1982 (27 page)

But Wendy could smile. She made it okay. Wendy could smile without being uncool. It was actually very nice. And I knew that Bowie would smile on occasion as well. I had seen a vintage photo of Bowie smiling when he was onstage at Boston Garden in 1978 during his “Berlin” period. This was when he was making some very serious music about his drug addiction and beating his drug addiction. You’d think that Bowie would only be brooding at that time. He would have had good
reason to brood. But even then, Bowie would smile sometimes. I assumed Bowie was above a lot of these conventions.

On the floor at the Grandstand, I was quite sure Wendy was smiling because she wanted to put me in a good mood after the Adidas bag situation. I could tell Wendy was attempting to be compassionate about my loss. But she was also pushing me to move onward and forget about it all for the sake of the rest of our night.

“It’s just a bag, right?” she’d said in the aftermath of Forbes the punk launching my prized possession at Joan Jett. “It’s not a big deal. Just stuff, right?”

I knew what she meant. And she was not wrong. It was probably more mature not to care about “stuff.” But Wendy really had no idea how important my Adidas bag had been. It was a shock when Forbes had raised my bag above his mohawk head and thrown it at the stage. And now Forbes was no longer anywhere near us. He’d graduated to terrorizing other members of the audience. Forbes had enough punk cred to avoid repeatedly picking on the same kid.

Odd things can happen as a result of unforeseen events. Now that my Adidas bag was gradually becoming a memory, I was filled with a strange new sensation. I began to feel okay about no longer having it in my possession. It was not fun to lose my goods, but I wasn’t as devastated as I thought I’d be. The Joan Jett incident had actually rendered me less freaked out about the whole day. You might think that was strange, too. You might think it’s the opposite of what would happen. But in a way, I felt free.

Experiencing a loss can make you forget about putting on airs. Maybe that’s what happened after I lost my Adidas
bag. Or maybe it was a genetic predisposition to react calmly to catastrophe. My father had a knack for bringing calm to a storm. He could react with impressive composure when truly horrible things went down. When I smashed his Buick outside of Unionville High School a few years later, he had every right to scream at me, but he didn’t. He had every right to be really angry, but he wasn’t. Immediately after the collision, I was worried about what my father’s reaction would be. I had totalled his Buick. And my father’s Buick was big, and very long, even longer than a Cadillac. My father loved his big Buick. And bigger was better in the 1980s. But when I got him on the phone from the school office to explain that I’d been in an accident and that it was my fault and that his big Buick was now wrecked, he reacted with surprising serenity.

“You are okay?” my father asked softly after taking a breath.

“Yeah, I’m fine. But, Dad, the car …”

“If you are okay, this ees most important theeng,” my father said, calmly cutting me off. Then he added in a reassuring tone, “Don’t worry about thees car. We can fix thees.”

My father could be calm when we needed him to be. Maybe that had rubbed off on me.

It certainly was odd for me to be at peace without my long-time material companion—my Adidas bag. But this was exactly what transpired. Up until the late afternoon at the Police Picnic and the Joan Jett thing, I’d been self-conscious about the way I was looking and acting with Wendy. I’d been very focused on trying to be cool and anxiously hoping she’d like me. But losing the Adidas bag had somehow made me forget much of that—at least for a few hours. It was strangely
liberating. It was like the way those Buddhist guys figure themselves out and learn what’s important in life when they give up everything they own. The Buddhist guys have a revelation when disposing of their possessions. The Buddhists are really impressive when they do that. Or maybe it’s the Hindu guys. Well, I can’t remember which, but the point is, I was just a boy who had recently turned fifteen named Jian, standing at a concert and waiting with an older girl named Wendy for the next band to play. That’s it—nothing more dramatic or less. And no more fake-leather baggage. Just like Buddhists. It was an inspiring realization. Not that I didn’t still want to be Bowie. I did. Maybe I just wanted to be Bowie mixed with more of me now. Before the end of this day, I would have another revelation, too. I would discover something very magical. It was all about to happen. And I could not have anticipated what I was going to find.

