Cadillac Couches

by Sophie B. Watson

  “Why would you sell it? You could busk! Of course, that’s it . . .”

  “We are huge music appreciators, Isobel and I, not musical at all sadly . . .”

  “I’ll help, we’ll busk together! Seriously, it’s a great way to make a quick buck. I haven’t done it in years, but I’m sure it still works the same.”

  This was just so weird. A fifty-year-old English man trying to convince a couple of twentysomethings to busk. Even more weirdly, I was up for it. “Whatta we got to lose?” I realized.

  “Dignity,” Isobel answered.

  “Oh c’mon, no one knows us here in this town. Look, Isobel, it’ll be just like karaoke, only with more creative freedom. Please.”

  We headed to the gas station to get the guitar from the backseat of the car. I worried about the potential bad scene awaiting us back at the station, but Kerridge said he would tell Red he’d vouch that we would be back to pay the bill.

  “These two minstrels here are going to give an amazing concert this afternoon that you really shouldn’t miss. Main Street in three hours,” he told the bored clerk.

  So we headed back to the park. I was glad I’d had the cantaloupe soup, but I was still a little hungry. The sun was really in full form, beating down on our heads. Luckily there were giant, old maple trees lining the streets giving us some relief.

  It happened so quickly I didn’t have time to warn them.

  Something was tickling my nose. I opened an eye, Isobel was tickling me with a blade of grass. Kerridge was holding my wrist, checking my pulse. They stood me up and walked me over to a water fountain. He wanted to know if this was normal behaviour for me, sudden drops to the ground. I told him yes.

  After the water I felt better. I needed more food. We went into a 7-Eleven and he bought me a hamburger in a bag that we nuked in the microwave. I ate that in two seconds. He bought me another, and he and Iz had one each. God bless North America, he said as he got us a round of lime-flavoured Slurpees and a couple of lottery scratch cards.

  Isobel used the 7-Eleven bathroom to change into a red dress she had got out of her bag from the car when I was busy negotiating with Red. She came back looking like a Spanish diva. I was as jealous as usual of her perfection. She handed me a bandana.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Eh ben dis-donc, you’re not really one for dressing up, are you?”

  I was annoyed. She always got to be the goddamn beauty queen. I tied the blue and white bandanna around my neck, trying to feel rock ’n’ roll, but felt more like an angry punk. It was the wrong vibe. We sat in the hot sun, waiting for Kerridge, who was using the bathroom. I put on some more lipgloss and some shimmering eyeshadow to soften my look. At least I was wearing a decent gypsy cotton top with my best pair of cutoff shorts. Isobel trumped everything by taking off her bra, saying she was too hot. Next you thing you know, she’d be pouring water down her dress.

  “Let’s go find a good bench. We need to work on our shtick,” Kerridge said.

  He didn’t seem to be ogling her obvious nipples. After we’d scratched our tickets and won nothing, we brainstormed for an hour going through all of our favourite songs, singers, lyrics. Kerridge practised on the guitar and managed to perfect a two-chord riff that he figured we could use all day. He taught me it, and my fingers struggled to bend in the right way. I figured I could ultimately go in for loud and vigorous strumming, doing only the most basic chord progressions. Isobel shook the ice in her Slurpee for a percussive element. This inspired Kerridge to go on a mission to find a pawn shop to get a tambourine.

  He came back singing “A Day in the Life”; he was thoroughly embracing the adventure. Super keener. Not only had he scored a tambourine but also a Beatles songbook in the adjacent music store.

  My doubts about the success of our busking were so enormous I’d been trying to come up with other ways to get our car out of hock and get us to Montreal. Selling the guitar wasn’t really an option, that would just be appalling, considering the autograph and Finn’s gesture. My grandmother’s opal ring was my prize possession and not an option. I couldn’t bear phoning my family and feeling like a schmuck. Maybe I could phone VISA and get my credit limit extended . . .

  We decided on doing Beatles’ songs because we had the book and also partly in honour of Kerridge’s Britishness, and also—who doesn’t love the Beatles! Plus, when I sing along to their music I actually feel like I’m doing it right.

