Maybe I could tell her how much I like Neil Young and the Pixies. Maybe I could invite her out for a beer at the Phoenix, and then after a couple hours of conversation she’d wind up spending the night at my messy apartment, brushing her teeth with her finger, and sleeping in a borrowed t-shirt. Better yet, maybe she’d take me home to student housing and I’d fall asleep on a futon surrounded by fat, half-melted candles, dead roses, and an oversized Klimt poster. I’m just about to ask her what program she’s in when the bell on the door chimes and I hear a voice say, “Hey, it’s Mr. Curtis ...”
One of my keeners from second period walks in with her mom, and I realize I’m thwarted. I pay for my rental, smile a goodbye to the Video Store Girl, and narrowly avoid an impromptu parent–teacher interview. My basement apartment might be an empty, lonely place, but soon there would be pizza, Jim Jaramusch, and most importantly, no kids.
SIDE A
Salesmen, Cheats, and Liars
“Sorry. No kids tonight. Licensed show.”
Frank’s looking at me like he’s never seen me before in his life. It probably wouldn’t help to tell him I play drums in Giant Killer. He probably wouldn’t remember us, and to be honest, I’m not really sure there is a Giant Killer anymore.
“Come on, Frank. We’re on the list.” I point to a lined sheet of paper he’s got next to the cashbox. Already I can tell that this evening isn’t going to go the way I expected it to.
“She’s on the list.” He points at Kim. “And she’s nineteen. You don’t even have a driver’s licence.”
Kim pulls me aside and lets the people behind us pay their ten dollars and slip past me into the bar. We walk back into the cold air outside. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do—”
“You know, we could just rent a movie or something.” To be honest, I wasn’t all that keen on watching Bunsen Honeydew open up for some Toronto band anyway, especially if Soda was going to make another surprise appearance. “I haven’t seen True Lies yet. If it isn’t any good—” I rub her shoulder a little and smile “—we could always find something else to do.”
“I can’t,” she says, shaking my hand off. “I promised Matty I’d get live shots for their album artwork. I’m a photographer, Pete. This is what I do.”
She says it with a tone that suggests I have no respect for her art, even though earlier today she asked me with a straight face if I had learned the drums because guitar was too hard.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?”
“Well, if you’d listen, I was about to tell you. Go wait out by the back.”
“You know they lock that door now, right? Ever since Gordie Miller snuck in and stole that case of—”
“I know, I know. Give me about ten minutes. If Janey’s working in the kitchen, I should be able to sneak you in.”
“What happens if you can’t?”
“If I
can’t, then come back and meet me at eleven thirty. I’ll be right here. Standing in this very spot.” She points at her wine-coloured Doc Martins.
“Ugh. It’s so complicated. I wish we had, like, walkie-talkies or something.”
“Well, we don’t. So sit tight.” She kisses my cheek. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
I start to walk around to the back of the bar when I run into Rita, red-faced and bundled up against the cold.
“Hey!” she says. “Can’t get in?”
“No,” I say, suddenly optimistic. “Any chance you can pull a few strings?”
“Sorry, dude,” she says. “Apparently Liquor Control fined the shit out of Frank last week, so he’s really cracking down.”
“It’s so stupid. We packed the place a couple months ago, and now I’m not even allowed inside.”
“Aw. Don’t worry.” Rita pats my head. “You’ll be able to play with the big kids soon enough.”
Behind Jack’s, I pull my toque down over my ears and kick at little balls of ice on the ground. The door swings open too early, and a skinny guy in an apron throws out two black bags of garbage and eyes me warily. I fumble in my jacket for cigarettes, just so I look like I have something to do. He turns back inside and the door slams shut. I light my cigarette and wait. I don’t worry so much when ten minutes come and go—since I’ve known her, Kim’s never once been on time—but when nearly twenty minutes have passed and I hear the first few muffled chords of the unfortunately familiar ‘Munchies From Outer Space,’ I know I’m beat.
I might not have cared all that much if it wasn’t for the fact that I hadn’t really seen Kim for the last two weeks. First, she got “totally clobbered” by a bunch of papers due for school; then her dad paid for her to go with a couple friends to the Dominican during Reading Week. When she came back brown with the promise of tan lines, I thought Valentine’s Day would be a pretty good excuse to regain some romantic momentum. My parents had gone to Kenora for the weekend, and I was planning on lighting a bunch of candles and making her dinner. Then she suddenly remembered she had promised to photograph Bunsen Honeydew, and I got relegated to being her plus one. Now, I’m not even that.