Blackout Odyssey

by Victoria Feistner

  “…setting up? But we’re double-booked, remember…?”

  “I know. But… but it’s hardly an ordinary night, is it? What did you say you played again? Metal and what?”

  “Ska-funk.”

  “That sounds like a super combo. Really… original. Do you have representation?” The bouncers were close and one of them shouted in a temper at the others about the crowd outside. “No? I would give you my card but they’re… in my other suit. In my car. In the meantime, fell—uh, people, I’d really love to hear what you’re made of.”

  “But there’s no power?”

  “Right. Which is why… this is such a great opportunity for you. Because anyone can sound good with amps and, you know, microphones, but it takes truly great performers to… perform… regardless of a blackout or not. The show must go on, right?”

  More rustling and some whispering. “The Maytags are outside,” someone reminded us, the question hanging in their voice.

  “True, but it’s a free country and Bloor Street has two sides.” The bouncers were coming over. Gritting my teeth, I tried to crouch down so that I blended in with the others, who smelled liked old wigs and grease paint.

  “Hey, who’s here? What are you doing back here?” Wall o’ Meat demanded.

  “We’re Straight Messina,” the first voice said, indignant. “We were booked by management. We’re supposed to be playing here tonight.”

  Wall o’ Meat grumbled. “Obviously that’s not the case.”

  “But the Maytags are playing!”

  I added my voice to the chorus of agreements.

  “That’s not my problem.” Brick o’ Meat gestured. “Time for you to go.”

  I leaned in and whispered: “Time to show me what you’re made of!” and then pulled back.

  “Yeah!” The band member that I’d whispered at pushed forward. “We’re not going to take this from you, you know, it’s a free country.”

  “Phil!” one of the other bouncers called from the door. “The crowd’s getting kinda big, man. What should we do?”

  “We’ll play outside with the Maytags then!” the leader of the band cried, triumphantly. “We can do an acoustic concert too! We’re just as good!”

  “Brampton rules!” someone shouted in a burst of misplaced enthusiasm.

  “Phil! Where are we going to put everyone?” demanded one of the other bouncers.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered, giving nudges, and the six members of Straight Messina responded as I hoped.

  “Yeah! Let’s go! Let’s do this!”

  “Hey, can you get my guitar case, it’s by your feet—”

  “Someone’s standing on my cape!”

  “This is so cool! Like being on Much Unplugged!”

  “That’s the spirit, seize the moment,” I urged in an undertone.

  Phil the bouncer flung his hands up in defeat, waving them towards the door. “Whatever. Whatever! You just need to get out of here, okay!” He turned to shout over his shoulder. “Get them out the door, Joe, god, what am I paying you for?” He turned his back long enough for me to squeeze by at the tail end of the band, and we emerged into safety and the cooler air.

  In the moonlight, Straight Messina were all wearing KISS-esque makeup along with fake mullets and fedora hats and capes. I blinked in confusion while they stared up at me expectantly. The oldest looked barely old enough to shave. I’m not that old, am I?

  “There’s no room,” one of them said plaintively to me.

  Indeed there wasn’t, and the free space on the sidewalk grew narrower by the moment. The Maytags were doing a… spirited… cover of Oasis’ Wonderwall, in the style of… I’m not sure what. I felt very old and extremely non-hip. Peering around, I locked eyes by accident with Phil the Bouncer. He recognized me. And whatever gears he kept for thinking were turning. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “The other sidewalk is clear! Come on! Let’s get you set up!”

  “Don’t you represent the Maytags?”

  “I represent a lot of different people,” I retorted. “And I want to see what you kids can do. So I’m going to stand in the middle of both bands and see who wins.”

  “…what?”

  The bouncer pushed his way towards us, fury gathered in his face. “Come on!” I hustled. “You know, like a rock battle! Toronto’s Blackout Battle of the Bands! Who will win! Who will lose! Exciting stuff! I can’t wait!” With a combination of shoves and cajoling, I got Straight Messina across the street safely and directed them to set up as if I knew.

