Cadillac Couches

by Sophie B. Watson

  To bagel purists, it might have seemed like sacrilege, but I went all the way and slathered a bagel with cream cheese and blackcurrant jam that we’d also bought in little tubs. Then I dunked the bagel in my coffee. Bliss, happiness. I could feel Isobel watching me. She picked at her bagel in between puffs of her cigarette. She shot back her espresso and went to order another. By this point in our road trip, we weren’t speaking much; we’d run out of topics.

  I watched the other customers. I was so attracted to Montrealers; they were a sexy bunch. It’s not that they dressed fancy, they just seemed to have a just-rolled-out-of-bed innate chic. Our classic Albertan men with their baseball caps and Oilers sweatshirts couldn’t compete romantically with the Québécois men in their loose blazers and woolly turtleneck insouciance. Theirs was a nonchalant elegance. Not pretentious, just distilled Euro flair. Think Leonard Cohen. Plus they had that whole bilingual thing happening; they could woo in French and English.

  Isobel came walking back over to the table with a latte. She looked a bit like a flapper with her sleeveless, jade green short dress and her Cleopatra haircut. “The old man thought two double espresso back to back wouldn’t be idéale.”

  The morning got hotter and hotter as we sat there sipping coffee and eating bagels, reading newspapers until lunchtime. By noon it felt like +40 and humid. Steam-room humid. I took some more cold medicine. I was surprisingly alert for having not slept yet.

  We took off down Mont-Royal East, needing to find a flower shop or a well-stocked flowerbed in a public park. It was imperative that I found a red flower so Hawksley would be able to recognize my signal like I’d told him in my letter. After milling up and down the streets for a while, and seeing no flower shops, Isobel pointed at a flower box in someone’s front yard. A whole box of red snapdragons. I looked in the windows, saw no one, and so bent down and struggled to break off one from the bunch. I had to shimmy it from side to side and then yank it out from the root.

  I wasn’t sure how good it would look in my hair, this snapdragon with its puffy petals that looked like painted earlobes on a stalk. I felt shame for stealing it and leaving a flower tomb in the soil. A flower robber. “Come on, Annie, we’re going to be late, what are you doing? Why are you sticking a bagel in the dirt? Those bagels are precious, Annie, Montreal bagels, for heaven’s sakes.” The bagel felt like the right thing to fill the gap. Maybe the flower bed owners would understand the swap.

  Isobel helped to secure the flower properly in my ponytail’s elastic band. She said it looked a bit like I was wearing an Indian headdress, but not to worry Indian chic was all the rage. I had been aiming more for flamenco dancer.

  When we got back out on the street we saw it was much more crowded. Downtown Montreal and the streets were now heaving. People of all ages strolled everywhere. I wondered if there was a parade or some kind of protest. It was mad. People were barely clothed. So much flesh. God I loved summer!

  Summery people in their light clothes, all just sliding along in rivers of summer sweat. We joined the crowd and walked for a block. I hoped we could get off the main road, but when I looked down the other street, it was packed, feeding onto Saint-Laurent. I felt nervous in the crowds, claustrophobic. I hadn’t experienced a heat wave in forever. My heart pounded; I was definitely overheating.

  Unlike me, Isobel could see over most people’s heads. “I could lift you up on my shoulders, if you’re feeling claustrophobic.” The fact that she knew me so well mellowed my mounting fear. We considered slithering across the car roofs to get to the gig on time. I stood up on a bumper of an old Citroën to see ahead. All I could see were swarms of more people.

  And then it hit me.

  Everyone was headed to the mountain that day for the free concert.

  They were all headed for my Hawksley.

  We were but two in a sprawling, buzzing mob.

  He had become, without my noticing, a megastar, no longer an indie fave with a cult following; the masses were involved. My stomach forecasted doom.

  When we got to the mountain area, we saw an outdoor stage. I did a double take. Hawksley was walking on stage! It was too early, surely. No, it was Him. But it didn’t look like we could get anywhere near the stage. I felt sick realizing I’d driven red-eyed to get to the city early and somehow, lost in coffee land, I had messed up and now we were late. My eyes welled up. My nose felt stuffed. I felt Isobel looking at me.

