by Eva Crocker
Then the chair came careening down. Somehow there was time for everyone to move out of the way. At first the band didn’t notice that the singer had fallen. For a moment he was on the floor with the music rumbling over him, the crowd gone still around him.
When the band stopped, first the drums then the bass and guitar, one of the older guys held up a hand and told everyone to “back the fuck up” and then “get the fuck out.” In the parking lot people were saying they saw blood, someone said he’d stopped breathing.
It wasn’t dark yet; the sun was sinking on one side of the horizon and a pale moon was visible in the sky across from it. It was one of those strange times when you can see dark pits in the moon’s face even though the sky is still bright. Someone said the cops were coming and people ran to stash beers behind the dumpster on the far side of the building.
There was a narrow driveway leading up to the church hall and the ambulance got stuck behind a stream of parents’ vehicles. The siren wow-wow-wow’ed as clumps of kids piled into back seats and their parents’ cars made tight U-turns to head back down the hill. I stayed and watched the paramedics carry the singer out on a stretcher. He was alive but there was blood all over his face. One of his bandmates walked alongside the stretcher going, “Oh my god, man, I’m so sorry. So, so sorry, dude.” The paramedics were stone-faced.
That night when I got home one of the guys who’d been hoisting the chair added me on MSN Messenger. Jordan Nolan. He was in two popular bands. Tear Gas and Bad Guys. Viv had sewn a silkscreened Tear Gas patch on the back of her favourite fluffy pink sweater.
“It’s ironic,” she’d explained.
I’d sat with her while she sewed the patch on with dental floss. It took two hours. There was thread in her mom’s sewing tin but dental floss was cooler. She kept pinning and re-pinning the corners to keep the patch from puffing away from the sweater.
“The sweater was always ironic, that I would wear a sweater like this is ironic, the patch makes it more ironic,” she said.
I bit the round pearly tip of one of her pins. “Yeah, I get it.”
I was jealous of the sweater. Jealous that she’d come up with the idea to sew the patch on it.
Jordan Nolan was one of very few people I knew as a teenager who had a full sleeve tattoo — it was of a space monster slapping a tentacle down in the middle of New York City. He was done high school, maybe he dropped out, but he was at least eighteen, I was around thirteen.
Sup, he messaged.
Not too much, you?
I was worried you got hit with that chair at the show
Nope
Cool, have a good night
I was using MSN Messenger on my parents’ computer in their bedroom. The window was open, I could smell the lilac tree in our neighbours’ backyard and the dirty socks in the laundry hamper next to me. I didn’t want the conversation to be over.
Thanks for checking that’s really nice of you
No problem
I stared at the green icon next to his name, trying to think of something else to say, until he slipped into the offline column. Then I ran downstairs to call Viv on the phone in the kitchen. She had updates about the Sewer Standoff incident and I let her ramble through them, savouring my news. It ended up the singer was pretty much fine, he had a concussion and three of his front teeth got knocked out, some broken ribs and a broken arm. We weren’t allowed to rent the hall anymore. Sewer Standoff was planning to use a grainy photo of the singer taped to the chair for the cover of their new demo.
“Jordan Nolan added me on MSN.”
“What?”
“To see if I got hit with the chair.”
“He likes you,” she said and I knew it was true.
The next day he sent me Sup again and told me he was helping organize a show to buy the singer dental implants. We chatted for weeks: I told him about studying for my first midterms and he told me about working at Tim Hortons. When I found out I was going to be playing the part of the Cheshire Cat in the school production of Alice in Wonderland, he wrote, They should have made you Alice.
I told him I wanted to be the Cheshire Cat, it was a more interesting role. I fantasized about inviting him to see me slinking around the stage in my black turtleneck and leggings with whiskers painted on my face.
Sometimes he’d say, Too bad you’re so young, and I’d say Why? and he’d say Never mind.
One day I walked to his apartment. It was a long, hot walk from my parents’ house. He told me there was a silver Boler trailer in the driveway, one of his friends was living in it. When I turned the corner onto his street the sun bounced off the trailer like X marks the spot. He met me at the front door and led me to his room. All of my friends lived with their parents; it was my first time being in a house where young people lived without adults.
His room was a skinny rectangle. There were two short bookcases filled with video games and DVDs. On top of one of the shelves there was a big glass tank with a lizard in it. Like most of my friends, his walls were papered with photocopied posters for local punk shows. Lots of shows I’d gone to and ones from before I started going to shows.
He sat on the futon. It was clearly his bed folded into a couch — there was a fitted sheet on it and two full-size pillows were tossed to one end. I sat down beside him. He used the remote to un-pause the movie he was watching. It was Twister. He was wearing cargo shorts and there was a white square of gauze taped to his calf.
“New tattoo,” he said. “Do you want to see?”
“Yeah.”
He lifted his foot onto the couch and peeled back a corner of gauze to show me a palm-sized tattoo of a wolf with three heads. All three mouths were dripping blood. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“It’s still kind of puffy. It’s shiny ’cause there’s Vaseline on it. Do you want to touch it?”
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“Yeah, a bit.”