  The lead singer stared, confused and hopeful and just a little dim. Dim and trusting. “Come on, kid, show me what you’ve got,” I said, confident, then ducked around some people walking past. I flashed them a final thumbs up as they started singing, and then disappeared into the crowd.

  What can I say about Straight Messina? Well, they were really, really bad. And loud! Whatever else those kids had going for them, they had the lungs of opera singers. Opera singers who did free-diving, and didn’t let tone-deafness stand in the way of a good time.

  The Maytags took this competition as a personal affront and sang louder.

  There may not have been a Battle of the Bands planned for that night, but there certainly was one now, and the crowd was into it. Lighters sparked up and people cheered. There weren’t many cars, but there were some in either direction, and as the audience spilled out onto the street, the traffic built up on either side, the frequent and intense honking adding to the cacophony and attracting more commotion from the neighbourhood. People leaned out their windows and left their stifling-hot apartments for a distraction from sitting in the dark.

  If I wasn’t so exhausted, it would have been great fun to watch.

  The Maytags and Straight Messina seemed to find this crowd intoxicating, and by that I mean they threw themselves into their shitty music like cliff-jumpers, and the crowd clapped and cheered the sheer enthusiasm. Protected from the bouncers by the crush of people, I stayed to listen for a few minutes, appreciating my unmelodious handiwork. But this wasn’t getting me home.

  So I slipped back across the street, safely away from Lee’s Palace, and rejoined the trudgers heading west.

  14.

  Shovelling Horseshit

  It hadn’t been even half a block before I noticed someone in a blue sedan slowly following me, peering out their window, craning to catch a better glimpse. The glimpses of face over my shoulder was annoyingly familiar, but the actions were too skeevy for anyone I would be friends with, and that meant… “Oh, you have got to be kidding me. Leave me alone, man. Come on.” I picked up my pace, and the car honked at me.

  Honked at me.

  That was it. Fuming, I turned on my heel and marched up to the window. I expected to see an older, shaved head and a pin-striped suit, but instead it was someone about my age with dark hair and a bit of a beard. “Holy shit.”

  Mike grinned at me. “I thought it might be you, Mallory.” His accent seemed stronger than I remembered from high school. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Trying to get home,” I told him, bending over to lean in through the window. “Nightmare of a day. But glad to see a familiar face. It’s been a while.”

  East of us, the Maytags were winning the clash of rock bands; the lead singer remained audible blocks away even without amps. Shame he chose to scream obscene lyrics with them instead of anything productive. Like yodelling. Or shouting down a mine shaft. Really, I supported anything he chose to do with said lungs except shriek in the middle of the night out on Bloor Street. Still: gold star for effort.

  That being said, he didn’t clear the high note that he aimed for, and both Mike and I winced. Leaning over, he opened the passenger door. “Get in. I’ll give you a lift.”

  I’ve never heard such sweetness. I tried to scoot into the proffered front seat but he held up a hand to pause me, while pushing clutter into the back.

  “Sorry. I was not expecting a passenger. Where ar
e you heading?”

  “Islington. But any bit of the way would be great. Anything’s better than walking.” I closed the door, mentally crossing my fingers.

  He hummed thoughtfully to himself, pulling out of the traffic to turn left on Euclid and then into a Green P parking lot. The lot was deserted and bleak without the overhead lamps.

  I looked over at him with a silent question. Mike had never been a big talker; naturally quiet and thoughtful, but his thick Russian accent had led to some schoolyard teasing, causing him to chat even less. I’d worked with him on a few projects over the five years of high school, back in the days of OAC, including dramatic productions—he was a bit of a theatre nerd, helping out behind the scenes on everything that the cranky old drama teacher would let him, even hand-sewing at one point—and we became, not exactly friends, but we nodded at each other in the halls of Etobicoke Collegiate. You know how high school is.

