YOU NEVER CAN TELL

Significant page from The Gauntlet, March 4, 1988. See if you can spot the title of our episode.

As the counter girl turned to me to ask for my order, she was still talking to her workmate behind her who was cleaning the espresso machine. "No, I can't listen to Stairway to Heaven anymore," she said. "It reminds me too much of my friends who've died." And indeed, from the radio behind them I could just make out a rather tinny, echo-like rendition of the finale of the Led Zeppelin tune. Of course. I would have to show up just now. Along with this young lady's morbid and misgiven take on the song's significance. (Sometimes all of our thoughts . . . oh, never mind.)

With "the piper's calling you to join him" from the radio echoing in my head, I settled into the Black Lounge with my coffee, aching for a cigarette. One could still smoke here—hence its nickname, the Black Lung—and on Friday afternoons there was usually live music. Today was no exception. As a fairly competent RnB combo churned away in the background, the nicotine hit all the right receptors, and my mind began to pulsate along with the music, fixing itself now on another part of the puzzle.

It was the names. There was something going on there, and I hadn't been able to either calm down or speed up enough to sort it out.

I had looked up KEITH in a few of those name dictionaries in the library. To my surprise, one of them gave its origin as "the wind." Now that was something. Your stairway lies on the whispering wind. Words for the Wind, by Roethke.

My name, of course, meant "a rock," on which to build a church, saith the Nazz, once upon a time.

Laura, my infatuation from 1985, was one letter's difference from Lara, Doctor Zhivago's main squeeze. Clapperton and I had discussed that movie during our first conversation, on that C-Train ride to work. Why? I'd forgotten. And anyway, it was her last name that mattered, with its incidental resemblance to Clapton (a resemblance I had somehow managed to avoid noticing for almost three years).

I looked up MONICA, but the authorities would only give "Latin, of uncertain origin." Whaddya mean, "uncertain origin"? Do your damn job, Name Dictionary.

The name of Keith's photogenic wife and twin of Monica, APRIL, came from the Latin APRILIUS, to reveal, which made sense because spring vegetation revealed itself in April.

So I had, maybe, a few dots of a mysterious paint-by-number vision. There were moments when I could almost make something out. It was on the tip of my cognitive retina, if you will. Teasing me, tantalizing me with the fruits of a harvest whose seeds had been planted and germinated, in some cases, years before.

I began absentmindedly leafing through The Gauntlet, the student newspaper. Just then the leader of the band produced a blues harp and introduced the next song. "We'd like to do a little thing by Chuck Berry called 'You Never Can Tell.'" And after the opening harp chords, he started singing:

It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well.
You could tell that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle.
And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bells.
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell."

That was all I heard of it, because just then my eyes lit (like a bee on a bright flower, heh, heh) on a strange entry in THREE LINES FREE, the paper's free personal section:

"There was Monica, Monica, playing her harmonica, in the store, in the store..."

I didn't know it at the time, but it was the beginning of a personal message in the form of an adaptation of an old children's song called "The Quartermaster's Store." As for its personal message to me—to make it clear to even the dimmest dolt— there was an actual harmonica playing as I read it.

Of course! How could I have missed it before? "Monica" meant "HARmonica." As in Keith's harmonica, or harp. Since Monica's arrival in January, she had seemed to me like the proverbial "other shoe" whose drop I had been waiting for, perhaps secretly hoping for, during these baffling three years after Clapperton. Now I felt it drop right on my head, in the form of an unavoidable cryptic equation that tied me together with the names of these two women and with the beginning of this whole mystifying experience:

Harmonica + Clapton + Keith = "I'm a Man," March 1964

And highlighting the added/subtracted syllables, I was presented with:

[HAR]monica + Clap[PER]ton + Keith = "I'm a Man," The Marquee Club, March 1964

So the syllable added, HAR, and the syllable dropped, PER, formed an actual damn word, HARPER. Which is what Keith was. Blues HARPer. In the lingo of the day, he's introduced on Five Live Yardbirds as "the SINGER and HARP, Keith Relf."

The Harper was Keith. Who was also the wind, carrying the tune, literally as well as figuratively. And in medieval culture, the Harper was the Bard, who made the songs and spun the riddles. Riddles. Yikes. I practically jumped out of my seat. There was the answer to a riddle, addressed specifically to me, embedded right in the word HAR+PER. For Pete's sake, there was even the Chuck Berry wedding song, to go with the wedding photo of Keith and April. A wedding song about Pierre and his mademoiselle. And that wasn't the only wedding song on the afternoon's menu.

What in the devil was going on? Had I somehow been predestined to meet these two women, almost exactly three years apart, and become infatuated with them just so I'd be receptive to a special significance in their names?  I admit at that moment part of me was relieved that there seemed to be a reason, however arcane and mysterious, for me having made such a fool of myself. Twice. Yes, I was going with that; otherwise I was going to have to accept that I was just an immature spinhead with no control over his emotions. And now it wasn't just the women; there was this growing kaleidoscope of names and connections I was trying to keep steady in my head.  

