The Fiddler Is a Good Woman, page 15
Who was worse? Hard to say. I don’t know. That’s hard to measure. When they were together, Rosalyn tried to do what Cole wanted to do more than Cole tried to do what Rosalyn wanted — and it nearly killed her to cope with that.
I’m digressing. I can feel myself digressing. What is the point that I’m making? The point is that when someone was explaining to Rosalyn what was and was not allowed, I would watch the expression on Rosalyn’s face and feel this rush of vicarious naughty pleasure, because the look she had was this blank, friendly innocence as she nodded and uh-huh’d at them, saying, “Right. Got it.”
Maybe this is true only if you know her, but if you look at her forehead and you look at her ears, you see little tiny movements, little twitches, that tell you she’s mapping out her plan for when exactly she’s going to break every single rule about smoking and drinking that they are laying out, and how she’s going to do it. Those little twitching facial muscles betray that she’s already privately, inwardly enjoying those smoking and drinking pleasures, and she’s not just laughing on the inside — the right word is she is cackling on the inside.
Some time after the Grifters went their separate ways and before DD joined the Low Johannahs, Rosalyn and I took DD on a cross-Canada jaunt in a little Hyundai Accent with seats that really jammed into your lower back. DD played in both our sets, or sometimes we all just played together, swapping songs, which is something I only like to do with people like Rosalyn who have songs that I truly admire, because otherwise I feel like I would gnaw my own leg off to get off the stage when it’s a bad song.
I’m told that although I try to smile and tap my feet so that people won’t know that this bad song I’m listening to is hurting me very deeply, I’m told that people, in fact, can tell that I’m very uncomfortable. I’m not a very good liar. I am very easy to read, I am told.
We were in London, Ontario, at the London Music Club. London is a truly terrible place. The downtown is a ... a classic hollowed-out shell with every second shop window boarded up and a smattering of McDonald’ses, Subways, and cheap vinyl ladies’ clothing stores. People hang around the corners, exhausted from meth, begging.
There are two things in London that create the employment for the people there. There’s the university, which as far as I can tell is a factory that makes crass young drunk people without a thought in their heads, mostly blond or dyed blond. You only have to take a glance at these kids and you know that they’re the boring-middle-class-suburbanites-with-SUVs-and-$3,000-strollers of the future.
The other employer is the insurance industry and we all know that any time something fun is getting shut down it’s almost always because of insurance. So, that’s London, Ontario. London Life. Everybody from western Canada who plays music hates, hates London, Ontario, because it exemplifies everything we hate about Ontario. Campbell Ouiniette liked to say they call it the “Forest City” because that’s what they cut down to make it a city.
The London Music Club is actually a multi-venue complex. There’s a small proper concert hall up top for music that really draws people out, like shitty, white Ontario blues players who play “Dust My Broom” and “Kansas City” without ever going to Kansas City, so, when you think about it, they’re constantly lying about how they’re “goin’ to Kansas City,” and a little basement bar for the likes of us, unknown people. I think there’s an evening supper club space that’s part of the building, too, but obviously we would never have been allowed in there.
The beauty of the set-up is that when the popular act is playing upstairs, the shoomp, shoomp of the bass drum and the rattle of the enthusiastic applause bleeds into your sparsely attended show in the basement, emphasizing the pathos of your situation as a bottom-feeder. That’s the London Music Club, and London in general, going out of its way to make sure you don’t forget that most people, the vast, vast majority of people, think you’re a loser who doesn’t really, ah, merit a lot of listening attention.
The general manager lady was already a bit pissed off with us when she started her memorized talk about the rules, because we were late for sound check. Rosalyn doesn’t really do sound check, generally.
Anyway the GM lady started by lecturing us veterans of 150 shows a year for the past decade, lecturing us about the importance of reading the attachment to the contract that clearly states that sound check is always at 3:00 p.m. to avoid disturbing the dinner service. We didn’t bother explaining that we would have had to have gotten up at 7:00 a.m. to arrive in London by three because we knew from experience that this lady would likely not have seen a 7:00 a.m. wake-up time as the absurdity we did because she was likely not up drinking until 5:00 a.m.
Then she launched into the smoking and drinking rules, and this is when I really perked up, excited to watch the tiny muscle above Rosalyn’s left eyebrow. Some Canadians like to watch hockey and listen to the Tragically Hip, but I don’t. The way I express my Canadian identity is by watching and enjoying Rosalyn’s left eyebrow.
The lady explained that there was no smoking anywhere inside the building. Smoking was allowed on the fire-escape steps and the load-in steps where ashtrays were provided, but not in front of the club because, even with ashtrays provided, allowing smoking in front of the club led to people throwing their butts in the snow where they became a fermented stew of nastiness that surfaced every spring.
She emphasized that it was all right for staff and musicians to duck out into hidden spaces to smoke, but they could not, were not allowed to, must not ever bring alcohol outside for any reason. Ever. Especially not while smoking.
I watched Rosalyn nod along to this. The tips of her ears started to wiggle a bit. I could already see her with the glass of red wine in one hand, the burning Du Maurier in the other, elucidating some bizarre and little-noticed law of the universe as DD chortled away. And I could see that she could already see it, too. I don’t think she had decided to go completely all-out quite yet though.
