Joyride
(Gessle, P) Performed by Roxette
Hit the road out of nowhere, I had to jump my car
and be a rider in the love game following the stars.
don't need no book of wisdom, I get no money talk at all.
She has a train going downtown, she's got a club on the moon
and she's telling all her secrets in a wonderful balloon.
Oh she's the heart of the funfair,
she's got me whistling her private tune.
And it all begins where it ends,
and she's all mine, my magic friend
She says: Hello, you fool, I love you.
C'mon join the joyride, join the joyride
She's a flower, I can paint her, she's a child of the sun,
we're a part of this together, could never turn around and run.
Don't need no fortune teller
to know where my lucky love belongs oh no.
Cos it all begins again when it ends,
and we're all magic friends
She says: hello, you fool, I love you.
C'mon join the joyride, be a joyrider
I take you on a skyride,
a feeling like you're spellbound.
The sunshine is a lady
who rox you like a baby.
She says: hello, you fool, I love you.
C'mon join the joyride, join the joyride
I've been reminiscing about Sha Na Na's for a few weeks now and this week I want to write about some of the people I knew back then. Funny that this is the song that popped into my mind because it's tied to a customer instead of a co-worker. There was this guy that we called Goofy Dave (because there were just so many Daves and only my own Dave was known as just "Dave"), and he drove a souped-up Datsun pickup like the header picture (it may even have had floodlights on the roll bars?) and he was so in love with the girl from Roxette that he had encouraged his own girlfriend (who looked nothing like the singer) to dye her hair platinum and spike it up like her's. What I most remember about Goofy Dave (other than him always being in the bar without his girlfriend) was that he supported himself by stealing milk crates from variety stores and collecting the deposits on them from a guy he knew at the dairy. Goofy Dave had all these stories about climbing chainlink fences to get to stores' outdoor storage areas, and the close calls he had with store owners, and complaints about his contact demanding ever bigger shares of the proceeds, and I'd listen and appear sympathetic but think all the while, "Imagine if you directed all that energy into actually working somewhere". I wouldn't say that Goofy Dave was our friend exactly, but he would sometimes sit with my own Dave if he came in early some evening, and there was always some exciting shady business being discussed. Some joyride.
Delight was the most important person in the bar to me. A couple of years older than I was, she was decades ahead of me in life experience and I thrilled to have this "bad girl" as my friend. She had run away from home as a teenager and never went back; living wherever she could, and always working hard to support herself. Delight was the single mom of a cherubic four-year-old girl when we met, and I will never understand what Svengali-like effect that little girl's father (a shiftless, tubby David Crosby-lookalike pothead) could have ever had over my gorgeous friend. Delight lived in a suburban house with her brother and a couple of old friends -- so Cara was always cared for while we worked -- and whenever Dave and I would go over there, I'd marvel at what a normal domestic scene they enjoyed. At the bar, Delight drove the boys crazy with her tight jeans and tank tops, and to most of them, she said her name was "Sue"; she had a way of being totally at ease with her own body that wasn't sleazy or provocative; everything about Delight was "what you see is what you get". Delight liked to treat me like a babe in the woods, and I liked that treatment; I probably needed someone world-wise watching my back at the time. She was bright and efficient at her job, quick to laugh and try to shock me, called me Redness when she was feeling affectionate, and had the biggest heart of anyone I knew. We were the two full-time staff, so we worked together five days a week, but Delight wasn't always the waitress-station bartender on the busy nights (but she was the best at it).
Lise was one of the busy night bartenders, and she was a bit of a mess. Older than the rest of us (definitely in her thirties, maybe even late thirties), she had a fake mahogany tan and fake nails (that would sometimes fall into drinks as she was pouring them; she'd fish them out with her fingers and shrug, daring me to ask her to repour). Like I noted last week, we'd all start drinking when it got busy, and Lise would sometimes get stumbly drunk behind the bar. We figured Lise got stumbly drunk a lot. True story: I also noted last week that Dave moved into my apartment, and although he had some furniture, we decided to buy new stuff for the living room. I mentioned at work that we were going to order an advertised set from The Brick (a wall unit, sofa, loveseat, set of tables) and Lise said that she had a credit card from there; that if we wanted to pay with her credit card and then give her the cash, we'd be helping to restore her credit rating. So, I took her credit card, ordered the furniture under her name to be delivered to our place, and when the deliverymen were done moving it all in, I presented the card, they ran it...and it was declined. I had to stand there, pretending to be Lise, and have no explanation for why the credit card that I thought had no balance on it was in arrears. Luckily, I kept my tips in a coffee can in the kitchen and Dave was able to peel off enough cash to cover it. When I told Lise the story later, she just kind of stared at me for a while, then shrugged. That was Lise.
