Festival Man

by Geoff Berner

  There was also that Norwegian band that I brought out to Canada to open on tour for Cole Dixon’s old hard rock outfit. They were big in their home country, and I was going to get them rolling in North America. That turned out to be a pipe dream because of Cole’s abilities as a poker player. He’s a strange man. I’ve seen him finish a gig at 2 a.m., get back to the hotel room at three, and be on the phone seeing if there’s any casinos open in town. Then he’ll head out and play Texas Hold ’Em till ten in the morning, get picked up and sleep as the bus rolls, all the way to soundcheck, like a fuckin’ vampire in a cowboy hat. I guess somebody told him he needed to have a career to fall back on in case music didn’t work out, and he picked card shark.

  Cole was stringing those Norwegians along the whole tour, “teaching” them how to play poker each night after the shows, with toothpicks as chits. I knew what he was doing. I should have known on the second-to-last night of the tour when Cole bought me a “present” of two great big bottles of Maker’s Mark, that was the night he was gonna make his move. It was so easy. They’d been “winning” all these toothpicks off him for the last week, and several times they’d suggested they all play for real money to “make it interesting.” Cole, being a gentleman, had of course always politely declined. ’Cause he knew I was watching him, and I would have stepped in.

  But then that evening, because of Cole’s gift, I was the worse for wear, some fat chick from Brooks, Alberta, was trying in vain to fuck my insensate form in the back of the tour bus while he lined the squareheads* up for slaughter. When one of them brought up the idea of playing for dough again, I bet he hemmed and hawed a couple of times before “reluctantly” agreeing to humour them.

  The next morning, I made him give them back their instruments, but he held on to most of their kroners. I think they always suspected me of setting them up, but I honestly just failed to be there when they needed to be protected.

  Not all my alcohol-related failures were sins of omission, of course. There was the time at the festival in northern Saskatchewan where, suspecting that the emcee had stolen my tequila, I strode onstage as he was doing a “lost child” announcement and demanded it back (the tequila, not the child), shoving him, knocking him into a speaker column that was not sufficiently fastened, which thus toppled over onto some overeager Wailin’ Jenny fans, who I imagine repented somewhat that they had fought their neighbours so jealously to be right up at the front. That’s one of the fests where I now have to use a false name when sending artist packages.

  And if I hadn’t been pretty ginned up, I probably wouldn’t have thought it was a good idea to drop a dime with Canada Immigration at Vancouver International Airport on that English political folk band that tried to skip out on paying me my commission. But they did get home, eventually, after the investigation exonerated them of the charges. Wasn’t too good for my rep with the limeys, though.

  And I have in truth had to change cities from time to time, in order to evade bar tabs that had metastasized into figures so large that they could simply no longer be contemplated. Several pretty decent establishments may have even had to close under the weight of them. I admit that. And of course there’s been the odd house fire that may or may not have been caused by drunkenly knocked-over late-night candles, and the times when slurred speech led to horrific misunderstandings involving the similarities between words, like “druid” and “jewed”; and “jugular” and “drug dealer,” and a few stepped-on and stepped-through musical instruments, and of course, the incidents with the vehicles, including my somewhat ill-advised attempt to found a rental van company …

  Okay, so surveying it all now, in some ways I understand how people accuse me of being a useless, drunken bum. I understand if you feel that way, Love.

  Still, when a man is tested, he has two choices: He can give up, or he can stand up. So after a decent interval, I stood up, ready to sneak past Big Dave and go and try a new approach to Wren. Yes, I’d been defeated. Yes, I’d been outmanoeuvred before I’d even really begun the journey to Calgary. Yes, I had no idea what to do to fix the situation and ingratiate myself into a negotiation, given the fact that it was certainly arguable that just twenty minutes previously I’d tried to cut the man’s throat, but I felt confident that once I got in there and got close to Wren, my Manager Brain would kick in. After all, I’d figured out ways around tougher problems than this.

