The Trucker Who Fringed
By Ed Malin
I met him at a café in Winnington. It was a wonderful Canadian summer day. Folks were swarming the town because of the upcoming Rainbow Fringe Festival. Posters for theatrical productions covered every available space, and even some that weren’t available, like the side of a big 18-wheeler.
What surprised me most about him, and this is relative, since so much surprised me, is that he saw some performers plastering a sign to the side of said big rig, which was parked to the side of the street café, and encouraged the actors to keep putting up their sign. It was his 18-wheeler, after all. He never did tell me how he parallel-parked it on the corner of Portage and Whyte.
Not only did he not object to the postering, but, since he was reading the official Fringe Festival newspaper at the time, he recognized the name of their production and asked them what they thought were its selling points. Who ever heard of a trucker who loves going to the theater?
I was there as an arts journalist. Well, I had planned to be in Winnington to cover my girlfriend’s show. Till she broke up with me. Tough luck, eh? That’s what happens when someone hits the road to tour a show, they call you up to say they’ve had a change of heart. Which begs the question: was there a heart in there to change?
The trucker didn’t need to know that, but I told him anyway. He then calmly asked for the name of my ex girl’s show. He would see it on my behalf and let me know how it went. The guy was really planning to see the whole Festival. I said that was was very nice but… He mentiioned it was his vacation, and in practice the only time he could be around other people. Besides, he knew a thing or two about exes himself.
As I was saying thank you, he gave he a tooney. The suggestion was for me.to go get a Labatt Bleue, since I had the blues already. If I needed him, his rig shouldn’t be hard to find.
Next time we had coffee together, I asked if he’d seen anything good so far. He said he liked the ladies of Winnington, the way they just smiled at you. I clarified, had he seen any good shows in the Festival?
So far, he saw “NASA Bahamas”, a dystopian future where space exploration operations are moved from Florida and Texas to the Caribbean, everyone gets real chill, and no actual space missions ever happen.
And then he saw “Only Poodles Are Toys”, which was a rom-com and fairly self-explanatory.
This led him to talk about his life. He hit the road when his wife cheated on him. Which was Valentine’s Day five years ago. A time he refers to as his Bison tenial.
He asked if Big John John Terwilliger was my given name.
I told him, “it’s a stage name…like Deutero-Isaiah”.
But was I actually on stage, then?
“I had been, in the before times..I kept the name. It might come in handy when the time was right.”
The next day, the trucker approached me. He had figured out that my ex was in a show of her own devising, entitled “Trudy Cool”. It was about Gertrude Stein and the living of the literary life in Paris.
You know, he said, I had to learn French in school because this is a bilingual country, eh? Trudy Cool, that sounds like something not so nice in French.
For a guy who spent so much time on the road by himself, well, he certainly didn’t have to speak another language.
Then he told.me, he loves to sing along to French ballads on the radio.
We went through his favorites: Françoise Madeleine Hardy, Jean-Jacques Goldman, Celine Dion. We never did get to talk about the actual show.
Next time I was heading through that part of town, I saw the Trucker about to go into a venue. I waved to him from the venue across the street, which I was entering. We met up afterwards, for a Molson or three.
“What did you see?” I asked
He smiled. “Leave Room For Milk – an improv show where the AUDIENCE creates the story.”
“Any good?”
“Sometimes the audience has too much going on.”
I thought this was a generous assessment. I thought of him driving along in his truck, no one else around, which leaves plenty of room for milk.
“How about your show?” he asked.
I told him about “Lover In Law”.
“Sounds intriguing,” he said.
“I mean, yeah, but. Anyone who would marry my brother, I don’t see myself getting the hots for her.”
He paused. “I had a twin brother, but he died.”
“I’m sooorrry,” I said.
“It was many moons ago. Still, what if she couldn’t tell the difference? What if this Lover In Law had been manipulated?”
I nodded and decided this topic of conversation was for hosers.
He flagged me down on the street the next day. “I think there’s a woke show in the Festival this year.”
“Oh that’s progress. I think they tried to get one last year, but couldn’t get anyone from the U.S. to agree to travel here and perform.”
“Well, do you have time to see it?” he asked.
“Which one is it again?”
“Malcolm the IXth.”
“Why does that sound familiar?”
