Not long after the Ferris wheel incident, Sarah changed my life again when I saw her outside her locker reading a thin paperback with a bright red cover. I asked what it was and she told me about “Ice Nine” and the end of the world before finishing with, “It’s funny. You’ll like it.” Then she walked off to meet her Neanderthal date du jour.
I only got the book out of the library so I could discuss it with Sarah, but I read it in one night. The next day I went back to the library and took out every other Kurt Vonnegut book they had. Until Cat’s Cradle, I thought writing was about showing off your vocabulary. The stories I wrote in grade eight had more syllables in each word than this entire paragraph. Cat’s Cradle was responsible for me becoming a writer. It was also responsible for me losing my A in grade ten English because my teacher declared all my post-Vonnegut writing “too creative.” So it goes.
By the time we were in grade twelve, Sarah had graduated to college boys. And that meant one thing. If I was going to attract her attention I was going to have to do something spectacular—something epic—like write and direct the greatest rock and roll magic show of all time. It would have been easier to storm Troy.
3
The Black Metal Fantasy
Randy Kagna was the textbook teen definition of cool. Randy never had trouble finding girls who would make out with him. A good-looking guy just shy of six feet tall, he had an easy laugh, a perpetual toothy grin, Rick Springfield’s hair, an endless supply of locally grown marijuana and a basement apartment in his mom’s place with doors that really locked. And thanks to failing grade ten, he was eighteen in grade twelve—which may not have thrilled his parents, but made him pretty much irresistible to sixteen-year-old high school girls.
When he produced The Black Metal Fantasy he’d been out of school a year and his charm was working just as well for him in the real world. Randy’s motto: “Nooooooooooooo problemmm.”
Randy did have one problem though, his Achilles’ crush: Lisa Jorgensen. She may have been the only girl on the planet who liked him as “a friend.” So even though he was probably getting laid with more frequency, by more girls, than any other guy in Vancouver, at least in our neighbourhood, all he could think about no matter what—or who—he was doing, was Lisa.
So Randy hatched a plan. It was the type of devious, ingenious plan only a mad scientist or a teenager in love could possibly come up with. Maybe it was the dope, or maybe he got the idea from studying Hamlet the second time he took English Lit, but since Lisa wanted to be an actress, he’d write a play for her. She’d be the leading lady. He’d be the leading man. The play would be the thing. And, in the play, they’d kiss. They’d never kissed before and Randy was convinced that once his lips touched hers, magic would indeed take place. And that magic would lead to love—or at least sex. Lots of sex.
Lisa looked like she’d been genetically engineered to mate with Randy. The stuff teen dreams were made of circa 1980, she was 5'9" and had the type of open, friendly smile and genuine, contagious laugh that made movie stars millionaires. She and Randy met when Lisa’s family moved in across the street back when they were both in elementary school. For Randy it was love at first sight.
Lisa thought Randy was sweet.
Aside from being a good-looking guy with a lot of drugs, an easy smile and a devious master plan, Randy was also a magician. Doug Henning, a goofy kid from Winnipeg with even longer featherier hair than Randy, a bushy moustache, Bugs Bunny’s teeth and impossibly colourful tie-dyed T-shirts had just made magic hip for the first time since the word “hip” was invented.
After Houdini died in 1926, magic pretty much went with him. There were still a bunch of guys in cheap tuxedos cutting women in half and making things no one wanted to see in the first place disappear, but even the best of them succeeded better as nostalgia than entertainment. When TV was at its corniest and shows like Ed Sullivan featured special guests spinning plates or making little mice talk, magic on the tube looked stodgy, slow and tacky.
Henning was the first “rock and roll” magician and through his mix of charm, energy, and all-new takes on classic illusions, he somehow made audiences believe in magic again. Instead of trying to fool people, Henning tried to make them feel a genuine sense of wonder. And it worked.
Randy had fallen almost as hard for Henning as he had for Lisa and just after the first time he saw Henning on TV surrounded by enthusiastic, beautiful and barely clothed assistants, a fourteen-year-old Randy signed up for a beginner’s magic course at the Jewish Community Centre.
He learned a few tricks from the teacher, a tuxedoed birthday party magician who performed as “the Amazing Kendini”—who was about as amazing as his stage name suggested. Randy snatched the sponge ball from his master’s hand within a few weeks.
That’s where Randy and I first met. We didn’t talk, though. He was fourteen. I was twelve. It would have broken several natural laws of adolescence for us to even acknowledge each other. Besides, from the first time I saw him palm a coin it was obvious he was really good. And I was … okay.
Randy might not have been able to focus on school work, but he quickly earned an A+ at manipulating coins, cards, ropes, ribbons and any illusion he could afford to buy from Jacko’s—the local “joke shop” that specialized in classy gags like fake vomit, whoopee cushions and pepper-flavoured gum. It’s possible the most useful thing Randy picked up from Kendini was Jacko’s address. Even though he started with store-bought magic, Randy instantly stood out from other would-be wizards because he ignored the “snappy patter” on the cardboard cards that came in the same plastic bags as the tricks. Randy created his own routines and revamped every trick he bought, or learned, to make it faster, funnier and more exciting—like how Henning might do it if Henning bought tricks from Jacko’s. And he started performing everywhere. You couldn’t talk to him for five minutes without him making something appear or disappear, or being asked to pick a card from one of the half-dozen decks he always seemed to have in one of his pockets.
But it was the big illusions that really appealed to Randy—the stuff Henning did on TV. Randy didn’t want to make coins and cards disappear, he wanted to vanish an elephant. Forget levitating scarves, he wanted to make women fly across the stage—preferably half-naked women. During his spare time—which was whenever he showed up to class—Randy designed illusions in his notebook. Instead of the details of who attacked whom, when and why during which World War, he’d doodle elaborate creations that would let him fly across the stage—if he could only find a few thousand dollars to build them. It was during one of those classes, when everyone else was learning about the Treaty of Versailles, that Randy first envisioned The Black Metal Fantasy.
The coolest comic in the world was Heavy Metal. It was drawn by crazy French artists who loved battle scenes where people got maimed, bled and died for women who barely wore enough chain mail to cover their seins. If Randy could live in a comic book, it would be Heavy Metal. So that’s where the Metal came from.
“And what could be cooler than black?” he said, when he first shared his vision with Lisa. And who could argue with that?
Fantasy—with a capital F—that’s what Randy was all about. He was going to bring a Heavy Metal comic to life and put it onstage, complete with a kick-ass rock soundtrack. That was The Black Metal Fantasy.
It would have magic, it would have music, it would be a thousand times hipper than Henning and best of all, it would have a climactic love scene where he would make out with Lisa Jorgensen.
After he graduated, Randy started performing at clubs. He also did benefits, and visited hospitals and old folks’ homes to cheer up the inmates. He began to develop the show, building the tricks with his friend Norman. While they were making the guillotine, they realized the show could be huge. That’s when Norman told Randy about his cousin Jane. “Jane works for Rainbow,” Norman told him. Rainbow. No explanation was required. Rainbow had