Here is a story I wrote for my Off Topic Literary Festival talk. It's untitled at the moment but I wanted to use the principles I developed to write something to show that they work. I kind of want to call it Forgotten Past after a deep track on Death's classic 1988 album Leprosy, but maybe a better title would be Paradise City. Hmmm. Ok stay tuned at the end because that's a better spot to show the skeletal structure:
No one was looking so I ran out and kicked the tire of our U-Haul. I knew it was a futile gesture but it was the only outlet for my fury. Besides, this rental van was trying too hard to win me over- it was one of those new ones they’d rolled out recently with the fancy graphics on the side- ours had a dinosaur on it. Albertosaurus, a locally grown T-Rex lite. I wasn’t falling for it, and anyways I was damn near fifteen, way too old to care about dinosaurs anymore. I kicked the tire again.
The dinosaur just stared at me, frozen in a roar as ineffectual as, well, as a kid who didn’t want to move away from his hometown.
The window for sabotage closed, as my dad and mom emerged from the house with another load of boxes. The moving van was pretty much full.
It was time.
Dad jumped in the van with me getting in the passenger side. He smiled and turned the key. It … definitely tried to roar to life like an Albertosaurus on the hunt, but only if said dino was gaseous and unwell. It belched and blew black and blue smoke. Not inspiring. There was a knock to the engine too, perfectly acceptable for a diesel, only the rental wasn’t a diesel. I side-eyed Dad. Maybe he would see reason and call off this whole “adventure”.
But no. He didn’t seem troubled at all by the van’s obvious mechanical unsoundness. He just seemed eager to go. “Our new life awaits,” he said, and I looked around at our old life, the only life I’d ever known, and I was struck by how normal the day was. Just any old day. It felt like the last day before the end of the world, but it looked like Saturday. There were no fireworks, no parade in our honour. Dad shifted the van into drive.
“Wait!” I shouted. “Not yet. I gotta . . . I gotta say good-bye to Duncan.” Duncan was our neighbour's cat. I unbuckled my seatbelt and jumped to the sidewalk, running up our neighbour’s walk before my dad could say anything.
I knocked on the door. No answer. I sighed. Not like I actually needed to see Duncan, or Duncan’s always angry owner. What would I even say? “I’m moving away forever, bye!” I stuck my hands in my pockets and got in the van. I was all out of delaying tactics.
Dad shifted the van into drive and pulled away from the curb. From our house. Behind us, in our car, my mom and sister followed. Dad turned on the radio just as Axl Rose started singing the smash hit of the summer. Dad exclaimed, “Paradise City! What are the chances? That’s a good omen if I ever heard one. And if I’m wrong I’ll eat Slash’s hat. Take me down to the paradise city…Edmonton is the paradise city, buddy. Trust me. You’ll love it.”
I looked in the rear view mirror at our rapidly receding house. I wasn’t so sure.
*
Maybe it wasn’t Paradise City but Edmonton wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t even all that different than home, just more of it. Lots of things to discover and learn and see. I don’t even mean the big touristy things like the Mall or whatever. For me it was simply exploring my new home, figuring out how things work. Streets go North-South, while Avenues go East-West. Kind of mind blowing. And the numbers made a grid that, once you understood the code, meant you could find your way around much easier than in Hinton, where all the streets were named after trees or people or who even knew.
Armed with this knowledge I was able to navigate the transit system half-decently. I felt confident enough in my new skillset that I took the bus to my first day of high school, a few weeks after we moved. Couldn’t be seen getting dropped off at school by my mom on the first day, right? But I missed a connection and wound up being a few minutes late. Clutching my schedule, which told me English 10 was my first class, I searched the unfamiliar halls and found a closed door.
I knocked.
Teacher answered, and I apologized for being late. She checked my schedule and pointed out that I was in the wrong class- this was Physics 30, a Grade 12 class. All those adult-looking grade 12s laughed at me. I scurried away in embarrassment.
The day didn’t get much better after that.
*
Edmonton was scary as hell. And high school- I didn’t know the rules the way I did back home in Hinton. Back home. Edmonton was my home now, and I needed to get used to that.
At least I learned where and when all my classes were. But even those were strange and unfamiliar. The kids all seemed so grown up and mature compared to me. Like they took school seriously which was kind of a foreign concept to me and everyone I went to school with in Hinton. It made me want to do better but it also just kind of exposed to me how terrible my work habits were and how ill-equipped I was for a school where the students actually gave a fuck.
I was falling behind fast, which had a sort of negative feedback loop effect since I felt less and less comfortable taking part in class discussions. I hated feeling like a small-town hick in front of all these strangers. So I learned to keep my mouth shut, but I listened intently.
“Anyone read the newspaper this morning?” Mr. Brownstone, my social studies teacher asked. Many hands shot up, but not mine. My family didn’t get the paper.
“Last night some racist shitheads- excuse me- skinheads knocked on the door of K___ R___ and viciously assaulted him with a baseball bat. They were mad about some antifascist things he’d said on his radio show. He’s alive but in intensive care. Police have the perpetrators in custody.”
