Midnight Light, page 29
“You sound great,” I told Ricky.
“Well, I’ve been trying,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Trying to get ready for the festival. I have a band. Some guys. They’re good, but we don’t get together very often.”
“You practise on the kit and guitar?” I asked.
“Yeah, well, sometimes,” he said, tapping the shallow plastic of the bass drum while stroking a guitar chord with his right hand. “It’s hard, you know.”
“I play a little drums,” I told him.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Ricky stood up, moved some clothes around, emptied an ashtray, buried some old chip bags into a kitchen garbage can, kicked some more shoes into a corner, and waved me toward the drum seat.
“Here, here,” he said, handing me a pair of sticks.
I sat behind the cymbals, snare, and toms; plastic vestiges of 80s percussion that triggered electronic, and heavily processed, samples of real drums (one of the advantages of a V kit was having a volume knob to set the actual thump of the instrument; that and they were light, portable, and didn’t take up as much room as a conventional kit. They also lasted forever and you could take them with you wherever you had to go). Ricky pulled his crane-necked mic stand across the room to a kitchen chair, where he sat down. Tina came over, gave him a smoke, then passed both of us mugs of coffee. Ricky had wired the mics—one for him, one for me—into a small PA with small speakers on either side of the room. Tina settled down at the kitchen table and started filming everything with her iPhone, even though we hadn’t made a sound. At varying intervals, young Inuvialuit children appeared from an adjacent hallway. They were cousins of cousins of cousins, and two of them—twins—had been adopted by Tina and Ricky after their mother fell on hard times. There was also a young man who looked about twelve with a great bushel of dark hair on his head who came in every now and then to roll a cigarette, which he smoked while watching me play. At one point, the twins sneaked into the room and stared at me. Ricky laughed: “It’s the first person they’ve ever met who’s not from here.” I extended a greeting to them. One of the girls ran away while the other held out her delicate hand, which I swallowed in the paleness of my palm.
Ricky opened a steno-binder scribbled with lines of verse and placed it on a music stand. Then he looked at me with a worrying glance: “I’m not sure what songs you want to do here.” I told him to start and I would follow, and so he did, and after ninety minutes we’d played everything in his book: covers from John Prine to Ray Price to Merle Haggard to Buck Owens. I decided that, in its own stony way, playing country music with Ricky Kikoak in a trailer in Tuktoyaktuk was as good as going back in time to see Led Zeppelin (and probably a more onomatopoeic future lyric). At one point, he asked me, “Do you know Doug Sahm?” I expressed my love for the late Austin/Californian songwriter and spared a moment to wonder what the transient Tex-Mex singer would have thought knowing that one of his songs was being played so far from where it was born. At one point, Ricky told me he’d written his first song, called “Tuktoyaktuk,” a paean to his home. Being a dedicated fan of paeans to home, I insisted we play it, and so we did. Even though the electro-drums went plink and thwap when they should have gone boam and dud-duh, it was fine. Ricky sang through his teeth in a bent Arctic twang and I scrapped a rhythm out on the kit. Tina filmed and the kids came and went. Outside, birds crept through the driftwood.
It was around two in the morning—the day glowed as if it were mid-afternoon—when we finally ended, sated, played out, weed-tired. I thanked the Kikoaks and the twins came to look at me one last time. It had already been the greatest day—maybe the greatest day of my summer up north—and when I crossed the street to say goodbye to Terry and James and the crowbar, I found a whole other crew of people in the yard. I pushed my hands into my pockets and turned back, a Kabloonik shuffling home.
Through the weed and music and company of all the people I’d met—people whom I doubted I might ever see again—I thought of what I’d tell John McFadden back in the newsroom, my mind emerging from its reverie to think about the trial, the newspaper, and Yellowknife. But just then, I heard a voice.
“Hey, mister! You wanna play?”
I looked down into the bleachered divot in the centre of town. There were about twenty kids—fifteen years old to maybe twenty-two, an equal number of boys and girls, a whole bunch of them named Junior—gathered around holding bats and gloves and standing over a jumble of bases and yellow balls.
