Chad Davison completely ruined any efforts I had of being a lonely new kid at the the school I suddenly found myself in in grade three. Let me explain.
I’ve written in this space before about Magic. Not the Houdini-Copperfield type, no. Not the pick-a-card-now-here’s-your-watch close magic either. A few months ago, feeling bereft, I snarled into the phone to someone that I know quite well that ‘…the only Magic is music…’. The truth is, the castles of cards I’ve built in my mind can easily tumble when set upon by a stiff breeze or the hot breath of words uttered in anger. What a foolish boy I can still be even in my advancing years. There is Magic, and its found in the moments and even the separation and distance between those times that we share with one another.
Chad wasn’t at my wedding. I wasn’t at his. I wasn’t a co-worker at his first job after high school and he wasn’t around when the fates I let take me insisted that I become a door-to-door salesman. Or a telemarketer. Or a whatever. We weren’t around for each other’s first girlfriends or the relationships that broke our ankles, then hearts. We never got to tell one another about any of those formative moments. Times and experience that that pound incessant waves at the rocky shore of a boy’s heart with a frequency and indifference that forge an adult.
What I’m trying to get at here is that there are weeks and months and moments he shared with people I don’t and may never know. I understand that all of his peeps are suffering from his absence and in writing this, I won’t pretend for an instant that I knew him to the depths that they do. In no way will I try to rent or rend any memory of him they have. What I need all of them to know is that your Son, buddy, boss, brother or husband, your father, was the first real friend I ever had.
We all have those mashups when our Moms drag us to a another Mom’s place and our heads get knocked together like a couple o’ coconuts. We’d just have to get along while they drank “coffee” on a weekday afternoon. It’s great and its lovely and there are wonderful relationships that many of those situations will beget. These are circumstance. What I’m writing about is happenstance. The weird and ebullient Magic that allows two kids’ paths to cross in the hallways or upon the crests of the rolling hills of their ‘hood and they have a silent agreement. It’s organic. It can be forgiven that the purity of these moments are lost on a kid or a pre-teen’s smooth and barely formed brain because maybe it is Magic and we’re not supposed to get or appreciate it just then. As we age and stumble headlong into life and/or have children of our own, we can at last understand the sanctity of those encounters. A tacit understanding made with just a glance, nudge or shared laughter after hearing a fart or a schoolyard jibe or “cheddar” (If You Know, You Know) let loose. It is a pact absent any insistence of favour. No cult, crew or kaffee klatch has any sway or say about it. An unspoken gesture that is sealed with look of understanding that says;
“We’re gonna be friends”.
That’s what happened with Chad and I.
Cue the montage of Chad and I ripping around our neighbourhood on BMX. Football scrimmages every recess and lunch hour and an almost superhuman and intuitive on-field connection between QB and WR (interchangeable). C.A.L.E. Communications satellite dishes sought purchase of airborne frequencies in our periphery (IYKYK). Rides and Rider’s games with he and Dallas. Once, spellbound by the mesmerizing spiral of a hot orange coil, I ruined my thumbprint on the lighter in his parent’s van in the parking lot of some ballgame. Watchin’ TV. Climbing stuff. Hanging out in front of Happy Shopper or the Green Thumb Grocery (I only have enough for a handful of MOJOs). Summer twilights just bullshitting about how wide and vast we were sure our tiny worlds were… and a few memorable moments spent at his family’s place by the beach. Dude.
Chad’s parents invited me out for a weekend at their cottage. We were barely or maybe just teenagers. I still think about it at least once a week which means I think about Chad and all the adventures we done had. Memories that sit snug in the back pocket of whatever jeans my brain wears on any given day. These come about so often there is really no time that they are not with me. Are they just memories if they are ever present and an indelible part of me? Times that still, decades later, inform the path I choose?
1984 I think. Plus/Minus. Chad and I made our weekend home in his parent’s camper-trailer about 30 feet and down some wooden stairs from the door of their cottage. This camper was maybe 10x 12 with a louvered window on the rear and a few small ones on either side. Didn’t matter. You couldn’t see a god damned thing looking out just ‘cause of whatever illumination emanated from within VS the dark of the world without. There was a small cot lengthwise on one side at one end and a wider bed at the other end laterally. We laughed and joked in our little Honeycomb Hideout. We were just free kids dicking around and cutting up. Casey Kasem’s American Top Forty seethed out of a transistor radio rom a shelf on the corner of the camper, and he was “countin’ ‘em down”. I’d hear it a day later from some car on the beach, but in the camper that night this song came on. I’d love to say that it was even in the top 5 that week but I don’t know or remember. Hang on a sec.
