My first wedding was on the grade five playground. Lance was being dragged toward me. I knew we’d be friends. He had on an orange shirt, a purple tie, and Beatle boots. A Fuddle Duddle sticker on his lunchbox. They wanted to “marry” us. I was drinking a warm can of Sun-Rype apple-lime that cut my lip when they pushed our faces together and chanted, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” When the time came, Lance ran toward me wearing a Kleenex veil and holding a fistful of stinkweed.
That was the year all the oil companies were moving to Calgary. The Texans were angry; Edmonton was too cold for them. They snapped under the brittle reality of forty below every day for forty days. If you lived through it you could send away for a cartoon certificate from the Edmonton Journal. It had your name printed on it and a shivering guy with “I survived” written underneath him, a thermometer sticking out of his mouth, icicles hanging from his ski jump nose. Exxon was the first to escape. They transferred everyone south to Calgary and soon the other companies followed suit.
It took a while to sink in that Dad wasn’t coming up from Calgary on weekends anymore. One night Mom called us into the master bedroom. “Your Dad got transferred,” she said, pulling off her white work shoes. “He decided he didn’t want to take us. Prop your pillows up here and we’ll watch the rest of Carol Burnett.”
Products I’d never seen suddenly figured in our cupboards. Hamburger Helper, powdered milk and Manwich. Every Saturday night, there was a man checking his watch in the good chair.
Lance’s situation turned out to be kind of the same. When his Dad moved to Calgary he got himself a new wife, a DeLorean, and a gold Cadillac with suicide doors. In grade nine I heard Lance was living with them in a big house on Lake Bonaventure. Never mind his own room, he practically had his own wing. And a baby sister.
Edmonton is Petrograd, town of Peters, blue-eyed sheiks. Lougheed and Pocklington. The mass exodus was a suffering blow. Further north ran the meridians where the highways turned to dirt and our fathers had lined up blasting caps, in their early careers, sending depth charges into the earth. Black and white photos of smiling men and trucks in the mud. Heavy equipment. Schlumberger, Haliburton. The endless rig pig search for Mesozoic residue.
Our fathers: fossils.
I was in the library, skipping math, reading Fear of Flying. I’d got to the part where Isadora is traveling across Europe with her lover, Adrian Goodlove. Isadora was blowing him. You’d think that Isadora would have given some actual tips, but she made it sound horrific. She talked about his “curled pink penis that tasted faintly of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth.” Isadora White Wing —such a great name. You have to rename yourself, if you want to be legendary like Cherry Vanilla or Sable Starr. I decided I’d only answer to Crow Child.
Some skids at the next table were talking about Purple City. A girl in a felt-penned jean jacket was saying “Ooh, Purple City, its sooo trippyyyy….” Yeah. Trippy, man. If you smother your face in the orange rectangular floodlights illuminating the Legislature, then look away, the whole world turns violet—the grass, the moon, the lights from the apartment buildings. They all love the after-image that hits your retina like the burn of an A-bomb. They speak of how that burn will stay with you and live on. It’s a hypnogogic mind fuck among the underachievers.
I heard a noise behind me and felt someone touch the back of my head. I whipped around and Lance was standing there. “I’m back in Edmonton. Hellooo Chucksville,” he said. He had a haircut like Diamond Dogs. He fluffed my hair up into a French twist and said “I see you as sort of… Italian princess.” It was an old joke of ours. We smoked a joint and went over to his mom’s house and he made me a fluffernutter sandwich.
“My dad’s house is so huge,” Lance said between bites. He was feeding bits of crust to his dog, Lady. There were canvasses leaning up against the wall and pottery on every level surface. “She’s been taking a class,” he said. “Anyway, there’s an intercom system and an indoor pool. They have a built-in sound system in the conversation pit. Did you know he bought Yukon Jack?”
“Who’s Yukon Jack?”
“This gross booze.”
It got around school that Lance and I were going out, and I guess we were, but we never really did anything. He kissed me once on the school bus, but other than that we just hung out at his mom’s. We called her “Mrs. Mira”. She owned an art gallery near their house, mostly a framing place but there were a few of her paintings, kind of vulvular cow skull stuff, and rocks with mushrooms painted on them that her hippie boyfriend made. I liked her. She wore purple Muu-muus and called me Sweetie.
We were lying on Lance’s bed, freaking out to “Moonage Daydream” on his stereo. Lance said, “There’s this place I go to sometimes. It’s downtown. You should come with me, it’s really fun… it’s kind of like, you know, um, sort of avant garde.”
When Lance took me to Flashbacks I thought it would be like Rodney’s English Disco on the Sunset Strip. Glitter rock, kind of Max’s Kansas City. A place that Iggy Pop would stumble into ‘luded, in fabulous disarray. The Mylar outline of Marilyn on the wall was promising, but most of the guys had moustaches and plaid shirts. They looked like Mr. Downes, our math teacher. It wasn’t what I expected at all.
Locker Room and Talent Cobras
When the phone rang in the middle of the night it was Lance calling from Hawaii. “Oh my god I’m freaking out I’m in this huge house on the beach and I’m totally on acid and guess what else!”
Turns out he was getting laid by Gomer Pyle.
“The Gomer Pyle?” my mother slurred. She was on the extension.
I went back to my book. Isadora White Wing was still looking for the Zipless Fuck. Too bad she wasn’t a blonde surfer boy in Lahaina or the gay discos of Edmonto