Posted by Let’s just start flat out with the fact that I don’t remember one single thing about seeing Trooper in Moncton at the Cosmo sometime in the spring of 1988*. Like, nothing. ‘Matter of fact, I might have sworn that I didn’t see the band for the first time until they played at the Ottawa Tulip Festival several years later, which is a show that I remember at least a little bit yet can find no trace of whatsoever in my ticket binders so I might as well forget about it.
However, any attempts to jar memories of this show at the Club Cosmopolitan (the bar’s official name, though nobody called it that) have come up flat, and so I will instead briefly expound on my friendship with Brad. My ticket binder tells me that I went to this show with Brad, which makes me happy. I hope this concert is a nice memory for him.
Brad and I started hanging out when we were in grade 6. His family had a nice house on an eighty-six acre parcel of forest a mile or two** up the road from Lutes Road Variety, a corner store that my family owned and lived upstairs from for a handful of years while my dad tried to segue out of long-haul trucking. A couple of miles was nothing for us; I walked everywhere back then, plus Brad had a dirt bike. Brad was always into anything with an engine. He would double me through the maze of trails behind his house all summer long.
Come to think of it, the first time he asked me over after school we ended up going out for a long snowmobile ride on those trails. It was dark, and once we got deep into the woods Brad stopped the snowmobile and shut off the engine. The world suddenly went winter-quiet and I can remember with perfect clarity the sound of Brad’s frosty jacket crunching as he reached around and dug through his pockets.
“Here,” Brad said, pulling out a miniature bottle and handing it to me. He turned back to his pocket as I read the label through my frozen breath. Canadian Club, 40%. My dad drank CC all the time. “Here it is…” he muttered, pulling out a second airplane bottle of contraband.
“Down the hatch!” Brad exclaimed, turning to me and tapping his bottle to mine.
“Um…” I stammered. Christ, we were what, twelve years old? I looked down at the bottle and stared at it thoughtfully.
“No thanks,” I said finally.
“Aw c’mon,” Brad replied. He uncapped his bottle and drained it with one big gulp. “You should have some.”
I rolled the bottle around in my mittened hands and thought hard. I didn’t really have any friends and I had been pretty excited to be invited over to play, but still…
“I don’t want it,” I concluded, handing the bottle back to Brad.
He smiled at me and unscrewed the cap. “That was a test,” he said, extending the bottle towards my nose. “It’s just water.”
I smelled the bottle and took a sip. It was just water! I felt simultaneously belittled and uplifted, an emotional combination that encapsulates the timbre of our upcoming relationship rather well. “I always test my new friends,” he lied as he pocketed the empty bottles and turned to start the snowmobile. Brad didn’t have any friends either.
He had one now.
Brad and I became pretty inseparable after that, and he remained the alpha friend throughout our relationship. He taught me how to play Blackjack and within a month I owed him more than $100. When my mom found out that I was handing over my $2 allowance to Brad every week she met with his dad and haggled the debt to $50, which I dutifully paid over he next several months. When Brad was fourteen he bought a big street bike and we spent the next two summers riding that bike all over town with forged plates. When he turned sixteen (and I was still fifteen) he acquired an almost-new Trans-Am in his parents’ divorce. It was a beautiful car with a kickass Pioneer tape deck and we cruised Main Street every Saturday night in that thing blaring songs like Raise a Little Hell and Boys in the Bright White Sports Car while we honked at all the pretty girls on the sidewalk.
After our house burned down my family moved to Ontario, but my dad was trucking between Moncton and Toronto and I was able to catch a ride “home” to visit with Brad on school breaks and the occasional long weekend, so we stayed pretty tight.
By the time we could afford to move back to Moncton my young life had started going a bit sideways. I dropped out of school a week after my 16th birthday and hitchhiked back to Ontario. A thousand lifetimes later*** I was back in Moncton restarting high school just weeks before my 19th birthday. Brad, however, had managed to keep to the straight-and-narrow well enough to graduate on schedule, and when he went away to university we naturally saw less and less of each other. We had gone through this before, but this time it was different. Brad was being exposed to university-sized life while I was still passing notes in geography class and getting drunk at school dances. Plus we’d both started getting better at making other friends.
