And the indie music blog posts: Phil Coswell Finally Loses His Mind. Phil “Birdseye” Coswell Knocks Out Bandmate with a Bass Guitar. Birdseye Tour Turns into Psychotic Nightmare.
And the YouTube videos, shot on cell phones, of the event: Watch Phill Cozwel Goin Psyko at Concert. Phil Coswell Losing His #%$* at the Train Room—Part 1. Phil Coswell Psycho Attack.
I click through tab after tab of YouTube videos, Pitchfork write-ups, and articles in the Ubyssey and the Georgia Straight. They’re all about a boy named Philippe with a green bass guitar who lost his mind at the Train Room.
There are quotes from bandmates, onlookers, and friends: “Coswell, 18, allegedly swung his bass guitar at a bandmate’s head, knocking her unconscious.” “Bandmates say Coswell had been ‘progressively losing his mind’ over the course of the tour.” “They describe Coswell as ‘volatile,’ ‘unstable,’ and ‘really paranoid.’” “Bandmates say he had been abusing drugs for several months leading up to the breakdown.” “Tess Elowak, Coswell’s bandmate and former girlfriend, says she will not press charges.” “Coswell has since been hospitalized for psychosis.”
I watch all the videos. At first, I can’t believe it’s Skunk. He’s skinny. He has the same black hair and brown eyes, but he’s about a hundred pounds lighter and his face is sharper, more triangular. The only way I know it’s really him is by looking at his tattoos. The videos are really low quality, but I can make out the general shapes of the ink on his arms, the bird silhouette and the bass clef. It’s Skunk, but it’s also not Skunk—it’s this wiry teenage rock star clutching a bass like he’s drowning.
I recognize the wooden stage at the Train Room with the rusty railway crossing sign nailed to the wall. His band, the six of them, takes up the entire stage with all their gear. They’re all dressed in black. Four guys, two girls with ragged haircuts. Skunk’s center stage with his own mic. Whoever’s shooting the video is somewhere near the back of the crowded room, holding a cell phone camera high over the sea of heads to catch a bit of the show.
In the first few seconds of video, it’s hard to tell that something’s wrong. Everyone in the band is playing their instrument, and the crowd is humming along. But slowly, you realize there’s something out of place. Skunk isn’t singing. He’s talking. No, he’s shouting. At first, it seems like part of the music, but the song ends and he keeps going: “STOP IT! GET AWAY FROM ME!”
You can hear the person taking the video talking to their friend. “Whoa, dude. D’you think he’s tripping on something?”
The harmonium player and the electric guitarist put down their instruments. In the grainy video, you can see them huddle around Skunk, talking to him, trying to walk him backstage, but he shakes off their hands like a scared animal, clutching his bass to his chest. The crowd’s buzzing now, that greedy, hungry thrum of excitement people make when something bad is happening and it’s not happening to them.
“Whoa-ho-ho, man—are they gonna fight?”
The camera tilts toward the floor, showing a dim swarm of sneakers and pant legs, and when it swings toward the stage again, Skunk is locked in a slow-motion wrestling match with the harmonium player, still shouting “STOP!” and “NO!” and all sorts of things in French.
Everything happens in the next two seconds.
Skunk wrenches free and staggers forward, swinging his bass like a club. Most of his bandmates get out of the way in time, but in the midst of the chaos, you can just make out the blond girl’s arms flying up to protect her head.
“Dude, I think he nailed her!” says the person shooting the video.
A second later, the video ends.
I sit at the computer wrapped in a blanket, watching it over and over again, until every millisecond of crappy footage is burned into my eyes.
chapter thirty-nine
“They were broadcasting my thoughts through the speakers,” says Skunk. “They’d been doing it the entire tour.”
It’s Monday afternoon and we’re at the Army & Navy store on Cordova Street, shopping for cat supplies. As we talk, I grab things and toss them into my basket: a red-and-white bowl, a catnip mouse, bags of litter and food. Snoogie misses Doug, I can tell from the way she sniffs around Denny whenever he opens a beer, despite the fact that I have informed her in both English and cat-speak that we are not acknowledging his pathetic existence.
“You mean, you thought they were,” I say.
