Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Pet Sounds

  Arthur

  Galway

  The Fly

  I’ve Got You Under My Skin

  Christmas Presents

  Harrison Ford’s Toes

  Dorothy

  Who’s Sorry Now?

  The Last Kind Word Blues

  The Bare Truth

  Susan Is Serious

  I Fall to Pieces

  Odd Jobs

  The Razor’s Edge

  Morley’s Christmas Pageant

  Someone to Watch Over Me

  Figs

  Love Never Ends

  Praise for Stuart McLean and Home from the Vinyl Cafe

  “Stuart McLean is a natural storyteller with an ear cocked for real talk and a perfect sense of comic timing. In the modern line of Peter DeVries, Garrison Keillor, and fellow Canadian Stephen Leacock, McLean is a sly, entertaining humorist and an expert on the inexhaustible subject of human foibles.”—Billy Collins

  “McLean draws his characters in such a way that we all know people just like them . . . Terrific.” —The Providence Journal

  “This folksy collection of stories follows a year in the life of Dave and Morley and their family. Christmas, summer camp, first dates, and other minutiae are covered in a warm and engaging manner. The stories . . . make for pleasant reading.” —Booklist

  “An irresistible wit, warmth, and verve.”

  —Ann-Marie MacDonald, author of Fall on Your Knees

  “Think Garrison Keillor but with an urban twist. McLean is a natural storyteller, a modern Will Rogers if you will, with an ear for dialogue that is real and often laugh-out-loud funny.” —Tucson Citizen

  “Pure comic genius.” —The Halifax Chronicle-Herald

  “Stuart McLean is a storyteller par excellence . . . These are characters and situations that many readers will want to visit over and over.” —Quill & Quire

  “Rip-roaringly funny . . . A cozy, meandering, often laugh-out-loud treat.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Warmhearted . . . funny . . . poignant . . . highly enjoyable.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by Stuart McLean

  Nonfiction

  THE MORNINGSIDE WORLD OF STUART McLEAN

  WELCOME HOME: TRAVELS IN SMALLTOWN CANADA

  Fiction

  STORIES FROM THE VINYL CAFE

  HOME FROM THE VINYL CAFE

  VINYL CAFE DIARIES

  DAVE COOKS THE TURKEY

  SECRETS FROM THE VINYL CAFE

  EXTREMEVINYL CAFE

  Edited by

  WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  VINYL CAFE UNPLUGGED

  Copyright © 2000 Stuart McLean

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15205-8

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For David Amer, who said one day,

  “We should do a radio show together.”

  Mix a little folly with your plans:

  It is sweet to be silly at the right moment.

  HORACE, 65-8 B.C.

  Pet Sounds

  Arthur

  At five in the morning, on a sticky Tuesday in July, Dave woke up sweating. He reached out with his foot and wasn’t surprised to discover he was alone in bed. He found Morley downstairs, sitting at the kitchen table. She was reading the paper.

  “I was hot,” she said.

  “Me too,” said Dave, flopping into a chair.

  It was cool downstairs. It was cool everywhere in the house except for their bedroom.

  “I don’t get it,” said Dave. “I’ll call that guy again.”

  The air-conditioner guy came after lunch. He knelt by the vent in the floor of their bedroom.

  “It’s working,” he said accusingly.

  He was there for five minutes. For this he charged fifty dollars.

  But he was right. When you held your hand over the vent, you could feel the cool air. Yet every night they woke up hot.

  This was the second time in less than a year that Dave had called a repairman to examine the bedroom vent. They had a guy come in the winter too. In February Dave and Morley kept waking up cold.

  In February when the furnace guy came, he held his hand over the vent and said, “Hot air,” as if they were crazy. And then, because Dave insisted, he vacuumed the vent. Half an hour, seventy-five dollars. And still all winter they kept waking up freezing. And now it was summer and they were waking up hot.

  It was Sam who figured it out. One night Dave found Sam sitting on the vent in their bedroom.

  “What are you doing?” asked Dave.

  “It feels good,” said Sam. “The cool air. It’s where Arthur sleeps.”

  Arthur the dog.

  Arthur the sleeping machine.

  Arthur the plug.

  “Jesus,” said Dave.

  When he was a puppy, Arthur was allowed to sleep on Dave and Morley’s bed. When he got bigger, they tried to move him to the floor and found they had a battle on their hands. They found that no dog in the world was more determined or skilled at insinuating himself onto a bed than Arthur.