  * * *

  * “Squarehead” is a little-known racial slur on Norwegians. I try to make a point of learning the slanderous terms for every national group I encounter. I’ve never found a satisfyingly nasty one for Australians, though. “Nation of convicts” just doesn’t hold any sting in my book. They’re more like a nation of unquestioning, incurious prison guards, really.

  CRUCIAL MOMENT

  I CRUISED PAST THE SECURITY volunteers, calling to an imaginary person beyond the rope, waving my pass. By this point in the evening, the security guys were close to as far gone as I was. Maybe more, since my tolerance is pretty heroic. I was determined to take that one last shot at making something work with Wren. I knew that everything came down to this moment, when I was called upon to do the Truly Impossible. It was the Ultimate Test.

  RESULT

  BUT OF COURSE WHEN I GOT IN, he’d already left. So there was nothing to do but drink.

  INTERMITTENT NIGHT

  AS I SAID, I’M NOT SOMEONE who claims to be perfect. I do admit my flaws, my mistakes. So I’m willing to concede that after that, I probably did hit the sauce a little too hard. I don’t have a full accounting of every minute of every hour I spent after the crushing realization that there would be no second chance with Wren. I think of myself as a positive person, so I really tried not to let the facts of the situation depress me. I know that it was only a few minutes after I came back into the ballroom and saw that Wren was gone that I did jump up on stage with Buckwheat Zydeco and insist that we sing “Beast of Burden” together. He really does a stunning version of that song, and I know all the words.

  I know that there were words between me and Jenny Reid at one point, because I remember her hitting me in the face pretty hard. I think I asked her why lesbians were so angry all the time. Jenny brought up the salient possibility that “Maybe lesbians are only angry all the time around you.” and, with her impeccable rhythm, timed the “you” to coincide with the impact of her right-hand haymaker. Even while I was reeling backwards from the punch, I was congratulating myself on having chosen such a talented person for the band. I really do know how to pick musicians.

  Also, it may have seemed that I was making a pass at the jolly buxom blonde who was hanging out with Mykola for the night, but I swear that was just in jest. I was satirizing drunken, lecherous, grabby behaviour, rather than earnestly engaging in it.

  And I believe that it was after that when I made the collect call to Athena’s cellphone in London, and demanded that she fly standby to Calgary to resurrect my reputation. I know I tried various strains of persuasive rhetoric, but to no avail. I do clearly remember the last part of that conversation, because it involved Athena promising that the next time she saw me, she was going to vise my jaws open and shit down my throat. Yes, I’m pretty sure I recall that correctly.

  Then there’s a dark period, and I remember leaning on the wall of the lobby, and suddenly feeling very hungry, and seeing the sign for the coffee shop.

  The Early Risers were having breakfast. When you’re a Late Nighter, and you go all the way round to the point where you start seeing Early Risers, you should probably just avoid those cold, bright-eyed strange people like the plague, but somehow as I made my way into the coffee shop, my better instincts had deserted me. I spotted Stan Rogers’ Widow sitting with some young volunteer girl, or maybe it was her daughter from a later marriage or something.

  Stan Rogers’ Widow is kind of the figurehead of the Stan Rogers Festival, a folkie gathering that happens every July in Canso, Nova Scotia. They always have a heavier-than-usual helping of diddlee-dee-
ers and earnest, clichéd white folksingers, et cetera. That’s why one year, when they were in danger of losing some of their government grants on account of the lack of Canadian Cultural Mosaic Variety in their lineup, I had been brought in as a pinch-hitting programmer, to helpfully supply a few exotic elements, like a Gamelon orchestra, a Japanese Kodo lady who used giant cockroaches as improvisational percussion, and a ninety- four-year-old yodelling cowboy, for good measure.