Fuuuck. Edmonton was scary as hell, see what I mean? Dangerous! There were literal neo-nazis walking around attacking people in their homes. How could you ever feel safe in a place like this? The discussion carried on without me, as my stomach had tied itself up into such a dense knot it actually turned into a black hole, swallowing me whole. At least, that’s what it felt like. I thought back to Hinton and wished I could be back there, playing outside with my friends.
I hid on the bus ride home. Not like under the seat or anything, but I wrapped myself in my jacket and didn’t look at anyone. I didn’t want any skinheads following me home.
The next day I had to run my daily gauntlet yet again, ducking past the headbangers smoking outside the main entrance, arranged on the steps like the lion statues outside marble buildings. They utterly ignored me every day, but I didn’t like taking any chances, and always tried to scurry by as quick as I could hoping to avoid any attention whatsoever. On this day, though, they were all focused hard on their stereo system. I found myself- inexplicably- slowing down to listen too. Such a pretty song! What was it? I had to know. Against my better judgment I approached one of the, uh, music aficionados, a tall muscley guy with super long hair and a t-shirt that said “Metal Up Your Ass”.
“What are you listening to?”
“This is Knocking On Heaven’s Door. Bob Dylan wrote it, but this version is a cover by GnR.”
Of course- who could mistake Axl Rose’s voice for anyone else? “I like it. Bob Dylan, hey? Did he write Paradise City too?”
The metal dude laughed. Then he popped the cassette out of the deck and handed it to me. “You can borrow it if you want. I think I prefer the Dylan version. GnR’s a little light for me. Here, take this one too, it’s way heavier. Fucking insane but catchy as hell. You’ll like it.”
I was gobsmacked. This guy had no idea who I was and he was just lending me tapes! I looked at the fucking insane one and the garish, almost cartoonish painting of a guy wracked with disease stared back at me. Death. Leprosy. I’d never seen anything like it.
“You’ve never heard anything like it. Tell me what you think of it, ok? Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. Ok.
On the bus after school, I pulled out my yellow Sports Walkman and the tapes. I meant to put the Guns N Roses one in but the bright pink Death album pulled at me like a corpse dragging me to hell. I put my headphones in and pressed play.
It was loud. It was heavy. It was chaos. It was awesome. It was just like how the metalhead described it. If this was hell I wanted to live there. The songs were not just noise, they were melodic and catchy. Kind of surprised me. And the singing . . . if you could call it that. It sounded like a ghoul that had been dead for a thousand years, screaming and growling about being left to die. I was so enthralled I almost missed my stop. At the last minute I pulled the cord requesting a stop and ran off home.
I listened to Leprosy a hundred times that night. No, six hundred times! And sixty-six. I couldn’t wait to go to school in the morning and see what else my friend listened to. Maybe he would lend me more tapes!
*
“Empire Strikes Back is on tv!” my Mom called to me. I was in my room listening to Sepultura. But I couldn't pass up a chance to watch my favourite movie. Maybe not the most exciting Friday night but far from the worst, right? Anyways I loved the opening scenes on Hoth so much- reminded me of Hinton.
The Imperial Walkers were making a mess of Echo Base when there was a knock at our door. Mom said, “I wonder who that could be?” and she peeked out our front curtains. “Oh. There’s a scary looking guy out there.”
My heart skipped a beat. I thought about the radio announcer who was still recovering in hospital from the skinhead attack.
“What’s he look like?”
“He has really long hair and a leather jacket.”
I jumped up. “I’ll get it! It’s for me. That’s my friend. We’re going to go listen to heavy metal. Bye!”
I closed the door behind me before she could object. A small gesture of defiance - more symbolic than anything else especially since I knew the door would be unlocked when I returned.
I realized that I've written a ton of stories about growing up in a small town, but almost nothing at all about living in a city. When I saw that on paper it really struck me- like, why not? What's going on there? I have lived in Edmonton for over 2/3 of my life now, so why do I keep going back to that first third? With the idea of exploring for the future I decided I would write a story primarily on the other side of that discontinuity.
So, knocking is a recurring motif here, did you notice? The skinhead attack really happened like that, and I remember being kind of freaked out about that. And I really did see the metalheads all gathered around listening to Knocking on Heaven's Door. And most resonantly for me in real life, it really is true that I was watching ESB with my mom on a friday night when there was a knock on the door. In real life it was my two best friends, Travis and Jon, sneakily brought to Edmonton by my mom to surprise me for my birthday. And in fact Travis and Jon saw us off on the day we left Hinton in that U-Haul. But for story tension fictive purposed I realized I had to cut my two besties out of this story altogether and instead talk about the awesome power of heavy metal which helped me cross over that crucial discontinuity of going from being afraid to being unafraid in my new home. And then there never was a Duncan the cat and the U-Haul probably didn't knock when it fired up. Anyways thanks for coming it was tons of fun!
