1982 (13 page)

When Forbes was scouring the ground to find things to throw at Joan Jett, I could see he’d spotted my red-and-blue Adidas bag. It was still between my feet, but it was sticking out
in front, quite close to Forbes’s combat boots. Forbes looked at me and then looked back down at my Adidas bag. I didn’t want to allow myself to fathom what could transpire here. I had bought this Adidas bag with my saved-up money from SAVCO Pet Food and Supplies when I was in Grade 8. I had carried it with me everywhere. Toke and I used to take our Adidas bags when we walked to Mac’s Milk and saw the “good Chinese woman” behind the counter. I’d been carrying my Adidas bag when I asked Wendy to come to the Police Picnic. And now it was at my feet, holding my brand new Walkman and my mix tapes and my jean jacket and my portable headphones.

Forbes looked back up at Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and started to scream “Fuck you!” along with the rest of the crowd. Just when I thought Forbes had become distracted, he twisted his body around to face me. In one motion, he bent down, grabbed my Adidas bag, then stood up and held it over his head, King Kong style. I was panicking. I looked up at Forbes and he looked down at me with my Adidas bag above his head. The bottom of my Adidas bag was touching the tips of his mohawk.

“Please don’t do that,” I said as firmly as I could.

Using the word “please” might have been a particularly diplomatic form of negotiation with a crazed punk gorilla, but I didn’t feel in a position to be any more aggressive with him. Wendy tried. She grabbed Forbes’s arm and said, “Hey, c’mon, stop it. That’s his bag!” I was terrified at what Forbes might do but excited that Wendy was sticking up for me. We were a team.

Forbes was having none of it. He looked at Wendy and started to show his teeth like an ape. It was clear the mission
to stop Joan Jett was much more important than saving either the Adidas bag or the feelings of a confused young suburban boy aspiring to be a New Waver. Forbes pulled his arms back the way you’d prepare to throw a soccer ball back into play from the sidelines. Everything was moving in slow motion now. Then it happened. Forbes lunged forward, pumped his arms, and launched my Adidas bag into the air.

The music stopped. Everything stopped.

Or at least it seemed to. Of all the things the crowd had witnessed being catapulted at Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, this was clearly the most valuable so far. The Adidas bag flew through the air, and I could feel the collective gasp of forty-five thousand onlookers anticipating where it might land. In that split second, I could see Joan Jett registering the incoming Adidas missile and sidestepping it to avoid impact. The red-and-blue projectile flew directly in Joan Jett’s direction and just missed her, heavily hitting the stage next to her amp. It landed right side up. From my vantage point I could see the name tag on the bag, now sitting prominently onstage. In fact, the whole crowd could. It was very clear, in black, upper-case letters: THIS BAG BELONGS TO JIAN GHOMESHI. THORNHILL, ONTARIO.

Suddenly, everything was back at regular speed and events were moving ahead without any regard for the Adidas bomb that had just been launched from the audience. Other things were being thrown. Forbes had pushed forward a couple of rows to make his human-rights case even closer to the stage. The crowd was still loudly booing the Blackhearts. I looked at Wendy and she put her arm around my shoulder. She knew I had just lost my Adidas bag forever.

After their second song, Joan Jett threw her guitar on the ground and motioned to her band to abandon the stage. They fled the onslaught and headed into the wings. As she left, Joan Jett held her head up and sneered with a kind of tragic look on her face, the way someone’s face looks when they’re feeling quite upset but want to appear tough so no one will know. That’s what Joan Jett looked like. Except everyone knew it had not gone well. Joan Jett then gave us all the finger. This time there were no cheers the way there had been when Siouxsie told the audience to fuck off at her show a few months earlier. An MC came on to chide the audience, stating that Joan Jett would not come back out unless the avalanche of debris stopped flowing. There was general confusion for a little while after that.

In the midst of all this, my Adidas bag could still be seen on the stage. Wendy had her arm around me, and I could tell that she was looking directly at me, trying to gauge my reaction. I just kept staring straight ahead at my bag. I wondered if the impact of the landing had knocked my new Walkman on inside the Adidas bag. Maybe my new mix tape was playing with the Heaven 17 song “Let Me Go” blasting in the portable headphones.

