Featherless Bipeds

by Richard Scarsbrook

  “Excuse me, miss,” he says, touching Lola on the shoulder. He screams as I pounce on him. Before Lola even turns around, I’ve got him pinned to the concrete.

  “Oh my God, don’t hurt me!” he whimpers, “Take whatever you want!”

  From behind me, Lola says, “This isn’t the guy.”

  I look over my shoulder at her. “Not the guy?” Then I focus back on the small man pinned under me. “If you aren’t the guy, then why were you following her?”

  “I just wanted directions to Queen Street,” he says, eyes wide.

  “You’re lying on Queen Street right now,” I say, and I get off him and help him to his feet.

  “Oh,” he says, turning to hurry away, “thanks.” Then he stops, takes a second look at me, and asks, “Hey, aren’t you that guy who was supposed to marry Janice Starr?”

  “No, I’m not,” I grunt, “I’m a crazy street person. Now get the hell outta here.”

  “Well, you wound up where you belong,” he says, shaking his head as he wanders away. “You really broke that poor girl’s heart.”

  I look at Lola, who has her fists planted firmly on her hips, and is tapping one foot on the sidewalk.

  “Nice going,” she says. “Now we’re never going to catch the real Downtown Rapist!”

  “Well, you could have told me what he looks like!”

  “I don’t know exactly what he looks like! He always followed at a distance, but he was bigger than that guy!”

  “How was I supposed to know! I mean, it could have . . . ”

  “Shhhhh!” Lola hisses, “Listen!”

  “What?”

  “I heard a cry for help!”

  Lola sprints up the street. I try to catch up with her, but I keep tripping over the baggy pants of my street person costume. I look down an alley, but Lola is nowhere to be seen.

  In the alley, on the ground beneath a fire escape, two figures struggle. A woman is face-down on the pavement. A man kneels on her back as she thrashes beneath him. He jerks her head back, tapes her mouth shut, then pulls her arms behind her back and begins winding tape around her wrists.

  “Hey!” I shout.

  The guy jumps up from his victim and charges at me, his eyes wild through the holes in his ski mask. He grabs an aluminum trash can lid and clangs me in the face with it. My knees buckle, and I’m sprawled out on my back. I can hardly breathe through the blood and goop spurting from my mouth and nostrils. I roll over on my side. I hear the tearing of duct tape. My arms are jerked behind my back. I am helpless to stop the tape from binding my wrists and legs. I’ve finally mustered enough breath to call out for help, but the duct tape is plastered over my mouth.

  “Now you can watch, hero,” he says.

  Lola leaps from the fire escape above him, hitting him squarely on the shoulders with her heels, knocking him to the ground.

  “He can watch you get your balls busted,” she says.

  He pulls a knife from his belt as he struggles to his feet, but Lola sends it clattering across the concrete with one deft karate kick.

  “Fuck!” cries the rapist.

  “Not again in your lifetime,” says Lola, who kicks him several times in the crotch.

  He falls to the ground, gasping and puking. The woman he was attacking is on her feet, and she adds a couple of kicks of her own. The man rolls onto his back, groans, and stops moving.

  “You okay?” Lola asks the other woman, who nods yes. Lola picks up the knife, cuts the duct tape from the woman’s wrists, hands her the cell phone and says, “Dial 911. Tell them we’ve got the Downtown Rapist here.”

  Then Lola cuts me free, and tears the tape from my mouth.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  I am able to say something that sounds like, “blorrt!”

  She helps me to stand up. There is the sound of a police siren, tires screeching. Four uniformed police officers run into the alley, guns drawn.

  “Hi, guys,” says Lola. “He’s over there.”

  Lola and I stand in the alley answering the police officers’ questions. I’m dirty, stinky, ragged and bleeding, so of course this is the moment that the photographers and TV cameras finally catch up with me.

  ENCORE

  HARMONY

  The van comes to a stop.

  “Here we are,” says Akim.

  Here we are, indeed. Harlock’s Rockpile, the rock bar where the Featherless Bipeds were born, and where, if the fates allow, we will be born again.