Yeah.
No.
Nope, yeah the Infallible Internet tells me that on that particular year/month it was #24. All I know is that when The Cars’ Magic came on, we were both immediately entranced by the wind-up intro of the post-new wave pop-syth/harmonics of this weirdly wonderful tune. Billboard be damned. It was Number One that night in the camper.
Magic (Spotify)
Click that hotlink above these words. I’m listening to it as I write this and I’d like you too as well.
It really is Magic.(Youtube)
I was fifteen in the mental wrestling wring of adolescence. Through the speakers it came… It opens with the sound of, like, a UFO beaming some cow up in a tractor beam and then a guitar riff comes in that’s already got me pinned. Then this synthesizer comes in from the top rope and its notes only hint about what we are about to hear. They’re gone for a bit but then Ric Ocasek is like, he’s all like,
Summer, It turns me upside down…
Summer Summer Summer…
It’s like a merry-go-round…
I tap out because I’m now 30 seconds in and I know I’ll love this song for the rest of my days.
I’m typing away and have the headphones turned up past eleven to LOBOTOMY when the keyboards go TING TING TING TING TING TING TING with the same cadence of the sprinklers Chad and I used to run through in the park and every key and every note is showering my limbic brain with so much joy it brings me to tears. In the middle and then the end, pal, I’ve listened to it a zillion times but I’m never ready for Benjamin Orr coming in out of nowhere and exhaling GOT A HOLD ON YOUUUUUUUUUuuuuu. It all combines into something that is still so much for a boy of 52.
Play that song when I’m around and I’ll close my eyes and breathe in through my nose. Same thing when I hear it on the radio sitting in bullshit traffic or in some bullshit bar on a Wednesday afternoon. At home alone about 5 beers in like I am right now. I could be working the third shift in a fish rendering plant and if Magic came on the breath I’d draw would smell only of salty french-fries and suntan oil.
Such freedom, such a low level of supervision than either of us had been used to at home or in the city. Wearing nothing but swimming trunks and velcro/zipper pocket with maybe two or three Canadian fives (soon to be converted into quarters and obliterated in the beach arcade). Music blasting from Camarii and what seemed like a thousand girls only a year or two older than us in bikinis. There were a thousand girls! If my math was correct, which it rarely is, that meant two-thousand boobs. It would still be a number of years before I touched a pair, but Lordt, the boobs. The whole three day stint at the beach/cabin was a fever dream of sounds and smells, a rolling calliope for two boys blissfully ill-informed of the perils of the planet proper outside of our space and we were all the wilder and happy for it.
WAIT. STOP. Go back. Okay so we’re in the camper and up waaaay too late (a predilection I have yet to shake), and Casey Kasem is letting us know what is climbing the charts to number whatever when we hear someone outside circling the camper, making footsteps in the surrounding gravel.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
We freeze. I mean we fucking freeze into statues. We look at each other with eyes wide as saucers. I close my eyes and tap into a million crime shows that I won’t see for thirty years and think: White male 25-40. Six foot four, maybe five. He’s got a hitch in his step which could be the result of a accident from his teen years that healed improperly. That, or his gait is compensating for the wooden-handled ax he carries in his left hand. He favours the other leg to a degree because it’s off set by an eight-inch hunting knife kept loosely in his boot and/or a belt with a leather strap from which hangs a small hatchet on his right hip. Likely both. Kinetics aside, whatever criminal insanity that is rotting his brain has given him a thirst that only violent and bloody murder will satisfy.
“Shut the radio off…” says Chad.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
They stop.
Dude He heard us. He heard us hear him.
Collective sphincter clenchage ensues.
Then nothing.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
Four minutes pass.
Ok he’s gone.
CRUNCH. Oh fuck.
Silence. Three minutes.
OK he’s gone.
CRUNCH. JESUSFUCKINGCHRIST.
In our minds, the only reason this maniac hasn’t torn the locked door (with a pin-lock that wouldn’t stop a charging hamster) off of its hinges, is that he can’t decide which of his weapons he’d like to carve us up with just yet.
“SHH!”
Nothing.
OK he’s gone.
CRUNCH.
We’re going to die tonight.
The killcrazy maniac continued to circle.
