by Geoff Berner
Translation. Muted chuckling.
“Okay, bad luck. We fired that motherfucker, you bet your ass. Then, the hotel we stayed at — in the middle of the night — the entire staff ran away!” I gesticulated wildly, a man driven half-crazy by misfortune. “Can you believe that? Ask them if they can believe that. Unbelievable bullshit. Ask them!”
Marko asked them. They shook their heads. Was it a “Yeah, it defies belief how many people don’t have any pride in their work, their duties,” sympathetic head shake, or was it a “No, I genuinely don’t believe you.” head shake? I think at that point it was a deliberately ambiguous head shake. They hadn’t made up their minds what they were going to do.
“And worse than that, they stole our passports that we left at the desk for safekeeping! I tell you, we don’t have this kind of thing happen in Canada. No sir. Sons of bitches!”
As Marko spoke, the older guard nodded, with a half-smile. He knew where this was headed.
“So. I have a letter here from the Canadian Consulate, explaining the situation.” I waved the meaningless, semi-purloined document with its distinctive maple leaf letterhead. “The procedure is, you’re supposed to hold on to this for your files. This’ll cover your ass if anybody asks any annoying questions. Another drink?”
I handed over the paper as I filled the glasses. We knocked another one back.
“Oh, there’s another important issue: We won’t be able to take all this liquor and tobacco we’ve got here across the Italian border, because we don’t have enough cash with us to pay the customs duties, which are outrageous. The Italians are all thieves, as I’m sure you know. So we’re gonna have to leave them here. Can we leave it with you guys for safekeeping?”
Marko imparted this to the pair. The younger one said something that made the older one laugh, slap his thighs, jump up suddenly, and shout “Hoy!”
I turned to Marko. “What, they just celebrating their haul? What’d he say?”
“He says that before you can go, since you are Big Rock Stars, you should give a little concert for them, so they can hear your music.”
“Ha, ha ha!”
The guard laughed.
I laughed.
Everybody laughed.
Then the guard said something.
“He says ‘No, really.’ They want a concert.”
I had little time to prep the gloomy bus inmates.
“OKAY, JUST DON’T SAY anything. Just chant, like, ‘Ahh, ah, ah ah!’ And just bang the shit out of the bus with whatever comes to hand. Make it rhythmic somehow. Put every aspect of your anxiety about this moment into your performance. It’s got to be convincing.”
And it was.
I would go so far as to say that my Bosnian Crowley-ites didn’t pretend to be the Industrial-Noise-Rock band Machine Vivisection Anatomy Laboratory — they formed this band, for one performance only. Wailing their angst and whaling away on that school bus with tire irons, wrenches, some of the harder luggage, a metal thermos or two — whatever came to hand. The blond quiet guy just banged away at the rear left fender with his bare fists till they were bloody.
“So, what do you think? Eh?” I myself was pretty impressed with the power and density of the sound these people were creating. It was a fantastic musical moment. I wish I had a vinyl pressing of that moment in my hands right now.
The older guard took a luxurious drag on his Marlboro and said something, deadpan. The younger one laughed.
“What’s that, Marko? What’d he say?”
“He says that with umm, a ‘bad noise’ like that, they should be bribing you to leave the country.”
I was genuinely offended, I tell you. Some people just have no taste.
As the bus laboured away, I took a long pull on one of the bottles that remained. We hadn’t even had to give them all away. Someone turned on a ghetto blaster. It was Supertramp. “Bloody Well Right,” a band and a song I’d always despised for its slickness, softness, and pretentions to classical music influences. But right then, I suddenly felt a surge of warmth for the thrust of the melody, the repetition of the word right. Then Marko slammed his fist on the Eject button and popped in Keskonen Suoli’s first album, and I felt even better as the guitar riff introduced itself briefly before the brutal bass and drums thundered in like a glorious, galloping herd of muskox the size of mountains.
Marko leapt up and began thrashing up and down the aisles, banging his head in ecstasy.
