Читать книгу Festival Man - Geoff Berner - Страница 8

AT ANY RATE, ALTHOUGH MANNY would never have been booked into Calgary on his own, he had enough of a name in folk circles that if I vouched for him and made it clear that he was there as a sideman, Leslie Stark, the artistic director of the Calgary Folk Festival, was willing to tolerate his presence. She has a thing for weird shit, anyway.

I woke when I hit the back of the seat in front of me. I’d been lying lengthwise on the back bench of the minivan, taking a beer-nap.

“Mother fuck!” Jenny shouted.

Mykola was at the wheel, his panicky deep breathing interfering with his attempts to calm us. “It’s (gasp!) ooookay, everybody (gasp!).”

Jenny leaned over to take a look at the speedometer. “One-sixty! In a fucking minivan! You crazy fuck! You slow this thing down!”

“It’s (gasp!) okay, everyone! Just caaaaalm down. There was a deer or something, but we avoided it, it’s long gone now.”

Jenny’s a person who’s mastered that delightful alchemy of conquering fear by instantaneously transmuting it into anger.

“I’ll tell you what, I’ll fucking punch you in the mouth right now if you don’t fucking slow down.”

“I think ya better listen to the lady.”

Mykola is not tough. Not that way, anyway. He slowed down, pumping the brakes erratically.

“Sorry, everybody, I guess I’m just sorta nervous, excited about this festival, so I wasn’t watching the speed. Sorry, sorry.”

Jenny relaxed a bit. “Just fucking watch that speed. I don’t know what you’re in such a fucking rush for, we’re probably not even gonna get to play.”

I wiped the beery eye-gunk away. “Excuse me?”

“I mean, what the fuck are we gonna do when they figure out that Athena’s not coming?”

“Look, I told you, I got that all figured out.”

“Yeah, right. I’m beginning to figure out your deal a bit more, Ouiniette. You know, Cole Dixon says he spent Canada Day in a sports bar in Charlottetown that didn’t even know he was coming, and he wound up having to buy pitchers for his band, his band that he flew all the way over from fucking England to do the gig. And they didn’t even have music at that bar anymore!”

“Look, that was a misunderstanding that was actually completely sorted out between me and Cole.”

“Oh yeah. He said you demanded a booking fee for that gig.”

“Well, listen, you’re here, aren’t you, so unless you have a different plan, let’s go with mine.”

“Which is what, exactly? They want Athena, not us.”

“They don’t know what they fucking want. They ‘want’ good music, as in, they are in a position of ‘want’ for it, seeing as how their headliners are Great Big C U Next Tuesday and fucking Tom Cochrane. You guys have a hundred times the talent in your fucking little fingers of half the bullshit they’ve got there. Once they get a load of your amazingness, they’ll be in the 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.