I never met any of Brad’s university friends but I heard about them. For my part, I had become fast friends with Glen, a brilliant guitar player who had moved to Moncton in grade 11, just as I was getting serious about learning how to play. Glen and I quickly became as tight as two heterosexuals could be.
Brad didn’t think much of Glen – who was several years younger than we were – and I started seeing less and less of him. I’d gotten pretty busy though, I was in grade 12 and I worked part time at a nightclub. Glen and I had started a band that was playing around town a bit and we would go busking outside the Cosmo whenever we were free.
Glen and I usually had a bottle of whiskey to pull on while we were busking and one night I was pretty deep into one when I saw Brad coming up the sidewalk with a couple of buddies. “Hey Brad!” I called, but he kept walking as if he hadn’t heard me. “Hey,” I yelped again, lurching out to stop him as he walked past.
“I didn’t know you were home,” I slurred. Brad always used to let me know when he was coming to Moncton.
“I got in a few days ago. Finished my exams last week,” he said.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked. “I gotta go,” he replied, starting towards his friends who were waiting a dozen feet away.
“But why didn’t you call me?!?” I insisted, grabbing his arm. I was drunk and hurt.
Brad suddenly grabbed me by the shoulders and leaned in close. “Listen,” he whispered, casting a glance over my shoulder at Glen who was still strumming away. “You’re hanging out with kids,” he hissed, “and that makes you a kid. And I don’t hang out with kids.”
Brad had always been a big guy. I won’t say he bullied me in our relationship but he was quick with a jab in the arm or a punch to the stomach if I ever said anything out of line. He even knocked out one of my front teeth, but I had never hit him before, not once. Mostly because he was twice my size, but also because I couldn’t bear to jeopardize our friendship.
But in that instant everything irrevocably changed. Glen was the sweetest, nicest kid I had ever met. He didn’t have a malicious bone in his body, he was an incredibly talented musician, and he loved me like a brother. Brad was still holding me by the shoulders but I grabbed him back and quickly spun him around, slamming him back against the wall of the bar with my guitar dangling precariously from its strap. I don’t remember what I said to him but I remember what he said to me. He pursed his lips and said: “Don’t do this, because if you do me and my crew are going to beat the living shit out of the two of you right here on the sidewalk.” I knew he was serious but I’m still not sure what I would have done had Glen not pulled me away. I definitely remember screaming a hateful stream at Brad as he and his friends disappeared into the bar. Glen and I pocketed the change in our guitar cases, packed up and got out of there.
I never heard from Brad again. It was approximately a year before this – perhaps even to the day – that we saw Trooper together in that very same bar, which is ostensibly the point of this story. I suspect that I had fun; I’ve always really liked Trooper.
Here for a good time, not a long time. Indeed.
*Coming in at a mere six square centimetres and containing just four words, the small and frustratingly vague note in my ticket binder that tells me I attended this concert seems to be the only shred of evidence that Trooper even played at the Cosmo in the first place, for I remain utterly unable to nail down the date of this show – or get even close – no matter how much internet I surf.
However, the location of this scrap of paper helps me to approximate a date, as I am wont to do in these experiments of concerted verbosity. Situated as it is between a stub for a very odd performance starring Burton Cummings and McLean & McLean (also at the Cosmo) and the stub from my first Def Leppard concert I can assume that this show occurred sometime between April 10th and June 6th, 1988.
Now, I’m thinking that the Cosmo would have been much more likely to book live music on an off night (plus Trooper probably preferred to save their weekend plays for bigger markets) so it probably would have been a weekday, and my friend Brad would have been out of town for school so it makes sense that the show date would skew later due to exams…
With all this in mind I have thrown a metaphoric dart at the calendar and settled on May 26th, 1988, which was a Thursday. Not coincidentally, this was also one of the thirty-two calendar dates in my concert life that remained empty (now thirty-one).
**At the time Canada was still a year away from switching over to the metric system.
***In the ensuing twenty-four months I would work several slave-like labour jobs, live on the street, hitchhike thousands upon thousands of miles, go to jail, become a devout Pentecostal Christian, move in with and get dumped by my girlfriend, and appear in two television commercials.
Todd Man Out 