It's Been a Long Time (Since I Rock & Rolled)

One day my friend Donny called me with the idea that we should try to revive our failed music careers. I hadn't played the guitar in about five years and so I was pretty lukewarm on the idea.

Years earlier when I had finally moved out of my parent's house at the tender age of twenty, me and my friends were a pretty hopeless bunch of losers. I had dropped out of University and had no job experience beyond busing tables at a restaurant. About a day or two after moving out I felt an awful sensation where I was weak and my stomach hurt. It took about anther half a day for me to realize that it was hunger.

We were living in a basement suite in a house down by the railroad tracks in a suburb adjacent to the one where I had grown up. It was kind of a seedy neighbourhood and it was only a few months after we moved in that we were robbed and all my guitars and equipment got stolen. I never did play again after that until I got that call from Donny.

I finally agreed to a practice and went out and bought an old metal axe and an amp from a thrift shop. I went home to play and I was pretty terrible. I couldn't even hold some of the notes down cleanly. I persevered though and by the time I went over to Donny's I had recaptured a little of my old form.

Our practice space was the attic in Donny's three level apartment. His drums were set up and there was an extra amplifier for me so I didn't have to schlep mine over there. Our third band-mate was Ben, a good looking young lad from a rich family on the West side. He had hair that he had grown almost to his waist. Ben played base and keyboards, I played guitar and Donny was our drummer. Ben was a pretty decent musician and due to his influence we had put a few instrumental numbers together within a few weeks. We still didn't have a singer or any lyrics though.

Donny had a lot of connections in the Vancouver scene and before we knew it we were playing warehouse gigs and house parties. We also made what is perhaps the worst demo tape ever recorded. The backing music wasn't too bad but Donny's imitation of a punk rock singer was soooo awful. To this day I'm still kind of embarrassed that anyone heard that thing. Then, before we even had a singer we were booked to play at this huge club called Graceland for a comic book benefit that was going on there. To get ready for the show we had a couple of rushed practice sessions with this guy from Victoria who could sing pretty well, but he was just making the words up as he went along.

When the day of our big show arrived I was terrified. How could this go well? At least I had a good outfit. I was going to wear a black one piece woman's bathing suit on-stage with my hair slicked back like I was going to Sunday school. We were the opening band and so when the time came for our sound check we were low man on the totem pole. The sound guy seemed impatient and pissed off every time we asked him to change anything. I couldn't hear myself very well in my monitor and I asked him to turn it up but he just kept turning up the PA that was miked to my amp. By the time our sound check was done things were hopelessly fucked up. My guitar was so loud it drowned everything else out and when we started playing I couldn't hear anything any more except my guitar.

We limped through our set. It was so frustrating not being able to hear anyone that I became incredibly agitated. Thankfully we were so loud that people couldn't really tell what the fuck we were playing and everyone seemed to enjoy the show immensely, especially my bathing suit and they were all clapping us on the back going "good show!" afterwards.

Ben came up behind me. "Hey could you even here what I was playing?" I was talking to someone and didn't quite hear him. He hit me lightly on the back of the head with a rolled up tube of papers. I had been drinking since noon to get my nerve up for the show and I was in a really terrible mood because of how things had gone. Sometimes when I was really drunk back then, I would do terrible things and poor Ben was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I turned around and got him in a headlock. "There they go!" yelled the doorman enthusiastically (the same guy would later take off with all the door money that was supposed to go to the comic book). I thew Ben down on the ground and kicked him in the stomach, causing him to writhe in pain on the floor. I went outside and helped Donny load up the van.

"Where's Ben?"

I shrugged my shoulders sullenly.

We drove back to Donnny's place and he was glaring at me. When we got there he said "Could you even hear what I was playing!?" We argued for half an hour until I had had enough.

"Fuck this and fuck you Donny."

"What? Are you quitting?"

"Yes I'm quitting."

"Todd what are you going to do without this band? You have nothing going for you!"

"I'm going back to school in the summer."

"School!!?" he sounded like I had kicked him in the balls. "Look you don't have a job, you don't even have a girlfriend!"

"I'm temping and... Lauren."

"She's not really your girlfriend and besides Lauren's ugly."

"What do you mean she's ugly!?"

"She's sexy but, she's not very good looking."

"You just say that again you smug little fuck-head."

"What?"

"Fuck you."

I'm a pretty crappy fighter but Donny was even worse. By the time I backed off I was worried that I had killed him. He was lying on the floor his face a mass of blood and gore. That was the end of our band.

Margaret

There was a certain point in time where I was in the habit of going to parties in full drag, except for a wig sometimes. I make a pretty homely woman so I don't know what the attraction was. One evening, so attired, I went to a party at my friend Bill's place. He and some other friends were renting this big suburban house that everyone called the Brady House because it looked like the house from "The Brady Bunch". There was a real mix of people at the party including a bunch of these rocker dudes from Surrey who weren't quite sure if they should beat me up or not for wearing women's clothes.

About half way into things I met this really neat girl named Margaret. She was pretty but that wasn't really the thing about her. She seemed to have the force or something. I was fascinated by her. At one point I managed to drag her into the bathroom and we were necking in there and I was kind of pawing at her. Finally people who wanted to use the can broke in and we were interrupted. I lost track of her and wandered around. My lipstick was smeared all over my face which the rockers seemed to like. When I finally found Margaret she was talking intimately with Ron. Ron was far and away the best looking of all our friends and more or less had a monopoly on all the women. I had had enough of the party and shared a cab with Brian the punk rocker and his girlfriend. I said something obnoxious to him and he told me to fuck off in so many words.

The next time I saw Margaret was at a party at some other friends who lived in a house on a hill in Burnaby that had a great view overlooking East Van. I was feeling playful and tried to jump on the back of our friend Clara from a chair. Clara was a very large black girl. She had some kind of epileptic disorder that had the side effect of making her muscles very hard. Plus she was five eleven and easily three hundred pounds. When I landed on her back it was as though I had hit a brick wall. The air was forced out of my lungs and I fell straight downwards hitting my ankle painfully on a coffee table. Undaunted I jumped up. "I want to manage you Clara."

"What?"

"There's this new thing starting down in Nevada where people have these bare fisted brawls in an octagonal ring. I think you could mop up the floor down there."

"Fuck off Todd, please."

"Okay whatever."

Margaret and I started chatting out on the porch. There was a definite attraction and we moved down to the basement and sat on an old futon cushion. I can't remember if we made out or just talked. At any rate we agreed to have a date. I called her a week or two later and went over to her house with a case of beer. She was living in South Van with Aiko and Erin who I both knew and Aiko's girlfriend Sarah. We went to Margaret's bedroom which she had decorated to have this neat sixties look. She was a huge music fan and had a million records. I felt a little uncool due to my fairly limited knowledge of the latest alternative music.

We started talking and laughing and really hitting it off. We thought about going out but then decided against it. The sex seemed to sweep us up like a wave. My God that girl could fuck, it was actually like having a religious experience. I was on a high for days afterwards. She had grown her fingernails long recently and wasn't quite used to them yet. When I got home later my back was torn to shreds. I felt proud of my wounds as I felt we had hit some kind of sexual high water mark.

Margaret ended up dumping my ass a few months later. I don't know if she just got sick of me mooning around or it was something to do with my on-again-off again relationship with Lauren. Maybe a bit of both. I was devastated and Margaret would haunt my dreams for many months. She called me up a couple weeks later and asked me what I was doing. I guess it might have been a booty call but I was in no shape to go back in for more. We chatted for a while and then hung up the phone.