“Yeah. I thought they were,” echoes Skunk distractedly, as if to him the distinction hardly matters. “I realized they were using my bass as an antenna. I was going to smash it so they couldn’t do it anymore.”
“And Tess got in the way?”
“And Tess got in the way.”
I throw another cat toy onto the pile, some kind of battery-operated ferret that squirms when you pull a string. Snoogie is going to rip its freaking head off.
“Did you try to explain?” I ask him. “Did you tell them about the broadcasts?”
“They thought I was on mushrooms,” Skunk says. “Nobody realized what was really going on.”
As we wander the aisles, Skunk tells me everything. He tells me how the police and ambulance showed up at the Train Room, their carnival lights spraying all over Cordova Street. He tells me about the hospital ward, with its long, windowless hallways, where he bounced like a pinball in the doctors’ attempts to Stabilize Him.
Ten medications. He tells me their names: Risperdal. Lithium. Seroquel. Haldol. Lamotrigine. Trazodone. Depakote. Celexa. Wellbutrin. Ativan.
The doctors turned the volume up and down on Skunk, adjusted his bass and treble. Now he was the Messiah; now he was cold and dumb as a potato. He lost all emotion for weeks at a time. Couldn’t speak. Lumbered fatly down the hall looking for a window to look out of. Couldn’t find any. All communications suspended. The world went flat and fuzzy. Abort.
I kiss him quickly. An old lady looking at salad spinners glances at Skunk’s tattoos and edges away. We’ve drifted into the kitchen section, all translucent plastic picnicware and lemonade pitchers. I gaze at a stack of cups printed with ladybugs. “What did your band do?” I ask, and his words weave themselves into a movie in my mind.
The rest of Skunk’s band drove back to Montreal, back to a warm sunlit spring of shows and acid trips. On the West Coast, it rained. The nurses would come into work with damp hair, carrying umbrellas. They kept saying he was almost ready. Almost cooked, like a fat loaf of bread. Yeasty and soft on the inside, blank.
The days crackled by.
When they finally let him out, he was not Philippe anymore. He did not look like Philippe. Under the spell of the pills, he did not feel like Philippe. When he finally made it back to Montreal, people he knew no longer treated him like Philippe. His bandmates shunned him. His mom and stepdad treated him like a criminal. At least on the West Coast, he could hide in Aunt Martine’s basement and be left alone.
I listen to this. I listen to this, and my heart swells with love and indignation until I can’t contain it anymore. When we circle back to the cat aisle, I stop Skunk midsentence. “Here’s our plan.”
“We have a plan?”
“Yes. You’re going to play the victory show with me at the Train Room on Saturday night. Instead of Lukas. It’ll be your big comeback. We have five days to write all our songs.”
Skunk is quiet, and for a moment I think he’s going to protest. But he’s nodding. Skunk is nodding. He agrees with the plan. “What will our band name be?” he says.
I pull the string on the electric ferret. It leaps out of my hands and convulses diabolically on the floor. We gaze at it, this convulsing ferret, like a sign from the gods. I grip Skunk’s arm and whisper in his ear.
“Daffodiliad,” I say.
After the Army & Navy, we decide we desperately need coffee, so we head down to the Waves on Main Street, where a woman in a purple jacket standing in front of us in line takes a skinny, practically hairless white dog out of her bag, roots around in the bag for her
cell phone, puts the unresisting animal back in, and zips it up. The lights behind the counter undulate in a sort of faded neon slurry. We order the biggest coffees we can get.
I talk to Skunk about our new band, Daffodiliad. I tell him exactly how it will go. The Train Room will see that Phil Coswell has not slunk off into the dark. He is not a monster. He is still as ferociously talented as ever, and as gentle. Our music will be soft, intellectual, peculiar, and lovely. It will hit the airwaves all over the country, and it will be specially engineered to make the other members of Birdseye go insane. We will go on tour in Skunk’s van, or perhaps riding our bicycles, pulling our instruments behind us on little red carts. We will play to packed venues all over North America, then put our bicycles on a plane and tour Europe.
We must do all these things. We must do all these things, and we must make love frantically at every possible opportunity.