  They bought him a basket and put it in the hall. Arthur would make a big deal of climbing into his basket every night—circling it neurotically, sighing and grunting as he worried his blanket into a pleasing hump. But as soon as Dave and Morley were breathing rhythmically, Arthur’s head would rise like a periscope and he would slide over the edge of his basket and work his way into the bedroom, keeping low to the ground, as if he were hunting. He would stop a foot short of the bed and cock an ear. If he didn’t like the way one of them was breathing, he would bring his face close to theirs and listen, sometimes for five or ten minutes, staring at them like a priest taking confession, his wet nose onl
y six inches away.

  One night Dave woke up when Arthur was in the middle of his reconnaissance. When Dave opened his eyes all he could see were two huge eyeballs glaring back at him. They were so close Dave couldn’t tell these were Arthur’s eyeballs he was looking into. All he could see were two black pupils surrounded by hair. He smelled the sour breath of death that seemed to belong to these eyes and he soared upright, waking Morley with his gasp and sending Arthur bounding to his basket. When Morley opened her eyes, Dave was standing on his pillow pointing at the door.

  “The dog,” he said.

  Arthur was in his basket, snoring.

  “You’re having a dream,” said Morley. “Lie down.”

  Dave didn’t get back to sleep for hours.

  If Arthur was satisfied Dave and Morley were asleep when he crept into their bedroom, he would lift one paw slowly onto the bed and place it there without moving another muscle. If neither of them stirred, the other paw would go up just as slowly. Then, like a mummy rising from a swamp, Arthur would pull his body onto the bed and settle near their feet with a sigh, taking at first as little space as possible, but slowly unfolding and expanding as the night wore on—as if he were being inflated. He liked to work his body between theirs on his way toward the pillows.

  One night in a dream Dave saw himself sleeping on the floor, in the corner of his bedroom, like a child servant from the Middle Ages. He looked at the bed to see who his master was and Dave saw Arthur. Wearing his pajamas. Lying in his spot. Arthur had one paw behind his head and the other resting gently on Morley’s back. In the dream, when Dave tried to get back into bed, Arthur bared his teeth, snarled and drew Morley closer.

  When Dave woke up, he was, in fact, in his bed, and not on the floor, but Arthur was lying beside him with his head on the pillow, snoring (it was Arthur’s snores that had woken him). Morley had disappeared. Dave found her in Sam’s bed.

  The next night when Arthur came into the bedroom and stared at him suspiciously, Dave said, “Get lost,” and Arthur sighed and slunk away

  Now he was hogging the vent.

  On the Saturday after Sam had solved the air-conditioning mystery, Dave picked up a Reader’s Digest while he was waiting in line to pay for groceries. He noticed an article called “Is Your Dog Your Boss?”

  There was a test.

  The test was straightforward. Get down on all fours and stare at your dog. If you are dominant, your dog will turn away. If your dog stares back, it means he considers you to be an inferior member of the pack. Dave drove home. He threw the frozen food in the freezer. He called Arthur. He dropped to his knees.

  The thing that makes bad news worse is when it comes unexpectedly. Arthur had always been, if not considerate, at least obedient. Arthur might have pushed the limits but, unlike Sam and Stephanie, he usually did as he was told.

  When Dave stared at Arthur, he fully expected him to turn tail. He had harbored the possibility of a little staring match. What he hadn’t considered was that his dog would stop wagging his tail, hold his gaze for a full minute and then curl his lip and begin to walk menacingly forward, growling.

  “Arthur?” said Dave.

  Before the alarming moment resolved, Morley walked into the kitchen and Dave looked up at her, or more to the point, away from Arthur.

  Arthur lifted his snout, sniffed derisively and ambled away, leaving Dave squatting on all fours, looking pathetically back and forth between his wife and the disdainful rear end of the retreating dog.

  “Wait a minute,” he called after Arthur. “That wasn’t fair. Come back here.”

  But Arthur wasn’t coming back.

  “Arthur!” barked Dave, as firmly as he could.

  Arthur was already around the corner, out of sight.

  “Dave,” said Morley softly, “what’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” he said, struggling to his feet.

  The summer Dave was seven he brought a notice home from Cubs about an overnight hike to the trouting pond behind Macaulays’ farm. Dave had never slept away from home before. The whole idea made him nervous. He told his mother he didn’t want to go.

  “It will be all right,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  The evening before the sleep-out his father took him for a walk. They ended up in front of Angus MacDonnell’s Post Office & General Store.

  “You should have some supplies. For tomorrow night,” his father said. He handed Dave fifty cents.