During the prolonged break between Joan Jett and Talking Heads, I asked Wendy if she would like a drink. She told me she would like that very much, and I headed off through the crowd in pursuit of refreshments. I should explain that by “a drink,” I mean a Coca-Cola. Actually, I mean two Cokes and some pretzels—the large kind. I know that “a drink” sounds like alcohol. That’s why I said it. That would be cool. But this wasn’t alcohol. And whether it was alcohol or not, I liked the idea of taking care of Wendy and showing her I could assume control. Besides, they didn’t sell fancy foods and drinks at concerts in 1982. They only offered basic items like Coke and pretzels. Today, they might include sushi. Today, they might sell various packages of sushi rolls and sashimi at inflated prices at concerts. But we didn’t know what sashimi was in the
’80s. Most of the fish you bought in a Toronto restaurant was cooked or fried back then. And you probably wouldn’t buy fish at a concert. It would be odd to be carrying around fish at a concert in 1982. They just had pretzels at the Grandstand. And Cokes.

I still had some cash. Fortunately, I’d put money in the front pocket of my black jeans earlier in the day rather than inside the dearly departed Adidas bag. I’d done some calculations and was satisfied that I had enough to buy Wendy and me some non-fancy refreshments and pay for us both to get home on the subway. I was feeling more at ease now. I found the concession stands and got in line to buy the Cokes and pretzels.

I was standing just behind two goth guys with heavy eye makeup and black cloaks. It seemed strange to see goth guys buying pretzels. I’m not sure why. But you probably know what I mean. I think you do. You wouldn’t really expect goth guys to eat. Or at least, you wouldn’t expect them to eat concert pretzels. I don’t really know what the alternative would be, but that was the image I had of goth guys in the summer of ’82. Non-eaters. Maybe I thought real goths would have some rule confining them to consume only cool and gross things, like human blood or imitation human blood. I wondered about this as I stood in line at the concession stands at the Police Picnic. Maybe these guys were fake goths or young recruits on a goth apprenticeship program. Maybe that’s why they ate pretzels. One of the goth guys had a Bauhaus T-shirt on, and he didn’t look very happy—just like his heroes. Bauhaus was another band full of members that weren’t allowed to smile.

I made my way back to Wendy with the drinks, pushing through punks and sweaty New Wave fans. I was experiencing
a new excitement. I debated whether I should try to put my arm around Wendy during the next band’s performance. It would be a big move. Maybe we were ready for that step. I wasn’t sure how people made such decisions. But things seemed to be going well.

Coming back, I was reminded that our position on the floor was remarkably near the stage. As I approached the place where I’d left Wendy, I spotted the older stubble-faced guys in the cut-off English Beat T-shirts who’d been standing next to us earlier. Then I saw Wendy amongst them too. The stubble-faced guys were talking with her again. They were sharing a smoke. Wendy looked cool when she smoked. She looked intelligent and introspective. The main stubble-faced guy— who was very tall—was speaking with his face quite close to Wendy’s. I figured he’d probably offered to light her cigarette. He’d also said something that made her laugh. Wendy’s eyes squinted a lot when she laughed. It was like Bowie. The main tall, stubble-faced guy had his legs planted squarely on the ground and held his cigarette in one hand while he hooked the thumb on the other hand in his jeans like a gunslinger. He looked like a real man.

Our prime minister at the time, Pierre Trudeau, had also been known to stand like a gunslinger. He knew karate. I wondered what I would look like if I attempted to stand like our prime minister. I didn’t think I’d be very believable as a gunslinger. I tried to imagine the way Bowie would stand if he were there. I adjusted my body and my expressions to appear more Bowie-like. I had actually started doing this over the previous year anyway. I carried myself based on images of Bowie I’d seen. New Wave was about the music and the
culture and even the aesthetics, but it was also important to consider the way you held your body. At least it seemed so. I knew Bowie moved in an impressive way, but I had no idea he had practised this. I had no idea he had begun studying back in 1967 under the tutelage of Lindsay Kemp, an abstract mime who was also a dance instructor. I didn’t know he had then learned how to move onstage and how to help reveal a song’s meanings through movement and lighting. I knew nothing of any of this. I would learn it all later. I just knew that Bowie carried himself in a cool way. And whether that was New Wave or not, I’d taken to trying to physically copy what Bowie did.

