by Rich Terfry
I couldn’t do it.
I told my tormentor to let Olesya Isinbayeva go, to let her get on with her life.
And with that, I was led without ceremony off the premises and into the afternoon sun.
•
The fresh air thrilled my body. But my eyes burned and my legs wouldn’t work. I slumped on the steps of the police station and cried for twenty minutes before gathering enough strength to move. Then, like a dead leaf caught in a stream, I floated along a current of humanity to a park called, in English, Patriarch Ponds, where I spent the rest of the day performing psychic ablutions before falling asleep on a bench.
It was only when I arrived back in Paris that I learned exactly how long I had been away. I had calculated that I’d been in jail for almost two weeks. It turned out that I had been incarcerated for closer to two months. Claire had figured out where I was after a week making frantic phone calls to the police in Paris and Moscow. She’d invented stories for anyone else who called looking for me, and worked frantically behind the scenes trying to get me freed.
Now, at home, I continued to imprison myself. I felt the need for confined space. I spent a month in the fetal position on the floor of my bathroom, while Claire wept and smashed things. She couldn’t understand what had happened to me, and I was no help. I couldn’t talk. I was paralyzed. Every time I heard the siren of a police car, I’d fly into another panic attack, convinced “they” were coming back for me. Claire was perplexed by my convulsions and quickly lost patience with me. I don’t think the French have panic attacks. They smoke and dance and screw all their troubles away. Meanwhile, I was a total wreck. But I had a profound new appreciation for the simplest things: filling a glass with water whenever I wanted, walking freely from one room to another, lying on sofas …
My manager Liz knew only that I’d had some kind of a breakdown. She was in damage-control mode with the promoters of my cancelled shows across Europe. Luckily, Liz’s specialties were lying and making up excuses. But the longer I lay on the floor, the emptier her pockets became. Pressure was put on me to get back to work.
Still shaking uncontrollably, and unable to make eye contact with another living soul, I was soon crawling across the UK—the violent crime capital of Europe. Dreary hotel rooms were a bad home for my agony, but the stage was perfect for it. Ticket buyers always go home satisfied when they’ve seen a man crucify himself.
I was in Birmingham when I received a panicked call from my accountant in Montreal.
“Something is terribly wrong! How soon can you get back over here?”
“What the hell is going on?”
“I can’t get into it over the phone. You really need to come to Montreal. Liz too. The three of us need to have a meeting. It’s urgent!”
“Cripes. Okay … The soonest I can be there is three weeks from now.”
“Just get here as fast as you can!”
My accountant wears Hawaiian shirts and doesn’t get too worked up about anything, so I took his panic seriously. An emergency was the last thing I needed at a time when I was trying desperately to shield myself from anything negative. I was already down and being kicked; now gasoline was being poured over me.
Three worrisome weeks later, at the designated time and place (11:00 a.m. in my three-star-hotel room), my accountant and I waited anxiously for Liz. After an hour and still no sign, my accountant heaved a great sigh.
“Well, I thought this might happen,” he said, pulling a folder from his floppy leather attaché case. “We might as well get started without her.”
He laid a stack of paperwork on a little round table and I pulled my chair closer.
“As you know, I’ve been working to get you caught up on your taxes for the past few years. Well, I just finished going over everything from the year before last, which was a very good year for you. Have a look here.”
Across a document on top of the stack, he traced an invisible line from the words gross income on the left to a startling figure on the right: half a million dollars!
“You made a lot of money.”
My heart leaped. My brain spun: That’s a shitload of money! Wow! Wait! Shit! Why am I broke? This makes no sense! Where the hell is Liz?
“But …”
My accountant’s finger moved down the page to the very bottom, where it landed on the words net income.
“As you can see here—”
His finger now moved across the page from left to right again, and settled on an even more startling figure: –$2,478! Negative!
“—we have a problem.”