Yes, this was just like the yellow flower vision, except that I wasn't about to forget it. Now my mind's Rolodex was flipping furiously. There was something else. Harper was the name of a film I'd rented once, from that magic year 1966, if memory served. Starring Paul NEWman. So, with a little crude, tenuous algebra, I figured that if Keith and I were photographic twins, and Keith was a Harper, and Harper was a Newman, then maybe I should think of the N in N-Man as standing for NEW. 

(We would in the future have lots more to think about in this particular equation.)

Was I leaving anything out? The Rolodex flipped again, back to the first photograph that had started this whole funny business—Peggy Ashcroft in Jew Süss. Well, there was the fact that Monica, Monica (as I was now thinking of her, newly minted twin that she was) had most recently lived in Ashcroft, BC, just before she'd come to Calgary. Odd that I hadn't noticed that before. I was starting to automatically think in semantic terms about these correspondences. So, Monica came from Ashcroft. Did that mean she came from the Ashcroft photograph in some respect? Well, there was no question now that she at least partook of some of what the photograph had brought to me—or what had brought me to the photograph. But I suspected there might be more.

So I flipped back in my notebook to reread what I'd gleaned about Dame Peggy in the library earlier. Apparently her debut in the play on September 11, 1929 had been a stunning success. She first appears onstage sitting quietly in profile, as captured by the famous photo I had in my bag of tricks. Then she speaks, reading from the Song of Songs. I'd written down the reaction of critic Harold Hobson, who witnessed it:

And then the miracle happened. The curtain rose on the 4th Act...to show a platform on a high tower; and in the centre of this platform, exalted, isolated from the world, the clean, cold light shining on her, sat a young girl Naomi. This was Peggy Ashcroft. Why did it seem to me that lightning had struck, that the revelation had come, that all that had gone before was only a prologue, an introduction to what really mattered, to the thing that would always last and illuminate? 

So, no mystery as to why I'd copied out that paragraph. That last sentence captured precisely how I'd been feeling about the events of the afternoon so far. 

I'd also noted that Ashcroft went on to become, among much else, the premier Shakespearean actress of her era, tackling at some point all the major female roles in the comedies, histories and romances. All of them, that is, except Lady Macbeth. The "Scottish play" she would not go near—as with many theatre people, not even so much as to pronounce its name.

A name, I realized then with a ZAP, that I'd just seen a few minutes earlier. Could it be? I stashed the notebook and furiously flipped back a few pages in The Gauntlet. There it was, in big, bold type. Appearing today in the Black Lounge. The name of the guy whose music I'd been listening to, who'd brought the Chuck Berry wedding song into the picture. BILLY McBETH. A minor variation, same pronunciation. One letter's difference.™

Speaking of letters, I said to myself, that title Jew Süss could not but remind one of the conventional name of Our Lord and Saviour, a.k.a. The Nazz. In fact, when I sorted those letters out of it, what I had left over was a W and an S. Well, in the context I found myself at that moment, those letters could only suggest The Bard himself—Bard being another name for Harper, just to confuse things—and if you thought of that in terms of Dame Peggy, we now had a complete set of plays, having just magically snagged the "missing Macbeth."

The Nazz and the Bard. Two humans who had become more than human, who had come to be seen as the very incarnation of their respective eras. And thus, perhaps inevitably, had aroused doubt and skepticism about the nature and facts of their lives and identities. How long had the search for "The Historical Jesus" been going on, and when it reached its goal, would the Gospels mean any more or less than they did now? Similarly, if Shakespeare were proven to be someone else, would the words or meaning of the plays and poems suddenly be altered? Whenever I tried to explore the motivations for these curious quests, I had to admit defeat. Maybe I was insufficiently skeptical, too credulous to understand, but I found myself agreeing with Chesterton's quip: "Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason..... Critics are much madder than poets. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else."

So, yes, I was still pretty confident in the reality of the Biblical Jesus and had no interest in a search for any "Historical Shakespeare." But what about me? Was I partaking of this new, unexpected flavour of reality I'd just stepped into, or was I just an observer, a note taker? This was all quite symmetrical and elegant and all, but would it have any significance in my life in the long run? Did it have anything to do with me at all—the essential, rather diffident and feckless me—or was it just a passing thing, an epiphenomenon of unrealistic romantic infatuation, too much coffee and not enough sleep? 

Or was I indeed becoming a New Man? I gathered myself together and returned home to ponder the possibility. In my manic state, I couldn't help but phone a few friends and try to fill them in on what was going one. Rather ill-advised in retrospect, but no harm was done. Alison was sympathetic but a bit concerned, and invited me over for the following evening. My erstwhile roommate Jim, who was sharing a house by then with his girlfriend Sue and my medievalist office confidante Laurie, invited me over for a movie and popcorn later that evening. I enthusiastically accepted. Considering my obvious vibrational state on the phone, it was a brave move on his part.

I collected and reviewed all my photos and other documentation, then lay down on the couch, closed my eyes and tried to relax and collect my thoughts.  There was a lot to collect. I was going to need a big net.

The Black Lounge today. They seem to have erected some sort of futuristic monument to my epiphany of March 4.

Next Stop: BLOW-UP