Cadillac Couches (6 page)

I could stare for hours at my posters of Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash, and Tom Waits: the Holy Trinity. Smoking dope taught me the joy/Zen of just sitting, or just lying down. Just staring. Just thinking. I excelled at mining old times to relive them, digest them, like an animal that has two stomachs and regurgitates food to eat things twice. I wasn't a hermit, my Isobel was coming over later for drinks.

Sullivan was the first person I met who actually loved Alberta. He never bitched like the rest of us in winter when it was minus thirty with a wind-chill factor of minus fifty during a two-week cold snap. He cross-country skied to work through the river valley trails. He made me paintings on bark. Most people dreamed of leaving Edmonton, for the coast or somewhere cosmopolitan like Montreal, but Sullivan saw the beauty in our frozen prairie city. He had a black Labrador always at his side, he canoed on the river, he made igloos in the winter with his friends.

He was woodsy. I was lipsticky. He basically introduced me to nature. And oof! what a discovery nature was: the wind, the stars, the air, the smells, the great outdoors. Sullivan showed me how to camp properly, how to start fires without matches, how to scope out the ideal site in the wilderness, how to cook over the open fire, how to smoke pot and sit naked on a mountainside just in time to catch alpine glow.

I loved the feeling of a breeze on my butt as I squatted to pee in the woods, the long grasses tickling my nose. Skinny dipping in mountain lakes. Drinking whisky around the fire. Cooking tomatoes in a can. I was a late bloomer in the nature revelations, but it was heady stuff to discover at twenty.

From what I can make out, some people marry their big heavies, some lose them and move on, and some are forever haunted by them. I wanted to have it again. That kind of love. But deep down, I was pretty convinced it would never be that big again, and so I had become the curator of a dusty, rundown love museum with the same damn permanent exhibition.

I used to blame my fractured relationship with Sullivan for causing my Nerve Problem. I thought he had broken through my pain threshold when he left me for good. Like my pain was somehow worse than the rest of the world's heartbreak. I probably should never have read
Love in the Time of Cholera
. The guy in that story loves this girl from when they're teenagers until their eighties, even though the woman marries someone else and the guy lives in a brothel for twenty years. That book infected me with the notion that you could and maybe should love someone your whole life even if you weren't together, especially if you weren't together, and that equalled Pure, True Love.

That evening, Isobel said, “Let's get out of town . . . I want to put some miles between me and Finn.”

I, drunk on cheap red wine and a belly full of smoked oysters, proclaimed from my wobbly perch on top of the Cadillac couch: “I want to have Hawksley's babies! Let's go see his concert in Montreal. The gig on the mountain. We can meet . . . He can see with his own eyes how wonderful I am.”

“Go, sister, go,” was Izzie's battle cry. We were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

I knew it was a good idea to hit the road. I'd been getting a little overly vigilant on checking the light switches and unplugging the appliances again. When that happened, I needed to squash the habit cold turkey. Get me away from the goddamn oven! It's definitely off. Off. And the couch; enough already. The more my left eye twitched, the more I knew running from the Problem was the answer because compulsiveness was often only the goofy precursor to something much harder to cope with.

The next day I had to pick up Rosimund from the mechanics—my 1972 pink Volkswagen Beetle was in for a tuneup (which was coincidentally perfect timing for our road-trip plan). I took the Number 7. The overwhelming silence of public transportation really gets to me sometimes, all those people, side by side, not talking. I automatically tried to sit as near to the exit as possible. I thought I was fine. At the next stop a big guy got on board and sat right beside me, practically on top of me. He didn't smell great. I tried not to think about how I couldn't just get off the bus whenever I wanted, and how I was going to the north side of town, which was pretty far away and I wouldn't be able to just run home. I tried to calm myself by imagining the drive home, having a smoke, and not having that horrendous muffler sounding like a dying buffalo. I worried about getting anxious, having an attack on the bus. That made me anxious, just having it in my mind, and once the thoughts started like that it was too late . . . 