The next morning, Liz, my accountant and I went to work investigating the case of my missing money. The best we were able to come up with was that I had been a victim of identity theft. Over the previous few weeks I hadn’t noticed that there was no money in my bank account. I always had cash in my pocket from T-shirt sales at shows and I used that for day-to-day expenses. Everything else—flights and hotels—went on my credit card. Not paying attention during those weeks had given my identity thief the time needed to spend a small fortune.
I had spent most of the previous three years on the road. I had played between two-hundred-fifty and three hundred shows a year. On my own. A solivagant. Grinding my spine into powder. Enduring sanity-eroding loneliness. Sprinting through airports, ringing in my ears. Eating out of bags. Hauling on broken luggage handles. Hollowing myself out onstage, night after night. Yes, the crowds were warm and beautiful. I loved them as unselfishly as I could. But they were also demanding and made me nervous. I pushed. Hard. I couldn’t sleep nights for the screaming of my body. I was tired. And now I was right back to where I had been before signing my big deal: in debt. I had no tears left either. I’d cried them out in Paris. I felt numb. You could have cut my heart out and I wouldn’t have flinched.
A month later, I was back on the road, trying to work my way out of debt. Normally I heard from Liz a few times a day. So when two or three days had passed with no word from her, I worried. I called Hannah, Liz’s sister. Hannah began to sob as soon as she heard my voice. She explained that Liz had met a charming man, had fallen head-over-heels, and had run off with him to join a cult. She was gone. Unreachable. God-knows-where. Hannah had been the last of Liz’s family and friends to see her before she disappeared.
A few years after Rose and I had broken up, I had left Halifax to live in Montreal. Liz had done the same. Close as they were, Liz’s sister Hannah had followed soon after. When I’d then left Montreal to live in Paris, I had stashed most of my worldly possessions at Liz’s place: the collection of rare talking-blues records I had inherited from my grandfather, my baseball gear, music equipment among them. After Liz disappeared, that stuff ended up in Hannah’s basement. Now I had to figure out what to do with it all. I was still on tour and couldn’t attend to the task myself. I hated to do it, but I called in a few favours. My friend Paul had also been friends with Liz. He had access to a truck and was willing to collect the stuff from Hannah’s house and haul it. And Marie, an old friend with benefits, offered to hang on to my possessions temporarily, until I found a long-term solution.
Marie had always said she wanted to marry me and take care of me for the rest of my life. I believed she would give me the shirt off her back. I felt bad for burdening her but knew I could count on her to help without hesitation.
Marie looked like the actress Nancy Kwan in the film Tamahine. When we were together, we’d spend whole days slipping in and out of conversations that didn’t really make sense. She’d say that I was the only person who knew the real her—that I knew her better than anyone else in the whole world. I have no idea why she felt that way. I didn’t think I knew her at all. I had never met any of her friends. I couldn’t tell you what she did at night. Maybe she felt a connection because I just let her talk. She would sermonize for hours at a time, punctuating her conclusions with deep sighs. But as much as she would talk, I knew she harboured dark secrets. She had a sadness I believed only I could see. Mayb
e I was the only one who cared to. I think she saw my sadness, too. I suppose that’s why we had gravitated toward each other.
One of the things Marie liked to talk about was dreams. Once she told me that for as long as she could remember, she’d had recurring nightmares of airplanes flying into tall buildings. But after September 11, she never had those dreams again. She was sure they were premonitions.
In return, I told her about a particularly vivid dream I’d had with her in it. We were in the back seat of a van, driving along a winding two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere with two other couples. The highway cut through forest. There was nothing but trees through the windows on either side. We were returning home from a camping trip or hike. Still an hour from home, the unnamed fellow behind the wheel shouted into the rear-view mirror.
“Hey! I have an idea! You guys wanna go up Such-and-Such Road?”