“Hey, mister, c’mon down.”
There are a few things that a sleepy-stoned fifty-two-year-old Canadian writer might want to find on the way back to their bed in the middle of a bright northern night. For some, it might be a handsome suitor waiting on the steps of their residence; for others, a bag of money discovered on the way home; and for others, still, an email announcing Steven Spielberg’s plans to turn their book into an epic and expensive film. For me, however, finding a softball game about to begin under the Arctic sun at the edge of the ocean was it. I scampered down the hill to join them.
I was met in the dirt pit by a bright, smiling kid named Carl, who shook my hand and said, “Thanks for playing.” That Carl wasn’t so disaffected that he’d resisted asking someone four times his age to join the game endeared him and the group to me. They were nice kids. One of them, whose name was John, was a young goaltender and we talked about Carey Price before I asked him if he’d ever seen an NHL game.
“Never. But my dream is to one day go to Edmonton,” he told me, looking into his blue leather glove.
On the hard flat dirt, I took my position in left field and stared at home plate, the old graveyard and its bent wooden crosses rearing over the diamond at the top of the hill. The game started and I shagged flies whenever I could, although I mostly chased after balls splashing around in muddy puddles of water at the back of the lot. I took my cuts, too, slicing a few balls into the ground while lining a couple at infielders, but some of my hits found holes over second and third. In the seventh inning, I homered—admittedly, the ball bounced off sets of shins and midriffs before arriving too late to the plate—and, in the ninth inning, I ran with all my spirit in my Australian boots and jean jacket with the girly pins to chase a ball stroked into the gap, reaching up with my glove and snaring it. I came out of my run like a Rockette, legs kicking while holding the ball in the darkness of my mitt. It was the third out and I ran off the field. One of the outfielders came over, tapped me on the back with his glove, and said, “Hey, nice balance, mister.” The bottom of the ninth came and went—26–22 final—and the game ended. I thanked Carl. “No problem,” he said, “that’ll be, oh, twenty bucks.” I told him that I couldn’t possibly break my $250 bill, then turned to walk back up the hill with the kids still laughing at the joke. Carl shouted to me from home plate, “Hey, man, don’t forget to tell ’em about Tuk.” I promised that I would not.
THE NORTH SLAVE PRISON BLUES
I returned to Yellowknife to discover that John’s trial was scheduled for the fall. In the meantime, he wrote desultory pieces about quills and animals (“If I have to do one more caribou story, I’m going to grow antlers,” he complained) and tried to hold whatever shit he had left together. He swung from the hope and possibility that he would be cleared—there was even gossip at one point that the Crown would drop the charges, but that was unfounded—to a sense that the cops were furthering their resolve to make an example of him. Mike and Bruce were equally nervous about how the trial would affect the Yellowknifer and their ability to freely cover the activities of a police force protecting its standing within the community as a group that didn’t assault writers. If the paper lost its ability to freely examine what the cops were or weren’t doing, no one knew what it would look like moving forward, a worry made even more pronounced considering what was happening in the greater newspaper world, the Toronto Star having laid off labour and environmental reporters and many North American publications challenged by the urge to chase clicks rather than let reporters sink into the matter of hard news.
If things weren’t bad enough for John, his life became further complicated after tensions escalated between the writer and the Justice Department, a situation for which I was partly—okay, mostly—to blame. It started innocently, during a visit to the prison—the North Slave Correctional Centre—where I was scheduled to play a thirty-minute set on acoustic guitar for a few dozen inmates. I’d wanted to put in some time because of what I’d taken from the community, and I knew a few people who had relatives or friends incarcerated in the prison. I sent a note to Sue Glowach, a Justice Department representative who helped facilitate this sort of event, and she fed me into an RCMP carousel where they ran background checks and cross-referenced my history to make sure I was fit for a visit.
