Strange Way to Live. Carl Dixon

      Alvin Shoes 1979 in full regalia. Left to right: Hal Hake, Chris Bastein, me a.k.a. “the girl,” and Blair Duhanuk.

       Photo: Carl Dixon

      Well, the trip began badly and went downhill from there. It’s actually kind of a big deal to make a journey of 3,150 kilometres, but you wouldn’t have known it by watching Alvin Shoes in action. Hal and Blair had once driven straight through to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for spring break, so that was our yardstick. I’d never driven even half the distance we faced. It seemed to us in our collective wisdom that if we left on Friday night and then drove straight through, we’d make the ferry to Port aux Basques by Sunday. Landfall on the Newfie side would put us in position to drive the eight hundred and fifty kilometres across the island and set up to play our first night Tuesday. There was no margin for error needed because what could go wrong?

      This is the story of what could go wrong.

      We were three hours late for the scheduled departure while we worked at prying Brad, our soundman, out of the Queen’s Hotel disco and the company of a young lady he’d fallen for that same night. So compelling were her charms that he changed his mind on the spot about going to Newfoundland. Somehow we eventually found the right combination of persuasion and threats to get Brad into the van.

      Once under way, we discovered after driving only fifty of the initial two-thousand-kilometre run to the ferry dock that we had an oil leak. This now required us to stop every hour, then half hour, to add another bottle of oil.

      We hit Montreal around midnight in a rainstorm, now five hours behind schedule. The highway interchanges on the Décarie Expressway in downtown Montreal can be confusing at the best of times; Blair at the wheel and me navigating somehow put us on the southerly route toward Sherbrooke, a wrong turn that took us two hundred kilometres out of our way.

      Our ship of fools pressed on, stopping every so often to pour in fresh oil from the stash we now carried, but every service station on our secondary highway route through rural Quebec was closed for the night. Running on fumes in the pre-dawn hours heightened our choking anxiety. I was sustaining a hope that we could still make it on time for our first night in St. John’s, in spite of our errors, if we could just nurse the cube van along somehow. Running out of gas, though, now? How idiotic would that make us?

      The possibility of missing our gig was unacceptable, inconceivable, and I shifted into marshalling all my thought, resourcefulness, and courage to forestall that unhappy outcome. I was going to get us there, period.

      We reached a small town in Eastern Quebec at about 3 a.m. There was an old-fashioned service station, one where the owner lived upstairs. This was our chance to keep alive the spark of hope that we might still reach the ferry on schedule, if we could just get fuel and keep moving. If we parked until morning we’d miss the boat, literally.

      For some reason I believed that gas station operators held a sacred trust to aid travellers in distress. Armed only with a smattering of grade seven French, I decided to address the house. Dim memories of “La Famille Leduc” (“Peitou manger le rôti d’bœuf,” etc.) led me to holler up at the apartment, “Ah-Sée-Stawnse! Ah-Sée-Stawnse, Sill-Voo-Play!” My urgency was not felt by the people who lived upstairs, and I tried repeatedly to make my meaning clear. There may have been a language barrier. In any event, the only sign of life was a slight flutter of the curtain; otherwise all remained dark and quiet.

      I think it’s fair to say that a kind of craziness took me over at this point. I was bitterly frustrated. I left the guys to wait with the van at the service station while I went to scout around. In full confidence that I was being clever and resourceful in a crisis, I started darting around the lawns and driveways of the sleeping town, prowling through people’s back yards in the hope that someone’s full gas can might have been left out for me to “borrow.” No luck.

      I was roused from this little fantasy by a mustachioed Quebecker in a muscle car, out cruising at 3:30 a.m. for some reason. He spotted me emerging from someone’s yard just as he drove by, so he applied the brakes and swiftly began to turn around. Instinct told me to run. I cut back through the yard where I’d just been, over the fence, and through the next neighbour’s yard to the street beyond. My souped-up pursuer was speeding around the corners to try to intercept me, tires squealing. I sprinted across the open street and through another two back yards. The driver probably imagined being feted as a local hero for catching a “maudit anglais” in the act of doing suspicious stuff. I recognized that I would have a hard time explaining my decisions to the law, so I went into full evasive action. Cut hard right for two back yards, jumping fences, then double back to the spot where I began running. Flat on the ground behind someone’s garbage cans, I lay very still as I heard the car speed around the streets close by for maybe another five or ten minutes. Monsieur Muscle Car gave up after a time, and the sound of his engine faded.

      A different approach seemed prudent. Getting fuel somewhere was still the only thought I could hold. We must get to the gig! As I cautiously walked back to the service station, I noticed a Quebec Provincial Police outpost a block or two from the highway. Great! They’ll help us get fuel. The doors were locked but there was a call box. I picked up the receiver; it quickly auto-dialled and was answered by someone whose main language was, of course, French.

      In time I was able to make him understand why I was calling, and he told me that my location was a satellite station, only open in the daytime. He was speaking to me from the nearest station, half an hour away. I thanked him, hung up, and started to think about this new information. I thought about the QPP car sitting parked and untended until morning in this little town, about how all the cops on duty were in that town half an hour away and, God help me, about how that police car was bound to have fuel in the tank.

      I hurried back to the service station where the guys remained waiting. “Okay, does anyone know how to siphon gas?”

      They say craziness is contagious, and I guess we were all so tired and stressed that I was able to overcome the good sense of my fellows and convince them that this could work. It seemed awfully clever in the moment.

      It was agreed that you need a hose to siphon gas out of a car. Then you have to get past the awful taste of the gasoline. Who volunteers? Ha-ha. Now let’s find a hose. I’d seen some in the yards where I’d been skulking, but I didn’t want to go back down there. Hey, there’s an air hose on the tire pump of the service station. Scoop.

      Now, off to the police station and the lonely car in the lot. We pulled the van up at an angle so our gas tank was near the police car’s. Their gas cap was standard issue, no locking device. Stuff one end of the hose down into the QPP gas tank and have our tank open at the ready. This’ll be great! Chris had a try at sucking hard on the hose, to no effect. I fancied that I had extra lungpower, so I tried. Nothing. Someone pointed out that the hose was at least twenty feet long and had a very narrow opening, as befits an air pump hose. It would be impossible for even Hercules to siphon gas through that. Man, we were the world’s worst criminals.

      We began frantically searching now for something to shorten the hose, but what to use? Hey, here’s a pop bottle. Break the glass and use the jagged edge to cut! I smashed the Coke bottle to reveal the thick glass of any standard issue Coke bottle, sans jagged edge, but tried sawing away anyway. The futility of this finally sapped my remaining belief in the idea. In disgust I lifted my head, blew out the pent-up air in my lungs, and took a step toward the street. At the same moment a QPP cruiser roared up the street right past us.

      There were two officers in the front seat, one at the wheel and the other holding a shotgun upright ready for action, but neither one looked to their right, where we were standing. They likely never expected to have a crime scene unfolding right in the police station parking lot. I barked, “Back up the van away from the car! Close the gas tank!” It was now critical to hide the evidence. In early April in Quebec there were still high snowbanks, so I grabbed the air hose and the broken pop bottle pieces and heaved them over the snow banks, where they’d be hidden. Just as I completed this task, the police pulled up abruptly on the sidewalk to face