Joaquin suggested I move to the empty table at the back of the class, and that was where Dr. Bob found me when he arrived. When he asked to pair up with me for an assignment, I should have warned him to run—but I didn’t know he had dreams of doing cutting-edge, real-world research.
When Bob showed me the screaming candle he’d doodled in his notebook I suggested we hand in one of our assignments in a series of cartoon panels, like a comic book. It was on cell multiplication. Don’t ask me why we were doing cell multiplication in chem class. Bob drew all the different phases of cell development. We had all the right phases, but we added a bonus answer. At my urging, Bob drew one of the cells grinning demonically and we labelled that last one, “Happy Phase.”
Thanks to Bob I passed the class. Barely.
Thanks to me, my new friend the science whiz passed the class, too—with a C+. But Bob liked my sense of humour and I liked that he’d had a life outside of school. He’d travelled. He’d lived in America and Quebec. He even spoke French. By the time I realized he was a jock (a sprinter and basketball player) and he discovered I was a geek (acting in school plays and running the school paper), it was too late, we were already friends, even though I was a grade below him and two years younger.
That summer after grade ten (grade eleven for Bob) we went backpacking across Canada together. I was supposed to be going with a dozen friends from my grade. We’d been planning the trip for months. It was a few weeks before the end of the school year and time to book the Via Rail passes when an invisible blizzard hit, giving everyone else cold feet. The idea was to travel across the country for a month on less than a thousand dollars each, and none of my friends liked my suggestion that we stay in youth hostels. They were scared of them, or their parents wouldn’t allow them to go, or they were scared of them so they claimed their parents wouldn’t allow them to go. Brett, the last of my would-be travelling companions, a train buff with a basement filled with models and a track he’d been building since he was six, told me he’d go with me. “But I won’t get off the train.” Brett wanted to take a real-life train ride, but he just wanted to go all the way from Vancouver to Halifax and back.
I was so upset I left the history classroom where my wouldn’t-be travelling companions were eating lunch and retreated to the cafeteria to drown my sorrows in a burnt egg roll with plum sauce. Dr. Bob saw me. “What’s wrong?”
I was too upset to explain, so I snapped at him instead. “You wanna go across Canada with me?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Sure,” he said. That night I went to his house for the first time and he played Blood on the Tracks. I’d heard of Bob Dylan, but as far as I was aware I’d never heard him before. I listened to seventies rock radio—which was cool at the time since, hey, it was the seventies, and the alternative was disco dudes in pants so tight they made ’em sing like a castrati. This would be my way of saying ... not a Bee Gees fan. When I discovered the worst singing voice I’d ever heard belonged to THE legend of the sixties all I could think of was, “they really were stoned all the time, weren’t they.” I told Bob I thought Dylan’s voice sounded like gravel being sucked up by a vacuum. He looked at me like he was channelling Mr. Joaquin. But he still agreed to go across Canada with me.
Then he turned me onto Frank Zappa and Arlo Guthrie.
A month later we took trains, ferries and buses, and hitchhiked through every province but New Brunswick. We stepped onto the station platform at Moncton, thought it was too ugly, and got back on the train. We stayed in youth hostels every night—and every night when I handed over my ID the person running the hostel phoned the RCMP to make sure I wasn’t a runaway, or a kidnap victim. I was still sixteen. Bob was eighteen.
We saw lobster fishermen in Newfoundland, the Anne of Green Gables House, the Anne of Green Gables musical, the wall around Quebec City, Parliament Hill, the CN Tower, Maple Leaf Gardens, the Sudbury Big Nickel, Saskatchewan’s alleged mountain and—special bonus sightseeing highlight—a naked woman who stepped over me one night when she thought I was asleep in the Charlottetown Youth Hostel.
So Dr. Bob was definitely open to my crazy ideas. But when he heard about The Black Metal Fantasy he didn’t get it. “You’re already doing school plays.”
“But this is real.”
Bob wasn’t sold. Then he saw the show at the JCC. And he saw Lisa in the harem outfit. And cousin Jane. Bob was in university. He was almost the same age as Jane. “Maybe I can help.”
“Sure,” I said. “That would be great.” I knew we’d need help. I just didn’t know what kind, or how much. When Bob came to my house a few nights after the showcase I was in my room trying to figure out our story. I had a manual typewriter and all the vital posters on my bedroom wall: Spider-Man, Batman, the wickedly cool Bakshi Lord of the Rings fellowship with Gandalf front and centre, and an illustrated Star Wars, with Luke and Leia striking heroic poses, that I’d bought from the Comic Shop for a then-astronomical sum of seven dollars. My record player was playing the only album I ever played when I worked: Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf. Awesome lyrics by Jim Steinman. It was an album I first heard on my cross-country trip with Dr. Bob when we were in a car with two friendly nursing students from Regina, one of whom might have been a lot friendlier to me if I’d been clever enough to lie about my age.
Bob was not amused to see me working. “We’re gonna miss the movie.”
“Sorry, just a few more pages.”
Bob collapsed on my couch.
A few years earlier when my mom was redecorating I saw a desk I loved—a modern reproduction of a classic nineteenth-century rolltop. It was a writer’s desk and I wanted it desperately. My mom said I couldn’t have it, because it was too big for my room. “If you get a desk that big you won’t have any space for a bed.”
The answer was obvious. “So I won’t have a bed.”
I gave my bed to my brother David, and mom bought me a cheap, brown fold-out couch. I thought it should be brown because the desk was brown and besides, brown wouldn’t show dirt. Some nights I’d pull the couch bed open to sleep, but most nights I’d sleep on the couch cushions. I was a writer and had a writer’s desk—who needed a bed? “I don’t get why you’re doing this,” said Bob. “It’s your last summer before university.”
I didn’t look up, just kept hitting the keys. “I’m getting to write a real play.”
“Does Sarah like magic?” Bob said the name singsong style. I hadn’t told him. I knew I hadn’t told him. How did he know?
He smiled at me like the lost cause I was. “Everything you do is about Sarah.”
I stared at my typewriter more intently—like I was thinking about something particularly deep. “Not everything.”
“So she’ll come to the show and fall for Randy. Or Kyle.”
He was wrong. He had to be wrong. “I could do something really great here.”
“Like see Alien,” he reminded me. “It’s supposed to be really scary.”
“Yeah, a scary science-fiction movie. Right.”
“You know what’ll be scary?”
I turned away from the typewriter. If this was another joke about Sarah I was going to hit him.
“Rafting.”
Rafting?
