Cue the Dead Guy. H. Mel Malton
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it again. Still, I blush when I lie, and Juliet knows it.
“Ummm . . . yeah. I’m still in good standing.”
“Puppet business booming, is it?”
“Not as such.”
“You’ll get two months at production stage manager rates, with a per diem and use of the Steamboat van. Now, let’s talk about the rehearsal schedule,” she said, pushing Jason’s prompt script binder towards me.
I sighed. PSMs make big bucks. The cast would hate me for taking Jason’s job when his body wasn’t even a body yet, and anyway, I hate stage management. But I had a dependent now. A mutt called Lug-Nut whose vet bills were climbing (a recent run-in with a porcupine) and whose per-month food bill was more than I get for a marionette commission.
“Write it into my contract,” I said. “My dog comes with us on tour, and I get my own room.”
“Whatever, dear,” Juliet said. “Now, perhaps you’ll go out and pick up some amp cables so we can do a sing-through this afternoon. Keys are in the van.”
Eight
MOTHER: A single note will soothe the breast / when evil puts you to the test.
-The Glass Flute, Scene ii
The interior of Fish Gundy’s Musical Emporium is very dark. There are lava lamps in every corner, though, and once your eyes get used to it, the atmosphere is quite soothing. Fish usually sits at the back in an ancient leather bean bag chair, which is elevated on a platform behind the counter so he can lounge there and still be able to reach the cash register. It gives him a Godlike aspect, which is possibly deliberate. If you buy something from him, you sort of have to look up, but if you were standing on the floor next to him, his nose would reach your sternum.
Fish hasn’t changed much since high school. When we were in Grade Nine at Laingford High together, he came to class dressed in striped bell-bottoms, a Nehru shirt and sandals. This was at a time in the late seventies when all that hippie stuff was recent enough to be excruciatingly uncool. People laughed at him, partly because of his size, but mostly because of his style. He didn’t alter it, though, which lent him a kind of weird mystique, as if he had become stuck against his will in an era the rest of us wanted to forget.
We became friends because we were both charter members of the out-crowd (Lori Pinkerton wouldn’t even acknowledge Fish Gundy—she looked right through him) and he was an incredible guitar player. Ruth and Fish and I used to hang out together in the school greenhouse at lunch and write songs. Fish’s tragedy was compounded by a terrible case of adolescent acne, which he finally overcame in Grade 13, but by then the damage had been done. Once nerd-hood is established, you can’t escape it unless you change schools. Ruth, Fish and I shared the burden of the label with all the dignity we could muster. It was only later that we were able to acknowledge that being in the out-crowd was a good thing. All the really interesting people were members.
Fish went away to university, earned a PhD in medieval music history and learned to play the shawm and sackbut. Later, he travelled, took up the sitar and mastered various unpronounceable Japanese instruments, then came back to Kuskawa and opened up his emporium in Sikwan. He’s married to a Japanese woman called Mako, and they have twins, child prodigies, both of them.
“Hey, Polly. Peace,” Fish said from his beanbag throne as I made my way through the murky interior to the back of the store. The walls of Fish’s place are studded with guitars, from ancient Rickenbackers to shiny new Fenders. He does a brisk trade-in business, and the bands that come through town on tour often re-fuel there, so there’s a collection of wildly custom-fitted electric guitars, some of them autographed by their former owners. The rest of the place is crammed with instruments from around the world. There are Bolivian rainsticks and pan pipes, a whole collection of African drums, some beat-up coronets and baritones, a bunch of Quebec-made violins (plus an old European one that he keeps locked up), a Celtic harp and a set of bagpipes. Collectors from Toronto often come up to Sikwan just to see Fish.
“How are things up in Cedar Falls?” Fish said.
“Looking up, Fish,” I said. “Spring’s in the air and I just got a paying gig with Steamboat Theatre.”
“Good for you,” he said. “Doing what?”
“Well, I was the puppet designer until about ten minutes ago. Now I’ve been promoted to stage manager.”
“Cool. I thought you hated stage management.”
“Yup. But somebody bumped off the other one, so I’m filling in.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, we think so. He’s vanished, anyway.”
“Bummer,” Fish said. That’s all he said, which is one of the reasons I like him. He knew that if I wanted to talk about it, I would. I didn’t.
“I need amp cables.”
“Right this way,” he said. I followed him into the back of the shop, where he kept accessories and sheet music. We spent a half hour discussing techie-stuff, and as we were comparing the relative merits of the brands of cable available, he stopped mid-sentence and gazed up at my face.
“You do something to your hair?” he said.
“No, Fish.”
“Huh. You look different, somehow.”
“My nose. I got a nose job.”
“Oh. Cool. Suits you.” That was that. There are plenty of fish in the sea, but there was only one Fish for me. I left with the requisite gear carried in a loop over my shoulder. I would have liked to have stayed and gabbed some more, but I had a rehearsal to run. I was sure that I had wasted enough time at least to have missed Becker’s visit to the theatre, which was the whole point of the exercise. The other music shop in town was closer to Steamboat, a place down in mall-land that specialized in Hammond organs and ukuleles, but that trip would’ve taken me less than fifteen minutes.
The Steamboat Theatre van is a big Ford with one bench seat in the back and eight feet of storage behind it. This is the classic children’s theatre touring vehicle, with just enough seating space for four actors (who traditionally fight like five-year-olds about who gets to ride shotgun) and the stage-manager, who gets to drive. The set, lighting, costumes and props are packed in, wedged roof-high behind the bench seat.
Loading up the van at the end of every show means following a pattern. If you pack the gear in the wrong order, or put it in the wrong place, you can end up with a few pieces at the end that simply won’t fit. If that happens, you have to pull everything out and start over, which can be disastrous if you’ve got half an hour for lunch and another show at a school twenty kilometres away. Sometimes the technical director will issue a kind of floor-plan, like the “what’s where” directions in a box of chocolates, which gets taped to the back door of the van. After a week, the cast learns the order of the pack, and things go smoothly. The first few days, it’s hell.
If there’s a lot of travelling involved on tour, the cast quickly learns to establish ground rules for van-time. Being stuck like a thespic sardine in a five-foot by three-foot space for several hours a day is no picnic. Personal hygiene, for example, becomes very important, as does music etiquette (if you like listening to rap music, you bloody well wear a portable CD player and you keep the volume turned way down). When I told Rico that touring was murder, I was remembering vaguely how uncomfortable it could get. Now, driving the empty Steamboat van back to the theatre, it struck me full-force that I had agreed to do it again.
“I must be completely insane,” I muttered. I tuned the radio to CBC, knowing full well that once we hit the road, there would be arguments over which station to listen to and battles over volume control. Mid-tour, a fog of depression would permeate the van, as the five adults cooped up inside came to terms with the fact that they were doomed to spend another month in each other’s company. Touring is like being in a marriage with four other people. If the chemistry’s