Broken City
On Sobriety and Music, Through the Ages, Through Rage and Angst and Sheer Gong Sheet-Metal Warble.
This is a hyper-extended essay I worked on over the years. It recounts much of 16+ years I’ve been sober for, and how that question changed for me at different points along the way.
I haven’t added much to it, particularly since the advent of Covid, as I don’t really like the predatory nature of music scenes, their insular self-defense mechanisms that predators thrive in, and that very few folks are willing to put on events that privilege anyone’s safety (re:Covid or otherwise).
The narcissism of music as vocation is something I could probably write about, that you can charge 10 bucks at the door for an art that no one is even compelled to listen to, that can be consumed with literally no attention to the act at hand; imagine charging literally anything for someone to come out to a poetry reading? lmao.
I kinda aged out, really, of the ability to stay up late to participate in a shared main-character psychosis. I went a few times post-Covid, to take photos for bands some exes were in, but I am very happy to not be part of any of these mandatory roll-call scene-first art-second no-accountability hellscapes.
It’s a similar problem to the fact I cannot watch T.V. or films anymore. Reading, spending time with people I care about, making rugs and writing are the things that matter to me. I wish those practices had manifested immediately when I chose to quit drinking, but they didn’t.
I liked playing music a lot, I really did. I met people I really cared about, and I learned a tremendous amount about improvisation, collaboration, and listening. When us metal kids all eventually aged out, everyone else got into dubstep because the drop was heavy, and I got into harsh noise, musique concrete, and realllll early folk recordings where the tape hiss put it into conversation with these outer-limit musical fields. I have never figured out how to pass through the same thresholds as the people around me, always Scooby Doo my way into the wrong lane.
I think also, having lost Vic, and Scott, I don’t have the heart to play anymore. I would like to make music with my friend Audrey, maybe, if she was okay with us not really playing it live at any point. She’s a great musician, and probably an even better friend.
An earlier version of this won the 2015 Writers Federation of New Brunswick’s Creative Non Fiction surprise, which pissed me off at the time, because all I wanted was to be a successful short fiction writer and I kept winning prizes in every genre but short fiction. They called me to tell me about winning, and read me the juror’s notes, but I didn’t remember to write anything down. I wish I had. I never got an email or anything, but I did get the cheque.
I’ve left the original, juvenile muchness mostly intact, editing only for a few little grammatical flubs and typos.
BROKEN CITY
“Everyone becomes someone else when they listen to music, Joe was thinking—they believe the music is for themselves alone even if it has nothing to do with them. Once outside in the snow and without music they would be completely different. Joe felt this.”
—David Adams Richards, Nights Below Station Street.
Nü Sensae / K-Holes, Summer 2012. Calgary, AB, Canada.
I’m sorry, but I don’t know you, and I don’t really feel good about you buying me so much beer. This guy wasn’t listening to me. He was just out drinking. He didn’t know about Sled Island, didn’t know everywhere he usually got drunk was being hijacked by an alt-music weirdo-festival. But he was digging it. He’d tried to strike up a conversation with me earlier, in the bathroom, and I made the mistake of replying at all: Yeah, Nü Sensae is rad. I’m glad they picked up a guitarist finally. I went back to staring at the drywall void above the urinal to avoid him. He bought me six separate beers that night. I slopped one out of my glass onto the bloated floorboards as I danced, slow and careful so that noone’d notice. I pawned a few others on my friend, Mike, who was determined to scale the tallest gal in the shortest tank top. Mike passed out on the bus-bench later that night, and I think we were all grateful, because that way we didn’t have to tell him to fuck off; I don’t know where the tall gal got to. The stamping feet all around me sounded like ripping fabric, the stick from all the beer on the floor, not just mine, and K-Holes’ saxophone player braying as though the horn’s throat were full of sand, a Saharan-jukebox riddled with sentimentality, strung out and crackly. All that beer on the floor instead of in mouths; was a wonder anyone around me was drunk at all.
St. John’s, NL, Canada. *10/17* 2018.