  I obviously couldn’t really play the guitar properly, so Kerridge was to be the guitarist, me the percussionist, and Isobel the front woman. We had the book open on the grass in front of us, and if we stood in a horizontal line, we could pretty much all read it. The book turned out to be just a prompt really, lyric-wise, because those lyrics seemed already naturally emblazoned on our psyches. We practised two goes of the book. From “Oh bla di o bla da” to my personal favourite, “Amsterdam.”

  It was so much fun to be in the middle of small-town Ontario with this crazy Brit, jamming. We were jamming! Kerridge and I alternated between the guitar and the tambourine, while Isobel jiggled and sang like a cockatoo. We practised for a couple of hours. He told us stories from when he was our age in the 1970s. How he’d worn purple pants and orange tops and gotten arrested for doing acid and roaming around an owl sanctuary in Sussex. How he went bird watching with his older sister and lost their money in the woods and how they had to busk in a small, posh village just to get enough money for the train fare home and how they hitched a ride home in the end with hippies who smoked them up. One guy had question marks on the front of his sunglasses. It also sounded so romantic, like A Room with a View fused with Withnail and I.

  Surely we could make up for our lack of technique or polish, in fact our whole raw thing, with sheer summertime enthusiasm. We jammed until it was time to scout our location. Downtown in the main square there were some real musicians so we went away from the centre where we found a lane that had three coffee shops with patios full of mostly empty tables except for a couple of readers. It was two o’clock, people reluctantly strolling back toward their offices.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please bear with us. We are a new band. Very new indeed. Blushingly new. So forgive us our transgressions. We hope it isn’t too painful.” Kerridge said his piece, then backed up into formation with us. I felt sick, queasy. There were only three people sitting on the four patios. Did Dan Bern feel this way? Hawksley? Ani?

  “Right girls, imagine we’re in Paris in the 1960s, Situationists, rebelling against elitism, reclaiming our right to be artists!” And with that he launched into “Paperback Writer.” I didn’t need to look down at the sheets. No, it wasn’t remembering the lyrics, it was the sound of our voices that freaked me out. I tried to move my body in a dancing kind of way. Two people from the patio got up and left. With the sun beaming down on my face and just the one guy there busy reading a newspaper, I felt my self-consciousness start to slide away. When the reader got up to go to the bathroom, Kerridge chucked a five-dollar bill and a handful of loonies in the guitar case.

  “Monkey see, monkey do, works every time.”

  So we sang and we sang for an hour and by that time we’d perfected some of the songs. We were now competent on “Paperback Writer,” “Revolution,” and a medley of five other songs. The waiters and waitresses were finishing their lunchtime shifts and their replacements were strolling on in. Some smiled as they passed us, a few tossed in coins.

  We smiled back. All of us. Big. The Beatles were obviously a massive crowd pleaser even from our bumbling selves. And there were some points where I felt like Kerridge and I actually reached some gorgeous-sounding McCartney/Lennon harmonies.

  It was four o’clock and my throat was sore, but a pile of money was growing in our case. I couldn’t believe it. We were halfway through the songbook. (We had to skip any of the more experimental songs; they were just too tricky.)

  The patios slowly started filling up again for Happy Hour. Strawberry margaritas were bei
ng served and ice cold schooners of honey-coloured beer. Nachos dripping with sour cream and cheddar cheese and guacamole plunked in the middle of truly happy people. There was other music playing on café stereos, but not so loud, and people still seemed to be enjoying us. In fact, the longer Happy Hour went on, the more beer was guzzled, the more applause we got. Gooners sang along with us.

  One sly waiter brought us what looked to be coffees to go but turned out to be beer! I sang and sang and shook that tambourine for all I was worth. Kerridge was thrilled banging away on the guitar. He was even redder in the face than before, and I was worried that delicate English skin of his might be getting burned. Isobel was happily strutting around as if she was dancing in the shower, belting it out.