  He got out of the car, and I followed, still none the wiser as to why we were parked. “So, how have you been?” I asked, voice raised, while the Maytags and Straight Messina battled to a cheering crowd only a block away. “I haven’t seen you in years. Been good?”

  “Oh, yes, fine,” Mike agreed, popping the trunk. “Can you do me a favour?”

  “Sure?” He tossed a small plastic bag, knotted at the top, which I caught one-handed; it had the familiar lumps of empty Tim Horton’s cups. “Want me to throw this out?”

  “Am sorry, I live out of my car most days.” He smiled at me as he hustled an armload of long tools from the back seat—that’s what must have been poking up—and dumped them into the trunk.

  I wandered to the dumpsters on the edge of the parking lot. Tripping over an unseen pothole, my ankle turned on itself and I stumbled. Thankfully I didn’t fall, but my high heel developed an unnerving and unsecured wobble. “Oh, of course.” I dunked the bag of road-trip empties into the trash with vengeance.

  Mike, meanwhile, was using his foot to push something down in the trunk when I came back. His face was illuminated by sickly yellow light from inside the car. He glanced up as I approached and then slammed the trunk down.

  “Need any help?”

  “No, no, it’s fine.” He hurried around the car to open the door for me. “Here.”

  “Thank you.” I was too tired to do anything but accept graciously and I made myself comfortable in the front seat. That being said, best mention Dylan as soon as I ‘naturally’ could, before Mike got any ideas. “Live out of your car, eh?”

  He agreed, starting the engine. “I help my uncles with their business, so I spend a lot of time running errands.”

  “Landscaping?” I asked, as we started on our journey, heading south on Euclid to avoid the crowd.

  He blinked, then nodded. “Yes, something like that. How did you know?”

  “The shovels.”

  “Oh, yes, the shovels.” He laughed. “Thing is, I am running an errand for my uncle now, but then I promise I will drive you home.”

  Shit. “I really don’t want this to be a bother. I mean⁠—”

  “It’s not bother,” he assured me. “Really. I drive all the time. Company is nice. You can tell me how you have been. It’s been many years.”

  I swallowed, feeling a red flag unfurl in my mind. It had been a day of shitty people doing shitty things, but I was being cynical. I mean, I’d seen nice people doing nice things too. Right? “Well, you know, I mean, yeah. I guess I don’t know where to start. I work in sales—”

  “Really? Me too,” he said, cheerfully.

  “I thought you worked in landscaping?”

  “That too. Sales in landscaping. But sometimes I help with other things. It’s a… family business, you know, so we all have to help where we can.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “Of course. I always figured you’d go into the theatre.”

  We were heading east now on Harbord, the small houses dark and quiet. We startled a cyclist with our high beams—that takes nerve, to cycle with no streetlights—but other than that, there was no other traffic. Mike laughed. “Theatre? Why would you think that?”

  “Well, you always helped out in drama class.”

  “Oh. Ha ha ha. Yes. But drama was fun and easy. That’s all. Wasn’t that why you were there?”

  “I guess so. I wanted to take an art class but drawing was full, so I figured I could paint backdrops or something.”

  “My parents wanted me to become a doctor, so I took all those math and biology classes, but they were so boring. I told them, here in Canada you must take drama classes too, everyone must, is standard, and they believed me.” He smiled, fondly remembering. We turned north on Spadina. He seemed just as quietly friendly as I remembered from school. A pleasant enough partner in class but too quiet, and we never hung out afterwards.

  The few times I’d tried asking him about himself he’d gotten a panicked expression on his face and clammed up tighter than usual. In my myopic teenager way I’d assumed it was because he was, like, totally weird or something, so I stopped asking. I’d spent most of my social time in high school learning how not to stand out and glide through the classes until I could make my escape.

  But Mike didn’t seem any different from what I remembered. Older, obviously, and he’d filled out in the way that weedy teenage boys often did later in life, but he still had his open face and a pleasant manner, and didn’t say any more than he needed to. He watched me out of the corner of his eye. “You want music on? Or air-conditioning?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  He nodded. “One small errand, then I take you home. You are married?”