“Oh, well it’s like they took Malcolm X but put him into Macbeth.”
“You’re supposed to say the Scottish Play.”
“I’ll give it a try, and keep an open mind.”
“Sorry,” I said, “I promised I would go see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Zombies.”
His eyes lit up. “Is that by the same folks who did Beavis and Butthead and Zombies last year?”
“No,” I said, “I think it’s just a coincidence.
We ran into each other at the after hours club for the Festival performers, which was called Mike A Delic. If you wanted to, you could get up and preview little bits from your show, or freestyle some verse. When I entered the glorious basement space which was hosting Mike A Delic, the first thing I saw was his eyes, focused on the person on stage, who was my ex girl.
She screeched into the mic “I am Gertrude Stein, hard as rock! You are all a lost generation but I am a lesbian and I have collected you, like cats! You can all lick me, you pussies!” Somehow, a flash of smoke happened. And then she was gone from the stage.
A minute later, I came down the stairs, trying to unsee what I had seen. He may have been doing the same thing. It was dark, but I think he might have been crying.
“You have a good day?” he asked.
Leaving one of the many Festival venues one day, I saw the trucker. Given the total number of shows in the Festival, I was surprised that we’d both chosen to see “Anna Freud and the King of Siam”. For a moment, we both seemed poised to ask each other about this ambitious new piece of work.
“I learned so much about her…”
“Who? Anna Freud or Anna Leonowens?”
“Neither had been on my reading list before this.”
“The thing is, he stammered, I fell asleep in the middle.”
“I breathed a sigh of relief. I loved it, but I fell asleep at the end.”
“Do you think between us we can piece together the whole story?”
“Mind if I ask you, since you fell asleep, what did you dream about?”
“Who says I have dreams?”
“This wouldn’t be Freudian analysis if you didn’t have dreams.”
“Very well. I dreamt I was in a nice, warm, cozy chair. Well, it was like being in my rig, driving, except I never sleep and drive. Ya might hit a caribou, and who’ll be laughin’ then?”
We had intrigued each other to a stalemate, but neither of us had time to go back and see the show for a second time, with so many Festival offerings, of course, so I bought the show’s stage manager a box of Tim Hortons donut holes and obtained the script for the show in question. The Trucker and I read it out loud, and this is how it went:
I woke up hurting from whatever I drank last night.
I know I was wicked to myself, but am not wise enough to know why.
It’s at times like this that I think about Anna Freud and the King of Siam.
No, I am not getting confused with Anna and the King of Siam a.k.a. The King and I, because my life is not a fucking musical.
Anna Freud will go down in history as the first woman who was told at birth that she had daddy issues, thus sparing her the trouble of working it out for herself.
Anna Freud knew exactly who her father was, and tracked everyone else in the world to make sure they had a normal level of attachment. What was it like for her on Sundays? Get the fuck off that couch! But I’m tired, Papa! Only people who don’t know what’s wrong with them are permitted to lie down on that couch. You, in contrast, know exactly what’s wrong with you!
But, now that I think about it, there was a real woman named Anna Leonowens, who went to Siam in the 1860s, and helped the Younger King survive the psychic guilt of his father, the Older King. There was a whole harem of children from this one Royal father, a very vengeful person by all accounts, and one legitimate heir, who was coming to terms with who he was supposed to be. How horrifying.
You know what else is weird? Based on his date of birth in 1856, Sigmund Freud himself could have been one of those kids who grew up in the harem not the heir to the throne. Depending on one’s view of reincarnation, naturally.
Getting to know you. Getting to know all about you? If you did not disclose the reasons you are fucked up, nowadays that can only mean either you don’t know them or you don’t want to know them. Don’t come at me with this it’s all good bullshit.
Because I wouldn’t call the Young King of Siam ruthless, I mean he does look so handsome in the musical, but without the very judgey, sarcastic, Western widow Anna Leonowens coming into his court to educate him, one might imagine that Siam, now known as Thailand, may have been finger-fucked by France along with its neighbors Laos and Cambodia.
The power of Women Freuds is not purely my invention. The great jazz bassist Charles Mingus, who was depressed and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy hadn’t been invented yet, who was the one and only musician ever fired by congenial bandleader Duke Ellington, who he saw as a father and was trying to please, this same Mingus recorded an improvisational twist on the standard song “All The Things You Are”. His version was called “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother”. If you don’t believe me, I have it on vinyl.
