I will. Go on.
He meets us. We all hang out. Everything’s fine. It seems like Dad must have held his tongue or something, because Lloyd was charmed. Then he flies back to California and pretty soon we get a letter saying he’s arranged things with this super-surgeon. The long and short of it is, he flew us down to California and paid for our operation, and it went perfectly. They had a team of fifty-eight people working on our operation. I will never forget that number. Because, back then, I used to imagine all fifty-eight of them crowded around the operating table, elbowing and shoving each other to get at us, but obviously it wasn’t like they were all in the room at the same time. Anyway, so today this—Albert lifts his hat and bows his head toward the camera—is all that I have left of my seventeen years attached to you, bro.
Donald zooms in on the oval of pale scar tissue that marks Albert’s otherwise sepia crown.
Albert settles the hat back on his head and cocks it a little, leans back in the chair. We are free of each other because Dad made a few mediocre hard-bop LPs in 1969.
Do you really think they were mediocre?
Those are Dad’s own words. But you’re right, he’s hard on himself. It was a beginning, but he never got further than that, because—well, maybe he should tell his own story. See, I don’t even know if you know this, but Mom told me that the whole time during the lead-up to our operation, Dad was trying to get Lloyd to put up some money for another record.
Yeah, I know.
Here’s the thing: Mom says Dad made a demo recording for Lloyd. He played it for him, and the guy just stopped taking his calls. And this is before our operation, mind you. Mom was freaking out, trying to keep Dad from screwing it up. She thought he’d scare Lloyd away before they went through with separating us.
Where’s the demo?
Dad gave it to Lloyd.
What was it called, did she say?
“Jesus Defines the Surface of the Caul.”
Surface of the Call?
That’s caul, as in c-a-u-l.
Donald scratches his eyebrow and sighs. So if I asked you to describe the music you do now, how would you describe it?
Jazz. Not punk. Serious business. I play with a bassist who thinks Mingus is God and a drummer who thinks keeping time is for sell-outs. Dad won. I’m halfway to being him. All I have to do is go mad and I’ll be all the way there.
DONALD IS IN the passenger seat of his mother’s Corolla. It’s just after her shift, and she’s taking them through Stanley Park and across the Lions Gate Bridge to her North Shore condo. Up on the bridge, which arches over and above the inlet, it occurs to Donald that they are not only seeing the view, they are a part of the view. They are being the view.
I’m sorry, his mother says, but I think I agree with Al on this. I mean, I can see why you’d want to do it, and I’m happy that you are expressing this creative interest, but I don’t know. I’m concerned.
About what?
She licks her lips, changes lanes. Well, what is it that you want to ask me?
About everything. Anything. What it was like raising two kids like us. What it was like when we were on TV and in the newspapers. Stuff about Dad. Whatever you want to talk about.
I don’t know what I have to say. If you want to read all the newspaper articles I have about you, I have a closet full of them, whole albums full of clippings. You can go through all that if you want to. But I don’t know what I have to add to it.
Do you have any clippings about Dad?
Well, he’s mentioned in a couple of the news articles, after David Lloyd got in touch with us.
Anything from before that, on his music?
She cocks her head for a second, sort of shaking it, sort of shrugging. We met just after he was quitting music. You’ve heard the whole story before.
But didn’t he make a demo tape for David Lloyd, when they were getting ready to operate on us?
She looks at her son, then returns her attention to the road. Yes, he did.
Do you have it?
She purses her lips. Then she shakes her head. He gave it to Lloyd. Or at least that’s what he told me he did.
Mom, can I turn the video recorder on?
What, right now?
Yeah.
Why?
This is interesting.
Oh God, do you have to?
Can I? He leans over and unzips the backpack at his feet.
No, no. I mean, really, what’s the point?
What was the demo like?
Are you going to turn that thing on? Won’t the sound be awful in here?
It’s okay.
Why don’t we wait until we get home?
The car has begun the low, sloping descent off the bridge, and Donald’s mother rides the brake as they go down the ramp.
What was the demo like? Did Dad play it for you?
She shakes her head again. Not the whole thing. I only heard a bit of it. Just enough to know that it was a bad idea to give it to Lloyd.
Why? What was it like?
She slows the car and it curves around the off-ramp. She clears her throat as she gears down.
Donald, you know that your father is not well. He was an immensely talented person. When I first met him, he would play the clarinet for me, and it was like diamonds—I don’t know how to say it, like rays of light. But, you know, I also loved just watching him take the instrument apart and clean it. That was almost as beautiful, seeing him take it apart, look at the mechanisms, study how they worked. That’s the thing; when I met him, he loved the music, but he was talking about making instruments, not playing them. He wanted to quit playing music. It was a different time. There was this tension between being free and drifting around, which is what we sort of wanted to do, and the discipline of being in a band. I guess he resented the regularity, the time the band took up. And those guys didn’t like me. Because I was white. They never said anything to me directly, but there was a feeling that they thought I was this white girl taking him away from his music, which was totally untrue. Your father, when I first met him, was already talking about quitting and moving away from San Francisco. Honestly, I think part of what attracted him to me was that I was Canadian. I think he had an idea to go away with me to Canada right from the get-go, when we first met, like I was there to take him away from the States. You see, when we left to live in that commune in Oregon, it was his idea. They were my friends, yes, but it was his idea to go there. He wanted to become a carpenter, he said, and make musical instruments in his spare time. The commune was a total disaster, of course, and we moved up here afterward. You and your brother were conceived at the commune, though. Is that too much to tell you? That was the only good thing to come out of that experience. Anyway, we moved up here and prepared to raise a family. By the time he became an immigrant to Canada, your father had really turned his back on being a musician. And that’s when all the Jesus stuff started creeping into his thinking. Not at the commune. Here.