I’m second-guessing my attire. Do you wear a bolo tie on a date? I don’t think this is a date, and I’m still feeling warped and loud like a wobbly piece of sheet metal from grief over Victor. Josh called me last night and we had a good laugh and cry, and talked about how Victor always played, well, all of it too fast. Thrash metal is too fast in the first place, but Vic was too excited to play it at the hitherto agreed upon tempo; you can’t argue with the drummer; the drummer can’t argue with being a little drunk and wanting to play AFAFP (as fast as fukn’ possible). Vic, plucked from our lives like a chin-hair by tweezers. Josh is convinced Vic’s heart just gave out, you know, because he quit drinking. Vic’s younger brother Ryan, poor Ryan, so different from Vic, like a classical statue carved out of a stone-still early draft of Vic, an optimistic refinement of Vic. Vic’s younger brother Ryan alludes vaguely to mental-health issues, to a future charitable fund, but like Josh, also mentions Vic’s recent sobriety from alcohol to me over email. I call a few people Vic had fallen out of touch with, other semi-famous YouTube-rs who weren’t on Facebook anymore, or who had unfriended him after countless late-night babystting Skype calls. Vic, his problems and friendliness alike, stretched tendrils into so many lives, across cyberspace and close-proximity too. I’d used to sponsor him, well, somewhat unofficially, because I wasn’t ever friends with Bill W., and Vic wasn’t organized enough to have made it to a weekly meeting; I’d pick up when he called, and I’d drive anywhere we went, because odds were he was out of his gourd one way or another whatever hour it was. I quit sponsoring Vic when another mutual musician friend of ours, Scott, OD’d six years ago, also connected vaguely to “substance abuse” and “mental health”; Scott’s death was also only ever discussed obliquely, like using the S-word—if that’s what it even was—might sicken us. I never came home for a service.
Vic and I had just chatted on the phone the day before Matt found the body. Vic’d called me proud as a dog with a new stuffy, pleased he’d gone in to some sort of program (I didn’t catch which), that he’d so resolutely taken a step to quit drinking without being prompted to by someone else; I remember rolling my eyes, wondering if it would stick, until unprompted he apologized for how often he’d taken up space in my life. Vic and I had a good cry. And then Matt found the body the next day.
Josh is on anti-anxiety meds for now, and so he hasn’t drank in a few weeks; he cries as hard acknowledging that he drank too much as he did when was talking to me about Vic’s heart literally giving out. So many weepy phone calls in such a small window, my eyes puffy, the puff overlapping the many calls the many hey it’s been a while-s.
I don’t think this is a date tonight. I wear a nice western-style shirt in case, with rat embroidery on each side of the breast plate, a shirt that Kelly made me from scratch for my birthday a few years ago.
I want to be able to tell a story about how I didn’t bother to see Broken Social Scene, to wield that capital, but if this is a date, I want it to be a date more than I want to be able to tell people who don’t care about it that I didn’t bother seeing Broken Social Scene. Bottom-line I don’t want to see Broken Social Scene downtown, especially with no official write-up confirming their presence; the show is one of these “secret” things, built to make people feel alien to their city if they aren’t hip enough to get into a reliable stream of word-of-mouth, or to make you feel special and hip and precious if you do know. I only know one person who might know the secret, one person who knows a few people who think Broken Social Scene is playing tonight—one person who might think we’re going on a date or might think I think we’re going on a date and worry about how to clarify that we aren’t, or that hasn’t had this kind of neurotic railroaded anxiety ruin their appetite the way I have. I think of all the neoliberal rich-dude bros that will probably be at this club that we got passes for who don’t even listen to Broken Social Scene, but don’t listen to them in a less cognizant way than I don’t listen to them. I don’t like the idea that a band is being paid by a very rich legal-drug-dealing company to play a show here. I will concede that I like I’m Still Your Fag, and I like the Patti Smith cover they did on the soundtrack to “The Tracey Fragments.” Only liking those two tunes that are probably not on their set-list tonight is not appetizing groundwork for going to this show.
I hate the idea of a sprawling many-membered hydra band, I hate the idea of a Canadian-institution, and I hate that this boring band who drum up dull visions of cool mediocre Toronto-residents is in St. John’s, for a fat paycheque to play a stupid show that I don’t wanna go to, but I said yes to, in case it was a date. I hate that I am so concerned about the economics of this whole show, that I can’t pinpoint if I’m mad at the band or the neoliberal bullshit that legalizing the government to poorly do what a lot of industrious and entrepreneurial Indigenous folks and POC have been continually persecuted for doing under prohibition. I hate that Trudeau picked the ten-year anniversary of me quitting drinking to legalize weed; at least your dad did something for the fucking arts. I hate how I feel, how everything feels when it collides with me, makes that sheet metal warble; it’s like the flu, how everything aches when it touches you; I never had a hangover when I drank, but I imagine that this is what the wine-flu must’ve felt like too, this grief-fog drunkenness; I hate not having two hands on the wheel of my emotions; I hate having to spend my every waking hour sifting through my emotional wellness with no end in sight, seemingly no return to control on the horizon.