The sum total of every time we’d blinked was the only shut-eye we got that evening and, blissfully, the sun eventually rose. Strangely, the drooling psycho had been circling the camper ALL FUCKING NIGHT AND WAS STILL OUT THERE. There were birds singing for Christ’s sake. Let it GO. I don’t know how we ranked among the rest of his victims, but I had to believe the blood and bones of two virgin boys kept him up and interested until well past dawn.
Sunlight bathed the yard in front of the cabin. It was time to make a break up to the stairs to Chad’s parent’s place to safety. But who was gonna go first? Better to ask who is gonna be snatched by the devil-worshipper lying in wait just outside the camper door, dead set on cleaving us in two so we’d be his army slaves in the afterlife. I mean this guy was obviously a sick, sick fuck.
The camper door slammed open like a gunshot and both of us bolted for the stairs as fast as our boy legs could take us. Its like that old joke about bears, “I don’t have to outrun Jason Vorhees, I just have to outrun YOU.” Maybe two steps on the ground before we three-stairs-at-a-time hot-footed it up into the cottage, blasted through the screen door then searched and scrambled for whatever blanket or couch we could hide under. His parents, Larry and Barb, likely had quizzical looks at one another over plates of eggs like ‘what the fuck are these morons on about?’ We explained from dry throats that, from dusk ’til dawn, we’d been stalked! Coulda been Jason. Coulda been Pumpkinhead. Maybe that non-binary person from Sleepaway Camp. Nobody really knew. They calmly counselled us through chuckles that it was likely just local kids creeping about. Fifteen minutes later we mustered the courage to head out to the relative safety of the porch and looked upon the would-be crime scene from above. Summer sun shone upon an almost idyllic scene. There was nobody and nothing. Just the camper-trailer comfortably ensconced in a copse of trees, one of which leaned lazily offering a lone, leafy branch that the wind brushed up and down incessantly against the open vent on top of the camper…
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
Like it had all the time in the world.
I wish now we could laugh again about what boys we were that night. Best I can remember we wended through the years in elementary school and then off to different high schools and all the weird, new experience that a boy’s life entails at that age.
Blink, and an eon passes.
Thirty years later I get a Facebook message. Its Chad and he says he’ll be out to the coast with his family for his daughter’s volleyball tournament and, would I like to meet up?
Boy, would I?!? A week or so later here I am walking up to some restaurant tacked on to a shopping mall near the edge of a coastal town maybe 30 minutes from where I live. I see two dudes roughly his age and height speaking to the hostess. It’s really busy so a second hostess darts around them to assist me but I see Chad’s frame and and I know it can be nobody else. I tilt my head and nod towards these two rogues and tell her, “I’m with them…” Meaning Chad and who I now know as Paul. Both hostess look at them and then shift their elven eyes in unison, to me. Chad follows their gaze and after a million years or a moment, Chad Davidson and Chris Vermeulen look upon one another once again. All of the dust of days between us gone. Not sure what he saw, but for me? Those same deep-set, laughing eyes above rosy apple cheeks, and an open and honest smile a mile wide.
Chad F**king Davison.
Same pattern on the table. Same clock on the wall.
We say in unison after entirely too long, “HEY!” We do the awkward ARE WE SHAKING HANDS OR HUGGING and work that shit out. We have a seat at the bar.
What a time. The seed of our initial friendship was wandering around and about our conversation the whole time. We shared loves and losses. Feats of derring-do and spoke of maybe mistakes we maybe made. We left in an hour or so and said goodbye at the front of the restaurant. He called me over to meet his family and in that moment, I tried to be cool and whatever. To be whatever it is I think people think of me. This thing I try to show you all while I harbour a secret hope you don’t see the static at the seams. I felt an immediate but brief jealousy of Paul and their relationship. Then a sort of mild, momentary mourning that we hadn’t had a chance to share our lives experiences until now.
There was a suggestion, but Chad never shared his diagnosis or health issues during our conversation. That’s OK. Its OK because that stuff wasn’t FOR me. It was for all of you that knew and experienced this wonderful, magical guy. I’m sorry and sad because I know this guy was a champ. I knew it in grade three.
I say goodbye to Paul, then Chad and his family. While he gathered his team, I fumbled for my keys as I wandered across the parking lot. I sat in my truck for a moment wishing or thinking I could say more, because there was more I had to say. If I’d known it would have been the last time I’d see him, I’d tell him, “So long, first friend. You’re Magic.” And he’d know what I meant. Off we all went on our separate ways.
Just west of us waves crashed incessantly against a rocky shore.
Like they had all the time in the world.
Tonalvoice 