Sue and I headed to the jail. We pulled up to the kind of dull, flat, square building that was so inconspicuous it was conspicuous, like a movie star in a baseball cap. The relatively new complex contrasted with the site of the former prison, near Tommy Forrest Field, positioned beside a trailer park and close enough to the edge of Main Street that, when songwriter Indio Saravanja was a boy, “you could stand and watch the inmates play baseball on the prison diamond,” he remembered.
We were met at the front entrance by the convenor responsible for the inmates’ social activities, a fellow named Stephen. Rather than uniformed with handcuffs hanging off his belt, he was dressed in civilian clothes—T-shirt, jeans, running shoes—with a fob looped around his neck. He kachunked us through the outer ring of the prison—a series of passageways leading to ante rooms leading to a small rec room/gymnasium with a few dozen chairs scattered about and some old Christmas decorations piled on a table—and, after settling there, he pointed through a window looking into the yard and told us, “See, you could escape from there. And there. And there. Oh, and from there, if you wanted,” gesturing to a raised landing at the far end of a fenced enclosure. I wondered whether this was part of correctional centre routine—showing visitors how to escape were we, oh I don’t know, taken hostage by prisoners—before deciding that Stephen was maybe just a little different.
“Has a jailbreak ever happened?” I asked him.
“Not during my time,” he sighed, sounding disappointed. “There was a riot twenty-five years ago, but that was in the old facility.”
“Okay, well hopefully one day someone will escape!” I told him, playing along.
“I hope I’m on holidays when that happens,” he said.
“I hope I’m not in jail,” I said.
And then everyone laughed.
It was all very weird.
“We’ll probably have 2A and 13 and 17B and 6F and 3 and 7 coming,” he said, listing the names of the pods—units of cells within the jail—who’d signed up for the concert. The rec room events—which included three-nights-a-week inmate jam sessions in a small room off to the side (“Lots of AC/DC and Metallica,” said Stephen)—were arranged so that the men could meet people from other pods. “They’re a pretty enthusiastic group,” he said. “They love having visits.”
“Who else has come?”
The convenor thought about it.
“You’re the first one!”
A door cranked open and the inmates shuffled in. They were dressed in plain green T-shirts and sweatpants. Almost none of them looked at me, choosing, instead, to collect in little groups on fold-out chairs. A decorative wooden throne—“It’s where Santa sits,” said Stephen, before adding, “for the Christmas pageant”—was before the window, and, after a moment, an inmate with tubes in his nose wheeling an oxygen tank—a Dene man in his seventies—ambled across the room and took his seat there, staring out at the parking lot. I looked to Stephen for a clue about what to do next, and he made a goofy strumming motion while nodding his head, which, having had years of experience in professional entertainment, I took for the universal “Why don’t you start playing now?” gesture. I cleared my throat and struck an A chord. The men scraped their seats across the tiled rec centre floor into crooked rows. They sat down and manspreaded and waited for me to say something that couldn’t possibly render me as anything other than a white guy from suburban Toronto whose only reason for ever being in prison would have been if prison were a place where they put you for stealing the neighbour’s Internet. I welcomed them and told them my name. There were no cheers or applause or signs of acknowledgement. I might as well have been in Regina.
“I just came back from Tuk,” I said, starting the show as if it were the beginning of a stand-up comedy routine.
The silence lingered. The inmates’ bored faces stared back at me until a fellow with a dark goatee and mischievous eyes piped up:
“Did ya get laid?”
Suddenly, laughter.
“Um, no,” I said, giving him nothing to work with.
“Oh,” said the goatee. “You want a number?”
During the first few songs, the inmates spoke with each other under their breath while I played. After one song, someone said, “Sounds like Johnny Cash,” and then another said, “Sounds like Tom Petty,” and then another, showing off for his friends, said, “Sounds like shit…”
“No, that’s Nickleback,” I said. “They’re here next week.”
I played on.
After one long song with many verses, an inmate told me, while digging his hands around in his waistband and scratching his nuts: “It’s kinda ramblin’.”
