by Geoff Berner
“I swear to you, on my daughter’s life, I did not know that Athena had gone off with some Icelandic disco yodeller.”
“Right on, whatever. I’ll see you down at the party, you big lying cocksucker.”
THE HAIL MARY PASS
I LEFT LESLIE’S ROOM, STUNNED, with one thing on my mind: the Hail Mary pass. I had to find Richard Wren, get him drunk, and solidify some kind of deal. Then I’d still have my prize for the weekend to bring home. As I calculated it, he was totally primed by the workshop — he was ripe for the picking. I know how to handle the English. Especially the classy ones. You kind of go cowboy on them, talk about horses and guns and shit (all of which I know a great deal about, having grown up on a horse ranch). It wakes up the kid in them, gets them ready to say “yes” to anything you have in mind.
In the elevator I was rehearsing my best lines, getting ready to handle him. Unfortunately I was feeling a little dark after the conversation with Leslie and every time I tried to think of horses, I had this little problem where I couldn’t stop thinking about the time when I was ten and I pulled a shotgun on my pap in the kitchen to stop him from hitting my mom and he disarmed me and threw me to the floor, and those thoughts were just leading me to thinking about the way the house and the chicken yard and my saddle horse looked as my mom drove us away in her old Volkswagen Beetle with the hole in the floor a couple days later when my dad was safely passed out. I’d had to look away from everything I was leaving and concentrate on watching the muddy slushy mush of the dirt road passing by through the floor-hole.
BUT I KNEW THIS WAS THE TIME of destiny, and I had one shot and I had to make it count. So I gave my head about ten shakes, and by the time the elevator got me down to the party-room floor, I was back where I needed to be and ready to dance. I have that ability, the power to turn my feelings around and point them in the other direction. My Herculean emotional strength had me in a space where I was actually now absolutely set and looking forward to my seduction battle with Wren. I felt that as colleagues in the same crazy, up-and-down business, he and I could commiserate together, and I could commune with the old pro about the nature of being a Manager, of singing your life through other people. In my bag, I fingered the “Co-Management Agreement Contract” papers I’d made up back in Vancouver.
Out the elevator, through the lobby. The Supersonic Grifters had insinuated themselves onto a couch there, before the “passes only” area started, and they were playing some folk song about smashing machinery, at quadruple the speed it was normally played. Old Utah Phillips was sitting by on the arm of the couch, smiling upon them like an anarchist Santa Claus. I could see a couple hotel security dicks moving in their direction. Over to the left, some paramedics were loading a girl with heatstroke or alcohol poisoning or an overdose or something onto a gurney.
Up the steps, flashing my pass. Into the ballroom, past the lineup for chili.
I scanned the room, looking for a white-haired Englishman.
Mexican cowboy band on stage. The party heating up. Volunteer security personnel doing silly-named shooters at the bar.
There he was. Literally holding court at a corner table. Various hangers-on, hopefuls, and fans trolling for inside gossip surrounded him. A carafe of red wine before him. Good. How could you tell he was powerful? He was smoking with impunity, indoors, in Canada. And no one saying a thing.
I strode toward the cocktail bar to get my soon-to-be new friend a special cocktail.
There was a growling sound from behind me. I turned and a chubby little blond hippie girl danced past me, giggling in her Thai wrap skirt. Mykola was on his hands and knees, chasing her, snapping his teeth.
“Stop biting my ankles!” she laughed, not particularly running away.
“Rrrrr. Oh hi, Cam!”
“Looks like you’re feeling a bit less nervous, Mykola. Having a good festival?”
“Oh, yeah, thank you.”
He climbed up a chair to his feet, and offered a paw to shake.
“Everything went just like you said! You were right! Did you hear? Richard Wren has invited Jenny and me to London. England!”
“Oh, really?”
“This could be our big break! Thanks, Cam. Thanks so much for this. I really owe you. Hey, did you hear the little fiddle-playing dyke girl in the busking band outside the gates?”
“I don’t suppose he said anything about talking to me about London, first, did he?”
He looked surprised. It hadn’t even crossed his mind.
