Beach Reading

by Lorne Elliott

  As soon as the music started the audience welded into one organism with a common purpose. Not only did they sing along with all the words, there was even some choreography. At a given place in the chorus of that first song, for instance, everybody pounded the table three times. There was a small dance floor in front of the stage, but who needed it?

  A large mug of beer appeared in front of me, and when I went for my wallet, Sid reached across Robbie and stopped my hand, then gestured that he was buying this round. I raised my glass to him, put the mug to my lips and sipped my first beer ever.

  It tasted awful, like licking brass. What was all the fuss about? Robbie smiled at my puzzled face. Sid reached in front again and chinked his glass against mine. I sipped again unwillingly, but the second taste was better than the first, more like old pennies with a hint of dandelion. I might be able to finish this glass and not embarrass myself by revealing that I was not a hard-drinking man. I saw Robbie move her lips, but I couldn’t hear her over the music.

  “What?” I yelled.

  She had to lean in and yell into my ear. “Wallace!” She pointed, “Look!”

  Over by the dance floor on the far side of the room I could see him, picking his way slowly towards us through the seated crowd, smiling apologetically to the people around him while holding upside down over his head a chair he had discovered in the back corner. His path was impeded by having to time his progress to the movements of the drinkers who were swaying in rhythm to the song they were singing, but he had made it this far without incident, to where the bank of lights spilled out, shining on him like he was part of the act. Now though he found himself having to go beneath a rustic chandelier, a wagon-wheel affair with red glass mock candle holders, held by chains to the ceiling. He couldn’t lower the chair because of the heads around him, and he couldn’t hold it up much longer because his arms were tiring. Disaster loomed. And just as he elected to turn around and get out from under this trap, he attracted the notice of the Barley Boys, who all saw him at the same time, smiled broadly, then nodded to each other. Those of the audience who were watching the band now had their attention drawn to Wallace who crouched there, twisted and panting, holding a shaking chair above his head like antlers, a stag at bay. And just then the Barley Boys, with devilish looks in their eyes, switched into their next song without a break, and as the first verse headed inevitably toward the chorus the audience saw what was about to happen, and nudged each other in anticipation.

  The song was “Stand Up!”, a stirring political shanty which inhabited a place in the culture somewhere between a political call-to-action and a soccer chant. In the course of its performance history it had accumulated its own set of moves: during the chorus, at “Stand up!” everybody would leap to their feet, and then, at “sit down,” they would likewise obey. Newcomers to the song were quickly recruited into these moves because if they didn’t, they’d be crushed. Waitresses had learned to stay clear whenever the song started lest they be pummeled by the sudden press of upward-shooting bodies and displaced chairs.

  The Barley Boys started slowly, punctuating the words with a simple root chord.

  “The rich live off the poor while the poor are left to rot

  The bastards just get richer and the meek inherit squat…”

  The chorus was approaching. Anxiously, Wallace glanced around.

  “Now I’m a peaceful man, but sometimes you must fight

  When the only way to stop it is to stand up for what’s right…”

  And then the chorus.

  “Stand up! (Stand Up!) For the right to fight for Freedom.

  Sit Down (Sit down!) for everything that’s wrong.

  Hooray! (Hooray!) for our rights, by God we need ‘em.

  Stand up, sit down and sing out loud this song.”

  At the first stand up! the crowd leapt to their feet, and two chairs and a patron bumped Wallace, who lost his balance and started to teeter backwards onto and across the dance floor. If he had just allowed himself to fall he would have put an end to it then and there, but he chose instead to make a heroic fight to stay upright, and so managed to turn a harmless case of clumsiness into a sprawling catastrophe. Trying to get his feet back under him, he took three rapid steps backwards across the dance floor towards the stage, but the chair he was holding smacked another chandelier overhead and he slipped. It clattered to the floor, he hung in the air for a second, then fell like a tree, smacking the back of his head against the edge of the stage, and instantly going limp as a rag doll.

  The music stopped. Robbie shrieked. The room was suddenly very quiet.