  The sun pelted down on me, and the beer collided with sun spots; we bellowed “Love Love Me Do.” I felt love and forgiveness. As if I could ever stay cranky at this girl, this co-pilot of my life. What a muchacha she was! I was proud. We were a great team, the best buddy sisterhood. Forget Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. We were way closer. Thelma and Louise, the Golden Girls, Laverne and Shirley.

  We didn’t wrap it up until just after midnight when last call had come and gone for the patio and people had gone inside to finish drinking. We walked inside the first one and got more applause. It was really a bit embarrassing. They gave us a pizza on the house, and we counted our earnings: one hundred and fifty buckeroos!!!! Kerridge insisted we keep it all.

  “That was so brilliant! I’m reliving the youth I never had. I always dreamed of being a musician in America.”

  “This is Canada.”

  “Sorry, yes yes, of course.”

  We would be able to pay off the gas station bill, get the car out of hock, and have ninety bucks left over for gas, it was a great start to fiscal rectitude and recovery. Amazing. And we’d earned it ourselves. Finn would be so proud. And God how I’d loved being in the middle of the music and not just watching it. It was a high I hadn’t experienced since I did that air-guitar performance of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” at talent night in Grade 4.

  After the bar finally closed, we were still all high from our day as rock stars. Kerridge said he had a VW van he’d rented that was parked on a campsite in front of a lake near town. He said it was a birdwatchers’ paradise. A free place to crash was a great bonus, so we all piled into a taxi to drive us out there.

  Inside the green van was a shambolic arrangement of piles of books and binoculars and poems written on Post-it notes attached to the walls. Beside a picture of an Ontario green tit, he had a quotation from Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

  We made a fire on the lakefront and toasted the Beatles and talked and talked. And smoked a little pot. He talked about England and E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, and we listened to him rhapsodize late into the night about the North American robin versus its tiny English counter­part and Canada in general as a hotbed of not just culture but hummingbirds too. He was so goddamned enthusiastic for life, it was fun just to be around him. And he had a big brain. A big English brain.

  “Though I am a doctor of literature, and not a doctor doctor, I do have a hunch about your lapses in consciousness, young Annie. Let me feel your pulse.”

  I gladly gave him my wrist. He was my new guru.

  “Yes, I thought so, you’ve got low blood pressure. And dope, well I’m afraid you’ll need to cut it out, your pulse is slower than after you fainted. Annie, you need to take actual care of yourself, you are a beautiful young woman with such a life ahead of you.” He was quoting my mother.

  “You also need to pursue this music thing, rather than just the musicians. It’ll be good for your health! If you take singing lessons, they will teach you how to breathe properly.”

  Isobel spoke up. “C’mon, Kerridge, you’re bullshitting. A slow pulse does not mean low blood pressure! I failed math, but I do know that.”

  “Okay, that’s true, but singing lessons would definitely help. Go forth, you young women, conquer the road, bring that Hawksley to his knees with your obvious charms! And try to ease off the hedonism, just a little.”

  In my post-busking euphoria and stonerness, his one-liner solutions for my life felt like the most genius wisdom I’d ever heard. There was no way we were going to sleep that night. It was so light out, we just kept talking bullshit. He was over the top with his take on us: “You’re rebels, you’re outsiders—practically lesbians, for all intents and purposes, rejecting men and seeking life and art on your own terms, grabbing the balls of your own adventure, saying ‘up yours’ to suburbia, to empty consumerism and, goodness gracious, to Céline Dion, you are like the first great women pioneers. Reject the status quo, embrace all experience! God, I wish I was your age again! Let me tell you, I’m not bullshitting you, as you would say: this trip, these kind of times are the times that will live on in your life well after it’s over and winter has come and you’ve got arthritis. You are living!! And you must, must, must do more canoeing! Absolutely, this is the Canadian advantage, all the canoeing opportunities that simply don’t exist in Britain. They just don’t . . .”

  “Oh la la, you’re really stoned!” Isobel said.

  I was with him on his same infectious wavelength. We ate hot dogs at four in the morning. By six, we were delirious. Fish were jumping, birds had woken up and were in the midst of their dawn chorus. We decided to go skinny dipping in the lake as the sun rose.

