How Not to Start an Orgy After a Toy Train Ride

An Excerpt from the novel, THE NEW BOHEMIANS

It’s the 1980s, an era of smart suits and saxophones. Typewriters are plentiful, David Bowie and Prince are at the heights of their stardom, and the decade’s hottest place for music, fashion and politics is London. It’s here that a group of expats from North America found a magazine they hope can rival Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair and try to build their dreams into reality.

THE NEW BOHEMIANS is a story about an era that was more vibrant, more complicated and more exciting than today’s nostalgic references. By turns lyrical and comic, it’s a love letter to the writers and artists who are the also-rans, the ones who don’t get movies made out of their lives or who have courses taught on their forgotten works. But for a short while, they had their brilliant moments…

In this edited excerpt, narrator Ram Talbott and his friends are months into publishing their magazine when they get disturbing news in a long-distance phone call…

There was a rough all-nighter we pulled for our fifth (sixth?) issue, and we wound up crashing at Cal’s place, with Beth on his couch, while Peter and I were flopped out on the floor in old sleeping bags. When in doubt, go with the classics, so our lullaby was Roxy Music’s Avalon album. We must have slept in fairly late, because the twin brrr-brrr of the phone woke all of us. The call turned out to be long distance from Winnipeg.

“Who the hell’s left back there?” joked Peter, rubbing his eyes.

Dale, I thought. Dale’s still back there. No, wait, he was in Toronto now. Only it wasn’t Dale calling. It was Scarlett, his sponge of a pseudo-girlfriend, the chick who wanted to have some art movement named after her…

He handed Beth the receiver, who let it drop like an anvil into its hook cradle. We waited for an explanation, and he said, “You’re not going to believe this one — ”

We put together the rest of the pieces later, and the full story went like this. Back home, it was a long weekend across the country thanks to a statutory holiday. (National Family Moose Day, who gives a shit what it was?) Scarlett missed her little brother, but instead of paying herself for a cheap flight back to Winnipeg, she somehow talked Dale into coughing up the price of two tickets for the weekend. The brother was apparently a roadie for a touring one-hit-wonder band, and as soon as Dale and Scarlett arrived, they somehow got invited to a party at the Empire. This was one of the city’s turn-of the-century grand hotels, with a unique façade made of cast iron, galvanized iron sheet metal and pressed zinc. I know, I know. Kind of hard to visualize, but the effect was of Greek columns and Renaissance palace grandeur, the kind you had with a lot of old hotels of a bygone era. The place is bygone now, swept away for the redevelopment of what’s called The Forks on the riverfront.

Enter Dale and Scarlett, mixing, socializing, having fun. Until, true to form, Scarlett flirts with the band’s vocalist and is spotted forty minutes later necking with the guy, her dress peeled halfway down, topless and getting felt up against a gilt mirror close to the kitchen door. Dale, of course, loses it. He’s drunk. He’s been sexually frustrated and teased and shut out and manipulated and generally jerked around by her for months. He loses it.

There was, we understand, obligatory expletive-laced yelling at Scarlett, yelling at the band’s singer, and then Dale stalking away up the hall. But since everyone knew what hotel rooms the band members were in, Dale — after downing more shots from the open bar — began pounding on the door of the singer’s room while the guy was busy with a now distracted and possibly even guilt-ridden Scarlett. No one was stupid enough to open the door, but the other guests called down to the front desk.

So far, so dull, yes? But Dale was a genuine original. Whenever I think about him on this night, I always remind myself that Dale really admired and enjoyed Hunter S. Thompson. He liked William Burroughs and Naked Lunch. He read Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Rimbaud, but more than their work, he seemed to quietly, privately admire the personal chaos these guys created, and their unapologetic, ruthless drives, whether it was to live as they wished or for squalid experiences. If Dale wasn’t going to write — he had yet to show any discipline or ideas — he would make himself matter through larger-than-life, bat-shit crazy scenes like his heroes.