  And from where he lay motionless, like a voice from the grave, singing the same tune but with new words, his voice warbled,

  “Fall down (Fall down!) for everything that’s wrong….”

  And the room erupted in a huge explosion of laughter and relief.

  “Hit it!” said the head Barley Boy, and the band went into a fiddle tune as Wallace pulled himself to his feet, picked up the chair and carried it towards us. Patrons cleared the way for him now, slapping their congratulations on his leg as he passed.

  Without thinking, I took another gulp of beer. It seemed to be quite drinkable now. I giggled at the thought of what I had just seen, started choking, and to clear my throat, took a good large swallow. I don’t know what I had been thinking, it didn’t taste bad at all. You just had to get used to it.

  Soon there was a break in the music between sets and we could talk. Two men who had to be brothers, dressed in jeans and Canadiens hockey jerseys, came over and sat down in some temporarily vacated seats.

  “Hey Christian,” said Robbie. “This is Toe and Gump Blake. They run the stand where you got those potatoes.”

  They were built close to the ground, squarely, as wide as they were tall, and Gump may even have been wider. If he was a goalie he would have fit almost perfectly into the opening of the net.

  “Are you a goalie?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he said. “Heard of me?”

  “Can’t say I have. But your name, of course.”

  “Yep. That’s who they called me after. It’s not my real name though. My real name’s William.”

  “Like the poet.”

  “Yeah. Mom’s an English Professor.”

  “What’s your brother’s real name?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Toe? I mean…”

  “No. That’s how they christened him. Mom fought it, but Dad said if she could name me after some fag poet then he could name Toe after the finest coach ever to lead the low-flyin’ Frenchmen to victory.”

  I had a brief shocking glimpse of what life in the Blake household must’ve been like.

  “I didn’t know William Blake was gay,” I said.

  “He was a poet, wasn’t he?” said Gump. “Name me one poet who wasn’t a fag?”

  “Wilson MacDonald,” I said, and his eyes lit up.

  “Boston she ‘ave good hockey team,” he recited. “De Maple leafs is nice, But Les Canadiens is bes’ Dat hever skate de ice!” He clicked his tongue and winked at me. I was all right. “Got me there,” he allowed. We chinked mugs.

  “I met Maurice Richard once,” I said, not knowing why I said it, except that it was true. But the effect was sudden and extreme. They both looked at me in awe, their eyes wide as pie-plates.

  “Where?” said Toe.

  “My father was doing some sort of a fundraiser with the Molsons, and there he was. I was only, eight, though. It’s not like I had a long conversation with him or anything. Just said hello. And he said, ‘How you doing, little fellow?’”

  “ ‘How you doing, little fellow’?”

  “Yep.”

  “How’d he say it?”

  “Sort of ‘Ow’ ya doin’ little fella.’”

  “What did you say?”

&nbs
p; “I said, ‘Fine’.”

  “Shoulda asked him about his fifty goals in fifty games.”

  “No time. He’d left.”

  “Wow. Maurice Richard!”

  “The Rocket!”

  “Yep.”

  “Let me shake your hand,” said Toe.

  “Me too,” said Gump. “I’m buying you a beer!”

  “Me too,” said Toe. And they left to do so. Robbie came over.

  “They seem to like hockey,” I said. She nodded. “They don’t seem to like gays, though.”

  She nodded again. “That pretty well sums up Gump and Toe.”

  The Barley Boys got onstage again and launched into their second set and my beer arrived. I could feel my forehead giving off heat from the sun I had caught that day, and the skin there was stiff and tight when I wrinkled my brow. The beer was tasting better and better.

  More songs, and everybody linked arms and swayed. Like in a jostling crowd, you were forced to follow. I watched one patron, his arms hopelessly linked with his neighbours, trying to sip from his beer as he passed and repassed in front of it. Sweeping close, in a doomed drunken effort, his jaw hit the mug, knocking it over. Next time he passed, he tried to lick this spilled drink off the table.