There was a crooner of love songs with a moussed-up quiff and a smoking jacket performing upstairs. He called himself Royal Wood. Rosalyn and DD liked him, but I didn’t. I found him insipid, partly maybe because he was better looking than me and he was performing upstairs rather than downstairs. I’d been calling him Morning Wood for so long that I actually slipped up and referred to him as Morning Wood to the face of the GM lady when I asked if he’d be on at the same time as our show (yes, he would). His full band’s boobley romantic sounds were sure to waft through our performance, reminding us of our place in the hierarchy.
The lady then handed us our drink tickets. She spelled out that the tickets were for draft beer and well drinks (no labelled liquor from the shelves). Rosalyn smirked. No mention of wine at all. I knew she was at that moment giving herself permission to behave badly, but I couldn’t stop myself, I had to wallow in the moment, I had to make sure, so I asked, “And wine? Do the tickets get us house wine?”
She kind of frowned at me and said, “There’s no house wine, per se. If you want wine, you have to purchase it at staff discount.”
I was thinking oh boy, and I just had to go deeper. “What’s staff discount?”
She answered that one annoyedly, because anywhere that does things a certain way, where the people who run the place don’t travel much, they always act like their rules are the only sensible rules, the only possible rules that could exist. Like when you try to buy beer at a supermarket in Kristiansand, Norway, and it’s 8:01 p.m., and the cashier rolls his eyes at you because you’re so dumb that you don’t know that beer may not be sold in a supermarket after 8:00 p.m. This lady was like that. “Um, ten percent. You know.” No, we didn’t. So that was it. That was the permission Rosalyn needed to … to aggressively flout authority.
The first time the manager lady came out to the basement steps to remind Rosalyn and DD (and, all right, me, too, I admit it) that alcoholic beverages were not allowed outside, she kept her temper pretty well. It was a simmering tone. We were apologetic. We slapped our foreheads in frustration with our poor memories. It wasn’t too bad.
I actually decided not to do it again. I kind of hung in the doorway. I don’t smoke, thank God, because I have enough self-sabotaging compulsions. DD either smokes or doesn’t smoke, depending on who’s around. She appears to have no withdrawal symptoms when she’s hanging around with people who don’t smoke, but when she’s with Rosalyn, she smokes and smokes, and she has nic-fits from not smoking, just like Rosalyn.
I used to believe Rosalyn’s pose, her adamant position, that her fanatical pursuit of smoking, drinking, talking, and laughing was merely an indulgence in sheer hedonistic, lazy, selfish time-wasting. Ask her, and she will swear up and down that she is “one of the grasshoppers that played in the sun while the ants stored up nuts for the winter.” Don’t be deceived. Rosalyn is always working.
I didn’t figure it out until a few tours in. Every night on tour, Rosalyn would find some people who were up for the party, and she’d be the last of the touring company of musicians and hangers-on to go to bed. We’re talking average between three and six in the morning. Sometimes nine in the morning. Only the Irish in Ireland ever outlasted her, to my knowledge. She would doze in the van or on the train, be bitchy around 5:00 p.m., perk up at dinner, do a fantastic show, and then party onward into another night. Every night. She’s made of iron. Party iron. I swear.
I would attempt to keep up with her as best I could, often because I was probably trying to stay up late enough to see if some particular girl there was really interested in making out with me or just liked my music. Inevitably, I would crash out, tired and lonely and blue-balled, and Rosalyn would still be rolling. Telling stories, developing running gags, stumbling across plays on words, and riding her hobby horses about the nature of the music business, the nature of music, the nature of love, the nature of the world.
And every time she’d launch into one of those themes, I’d sigh to myself and think, There she goes again. I didn’t notice how the themes were mutating, developing. I didn’t recognize that the repetition was taking on a more and more definite shape.
I think it was the album Sauntering Through the Hellfire that sprung the startling truth on me — the title track and most of the others were made of the hobby horses that Rosalyn had been riding all through those tours of the previous year. The themes and ideas had been cultivated, stacked, and then fucking rhymed. The partying of the past year had been this devious, deceptive exercise in songwriting R&D, and I’d been thinking the whole time that we had just been pissing the time away.
The second time the lady came out to tell us off, she wasn’t so sweet.
Although I had resolved not to go out there with my beer in hand again, I admit that I was actually out there with my beer in my hand. But I hadn’t wanted to.
Stop everything. Wait. I realize that I’ve been saying bad stuff about London and the London Music Club, and that makes me feel like a total jerk, because I really didn’t want to be a jerk to this lady and the London Music Club. I mean, London is ugly, but the people running the London Music Club were actually trying to make London a better cultural place to be, trying to be part of the solution, make life better, support live music when nobody else cares to do that. There was probably some terribly officious Ontario Liquor Board inspector who had failed the actuarial exam at London Life and was putting all the bitterness of his failed insurance career into trying to catch the London Music Club in an Upper Canada Liquors Regime infraction and wanted nothing more than to slap the club with some massive fine so it would go out of business, and I didn’t want to be a party to that, of course. No. I am really very much in favour of the London Music Club, even if I’d rather not play there.