A small, cold hand took mine. I turned to look in the beautiful, sad eyes of Marina, Marko’s girlfriend.
“I have not been in love with Marko for some time,” she intoned, dolefully shaking her head.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said. It did not dampen my elation. I tried to look empathetic.
Sadly, she shook her head again. She sighed, partly in exasperation.
“No, you don’t understand.”
“No, I’m really sorry.”
“I think I may be falling in love with you,” she said, with a shrug of hopeless disbelief.
That moment when you said that, my Love, was the greatest moment, of the greatest day of my life.
ATTACKED
ONCE I WAS FINISHED illuminating the Widow Rogers about the errors of her ways, I grabbed my Caesar (I think it was mine) and headed out of the coffee shop. I believe that some of the bruises I later found on my legs and face were from the fall I took between tables when some inconsiderate gimp left their crutches poking out from under their chair, and the now-frayed bathrobe caught on them. You bet I gave him a piece of my mind.
I could feel myself crashing hard, so I was desperately searching for an appropriate place to lie down. But nowhere seemed quite appropriate enough. I remember myself stumbling onward, onward, toward the festival grounds, but I don’t have a clear memory of actually vaulting the fence, somehow, or the decision to lie down in the long grass under the outdoor tent stage where Mykola was due to perform at another workshop five hours later. So you have to credit me, that even in my lowest, most anaesthetized state, I still had an intuitive sense of where I ought to be.
All I know is, I woke up and I was under attack.
From the blackness of my inebriated sleep, I felt a hand slap my face. I’m a man who reacts quickly to danger, so when the hand slapped me again, and then a third time, I sprang into action, even before I’d taken full stock of the situation, or the size, or identity of my assailant. There was no time to wonder, Which of the people who’ve threatened revenge upon me at one time or another could it be? It was anyone’s guess.
I swore valiantly and grabbed hold of his arm. But he was even quicker than me, because he somehow instantly grabbed hold and wrestled me into a prone position on the grass, pushing the heel of his palm into my face — clearly someone with martial-arts training. Now my eyes were forced shut, further delaying any attempt to discover my enemy.
We thrashed around in the dark under that stage, me, shouting and cursing, he, silent as a ninja assassin, following my every attempt to break free with an equal and brutal counter-move. Somehow, I had to dislodge him. I’ve been trained by long experience brawling on the beer-soaked floors of Alberta taverns, and also on the beer-soaked floor of the kitchen that I grew up in, where my father would administer his soused version of discipline. I learned early that there’s no such thing as fighting dirty, just fighting for survival, for escape. So I had no compunction about grabbing hold of the bastard’s hand, leaning up and taking a huge, tearing, vicious bite. I felt the flesh rip and thought I heard a crunch of bone. Blood flowed into my mouth. But I heard no scream, although he did counterattack immediately.
An inkling of pain flowed into my mind from somewhere. The dull, soggy processors in my cerebellum slowly sorted out the source of it — the villain had hit me precisely tit-for-tat, stabbing me in my right hand.
With a mighty heave, I rolled over and out from under the stage, with the idea of exposing this psycho to the public. With more room to move, I started flailing abo
ut, trying to shake him. “Holy shit!” somebody shouted, and I opened my eyes. I looked around. Where was the sonofabitch?
Various people nearby were staring at me, edging away with looks of shock and disgust. A guy in a tie-dyed shirt and sandals, some kids with a Frisbee. A couple of old ladies. None of them could have scrambled away quick enough to have been the culprit.
The cruel truth of the matter crept up on me slowly. I re-traced my memory of the last few minutes, looking for an alternative scenario, as I sat there, bleeding. But there was no getting around the fact that I had just bitten my own right hand to hell. I guess I’d been sleeping at a funny angle, and my entire right arm had lost circulation, pressed under my own weight. I blinked at the realization, tasting my own blood, watching it flow all over my bathrobe and spatter my track pants. I screamed. The people moved farther away.