Such-and-Such Road led to a community that had been completely abandoned for reasons unknown. One of the couples in our group had never heard of it. The rest of us were familiar with the legend but had never seen the road. After a buzz of nervous curiosity, we agreed that we’d make the turn up the road when we came to it.
Ten minutes later we made the turn. There was nothing new to see at first, just more trees. The road was in bad shape. It became very noisy inside the van as we staggered over the potholes and loose gravel, and the conversation became more excited. I was suddenly overwhelmed with bad feeling. I closed my eyes and rested my head on Marie’s shoulder. Through the blackness, the racket in the van became increasingly muffled, until it was as if I was hearing it through a wall. Then, after a period of perfect silent nothingness, I felt Marie’s arm move over my shoulders, and her voice cut through so clearly it was as if I was hearing it inside my own head.
“Let’s go,” she said very gently. “Let’s get out of this van.”
Guided by Marie, I kept my eyes closed. I felt only vaguely aware that my body was moving. As slowly as it had drifted away, the sound of the outside world began to creep back. I could hear footsteps on gravel and then the voices of my friends marvelling over what they were seeing.
I opened my eyes to a sight that was at once the most horrifying and the most beautiful I had ever seen. Just as promised, we had stepped into an abandoned lower-middle-class residential area. Modest homes sat on either side of the road. But it seemed as if everyone who had lived there must have left very suddenly. Cars were in many of the driveways. Curtains were in the windows. Toys were in the yards. Everything was overgrown not only with weeds and vines but especially … flowers. Different kinds of the prettiest flowers! Everywhere! So much colour! Otherwise, there was no life—not even insects or birds. Just the wind hissing through the evil beauty of the untamed flora.
“Let’s go into one of the houses,” someone suggested.
“That one,” someone else said, pointing.
The growth was so dense that crossing the yard was physically demanding. We found the front door unlocked. Was it illegal to enter a place that had been abandoned like this? Even if it wasn’t, it felt wrong. But the pull was too strong.
Once inside, we all drifted to different rooms. We seemed to be in the home of a family of five. Walking through the living room, I was struck by the sight of a remote control and a drinking glass on the coffee table. Strange that something so mundane was now so eerie and fascinating. Time was frozen. I ran a finger over the surface of the table. No dust.
I entered a boy’s bedroom. The bed was made. There was homework spread out on a little desk, a stack of comic books on a bedside table. Images torn from the pages of sports and music magazines decorated the walls. The room was filled with the same kind of stuff I had been interested in as a boy. Resting on a shelf was a shoebox with no lid, filled with cassette tapes. I selected one and examined it. It was a homemade tape with a handwritten label. My heart jumped into my throat. Not only did I recognize the handwriting as my own—I distinctly remembered writing it! A fever washed over me. My eyes darted around the room. I began searching everywhere—in the closet, under the bed. Memories flooded through me. This was MY bedroom. I was in my childhood home. Overcome with sadness, half-blind with tears, I gathered my stuff in my arms: toys, trophies, souvenirs …
My friends entered the room, wearing sympathetic expressions.
“Let’s get out of here.”
I let go, and everything I had held crashed to the floor. I walked out ahead of the group.
Outside, Marie put her arm around me and said, “There’s something you need to see.” We walked back down the road the way we had come. She led me to where the road abruptly ended and fell away over a short cliff, having been washed away by flood waters.
“Look down there,” she said.
At the bottom of the drop was a perfectly clear pond. And under the water, lifeless on its side, was our van.
My ghost turned to Marie’s and said, “I want to go home.”
“You can’t,” said hers, behind quiet tears. “I’m so sorry.”
I was at home in Paris when I received a phone call from my friend Paul, one week after he had dropped off my belongings at Marie’s house.
“Hey, man! Did you decide to sell your stuff?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Oh shit.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well, I was in pawnshops all over Montreal today, shopping around for a set of used golf clubs, and saw your stuff that I moved last week …”
“Jesus Christ. Are you sure?”
“I hate to say it, but I’m positive, man.”