  I walk towards the crumbling yellow-brick building with my snare drum tucked under one arm, followed by Akim, whose well-traveled Stratocaster hangs inside its case at the end of his thick fingers. Tristan follows us, recording the occasion as always with his video camera.

  Together, the three of us step though the entrance marked “Stage Door — Performers Only”.

  Mr. Johnson, the owner of the bar, greets us at the door.

  “Well, if it isn’t the famous Featherless Bipeds,” he laughs. “What comes around goes around, eh? Glad you didn’t forget who discovered you!”

  “We wouldn’t have missed this for anything!” Tristan says.

  “Well, feel free to blow the roof off the place tonight,” he says, with a slight melancholy tinge in his otherwise cheerful voice, “It won’t matter tomorrow anyway.”

  After tonight, Harlock’s Rockpile will close forever, and we’ve been invited to play as part of the tavern’s last hurrah. The crumbling building has been appropriated by the city to build a parking garage, and the wrecking ball will arrive next week. Mr.

  Johnson has decided not to open another bar, and is going to retire to Florida. He’s taking his long-time waitress Suzy with him.

  This will be the first time that the Featherless Bipeds have played together in months, and of course a lot has happened since our last show. We’ve lost our manager, our producer, and our recording contract, so we’re looking at tonight’s gig as the band’s rebirth. Zoe will be arriving from Ireland today, and she’s taking a cab directly from the airport so she’ll arrive in time for the show. I can’t wait to see her. I’ve got something planned.

  “Hey, Dak,” Mr. Johnson says to me, “You haven’t changed a bit! Still way too clean-cut for a rock ‘n’ roller.”

  Since helping Lola catch the Downtown Rapist, I’ve been able to shave, get a haircut, and wear my usual clothes. Helping to put a rapist in jail seems to have outweighed jilting Janice Starr on the media’s good guy/bad guy scale, so I’ve been able to stay in my own house again, without having to sneak around reporters and TV vans. When they covered the story, the papers and TV news shows were even kind enough to show file photos of me playing with the band, rather than in my filthy disguise as a street person.

  Two disc jockeys banter on the radio playing behind the bar:

  The first DJ says: “And this just in — Big Plastic Records producer Billy VandenHammer, known throughout the music world as The Purple Messiah, was arrested late yesterday for fraud and tax evasion!”

  The second DJ says: “Probably to make up for all the money he lost when Janice Starr got whacked out on cocaine and attacked those cops, eh? Perhaps the fastest descent from number one on the charts to the clearance bin in music history!”

  DJ 1: “Of course that was after her live performance lip-synching scandal, right? Can you say ‘Milli Vanilli’?”

  DJ 2: “And then there’s that disc jockey in Vancouver who stripped away all the electronic effects from one of her recordings and revealed just how awful her singing really is — she made Linda McCartney sound like K.D. Lang!”

  DJ 1: “My singing in the shower in the morning sounds better than that!”

  DJ 2: “Although I’ll bet Janice Starr used to look pretty good in the shower before she started snorting coke and scrapping with the police!”

  DJ 1: “Rumour has it that she and manager boyfriend J.P. Tanner have split up. Seems Tanner is now managing a hot new singing sensation called Brandy K! She’s only seventeen, though,
so J.P. had better not start mixing business with pleasure, or he’ll be sharing a cell with Billy VandenHammer!”

  DJ 2: “Anyway, here’s some cute, lightweight pop from Janice Starr’s MUCH cuter days, a song called ‘Love is Number One’!

  There is a race between Akim, Tristan and I to turn the radio off. I punch the button so hard, I nearly knock the radio off the shelf.

  We file out to the van again to start carrying in our equipment. It’s been a while since we’ve set up our own gear, and my muscles tingle from lifting all the weight. This used to be my least favourite part of being in a band, but now assembling our instruments and amplification feels wholesome and organic.

  “I hope Zoe gets here soon,” I say.

  “You sound nervous, Dak. You never sound nervous,” Tristan chatters. “Don’t sound nervous. It makes me nervous!”

  I fasten the drums to their stands. “Think anybody will show up to see us tonight?”

  “Months are like years in the music business,” Akim says ominously.