  “No, but I live with my boyfriend, Dylan.” This was safer, firmer ground.

  “Dylan?” He pried apart the syllables. “He is Irish? Or Canadian.”

  “Well, his mother was originally from Ireland but she lived her most of her life here. His father is from Peru.”

  “Ah.”

  “How about you? Married?”

  “Yes, three years now. We have a baby girl. Here, in dashboard, there is a picture, you can see.”

  And so the car ride unfolded, and I relaxed.

  * * *

  It was a luxury to be travelling at a decent pace. The car was comfortable, there was sweet blessed air-conditioning, and Mike didn’t seem to notice that I was a sweaty mess. Or maybe he did but he didn’t say anything.

  I told him the Coles Notes version of my day, leaving out the weirdness at Honest Ed’s, and that strange businessman I kept running into. He laughed really hard at the students in the car and the fight with the aunt and uncle and it brought me back to our high school days where I could have him laughing over almost anything; he often belly-laughed over turns of phrase I found only mildly amusing, but it did make for fun study sessions.

  Hearing him talk about his own life made me happy for him; he’d shed his former awkwardness. Transplanted from his home as a teenager had taken some of the life out of him, but he now was settled and, as he called it, “blooming”. And that was great. But whenever I asked him about his family’s business he went a bit cagey.

  “It’s very boring work.”

  “All work is boring. That’s why it’s work. Otherwise it would be fun.”

  This caused him to laugh so hard he slapped the steering wheel, repeating it to himself under his breath and shaking his head. (Sometimes we change from when we were teenagers, and sometimes we don’t.) “I like that.”

  “It’s yours. Feel free to use it whenever.” I made an expansive hand gesture of freedom, very Vanna White, but doing so moved the fabric of my jacket around and gave me a snootful of my own stink. I winced. “Do you mind if we turn down the AC and open the windows instead?”

  He frowned, then nodded, already reaching for the dial. I wound my window a couple of inches, three or four turns of the handle. “That’s much better.” The air blowing in was sweet with perfume; the house we passed had a fence covered in orange flowers, all still open. “Those smell goo
d.”

  Mike glanced out my window, then nodded. “Ah. Honeysuckle.”

  “Is that what honeysuckle looks like? Huh.”

  He made a face, and the silence grew awkward. I didn’t know what to say, but finally, he said, quietly: “The smell. It is a problem.”

  I froze, appalled at myself. Should I apologize? Laugh it off? Pretend I wasn’t as rank as a mule?

  He frowned, embarrassed.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said in a tiny voice.

  “It’s not your fault!” He seemed surprised.

  “Well, no, I mean, yes, but it’s been a long day. I put on deodorant on this morning,” I added, shrinking down in my seat.

  His rather expansive eyebrows gathered together to confer and then he relaxed, bursting out into loud laughter. “You think you are the smell!” All I could do was stare. Of course I smelled, what else was he talking about?

  I took some experimental sniffs. I hadn’t noticed earlier because my own stink had bothered me more, being closer to my nose. But there was a different, unsettling smell in the car, an earthy aroma with a vaguely metallic undertone. I peeked behind us, but it was too dark to see beyond there being a dark bundle on the back seat against the beige velour. “What does your family do again?” I asked, conversationally. “I know you told me, but honestly I am so tired I can’t remember what my own name is.”

  Mike glanced back at me out of the corner of his eye. “You can smell it,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  I tried to shrug but my nose wrinkled instead, involuntarily.

  “We do all sorts of things,” he said, the lightness gone from his voice. He was turning into one of the suburbs off Bathurst. We’d come pretty far north; I hadn’t been paying too much attention, but I guessed we were just south of Wilson. “I do, how you say, the weird jobs.”

  “The weird… jobs.”

  “I forget what it is called in English. I usually speak Russian more now.”

  I thought for a moment. “Do you mean ‘odd jobs’?”

  He brightened. “Yes! I do the odd jobs. That is why I am running errand now, at night.”