by Bif Naked
Marcos would bow deeply to my shy mother every time we entered the café. She was always embarrassed by this, but it was such a respectful gesture that we both always appreciated it. And she deserved it, this grand bow by a gracious young waiter. It made me feel good too, and I adored Marcos for it, and vowed to thank him properly for it one day.
He knew our order—it was always the same—and without fail would grab an ashtray for me as soon as we had sat down at our favourite table by the window.
The café was down the road from the university, and my mother and I met there often. We were entering a new era, my sweet mother and I. She had successfully reared me, I was growing up, eighteen now and in university.
The University of Winnipeg was, like any academic institution, a society within a society, like a walled city or a ringed planet off by itself at the edge of the Milky Way. I had begged my parents for the tuition money, enrolling through the university in Musical Theatre at the Prairie Theatre Exchange, a professional theatre company that also had a school. The program was theoretical rather than performance—it was all that was available, as I had waited too long to choose my courses. This upset me greatly, but I figured it was better than nothing.
I also took courses in sociology, political science, and French, being forced to wait until the next semester for the courses I really wanted, like English, calculus, biology, and chemistry, courses I wanted to get past sooner rather than later. The trouble with school for me was me being in one. I felt extremely vulnerable. The truth is, I would have had sex with my sociology professor if he’d asked me to. I knew it the first class. He was young enough, and had a head of dark brown hair. That first day he wore a smart camel-coloured blazer over a white button-down shirt tucked into faded jeans, with a brown worn belt and matching shoes. He was right out of the What Professors Look Like stylebook, except he didn’t have a pipe. He was awkward and quirky and somewhat self-conscious. I loved it. And I loved staring dreamily at him, not listening to a word he said.
Luckily for my professor, a prominent member of the university basketball team started chatting me up in the cafeteria. He always had lots of fun things to do, and he kept me busy and distracted. I believe that the universe connects people for a reason. This basketball player was kind to me and helped me build my self-esteem back up. As Marcos X had.
In the short periods between my classes at the university, there wasn’t much to do. This meant that I was usually found in the halls with certain other students. We were quickly resembling the Sweathogs from Welcome Back, Kotter. We were all theatre students, and horsed around and acted like jackasses. Anything for a laugh.
Marcos and a friend were cutting through the campus on their way downtown one afternoon when he spotted me with my boisterous friends. I was surprised and happy to see him. He introduced me to his friend, and when I shook the hand of Brett Hopkins and looked into his emerald-green eyes, my life changed in an instant. He was a towering oak, a six-foot-four-inch tree. And a vegetarian with a mohawk. His dreadlocks were tied back with an elastic band that hid his mohawk from the view of those folks whom had never seen such a thing in the daylight. I was enraptured completely and fell in love with him that afternoon.
Brett and Marcos were in a project called Jungle Milk, a world music group that had more than ten drummers, all playing bongos or congas or tabla drums and singing to accompany the four or five female singers the band had at any given time—often totalling fifteen or so people on the stage at once. The band was popular and had shows all over the city. And it had an opening for a female singer.
“You should come by,” Brett and Marcos chimed together. “Come to rehearsal. There’s tea.” And so I attended several rehearsals, held in an old house in Winnipeg’s River Heights area. The attic rehearsal space doubled as Brett’s bedroom. All fourteen or fifteen people would sit cross-legged on the floor, drumming and humming, drinking tea and burning Nag Champa incense. Keeping everyone company were a couple of pet chickens.
It was all quite marvellous, in my opinion, and I was thrilled to be there, not knowing, as everyone else in the room did, that Brett had more than one girlfriend in attendance—something even Brett’s various girlfriends knew. I had no real desire to sing; I just wanted to stare into the green eyes of one Brett Hopkins. Before long, I began to sing with the band. My parents came to every Jungle Milk show I played, as did my rocker friends from Chocolate Bunnies from Hell and their singer P.J. Burton. P.J. led the cheers, shouting “Bif! Bif! Bif!” from the back of the room. The name stuck.