Here’s to taking a good, hard look at your problems. Here’s to sharing your troubles with your trusted friends, or people who challenge you, or both? And if you liked the performance here in Winnington, tell your friends in Saskatoon because we’re planning a “transference” to their Festival. Thank you.
The next day, we had agreed to meet for brunch. It took me a while to persuade the Trucker to meet me at this time, and he was wary of the hype. But when we met, he said he was familiar with the concept of eating breakfast at 1 PM after waking up from a snooze in his rig in a parking lot.
On that note, I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to see in this fine city, to which he replied he had always wanted to go to the big Provincial Museum. So we went.
There was a lovely exhibit about how the animals of the Plains survived so well given the relative lack of light pollution from big human cities.
“That explains why they always run in front of my 18-wheeler out on the highway,” he mused. “Not used to people.”
I felt sad.
“I’ve gotten good at swerving to avoid the four-legged ones.”
The exhibit had a lot of info on bats which are nocturnal and have their own set of plants that open their petals after dark just to get pollinated by flying creatures.
He nodded. “Night flight is a lifestyle choice.”
I strolled to the next case, which showed how coral reefs release large batches of hormones at night so everything can get fertilized.
“Wow. Just wow.”
“it is pretty deep,” he agreed.
As the end of the Festival approached, I offered to take the Trucker to a nice place for drinks. This was The Proseccutor, the wine bar across the street from the Provincial Courthouse. We got ourselves a bottle of bubbly, and laughed and cried about all the shows we had managed to see. Indeed, there were a few we had missed, and the odds were these would get transubstantiated to the upcoming Calgary Fringe, for those who didn’t mind driving a ways and planning to be out further West in a few weeks.
Nearly a bottle in, he looked me in the eye. “She didn’t deserve you.”
I thought that was a nice thing to say, but wanted to make sure who she was.
“My daughter.”
Now I was feeling drunk. “Do I know your daughter?”
“Perhaps you thought you did,” he intimated.
“Who is this person?” I asked, after sipping some more.
“The one in the show about Trudy Stein.”
“She’s YOUR daughter?”
“I have only seen her on and off for the last 20 years, man.”
“You know the girl I was dating for the last two years?”
“What are the odds, eh?”
“You show up for this Festival, you go to a show I talk you into seeing, and then you figure out the performer is your estranged child?”
“I didn’t realize at first. Well, I saw the show and had mixed feelings about it. Then I saw her at that Open Mic thing and I wanted to go say hi.”
“Did you say hi?” I asked, knowing he hadn’t, because I had been with him and he hadn’t talked to her.
“Do you know how many letters, and postcards, and emails I sent that child?”
I nodded. “Does she blame you for something?”
“There were a lot of things I did wrong when I was trying to be a father to her. So much staying in one place. I’m a much better person now that I’m a trucker!”
“I think we should drink more,” I said, scouting around for a server.
“Well, before we get into that, here are my written impressions of Trudy Cool.” He slid me several hand-written note pages.
I smiled. “Thank you. Admittedly, I bit the bullet last night and went to her final show. I wanted to do the job I promised to do, but also to see a fairly crowded performance so she wouldn’t notice me.”
“And how did it go, eh?”
“Actually, for 9 PM on a Friday, there were very few people in the audience. But I don’t see this as a reflection on her. Most people don’t know anything about art and literature.”
“Did she see you?”
“Yes, she called out to me during the curtain call, asked me to stay.”
“Oh, I had no idea. What did you she say to you?”
“She said she had changed her mind about me, that I was the bigger person for coming to see the show after all that had happened.”
“Good point.”
“If I was looking for her forgiveness in order to feel good about myself, that might have done something. I wasn’t, though. It just made me realize she had gotten a few things right. A hundred years later and the world is still messed up, the brightest minds are still going abroad and we never know if the last war was just a dress rehearsal for the next one.”
He looked at me. “That tracks for me.”
It was getting near last call. We uncorked. We laughed. We cried. We needed to take a piss. Thank goodness there are Fringe Festivals. They’re like the Olympic Games, back in the day, but it isn’t a bunch of naked guys doing athletics. It’s just people speaking their minds while they still can.
THE END