Mandolin Dreams. Chapter IV
Montreal, 1987
The universe is only as large as our perception of it.
- Rick Rubin
The school had rented a hall in a park. It usually hosted fancy weddings, and other similar events, but the owner's daughter, was in our graduating class and nothing but the best for... I don't remember her name. Anyway, it was a fancy affair. We'd had the ceremony under a big white tent and dinner in the main building. It was a typical grad night, everyone full of empty promise and wet dreams.
Van seemed to enjoy it more than I did. I guess that there was a certain elation to knowing that this was it. It was the last time we would have to see these people, ever. Or it might be that he had a bead on some girl that had snubbed him all year but finally seemed to see the rebel and potential rock star as worthy of roll in the bush. I wasn't interested in any that. Well, I mean, I was, of course I was, but I had a girlfriend at the time and this grad was a student-only affair.
At the end of the evening, I sat outside on a rolled-up rug in the dark under the large white tent amidst the hundred or so chairs that were stacked and strewn about. It was getting late and I desperately wanted to get the fuck out of there, but I was Van's ride, and I wasn't sure where he was, and I didn't want to cut his fun short, and he deserved it. High school had been hard for him. He'd never been very popular. He refused to fit in, but had been able to carve out a place for himself in the school band. It probably also helped that in our little losers club, there was a large football player and a small martial artist. They always had his back and prevented much of the worst bullying.
I sat on this rolled-up carpet and watched the people in the hall through the window, as they danced and swayed to the music. At one point, I spotted Phil, an honorary loser; honorary because he seemed to have the ability to fit in nicely with some of the better crowds as well. He had a girl, Sandy, cornered by the window and was singing, or lip-syncing, at her into a plastic swizzle stick. "I wanna know what love is / I want you to show me / I wanna feel what love is" You get the idea.
I chuckled, and shook my head.
"What's so funny?" Van tumbled out of one of the bushes and was tying his belt. "You didn't hear any of that, did you?" He pointed behind him and to the girl that was scampering back to the party in her dirty white dress. She was smiling, and that made me smile as well.
"Nah. Your secrets are safe. I was looking at that." I pointed to Phil who now had his arms on either side of the girl, and was moving just enough to prevent her from getting away from him.
"Bloody hell. What an idiot." Van said.
"Should we help her?" I asked. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Van surveyed the scene for a few seconds and said "Hold on. Shouldn't be too long." We watched as he got just a little too close, and she had had enough. We didn't see what happened exactly, but Phil just dropped out view, and Sandy stepped over him and rejoined her friends.
"How did you know?" I asked.
"Well, earlier this evening, Phil may or may not have offered my twenty bucks to use my parents's shed for an hour, and I may or may not have told her that." He grinned, and pulled out a twenty dollar bill from his pocket “and now we have breakfast at Cosmo's tomorrow, on Phil."
I laughed. We weren't generally mean or at all antagonistic, but Phil had it coming. He'd been talking shit about me to the rest of the group and Van couldn't abide that. I loved him so much for that.
"You okay?" He asked.
"Yeah. Not really. I don't know what it is, but I thought the end of high school would have been more momentous, more important somehow."
"I get it." He stood up and faced me, his back to the hall, to anyone that might look this way and pulled out a mickey. It was filled with something or other from his father's tiny, overstocked basement bar. He poured some of it into the empty glass of coke that I had in my hands. The old ice cubes seemed happy to have something to float around in, to have purpose again. Van took a shot directly from the flask before putting it away and sitting back down.
"I thought that things would be clearer, that we would know what to do next, that we'd have at least a solid direction. Instead, it's just more of the same, except now it's on us. We need to just accept the system; it's our time to opt in, to join the ranks, and of our own free will no less."
"Fuck that." Van said. "That may be what all these assholes will do; what they need to do, but not us."
I nodded but didn't really feel it. "I already feel like we've made too many wrong decisions to get on the right track. How messed up is that?" We'd both been told that we had too much potential, that we had to go into the sciences, that would be best, open the most doors. I hated that word "potential."
Van took another swig and continued. "Once we're on our own, we'll do what we want. You're going to write and I'm going to make music, and then we'll get together and write a rock opera about how fucking stupid all of these, these Bootmen really are!" There was nothing more impressive than Van excited about a new project. He exuded molten optimism that swept you away while it burned you out. It felt fantastic and it burned like hell.
"Why don't we start now?" I asked. "Spend the whole summer on it. I have some ideas and I know you have a few riffs that would be great. Let's just get it done. Fucking Bootmen." I took a swig of whatever it was that Van had put in my glass. "Ugh! What the hell is this stuff?"
Van chuckled "I don't know. A little bit of every bottle in my dad's bar." Van took out the mickey and we heard a voice from behind us. A short old man appeared behind me and faced Van. He must've been in the back of the tent the whole time.
"You kids aren't supposed to be in here." He said in a quaint British accent. He looked at the mickey in Van's hand and my glass. "By the looks of it, you shouldn't be drinkin' that either." He grinned. "But I won't tell, if you give us taste." He put out his hand.
"Uh. Sure." Van handed it over.
The man raised it to his lips and took a large swig. "Bloody hell! That stuff is vile. You guys have balls drinking that." And gave it back to Van. "Now get out of here and try to keep your noses clean. I'll be watching you." He tapped his nose as he said it.
That was the first time we saw Hobson.
It's funny, now that I think of it that he was there at that exact moment. It was such a trivial evening. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, in what was of interest to him and --am I allowed to say?-- and them.
The rock opera? No, we never did spend the summer working on it. We never got to it at all. It still eats away at me that we never did it. We messed up with that.
What was it going to be about? Why? Fine. We'd had an idea to write a rock opera about the bootmen--
The Bootmen? It was silly but it was our name for those people that either made the rules or those that followed them. You know, 'the man', or 'the suits.' It was going to be about the Bootmen's rule coming to an end at the hands of a secret society, the Quiddists. They wanted to bring truth and art to prominence and get rid of everything else.
Why does any of this matter? It has nothing to do with Hobson. Can we take a break?