  Isobel rose to the challenge. “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll get you to him, ma chérie!”

  She grabbed my hand and shimmied us through the crowd, “Excuse me, excusé moi, merci, nous sommes Albertaines!” and wandangled us to the front. At one point she even hoisted me onto people’s arms. I was crowd surfing, which would normally have deeply embarrassed me, but here I was an anonymous Albertan. It was just a little ticklish.

  Hawksley was alone on stage, without his disciples, the Wolves. He cleared his throat. With Isobel beside me, now up close to the stage, I waited anxiously, my heart pounding. Sick with anticipation. He closed his eyes and looked like he was meditating. My salivary glands spurted as if there was a chocolate eclair within my reach. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and worried about my blood pressure dropping.

  “Salut, Montréal! Ça va? Ça trippe? Ça gaze? Eh oui, j’espère que toute la gang icite se sent fort fort sexy aujourd’hui! J’en ai ben des chansons là pour vous autres, si vous en désirez?”

  The crowd roared and clapped and wolf-whistled. The grass was lovely and green, the sky was blue, the woods were full of bouncing life. Summer, Montreal-style, hot and sweaty.

  He was wearing a fetching, episcopal purple blousy shirt underneath a suit vest and he had on matching pinstriped trousers—vintage shop chic. From a distance, it looked like he had safety-pinned his fly together; I was intrigued. I admired his sideburns and roguish black curly hair. His beauty was frightening, almost too much for me to bear.

  He opened with “Bullets,” which he spiced up with a four-minute tap-dance solo that made the crowd swoon. While he tapped away, he held an angelic high note and kept us all in breathless rapture.

  Following his spectacular opening feats, a girl in the audience with pigtail braids, who was balanced on top of a guy wearing a vintage military green jacket, pitched a handful of flowers on stage: blue, purple, red, yellow, and orange African daisies. He bent down to pick them up one by one and blew the girl a kiss.

  He gathered the daisies together, arranging them into a bouquet, and then held it with both hands and pretended he was holding a bat. He swung them luxuriously in the air, hitting an invisible baseball. It was beautiful. So beautiful that the cynical thought crossed my mind that he’d arranged for the girl to give him the flowers; it was hard to imagine he could improvise such poetic elegance.

  But I dismissed the thought pretty quickly; the man was an Artist.

  He rested his arms over his left shoulder, daisies dangling, and sang a vaudevillian number about a man named Johnny.

  He then ripped off a few petals and ate them.

  Stopped to put on some lipstick.

  Sang a song about stripping for your lover while he licked out sharp 1970s electric guitar riffs.

  The crowd went nuts.

  I could see his tonsils wiggle.

  I felt hot.

  The crowd pogoed up and down.

  As always, his shtick brought everyone together, like we were in on the joke. Everyone around me was fanning themselves. Couples danced lewdly. His spooky aphrodisiac effect had kicked in: girls smiled, purring like cats; boys puffed out their chests like peacocks. Winks and bashful nods. These uninhibited Québécois made it feel like one big summer festive mating dance.

  A man beside me turned to me and said, “I’ve got the shivers.”

  I nodded knowingly.

  Hawksley was a joy peddler, a love promoter, a bliss manufacturer. I could feel the endorphins releasing wave after wave in my brain, my mood elevating, my spirit soaring, my libido roaring. Love f
or everyone and everything, compassion, forgiveness. Serotonin was dancing in my brain. I had the feeling of pride when I saw him play, even felt a surging of corny patriotism: Canada produced this guy, we could hold our heads high as a nation.

  Isobel turned to me and yelled, “YOU’RE RIGHT, HE’S SO MUCH MORE DIVINE LIVE.”

  “I KNOW, HE’S SO HOT-BLOODED!” I screeched just as the music died down. Hot-blooded and Poetic.

  He let out a moan, the kind you might do when your toes are curling from your lover’s caresses. The crowd hollered.

  He moaned again.

  The crowd cheered.

  He shook his hips Elvis-style.

  The crowd whistled.

  A girl on Isobel’s left kept repeating, “Fabulous. Fabulous. Fabulous . . .”