The stage crew began collecting everything that had been thrown on the platform and tossing it into a big pile at the side of the stage. A crew guy with a ponytail and a jean jacket and lots of official laminates around his neck grabbed my Adidas bag and threw it out of sight into the wings. That would be the last I would see of it. Wendy now turned so that she was standing in front of me with her back to the stage and the crowd in a commotion all around us.

“Are you okay?” She looked concerned.

I tried to keep my composure for Wendy’s sake. “Yeah. I’m fine. Umm … that was crazy what Forbes did.”

“Yeah. Totally crazy. But I’m glad you’re all right. You know, he shouldn’t have done that.”

It was the first time I could tell that Wendy was a really caring person on top of being like Bowie. It was exhilarating and kind of romantic. In fact, this probably would have been my favourite moment ever if I hadn’t been thinking about all the stuff I just lost. Wendy continued to talk to me in an effort to make sure things were okay.

“But it’s just a bag, right? And it was pretty funny.” She was changing the tone so I could move on. “You can get another bag. Maybe you can get a black briefcase type.”

“Yeah. It’s just a bag,” I said. “I don’t use it that much. Not a problem.”

I bit my bottom lip. Wendy would never know the significance of the Adidas bag. She had no sense of its history and how big a deal it had been when I got it, and of the different colours it had been available in. She didn’t know that the red-and-blue kind of Adidas bag was a bit more rare. At least, I thought it was when Toke had gotten the other, more regular, kind. The bag wasn’t ultimately that cool. It certainly wasn’t New Wave. It had never fitted in with the rest of my outfit or with the 213 crowd anyway. And if I was going to lose it, it was strangely poetic that it should happen with Wendy. Maybe this was what it meant to become more of a man. I was dealing with a lot of adult stuff on this day. What I didn’t know was that before the Police Picnic and my date with Wendy were over, my world would change further.

4

“UNDER PRESSURE” – QUEEN AND DAVID BOWIE

T
he UK was always cool.

Before Joan Jett hit the stage at the Police Picnic in the summer of 1982, the lineup of bands had all been British. That is, except for the Spoons—and they were a Canadian band trying to sound British. Everyone wanted to sound British. Even British bands wanted to sound British.

It’s no secret that in Grade 9 my favourite artists were from the UK. Bowie was from England. So were the Police, and the Clash, and the Beat, and just about every other cool band, starting in a previous generation with the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who. In the ’80s, Britain was where real New Wave style and substance were centred. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it was because the UK was better at starting cultural trends. Maybe it came out of a more pronounced class war and politicized youth. That’s what my sister told me. But maybe it was because most English people had straight hair (much easier to crimp) and pale complexions (much easier to make paler), and that naturally made them more punk. And also
there were lots of reasons to be unhappy in England. Or at least, Brits would find reasons to complain. They might be unhappy about smaller food portions, or fewer TV channels, or more Thatcher, or less sunshine. They could often be bitter and miserable. And being miserable was cool. And New Wave music sounded better in a miserable or defiant English vernacular.

Billy Bragg wouldn’t have been as successful if he’d sung working-class protest songs with a Californian accent. He would’ve sounded like a surfer, and surfers have no reason to be angry. So Billy Bragg would have sounded like a liar. But he had a British accent. And so he was believable. And that was cool.

Besides, for me it made even more sense that I had an affinity for all things British. I was born in London and spent my first seven years in the UK. If only I’d known how to harness that lineage, I would have been more successful in Thornhill in Grade 9. I could have retained my English accent and peppered my sentences with “y’know wha-I mean?” and said about my friends, “They’re my best mates.” And then Wendy probably would have thought I was more special and punk and unique. But I was a different kind of unique. When I was in England, as much as I had friends and loved supporting Arsenal Football Club, I didn’t really fit in. And then I didn’t really fit in when I got to Thornhill. My search for appropriate role models often came up empty. And being myself didn’t seem a very appealing option.

WHEN I WAS A
little kid in England in the 1970s, the boys I hung out with at primary school called me Blackie.

Blackie.

This is a fact. It became my label. And some of those kids who called me by that name were my friends.