It was hot, and I was hemorrhaging profusely. I slowly crawled myself up to a sitting position, tore a strip out of the terry cloth, and fashioned a makeshift tourniquet to wrap around the spurting wound. I reflected that one good thing about biting yourself is that you don’t have to get tested for rabies or hepatitis or anything, since you already know the medical history of the person who bit you. At least I wouldn’t need any shots.
HIDE THE GRAIN
OF COURSE I HADN’T ACTUALLY consciously chosen to lie down under Stage Five in order to be present for the “Veterans and Rookies” workshop. That was instinctive decision-making, for which, as you know by now, I have quite a knack. It took me a minute or two to adjust my eyes and figure out where I was.
Leslie had put Mykola and some other younger folkies up against some of the old fossils from the early days of Canadian folk. These were people who started out back when you could make a reasonably good career and probably sell over twenty thousand LPs with some fake bluegrass and a few hippie ballads about the calming, sweet beauty of life on Vancouver Island. Sheesh.
The old folksinger got up to his feet and said, “Well, I’m going to play a song that may surprise you. Last February, I was asked to contribute some music to a documentary for CTV called Point of Blue. Now this doc follows the Vancouver Police as they do their thankless job in the Downtown Eastside. Some of these people in the Downtown Eastside have fallen through the cracks of the system, some might say they’ve jumped into the cracks, but that’s another matter. The point is that a lot of these fellas (and gals) who work down there are really going the extra mile to try to help the people down there to get out of the cycle of addiction.”
Now I know that people are supposed to drift to the right as they age, but I tell you, he then proceeded to play an almost unbelievably reactionary song, a paean to the goodness and caring of the Vancouver Police Department. I personally on several occasions have seen members of this fine force laughing as they pepper-sprayed junkies just for the sheer fun of watching them squirm and writhe. Pretty awful stuff, this. But on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with the guitar finger-picking in a pleasant, rolling way, and the folksinger’s low, mellow voice lulling along, it all just kind of washed over the crowd like a warm, not-very-cryptic fascism bath. The song finished, and there was the de rigueur applause.
Mykola picked up his instrument. He stood up. He took a deep breath.
“I’d like to dedicate this song to Frank Paul, who died of hypothermia this past winter, when he was dragged, unconscious from the drunk tank at the Vancouver Municipal pre-trial centre in the Downtown Eastside, and left lying in the rain in an alley between Hastings and Cordova Street. Nobody on duty at the time will admit to seeing this happen. And no one in the Vancouver Police Department is willing to say which of their members is responsible. I’ve translated the song from the original Ukrainian. It’s a song from the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, where over two million people died. It’s called ‘Hide the Grain.’ The chorus translates as ‘Hide the Grain, hide the grain, mother, but hide it well, for if they find the grain the police will shoot us. The police serve power, they do not serve justice, hide the grain.’”
I can’t play it for you now. I can’t use words to describe the way he played it. Nothing I could write would suffice.
But as much as you, reader, may want to pooh-pooh this notion, I am willing to swear, and do hereby swear on my daughter’s life, that Mykola’s song travelled outward in waves, changing lives as it went.
I saw a teenage boy standing with his conservative-looking parents. The parents were frowning, looking away from the stage, deliberately. But the boy stared, transfixed, exhilarated by what this chubby, goofy fellow with the odd instrument was doing on the stage.
I saw a very old woman. Who knows? She may not have lost family in that famine, a lifetime ago. Maybe she wasn’t even Ukrainian. But nevertheless, the tears were streaming, flooding the dry riverbeds of the wrinkles on her face as she shook. Another old lady next to her turned and took her arm and leaned her head on her shoulder, and they both wept together.
And then I spotted Sandy Mackenzie at the edge of the crowd, just listening, eyes closed, like he used to do when we brought those strange records back from the shop and played them in his mother’s basement, before everything went to shit between us.
He opened his eyes and he looked up, and caught sight of me looking at him, as Mykola’s song tore through the air. He looked at me, and he made a little head gesture towards Mykola. Then he gave a rueful little smile, and the slightest little nod. And I knew exactly what he meant.