I choked back my courage and asked: “My songs or your balls?”
“Oh he said it!”
“Johnny’s balls!”
“Dig ’em out, brother!”
And so it went. The most profound moment came during the performance of a Rheostatics song called “Legal Age Life at Variety Store,” which includes the lyric “I am the king, I am, therefore, what kind of a fool am I?” While singing the line, I looked at old the wheezing fellow—the prison elder—sitting on the throne, his faraway gaze trained on the parking lot outside. The moment was heavy and I realized why “Folsom Prison Blues” was the kind of record that it was: in front of this crowd—whose lives were messed up no matter how many times a week they got to jam—it was very important not to suck. I dug in harder the rest of the way: biting off lyrics, thrashing at chords, hollering the lyrics. One inmate offered, “Now you’re doing better!” I broke a guitar string and the show ended.
Sue drove me back to the newspaper. We talked about a lot of things, but our conversation inevitably turned to John, partly because it was impossible to talk to anyone in Yellowknife without his name coming up, and partly because Sue had dealt with John through her Justice Department’s liaison with the press. “It doesn’t look like it’ll go well for him,” she told me as we idled outside the paper. I asked what she meant—would it not go well for him in court? in life? in his career?—and she said, “Listen, I like John, a lot,” which is what a lot of people said before they said something bad about John. It didn’t go quite that way with Sue—she was a nice person, it seemed, who travelled around North America with her husband, Norm, a drummer, who’d come back from a recent studio session in El Paso, Texas, hosted by Terry Manning, the person who’d helped engineer the fourth Rheostatics album at Compass Point studios in Bahamas—but she openly questioned the veracity of John’s story about what happened the time he was handcuffed and manhandled outside the courtroom from which he’d been excluded.
“I’ve seen the tape,” she said. “John was interrupting the court proceedings by shouting, and the judge was getting angry, and you just can’t do that. You cannot anger a judge or disrupt their courtroom,” echoing something that Glenn had also suggested.
“But they’d given up his seat without telling him,” I said, defending John. “It’s his job to be there, and if he can’t do his job, he can’t work, and if he can’t work, well, you know how this goes,” I told her.
“Okay, but you know John,” she said, which is another thing people in Yellowknife liked to say. “He immediately went to outrage: shouting and yelling. He could have said, ‘Okay, let’s figure this out. Let’s figure out a way for me to be in there. Can I stand in there? Can I just sneak in the back?’ John didn’t do this. He didn’t do any of this.”
“That’s easy to say,” I suggested, “considering that neither you nor I was in that position. Besides, the security guard…”
“It wasn’t a security guard, it was a sheriff,” she said.
“Okay, the sheriff. He grabbed John.”
“He didn’t grab him. He moved him. I’ve seen the tape.”
“But there were tears in his shirt and in his pants, at least according to John,” I said, that last qualifier returning me to doubts about whether I wasn’t seeing the forest through the trees, my impressions spun a certain way by John to reflect his innocence. I gulped back the notion and listened as Sue continued.
“Okay, let me say that again. Yes, he was grabbed, and the sheriff shouldn’t have done that. But John immediately started freaking out and resisting when perhaps he should have stepped back.”
“Stepping back without his footing?”
“Or, I don’t know, something…” she said.
“But what about what happened next?” I asked her, remembering what John had told me: how an RCMP officer had come in, cuffed him, and led him down the ramp toward the courtroom exit, pushing him to the ground.
“I’ve seen the tape,” she said. “He fell. He wasn’t pushed to the ground.”
“He wasn’t pushed?”
“The carpet,” she said. “He got caught in the carpet and he tripped. At least that’s what I saw.”
“Listen, I know that, in any confrontation, it takes two to dance,” I conceded.
“And when you dance, sometimes you trip,” she said, smugly.
“I just don’t know how you tear your clothes and have a huge bloody wound on your knee by simply falling to the floor,” I told her. “I don’t get it. At all.”