  “Lighten up, Akim,” Tristan says. “We’re still the same guys with the same hands. We’ll rock this joint just like we did the first time.”

  “I hope we play better that that,”Akim says. “Let’s get our sound check done, and drive into the city to Jafo’s for one of those big-ass burgers.”

  “For old time’s sake?” Tristan says.

  “Nope, I just want a Jafo’s burger because they’re good,” Akim says. “Nostalgia is for has-beens. ”

  When we return to Harlock’s from Jafo’s a few hours later, the parking lot is already half-filled with cars.

  “I told you people would come,” Tristan says.

  “They might just be here to say goodbye to the bar,” Akim says, “I doubt they give a crap about the band.”

  As we walk inside, we’re surrounded by that familiar sound of buzzing of voices, clinking glasses and bottles, pool balls clacking together, the radio tuned to the local rock station. There are smells of stale spilled beer, cigarettes, fried food, sweat. Compared to the sterile environment of the recording studio, Harlock’s radiates life.

  “Holy crap!” Akim says, striding over to an elderly man who sits at a table directly in front of a PA speaker. He’s right to do something — the old guy will get his face blown off sitting that close to the stage! Akim shakes hands with him, talks for a few minutes, then joins us again by the bar’s entrance.

  “Didn’t you convince him to move away from the speaker?” I ask.

  “Oh, no, that’s my former landlord. He’s deaf, remember? He wants to sit close to the speakers so he can feel the vibrations. He says he misses the music.”

  “Does he know we named our second album after his garage?” Tristan asks.

  “He knows. He raised the rent.”

  Veronica and Sung Li meet us at the door.

  “Great crowd, eh?” Sung Li says, pulling herself close to Akim.

  “Not bad,” he admits.

  “And they’re still coming in,” Veronica says, pausing to nibble Tristan’s ear. Tristan gets that soft-focus expression as if his soul is being tugged toward heaven. He snaps out of it suddenly, though, his eyes bulging, jaw dropped open.

  “Dad?” he yelps.

  A grey-haired man with tired-looking eyes is making his way toward us, looking sullenly at Tristan. He stands in front of his son, saying nothing.

  “Jesus, Dad, I haven’t seen you for . . . ” Tristan says. “This is my girlfriend Veronica.”

  “Girlfriend, eh?” are the first words Tristan’s dad says to him in over ten years.

  Held firm in his right hand is the notorious Beatle Bass. He holds it out to Tristan. “You’ve earned this,” he says.

  Tristan holds the old instrument in both hands, and then sets it gently on the stage. He hugs his father. Tristan’s dad cries.

  Across the room, seated around one of the big, graffiti-covered tables that are the bar’s trademark, are a whole contingent of people who have made the trip from Faireville. Jo, the waitress from the Faireville Times Café is there, along with a couple of my high school teachers. Quentin Alvinstock is talking in his usual animated way, probably describing to Jo how he taught me everything about writing lyrics in his English Composition class. My sister Charlotte is laughing with the guy who owns Sammy’s Souvlaki Hut. J.D., the proprietor of J.D.’s Gas-O-Rama and my former summertime employer, gives me a thumbs-up. My mom and dad are here, too.

  As I make way to greet them, I’m intercepted by a man with a wild beard and mass of thick hair highlighted with multi-coloured paint flecks. It’s Sebastian, the half-crazed abstract artist from that back-alley store where I once bought painting supplies for Mom. Sebastian’s carries a huge canvas blasted with various shades of blue, and the print of a human face in one corner. I recognize the painting — “Whalemanpassion”.

  “Hey!” Sebastian yelps, “You said you would come back and buy one of my paintings when you got famous! Well, you’re famous now, and I haven’t seen you yet!”

  “Has the price come down at all?” I ask.

  “Nope. Still one hundred thousand dollars,” he says. “But listen. You can use it on your next CD cover for free. Good advertising for me, no?”

  The wild blue scramble actually would make a pretty cool CD cover.

  “I’ll be in touch, Sebastian,” I tell him, and I move on.

  I take a couple more steps towards the Faireville table when two rotund, middle-aged men jump out in front of me. One is dressed like a Hollywood cowboy, the other like an old hippie. It’s Ray and Jay.