Mykola came to the finishing home chord, and let it ring. All around, the crowd was silent, gaping at the power of the seventy- year-old song.
I REALIZED THAT MY WORK HERE was essentially done. I had achieved the transcendent moment of the festival. And I was seized with a violent urge to get the Hell out of there before anything fucked up this feeling. I figured Mykola and them would understand. They were true artists, after all. Sure, they might be a little pissed off about not getting paid and having no immediately evident way to get home to Vancouver, 1,200 kilometres away, but I knew that they’d get quite a bit of money from sales at the merchandise tent, and they could always bum a ride home with somebody who wanted to sleep with them or something. Musicians always get by on their charm, anyway.
I LIMPED MY WAY TO THE GATES of the festival, taking care not to make eye contact with anybody, so that I wouldn’t get drawn into any conversations that might wreck my mood. Nobody seemed to want to come within twenty feet of me — I guess I just gave off that “don’t talk to me” vibe, and then also of course there was the facial bruises, the all-over filth and dead prairie grass, the torn, blood-soaked bathrobe, and the open, suppurating wound that I’d made of my right hand.
I walked out the main gate, and lo and behold, there were the Supersonic Grifters. They weren’t playing. Just standing around, passing a smoke between them. They also looked a bit off. Maybe not as off as me, but off.
“What’s the matter, kids?”
“Security called the cops on us last night in the hotel lobby. Jacob started lipping them off so they hauled him to the drunk tank. So we just spent our last money bailing him out.”
“Yeah, and you did all the coke while I was in the can. Why does this always happen to me?” Jacob kicked the fence with a worn combat boot. “I just wanna fucken break something!”
“Hunh, that was a lot of coke to do in one night.”
“We called it the Blizzard of ’03.”
The feral little fiddler was still chipper. She held up her right hand, which was shaking visibly. “My bow hand’s got n-n-natural vibra-a-a-a-to. I don’t even have to doo-oo-oo anything.”
I had a sudden impulse. I took the laminated, all-access pass from around my neck, and put it around the fiddler’s.
“Well here ya go. It’s my gift to you.”
I knew I didn’t have to explain to these little criminals about getting themselves all in, one at a time, through different gates by passing the pass back out through a hole in the fence. In twenty minutes they’d all be
loose in the festival, and the Devil would ride. I walked on, leaving them to their celebration dance, imagining all the transformative experiences that were now pre-ordained for the unsuspecting festival-goers.
I found the minivan, gunned the engine, and tore out of the parking lot of the Westin. And I haven’t looked back, I tell you. That’s how I operate.
THE GAMBLING NORWEGIAN FARMER
A GUY IN STAVANGER, NORWAY, once told me this story:
He said his great-grandfather was a farmer in a little town, about 100 kilometres outside Oslo, back in about 1905, when 100 kilometres out of town was really the sticks. He owned a decent-sized farm that had been in the family for generations. He had a wife and twelve kids. He had a reputation for being tight-fisted when it came to spending money on his family.
This great-grandfather got into a poker game on a Saturday night. At this poker game was a bunch of other farmers from the area, plus a Stranger, an Outsider, a travelling professional gambler.
The farmer started to lose, and lose big, to this professional gambler. When normally sober, hard-working people hit a run of bad luck, they can fall into a trap that tells them that they just have to try even harder and their good fortune will return. The Lord rewards hard work, and all that. This is not a good strategy at poker. Soon the farmer had lost all the cash he possessed.
The guy who told me this story didn’t offer any insight into the farmer’s interior life. He just told me what he did. What he did was, he bet everything — and I mean everything — on his next hand.
And of course he lost. He got up from the table and left.
THE GUY WHO TOLD ME THIS STORY, he says he heard it from his grandfather, the youngest of the twelve children of that farmer who lost the poker game. The grandfather would have been around six or seven at the time of the story.
According to the Norwegian guy who told me the story, his grandfather says that the morning after the poker game, Sunday morning, a stranger rode up to the farmhouse.