“Well, um, he’s right over there if you wanna talk to him.”
“That’s what I’ll do.”
“Okay, great. See you later, man.” He dropped down on all fours and crawled off to the beat of the Mexican cowboy music.
“… BUT THE THING WAS, and I told them to their faces, ‘Listen mate, the best part of your band just lost his mind to LSD. I don’t care how much money’s involved, I just don’t find it creatively interesting, you know?”
“Hello, there, Mister Wren. Thought I’d bring you over something special. Mind if I sit down?”
“Please do — oh you’re the fellow who’s with Mykola and Jenny. Bloody brilliant. Brilliant stuff.”
“This here is a Caesar. It was actually invented right here at the Westin Hotel in Calgary. When I tell people in Europe what it’s made of, they usually don’t believe me.”
“Oh God, it’s not that awful drink made of clam juice or summat?”
“I guess you’ve been to Canada before.”
“Since before you were born, my son. Don’t really have to go at this point, of course. Just love the scenery here, though. The big skies, wide open spaces where you can breathe.” Big intake of breath. “Bit of a busman’s holiday, really.”
“Where’s the Brave Hero of the British Left?”
“Hmm?”
“Jimmy. Your actual client.”
“Oh, yeah, Jimmy’s gone to bed.”
“Jimmy doesn’t stay up and party?”
“Not for ages. Wants his voice to be in good shape. Feels he owes it to the people who pay their hard-earned wages to see him.”
“Not very rock ’n’ roll.”
“No, I suppose I’m probably a bit more flamboyant than him these days. That’s a bit pathetic, really. Hah.”
“I hear he lives on a sheep farm now.”
“Yeah, it’s not a sheep farm anymore, though. Just a big piece of land. Big in terms of England.”
“Not very socialistic, being a big landowner.”
“Yeah, he has trouble with that. The rabble-rouser in him feels it’s a bit wrong, really. He’s afraid his daughter’s growing up talking posh. What can he do? The poor bastard’s rich as Croesus. All my fault, I s’pose.”
“You sound amused. You don’t have any qualms like that?”
“Qualms? Qualms? No qualms on me. I grew up posh, as a matter of fact. Went to Rugby as a day boy, didn’t I? Orando Laborando.”*
“You’re a champagne socialist?”
“It’s my considered political position that I should have a right to drink champagne now and then. As a socialist, I just advocate champagne for everybody else, as well.”
“Well, that sounds perfectly consistent. Let me buy us a bottle of champagne.”
There was still just enough room on the third credit card for that.
WE CHATTED ON: MUSIC, politics, travel, the idiosyncrasies of musicians. He told me about the time he had to bribe a jetlagged Chuck Berry out of his sudden refusal to play a British rock festival by gifting him with the ownership papers of the Rolls that had brought him from Heathrow. I told him about the time I got fired from emceeing South Country Fair when I announced from the stage, during a summer prairie lightning outbreak, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re experiencing an electrical storm. Would all the hippies and Australians please place their hands on the tall metal swing set in the centre of the field.” He laughed. He was laughing at my jokes.
All the hangers-on had dropped a
way. They could see this was a meeting of minds that should not be fucked with. So after the champagne, in the spirit of thrift, we sucked up all the booze that had been left lying unattended on the table. Then Wren had a thought: “Hang on a minute. Forgot I had this!” He reached into his satchel and brought out a bottle of eighteen-year-old Scotch whose name neither of us could pronounce by that point in the evening.
I could feel it. This was the unmistakable sign of comraderie and bonhomie and good feeling. I could feel the co-management papers pressing against my chest. I had charmed the snake, and now it was time to climb it into the clouds, like a Swami in a Bob Hope movie.
“I wanted to talk to you about Mykola and Jenny. I understand that you’ve invited them to London.”
“I told them, they’ve absolutely got to get out of Can-a-der if they ever want to get anywhere. Told them to stop by, we’ll put them up in the spare room. They’re absolutely wonderful. Can’t promise anything, but there’s a real possibility we may want to work with them.”
Yes, yes, yes. Strike at once!