But I had real trouble hanging around listening to Royal Wood when I could be on the edge of a parking lot listening to Rosalyn and DD.
By now they had gathered a small crowd of fellow smokers.
“… and then we stayed with those activist kids in Peterborough, right? You know when you meet someone and you just know that their house is gonna smell like cat piss? How is it that one always knows?”
DD belched. “Could be because they smelled like cat piss.”
“That might be it.”
“Yeah, but you went there anyway.”
“Well, the pickings were slim. There was that guy with the white cargo van. He was obviously going to murder us with a drill. At least with the vegan activist kids, you know they’re so anemic they don’t have the strength to kill you. And they can’t eat you, ’cause they’re vegans, right?”
“One time I went home with this girl who had three cats and, like, fifty different kinds of dildos.”
“Fifty? That’s too much dildo. That’s a dildo glut. That’s a flock of dildos. A murder of dildos?”
DD said, “First thing she says to me when we get home is ‘how do you identify?’”
And Rosalyn piped in, “Sex-ay!”
They went on and on, bantering back and forth. DD said, “And I’m lying there with like, seventy dildos around my head, and these nine cats are jumping on me, and I can’t fucking move.”
“Were you tied up?”
“Was I?” Then DD paused, frowning. “No, I was just really drunk.”
“Oh. Yes?”
“It was like being tied up, because I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t really speak. And there’s all these dildos.”
“What did you tell her about how you identified?”
“I was like, ‘Uhhh, me DD.’”
Then the manager lady came out in the middle of the dildo/cat story, and said, “Okay. I’ve had it. I’ve now told you three times that you can’t have alcohol out here. The next time I see you out here, you’ll stay out here because you’re not coming back in.”
DD said, “But we’re playing tonight! You have to let us back in or we have to play out here.”
The woman looked at DD and said, “People like you are the reason why London’s music scene can’t get off the ground,” and stormed off.
The third time they were heading out, drink in hand, for a smoke, I said, “Hey!” and they turned to look at me.
“Um, you know, if she catches you out there again, we’ll probably never be allowed to play here again.” They both raised their eyebrows and smiled a little Mona Lisa half smile at me, each doing the identical smile. And Rosalyn’s eyebrow said, “Oh, yes?”
This time I really didn’t go out there. I just couldn’t. I felt like a total wuss for it, but I just couldn’t face another confrontation. I stayed inside, drank the beer, listened to Royal Wood, and ate some old Bridge Mix I had in my inner coat pocket.
Ten minutes later, the lady stormed out into the parking lot. She screamed, “Do you people think that the rules don’t apply to you?!”
There was a silence. DD looked at Rosalyn. Rosalyn looked at DD. A knowing look. Then the laughter, which went on until 4:00 a.m.
Fourteen months later, UnMatched Records released the new full-length Rosalyn Knight album, a chronicle of a delirious love affair gone south, entitled The Rules Do Not Apply to Us.
Amy Williams
Her Kitchen, Fernwood Neighbourhood, Victoria, 2014
We were absolutely broke. I owed my mother twelve hundred bucks, which she knew was never going to be paid back. And there was always a danger with her that if I asked for too much help, she’d try to take the baby from me. We were living on food DD got Dumpster diving. She could pick the lock on the containers outside Overwaitea Foods. Mostly bread and cheese a day past their due date. Rent was due in a week. DD had just come back from tour, and they had earned seventy bucks each. DD called Brody to see if there was any roofing work to be had, but the weather had been lousy and nobody was calling him. He was at home by the phone with his thumb up his ass, watching The World at War documentary series again.
Our lives together in the past had been one romantic transgression after another. We had been each other’s guilty pleasure, we had been each other’s break from reality. Now we were completely ensnared in reality. I’d like to say we knew that as long as we had each other, we’d be okay, but in fact it felt like shit. I felt ugly and stupid and lame, having been left behind on the tour once again, but this time by DD, and here she was, back at home, and I was The Wife, demanding to know what the fuck we were gonna do about the looming first of the month. But I really needed to know. You know?
That’s when she started going through my clothes and picking out the femmiest ones. Shit she would never wear in a million years. She’d let her hair grow while on tour, a sure sign she was feeling low. She started to brush it out in front of the mirror, while pawing through my makeup bag.
“What the fuck are you doing with my stuff? Something’s going on here.”
She turned to face me, full-on, eye-to-eye. “Got any hairpins?”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m getting dressed up. Gonna go see some friends of mine.”
The realization dawned on me, about what she was doing, but I didn’t want it to be true so I pretended that it hadn’t dawned on me. I knew what kind of work she’d done when she lived in Quebec. She had some funny stories about some of the odd kinks that dudes had, like rubber dresses, diapers, other stuff they couldn’t get their wives to do for them. But that was years ago. It gave her an edge that she’d been tough enough to do that kind of work, but that was years ago. It was in the past. It wasn’t what was happening now, just because somehow we’d run out of options. No way.
“What friends?”