“Okay, Skunk?”
“Okay.”
We collect our bikes from the place where we locked them and ride back to Skunk’s house. While we’re putting our bikes in the shed, laughing and snatching the blossoms out of one another’s hair, a car door slams in the alleyway, and Skunk’s aunt comes crunching across the gravel, carrying a bag of groceries. I wave at her.
“Hi, Martine.”
When she sees us, she stops.
“Philippe. Dr. Winterson called. You missed your appointment today.”
Skunk slowly leans his bike against the shed wall.
“I’m sorry, tante Martine. I can’t believe I forgot. I started taking the pills again. I’ve been taking them every night.”
Her face doesn’t soften. She jerks her head at the door.
“Come with me, Philippe. Your uncle and I want to talk to you.”
She glares at me, glares at Skunk, crosses the courtyard, and goes inside.
chapter forty
That night, Skunk calls to say that Martine is thisclose to kicking him out. He has been Reckless and Noncompliant, and no amount of promises to take his meds will do. From now on, Skunk has to check in with her every morning at six thirty and every night at ten. She’s going to watch him take his meds just like with the patients at the hospital.
There are to be no visitors.
And no midnight bike rides.
And no afternoon omelets when she’s out of the house.
When Skunk comes over the next day, we have a grim conference about how best to deal with these constraints.
We decide that Skunk will come over before noon every day, and we’ll play music until 9:24. He’ll bike home in time to be medicated.
“What about Saturday?” I ask. “You’ll need to stay out later than ten o’clock for the show.”
He chews on this. “I’ll have to ask.”
“What if she says no?”
“They might not be home until late anyway. Sometimes they go to this comedy club with their friends on Saturday nights.”
“Aunt Martine likes stand-up comedy?”
He nods. I try to wrap my brain around this latest revelation.
“Okay,” I say finally. “Let’s just hope.”
We spend the rest of the week writing songs, drinking coffee, and playing until we collapse on the basement floor. We gambol, star-clad, every night at nine.
I ask Skunk what I should do if he ever has a fit.
“A fit,” he says. “What is this, 1852?”
“I don’t know, a session. A sesh. What-do-you-call-it.”
“A psychotic episode?”
“One of those thingers.”
He flips over onto his stomach and regards me very seriously.
“I’m not going to have another psychotic episode.”
“But what about—”
He shakes his head.
“Really. The first time, I had no idea what was happening. Now I know how to catch myself before things go that far. I know I crossed the line the other day, but that was an accident. I’ve got it under control.”
I climb onto his back and start biting his ears.
“But what should I do? What are you supposed to do?”
Finally the playfulness returns to his voice.
“Okay, okay,” he says. “First you have to fill a bucket with ice-cold water and dump it on my head. Then go into my backpack, grab the giant syringe from the box marked with a skull and crossbones, and stab it into my—”
Laughing. “Come on, Skunk, I’m serious! What would be the best thing for me to do?”
He tickles me.
“Then you have to take off my pants and take off your pants and climb on top of me and—”
Squealing. “You’re joking!”
“It’s true. That’s what you do when someone you love is psychotic.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
More tickling.
“Okay, okay, okay, you win, you win. I’ll throw a bucket of water on your head and then jump you.”
Since Skunk’s on an Enforced Sleeping regimen, he wants me to go on one too.
“I want to know when I’m dreaming that you’re dreaming too.”
“I don’t sleep anymore,” I inform him. “I unsubscribed.”
“Sleep’s not optional,” says Skunk. “You can’t unsubscribe.”
“Yes, you can. It’s like cable. You just get it disconnected.”
“That’s crazy.”
“It’s true.”
“Okay then, how about you meditate and I’ll sleep. But you have to lie down so we’re both in our beds.”
“All right, Bicycle Boy. Whatever you say.”
So we each lie down in our own beds, and Skunk’s meds knock him out and I burn on, awake, lit up from inside like a neon sarcophagus. I think it’s meditation. I see fractals, think thoughts, recite the Tao te Ching backward and forward all the way to the end. I text Skunk: R U REALLY SLEEPING?
He doesn’t text back, so I guess that’s a yes.