The skin beneath and around the tattoo was shaved. I put a finger in the slippery Vaseline and pressed down.
“Ow,” he said, flexing his calf. I pulled my hand back.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay, I told you to touch it.” He smoothed the gauze over the tattoo and rubbed the tape, trying to get it to re-adhere.
“You’re really strong,” I said. “Like your leg is really strong.”
Sunshine was streaming into the room. People on TV screamed.
“I’ve kind of been working out. Here, feel my bicep.”
He tensed his arm, the one with the octopus-monster on it. I squeezed it and let my hand drop back onto the couch.
“Dave got the dental implants, they’re so white you can tell they’re fake,” he said.
“Oh, that sucks.”
“Anyway, I have to work soon,” he said.
“Okay.”
“So you should probably go.”
I stood up.
“I’ll message you later,” he said from the couch.
I closed his bedroom door behind me. In the porch his cat rubbed against me as I tied my sneakers.
Another time I asked him to go to a movie with me at the mall. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He’d already seen it once and wanted to go again. We arranged to meet in front of the movie theatre in the afternoon. I wore a pale blue T-shirt dress with a polo collar. Another long, hot walk from my parents’ house.
I arrived first. I tried not to stare at the escalator. I looked at the blinking lights that showed the schedule of movies for that day. He was five and then ten minutes late. Finally I recognized the flop of brown hair that hung over his eyes coming up the escalator. There was no line at the ticket counter. No line at the concessions. He bought an extra-large pop and I didn’t buy anything.
It was cool in the theatre. I leaned into his arm and he didn’t move it away. I
put my hand on the armrest and waited for him to take it but he didn’t. The movie went on forever. When it was over I waited outside the bathroom for him to pee.
As we were leaving the theatre someone shouted his name. We both turned and four of his friends came walking towards us.
“Hang on a sec, just wait here,” he said and jogged over to them. The group started walking back to the food court and he turned and yelled, “I’m gonna get a ride with these guys.”
“Does she need a ride?” I heard one of them ask.
“Do you need a ride?” he called.
“No.” I knew he didn’t want to offer.
He turned around and slapped an arm around his friend.
On the walk home I imagined what it would have been like to go with them. Crammed into the back seat with the windows down and the music blaring. I tried not to look sad, because I thought they might drive past me.
* * *
One night at Patrick Street, Viv organized a dinner party for her cousin Heather’s birthday. I carried extra chairs up from the basement and Viv rolled out taco shells in the galley kitchen. We turned up the heat.
Heather arrived first. After stomping the snow off her boots in the front porch she went straight to the kitchen and started pulling packets of spices out of the cupboard. I leaned against the counter drinking gin and soda. Soon all four burners were in use. The girls reached around each other, stirring and sprinkling, flicking the oven light on and off.
When I asked how I could help Viv said, “Just keep us company.”
Mike came back from the Great Canadian Dollar Store with helium balloons Viv had asked him to pick up. When he let go of their curly strings they swayed up to the high ceiling and bounced there.
People arrived in waves. A second load of chairs had to be carted up from the basement. On the way up the steps with a chair under each arm, I noticed I was drunk. During dinner someone brought up Jordan Nolan. Going to court for possession of child pornography. I swung around and tuned into the conversation. I googled and a VOCM article popped up. It was very short and there was no picture but the age was right.
“Are you sure it’s him?” I asked. “The same Jordan Nolan?”
“I heard it’s him,” Michael White said. “It’s sad, his life is so fucked up now.”
“I haven’t seen him in years, I thought he moved away,” I said.
I flipped my phone over and googled again. There was nothing besides the VOCM piece. It was just four sentences long.
“Who told you it was him?” I asked.
Michael White’s mouth was wide open, he was about to take a bite of taco but he laid it back on his plate.
“My sister, she knows his ex-girlfriend. It’s sad, that girl is super fucked up. She got him into drugs and they just like spiralled into all this fucked-up stuff. He was really in love with her.” He picked up the taco again.
It was never this warm in the house; we’d turned the heat up to twenty and now it was packed with people, plus the oven had been on.
“I don’t think it’s his fucking girlfriend’s fault, what are you saying?” I felt people on the opposite end of the table turn their attention to us.
“I’m just saying, maybe if he didn’t get into drugs, some people can’t handle drugs.” Michael shrugged, unfazed by how vicious I’d gotten with him.
I got up from the table and walked to the kitchen. I dumped my drink into the sink and filled my glass with water.
“We’re going to do the cake now.” Viv had followed me into the kitchen. She lifted the cake off the bottom shelf of the fridge. She’d made it the night before, coconut pistachio with swirls of rosewater frosting. She’d worked twelve hours on her feet and then come home to make this for her cousin. I watched her stab candles into the cake.
“Can you get the lights?” she asked.
I flicked the lights off and found my seat again, across from Michael White. Viv stepped out of the kitchen, the candlelight flickering on her face. We all sang. Someone turned the lights back on, and slices of cake were passed around.