“Well, you know, I’m their manager. I thought maybe we could discuss that a bit more. I have some ideas about how we might co-operate.”
Wren blinked, then trained a very direct, very unclouded gaze at me. It held my eyes effortlessly. He took hold of the bottle and poured himself a couple of fingers. His motion was smooth.
“Sorry, I don’t follow.”
“I’m saying we could work together pretty well here. I’d be the one who — “
“— Oh, no, sorry, that’s what’s called a ‘co-management’ deal.”
Geez, thanks for the remedial music-biz lesson.
“We don’t do co-management deals. Our artists are like family to us. We do everything for them. Taxes, insurance, we even pay their telly license for them. We used to practically change Jimmy’s nappies for ’im. Still do, some days.”
He was so so so nonchalant about it.
“No, if we did decide to take them on, of course we’d buy you out. Small cash settlement.”
“Small cash settlement?”
“Can’t keep what doesn’t want to stay, after all, mate. If you love something, set it free, et cetera. But obviously it’s much too early to say.” He sipped his whiskey and turned slightly to watch the dance floor behind my shoulder. Change of scenery.
My first instinct was of course, violence. But then I thought, No, you’re better than that, Cam. You can’t sink to the level of this arrogant, calculating bastard.
But then I just decided to go with my first instinct. I’m a big believer in that.
Here’s some advice: It’s much better, when you want to break a glass or bottle for the purpose of attacking someone, to grab an empty receptacle, rather than one that’s still got liquid in it. Because the spraying of the liquid, especially if the liquid is red, can be both distracting and needlessly lubricating. The last thing you want is a slippery weapon.
And if you’re going to attack someone with, say, a broken cocktail glass, you should make sure that you break it right on the first try, because if you take three tries to do it and fail, that allows enough time for Big Dave MacLean the Winnipeg bluesman and his big beefy bass player to notice what you’re up to, put their hands on your shoulders and say “Why don’t you come out with us for a smoke, Cam?” in a way that suggests that you don’t really have any choice.
In my defence, I wasn’t really going to cut him. I was just going to hold the broken glass to his throat, and tell him to leave my people the fuck alone.
My thinking is, I normally would have easily been able to break the glass, so I must have subconsciously been holding myself back from doing something that might have hurt Mykola and Jenny’s chances for their big break. That’s what I think I was doing, really.
* * *
* I looked that up. It means, “By praying, by working.” It’s the Motto of Rugby School, alma mater of many British luminaries, including the great Victorian hero, Brigadier-General Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE. He’s an ancestor of mine, on my father’s side, funnily enough.
EJECTED
BIG DAVE AND HIS BASSIST sat me down fairly insistently on the curb of the parking lot. He shoved a cancer stick in my mouth, unlit, at a crazy oblique angle, and shoved his face in mine.
“I don’t want to see you back in there till you’ve cooled off, Cam. Is that understood? If you run back in there looking for trouble, you know what we’ll have to do, don’t you?”
“Rngh.”
“Okay then,” said Big Dave.
Rosalyn Knight was in mid-anecdote, smoking nearby with a coven of cackling, similarly louche ladies in pretty thrift-store dresses with various stains and artfully mussed hair.
“Oh, Christ, and sure enough, they come right up to the stage, and they’re, ‘Like, you mind if we jam along with your set, man?’ It’s unbelievable.”
“What did you do?”
“Oh well, I just said, ‘Oh I would love to jam, but unfortunately, both of my parents were killed by bongos, so they’re very traumatic for me.’”
Big Dave turned to her and motioned toward me.
“You ladies, keep an eye on him?”
“Uh, yeah, of course. He tries to go back in, I’ll do my Tae Kwon Do on him.” Rosalyn made a few perfunctory martial-art moves in my direction, cigarette in one hand, wineglass in the other. The ladies cackled some more as Big Dave and his buddy went in.
I slumped down, putting my face in my hands, inadvertently crushing my smoke.
“Uh-oh. Somebody’s having a shitty night.”
“I’m an idiot.”