Right around this time, a new music cabaret opened in Winnipeg, famous for being a music city, and lots of musicians applied for a job there, including me and Brett. We got hired. Not only did I get to perform with my new boyfriend (still hoping to eventually be the Only Girlfriend), I got to work with him too. It seemed like nothing could go wrong, until it did.
FOURTEEN
Lola, Johnny Thunders, and Me
THE NIGHT SKY WAS LIT UP LIKE BURNING PARCHMENT paper in an oven, singed orange flecks floating through the black sky, the noxious smell of chemicals in the air, the smoke making us cough. Fire trucks and police cars screamed down the streets, and the seeping stench overtook the usual smell from the neighbourhood sausage factory. People ran around in all directions at once, like Keystone Cops, a menagerie of Winnipeg nightlife—the patrons from the rock pub upstairs and from the gentleman’s cabaret on the main floor, plus the strippers. To make things even worse, it was a cold Winnipeg winter night.
Now, you may think you know a thing or two about Winnipeg winters, but unless you’re a Winnipegger or have spent any time there, you don’t. Really, you don’t. The band rehearsal or jam spaces often had no toilet facilities. Musicians (with the exception of me, they were all male) who absolutely needed to go would, in the warmer months, step outside and urinate in the alley or, in the winter months, fill a 7-Eleven Slurpee cup while huddling in the doorway. Upon filling the cup, the next step was to open the door and somehow disperse the contents without them blowing back on oneself. This called for a fine-tuned technique in the sixty-mile-per-hour wind and heinous sub-zero temperatures, which combined into what felt like a winter hurricane. The wind threatened to blow you out the door and down the alley. The contents of the cup, tossed out the door, froze the moment they hit the ground into a flat puck you could pick up with one mitten-clad hand. Occasionally, a semi-drunk band member would find this a very funny thing to toss at other semi-drunk bandmates, and the inevitable fight would break out. Of course, I didn’t participate but ran for cover.
Similarly when travelling in a band van, deadheading—driving non-stop—from, say, Quebec City to Winnipeg to make the next show, the guys would pee into a cup. Even if you had time to stop for a pee break, there weren’t any towns or gas stations to stop at. With the exception of Wawa, Ontario, halfway between Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay. I am sure that every band that has ever travelled that godforsaken highway has taken pictures of themselves in front of the Wawa town sign—it was a landmark of sorts.
Winter touring in a van with a band is no place for a nice girl and neither was the St. Boniface Hotel’s strip club in Winnipeg, but that’s exactly where I was when I met Lola. She was a dancer and miffed that her shift had been cut short by the inconvenience of a factory explosion that saw the entire area evacuated.
I was working as the coat-check girl at the cabaret, a legendary stopover for some of the most infamous underground rock acts. GWAR and Soul Asylum were well-known touring acts, and both played at St. Boniface’s. Pandemonium had broken out among the patrons after the police announced that the area was being evacuated: we were to collect our personal belongings and calmly vacate the premises. People were outraged that they would be unable to continue drinking until closing time.
As I desperately tried to return coats to angry patrons forced to leave, Lola burst through the front doors of the club and marched right up to me. She smiled and plopped herself down with a huff on
my coat table. She was still in her bra-and-panty costume, complete with high heels, a stripper floor-show blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She lit a cigarette and started talking to me as if we had known each other our whole lives. It was like looking into a mirror, only Lola was extremely good-looking.
She had big boobs, long legs, long hair, and a tattoo. She was the coolest girl I had ever seen. Moss-green contact lenses covered her God-given hazel eyes, cloaked in long black eyelashes that didn’t flutter but waved at you. She had big lips and wore the shade of blue-red lipstick that makes men weep. Lola was a throwback to an era few alive today have actually witnessed in the flesh. She was a modern-day Tempest Storm, Bettie Page, Eva Gabor. A timeless beauty whose image burned in your memory for a lifetime.
“Can you fuckin’ believe this shit?” she said.