  Which is to say that I wasn’t a stranger to Stan Rogers’ Widow when I sat myself down and proceeded to discuss with her the merits of her choice of “Amazing Grace” as the Grand Finale song for her festival. The Grand Finale is when all the artists gather in a crowd on the main stage, late Sunday night. They link arms, sway and sing, Kumbaya-style. Look, my point still remains — “Amazing Grace” is a Christian hymn, which alienates a lot of people who don’t subscribe to that set of beliefs. Not just lapsed Satanists such as myself, but Atheists, people of the Hebrew persuasion, et cetera. The Ghanaian band I helped book in were fucking Animists, for God’s sake — what the fuck do they care about some benighted pissant jumped-up sea shanty by some syphilitic slave-ship captain, anyway?

  I mean, even Rogers himself, that bald Fake Newfie from Taranna Onterrible, didn’t have much use for the Church, as far as I could see. Why not use one of his own fucking ditties? Have the whole fucking stage of World Beat-ers, third-rate Canadian electric blues-guitar wheedlee-wheedlers, irritating potato-munching racist psychotic pee-obsessed fiddlers and lesbian-separatist strummers, all join hands and sing “I’m a broken man on the Halifax Pier”? Wouldn’t that at least fit the occasion? So you can see why I got a little passionate about it, obviously. It matters what song you sing. It matters. I’m sure that the Good Widow understood. I mean, she kept nodding at me. But it’s true that when I get excited, after imbibing, I tend to kind of emphasize the sibilant consonants, and that can result in a certain amount of precipitation, I admit that, but I still hold it to be inaccurate and unfair for people to start instantly spreading the word from table to table about how somehow “Campbell Ouiniette just spat on Stan Rogers’s widow!” I took great exception to that. And I still do.

  But I guess that was a situation where it might have been better to have had a little less to drink.

  WE WERE NOT TRAPPED, PART III

  THE THING ABOUT BRIBING a border guard, or any official person, is that you’ve got to remember that you’re not really bribing a border guard — you’re bribing a human being. A human being with dreams, with dislikes, with a desire for some semblance of dignity, and if you’re lucky, a human being with a sense of humour. And of course, it helps if they’re a smoker.

  Most of all, you’ve got to have confidence. Real confidence. And somehow, that morning when I woke up, I had it. Somehow, I knew, on that day, this was the day, maybe the one day of my whole life, that God had given me, when I could Do No Wrong. No cocaine was involved in my mood, either. I just had a true sense of Destiny, of the alignment of all the forces of chance and the unseen currents of the events that shape men’s lives, roaring behind me like a set of nine diesel locomotives.

  I don’t know why, but nobody ever had to tell me how to finagle my way across the Yugoslav checkpoint on the border of Bosnia. Somehow, I just knew. Like I was born for it. It’s strange, because eastern European corruption is so different from Canadian corruption.

  A Canadian government minister doesn’t need to take a bribe, say, from a company like Bombardier. Bob from Bombardier was in the same fraternity at university as the politicians, they all belong to the same country club. Bob gets the fat government contract, the government minister gets a seat on the board when he retires from politics, seven years later.

  Sure, a small group of people who all know each other make out like bandits off the People’s money, while the People get overpriced trains and concrete with too much sand and not enough cement, but it’s not corruption, silly.

  But in unstable places where you can’t be sure that patience will bring the payoff, the exchanges are a lot more honest, a lot more clear, immediate. Honest — in that nobody is fooling themselves about what’s actually going on.

  Maybe that’s why I’ve had so many troubles in Canada over the years. I don’t connect well with the self-deluded, self-righteous Canadian style of corruption.

  Anyway, the first thing I somehow just knew was that instead of driving the school bus and its load of black-clad chain-smoking Sarajevo alternative-culture intellectuals straight up to the checkpoint, it was better if we just parked over to the side, about thirty yards away.

  “Everybody stay in the bus,” I shouted. “Let me do the talking.”

  “Man, you don’t even speak Serbian,” pointed out Marko the Finnish metalhead.

  “I can lie in any language. Now listen, after a while I might bring you out to talk to them. Just you, Marko. And make your Yugo-talk sound as Finnish-sounding as possible, you know? Make sure you’ve got an accent. Everybody else? Don’t speak. Don’t talk. Even if they talk to you, act like you don’t understand. Just be cool and follow my lead. I know what I’m doing.”