Anne was the third busy night bartender, and she was a total sweetheart, but also a heavy drinker. She gave the appearance of being wide-eyed and naive, laughing along at our exploits without offering up much of her own doings, but we eventually learned better: Anne, as it turned out, was the mistress of a scary Portugese coke-dealer (Dave and I had a party, much later at a house we rented, and Anne was there, nervously hoping that Carlos would show up like he said he would, and when he did, I was terrified to have him there; he was so out of place with his shiny suit and flashing gold rings; he left sooner than Anne had hoped, but not too soon for me). True story: I found out a couple of years later that Carlos was brought down, and in the roundup of his known associates, Anne spent a weekend in a jail cell with Carlos' wife and his sister, suffering nonstop abuse that left her bruised and scared for her life.
Other bartenders came and went (there was one guy for a while -- a Pharmacy student at the U of A -- but even though I thought he was nice enough, I don't even remember his name), but those three were the most important relationships I had at Sha Na Na's. As for other waitresses, my favourite ever was named Anika. Her mother had named her for a character from Pippi Longstocking, and the mother had died tragically young; having been raised in a family of men, therefore, Anika was pure tomboy, and all 5'2" of her was in Edmonton to attend motorcycle repair school (she did ride a motorcycle and went back home up north in the winter to participate in motorcycle races on the frozen lake near where she grew up). We had a party one night (I don't think it was the same one that Carlos came to, but it was at that house we rented), and although we knew Anika was going to be one of the guests to sleep over, it wasn't until morning that I realised she had spent the night in the basement suite with Dave's friend Paul. That was also the day that Anika told me that the first time she had ever had sex -- with an older guy she was in love with -- he said to her afterwards, "Welcome to the wonderful world of herpes". What a creep. Yet the point of the story was that when she divulged this to Paul the night before, he wasn't turned off. Paul and Anika were both awesome people, but they were an odd match and nothing came of this. Further note: When Dave and I were planning our wedding, Anika had agreed to be in my wedding party (along with Delight), but in the end she couldn't afford to come to Ontario and had to back out.
There were other waitresses, mostly students, but other than Pam (about whom I wrote last week), they didn't leave much of an impression on me. There was a girl, Claire, who covered the whole bar and restaurant during the day, and she was another surprise: with her freckled moon face and long, straight strawberry hair, she looked like everybody's kid sister, but she showed up one evening on the arm of this Asian guy who was notoriously mobbed-up; he even brought his stable of prostitutes in out of the cold for a drink a few times. (And yes, I see the pattern of me misreading everyone, but like I said, I had Delight watching out for me.) The bar eventually hired a shooter girl to walk around with a tray of shots on Fridays and Saturdays, and although I can't remember her name (maybe Shelly?), I do remember what she looked like: Dried out permed and bleached hair, short skirts and high heels, caked on mascara and bright blue eyeshadow -- she looked a bit like Dee Snider's sister to me, but the guys couldn't get enough of her and she was perfect for the job. But make no mistake: she was a lovely, friendly person and I didn't put her in the same category as skanky Pam.
Delight had a few boyfriends over the early months that I knew her, but nothing seemed as permanent as when she started dating a new bouncer from the bar, Dennis. Dennis was good looking in a not-my-type kind of a way -- he was tall and broad, but also had dark shoulder-length feathered hair, a handlebar moustache, and as the son of a farmer, he wore cowboy boots, trucker caps, and a sheepskin jacket, all unironically -- and he and Delight made a gorgeous couple. The only problem was that Delight found him to be too fawning (and maybe not all that bright), and they were on-again/off-again for months after the shine wore off. Even so, we often hung out as couples, and eventually, Delight let Dennis move in with her. The closest Delight and I ever came to fighting was one day when she was acting mad at me, and when I asked her what the trouble was, she said that she was tired of me and Dennis flirting with each other. I was dumbstruck. I was nice to her boyfriend because he was her boyfriend; he was nice to me because I was her friend. Delight didn't like that Dennis had started calling me Redness, she didn't like that I was out on the floor laughing with him while she was stuck behind the bar not knowing what we were saying, and she tired of me acting innocent, like I didn't know when a guy was hitting on me. After pointing out that I couldn't imagine a world in which a guy who was sleeping with her would be hitting on me, I told her I'd keep everything extra-professional from then on; not talk to Dennis unless I really needed to. Funny, but the same evening, Delight apologised and said that she was being dumb and she didn't want me to start being cold to Dennis; she didn't want him to know what she had been imagining, and that was that. A few months later, Delight became pregnant with Dennis' baby, and as Cara was nearing six, Delight figured it would be a good opportunity if she was ever going to give her a sibling. Haley was born just a few months before I got married, and Delight and Dennis left her with Delight's mother because they, and Cara, all had roles in the ceremony. They didn't last a year together after Haley was born, but they remained friends; I was shocked to later learn that Dennis had died at thirty of a heart defect.
There were other bouncers -- Conrad was the other busy night bouncer who was nice enough, and sometimes Dennis' brother Leon would work a shift -- but that's about the extent of the staff who mattered to me. Goofy Dave was the closest that a customer came to crossing the divide into our circle of friends, but for the two years that I worked at Sha Na Na's, it was really only Delight and Dennis who crossed the more solid divide into family. If it's not obvious from what I've written (which I realise is more basic description than heartfelt memories), I loved these people: they made me laugh (hard), they always had my back, and I felt loved and protective in return. Those two years were a nonstop joyride.