“Hey, Blackie!”

That’s how they would greet me. This term was apparently based on my parents’ ethnic background and the way I looked. My parents had moved from Iran and settled in England before my sister and I were born. And we were the only ethnic family around. But I didn’t really understand what that meant at the time.

I didn’t take offence to being called Blackie. It didn’t bother me as a little kid, because I didn’t recognize any of the broader societal implications or any sort of power dynamic. I figured Blackie was just another nickname. There was Paulie and Nicker and then there was me, Blackie. Most of the good football players in the English Premier League had nicknames, too. In England, soccer was called football. And the footballers all had catchy monikers. Just like me.

You might wonder if I’m making this up. You might be surprised to learn that I was called Blackie. That’s because it was stupid. It never made any sense. I wasn’t black. My skin wasn’t even a particularly dark shade of brown, unless I’d spent too much time on the beach at Brighton. But in the suburb of London where I grew up, almost everyone was white. Like, pasty, pinky white. There were no black kids or brown kids or yellow kids—at least none that I remember. So I became the de facto ambassador for all of them. And clearly, “Brownie” or “Olivie” just didn’t have the same ring as “Blackie.” I don’t know why. I didn’t realize how insulting it could be to be singled out for my race until a few years later. But I did start
to get the message that I was different. Confusion about my ethnicity began right then. And it never really ended until well after high school.

When my family first arrived in Canada from England, we settled in an area called Don Mills. Don Mills was in the middle of Metropolitan Toronto, somewhere that was neither downtown nor the suburbs. Don Mills was an area that featured Fairview Mall and the Ontario Science Centre and a hamburger place my parents took me to on the weekends called Big Boy. I was seven. This was long before I knew Wendy existed. This was long before cool electronic music made by British people wearing eyeliner who called themselves the Human League. This was back in the mid-’70s, when I thought of Bowie as a kids’ performer because of his ditty “The Laughing Gnome.” My mother had taped that song on our Panasonic cassette recorder when we were still in the UK. It was my favourite track on the mix tape she’d made with me.

More than anything, upon arriving in Canada, I felt a sense of liberation. Well, not at first. At first I felt terror. Terror then liberation. I’d been scared about going to Canada because some of the kids in London had warned me about all the spiders. They repeatedly made the case that I would have to fight legions of spiders in my new country.

“Blackie, you’re gonna be covered in spiders in Canada, mate! The spiders will eat you!”

“No, they won’t!” I valiantly replied.

But I wasn’t really sure if the spiders would eat me or not.

And I wondered why my parents were taking me to a place that was swarming with them. That didn’t sound very safe. And the
spiders weren’t the only problem. By the time we arrived on Canadian soil, I’d accumulated a number of other fears. These worries included snow. I’d never witnessed giant snowflakes the like of which were falling the night we landed at Toronto International Airport. My father met us at the airport, and it was a particularly snowy evening. He’d moved to Toronto a few months earlier to set up our new apartment and settle into his new job. He had to drag me outside to the taxi that was waiting for us, because I wasn’t at all sure I was ready to leave the airport when I saw the mounds of snow. The Canadian outdoors looked daunting. And it also looked beautiful. And cold.

The thing is, in the 1970s, air travel to a new place was pretty much a guessing game. You couldn’t predict what you might encounter when you landed. It was like those old Cracker Jack popcorn boxes with the “surprise” inside. You never knew what you would get. That was the difference between travelling in the 1970s and travelling now. Now, you can Google the weather at your destination. Now, you can look at up-todate videos of your intended new homeland before you step on board the flight headed to your intended new homeland. Now, you can Skype with someone for free and ask questions like “How’s the weather?” And also, “Is there a military coup going on at present?”

But in the 1970s, it was all in our imagination. I had no idea what Canada would be like, except for a postcard my father had sent from a weekend trip he’d taken to Montreal. That’s all I had to go on, other than a book I had about polar bears. And I had been told about the snow. And I had been warned about all the spiders. And I had overheard our nextdoor neighbour in England, Mr. Boggart, telling my mother
that Canada was a “vast land.” That sounded scary as well. I was afraid all of these things.