  He moaned himself into a frenzy, playing his guitar like he was in love with it. He threw himself down on the ground. A fan jumped up on stage and mopped his brow.

  I almost forget from gig to gig how goddamned gorgeous he was. How over-the-top sexy he was. How he flirted, lamented, crooned, and seduced. My arm hairs stood up, like a strong breeze had blown them. My smile was hurting my face it was so intense.

  I could see that I wasn’t the only one smiling, the whole crowd was high, girls and boys.

  Business owners on the streets opposite the park were out in front of their restaurants, corner shops. People on balconies in high-rises waved and clapped. In the distance, I saw a deer coming to the edge of the woods. Were there even squirrels standing to attention? Could have been Sudafed hallucinations.

  We were all enamoured with Hawksley’s lust for life. His every yip revved up the crowd. He flattered. He flirted. He made fun of himself. He played matador, teasing an imaginary bull with a faux-fur red coat that he pulled out of a costume trunk on stage.

  Between songs, he drank tea from a pottery mug. He said he liked it with lots of honey, like his grandma used to make for him. He spoke of his grandparents between songs, retuning his guitar. “My grandpa was a farmer, he, like, loved birds . . . you know what I’m saying? This one year the drought was so bad, he couldn’t sleep at night ’cause he worried about the birds not being able to make nests ’cause it was so dry there was, like, no mud. None. So I go to visit him, right, and he’d be there—watering a patch of dirt. And I’d say, ‘What are you doing, Grandpa?’ And he’d say, ‘Just making the birds some mud.’ Every day for the whole drought he’d water that patch. You can see why Grandma was crazy in love with him . . . Now Grandma . . . she taught me how to put on lipstick and play poker. I love visiting them . . . They’re in a different lane than everyone else . . . you know what I mean?” When he was done tuning and talking he launched into “Striptease,” an anthem call for primal sex.

  “So did you guys all see the full moon last night? I mean WOW, I don’t know about you, but I felt a bit hairy. I started scratching and sniffing and, man, pretty soon I was a werewolf. I sat on that little balcony and did some howling, because . . . well . . . it felt good! I think us humans are too caught up in our minds, we need to get back to our bodies, back to our animal desires. You know what I’m saying?”

  The crowd cheered and barked and howled and honked up at him.

  “And you know for some weird reason the moon makes me think about Christmas . . . you know, in that kind of holy way that I think we should see more of all year-round. So in between howling at the moon, I sang a song, maybe you know it . . .”

  With no other instruments he started singing “Silent Night.” It was so surprising, like eating strawberries with ground pepper. And so even though it was a super-humid August summer afternoon with a blue sky and green grass, the crowd joined in.

  It didn’t feel odd or wrong to be earnestly singing “Silent Night,” it felt wonderful.

  By the final chorus, I opened my eyes and felt sick with love for him. It was almost too much pleasure. I couldn’t go outside to get some air, this was outside. But I knew I wasn’t going to pass out this time—I was beyond that.

  Isobel turned to me, wiping the sweat from her brow, still singing, “Ho-oh-ly Night, Si-eye-lent Night, All is calm, all is bright . . .” Once she realized that everyone else had stopped singing, she stopped and said, “Wow!”

  Behind her then I saw something that jolted me out of ecstasy. I caught sight of the Guy from the Rear-view Mirror. Was he wearing a red jacket? In this heat? He had no hat. Why did I think he was the same guy?

  I dismissed the paranoia by switching channels in my brain and visualizing Finn. I wondered how he was doing. I wished he was here for our impending rock-star encounter Number 3. After Hawksley graciously and deliciously played five encores, the crowd reluctantly let him go, only because he was sounding a bit hoarse.

  It was time to go backstage.

  Finn had doctored our media passes from the Bern caper so we would be able to have access to the green room. Except there was a lineup as long as the North Saskatchewan and it serpentined forever through the park. An infinite tail of girls and women from early teens to the seniors. Big ones, little ones, spiky-haired, curly-haired, big-hatted, small-skirted, tight-T-shirted, boob-tubed, gum-snapping, perfume-wearing, eyelash-batting women! All of them were flushed and had that just-got-Hawksleyed look. And they were meandering all the way from the stage to the St. Lawrence. The seagulls were hovering above the queue, like they were lined up as well.

