pine, and there’s paint flakes everywhere. Don’t see anybody else here so I guess that was me. I remember promising to only write a dozen pages or so, just the bare bones of the story of what happened at the Calgary Folk Festival, and here I am at twenty or more and I haven’t even got us to the festival. Sorry about that, reader, but what can you do? There’s stuff people need to know, in order to understand what an extraordinary figure I am, and what it is I do for people. Sometimes a digression or two is necessary, and I’m not sorry. Genius works in mysterious ways. If I had more time, I’d try to winnow the thing down, but I think it’s a better idea to just take a short break, get some candles lit, eat a tomato, do some more speed, take a shot of whiskey, and get back down to business. If a job’s worth doing, I always say, it’s worth doing half-assed, so long as it gets done.
ARRIVAL: COWTOWN
RIGHT. I’M BACK AT ’ER. Got my writing hat on. Let’s cut straight to Calgary.
Nobody has ever called Calgary a pretty city. “The big city with the small town feel” is the slogan that boosters like to cite, and for once, the P.R. guys aren’t lying. Calgary is big, and it’s getting bigger all the time. The people who run Calgary would give Jane Jacobs an aneurysm, if they ever met her, but they don’t run in the same circles. Calgary believes in ’50s-style suburban-development sprawl. If you see it from the air at night, its lights and grid make it look exactly like a massive Pac-Man game laid out flat on the dark screen of the prairie, and the high price of oil is making it ever-expanding, like a flood, but a flood of garbage. When we passed the city-limit marker, I noticed the green-and-white sign was mounted on a John Deere lawnmower, trundling west along the shoulder of the highway at five miles per hour. There’s eight of these lawnmowers, constantly moving outward from Calgary at every point of the compass.
Small-town feel? Absolutely. If you think of small towns as places full of small-minded people who mistrust racial minorities and single mothers, where the downtown turns into a ghost town at 5 p.m., then yesiree, Calgary’s got it, by gum. Only lucky thing about Calgary is that the lefty weirdo people can’t be laid-back and pathetically over-confident, like in Vancouver. Calgary oddballs have to huddle together against the storm of SUV materialism and shitty New Country music.
So as we pulled into the Westin Hotel in Renty the rental minivan, I naturally took the attitude of a regiment of cavalry, coming to relieve a besieged holdout. Triumphant, swaggering, cheerful, task-oriented. I drank a couple Red Bulls as Jenny swore us through the midday downtown traffic. I had to have the cheerful nonchalance of a busy man with nothing to hide and nothing on his mind except Achievement.
I told Jenny to guard the gear and Manny, and dragged the Fat Boy along with me to keep him from wandering off. Mykola is always wandering off, either daydreaming a song and forgetting where he is, or just chasing pussy, which he is surprisingly good at. Just off the lobby was a meeting room with a Jiffy Marker sign that said “Artist Registration, Liaison and Transportation.” I marched in.
A friendly looking late-middle-aged chubby lesbian in a festival sweatshirt and bifocals was at the folding table, where the piles of artist envelopes sat.
“Well hello there, sir!”
“Well hello there yoursleff, ma’am. I’m here to register Athena Amarok.”
She smiled, “Okey dokey …” and started ticking her fingers over the envelopes, checking names through the bottom of the bifocals.
“And you are?”
“Cam Ouiniette. Manager.”
“So I’ll tick her off then.”
She handed me the envelope. I checked that it had passes, drink tickets, and meal vouchers for everybody in the band.
“Do you know if Jimmy Kinnock’s manager, Richard Wren, is around nearby? Has he collected his package recently?”
“Sorry, no. They haven’t checked in yet. I’m really looking forward to his set tomorrow, though. I’d crawl over broken glass for that man.”
“Me, too. Listen, I was wondering, Athena’s playing Sunday night, so she’s sure to be exhausted after her show. Could we take care of the money at this point, so we don’t have to futz around with it when everybody’s tired and everything?”
“The money?” She sounded surprised that there was money somehow involved in this wonderful party she was helping to throw. Volunteers.
“Yes, can we grab the cheque here?”
“Oh, well, I believe it’s Sheryl who takes care of the money.”
Pause.
“Is she around?”
“Umm … no, she doesn’t seem to be about.”
“Can you get her on the walkie-talkie?”
“Is Ms. Amarok here? I believe she needs to sign the invoice for that.”
“She’ll be arriving shortly. I have proxy to sign for her. I’m the Manager.”
“Well, I dunno if Sheryl is on shift right now.”
Suddenly, from behind, I heard a sharp, theatrical intake of breath, and a dropping of a guitar.
“Eyah! I’m not going in there!”
“What’s the matter, Colleen? Are you alright?”
Oh, man. I’d forgotten She was coming.
“I’m not going in there with that rapist.”
I turned and took quick action to defend my name. “Lady, if you’re going to make accusations, you better be prepared to back them up. I demand that you call the cops and have me arrested, if you’re going to bandy that word about in relation to me.”
Colleen’s heaving breathing began to accelerate, like someone giving birth. “What you did to me was a violation.”
Her handler, a lady in a bulky old Cowichan sweater, took her arm, soothingly. The lesbian at the desk was suddenly not so friendly-looking any more. She used the upper half of her bifocals now to attempt to peer into my soul to see if this new portrait of me was correct. I tried to explain to the room.
“I’m her ex-Manager. A lot of artists feel that way about their managers. Believe me, the feeling is mutual on my part.”
“You fucked me. You fucked me! I’m not going in there with that fucking fucking monster!” Thank God. Colleen’s screaming profanity was bringing down the general estimation of her sanity in the room full of conflict-averse Canadians.
The desk lady looked at me, authoritatively. “Have you got all your passes and everything? Maybe you can come back another time and deal with the cheque stuff. Alright, sir?” Yikes.
“Listen, I just want to quickly —”
“He trapped me in a gunfight! He put me in a war zone! He was directly responsible for almost killing me!”
I handed Mykola the envelopes and his face showed that he had clearly taken another step in his long journey of reassessing me as his ticket to the Big Time.
“Come on, let’s go. I have no interest in having a conversation with this person.”
“Nor do I!” shouted Colleen. She shrank back from us, shielding her face as we passed as if I were emanating a visible toxin.
WE WERE NOT TRAPPED
FOR COLLEEN TO SAY “you trapped me in the Siege of Sarajevo” in that way of hers, narrowing her eyes and shooting accusative 1980s feminist separatist death rays at me, it’s totally unfair. And inaccurate. We weren’t trapped, and we weren’t in Sarajevo, exactly. Anyway, I saved her life, and you would think I would get some gratitude for it, but she always had to emphasize the idea that I was responsible for putting her life in danger in the first place. Negativity. That’s what that is. Negativity.
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