right frame of mind where we can make it all work. I’ve done this before. Just trust me.”
This emphatic reference to their collective brilliance turned the temperature of the whining down considerably. Flattery is like heroin: people use it because it works.
“Yeah, well, we’ll fucking see.”
“Cam?”
“What is it, big man?”
“Athena’s okay with us going in and using her name for cover to get into the festival, right?”
That was a fair question. You didn’t want to make Athena mad. She might have been about five feet tall, but when I went up on the trip North to sign her, her Nova Scotia transplant ex-boyfriend told me he’d seen her single-handedly take down a caribou, dress it, and carry it back to camp seven miles on her back. “She’s not vegetarian, but she won’t eat what she calls ‘southern shit-meat.’ Our freezer used to be full of things Theen had killed.” He’d confided in me, nostalgically.
“Athena is so far up into the Big Time now, she doesn’t give a flying fuck what we do. But, yes she knows what we’re doing, and she’s totally okay with it. She loves you guys. And she knows she wouldn’t have got where she is today without me. Without us.”
That seemed to do it.
“I’m just excited to get to play such a big folk festival. And Jimmy Kinnock is kind of my hero since I was a kid, and —”
“Yeah, well don’t get so excited that you crash us off the side of a mountain.”
The girl had a point there. An average of one band per year dies driving Canada’s Highway 1 over the Rocky Mountains, through Rogers Pass. You’re like to get smoked by a logging truck skidding over the yellow line, or if you slip and go off the side there, you better pack a lunch because you’ll get hungry on the fall down.
APOLOGY FOR DIGRESSION
DAMN, I WAS SCRIBBLING AWAY HERE, and I was having trouble seeing what I was writing. I started to worry if maybe I was going blind, but then I looked up round me in this dilapidated kitchen and realized that the sun was going down. My ass and back hurt from being bent over scrawling, and this poor old kitchen table is full of defaced yellow legal paper. Also, I was dimly aware of myself picking with my fingernails at the flaking baby-blue paint on the table top, but I now see that someone seems to have stripped the entire table to bare pine, and there’s paint flakes everywhere. Don’t see anybody else here so I guess that was me. I remember promising to only write a dozen pages or so, just the bare bones of the story of what happened at the Calgary Folk Festival, and here I am at twenty or more and I haven’t even got us to the festival. Sorry about that, reader, but what can you do? There’s stuff people need to know, in order to understand what an extraordinary figure I am, and what it is I do for people. Sometimes a digression or two is necessary, and I’m not sorry. Genius works in mysterious ways. If I had more time, I’d try to winnow the thing down, but I think it’s a better idea to just take a short break, get some candles lit, eat a tomato, do some more speed, take a shot of whiskey, and get back down to business. If a job’s worth doing, I always say, it’s worth doing half-assed, so long as it gets done.
ARRIVAL: COWTOWN
RIGHT. I’M BACK AT ’ER. Got my writing hat on. Let’s cut straight to Calgary.
Nobody has ever called Calgary a pretty city. “The big city with the small town feel” is the slogan that boosters like to cite, and for once, the P.R. guys aren’t lying. Calgary is big, and it’s getting bigger all the time. The people who run Calgary would give Jane Jacobs an aneurysm, if they ever met her, but they don’t run in the same circles. Calgary believes in ’50s-style suburban-development sprawl. If you see it from the air at night, its lights and grid make it look exactly like a massive Pac-Man game laid out flat on the dark screen of the prairie, and the high price of oil is making it ever-expanding, like a flood, but a flood of garbage. When we passed the city-limit marker, I noticed the green-and-white sign was mounted on a John Deere lawnmower, trundling west along the shoulder of the highway at five miles per hour. There’s eight of these lawnmowers, constantly moving outward from Calgary at every point of the compass.
Small-town feel? Absolutely. If you think of small towns as places full of small-minded people who mistrust racial minorities and single mothers, where the downtown turns into a ghost town at 5 p.m., then yesiree, Calgary’s got it, by gum. Only lucky thing about Calgary is that the lefty weirdo people can’t be laid-back and pathetically over-confident, like in Vancouver. Calgary oddballs have to huddle together against the storm of SUV materialism and shitty New Country music.
So as we pulled into the Westin Hotel in Renty the rental minivan, I naturally took the attitude of a regiment of cavalry, coming to relieve a besieged holdout. Triumphant, swaggering, cheerful, task-oriented. I drank a couple Red Bulls as Jenny swore us through the midday downtown traffic. I had to have the cheerful nonchalance of a busy man with nothing to hide and nothing on his mind except Achievement.
I told Jenny to guard the gear and Manny, and dragged the Fat Boy along with me to keep him from wandering off. Mykola is always wandering off, either daydreaming a song and forgetting where he is, or just chasing pussy, which he is surprisingly good at. Just off the lobby was a meeting room with a Jiffy Marker sign that said “Artist Registration, Liaison and Transportation.” I marched in.
A friendly looking late-middle-aged chubby lesbian in a festival sweatshirt and bifocals was at the folding table, where the piles of artist envelopes sat.
“Well hello there, sir!”
“Well hello there yoursleff, ma’am. I’m here to register Athena Amarok.”
She smiled, “Okey dokey …” and started ticking her fingers over the envelopes, checking names through the bottom of the bifocals.
“And you are?”
“Cam Ouiniette. Manager.”
“So I’ll tick her off then.”
She handed me the envelope. I checked that it had passes, drink tickets, and meal vouchers for everybody in the band.
“Do you know if Jimmy Kinnock’s manager, Richard Wren, is around nearby? Has he collected his package recently?”
“Sorry, no. They haven’t checked in yet. I’m really looking forward to his set tomorrow, though. I’d crawl over broken glass for that man.”
“Me, too. Listen, I was wondering, Athena’s playing Sunday night, so she’s sure to be exhausted after her show. Could we take care of the money at this point, so we don’t have to futz around with it when everybody’s tired and everything?”
“The money?” She sounded surprised that there was money somehow involved in this wonderful party she was helping to throw. Volunteers.
“Yes, can we grab the cheque here?”
“Oh, well, I believe it’s Sheryl who takes care of the money.”
Pause.
“Is she around?”
“Umm … no, she doesn’t seem to be about.”
“Can you get her