I hope this isn’t a date tonight because my anxiety is clearly not going to let me ‘win,’ whatever a win-condition might look like here. When I arrive at her door a guy comes to answer it, and he is also wearing a nice button-up shirt, and he is also wearing a tie. We cab downtown the three of us. I pull rank and take shotgun. I flex and pay for the whole cab trip and don’t let anyone pay me back. We walk along the street and we see the line. She gets anxious about the line, about all the dude-bros, just think of how eager they are to explain legalization to me, she says, having just made tens of thousands of dollars off of her early intelligent investments in a diverse portfolio of medical and legal weed companies. Just look at that line. Now I almost want to see the band, frustrated by her meek indecision, by her anxiety. The other guy with a tie takes an affable middling position, he’s happy to do whatever. In a moment of backhanded clarity I think God, Victor would have laughed at this guy, he would’ve just limbo’d under the rope, and he would have just gone on the stage and noodled on the drums until someone told him not to. And now he’s gone. Like Scott is gone.
I look to her but with no offer of what we ought to do. I look past her to all the people I don’t know, smoking pot in the streets. Every one of them could be a member of Broken Social Scene and I wouldn’t know it.
She breaks the silence: Trivia at The Republic? We walk past the line, like a train roaring past a row of still cars in queue at the tracks.
AIDS wolf, 2009. Calgary, AB, Canada.
Chloe Lum tugs down the v of my deep-v, dump-trucks a whole Solo’s worth of coke-soaked ice down my pale belly. She kept screaming into the microphone, eyes lolling here and there across all twelve of us at the noise-rock show. Her whole compact body sheer, and sequined like a sickly fish, and she’s stumbling back onto the Lilliputian stage to spit on Yannick Desranleau, the drummer, her partner. I shook out my tucked-in shirt, took care to keep the gushing cubes out of my waistband.
The show was at Broken City, or as we called it, Broke N Shitty. The bar was never that nice, but the booth benches had plenty of room for friends, maybe six or seven wide each side, or more, if it wasn’t for us dudes piling our coats at the end instead of checking them.
I offer Yannick a beer after the show, as he wraps up cables. We don’t do any of that stuff actually. ‘Preciate it though.
I reeled, tried to explain: I don’t drink either—I’m straight-edge. I figured it was convention, or, umm—
It’s cool. I’m glad you figured we’re ‘free-beer-worthy.’
Sure. I mean, yeah.
We took a not-so-awkward photo together, considering the conversation it followed: Chloe hard at work in the background selling merch to us few straggler patrons. Me, handsome in the foreground. Yannick, obliteratedly tired beside me, looking strung out on a big buffet of pills and booze, but dry as a desert-bone. I look pursed to say something, or mid-chaw chewing tobacco; maybe I was tonguing my eyetooth like I could salvage a bit of self-conscious dignity for being so uncool in my sobriety compared to these noisy weirdo fucks.
Retox, 2013. Brooklyn, NY, USA.
I met Justin Pearson prior to Retox’s performance, thanked him for the email interview. The bathroom here covered in years of graffiti like I LiKe BAD GIRLS, and a thick slab of band and slogan stickers on the walls—my favourite: NO FUN. We’re at The Acheron, less a dive, more a hellish pit tucked just off the main streets behind industrial infrastructure. Justin sensed my discomfort, overly accommodated me; he introduced Nick Zinner, like a young Nick Cave, think Birthday Party Nick Cave, Justin tells me. Except forget all the heroin.
Nick offers me beer after the last band, but I just get a soda, and he tells me, That stuff’ll rot your guts. He asks about me growing up on a farm, which he might’ve derived from my camo ballcap, or maybe Justin gave him a rundown when I wasn’t paying attention. Well, I don’t get a list for the show tomorrow, but if you come in from Prospect Hill Park, that side, you can just hop the fence.
A foodie-festival, I mutter rhetorically. I don’t get the point of a food festival. You just stand around eating?