And the demo?
His mother steers the car east along Marine Drive.
He hadn’t been making music for years by the time David Lloyd came around. He taught music to you two, but that was the extent of it. You remember. He had no interest in it himself, other than to teach you two. But when Lloyd came around, I think he flattered your father so much that he got the idea back into his head. So he built this floor in the garage, a false floor. I don’t know how to describe it. He built this rickety sort of wooden floor, like a floor with gaps between the planks. And he did this kind of dance or series of steps around the floor, and it would creak.
I remember that. Dad laid a floor in the garage. Are you saying he built a tap-dancing floor? Donald looks away from his mother and out at the road. He told me and Al it was just a floor, just to cover up the cement.
No, he had designed it specifically to creak—that’s how he described it. He claimed he had designed it to creak in patterns when he walked on it in certain ways, and that by standing and sw
aying and walking around on this floor, he was making a sort of music out of the creaking. He insisted to Lloyd that this was a kind of free jazz, you see. And he made a reel-to-reel tape of it after he was finished. I watched him try it out. He was swaying around and staggering, it looked like, but with the utmost concentration. I couldn’t bear to watch him do it. He played the tape for me. I didn’t need to hear that either. A bunch of creaking wood sounds. I didn’t want Lloyd to hear it because I thought he would figure out that your father was not so lucid, and it might break the spell, his idolization of your father. I was fighting to get you kids separated, so that you could have normal lives. But how can you stop your father when he gets an idea into his head? He sent the tape to Lloyd anyway. But David Lloyd was a decent man, I believe. He must have realized what was going on, because after that point he only communicated with me regarding your operation. I don’t think he gave your father any sort of answer about the tape. Your father was gravely disappointed. He had expected Lloyd to produce his new record—this creaking floorboard music. I waited until after you and Albert were separated from each other, and then I separated from your father. But maybe this is telling: the fight that we had, the one that made me decide to leave him, was about David Lloyd. Your father hated him for ignoring his demo. Hated him. Despised him so much it overcame any gratitude for what the man did for you two. Your father’s eccentricities had always seemed benign to me, up to that point. That was the first time I thought that he seemed totally to miss our interests as a family—and your health and happiness—because of his delusions. In retrospect, I don’t know if it’s so bad, but at the time it was the excuse I used to leave him. I love him, we all love him, and we’ll be friends until the day we die, but I just had to get myself outside of his head, you know? We’re home.
She wheels the car into her driveway.
The recorder is on Donald’s lap, the lens aimed at the inside of the car door, but the microphone is on. So he’s gotten it all.
In the living room, his mother spreads the contents of an old suitcase onto the coffee table and they sort through the archive of his and his brother’s conjoinment. Donald picks up a clipping printed on yellowing newsprint and looks at a photograph of his own young grinning face. In the picture, his head is tilted to accommodate the pull of his brother’s body beside him, part of him. Donald cannot now recall the moment or even the day when the photograph was taken, though he recognizes the background as their family home in East Vancouver. In the photo, his smile is wide and he’s looking directly into the camera. Albert, beside him, his head, neck, and body making the other half of their arc, looks away. The image of his brother’s body has been cropped—has been halved—by the frame.
ALBERT STEPS OUT of the key of C and into A, while Michael walks the bass line in circles and Werner punctuates the departure with some skittering rim work. Lambeau’s is a supper club, so Albert can only go so far outside—he has to be careful not to completely alienate the tourists and foodies and couples on dates. But he’s familiar with this edge, and knows just how many liberties he can afford to take per set. He hunches over his Gibson, balanced atop his bar stool on the little stage. His fingers and his mind move apart and together. He is levitating in all directions, outwardly and inwardly.
Donald, with the camcorder cradled on his shoulder, snakes in and amongst the trio, focusing an extreme close-up on Michael’s fret board for a moment, then moving on to film the bell of Werner’s ride cymbal. Then he closes in on Albert’s pick guard, tightening on his right-hand work. Donald squats in front of his brother, placing the camera up close to the guitar’s body, the lens just a few centimetres from Albert’s right hand.
Albert leans back and pulls a note north, like a man hiking a catamaran against the wind. He’s aware of his brother down there near his feet, but he shuts his eyes, pursues the sound.
Donald tries to stand up out of his squat, holding the shot, but he’s unsteady on the balls of his feet. He loses his balance and tips forward. The eye of the camcorder touches Albert’s knee, then Donald rights himself into a crouch and backs away.