  The English-speakers in the group translated for the others. For some reason, they just nodded their heads, stoically. Any of my friends back in Edmonton would have given me the finger and demanded to know what the fuck I thought I was up to. No man is a prophet in his own home, is what the Irish say.

  I knew it was important, most of all, to appear as non- threatening as possible. I needed to look anomalous, a Thing Outside of the Known Narrative of the war. I needed to seem like an improbable freak. This is within the realm of my abilities.

  That’s why I skipped and hopped like a schoolgirl as I lugged the full-to-bursting checkered plaid plastic carry-all bags, singing “The Rodeo Song” at the top of my scratchy bullfrog voice.

  Well, it’s forty below and I don’t give a fuck,

  Got a heater in the truck and it’s off to the rodeo.

  Here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand,

  He’s a one-balled man and it’s off to the rodeo.

  I often sing that song when I’m nervous, or drunk, or both. It takes me back to my childhood when my dad and my uncle would chunk it into the 8-track and sing along in the old red Dodge as we’d go rattling and bounding across the summer fields. Somehow it soothes me.

  I could see the two border cops eyeing me as they leaned against the little guardhouse in their puke-and-shit-mix olive uniforms. They feigned disinterest, but I knew for a fact that I was the most entertaining thing they were gonna see all week. A crazy Canuck with bags full of goodies and a line of ridiculous bullshit.

  “Hi there, fellas!” I waved and grinned like an idiot. They looked at each other. The younger one unbuttoned his pistol holster.

  I waddled up to them, put one of the carryalls down and offered my right paw in a forceful, friendly manner to the one who hadn’t unbuttoned his holster.

  “Name’s Cam Ouiniette, from Innisfail, Alberta, Canada. Pleased to meetcha!”

  The guard didn’t shake my hand, but I was unperturbed. The front pocket of my plaid shirt had a Bic lighter and a pack of the Canadian Consulate’s Marlboros in it. I reached in with a dainty light touch, causing no stir or sense of threat in the guards, since the Marlboros were plainly visible poking up from the top. I pulled out a smoke, put it into my mouth, and offered a dart to the non-unbuttoned guard. After just a second’s hesitation, he took it. Before I even lit it, I offered him the whole pack.

  “Go on, take it, there’s more where that came from.”

  The guy took the pack. The hook was set.

  I set the carryall in between us and started ostentatiously rummaging in it. They stepped over to see what I was doing. I pulled up a bottle of Jack Daniels and held it in front of them. It shone like the golden, boozy promise of Freedom in the noonday early autumn sun. The green meadows of the valley caught the refracted light. The rocky hillsides smiled down on the bottle, instrumen
t of Liberty.

  “Care for a snort? I got some important stuff I need to discuss with you.” I gestured over to the card table they had set up outside, next to the guard box. A pleasant place to pass the time.

  I can be a surprisingly patient man when I’m comfortably seated, drinking hard liquor. The number three is a magic number. I waited for us to look each other in the eyes and down the third shot before I began to broach the subject at hand.

  “My friends, it’s essential that I get these Canadian Rock Stars to Italy.”

  The men shook their head. Was it a “no” head shake? No. It was an “I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying, Creature from Outer Space” head shake.

  “Marko! Get over here, willya? Marko!”

  Marko jogged up the grassy hill, his dreads bouncing. He was pale, shaky. Like a rookie hopeful trying to show some hustle at the team tryouts.

  “Okay. You tell them: I am the Tour Manager. This is a Big Rock Band from Canada. “Machine Vivisection Anatomy Laboratory” is the name of the band. Industrial Noise Music. Very popular in Germany. Very popular.”

  Marko translated. The guards looked over at the bus, impassively.

  “We were going to Vienna, to play, and our son-of-a-whore driver got drunk in the night. Took a wrong turn into Bosnia.”