in bags with aluminum on the inside. They’re clearly the worst kind of battery hen, beak clipped off, whole-life-in-a-ten-inch-cage kind of birds, pumped full of God knows what kind of modern chemistry and hormones. I swear my left tit got bigger eating all that chicken. But it fed you. If you got some skin with the flesh, it tasted like something. Salt and pepper and grease, but it filled you up and gave you something do with your hands and mouth for ten minutes. And you wiped the grease from your hands on the inside of the roll and spread some free butter from the little pats at the deli counter on them.
We usually got at least a pizza or something from wherever we were playing, and most of the band was flying on speed or cocaine if we could get somebody to give us some, so that also saved on the food money because a lot of times people weren’t hungry.
I think we were in Thunder Bay, and we’d just passed through what Rosalyn Knight calls the “great foodless region” of the Canadian Prairies. We’d had a lot of chicken by then. I admit that.
I was at the wheel and we pulled into the big parking lot of a Safeway on the outskirts of the city. We hadn’t wanted to stay upstairs in the Royal Albert Hotel because it was so gross and Rosalyn had told us she’d found a dead body in the hallway there, so we’d left Winnipeg right after the show the night before, and it was probably getting toward noon and nobody’d eaten since a dinner of something really nasty at the Albert.
I put the Plush Monster in park and sighed, and began my short little song and dance of reaching into my pocket and shrugging and going, “Welp, I guess unless anybody has a better idea, I better go in and get the Universal Chicken,” which is what we called it. Kind of like the “Universal Soldier” of the Buffy Sainte-Marie song.
That’s when DD snapped. She grabbed the twenty out of my hand with a flick and a “gimme that,” and climbed down onto the asphalt. She said, “I’m so fucking sick of eating fucking chicken,” and stomped off toward the store.
We just lounged around waiting for her. I mean, I didn’t want the job of feeding the fucking band. Just because I was a mother didn’t mean I felt fucking nurturing toward everybody in the world, and I sure-as-shit wasn’t feeling very nurturing toward the rest of the band after being jammed into a Ford Econoline with them for three weeks.
About five minutes later, DD comes out running. Under one arm, she’s got a baguette and the biggest fucking wheel of cheese I’ve ever seen in my life. And she’s booking it.
She jumps into the van, drops the cheese wheel once, leaps down to grab it, climbs back into the passenger chair, and yells, “Drive! Drive!” Meanwhile the biggest fuckin’ butch-lookin’ woman comes stalking out of the automatic doors of the Safeway. Not fat like roly-poly fat but fuckin’ built like a fuckin’ Scandinavian truck. She looked like if the giant fat lady from the opera did five years in maximum security and did a lot of weight training and took off her giant horned helmet and got a brush cut and put on a security-guard uniform.
And she was not in a hurry. She was determinedly heading right for us like an unstoppable force of the universe.
And DD yelled, “Drive! Drive! Fuckin’ drive!” at me.
But it just wouldn’t catch.
At this point we hadn’t had the van for that long. We’d probably only put a couple thousand K on it so I think at that point it was normally starting. Later I did learn how to start a Ford Econoline by rolling it, but at this point it would normally have started. Still it was about a forty-two-year-old vehicle, so it didn’t like to be rushed, if you know what I mean.
But fuckin’ DD of course would never believe me that there was something wrong with the van. She would always blame my “girly driving” and have to look at the thing herself before she’d ever believe me about anything with a motor on it. So she reaches over and turns the key herself, and even lunges her foot over to the goddamn pedal to give it some gas — which, if I did that she’d be like, “Whoa! Don’t flood the engine!” but she was clearly panicking.
Also it felt like the security-guard lady was somehow controlling the van with her mind, willing it to stay put. She didn’t seem worried that we were gonna peel out and get away. It was like she knew the thing wasn’t gonna start. She looked implacable. She looked like fucking geography, she was so solid.
It was summer so the windows were rolled all the way down. The van was built when probably only Cadillacs had AC. DD was still frantically trying to turn the ignition when the guard reached straight in, put her hand on DD’s shoulder, and said, “You. You’re coming with me.”
I was like holy shit. This is some serious trouble we’ve got ourselves into here. And DD obviously was thinking the same. She kind of gulped and meekly climbed down out of the van. I’ve rarely, if ever, seen her look so much at a loss.
The security guard took a look in the van, which was a mess of wrappers and magazines and musical equipment and shit, plus little Wyatt sleeping behind me in his car seat strapped into the first bench, and the rest of the band with their electrician-taped glasses and jean jackets with punk-band logos in felt pen and crumpled hats, lacking every kind of personal hygiene habit known to man. Anyway, the guard did a visual sweep of the van, raised her eyebrows when she saw the baby, then grabbed DD and walked her back into the store, carrying the baguette and the giant wheel of cheese. We didn’t say shit. We just watched her go.
About twenty minutes goes by, and we’re starting to wonder what the fuck we should do. Tom is like, “Well, looks like we’re gonna be fuckin’ buskin’ for bail money in downtown Thunder Bay.”
But then DD comes waltzing out, carrying the cheese and the bread, plus a giant, four-litre jug of milk, a pack of forty size-2 Huggies, a huge deli tray of cut vegetables, and God knows what else. You can’t see much of her face with all the shit she’s carrying, but she’s got a lit smoke in her mouth that’s sending up a cheerful cloud. The butch security lady is just watching from the doorway with her arms folded, no discernible expression on her face.
I’m like, “What the fuck, DD?”
She exhales smoke and says, “I’m banned for life from Safeway.”
As we’re merging onto the highway, I have to ask, “What did you do?” DD says nothing.
“Did you do her?” I just ask to be mischievous. She turns and raises her eyebrows, smirking.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
I think she probably just cried at her. But you could never be sure with DD.
Miruna Molnar
Her Home, Galiano Island, B.C., 2016
I have a theory about DD that, no matter what, she’ll always be a runaway at heart.
I had never been to Galiano, but I’d been to Salt Spring Island, and I was really into, you know, being in nature and the water and the trees and everything. And I was fully in love with her, body and soul. Sometimes I would think she was the wisest, most magical person, but even at the start there were inklings that something was a bit off, missing … the wiring was funny. But when you’re in love, any inklings tend to go by the wayside. My heart was pounding, my hands were clammy. I was so nervous when I got off the ferry, I hardly noticed the Douglas firs, the eagles, all of that, except as being … being a part of my feelings of excitement for new life, new love. It was as wonderful then as it became awful later.
She came to meet me on her motorcycle.
