to pick a card from one of the half-dozen decks he always seemed to have in one of his pockets.
But it was the big illusions that really appealed to Randy—the stuff Henning did on TV. Randy didn’t want to make coins and cards disappear, he wanted to vanish an elephant. Forget levitating scarves, he wanted to make women fly across the stage—preferably half-naked women. During his spare time—which was whenever he showed up to class—Randy designed illusions in his notebook. Instead of the details of who attacked whom, when and why during which World War, he’d doodle elaborate creations that would let him fly across the stage—if he could only find a few thousand dollars to build them. It was during one of those classes, when everyone else was learning about the Treaty of Versailles, that Randy first envisioned The Black Metal Fantasy.
The coolest comic in the world was Heavy Metal. It was drawn by crazy French artists who loved battle scenes where people got maimed, bled and died for women who barely wore enough chain mail to cover their seins. If Randy could live in a comic book, it would be Heavy Metal. So that’s where the Metal came from.
“And what could be cooler than black?” he said, when he first shared his vision with Lisa. And who could argue with that?
Fantasy—with a capital F—that’s what Randy was all about. He was going to bring a Heavy Metal comic to life and put it onstage, complete with a kick-ass rock soundtrack. That was The Black Metal Fantasy.
It would have magic, it would have music, it would be a thousand times hipper than Henning and best of all, it would have a climactic love scene where he would make out with Lisa Jorgensen.
After he graduated, Randy started performing at clubs. He also did benefits, and visited hospitals and old folks’ homes to cheer up the inmates. He began to develop the show, building the tricks with his friend Norman. While they were making the guillotine, they realized the show could be huge. That’s when Norman told Randy about his cousin Jane. “Jane works for Rainbow,” Norman told him. Rainbow. No explanation was required. Rainbow had promoted every concert Randy had ever camped in line overnight to buy tickets for. Rainbow presented Fleetwood Mac.
“She’s a promoter,” said Norman. “She says magic’s huge right now. Everyone’s looking for the next Henning. I told her it was you.”
Randy knew how to make the show huge. He needed Kyle.
Kyle Norris was an actore.
No, that’s not a typo—you absolutely need the “e” at the end to get the full effect. He was a serious actore. He took classes outside of school. His teacher probably preferred to be called a “coach.” He wanted to be a star. But you couldn’t be a star when the only TV series shooting in the city was about chasing lost logs. If you were serious, you had to move to LA.
This was years before every kid in every high school everywhere had headshots and resumés and a self-proclaimed agent promising to score them a shot at appearing on whatever TV series or movie-of-the-week was filming in their town that month.
Kyle looked like the kind of kid I usually walked across the street to avoid. He dressed in the uniform Brando defined as trouble—and timeless cool—back in the fifties: jeans, a tight white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. But Kyle had a brain. He tried not to use it in public—that would have destroyed his image—but he read more sophisticated books on his own time than any of the assigned reading he ignored. And his big brother had turned him on to blues and jazz and types of rock that most teenagers would barely recognize as music.
He also had a girlfriend he’d been with forever—or at least forever in high school years. Kyle was with Wendy, the hottest girl in grade eleven. So maybe he wasn’t trying to have sex with anybody besides Wendy, but he always seemed determined to make sure every girl he met was at least considering the option.
Kyle was supposed to be my secret weapon for my grade twelve writing and directing class. He was going to guarantee me an A.
I knew Kyle’s secret. I knew he was in love with theatre because I read the newspapers and I’d seen his name in the review of an angsty musical drama about tough New York kids showing their sensitive side—a sort of high school Chorus Line. Kyle got rave reviews, but he didn’t tell anybody at school about the show until it was over, to make sure nobody he knew saw it. Kyle got rave reviews because he cried—and there was no way he was going to let anyone from our high school see him cry. If they did, he’d have to kill them.
We weren’t friends, since hanging out with me publicly would have been social suicide for him—but we’d gotten to know each other in grade eight when I’d traded essays for his best friend Danny’s early attempts at shop projects like birdhouses and coat hangers. It was a brilliant deal for both of us. Danny passed English and I avoided the humiliation of failing all my mandatory tech classes.
When I told Kyle I was writing a play with a part for him, he said if he liked the script he’d do it. I acted, too, but I only acted in school plays—and I always had fun—but it was the writing that appealed to me. Since I went to a school with a “progressive” English department, which meant we had a lot of American draft dodgers teaching whatever they thought was cool, there was a grade twelve course in “playwriting and directing.”
Mike Denos, a balding thirty-something draft dodger with a Bay Area California drawl, taught the course like it was a university work-study program. He’d give us our assignments then send us away. Other than making sure we checked in for attendance, all he wanted from us were three original scripts before the end of the year. We also had to direct three scenes and a one-act play. If I could have skipped everything in school and graduated with honours, I’d still have shown up for that class. I was the first and only kid in the history of our high school, possibly any high school ever, who took extra English classes as my “fun” electives.
I didn’t want to direct. I just figured if you wrote your own plays you had to. Directors were for Shakespeare and Shaw and Tennessee Williams—or at least for writers who were over seventeen.
Mr. Denos picked one of my scripts to compete in the provincial high school drama showcase. The play was called Mistaken Identity. A few years later, when I was accepted into the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia, I discovered that every student writer in history had written at least one story, play or poem entitled Mistaken Identity.
My play was about two perfect women who were both smitten with an arrogant, self-obsessed guy with no obviously redeeming features. I’ve since learned that every straight male playwright has written this script at some point in their lives—often, tragically, in their forties—and I think only Woody Allen has ever made the story work. The only thing I’m proud of about mine is that I got it out of my system at seventeen.
The lead character was supposed to be played by Kyle, who was the type of guy two women would fight over, even without a particularly good explanation. I imaginatively named the lead character “Kyle.” But after I finished the play, after Kyle said, “Not bad, I’ll do it,” he changed his mind. We were about to start rehearsals when Kyle told me he’d been cast in a play outside of school, so he wouldn’t have time for mine.
After I lost my lead, Mr. Denos said I could cast any guy in my class, which meant I could choose from three potential leading men: Jackson, a 250-pound rugby monster who took the course in the hopes of an easy pass; Graham, a dope dealer who’d spent the last two semesters in and out of a detention centre and took the class in the hopes of an easy pass; and me. A decade later, I might have made the daring choice to cast a woman and turn it into a hot lesbian triangle. But this was 1980—cable TV didn’t exist, and the Internet was barely a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, so I’d never heard of lesbians, hot or