We do this four nights in a row. I soon realize Enforced Sleeping Time is the most productive time of my whole day. While Skunk’s sleeping, I make plans and speeches, learn concertos, argue court cases, solve for x. I listen to entire albums start to finish. I realize all sorts of previously unrealized facts about science, and music, and physics, and history, and love.
Skunk buys me a bag of loose-leaf tea from an herbal medicine shop that’s supposed to help me sleep. The bag has a gold foil label that says FLYING LOTUS TEA FOR CALMING OF NERVOUS, and the tea leaves are little black flakes like curled-up pine needles. The tea tastes like dried mushrooms and dead grass. I boil up a teapot full of it and drink it before Enforced Sleeping Time, but instead of Calming My Nervous I have to get up and pee sixteen times.
Really, sixteen times.
When Skunk keeps waking up to find a night’s worth of texts from me, he gets worried.
“If you go for too long without sleeping,” he says, “you might be having a Thing.”
“A thing like your Thing?”
“Or something like it.”
I admit that the possibility has crossed my mind. “Do I seem Thingy to you?” I ask him.
“A little.”
“Are all Things bad? What if I’m having a good Thing?”
Skunk considers this. “Does it feel good?”
Now it’s my turn to pause, a million contradictory answers crashing into each other like bumper cars. I feel great. But I’m exhausted. But I’m perfectly fine. But I’m desperate. But there’s nothing wrong. But I can’t seem to shut myself off. But I could stop anytime.
“It feels important,” I say.
My in-box piles up with emails from my parents, but I’m too busy to read them. They can tell me all about the sea tortoises when they get home. I stop answering the phone when the caller ID shows the cruise ship number. What would we talk about? Snurkleberries?
“Mom and Dad want to talk to you,” says Denny, standing in my bedroom doorway with the phone in his hand.
I let him hand it to m
e, but when he leaves the room, I hold the phone next to my synth and blast it with sine waves.
There is only one time all week when I really fall asleep, and even then it is only for a few seconds.
I’m lying there, making up lyrics to songs, when all of a sudden I slip. I fall into a great yawning cavern of pent-up dreams that come rushing at me, yapping and desperate, like a pack of starving dogs. The dreams had been waiting for me all this time, their faces pressed against the gates. When I fall asleep, they swarm me and devour me, and the shock is so great I am suddenly awake again, my heart pounding, while the dream-dogs, dissatisfied, howl for more.
“Why’d you stop practicing piano?” says Denny. “Isn’t your Showcase thing, like, ten days away?”
Denny and I have hardly been speaking since he destroyed Sukey’s painting, or rather, he has been speaking to me quite a bit but I rarely speak back. He trails me around the house when Skunk’s not here, like I’m some kind of endangered species he has to monitor so it doesn’t go extinct.
“Aren’t you supposed to be back in Victoria?” I snap.
He looks confused for a second, then something seems to click.
“I was thinking I’d hang around and catch your show,” he says.
“Oh really.”
“Yeah.”
I eye him suspiciously. He takes a step toward me in the hall and wraps me in an awkward sideways hug.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
I keep my body stiff. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. It really, really sucks, and I’m sorry.”
I don’t know if he’s talking about the Showcase or Sukey’s painting or the bruise on my chin, but as he hugs me against his Old Spice–smelling T-shirt and doesn’t let me pull away, I can feel something broken in me setting like a bone.
“I’m sorry too,” I say. “And Denny? I’m glad you came home.”
After that, Denny doesn’t go skimboarding with his friend Chris as much. Instead, he hangs around the kitchen when Skunk and I are downstairs jamming, trying to catch a glimpse of Skunk or get a word in with him whenever we come upstairs to make coffee or get food. Denny, it turns out, was Birdseye’s biggest fan. I hear him tell Skunk that their music really spoke to him when he was going through a dark time last year. After Denny says this, Skunk starts talking to Denny a little bit. At first it doesn’t get much beyond “Hey, man,” or “Cool, man,” but after a while they graduate to complete sentences, and then all of a sudden we’re all making pancakes in the kitchen, Denny, Skunk, and me, throwing blueberries at each other and listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Wild Awake Page 22
