Читать книгу The Fiddler Is a Good Woman - Geoff Berner - Страница 8

Green Room Area, Rudolstadt-Festival, Rudolstadt, Germany, 2015

What do I remember about DD? Uhhh, so much … [long pause]. It’s very difficult to start because … I don’t know how to organize it in my head … and I have several theories about DD, and I’m worried. I’m concerned that some of them may contradict each other.

Well … [long pause]. One is that sometimes, I genuinely believed that God had sent her to this planet to teach me patience. She had this way of showing up for the plane, or the train, or the show itself at the very last second, after I’d checked in with her exactly a hundred thousand times to make sure she got there an hour ahead of time, just to allow for a margin of error. But she didn’t believe in reserving anything for a margin of error. I think my heart is at least … eleven years older from the wear and tear of wondering if she was actually going to show up at all. Although, looking back, she always did. So, does that mean that she was always, in her way, trying to get me to stop worrying? Or did she enjoy watching me sweat?

What else?

I read a science fiction book once. I don’t remember what it was called … Wait. It’s possible that this is a dream that I had and not a book that I read.

In the book, or in the dream, there were people whose minds had fused with cats. There was a woman, a regular human woman. She was leaving the outer-space town or something, going away. She asked her lover, who was a person who had fused with a cat in his mind, she asked him if he would miss her after she left, and the cat person said something like, “Meow … how can I think about you if you’re not there? Meow.”

All right, well, perhaps that’s an overstatement of sorts, but she … she’s very in the moment. This is what makes her such an excellent side player. Not even a side player — side player isn’t a fair term for her.

She forces you, the singing songwriter, to come into the moment with her, to reside in the song and not think about anything else. God what a sweet mercy and a triumph that can be when I can do it. When I can connect to my own humanity through a song, and then I shock myself that I’m actually connecting with other human beings. It’s the greatest thing.

Of course all the self-help new-age books all demand that you live in the moment. But what if you actually do live in the moment, which I have done sometimes with DD over the years? You wind up not remembering things that you told people you were going to do, including some promises you made, and you wind up not remembering things you promised you weren’t going to do, and you forget about planning any plan for the future, because you’re so living in the moment.

Although everyone says we are supposed to do that, it is actually something that annoys people a lot, to say the least, when you do it. I have experienced this from several different angles … [long pause]. Yes, I have.

She claimed to be a direct descendant of Chief Sitting Bull. He’s the one who beat Custer at the battle of the Little Bighorn. Oh, you knew that. Of course. I didn’t mean to insult you …

She told me she almost earned a degree in classical music from the conservatory, but they told her she would have to wear a dress to the final recital, so she just didn’t go.

She claimed to be born with a crescent wrench in her back pocket. She said it many times. She loved anything with wheels and she claimed to be able to drive and fix anything with wheels, from a backhoe to a grader to a locomotive. Could be. I once watched her hot-wire a cherry-picker truck in Whitehorse at four in the morning and drive it down the street to a mini-mall where we got in it and she got us up to the roof and we drank vodka out of Big Gulp cups and looked at the Northern Lights.

I was fretting aloud about how we were going to get arrested and I was trying to figure out a plausible story to tell to the cops to explain about why we were on the roof of the 7-Eleven with a weird stolen truck, and DD said, “Just shut up and look at the lights, boss.” I said okay … and took a deep breath, and just looked at them and almost enjoyed them like a person is supposed to. We didn’t get arrested. The cops never came.

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.