It was so unnatural the way people just sat there mutely, desperately avoiding eye contact.

The silence was strangling me.

The longer I dwelled on it, the more the pressure kept building.

Weirdly, I wanted to scream.

How crazy would that be? Maybe people would join in. Maybe not. Random screaming passenger. The pressure of stopping myself, restraining myself made me panicky.

I wasn't breathing right.

Oh no, here it comes again.

I was dizzy.

I was sweating.

I couldn't stop blinking, trying to hold it all together and somehow push back the wave of adrenalin flooding my veins. My heart was beating so horribly fast I thought surely I was going to break. This wasn't like my Dan Bern nerves. This was pure horror, like I was being buried alive, or was trapped in an elevator filling with water.

I had to get off the bus rightfuckingnow.

I rang the bell. I looked at the man at my side who was blocking my path to freedom. He was dozing, smelling pickled from the Old Stock beer poking out of his pocket and coming out of his pores.

“Excuse me, excuse me, sir?” He wasn't budging. I shook his arm.
What am I gonna do? I'm gonna shout! I'm gonna . . . 
The bus swung to a stop. Guy was drooling.
Screw it, I gotta climb over him!

I scrambled over the guy, half-straddling him, to get over him. Everyone looked my way. I got myself out of the bus, sweating and gasping, but relieved to be outside.

Except where was I?

Near some train tracks on 95th Street.
This was where the gangs that you read about in the newspaper live. Shit.

It was still daylight, luckily. I ran up the busy street. Keys clenched between my fingers. Ready to stab someone if I had to. A small, old Chinese woman with a scarf covering her head looked at me suspiciously. I tried to give her a reassuring smile, to prove I wasn't an unhinged weird girl strung out on drugs. She shrugged. I passed Sinderella's strip joint, saw the photos of girls in ridiculous positions, all open-mouthed, like they were just begging to be filled up.

I ran the twelve blocks to the Fasto-Matic mechanics. The running was definitely helping exhaust my nervous energy.

I arrived, hot and sweaty and out of breath.

But calmer. Much calmer.

The mechanics were Italian twins, one shy, one talkative, both sweet. Funny Fellini farting scenes came to my mind, replacing the anxiety. I paid the bill, and they got Rosimund out of the shop. I drove home, relishing my independence. They had vacuumed it, shined the vinyl, and spritzed it with a pine smell. I opened the windows to air it out and turned on the radio, vowing never to take public transport again. I had a celebratory smoke.

When I got home, I went straight to bed and lay in fetal. I talked to myself as if I was my own doctor. “There's no need to jump to conclusions. We need to run some tests, to rule some stuff out, and maybe later we could do some electric shock therapy . . . But for right now my diagnosis is that you must be some kind of freaky weakling.”

Later that evening when I woke up I put Hawksley on the stereo. I lay down on the couch, closed my eyes, and revelled in his soaring voice. As usual, I felt a wonderful warm wave of elation.

I unbuttoned my jeans. I imagined I was lying naked, basking in the sun. Hawksley sang about berry juice and wind on his soft places. I felt him singing to me, stroking my hair, loving my breasts, licking my skin. I arched and swayed and gyrated into a great sea of shivers. Airborne, in another dimension, until I crashed asleep.

When I awoke a little while later alone, miserable, with a dry mouth I reckoned it was time for whisky. Time to leave town too. Hitting the highway could be the answer. It was the one place I had never had the Problem. When I was on the road, when I was on holiday, my eyes didn't twitch, I didn't get the Attacks. Like a baby, I was lulled by the flow of tarmac and engine drone, wooed by yellow lines, white stripes, blue sky, and music on the deck.

I lit a cigarette and topped up my whisky.

My reserves broke down, and I did what I secretly wanted to do for months: I dusted off my calligraphy set and wax seal and finally wrote him a proper letter.