There were many ways to look like Bowie by the early 1980s. Sometimes, I would lift my shoulders up and slightly bend my left leg like on the cover of the album
David Live
, recorded in Philadelphia in 1974. That was a more passive position, so I would do that if I was standing and waiting for someone. Or other times, I would scrunch up my face like I was about to sneeze, the way Bowie did in the video for “Fashion.” I’d seen the video for “Fashion” on
The NewMusic
on Citytv. It was a song from his
Scary Monsters
LP, which had been released in 1980. I don’t know why Bowie made that scrunched-up face in the video. He probably didn’t have to sneeze. But the fact that he’d made that face meant it was cool. So I tried to do that, too. That’s the thing about being a trendsetter. You can do anything odd and it will be cool. It will become something that others want to do. Maybe Bowie was aware of this. Maybe he had a laugh with his mates about the fact that there would be a fourteen-year-old boy copying that scrunched-up face a couple of years later just to look like him. Maybe. But when Bowie did these things, they really did look cool.

I truly had no resemblance to David Bowie, but I sometimes imagined I did. I imagined this even though his skin was very pale and mine was olive brown, and being pastywhite was part of being New Wave. But it helped that I was skinny. I was really skinny. Just like Bowie. Mind you, I still had more of a circular Middle Eastern face. I got that from my father. Bowie had chiselled features. Wendy also had chiselled features. Just like Bowie. I always wanted chiselled features, but that physical trait would never be in my repertoire. I couldn’t get much skinnier than I was, and I still had a round-looking face. You see, along with being an olive-brown colour, the cherubic face was another cruel trick God played on Middle Eastern guys so we’d be destined to be less New Wave. But at least my body was very thin. That was one way I could be like Bowie.

I’m really not sure why I was so skinny in the 1980s. It was my metabolism or something like that. That’s what my mother said. My mother was very helpful in explaining these things. She would inform me that it was probably my metabolism or something like that, and then she would add some helpful suggestions so I would know what I should aspire to as an alternative to being thin.

“You should eat well and be active, honey. Then you will look grand! You know, Umar has a very nice build. He’s not as thin as you.”

My mother would say things like this. She would make her point about how skinny I was by comparing me to Umar. Umar was quite perfect in the eyes of my mother. Often, when my mother wanted to make a point about how I could change the way I was, or what I might aspire to, she would talk about
Umar. It didn’t help that Umar seemed to have been blessed with a tediously pious disposition. It really wasn’t fair. And Umar had a remarkable facility for doing adult-like things at an early age.

Once, when we were eight years old, Umar had single-handedly made hamburgers for both our families over at the Jans’ house. My mother had been very vocal at the dinner table about how impressed she was when Umar came out of the kitchen with the hamburgers.

“Oh, my, look at that! Umar, those hamburgers look just lovely. You made all of those by yourself? Wow! Do you see that, Jian? That’s just so great. Thank you, Umar.”

That’s what my mother said. As you can see, my mother couldn’t compliment Umar’s hamburgers without reminding everyone that I hadn’t made the hamburgers. And in truth, it really was quite impressive that Umar had made us all hamburgers. He was eight. I never found out if Mrs. Jan helped him, but I don’t think she did. I’d actually seen him in the kitchen with a pan in hand, cooking meat on the stove. And I really didn’t know how to make hamburgers. And anyway, I was quite sure my mother’s point had little to do with Umar and more to do with why I wasn’t cooking dinner for guests. Umar was just like That Chris from across the street and all the other kids that were better than me at various things. None of this seemed very equitable when I was growing up. And I already knew I was thin without my mother having to point it out.

Besides, it was true that Umar had a nice build. He was more robust than I was, inasmuch as a kid can be robust. At the very least, I could still take solace in the fact that being skinny
made me more like Bowie. I could hang on to that. Then again, even that claim wasn’t entirely steeped in credibility. The tragic part about my lean frame was that I wasn’t even skinny for the right reasons. Bowie had been gaunt because he was a drug addict and ate nothing but cocaine, milk, and red peppers for a lot of the 1970s. My skinny build had nothing to do with cocaine or anything glamorous like that. It was more that I was a fourteen-year-old asthmatic who seemed to get sick a lot as a kid. I also had allergies and I would sneeze often. This was bad. Mind you, by the ’80s, sneezing meant looking a bit more like Bowie with the scrunched-up face as if he were about to sneeze in the video for “Fashion.” There were some benefits to my downsides.