So enough kicking and pounding on doors. Pointless anger spent, he slipped away from hotel security, and though drunk to merchant marine sailor standards, he was coherent and persuasive enough to start becoming everyone’s friend in the middle of the party. The Empire used to have this oversized, die-cast model toy train that ran on an elevated track through the main ballroom. Then it chugged along the second, river-facing foyer of the hotel, and even through the boutique conference centre, the Swedish massage room and the small art gallery. No one knows exactly how, but Dale managed to slip behind its glass shield wall, mount one of the coaches and ride the damn thing along its line. Amazing that it could support the weight of a full grown man and keep chugging along.

It didn’t whistle, so Dale supplied the whistle, only it was a loony, drunken wolf call, “Arrooooo!” as he went through the rooms. Which could have looked sad and pathetic, except that he did this as the toy train zipped along above a prominent member of the legislature getting a blowjob from an escort in the massage room. When the hotel management went around apologizing to everyone for the ruckus, they discovered the escort agency had been using their facilities, and the married politician got in trouble, annnnd you get the idea.

That was later. With the party in full swing, Dale on his train circled around and around the ballroom, and the revellers let out a cheer every time he passed by. Back to the Extended Play “Girls on Film” club record blasting away. Oh! Here comes the train again! Yeaaaaa! And off he went. Extended play of “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It’s Dale on the train again. Yeaaaaaa! This went on for a while with almost comical monotony, and then the crab cakes and other hors d’oeuvres fell behind schedule. People began grumbling about the service, and Dale presented himself as the man of the hour. With his slurring, inebriated eloquence, he began to turn the party crowd into an angry, resentful mob that chanted, “Serve it out! Serve it out!” The head chef came out to apologize, but the revellers pushed past him into the kitchen, raided the food and then locked four cooks as well as a dishwasher in a janitor’s closet.

“It was my night to be Lenin!” Dale boasted later with a self-satisfied grin. He turned in profile so I could view his bald dome as he ponderously stroked a scruff of goatee beard. Sure. Lenin. Yep, it was exactly the same as the Russian Revolution, only with a bunch of spoiled, middle class Generation Xers and a few rich types, combined with the regular tribe of zombie-groupies for the band, all taking out their frustration on a cluster of cooks making minimum wage.

Then he cozied up to the remaining band members, one of whom he discovered had also liked Scarlett and genuinely believed the singer had “stole her away.” And he got them all worked up and pissed off, their bottled-up resentments just ripe for explosion. They wanted to go break into the guy’s suite and spirit Scarlett off in a fireman’s lift like a harem recruitment drive performed by Vikings. Dale, as bombed as he was, sensed trouble, so he suggested a “revenge-orgy” instead, “right here, right now.”

Some folks were into it, many naturally weren’t, fleeing as both men and women began to disrobe, and for reasons that remain unclear, the whole organization of the thing began to hinge on the issue of food. Dale wanted the participants to have sex on a gigantic, fluffy pancake, and imagine a river of maple syrup being supplied! It turned out there was a quorum of people who thought this was a great idea, prompting them to let the kitchen staff out of the closet — who listened, nodded their heads, then bolted for the elevator and called the police. Even at this point, Dale might have simply been run out with the rest of the mob by the cops, but he was now their de facto leader, so when a couple of burly officers showed up, Dale was shirtless and barefoot, turning angry and abusive again because the police couldn’t understand how their cuffs and batons would make brilliant props for the show.

He spent the rest of the night in the drunk tank. In the morning, they charged him with attempted assault of a police officer, interfering with a police investigation, trespassing (because he refused to go), and the list went on. He was supposed to be back in Toronto and at his desk Monday morning. Scarlett, it turned out, spent the night with the singer and the rest of the weekend in Dale’s suite. She allegedly didn’t hear about what happened to her “best friend” until Sunday night. And she dithered and screwed around and procrastinated until three in the morning on Monday when she chose to call London. And Cal. To enlist him to do something.

“You’re not making any sense,” he had told her on the phone.

“Someone’s got to bail him out!” she insisted.

“Well, then go get him.”

She was crying now. “I don’t have any money, and if I have to go by the jail, I won’t make my flight home to Toronto, and somebody’s waiting to pick me up at Pearson Airport to — ”

“Fuck, what do you expect us to do?” demanded Cal. “We’re here, for Chrissakes — you know that. You called a foreign country.”