A strange calm came over me. “Let me call you back.”
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you out.”
“Thanks, Paul.”
I hung up and phoned Marie.
“Hello?” she answered cautiously.
“Marie … what’s going on?”
There was a long silence before she said, “I’ve been trying to tell you this for a really long time. I have a bad drug problem, sweetie. I’m so sorry. I—”
I hung up.
Five months later, maybe six, I was surprised to hear out of the blue from Liz—sort of. I received a call from her lawyer. I was being sued. Liz claimed I hadn’t paid her in two years. I checked with my accountant—and confirmed that there was no way to prove otherwise. I had never asked Liz for invoices. I consulted with a lawyer, who told me it was most likely that I would lose in court and that even if I won, my legal fees would be roughly the same as the amount she was suing for. I was advised to settle out of court. I had to borrow $200,000 to get Liz off my back.
That was it. The slate had been wiped perfectly clean. I had nothing.
•
Poor, beautiful Claire.
She hadn’t asked to have the man she fell in love with replaced with a factory reject. But that’s what she got. I didn’t even look the same anymore. My face had hardened into a distortion of itself. A foreign wildness danced in my eyes. A sharper curve in my spine gave my posture a weird severity. I had become a Picasso of myself. No, that’s not exactly right. A cubist portrait depicts the subject from several angles at once rather than from a single viewpoint. I’m not suggesting that Claire was now seeing me differently or that I was somehow bending time and space. Rather, I had become a grotesque version of myself—like a Francis Bacon portrait.
I’ve served many masters during my life. But none more than my supreme overlord: guilt. My parents weren’t overly religious, but even a little bit of Catholicism will do a person in. Keeping secrets was my family’s pastime. I had spent my childhood walking on tiptoe. I had paid constant and nervous devotion to the prevention of my mother’s tears and had failed on a daily basis. Though my spirit would remain broken, my body became more durable, making me increasingly immune to my parents’ corporal punishments. So I had made it my responsibility to discipline myself. My chosen tools of correction were blades, flames and baseball bats. Pens. Sheets o
f paper. Starvation. Walls. My own fists.
My path of self-destruction eventually led me to paranoia and deviance. As a young adult, I hadn’t even needed trouble for guilt to stir inside me. My own worry that someone else would have false notions about me was enough to induce queer and prevaricating behaviours into my routine. This, of course, backfired consistently, arousing mistrust where it didn’t belong in the first place.
As I entered my thirties, an even more malign instinct lurked in me with increasing regularity. During placid times, I would become restless for devilry. A measure of darkness now sustained my equilibrium. I couldn’t allow myself to deserve peace of mind. My own shadow was drunk on sabotage. I would provoke insult upon my own name by engaging in savagery with predators. I handled vipers. I picked flowers from private property. I juggled machetes, I swallowed fire. All these acts scared me and filled me with hatred I directed at myself, but I was increasingly addicted to the sight of my own blood.
And now I had lost everything: I had lost myself in jail; and I had lost all my most important possessions. I was without an anchor. And I was sure I deserved this fate. I felt like I was worse than the worst person in the world. I told myself I was a monster. Claire gave me comfort, but I could read in her eyes that she wondered if the stories I told her were the whole truth.
•
Just as things were as bad as they could be between me and Claire, and I was filled with self-loathing, a call came from Canada. I was asked to co-host the televised broadcast of the Junos, the Canadian music awards. I said yes immediately—I was in desperate need of a decent payday—before asking who my cohort would be. When it was revealed that I’d be working with Pamela Anderson, I felt a confusion of emotions. The most famous boobs in the world. One of our biggest sex symbols. A name that will be forever associated with unrestrained female anatomy and pioneering work in the celebrity sex tape industry. Part of me was excited to work with her. But Claire was jealous and possessive, so another part of me worried that my already upset girlfriend would think the job was going to be some kind of X-rated sex and rock and roll showcase.