to pay for mine up front at a reduced price.
I occupied the southeast corner of the top floor, the best spot because of the fantastic view of the Toronto Islands and the downtown core. The floors were the original wood, sanded and polished. It had twelve-foot ceilings, and not a lot of furniture: comfortable stuff, mostly old pieces I’d picked up at yard sales, and a few upmarket pieces that had caught my eye. The walls, painted in cream and brown, also had some art of the abstract kind. Early on, I’d succumbed to buying a big stereo but generally listened to recordings through headphones. My two extravagances were books I’d bought over the years which took up eighteen feet of wall, and a nine-foot Blüthner grand piano which sat in the outside corner of the sitting room, where I could look out the window as I played. Since my downstairs neighbour was seldom in the country, I could generally bang away whenever it suited me.
Putting my suitcase down in the entryway, I went over to the thermostat and cranked up the heat several notches. Outside, the wind was raging to the howling point, and I could tell from the way it drove tendrils of cold in around the windows that the night would see the temperature plummeting to the bottom reaches of the thermometer. After closing the curtains in order to keep as much of the frigid air at bay as possible, I headed down the hall to the kitchen with the idea of brewing a pot of tea.
Even though they’d been there so long I hardly noticed them any more, something caused me to stop and examine the gold and platinum recording awards that hung the length of the hall.
Several were for Don’t Push Me, Neurotica’s debut album, named after the song Regina, twenty-four years my junior, could sing. It had been a hit before she was born, for Christ’s sake! I didn’t know which made me more depressed: the fact that I’d slept with someone so young or the fact that her knowing my tune drove home so solidly that the best point in my life had taken place over a generation earlier.
I hadn’t aged badly, the reward for a careful life, I guess. The passing years had done good things for my face, seemingly bringingout the strong points and hiding the weak. I’d kept most of my hair, and there was little sign of grey among the brown. Years of slugging equipment in and out of trucks had kept me trim, that and the fact that I skipped meals too often. Turning away from the present, I looked into the past, a promo photo taken in my twenty-second year at the end of the hall, showing a six-foot lad with long brown hair and a rather ascetic, sharp-featured face. What I couldn’t deny, though, was the untroubled expression of a person who had the world by the tail and his whole life ahead of him. That certainly was no longer in my eyes, but life has a way of obliterating those sorts of things.
Those had indeed been heady days, everything happening so fast. One month we were just another struggling Brummy bar band with a solid local following, and the next, we had management and a major record label paying for us to record at a posh London studio. In short, we were being groomed as Rock Stars. Don’t Push Me turned out to be the success everyone had predicted. The album quickly went gold, then platinum, and eventually double platinum, meaning that we sold a boatload of recordings. The single did equally as well.
The tours had always been the best part of it for the rest of the band. The excessive lifestyle had suited them all—especially Rolly, who embraced it with Bacchanalian gusto. I lived for being in the studio. I enjoyed most the time after everyone had left for the day with the hangers-on, spending hours experimenting, re-arranging, tweaking, looking for that something special that would take every song to the next level.
I made two albums with Neurotica and left them with enough material for a third. Although I didn’t have anything to do with recording it, to my sad satisfaction, it showed in its mediocre sales. Rolly and I always took writing credit for the songs, me for the music and Rolly for the lyrics—even though towards the end he was too busy becoming a legend to do more than a cursory job. (“Yeah, yeah, Michael. Sounds fine to me. You might want to fix up the chorus a bit. The lyric’s bloody depressing.”) The material on the second album was consequently almost completely mine. It was during the tour in support of its release that the whole thing had imploded for me.
The kettle sang its steamy note, jerking me back to the present, and I sat brooding for almost an hour over two cups. It hadn’t been a good idea to visit Angus. I didn’t like it when the old trouble got stirred up. Regardless of what I’d said, I also felt guilty about leaving Angus with a twenty-four-year-old problem named Regina. Heaven only knew how she had taken it when she’d woken up to find me long gone. But her problems were not something I could or would get involved in. When it counted, I’d done my bit and helped out a fellow human being. What had happened between us afterwards had all been her idea. If she now felt any remorse or anger about it, then it was her problem. Right?
So how come I didn’t really believe that?
***
Next morning, I pried myself out of a pleasantly warm bed and looked out at a snow-covered city. The wind had died down during the night, and white stuff was falling in big lazy flakes.
Dressing, I couldn’t help feeling silly about the night before, allowing myself to wallow in self-pity over how life had changed the cards I’d been dealt. A lot worse could have befallen me.
I’d built a successful business, and I still had a generous income from the royalties of my youthful musical endeavors. I could indulge myself when I wanted, buying silly unneccesaries such as the BMW M3 which sat in the parking garage in the basement of the building, the Blüthner in my sitting room, and now the ultimate silly musical toy waiting in a shipper’s warehouse at the airport.
A quick glance at the clock showed me I’d better get my arse in gear if I wanted to pick up my latest vintage keyboard before noon. Toronto traffic could be horrible with even a small amount of snow. It’s an odd thing that in a wintry country like Canada, few drivers in its largest city seem capable of driving in even moderately bad weather.
On my way to the customs broker, I phoned up the shop, getting Johnny, my newest recruit and a total keener for the job. Sensing that about him right from the beginning, I’d given him his own key earlier than I normally would have with a new employee. My intuition had so far proven correct. He was always first to arrive and last to leave.
“Welcome back, boss!” he said when he heard my voice. “Kevin told me that you’d scored on your big game hunt ‘over ’ome’. Are we picking it up today?”
“Yes. I’m on my way to the shipper’s warehouse to sign the papers and pay the charges. Bring the small van and meet me in an hour.”
“You bet! This is going to be so cool. I’ve never seen one of the big mellotrons up close.”
“You’re probably going to be pretty sick of it before long, Johnnymy-lad, since it’s to be your responsibility to maintain it.”
***
As usual with these things, it took two times longer to bail out the mellotron than I’d planned, with the result that it was past twelve when I rolled into the industrial mall in the northern Toronto suburb of Unionville, where I had my business. Kevin and my other employee, Hamed, were busy loading our fourteen-foot box van with a small mountain of equipment rented for a movie shoot at a downtown location. Seems someone had taken it into their head to make a film about the trials and tribulations of a rock band on the road in the late sixties. Spare me!
“Where’s the ’tron?” Kevin asked as he stood in the back of the truck, sweating profusely, even though the cold in the warehouse was fairly intense because of the open door.
“Johnny’s behind me somewhere with it. I told him to take it slow, since the roads are rather slick.” Looking over the equipment contract on the clipboard, I noticed that several more amplifiers had been requested and added, “What in heaven’s name do they need all this for? You could play an arena with this amount of gear.”
Hamed took the clipboard from me and checked off another three amps. “That’s exactly what they’re doing. Apparently they have actors who can actually play a bit, and they’re going to stage a sort-of-real concert at Maple Leaf Gardens, or what’s left of it. They need the equipment for an extra