It’s A Love That Has No Past

Earl Fowler

I’ve been having dreams about Taylor Street. Taylor Street and Wiggins Avenue in Saskatoon. Wilf Murray’s house. We used to sit on his roof when his mom was at work and huck half-eaten crab apples at passing motorists. Once watched from that vantage point as a pizza was delivered, exactly according to our order specifications, at the doorstep of Wilfred’s tetchy neighbour across the alley at Taylor and Ewart. Wilf had a mock CFQC-TV studio in the basement that his father had installed before I met him. The dad worked for Saskatoon’s only television station, which seemed to be partly staffed by Brits for some reason. Real spotlights, fake cameras and a set with an anchor desk. Both his parents had English accents. Later, our band would practise in the basement and water down the liquor of the downstairs boarder, who complained about both to Wilf’s mom. I don’t blame him one bit. Then Wilf kicked my friend Bob out of the band and later Paul out of the band and I should have quit right away but was born a coward and had to work up to it quietly to retrieve my bass. Never went back.

But the dreams persist.

One of the CFQC employees, Mr. Smith, was a tech support guy who had served in the Royal Air Force during the war. He and his wife bought the house on the corner lot next to ours on Ewart. His wife was a ginger bombshell who used to dress and undress without closing the curtains to their bedroom window facing our yard, prompting my puritanical father to erect a screen shielding our tiny concrete patio from the view. Bob’s older brother, Peter, swears he once saw Mrs. Smith topless, chasing her toddler daughter down the block. Early one morning, there was a commotion on our front lawn. Mr. Smith and Lloyd Saunders, a local celebrity as the CFQC sportscaster, were rolling around in a drunken fight. My dad broke it up. The day Bob moved in across the street after his family moved back to Saskatchewan from Baltimore, the Smiths’ eldest boy, Allan, hit him in the face with a toy truck. I met Bob the next day and he hit me in the face with a toy truck, figuring this was the way things were done around here. Toy trucks were metal then. Tough neighbourhood.

The Smiths moved to Newfoundland. Good riddance.

Wilf was unusual insofar as his parents were divorced. In those days, unhappy couples mostly stayed together for the sake of the children. Foskett was even more of an oddity in that he was being cared for by foster parents and went by two last names, his foster parents’ and his real name, Creighton. We never called him by his first name, which felt cold and grown up and a bit British boarding shoolish to me. He was one of those boys who got in a lot of trouble, at home and at school, but were mostly looking for a place to fit in. Foskett operated the band’s light show with floodlights he pilfered from around the neigbourhood, mostly from Christmas displays. I can’t remember where he procured the strobe light, but we felt like we were tripping on acid whenever it was on. He and Wilf concocted a plan to steal a prized amplifier on display in the window of Gordie Brandt’s downtown music emporium. I was supposed to distract the clerk by asking questions that would take us both to the back of the store while Wilf and Foskett sneaked in and spirited away the amplifier. I chickened out as I knew I would.

It was a stupid idea.

One of the songs we did was the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Wilf used to sing: “Come on baby, bite my wire.” He was a terrible lyricist and a worse singer. None of us could sing for toffee.

Wilf and Foskett started talking about “cunts,” a particularly ugly word I had never heard before. Especially the dirty, leering, guttural way they said it. I thought they were saying “cuts.” Out of my depth but taking a stab as I groped and grokked toward the general context, I made a joke about Paul or Bob running for a Band-Aid if they ever saw a girl’s cut. They laughed and laughed. I suddenly remembered I was late for supper.

In my hurry, I forgot my guitar.

I was sitting by myself on Wilf’s front steps, waiting for him to come home so I could retrieve the bass — which cost my parents $90 and was shaped like Paul McCartney’s long-lost Höfner 500/1 — when a beautiful woman with a push-up bra and a miniskirt got off the No. 4 bus and sauntered by. In those days, if you were a kid, you could ride the bus for a nickel. It was my first stirring of sexual yearning involving a grown-up woman instead of a schoolgirl. I was maybe 12, 13. She must have been 25. If she’s still alive, she’d be in her mid-eighties today. The downside of a bass shaped like that is that it pinches your thigh if you try to play it while sitting.

The downside of getting old is that your thigh hurts anyway, sitting or standing.

Bob and Paul and I stopped hanging around with Wilf after the band debacle. He wouldn’t acknowledge us later whenever he saw us in high school. He’d grown his hair all the way down to his ass and walked as though he were balancing an ancient amphora on his head, so as not to mess with the Robert Plant vibe. He looked straight ahead and walked straight into the future. We never saw him again, though I just noticed on the Internet that there’s a grizzled jazz drummer named Wilf Murray who kind of looks like him.

Only with an epic combover.

Bob and Paul and I get together once a year and immediately revert to our childhood selves, as old friends are wont to do. We share memories no one else has. We also remember things about each other and our families that the other two have long forgotten. Well into adulthood (chronologically speaking), Bob and I climbed a fence in the alley between Wiggins and Ewart and sneaked into the very yard where we used to steal the crabs. We absconded with four handfuls of forbidden fruit. They tasted just as juicy and sour as they had 20 years before, but we didn’t huck any at cars. Bob is a medical doctor with a long list of degrees and a distinguished résumé of honours and accomplishments. Paul is a very great artist who never exhibits his paintings. He has a house bursting with masterpieces. Me, I got so drunk on crab apple wine as a teenager that I blundered into a church youth group at nearby Cranberry Flats while screeching John Lennon’s soaring ee-ee-ee-ee part at the conclusion of “Don’t Let Me Down.” A welcome change from “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore”? Doubtful.

Friendship is all well and good (the best thing there is), but if I ever go to Newfoundland, Allan Smith is in for a rim shot to the kisser with a Tonka 4x4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCtzkaL2t_Y