Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

“They're hurting each other,” says Leon Kimmel, a transplant to Cape Breton from Windsor, Ontario. He is an ecologist, a green guy, proactive in the fight against pesticides and seismic testing, who runs a sugarbush on his land, and takes serious photographs.

“Fuck do you expect?” says the guy next to him. “It's a goddamned fight.”

Leon feels himself nudged towards the door by the crowd trying to get out. He came to the Hoff just because he was curious about Wing Night, and karaoke. Fists flying is not his idea of a fun evening.

“… on blueberry hill,” Molly and Wren sing anyway. “… on blueberry hill… when I found you.” They watch the crowd melt away from the window, as the combatants shove back in through the door, slightly bloodied, clothes ripped up, their arms around each other's shoulders. They belly up to the bar for their next beer.

If they are going to fight, Emily thinks, they should do it for something that matters. She delivers three baskets of wings and a pitcher of beer to a table of heavyset women who have come to eat and drink. None of these women will sing, though a couple of them sometimes dance.

Emily had been in Quebec for the WTO protest, and she had been briefly arrested, but her friend Brendan had been smacked with a nightstick. He still gets headaches. She tries to tell people about that, but no one here is interested, at least, not among her high school friends. They are interested in getting drunk and getting laid. She is glad to be back here if only to learn that about everybody. It will be a kind of closure.

Leon slips out the door, and drives his Volvo back into the night.

Marilyn Goo-goo pages through the song list — so many songs, and nothing yet by Rita Coolidge.

As Jamie heads from the window back to the verandah, Candy grabs him by the leg of his shorts. “Jamie, you know all about this. You go to school. I want to sing ‘Sixteen Tons,’ but Colin don't want me to.”

“That's a man's song anyway, for a man to sing,” Colin says without looking up.

Jamie lays a hand on Colin's head. “Well, she's a kind of a man, Colin. She's a candyman. She buys the drinks, don't she?”

“That's right, sing ‘Candy Man,’” Colin says, looking in her face. Jamie removes Candy's hand from his pants, and heads back to the verandah. “You going to play a few tunes?” he asks as he passes old Cameron Fitzgerald, who sits with his fiddle case open, plucking the strings. “Yass,” says Cameron, “They're fixin' the sound. As soon as they fix it.”

“So the guy, I think this happened because he had come here loving some woman in town — he didn't know anything about hanging himself — and that's how he decided to use chicken wire. No one in town knew him real well. I don't think he came from down here. He was quite a heavy man anyway, and when they found him… ” Marvin suddenly remembers that Emery is a Vietnam vet, and possibly suffers from post-traumatic stress, and has seen worse than this, and probably blocks it out. He suddenly feels bad, but is compelled to finish the story. There is some pleasure he takes in telling it: “So all that was dangling off the bridge there was the head and the spine. The rest was gone. When Sandy, the poor Mountie on duty, went to investigate he didn't know what he was looking at. They thought maybe some coyotes had jumped up and grabbed the rest of the body for their dinner, but then they found the whole mess further down the brook. All the flesh had sort of slumped off like an overcoat.”

Emery has no response, as if he isn't listening. Molly and Wren prance by on the dance floor. They are trying to lead a parade, a samba line, a bunny-hop. They pull people up to the dance floor. Emery will not dance. Marvin will, though he has no partner. Molly works out on a pillar as if she is advertising lap dances. Alexander and Hilda shuffle onto the far corner of the dance floor. Stacey MacMaster is called in from the verandah for her turn to sing Shania Twain's “Don't Be Stupid (You Know I Love You).” “This is more like it,” Hilda says. She closes her eyes to get into the beat, bites her lower lip, shakes her curly hair to the music. Rodney Frasier lunges onto the dance floor, followed by Mary, his wife, who grabs him by his belt, his shirtsleeve, whatever she can, to keep him from falling into people. The stroke he suffered a few months back has made his movement spastic, out of control, and reduced his voice to some grunts and moans that only Mary understands. His infirmity arrived with a new love for dancing, square or social. Before the stroke he had never shown an interest, but now he dances at every opportunity, thrashing about the floor to some people's amusement, and others' chagrin.

Alexander Goldfarb doesn't know what to make of this, after he is hit across the nose by a flying forearm. Mary apologizes as she follows her man around among the other dancers, trying to boogie as she goes. Rodney is a boatwright and mechanic, and a member of the Fisherman's Cooperative. He doesn't work anymore, but Mary has hope. Hilda and Alexander keep dancing with one eye on Rodney. Marvin sits back down. He was dancing alone, anyway. Wren sits for a moment looking at the playback on Emery's video camera, her hand over her mouth. “I'm sorry,” she says. “Just one more song, I promise.”

Someone taps Marvin on the shoulder and he turns. It's Eric Massie, an earnest young high school teacher, and an accomplished drunk. “You know,” he says, “the week after they found the fella on the bridge, you know what else happened?” He pauses a moment and waits for Marvin to shrug. “Well I won't say his name, because you might know the family, but this other fella, he just went over to his aunt's house, where his aunt lived all her life, an old lady. He didn't even know her very well, because he'd been away working in Alberta for years, he just went over to her house with a gallon of gasoline, sat down on the floor in her living room, and set himself on fire. Burned himself to death right in his aunt's living room. Poor woman. She was only old, didn't know this fella who he was except he was her nephew. So that's the winter for you here in Inverness.”

Marvin sees the glee on the young teacher's face as a reflection of his own abject pleasure in telling the gruesome suicide to Emery. Schadenfreude . He touches the young teacher's arm, and stands up. “I need another drink,” he says, and heads for the bar. The pub is packed now. Marvin swerves to head out to the verandah. He doesn't feel like he needs another drink.

Alexander and Hilda stop dancing when Danny MacLean leaps to the stage to thrust his fists towards the ceiling like a rock star working his fans, and he has his fans in the audience who chant “Dan-ny, Dan-ny.” He grabs the mic from Molly's grip, gives her a big stage grin. She is startled but a good sport. She embraces and dances him around, kissing his neck until he breaks loose and starts to sing one of his three songs. “I'm too sexy for this song, too sexy for this song… ” Rodney's spasms are re-ignited by this new energy, and he goes hurtling across the floor. His jeans are loose, and flap around his hips and threaten to slip down. His mouth flies wide open in a face as gaunt as an Edvard Munch scream. Couples flatten themselves against the walls as Mary follows, dancing and apologizing, pulling up his pants.

“He's not too bright,” says someone to Alexander, meaning Danny. “He knows but three songs, and not much else. This is his glory when he comes here. He really thinks he's a rock star.” Danny raises his fists again and grins triumphant at the packed stadium in his mind. He appears for his fans out of a cloud of smoke in a ring of exploding fireworks. Alexander and Hilda have had enough and go to the bar to grab their wings. They head for the verandah.