To this day, we’ve never been entirely convinced that she learned about his situation when it was too late to help him. In the end, she made her flight. Dale, of course, didn’t. He used his one phone call from jail to dial up work and pour it on thick that his grandfather had died (the man had died about a year before), and that he had to stick around because of family obligations. The company bought it. Dale was eventually released, bought himself another ticket but had to fly back to Winnipeg for court appearances. He lucked out in getting a good enough public defender lawyer who talked the charges down to petty misdemeanours, and he was even allowed to perform his community service in Toronto, where he was obligated to attend two-months-worth of seminars on coping with alcoholism.

And the damn idiot took Scarlett back! Well, “took back” is probably an inaccurate term since there was no real romance involved, merely parasitic dependency. They lived together in a shabby communal house in Toronto’s Annex district, and she wasn’t about to move out. She would still sleep beside him but not with him, and he was supporting her all the while.

As it happened, my brother had moved to Toronto, where he was living with his wife and two children and his expensive mortgage in High Park, and he sprang for a ticket for me to visit that summer. I naturally took a few days out to hang around with Dale, and he was surprisingly candid over brunch about getting fucked up at the Empire. Then he turned the incident into a hero’s journey with the toy train and the proposed pancake orgy, and I wouldn’t have bought any of it if I hadn’t spoken to a couple of bellhops and discovered his stunt even merited several paragraphs in a historic hotel encyclopaedia two years later (he would be disappointed that his name wasn’t included).

“Then it got real City of Night in the drunk tank.” He laughed. “You’ve never spent a night in a drunk tank, have you, Ram?”

“I don’t want to spend a night in a drunk tank.”

“But I’m telling you, it was kinda cool! I mean yeah, the place stank of piss and somebody threw up in a corner, but I met these drag queens and this gay hustler, and they were telling me all kinds of crazy shit. I may turn it into a short story.”

“You should,” I urged him. “You should really crack down and get some writing done.”

“Yeah…” He looked noncommittedly out the window and took a drag of his cigarette. I had dropped off a couple of issues of Passion for him, and he raved about Peter’s great art design and gave me a detailed critique on the grammar mistakes in one of my articles, but he ignored all my loud hints that maybe he should write something for us. When he was “ready,” he promised. I didn’t want to push that afternoon, so all that was left was the post-mortem on his debauch.

“Don’t you want more than this?” I asked. “The grind of going to an office, the nine-to-five bullshit? You’re the most talented writer I know.”

“Other than yourself.” He laughed.

We were in banter mode now, and I didn’t disagree with him. But then I said, “You should mail me some drafts of your work.”

“When I get to them. I got a few ideas…”

I would love to track down through time, with a bathroom scales under my arm, all those larger-than-life personalities rushing through novels — you know, the people who were supposed to have inspired those classics of modern literature. The real individuals. I’d like to weigh each and every one of them in terms of ordinary soul. Nobody wastes their time reading what Neal Cassady wrote versus what Jack Kerouac wrote about him; not unless they’re a liberal arts major. Hell, you may never have heard of Cassady, but I’m certain you know On the Road. The guy must have become a parody of himself, struggling to live up to all the bullshit hype. From what I’ve read, Jean Ross grew to resent Sally Bowles. I imagine she groaned with every revival of Cabaret. I wonder if that poor bastard Hemingway stuck a rifle in his mouth because he finally realized he wasn’t nearly as good as he thought he was, and that it was his life that was his real glorious tome. But at least he wrote.

Then Scarlett joined us, sliding into the booth table, giving me a flirtatious look that I hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve, and I couldn’t take it seriously because of her glassy stoned eyes and because her face acne turned me off. We had to talk about other things because she wasn’t in journalism, and so it was boring for her if Dale wanted to discuss Gay Talese, and she’d roll her eyes when he began to expound on how there was this cool, new sci-fi book by William Gibson called Neuromancer. (“Flip the record, man!” Followed by a high-pitched, cackling laugh.) I do give her credit for trying to read his books and glean what he loved about them, but she made a pose out of trying to puncture pretentiousness and hypocrisy, and that style doesn’t work too well when you’re grubbing money for cigarettes from your roommate.

© Copyright Jeff Pearce and Gallivant Books

THE NEW BOHEMIANS is available to buy in Kindle and paperback from Amazon here.