Doing nothing and not making anything
The drive to Victoria was shorter and flatter than we’d become used to. The Sadies beat us to the ferry by a decent margin, but we ended up on the same boat across (with two hours of sitting parked on land before the boat left).
Crossing to Vancouver Island was beautiful. Jeff repeatedly used the world “lush” to describe what we were seeing: islands dense with grass and trees and the occasional house we could dream of one day owning. Wayne saw dolphins jump out of the water, and Jeff and I looked in time to see the splash they made.
We left the ferry and drove the final stretch to Victoria. I’d never seen greener, healthier-looking plants. Mountains seemed to hang from the sky, and we couldn’t decide if they were clouds or mountain tops or a trick our eyes were playing on us. The effect remained surreal long after we’d confirmed that we were indeed seeing mountains.
The Sadies made last-minute lane changes trying to lose us on the way to the club, but we managed. It was another Mexican restaurant, another night for me to pretend I enjoy nachos to avoid turning down free food.
For the first time on the tour I was forced to sell merch in an area without a view of the stage. I spent much of the night reading “How To Be Alone” and hoping someone would ask me what I was reading so I could feel clever.
(I couldn’t hear the bands very well from where I was setup, but Critter later told me I’d missed a lengthy diatribe from Cuff The Duke about the frailness of the person selling their t-shirts.)
We spent the night at a local musician’s house. Critter told us she wouldn’t mind since she was out of town and expected the Sadies, who had hotel rooms, to be spending the night there. Somehow I ended up the one to sleep in her bed; I felt very uncomfortable about the whole thing, but I decided it would make a good story if Carolyn Mark becomes famous.
I realized before falling asleep that I was as far from home as I would be on this trip.
We woke up very early to start our drive to Vancouver, leaving Critter snoring loudly on a bunk bed in the living room. (The drive to Vancouver is not very long, and if Cuff The Duke hadn’t been scheduled to record songs for CBC radio that morning, we would have followed the Sadies’ example and left much later in the day.)
Breakfast on the ferry offered few options. Jeff used much of his change buying massages from the massage chairs, and I did my best to enjoy my breakfast scone. On each of the ferry’s decks people seemed to be loudly talking to or screaming at each other. I gave up searching for a quiet area and reused my earplugs from the night before, but I could still hear the dull hum of voices and didn’t sleep.
At the CBC, I felt useless: My duties were limited to holding paperwork and feeding the van’s parking meter, and the person engineering the recording asked if I was a groupie. I tried to kill some time by going for a walk and checking my email, but I returned in time for an hour or two more of feeling talentless and having my expendability pointed out to me.
Then we loaded the van, drove five minutes to the club and unloaded again.
The Sadies had already arrived, and Sean met us with a warning: “If you leave anything in your van, it will be stolen. It doesn’t matter what it is or how little it is worth; in Vancouver, your van’s windows will be smashed and everything inside taken.” While Sean was telling us this, a man leaned off his balcony and told us we were being too loud. Still coming down from his speech on the dangers of leaving your van anything but empty on a Vancouver street, Sean gestured to the now-vacant balcony and suggested that yelling at bands while they unload equipment at 5:00 pm is something one does while coming down off heroin. After unloading, Jeff and I walked out the front door of the club in search of food, and a man immediately tried to sell us hash. So went my introduction to Vancouver.
The bar was still packed with people watching hockey when we returned with food. When Vancouver tied the game, the promoter started swearing: “The last thing I fucking need is overtime.” The game went to overtime, but Vancouver scored quickly, and the promoter was glowing as he made an announcement asking everyone not willing to pay cover to leave.
When Cuff The Duke played, it was their best set of the tour. It was our last night with the Sadies, and we didn’t have a place to sleep, but it was easy to ignore that for a few hours longer.
The Sadies played, and I knew it would be a long time before I heard them again. Everyone was slow to leave after the show ended. We said our goodbyes to the Sadies and tried to convince a Vancouver resident named Paul to let us stay at his house. One of the bartenders started yelling at me, telling me to hurry up and get out, but I wasn’t really the one calling the shots.
Paul agreed to let us stay at his house, and the bartender gave me a final yelling-at as I was getting my sleeping bag from the club’s basement.
The drive to Paul’s house took 40 minutes, and we had five seat belts for six people. I sat on a trunk in the back of the van thinking once again about my chances of survival in the event of a crash. It was very late when we arrived, and sleep came easily.
The room stank of feet when we woke up. While burning brakes, body odour and the stench of the van’s mildew colonies were all signature smells that will forever remind me of these three weeks, foot odour was fighting to secure its position as the tour’s headlining stink.
We were in Vancouver at the same time as Slam City Jam, a three-day skateboarding championship. The Paul we were staying with was very much into skateboarding — to Jeff’s delight, he had a half-pipe in his garage — and he took us to a skate park on Hastings where we spent the afternoon watching kids as young as nine show themselves to be far better skateboarders than I’ll ever be.
After a few hours at the skate park, we were due to pick up the equipment from Saturday night’s bar and move it down the street to Sunday night’s bar. We entered through the back door and had loaded almost everything into the van before someone asked us who we were and what we were doing. Our belongings had been in good hands.
When we arrived at the club, a homeless man insisted on opening the door for us as we carried equipment to the second floor. We eventually gave him some change, and he offered to guard the van, saying he’d be at his post in front of the door all night. (He seemed very excited with the responsibility of guarding the van, and he was very serious about it: Not recognizing me when I returned to get my camera, he ran across the street to attack me, seeing who I was just in time to call off his offensive.)
The show that night did not go well. The venue was a dinner club, and Cuff The Duke was opening for a band it was unlikely to share fans with.
I still had a good time, but only because of the people who stopped by: Pat Adams, a friend from high school, dropped by for the second night in a row and was able to stay for the show this time. He left to run an errand for Jeff, so I wasn’t able to talk to him for as long as I’d’ve liked. When we said goodbye, I was optimistic, saying I’d see him again soon, pretending I knew this to be the case.
Mimi was at the show, too. She goes to Ryerson, and Nathan introduced us last fall. I’ve only spoken to her at shows, and only on days when I’ve had reason to be especially erratic, so I suspect she has a strange impression of me.
Aside from that, we only sold one CD, and Wayne’s harmonica broke during the last song, so he destroyed it on the floor of the club. The harmonica’s violent end almost made up for everything else.
We loaded the van while the headlining band played their encore. Carrying a bass drum through a crowd is challenging work, and I savoured each glare I received. Paul met us at the show and agreed to let us stay with him again, so we left for his house. Paul (from Cuff The Duke) stayed in the back of the van this time, allowing me to have a seatbelt and less cause for panic.
We left our shoes in the garage to minimize the foot odour we’d wake up to. Knowing we would be waking up at 7:30 am the next day, my body didn’t let me sleep, but the hours passed quickly.
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antigreg : other content : the albatross did follow...
1. “The albatross did follow...”
2. Jeff's tour journal
3. Twenty-two pictures with captions
4. Tour schedule