Hi Hawksley,

I can't hold it in any longer, my love and admiration for you. I've heard you sing in fifteen octaves, using your vocal chords one at a time or in unison like can-can dancers. I've been there when you sang angel-style a cappella on a unicycle, played piano backwards and upside down and just for fun you played electric guitar with your house key. You take a concert hall, an outdoor street parade crowd, a bar audience, and make all the hairs on all the arms and backs of necks stand up and do the wave in a collective mass crowd shiver.

You are not just some kind of prophetic rockstar, tap-dancing, curly-haired boy wonder full of the right measure of masculinity and femininity. You are my Grateful Dead, which must make me a Hawksley Head, which sounds like I'm some kind of weirdo birdwatcher. Edmonton, Toronto, London, Antigonish, Tuktoyaktuk, Wayne, Hove, Waterloo—there's nowhere I won't go for you. I would consider parachuting if I had to (and I'm seriously terrified of that moment when they push you out of the airplane).

Me and my pal Isobel are going to drive the flattest, most boring roads in the world to come see you in Québec. I'll be in Montréal for your mountain gig, it'd be great if we could hook up . . . 

I'll be wearing a red flower in my hair.

XOX
Annie Jones

Before I could stop my brave tipsy self, I ran down the block and popped it in the old-fashioned mail because I knew he'd prefer it like that. I would have loved to send it by messenger pigeon if it wasn't so damn far for a bird to fly. I called Isobel to say let's go tomorrow.

She said oui.

side a, track 4

“3,000 miles from satisfied . . .”

“Providence,” Luann Kowalek

Day 1

Southeastern Alberta

400 klicks gone

+30 Celsius, late August

2 o'clock

Hawksley probably hadn't got my letter yet, and I didn't have time to wait around for his response. His concert was on in Montreal in seven days' time. So we left the next day as planned, barely prepared. As soon as we left those city limits, I got the familiar feeling that it was so utterly right to be leaving, it would have been wrong to stay.

Isobel said, “Allons Sud!” And my heart filled with joy at her oomph. Her oomph was one of the best things about her.

So south we went first of all, hoping for more sun and southern charms. We'd go east after Lethbridge. We knew it was shorter to cut through the States, but we didn't have our passports, and besides, it was cool to keep it Canadian. I was driving the first leg of the day and was trying not to fall into a trance from the hypnotizing pulse of the road. I'd decided to quit smoking on the road because as much as I loved my cigarettes they weren't helping the Problem. I'd taken long, luxurious drags off my last smoke early this morning. When I felt the smoke mingle with my adrenalin, I knew I was halfway there on the anxiety hellpath. The new me was on Chupa Chups lollipops instead, interchanged with watermelon-flavoured Jolly Ranchers. Isobel was smoking like a chimney, so I was matching her one for one.

Some time after Calgary, in an otherwise empty landscape void of anything but a flatlining horizon, any specks are a major event. Isobel was the first to notice a blob in the distance. As we got closer we could see it was a hitchhiker with a panama hat and a red bandana covering his nose and mouth and a cardboard sign with the message:
PICK ME UP, I'M FRIENDLY
.

We slowed down thinking it might be funny to have a hitchhiker. Plus the guy might have some food on him. The break from monotony got my heart pumping. I pulled Rosimund over to the verge, and Isobel got out to stretch her long legs. Shielding her eyes from the glare of sun, she sussed out the guy: “What the—how?!” I leaned farther over the passenger seat to look at the guy in case he was a wacko and she was in danger.

It was Finn! And Isobel was pissed.

“Get in the car, Finn. You're in big trouble. What are you doing out here, in the middle of nowhere—like roadkill?”

“Whoa, Isobel, take it easy! He's hitching, he could be going anywhere. Where are you going, Finn, and what's with the bandit bandana look?” I asked. It had become our habit over the years to work a good cop/bad cop routine with men.