Amy Williams
Her Kitchen, Fernwood Neighbourhood, Victoria, 2014
That epic tour we did. We were the Supersonic Grifters. We roamed the country from soup to nuts starting in Fernwood, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, heading due east, all the way to goddamn Signal Hill, Newfoundland, a million thousand kilometres away, back west into Quebec for a while, then continued west and wound up in Calgary during the Folk Festival.
Yeah, we met Campbell Ouiniette there. He said he was gonna make us famous like the Low Johannahs, but then he disappeared. No, I wasn’t there when they did the Stampede, that was later, that was a different tour, later. They kept the band name that I had helped come up with, but they replaced me with Giulietta on that one. Yeah. On my tour we were in Calgary during Folk Fest, not the Stampede. They’re total opposites. Then we headed for home and finally imploded, or exploded, at the ferry terminal at Swartz Bay outside of Victoria again.
At first we let Jacob be in charge of the money. I don’t know why we did that. I guess he was sort of our leader at first, anyway. Artistically? Or something? It’s funny how you tend to give up leadership to anybody who just acts sure of themselves a lot. And Jacob always had that swagger to him. He always had an opinion, that’s for sure. And he was very, very handsome back then. What a handsome, lovely boy he ruined. Himself.
So, we would get to a gas station, fill up, and then somebody would have to wake Jacob from his drunken unconsciousness and get him to reach into his duct-taped wallet and hand us some nasty, sweaty, wet bills. And always, always, he’d grumble about it. One time I remember him reaching into his unwashed pocket and saying, “This shit has got to stop.” What the fuck does that even mean?
So after a while, I just started being the one to collect the money from the promoters, because I had a baby to feed. I mean, Wyatt was Jacob’s baby, too, but that did not seem to be a major factor in Jacob’s decision-making process.
I was in charge of the food money. We had two rules: nobody who’s drinking whisky can drive, and nobody eats the baby food but the baby.
God, we were poor. So damn poor. I’m not rich now, but then, we would sometimes spend our mornings digging in our pockets to pool dimes and nickels, even pennies, to get something to eat. Some gigs only paid enough for gas in the van, to get us to a show that we were hoping would pay more than that. Sometimes we just stayed in a town because we had no money to move on. Because I was the mother, I somehow got nominated by default to be the responsible adult in the band. Looking back on it, my level of responsibility only existed in comparison with the others, who were basically living like stray dogs or something. DD had to remind Tom to take off his shoes at the end of the night. Then she’d have to stop him from pissing in them.
I’m proud that I was able to keep us all alive on a food budget of just over twenty bucks a day for five people. The baby’s milk and a can of baby food came first and that was about five bucks a day. So, basically, most of the time you had to go to a Safeway or a Loblaws or a Sobeys and get the roast chicken. You got the roast chicken and a big bag of dinner rolls from the roll bin in the bakery department. We got our vitamin C from the bars we played, drinking screwdrivers, Caesars, and gin and tonics with a twist. So we never got scurvy like some bands we knew.
But really, if you wanted to feed five people, you had to go with the chicken. They have these roasted chickens in bags with aluminum on the inside. They’re clearly the worst kind of battery hen, beak clipped off, whole-life-in-a-ten-inch-cage kind of birds, pumped full of God knows what kind of modern chemistry and hormones. I swear my left tit got bigger eating all that chicken. But it fed you. If you got some skin with the flesh, it tasted like something. Salt and pepper and grease, but it filled you up and gave you something do with your hands and mouth for ten minutes. And you wiped the grease from your hands on the inside of the roll and spread some free butter from the little pats at the deli counter on them.
We usually got at least a pizza or something from wherever we were playing, and most of the band was flying on speed or cocaine if we could get somebody to give us some, so that also saved on the food money because a lot of times people weren’t hungry.
I think we were in Thunder Bay, and we’d just passed through what Rosalyn Knight calls the “great foodless region” of the Canadian Prairies. We’d had a lot of chicken by then. I admit that.
I was at the wheel and we pulled into the big parking lot of a Safeway on the outskirts of the city. We hadn’t wanted to stay upstairs in the Royal Albert Hotel because it was so gross and Rosalyn had told us she’d found a dead body in the hallway there, so we’d left Winnipeg right after the show the night before, and it was probably getting toward noon and nobody’d eaten since a dinner of something really nasty at the Albert.
I put the Plush Monster in park and sighed, and began my short little song and dance of reaching into my pocket and shrugging and going, “Welp, I guess unless anybody has a better idea, I better go in and get the Universal Chicken,” which is what we called it. Kind of like the “Universal Soldier” of the Buffy Sainte-Marie song.
That’s when DD snapped. She grabbed the twenty out of my hand with a flick and a “gimme that,” and climbed down onto the asphalt. She said, “I’m so fucking sick of eating fucking chicken,” and stomped off toward the store.
We just lounged around waiting for her. I mean, I didn’t want the job of feeding the fucking band. Just because I was a mother didn’t mean I felt fucking nurturing toward everybody in the world, and I sure-as-shit wasn’t feeling very nurturing toward the rest of the band after being jammed into a Ford Econoline with them for three weeks.
About five minutes later, DD comes out running. Under one arm, she’s got a baguette and the biggest fucking wheel of cheese I’ve ever seen in my life. And she’s booking it.
She jumps into the van, drops the cheese wheel once, leaps down to grab it, climbs back into the passenger chair, and yells, “Drive! Drive!” Meanwhile the biggest fuckin’ butch-lookin’ woman comes stalking out of the automatic doors of the Safeway. Not fat like roly-poly fat but fuckin’ built like a fuckin’ Scandinavian truck. She looked like if the giant fat lady from the opera did five years in maximum security and did a lot of weight training and took off her giant horned helmet and got a brush cut and put on a security-guard uniform.
And she was not in a hurry. She was determinedly heading right for us like an unstoppable force of the universe.
And DD yelled, “Drive! Drive! Fuckin’ drive!” at me.
But it just wouldn’t catch.
At this point we hadn’t had the van for that long. We’d probably only put a couple thousand K on it so I think at that point it was normally starting. Later I did learn how to start a Ford Econoline by rolling it, but at this point it would normally have started. Still it was about a forty-two-year-old vehicle, so it didn’t like to be rushed, if you know what I mean.
But fuckin’ DD of course would never believe me that there was something wrong with the van. She would always blame my “girly driving” and have to look at the thing herself before she’d ever believe me about anything with a motor on it. So she reaches over and turns the key herself, and even lunges her foot over to the goddamn pedal to give it some gas — which, if I did that she’d be like, “Whoa! Don’t flood the engine!” but she was clearly panicking.
Also it felt like the security-guard lady was somehow controlling the van with her mind, willing it to stay put. She didn’t seem worried that we were gonna peel out and get away. It was