Albert keeps tinkering in A, reaching for the crow. That’s what their father taught them to call improvisation. When they were kids, the old man said to them that musicians are magicians, pleasers, entertainers. What you do is no different from sawing a woman in half or making a coin vanish. But Albert and Donald’s father also told them there is a maze that the music makes, and there are moments when you are a magician reaching into your top hat for the rabbit you hid there earlier, and instead of a rabbit you pull out a crow. The trick tricks you. That’s what the best music is: you reach for the crow when you know there’s nothing but a rabbit in there. Yes, it’s only a supper club, and Albert is only running through old standards for distracted tourists. But Albert is reaching for the crow nevertheless. It takes a kind of non-concentration. A kind of self-obliteration. And there is his brother, a frigging camcorder all up in his face, all up in his conjuring. Rabbit. No crow. Just rabbit.
Albert scribbles out a few more notes in A, then looks up and over at Michael, signals for the chorus, and goes there. Michael catches it and follows, but cocks his head as if to say, What’s wrong? Werner halts altogether, but quickly punts with a strong crash, and finds them on the one.
As the chorus drags forward, a freckling of red appears on Albert’s white pick guard. Several droplets of blood spray against the plastic during his crab-like picking. A woman in the audience says, Oh my God. A few people point. Albert brings the song home quickly. When it’s over, he holds up his ring finger and examines it in the spotlight. He turns it toward the audience, to show them, then he shows it to Michael, who just stands there shaking his head. Werner shrugs and starts to unscrew his cymbals. Donald zooms the camera out, steps down backward off the stage, panning the trio now.
Albert leans toward his microphone: I’m sorry, folks, it looks like I cut my finger. I’m very sorry, but we’ll have to stop the show. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope we’ll see you again. He turns the volume down on his Gibson and unplugs it. There is a little applause.
Michael taps him on the shoulder. What the fuck?
Albert ignores him and looks instead at Donald. He says, Shut the camera off.
No, I want to get this.
Shut it off or I swear to God I’ll snatch it out of your hands.
Donald lowers the camera. What’s your problem?
Werner comes around the drums and the four of them stand in a cluster on the stage. The sound man puts a CD on, and the room fills with pre-recorded contemporary.
Albert makes a grab for his brother’s camera, but Donald pulls it back just in time. All right! He hugs the camcorder to his chest, away from Albert. Look, I’m pressing STOP, you fucking psycho.
Albert points his finger in his brother’s face, so that the tip is just beneath Donald’s nose, and he says, That’s it. That’s all the footage you’ll get of me. Then he takes his guitar and leaps over the monitor, walks through the kitchen doors, and is gone.
Donald is left there with the band. What the hell was that?
Werner looks at Donald and says, It was the last footage you’ll get of him, apparently.
Michael kicks Albert’s stool, sending it clattering to the floor. He curses loudly and drags his Engelhardt off the stage by its dark neck.
DONALD IS ROLLING.
Sounds like he juiced, Donald’s father says. He’s seated in his son’s easy chair, his hands clasped across his diaphragm. I can feel the heat from those lights, Don. Can you dim them down?
They’re to get rid of the shadows, Dad. They’re necessary. If you’re hot, take of your cardigan, ’cause I can’t open the window either. The sound outside.
I can abide.
Donald is behind his camcorder, which is now a little bit mutilated. He gouged the red light out with a screwdriver because the lack of it seems to loosen his father’s tongue.
What do you mean, juiced?
; Well, it sounds to me like Al did not want to continue performing. So he juiced. He cut his finger on purpose.
What?
That’s an old trick. Keep a little piece of razor or an old tin can lid or whatever stuck in your instrument. Jam it in somewhere you won’t likely touch it by mistake, but somewhere in plain sight. So whenever you want a show to stop early—joop—slice!—you’re free, contract or not. No one can expect you to play if you’ve got an injury. Some guys used to sew razor blades up under the inside of their lapels, so if some fool grabbed you that way, he’d pull back a handful of his own blood.
How come I never heard of this juicing thing? You never told me about that.
Should I have told you about that?
Well, how did Al know about it, if it’s an old-school thing?
The blood has a way of talking, has a way of talking you into letting it get to where it’s going.
Donald frowns. But I don’t get what Al was so upset about, why he got so huffy.
The blood will escape. It has its will. It is the will of God, the blood. The blood of Jesus and the wine of the sound. Water into will, blood will out. Jesus walked on blood, turned water into wandering.
Did you ever juice, back when you were playing?
Wars have been fought over whether wine becomes blood inside of yourself or not.
You’re talking about transubstantiation? Yes, I guess that’s true. There have been wars about that. But I asked you if you ever juiced back when you were playing in your band.
I am juicing now. We are juicing over and over, now and forever, Don.
THE TWO BROTHERS are facing each other across the threshold of Donald’s apartment.
You gonna let me in?
Dad’s coming. I’m interviewing him. I’d rather you weren’t here for it.
That’s exactly why I’m here, Albert says. His lip is curled. He points at his brother’s chest, stabs his index finger in the air as he talks. You’re done with this project. You’re going to give me the camera and I’m going to stomp it into dust. That’s what’s going to happen.
The Outer Harbour Page 5