  “What are you guys doing here?” I ask. “You know that, um, incident at the Superstar Bar was not our fault.”

  “Hell no, boy!” Cowboy Ray grunts, “We ain’t here to sue ya, or anything like that!”

  “That night you guys played at the Superstar Bar has become local legend,” Jay says. “Everybody has a story about the night the Featherless Bipeds came to town!”

  “We have pictures and posters of you guys all over the bar,” Ray says, clapping me on the back. “Everybody’s seen you on TV, and nobody on TV ever comes to Theodore. You guys’re like local heroes around our parts.”

  “We rented a bus!” Jay says, gesturing toward a table in the back, which is surrounded by an assortment of Pool Table Pec Flexers, Dance Floor Enigmas, and even a couple of Barstool Critics. I hardly recognize the Bull Man at first, since he’s respectably dressed and clean-shaven. He sits with his arm around the waist of the Elton John fan, whom I see still favours velvet jumpsuits.

  I scan the rest of the room, and pick out other nameless faces I remember vaguely from other gigs we played at the Triple R and the Twelve Tribes. A couple of Jimmy T’s girlfriends from V.O.S. are here as well, now just barely old enough to legally be in a bar. I can’t imagine Mr. Johnson did anything more than local advertising for this gig, but the word got around somehow.

  At last I make it across the room to where my mom and dad are standing. I hug Mom, and shake hands awkwardly with my dad.

  “So,” I say, “did you remember to bring it?”

  My mother smiles and slips a small box into my hand.

  “I’ve brought something to mark the occasion,” she says and holds up a painting of the Featherless Bipeds playing live at Massey Hall. “I downloaded a picture from a fan site on the internet, so it’s only as good as the source material.”

  But Mom’s painting captures much more of our band than any grainy bootleg photograph could. The brushstrokes make it look as if my arms are in motion, that Tristan is swaying back and forth like he always does when he plays, that Akim’s leg muscles are tensed for one of his trademark leaps into the air at the beginning of a solo. But the real sign of Mom’s artistic gifts is that Zoe, who always stands very still on stage, somehow radiates that warm, mysterious charisma, even rendered in acrylic paint.

  “You’re a true artist, Mom,” I tell her.

  I look at my watch. Where is Zoe, anyway? She sho
uld be here by now, even if her flight was delayed.

  Mom nudges Dad.

  “Show him, Arthur.”

  “Awwww,” Dad moans, “it’s Dak’s night, Jessica. I don’t want to steal his thunder. I’ll show him later.”

  “Show him now,” Mom says.

  Dad removes a book from his back pocket, and hands it to me. The Great Embrace, by Arthur Sifter.

  “The first copies were printed this week,” Dad says.

  “Dad, that’s amazing, I’m so . . . ”

  My father loudly clears his throat. Compliments fluster him.

  “Didn’t want you to have pulled that old manuscript out for nothing,” he says.

  “Hey!” cries a voice from across the room, “Aren’t you that crime fighter guy?”

  It’s Lola.

  “I’ll be back,” I tell my parents, and I go to where Lola is standing in the ever-thickening crowd.

  Lola has undergone another transformation. She’s dressed in a sharp navy blue business suit, and her hair is cut stylishly short, like a politician’s. Gathered around her are several other women, similarly dressed and coifed. I notice they’ve all got matching lapel pins — a gold exclamation mark superimposed over a rainbow. I think I recognize the symbol from TV.

  “Hey, Dak,” Lola says. “Good to see you again. I’m here on behalf of the Rainbow Action Alliance.”

  “I’m guessing that’s not the name of your new band,” I quip.

  “No,” she says. “We’re an organization that lobbies at the federal level for the rights of marginalized and minority women.”

  “Wow,” I exclaim, “that’s a broad mandate!”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke?” one of Lola’s compatriots demands. “Referring women as broads?”

  A dark feeling of déjà vu rushes through me, but Lola waves her hand in the air, saying, “Dak’s never funny. He doesn’t mean it that way. Dak is the guy who helped me catch the Downtown Rapist.”