I nodded, still handing over coats to the whining patrons leaving the club.
“I tell ya, I will bet the owners set the fire! They didn’t want us girls making our tips!” She exhaled a ring of smoke.
I nodded again.
“So, do you want to split a cab?”
I looked at her blankly. “I have my mom’s car,” I replied.
She lit a new cigarette from the burning tip of her old one. “Great!” she said, exhaling another cloud of smoke.
This girl lit up the room brighter than any chemical sky could light up the night. She laughed such a natural and warm laugh, it grabbed you by the throat and held you suspended, holding your breath waiting for the next thing she’d say. Lola was the funniest person I had ever met. Just being in her presence, I was funnier than I ever hoped to be. I effortlessly fell into being the “straight man,” and together we were magic.
I drove Lola home in my mom’s burgundy Ford Fairmont station wagon. I was, as usual, half-drunk from the bartender’s Italian coffee drinks and talking a mile a minute. A beautiful, lifelong friendship was born that evening.
Lola and I were so similar and so emulated each other, there were few differences between us. We hung out practically every waking moment we weren’t working.
The world-famous punk band The New York Dolls was scheduled to come to Winnipeg to our little cabaret, which was quite the coup, since they were legendary and such an integral part of music history. They would be performing on a night I was working. I was pleased about this—the coat check had a pretty clear view of the stage. Lola was even more pleased than I was that the Dolls were playing. She knew everything there was to know about music. She must have told me the history of every band there ever was. She thought Johnny Thunders of The New York Dolls was the best-looking and most prolific guitar player in history. I couldn’t see it at all.
My job that night, as always, consisted of taking the cover charge and coats, then taking more cover charge and more coats, all the while getting drunk on alcohol-laced coffee drinks. And then the show was done.
I was trying to locate my Lola so I could give her a ride home compliments of the burgundy station wagon and she was eluding me—I couldn’t find my best friend anywhere. So I waited, and I looked, and I waited some more. But she didn’t turn up. It was getting late, just after 4 a.m., and I was not pleased. Finally, one of the dancers told me she had left with Johnny Thunders. Now I was really pissed. I set about finding his room—the Dolls were staying at the motor hotel attached to the cabaret.
I had knocked on just almost every door when one opened to reveal Johnny Thunders himself, naked and with red lipstick covering the lower half of his face.
“Where’s Lola?” I demanded.
“Who? I don’t know.” His eyes were slits. Wobbling, he held himself up by leaning on the doorframe.
From behind him came a voice. “Bif? Bif? Is that you?” Lola popped her head out from under the thin sheet on the bed. “Hi, Bif!” Smiling, she jumped out of the bed, naked, her face covered in the same red mess as her gentleman friend’s. “Is it time to go?”
“Yes,” I said crossly. “I’ll be out front in the car. You’ve got five minutes.”
As I turned to leave I saw her scurrying around the room, collecting her clothes. Walking away, I heard her consoling the whining rock star. I sat in my mom’s car with the engine running, trying to warm it up. Long sobered up, I was dead tired. When Lola got in, she was laughing and began talking a mile a minute. She told me of the evening’s events and excitedly reported that Johnny Thunders was in love with her and that she was moving to New York to be with him. I rolled my eyes, having heard this song and dance about every rock star she made eyes at. Of course, they did all love her, but I loved her more.
FIFTEEN
Gorilla Gorilla
I WAS THRUST INTO A NEW-FOUND CAREER PATH AFTER my very first Jungle Milk concert. I had left my academic ambitions behind and was no longer in the theatre program, but I still didn’t really want to be a singer. I just wanted to be in the band to be around Brett. Besides being in Jungle Milk, Brett was playing in a few other bands, including a couple of hardcore ones, and it was through them that I was introduced to a new style of music and to the punk rock lifestyle. It was quite an eye-opener.