  It seemed to me that the music of The Barley Boys was both thunderous and wondrous. That rhymed. I tried to tell Robbie that I’d thought of a rhyme, clever me, but she couldn’t hear what I was saying. She told me this by yelling into my ear, which hurt my ear-drum, and rendered me more deaf. So, next time I had to yell harder just to hear myself.

  Another beer appeared, this time from the man to the far side of Sid. “Oh! Thank! You!” I bellowed, astonished at the goodwill and generosity of the human race. This was the way the world should be. It was all so simple. Not that I had ever found anything particularly wrong with the world before, but I knew it wasn’t that easy for everybody, and this buying of each other beer was one way we could all improve things, by welding together more firmly the Brotherhood of Man. I caught the chorus of the next song, which as it happened was a celebration of alcohol. I couldn’t agree more. This stuff was great. More songs followed, and more great cool refreshing tankards appeared, which I now slurped down not just with sips but large sloppy gulps. The rounds were being bought by these lovely strangers whom I’d only just met, and who were now firm friends for life, whatever their names were. One after another around the table they bought beer for the whole table, till it was Wallace’s turn, who looked at me. My round? I was honoured. Besides, I was in no condition to deny. The world was free. You just had to share. Everything so-called wiser heads had told me about propriety, sobriety and piety was utter horseshit. “Propriety, sobriety and piety” rhymed too. As it turned out, I was quite the poet. And contrary to Gump’s opinion on the subject, I wasn’t gay, either. Not that it mattered if I was. Nothing mattered. I had discovered my place in the scheme of things. Poet and buyer of beer. I pulled out my wad of bills and peeled off what was needed. Other people saw me from neighbouring tables and started to nudge slyly closer. I sent down towards the waitress the cost of the round plus a huge tip, which arrived in Sid’s hand, half of which he passed along, the other half kept to help for future rounds. The waitress scowled at Sid.

  The music was unending and visceral. It shook you with its force and plain good sense. No woozy-poozy “Crimson effervescent stardust, universal rainbows of your mind” lyrics here. Hangings, thievery and military insurrections mixed with paeans to God’s Golden Gift To Us All: Beer! Which kept coming. I looked around, smiling hugely. Wallace was walking from table to table with a sheet of paper which people were signing, for some reason…

  The next thing I remember clearly was hitting the fresh air outside the mall as though I was coming awake, and walking across the parking lot toward the truck.

  “Here’s the truck! The truck, everybody! It’s here! I found the truck!”

  “You don’t have to shout,” said Robbie. “We’re outside now.”

  “What? Oh,” I shouted. “Wait!” and I ran in a stagger around the corner of the mall, unzipped, faced the wall, and pissed like a horse. I was at it for ages, the whole time bellowing a deep maniacal laugh I didn’t know I possessed. I felt much lighter when I finished, making it easier to walk back, nearly floating in fact, my legs, oddly enough, filled with helium. I refused to get into the cab, arguing that it was cramped in there and that the fresh air would do me good, and Robbie got me into the box of the pickup truck after only three tries. Maybe I should forget it, I said, once I was in. Why go home at all? I could go back to the bar to live. I could sleep under the stage. I had money.

  “Well, actually…” she started, then stopped, waiting for a more opportune time. “Now stay down,” she said, but as soon as she started the truck and got it rolling, I stood up in the box with my hands on the top of the hood, thumping the remembered rhythm of their last song, their fifth encore. The Barley Boys were the most sublime musicians ever to tread this great green earth. By comparison, Claude Debussy was garbage.

  I maintained my balance as the truck picked up speed, but the air wasn’t sobering me up at all. Maybe it would help if I opened my mouth wide to absorb more oxygen, I thought, but it didn’t seem to, possibly because it roared into my lungs and pounded the alcohol more firmly into my bloodstream, making me actually drunker. I faced straight ahead and let bugs bounce off my face. One large insect the size of a June-bug zoomed right into my windpipe, causing me to sit down and try to cough it out. It wouldn’t dislodge, so I flung myself onto my back in the bed of the truck again and again until it spat out, bounced off the side of the truck and thrummed away dizzily. I knew how he felt.