  I swam underwater and surfaced again and dove down again like a dolphin—I felt strong. Kerridge swam along beside us, doing his own aquatic whoops.

  I made vows to myself at this new dawn. No more Sullivan, no more dope, no more smokes, less decadence. Just the beautiful dawn. And my best friend and new guru. What could be better?

  Now I could meet Hawksley as more of an equal, a fellow troubadour. And Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen. Kerridge said life is all two steps forward, one step back, and if I needed advice from now on, listen to Springsteen, dammit.

  We crashed asleep for a few hours on the floor of the van.

  side a, track 8

  “I’m invincible

  so are you

  we do all the things

  they say we can’t do

  we walk around

  in the middle of the night

  and if it’s too far to walk

  we just hitch a ride

  we got rings of dirt

  around our necks

  we talk like auctioneers . . .

  we are wise wise women

  we are giggling girls”

  “If He Tries Anything,” Ani DiFranco

  Day 7

  +30 Celsius, blue sky with bonus:

  super-sticky eastern humidity

  drink index: Fuzzy Navel & Black Label beer

  Poutine: Québécois number-one dish

  3,326 km behind us

  Wawa to Montreal

  1,215 km to go

  I stuck a Polaroid photo of Kerridge on the dash with a piece of gum beside pics of Hawksley and a stick-on Buddha statue. It was an epic driving day going along the coast of Lake Superior: down past Sault Ste. Marie, over to Sudbury and North Bay, down to Ottawa. We stopped for a few naps and snacks and pee breaks and stretching-our-legs breaks along the never-ending highway. At our last stop, we went off piste to go for a swim. It was super hot and sticky out and I thought it would be adventurous to go for a skinny dip, to keep up the new Kerridgean path of embracing everything in nature, particularly lakes, but Isobel got a bloodsucker on her nose and then I had to burn it off with a cigarette. So her nose swelled and chafed. She’d never had an ugly day before and wasn’t happy about it.

  I shouldn’t have been pleased.

  She was sulking and looking at herself in the rear-view mirror every five minutes to see if the swelling had gone down.

  Many hours later, crossing the border from Ontario to Quebec, Isobel took a break from sulking to whoo
p and cheer with me. We belted out the traditional French beer anthem that we’d learned almost a decade before: “On est saoul, on est saoul, on est saoul l’effet de la bière!” Careening on and off of the rumble strips we sang the one and only verse in an endless loop, putting all of our operatic gusto into the hardcore Quebbie pronunciation of be-er. Isobel added, in her best Charles de Gaulle voice, “VIVE Le Québec Libre!”

  I think being in Quebec makes people impulsive. I mean, there’s something about Frenchness that just jazzes everything up. Joie de vivre. I blame what happened with Isobel and me that summer on the Québécois syndrome.

  Besides being French and sexier than the rest of Canada, for me and Isobel, Quebec symbolized an emotional landmark—it marked the site of our very first romantic and boozy adventures. As we drove toward Montreal in silence, I looked at the Québécois licence plates ahead of us that said, JE ME SOUVIENS . . .

  We were fifteen years old when we first set foot in French Canada. It was possibly the most exciting time of our collective lives up until that point—except for watching Live Aid on TV.

  Back at home we went to Catholic Separate High School. Separate really felt like a giant euphemism for Lame. We were pretty much sheltered from all the glories of public school culture that we had studied like anthropologists on TV. We drooled over the dating and partying scene that public school kids took for granted. We managed to get to be fifteen years old without having ever kissed boys, smoked drugs, or drunk beer. It wasn’t due to some shortage of enthusiasm—we were dying to be corrupted.

  Our big chance finally came when we signed up for a six-week course in Quebec where we would be, as the brochure explained: “immersed in French language and culture.” The previous year’s students called it Club Fed and assured us it was party central. The brochure promised we would: “live, sleep, and dream in French.” Madame Plouffe, our French teacher, thought it was merveilleux that batches of francophiles were hatched out of the program in six-week rotations.