Vegetarianism, hardcore and punk music, stage-diving, and fighting skinheads in Winnipeg’s mean punk rock scene—all these Brett introduced me to. The local band Gorilla Gorilla had a singer named Geoff, who unexpectedly announced he was moving to Seattle. The band was left scrambling looking for a vocalist. Before long, it became clear that Geoff’s move was shaping up to be a great opportunity for the band and especially for me. But switching the gender of the vocalist in any band, and especially one with an established following, can be a dangerous move. With Gorilla Gorilla, it was scandalous to fans, and the band was risking their hard-fought-for credibility.
Few punk bands had female vocalists then. The concern was that switching to a female vocalist would be looked down upon by the male punk rockers, especially those in Winnipeg. The guys in Gorilla Gorilla decided to go out large, making gig posters to advertise the upcoming show that read “Come see Bif Naked.” It was a double entendre that basically baited the naysayers—peers, friends, and fans still disappointed about the previous singer’s departure—to come to the show, even if only out of curiosity to see if I really would be naked. The band plastered the posters all over the city, putting them on practically every street lamp post and mailbox, even gluing them on store windows. It was a massive street-level postering campaign, and it worked.
A lot of people came to the show, for whatever reason. And we kept them there for the entire performance, stage-diving, slam-dancing, and cheering. And the name stuck. Bif Naked was born.
Being in Gorilla Gorilla was an amazing time for me. As a band we were very lucky, getting lots of gigs and increasing our fan base. Most of the bands we toured with were respectful toward me as a female. And I tried hard to be respectable, professional, and humble. I never missed an opportunity to thank the headliner for having us on the show. I never wanted to come across as flirtatious or sexual in any way, and I was deliberate in my behaviour. My stage show was aggressive, angry, and sometimes violent, but regardless of how much I manned up, because I was a female, it was often misinterpreted as being overtly sexual. This was devastating to me, as it was never my intention and I prided myself on not being promiscuous. We were on national tours supporting bands like The Wongs, DOA, NoMeansNo, Bad Religion, Boston’s The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and even Los Angeles’s ska punk kings Fishbone, and it was important to me that my femaleness was not a weakness or a reason for people to discount our band.
We were in our infancy as a band, together less than a year, and it was all or nothing every day. The more successful bands were generally much more polite than those mid-level or at the bottom. But there were exceptions. We were opening for a popular American band at Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom—it had been our dream to play with them. As we waited for our turn to take the stage and do our sound check, one of the members approached me and asked, “Which one are you here to fuck?�
� He hadn’t even said hello. It was like being sucker-punched, and the wind knocked out of me.
Having just arrived at the venue, I was still in my coat. I mean, it wasn’t as if I was in some skimpy dress or a bikini. At first, I assumed he’d made a mistake. Maybe he thought I was a groupie hanging around to pick up a band member. “Oh, I’m in the opening band,” I said, smiling but feeling mortified.
“I know that, bitch. Which one of my band are you fucking tonight?”
I almost choked. “Oh, well, no one, actually. I’m here to start the mosh pit and warm up the audience for you guys,” I said enthusiastically, trying to get him off the topic.
“Then which guy in your band are you fucking?”
“Nobody,” I quietly answered, my voice—and heart—shrinking.
“Well, you gotta be fucking somebody, honey. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.” And with that he walked off, leaving me standing there feeling humiliated. I wanted to run home and die.
My band was still unpacking gear, and Kent, our bass player, walked over to me. “Biffy, there’s coffee.”
I nodded and started to head over to the bar with him to get some.
“Biffy, were you guys talking? What’d he say?”
“Nothing,” I answered, not looking at him. “We just talked about the weather.”
I played that night giving it everything I had, and we had a great show, and I felt good about myself.
This type of misogyny was not uncommon on tour. The road ain’t no place for a lady or the faint of heart. It’s a place for people who can handle their misogynists and their beer. Beer and gigs, it’s what you did in a punk band on a punk tour. It didn’t matter if you were a thrash band, a ska band, a hardcore band, or a skate-punk band. Many nights you were lucky just to get paid in beer—at least it was something. A six-pack for the entire band as pay, that was the night’s paycheque.