  But I was lying on my back now, and suddenly very sleepy. We turned onto a bumpy dirt road shortcut and the back of my head bounced up and down against the floor of the pickup box for a good ten minutes, but it didn’t bother me at all, in fact it felt rather pleasant. I might even have slept for a while. Eventually we halted.

  “You’re home,” said Robbie. “Unless you want to come to our place.”

  “What! No! Home! Here!”

  “You don’t have to shout,” she said.

  I leapt to my feet. It suddenly seemed very important that nobody should think that I couldn’t hold my liquor. I took two quick swaggering steps to the back of the truck and the tailgate caught me on both shins and flipped me face-first into the ball hitch, then continued to flip me, and deposited me on my back half onto the pavement and half onto the gravel shoulder. Robbie shrieked.

  “It’s all right!” I shouted, quite relaxed. “I meant to do that.”

  Robbie, still terrified, laughed in spite of herself, “You really don’t have to shout,” she said. She helped me to my feet. “Are you all right?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Wallace in the cab was leaning his head against the side window, asleep. What a wimp.

  “Well, go to bed,” said Robbie. “I’ll wait till you’re on the beach.”

  I walked down the path and to the top of the dune, Robbie watching.

  “OK?” she yelled in the distance.

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do have to shout now!”

  “O! K!” I yelled back.

  She waved and got back into the truck.

  A fine lass, I thought. Too bad she was a lesbian, though I’m fairly sure that I could at any time entice her to switch. I had detected a definite note of concern for my well-being after that flawlessly executed tailgate flip.

  I giggled, turned and slid down the other side of the dune, cutting my ankle at the bottom on a broken beer bottle. I faintly heard behind me the truck pulling away, the sound almost lost in the music of the darling surf. I saw my tent in the starlight and tacked toward it like a crippled warship. It was the poor footing of the sand that caus
ed me to stagger. I fell to my knees in front of my tent and unzipped the door and crawled inside. Life was good. I flopped down, the tent started spinning like a fair-ground ride, and I pushed myself up to crawling position and raised my head until it slowed somewhat. But what the hell, it was fun, so I flopped back down, and the tent revolved faster and faster until I was flung off into sleep, where I kept falling, falling, falling…

  3

  …And hit the ground next morning head first.

  Outside, some industrial raking noise, like metal on concrete, was repeating incessantly: the sound of waves crashing on the shore, and crashing in my head as well, like rocks dropping on both temples. It was not a calming rhythmic massage now, it was random grating booms and slaps. Inside their rumble I could hear the squeaks of chalk and crushing shells. Sand was grinding down to squealing powder and depositing itself under my eyelids. Sharper pieces of driftwood had been crowbarred into my sinuses along with rusting jagged bits of metal.

  “Oh, sh…” I started but then stopped, the violence of the thought alone too painful to finish.

  My face was bruised. My lip was swollen, one eye was partly closed, and bile rose to the back corners of my mouth, causing my face to distort into an awful sneer. I wanted a big soft cool pillow to bury my head into, but all I had was my packsack of hard canvas. My shoes, which somehow had climbed up and lodged themselves next to my nostrils, were radiating a pong that would have knocked me over if I hadn’t been lying down already. I pulled myself out of the tent and stood up, then immediately sat down on the sand again. The sky was green and sickly. I shivered with what felt like the flu. A wave thudded on the shore and I said with feeling, “Oh, shut up,” but immediately and maliciously another larger wave thudded again, on purpose. I got to my knees, and then to my feet, decided it was possible to move, and tentatively put one foot in front of the other. I felt something awful lurch inside me and quickly ran three steps in four different directions. I stopped in dumb shock at how utterly painful life could be, and bending over as far as I could, grabbed both knees and made a face like a Chinese Dragon. I retched my guts out onto the sand, and kept retching, again and again, even though after the second retch there was nothing left to throw up. The smallest outlay of energy was causing massive unimaginable pain, so what was possessing me to expend immense agonizing effort for no reason whatsoever? The irony of this was not lost on me, which was maybe why I kept whimpering: Why? Why? Why?