  Dave had never had so much money to spend on candy in his life. He bought two Jersey Milk chocolate bars, fifteen black-balls (three for a penny), five pieces of red licorice, a package of Thrills and a bag of pink candied popcorn.

  He rolled the candy up in his sleeping bag as his father suggested. Knowing it was in there as he shouldered his bag on the laneway that twisted through the Macaulays’ sugarbush and over the hill to the trouting pond was the only thing that gave him the strength to turn his back on his father and start the long hike away from home.

  After supper—burnt hot dogs and Kool-Aid—Dave sneaked into the tent and unrolled his sleeping bag. He had his mind on licorice. He didn’t notice Joey Talarico following him. Joey spotted the stash and told Gordy Beaman and Billy Mitchell, who were a grade ahead of them, and pretty soon there were seven kids crowded around the tent. Dave felt compelled to share his candy. He handed it out, piece by piece. When everyone had something, there was nothing left for him. Later, when he crawled into his sleeping bag, Dave found the gold foil wrapper from one of the Jersey Milk bars and he licked it, looking for traces of melted chocolate. He then fell asleep crying.

  That was the same year Dave got his first-ever brand-new baseball. It was his Easter present. A round, white leather orb with red lace—a miraculously beautiful thing that was both soft and hard at the same time. He took it to school after the holiday weekend in a blue velvet Crown Royal bag.

  When Jim McDevitt saw Dave pull the ball out, he carefully tucked his new ball back into his school bag.

  “Nice ball,” he said to Dave.

  By the end of summer Dave’s beautiful ball was a mushy, torn, grey lump. But Jim McDevitt’s was in the same pristine condition it had been on the Tuesday after the Easter weekend.

  “You should’ve looked after it better,” said Jim one day at recess.

  Perhaps if Dave had been a different sort of person he would have remembered Jim McDevitt and the candy-guzzling Cubs before accepting the job of road manager for a heavy-metal group called Thrasher. Thrasher was in the third month of a year-long Tour of the World! when Dave signed on. The fact that the position was open at that point should have told him something. He caught up with Thrasher in a hotel bar after a disastrous show in Evansville, Indiana, during which the sound man had hurled a bottle of Scotch at the lead singer and punched the drummer’s girlfriend—leaving her unconscious in the wings, while he stormed around the arena yanking cables out of speakers in the middle of Thrasher’s set. By noon the next day, on the bus and already halfway to Minneapolis, Dave had begun to appreciate just how irreparably dysfunctional the crazed enterprise was. The bass guitarist wouldn’t get on the tour bus and was driving himself to the gigs. The drummer’s girlfriend, who had been retching in the can since they left Evansville, had already been banned from a rival band’s tour by a road manager because of how badly she had messed up their drummer with the drugs she provided him. The keyboard player hated everyone, especially the bass guitarist; and the lead singer was so strung out it had taken them half an hour to talk him out of the hotel elevator that morning.

  It took Dave four months to straighten things out. By the end of the summer Thrasher was more or less back together. Dave, on the other hand, was spinning apart.

  His success didn’t go unnoticed. Whenever the tour lurched through New York or L.A., executives from the record company told Dave he was the best road manager they had. They praised his resourcefulness, and his diplomacy, and his ability to smooth out the most cantankerous local promoter. Most of
all, they said, the band loved him.

  Well, they should have. Dave was doing just about everything for them—picking up their dry cleaning, driving their dates home, preparing home-cooked meals on a two-burner camping stove he had bought in an army surplus store in Flint, Michigan, lending them money and writing “Dear John” letters for them as the bus rocked through the night. He finally quit the tour in Durham, North Carolina, after his fifth visit to see the lead singer’s mother, who was in hospital recovering from surgery. The singer said that the stress of visiting a hospital and spending time with his mother would be too much for him to bear.

  Dave lasted eight months with Thrasher. When he left, he vowed that he would never allow himself to be taken advantage of again.

  And here he was, a quarter of a century later. Apparently he hadn’t learned a thing about protecting his self-interest. Whenever he took a stand, especially whenever he tried to take a stand with his own family, no one ever paid him any attention. And if that wasn’t enough, he had just learned that the dog ranked himself higher than Dave in the family hierarchy.

  The Saturday evening after Arthur had delivered that disturbing news, Morley said, “Who wants to go for ice cream?”

  Sam said, “Yes!” And then he said, “Ice cream, Arthur?”

  Now ice cream happens to be Arthur’s most favorite thing in the world. When Arthur heard the words “ice cream,” his backside began to twist toward his head, his tail started wagging furiously and he crab-walked across the kitchen to Sam—the picture of a dog in heaven.