* * *
On the day we viewed the house, Holly met me at Patrick Street. We were walking fast because Holly has very long, skinny legs. I’d worn an outfit I save for job interviews and had pulled my hair into a tight ponytail. Holly had on leopard-print leggings and a baggy windbreaker.
“Do you want to smoke some weed?” she asked me.
“Right now?”
Holly looked at her phone.
“We have time,” she said.
I didn’t want to smell like weed at the viewing but I wanted to seem like a fun roommate. All along Water Street and up Queen’s Road, I’d been talking about myself, about a Standardized Patient Testing session I had coming up. This one was really like acting, I had to go to the doctor with the intention of telling him I was pregnant but then chicken out at the last minute and pretend to have a cold. The doctor was supposed to suss out what was really going on. The trick would be to seem more distressed than someone who only had a cold.
“Their professor will be in the room,” I told Holly. “Or sometimes they do it with a mirrored window. It almost feels like improv; I need to help the student doctor understand the conflict in the scene without explicitly spelling it out.”
“This looks like a good spot,” Holly answered.
I worried I’d bored her.
We stepped into the alley at the bottom of Tessier Park to smoke. A tall fence built by the city hid the alley from the street, and a thicket of mile-a-minute separated the alley from the rest of the park. After the first puff the bamboo leaves shivering on their stalks behind us started to seem ominous.
Holly handed me the joint so she could show me a photo of the two pit bulls she’d left in Montreal. I brought the joint to my lips again without thinking and inhaled. Holly held the phone in my face: two giant heads with wide grins, the corners of their mouths loose and fleshy, bright pink gums and pointy shark teeth.
I was about to tell her about my aunt’s pit bull, Burger, who had to be put down after it bit through her foot when she was mowing the lawn. My aunt thought it got confused trying to protect her from the growling lawn mower; she was heartbroken for a long time after the dog was euthanized. She kept his ashes on the hall table in an ornate tin. Once, I’d pried it open without knowing what it was and some of Burger puffed out and landed in the carpet.
I was going to use Burger to segue into a more recent dog anecdote, about how my co-worker’s German shepherd bit through my hand. But Holly had started her own story.
Her dogs had been kidnapped. She’d tied them to a bike rack outside a Couche-Tard on Saint Catherine Street.
“Have you been to Montreal?” she asked, bending to scrape the joint on the ground before putting it back in her pocket. “We should get going now.”
“I went once, to visit Viv.” I followed her out of the alley.
“So you know Saint Catherine, right downtown, there’s people everywhere and this was the middle of the afternoon.”
She’d run in to buy a pack of Halls and when she came out the dogs were gone. She looked up and down the street, turning around in a circle like a bewildered cartoon character.
“But you got them back?” I asked.
“After like a week and a half.”
“How?” I asked.
She’d papered the city with flyers of the very photo she’d shown me. Two big grins. Each poster was fringed with fluttering, easily rippable tabs offering her phone number. It had been a nightmare figuring out how to format the posters. And making a careful incision on each side of every phone number with a pair of hair-cutting scissors took hours. She printed and photocopied the posters at the library for twenty cents a page. Whenever she finished a shift at the tattoo parlour where she worked as a receptionist, she walked along Saint Catherine showing people the p
oster.
“That worked?” I was almost jogging to keep up with her long strides.
“I felt ridiculous, I didn’t think it would work but I had to keep doing it because I had to do something,” she said.
“Right,” I said, and I did understand, because Snot had gone missing before. He didn’t come home for three nights. Courtney sat in the window and mewled for his brother. I woke up every couple of hours and stood on the back deck in bare feet shaking the treats and yelling his name. One of my neighbours opened her window and shouted, “Can you shut up, it’s four in the morning.”
I yelled back, “My cat is missing,” and more quietly, “you miserable bitch.”
Eventually Holly got a text from a guy who said his ex-girlfriend had the dogs. She met him in a Tim Hortons and they drove together to the building where his ex-girlfriend lived.
“Were you scared?”
“No, that’s why I met him at the Tim Hortons first, to make sure he wasn’t,” she paused, “scary, I guess.”
“What about when you got in the car?”
“I trusted him, after talking at Tim Hortons,” she said. “You just have to listen to your gut in those types of situations.”
She’d waited outside while the guy talked the ex-girlfriend into handing over the dogs. The building where she lived was a skyscraper, the kind where you have to crane your head back to see the top of it. The guy told Holly his ex lived on the fourteenth floor. He took a missing poster into the building with him. Holly counted the windows up to the fourteenth floor. There was a row of twelve windows across the fourteenth floor but for some reason she felt like she knew which one belonged to the girlfriend. There were two forest-green lawn chairs on the balcony and, squinting, it looked like maybe there was a dog bowl on the ground. Maybe she imagined the bowl.
There were white curtains in the window, ones she recognized from the Ikea website. The cheapest curtains on the Ikea website; she’d thought about ordering them herself. They were white with a pattern of periwinkle or burgundy forget-me-nots.
Holly was watching the curtains, willing them to move and show the dogs, even one of them. Eventually the smudged glass doors on the ground floor of the building opened and the man walked out with her dogs straining at their leashes. She got out of the car and knelt on the sidewalk and they licked her face.