Nick smiles at a woman Justin mentioned he thought was Nick’s new partner, a Black British woman with a hard undercut and thick matte-rose lipstick, then Nick turns back to give me a bit of cool-guy wisdom, or maybe just to say something at all to this weirdo farm kid who didn’t want to pay to see his band play the next day: Hey, man, why go out to anything? He attracts a beer-foam mustache, and then perks up as someone else he recognizes steps between us.
Justin introduces me to every dude in proximity in the post-band impasse as Motörhead plays over the bar’s busted speaker-system. As they broker nods and reluctant handshakes (so embarrassing, why do I unwillingly throw my arm and hand straight out like a 2x4 when I meet people, like, can’t I play it cool?), I worry about remembering so many names from the lineup of pseudo-celebs, “this is x, he’s a great dude”-s, and one vomitous nobody with a kibble-bit of void still pinched in the corner of his smile; like many men, they fail to introduce the women in the room, maybe from jealousy, or maybe from some low-bar male forgetfulness. I ask Nick’s partner her name, and I don’t hear her reply over the too-loud Motörhead, but she shakes my hand so strong, and I nod, just as though I’d heard her, and I smile.
I had thought hard about a drink earlier: A punk in leathers, big Mickey Mouse patch pinned loosely into the warped black skin of his jacket, X’d out Mickey eyes, he gestures to the stage, You like this stuff? I shrug, indifferent. You want a beer?
No malice. No pushing. No one there to see me break edge, dip my toes, come full-circle back to the barley I harvested growing up prairie-bound now here on tap; I thought, If I do this, it’s for me. And if I don’t, it’s for me. All alone, or at least no one knew me. Leather-Mickey offered me an out though, or a soda? I drank myself soda-sick that night.
Two punks thrashing around during Justin’s set knock a fellow with cerebral palsy (with forearm crutches) down three separate times. Justin stops the band right in the middle of their tune. Hey, I’m not here to babysit. He eyes me, and others, But someone else could slap the hell out of you two dicks. I can’t help but notice the way puffed veins populate Justin’s shaved head, like roots or road-maps, certainly angry, but conscious and articulate—disciplined. He hops back on stage. Downbeat on the snare drum, the band’s back in, and the punks skulk off to some other corner.
Art Show Studio Party, Winter 2014. Saint John, NB, Canada.
I don’t wanna go home. Kelly’s unsettled. She doesn’t have time to get out much, and sometimes she gets anxious when she does, but she doesn’t quite detect her anxiety tonight between the beer and the wine. It’s midnight, and home is an hour away. I just want a good bed, and we both have appointments in the morning. We like to share a bed. We’re not clingy and definitely not codependent, we’re just comfy people, we like spending time together, silent much of it.
I remind her, I don’t change gears so quick. You stay, as long as John and Sophia promise they can give you a ride.
You don’t want me to stay.
I don’t, because of the plan we made, and how much my fucked up brain likes plans, but how I feel right now will pass. You stay. I go.
I already feel bad. Let’s just go.
The artist who did the ginormous Welcome/Welcome-Back banner at the show we came from (and came up to SJ for in the first place), she looks at me like I’m shouting, so I stop talking altogether. But she’s also looking at me like I shouldn’t be here, between the beard and the denim, like I don’t quite get ‘it,’ don’t get ‘art’ at all. Not the cute vintage thrift version, but the dumb hick version of the outfit other people here have on too. I don’t like that feeling, don’t like that there is no potable water in the studio, that if I wanna quench my thirst I have to drink some of the mix again, AKA, get eyeballed again for having a whole soda when somebody else needs that to cut down the taste on their gin, or rum. The harbor smells like shit even indoors. Does the cold make that worse? Or does it help?
The record player goes out of commission sometime in the middle of our disagreement, soaked now in Fireball and skipping and fussy, but someone is quick to jack a phone into an iPod dock, and Breakbot ushers out his electronic funk grooves too loud but no louder than the crowd’s centrifuging gossip and licentious courting rituals.
So we go. And we argue. Not even argue. But this is the first time I’ve put my foot down for a commitment in our one+ year run. She wants a smoke and I have none. She wants the music off as we barrel home, even though it helps keep me awake as I drive. She just wants to have fun and I don’t even remember what that feels like.