  The disturbing thing was, when I looked closely, it looked like several of these women had media passes just like ours. I could make out bits of plastic in their hands and T-shirts with newspaper logos on them. Low-down, stinking Liars, all of them. And their faces, their blushing red faces. We were all interlopers.

  I had allowed myself to forget how ridiculous a mission this was. How being a fan among thousands is unpleasant. How degrading it was to realize I really was just one in a desperately long line of Hawksley-eyed gaga women. I looked them up and down. I couldn’t possibly muster enough superiority to rise above them all. He belonged to all of us.

  I knew I had allowed myself to get wooed. Wowed and wooed. But I don’t know when exactly I got reckless and pelted myself across the line from normal listener to girl chasing boy. Willingly letting myself fantasize about Hawksley and me together, of the possibilities. Once I was on the other side, there was no going back. Being delusional was enjoyable. He was a love evangelist, and I was converted. I had given up on love after Sullivan, and Hawksley had saved my soul.

  I watched them fanning themselves. I felt like throwing up as we waited in line. I looked at the sky and concentrated on cloud-sculpting. My epic delusion was revealing itself to me, I could now imagine an advertising blimp trailing a banner across the sky in upper caps: GIVE IT UP, LET IT GO, HE’S JUST A ROCK STAR, YOU’RE JUST A FAN. He would never be mine alone. It was wrong to try to hoard him. But I didn’t even like sharing him with Isobel, let alone all of these strangers.

  But we were finally here, so I had to go through with it, for the sake of resolution. I needed closure, goddammit.

  My stomach was all nerves, still jumbling and rumbling, and my heart was still pounding too fast. I ignored the chorus in my head saying, WALK AWAY, LET GO. There were only thirty more women ahead of us in the lineup to speak to him.

  Two hours later, and with hope now in the minus department, I felt like we were all a herd of baby turtles making our way to the big sea trying to avoid being attacked by birds knowing that once we arrived, any number of predators could drown us. The line was barely advancing. I was worried about heat stroke, and Isobel was worried about lipstick melting. I was grateful she hadn’t run out of patience. Our media pass hadn’t helped at all.

  The whole set up wasn’t how I’d imagined it would be. I wasn’t going to be spending the night with Hawksley somewhere. I wasn’t going to entertain him with my funniest jokes, perform my entire repertoire of good stories, or impress him with how wild and charming I was. He wouldn’t care that I was his biggest listener, how I was the one for him. H
e wasn’t going to fall madly in love with me. The more I looked at the other women, I saw that they were fans in love with his Hawksleyness, just like I was.

  Tears streamed down my face. A girl beside me said, “He’s going to love your panda eyes, darling.” Her friend, who was also crying, told her to shut up.

  I didn’t want to share him anymore with these crazy chicks, but I felt my motivation already leaving me, saying, See you later, cowgirl. I was going through the motions, but I knew I would just keep doing that because there’d been too many kilometres; Alberta was too far a place to come from to stop now. Like when I was with Sullivan, a part of me needed the humiliation of rejection to truly put my obsession back in perspective, maybe even squash it forever. I drummed up the last of my delusion to fire myself up—I pictured kissing him in a bubble bath.

  I stared at the backs of two heads in front of me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Hawksley was laughing and they were swaying. Sounded like one of them was reciting a poem. Talented cows! How was I going to vie for his attention?

  The girls ahead of us said their goodbyes and smiled smugly at us as they walked dreamily away. Isobel lunged forward. I felt venom rising up in me as I watched her arch her back coquettishly and purse her lips in that new way she’d been developing lately à la French actrice (like a slow-mo pout).

  I hadn’t said a word, and she was already chatting him up in her strange-bordering-on-offensive way: “Can you believe all this?!” she said, gesturing to the crowd of people surrounding him and the lineup, including me. “I mean, what’s the fuss all about—it’s just you!” she said laughingly like they were old friends. It was classic Isobel behaviour; she resented anyone else’s fame.

  But she went too far when she had leaned toward him, offering her hand like a princess for him to kiss. She was taking over. She didn’t possess the grace to not be the centre of attention for once.