“Oh, don’t say that. It takes all the fun out of pointing it out to you. You don’t look so good, Scampbell. If you hadn’t ripped off so many of my friends, I’d be feeling really sorry for you right now. Maybe you should call it a morning.”
“Fuck. Why is the music bizness so fucking fucked up?”
“Well, my theory is, there’s smoke and mirrors in every business. But when the actual product is smoke and mirrors, it makes it that much trickier to know what the fuck’s going on. Of course you wouldn’t know anything about that. Because you’re just a simple fucking smoke machine.”
“How do you deal with it?”
“My needs are simple. I like to make up songs. I like to put on a show. I like travelling, hanging around with my dysfunctional friends.”
“Don’t you care about Making It? Being a Star?”
“Nooo, I’m totally above that. I’m completely zen with the universe, man.”
“Ok, but what if you never get there, never get where you’re trying to go?”
She took a long, dramatic drag, and said, on the exhale, “Fuck it.”
I sat and thought.
DRUNKEN SELF-SABOTAGE
IT’S TRUE, I DRINK A LOT. Perhaps some people might call me an Alcoholic, but in the regions of eastern Europe where I’ve been touring since the early nineties, where we get plied with palinka at the end of breakfast, just as a matter of common courtesy, to “wake us up” before we hit the road, I am merely a human being, a pedestrian. The world is a fucked-up place. As far as I’m concerned, if you can go through life and you’re actually paying attention to what’s going on, and the stuff you see doesn’t make you feel like you need a drink — well, as far as I’m concerned, that would make you a psychopathically callous individual.
I used to drink with a doctor of psychology in the basement bar of a university student union building. He told me — while ogling the undergraduates of both genders without a hint of discretion — that his clinical definition for addiction was as follows: a situation where something you do on a regular basis is actually making your life worse, not better. He further said that, in the end, everybody’s got to make that calculation for themselves. Sounds about right to me.
Obviously, a lesion-covered heroin addict in downtown Regina is not doing better for being a heroin addict. Unless the heroin makes that heroin addict
forget for seven blessed minutes that when he was nine years old he watched his stepfather rape his sister. If that heroin addict calculates that the seven minutes of forgetting is worth the lesions and all the other stuff, who the fuck am I to say?
But yes, it’s true, there have been instances where I have probably harmed myself, or my “career.” I don’t normally talk about these instances, simply because it’s bad for business, and not because I can’t admit when I’m wrong, which is a complete falsehood.
There was that time that I had the charge of some young quirky punky kids from the bourgeois West Side of Vancouver, taking them on a tour around Czech Republic, when I wound up puking up a big goulash meal with some mulled wine, beer, and vodka in Wenceslas Square at four in the morning. People talk as if everything was fixed after the Velvet Revolution, but the police were still as corrupt and nasty as ever. When I couldn’t pay the beat cops their bribe, they handed me a mop and bucket and made me clean up my own mess. That was an operation with several false starts, if you know what I mean, and each time my stomach revolted at the smell of its own contents, the boys in black would give me a couple of solid shots with their nightsticks. A few of their civilian countrymen stood around to jeer them on. It was the late nineties by then, and after several years of openness, I guess the charm of playing host to Westerners’ pig-wild cheap Easyjet alcoholidays had worn off a bit.
Unfortunately I lost sight of the kids I was supposed to be shepherding around, and they missed several shows after being taken under the wing of a unibrowed Canadian bar impresario named Glen, from Burnaby. I did finally find them in a brothel in Brno, a recently-converted Communist Pioneer Youth for Healthy Living Centre. They were rather grey from lack of sleep but otherwise mostly unharmed. I never did find out which side of the brothel transactions they’d been enlisted in, and I thought it insensitive to pry too much. I managed to talk the big moustachioed men wearing Confederate flag T-shirts who were cleaning old-fashioned Colt pistols in the front room into letting the boys go, and we even got to the gig on time that night, but they never really wanted to work with me again. I will say in my defence, though, that the album they wrote and recorded after they got home was much darker, harsher, more infused with the real pain of experience than their previous work. They’d had some of the Kerrisdale taken out of them.