Come morning we’ve both cried our fair share and feel better. And John and Sophia are stranded in Saint John; their car wouldn’t start in the cold (here’s hoping they found folks to stay warm with). Kelly thanks me for bringing her home when I did, says she wasn’t really having so much fun anyhow. But I still feel like I betrayed her somehow. I know I am not hitting all my marks.
I’m thirsty. The sun is too bright. I feel like shit. She feels great. Actually great. Her remarks are sincere, she’s never been opaque or a liar since I met her. She feels great and I have I have a great big guilt-hangover, it seems. It’s not all right, because I was a bully, I got my way and it coincidentally worked out for her, but I was a buzz-kill. What the fuck is wrong with me? So I walk to my appointment, leave Kelly my truck’s keys. And I feel better. But that party—my night was good, least ‘til I wanted to pump the brakes, and then everything and everyone pounced on me. And it wasn’t her fault or mine, but it still drove that wedge in between her and I like a doorstop. Was I sober to upset other people, or was it to make me happy, comfy? Maybe something in-between. Do I get to pick anymore?
Lethbridge, AB, Canada, *10/17* 2008.
We called it the slingshot. Tawni Tzupa’s keener boyfriend, dunno his name, he drove his Tracker (mini-SUV) down through the slingshot, out-of-towner that he was he got caught in it. You go down into the coulee at 110km/hr, then they collapse a lane, drop the speed to sixty. The cops nabbed him fifty over, but gave him no real hassle, said it was understandable.
All the while I’m there half-snorting in the back, pleased this missionary-dork driving us around got in trouble. I disrespect cops, but Josh’s chortles make more volume than my mastered and subtle oinking, and my mickey of Malibu is imposed sticky on my back-hair, tucked behind me when they pulled up, but I’m buckled in, we’re all stuck buckled in this vehicle. I want tacquitos, don’t even know what a tacquito is, but it’s why we’re on the road.
Josh and I are both passing Music Theory and Rudiments of Performance with the highest marks in the class, but failing out on every other course we’re enrolled in. Tzupa’s beau is visiting before he goes to Africa to build schools and get some ill-advised tattoo that means “crazy like bananas” in Swahili on his chest, just under his collarbone. I wanna party already. Farewell to dorks, hello to top-mark metal-bros, mouths wet in anticipation of tacquitos. I’m feeling too crammed in the back seat, my forearm too exposed against Jillian Cook’s forearm and mad that Josh is colonizing her other forearm even though him and Tawni have been secretly making out lately and mad that I wear medium shirts for length but that my shoulders are too broad and masculine now to really get away with it and mad about the hold-up on tacquitos and mad that my Malibu sits a smidgen sour between my lips and teeth like too-sticky too-sweet and it wouldn’t be if I replenished but the stupid cop took his time to chat and his sausage breath reeked even in the back seat and wasn’t the purpose of the slingshot to just get us all somewhere else quicker wasn’t that the point of our driver staying sober?
I swear I didn’t lose my temper.
Taylor, from back home, emails me that night. Wants to jam. Started a straight-edge outfit: u just gotta pretend 2 not drink. Be sober at the shows. Half-ironic gesture to upset Josh, half to redeem my grades, I sign up, quit the liquor. I found Josh outside of residence that night when I went out for a walk to cool my temper; he’d been sitting on the house’s stone mural in the front yard, passed out and fallen off backward. The mural was a bit like an overgrown hastily sketched tombstone, I think on purpose, either a natural formation, or something meant to emulate one. Josh would’ve fallen back three feet before his head hit. Bit of blood behind his head, but mostly dry, his hair must’ve really padded; his breath is consistent, so I leave him where he is, th’fuckin’ amateur. He’s fine, just sleepy, can’t drink like me, and later, the late-night lawn-sprinklers rouse him without trouble. Miraculously, we will both make it to wind orchestra for our 8am call, and to jazz band in the evening after napping the belly of our incoming Monday away.
I drink more, commit to the bottom of the bottle for just tonight. I roll my ankle trying to chase a deer into the coulee, like Fortune rolls the globe for fun. I lie there pissed, thinking, why do we call it the slingshot. What was that? Like the inertia from the way down was bundled up in my chest, and the cops stopping us sealed it there; I’m on my back here, back cold with wet dew, without a discharge valve for all my momentum. And am I angry because I’m drunk, or because I’m plain angry. And why can’t I tell? And
why do we call it that?