She claimed … she claimed to have hacked into the website that ran the Royal Bank of Canada bank machines in her hometown, and that she caused the one near her school to spit out a twenty-dollar bill every weekday at noon for all of grade nine.
She claimed that when she was a child, her father would sit by the window during dinner, with a .22 rifle. She claimed that he would shoot rats in the woodpile as they ate.
She claimed to have been raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses with no notion of a birthday party or Christmas presents.
She claimed that her parents didn’t force her to play the violin, like most people who ever played the violin. Instead she said it was the other way around — she said that at the age of four she had seen Itzhak Perlman playing a violin on TV and demanded to have one. She said that for three years every time she passed the music store she would scream and cry and carry on, until her mother finally relented and got her one and then only begrudgingly paid for lessons from the only teacher in town.
Other times she claimed that her first instrument was the tuba, at her mother’s insistence, and that her parents would send her up the ladder with the tuba to the attic to scare away the bats.
She was always DD, but she was always whatever version of DD she needed to be, or whatever version of DD she felt was required. So sometimes, if we were playing at a hippy festival, she would go full hippy and let some girl talk about whether Sagittarius was compatible with Aries as the girl braided her hair. Then the next night we might play at a Legion in the neighbouring town and she would go full redneck, talking with some manly man in a lumberjacket about favourite chainsaw brands, telling him about the time she was eight years old and had to drive her dad to emergency when his Husqvarna jumped and bit his shoulder.
Sometimes she would be in an intellectual mode, where she would reveal that she’d read A Brief History of Time in an afternoon. But then if we were out partying with her partying buddies, and you asked her, hey, what did she think of that book she’d been reading in the van, she might just say, “What do I think? I think I’ll have another Kokanee.”
She always lived on some island or other, and in my experience there were always at least two women she had … she had, she was having — one for home and one on the road. Sometimes the one from the road would replace the one at home, thinking that now she was going to be the only one, but then not that long after that, there might be another one on the road. And of course this sometimes led to … problems. One show we did, a girl I’d never seen before paid full cover just to come into the community center gymnasium and stand perfectly still through the whole set, staring at DD with her middle finger high in the air. But then she probably went home with someone else again that night. She could pick up like I’ve never seen.
One time we were in Nuremberg and I was wearing a hat that I didn’t like. It had started to bother me, like a canker sore, you know, in the lower back left of your mouth. It was making me kind of tense and hard to be around. I only forgot about it when I was playing the shows, because I never wear a hat when I’m playing, unless I’m sick. I was looking for a new hat. I had a black hat and a brown thrift-store suit that fit me. I hadn’t known that you weren’t supposed to wear a black hat and a brown suit until some girl told me that, in a way that informed me that I had descended in her estimation because of the colour of my hat. I was feeling very sensitive on that tour, so my hat was really bothering me at this point. I couldn’t shake it. We went into the bar next to the little theatre where we had played. I saw a hat that looked like mine, but it was brown like my suit and I thought maybe it might fit me. It was hanging on a hook behind the bar, quite high.
A pretty girl was bartending. She had mostly short hair but what do you call those? Tufts. Long side tufts. And a little tail at the back. She had more than one piercing on her face. I had been thinking about going over there and trying to start a conversation with her, but I was only on my second beer. I didn’t know yet if I would be able to work up the courage and the disregard for the fact that generally girls don’t like to get hit on while they’re working. Sometimes I disregard it and then, of course, I feel disgusted with myself the next day, or even as soon as later that night.
I said, “gee, that looks like a better hat than what I’ve got,” and DD said, “gimme that” and walked over to the bartender girl with my hat.
I couldn’t hear what they said but the girl took the hat down, and tried on my hat. It fit her quite well. DD said something to her and the girl said something to DD. DD brought the brown hat to me. I asked her what the girl had said about the hat, and DD told me she’d said that she got off work in an hour and asked if DD had a place to stay.
In previous conversations, we had both agreed that generally when people ask touring musicians if they have a place to stay, they are at least thinking about fucking them, even if they haven’t discovered in their own minds yet that that is what they are thinking. Not that someone will necessarily fuck every musician they ask “So, where do they have you staying?” but they are often rolling the thought around in their mind. So I said, “Oh. I see.”
I tried on the hat but it didn’t fit very well.
The next day we met up with DD at the train station. I asked her if she’d had a good time when she went home with the pretty bartender, and DD said yes but that it had been a little weird because she had a boyfriend.
“She told you she had a boyfriend?”
“No, I met him,” she said.
“He was there when you got there? How did he feel about you being there?”
“He was pretty sad because when we arrived, we all chatted for a while and had a beer and then she took him into the other room and broke up with him.”
“She took you home and broke up with her boyfriend?”
“When we were in bed later she said that she’d been meaning to do it for a while, and I was just the … what’s the word for something that makes something change, like with rust?”
“The catalyst,” I said.
“Right. She said I was the catalyst. Her English was very good. And she speaks French, too. We mostly spoke French together.”
I told her I hated her. That made her laugh.
The rest of the tour, we had a running gag where we would call her “the Catalyst,” as in “the Catalyst really needs to dig out her passport because we’re approaching the Swiss border,” or she might rub her belly and say, “the Catalyst is ready for a big plate of kartoffels.” Or someone would ask, “has anyone seen the Catalyst?” and the answer would be, “the Catalyst is in the men’s can because some big Austrian woman in the ladies’ room mistook her for a boy and screamed at her,” or something.
Pete Podey
His Home Studio, Basement Suite, Gravely Street, off Commercial Drive, Vancouver, 2014
I’m recording now. Check. Check one two. Levels look good. Okay, this is Peter Podey, July 27, 2014. I’m recording this because Geoff has asked me to try to come up with some thoughts about DD. Ah, for the record I don’t know where she might be. I wish I did.
What can I say about DD? Okay, well, I love her. Not in a sexy kind of way, although of course she is sexy, that’s just not the nature of our thing. I love her. Like a sister? Yeah. Like a sister, or maybe like the way guys in a platoon in a war love each other, because they’ve been through so much
