The Thompson Gunner (3 page)

Felicity tells me Emma wants me to call her about ‘the TV people', the ones I'm working on a show with, and it's only once the moment's passed that I realise a pause was left in there for me to elaborate. By then she's moved on to tell me there's a celebrity canoe race on Sunday, and she and
Emma were sure I'd want to say Yes so they've done it for me. And Emma said to tell me that there's a beer sponsor and a VIP marquee deal.

When Felicity mentions it's two to a canoe, I tell her I'll take anyone with a world record or an Olympic gold in butterfly or freestyle – anyone famous for their upper-body musculature.

It seems unfair that I should bump into Susie O'Neill at a photo shoot that was all about the stapling of spangly fabric, and yet I get dudded frequently at celebrity sporting events. I once played tunnel ball with an air-guitar champion, the state Health Minister, a hairdresser to the stars and Ronald McDonald, and there's a reason tunnel ball isn't usually played in huge plastic boots. Ronald was crap, frankly. The event was a fundraiser for cancer support, and we got caned by some ten-year-olds from Indooroopilly State School who, it has to be said, showed signs of considerable practice.

I tell Felicity not to expect much of me, that the moment I start hoping for a canoe partner with shoulders I'm pretty much guaranteed to end up with some fey boy interior designer from some crap TV show, who hardly has the upper-body strength to lift the Product to his own hair.

Felicity apologises, and I tell her I love these things, that's what I'm saying. This is all good. The race will be a happy debacle, we'll raise money for something that needs it, and there's a beer sponsor. Could a Sunday be better than that? I don't think so.

In the dark in the back of the car, this isn't all coming through the way I want it to. Maybe I should have mentioned
Ronald McDonald and the tunnel ball, instead of just drifting off into it as a hazy old thought. Maybe I should stop trying to play the role of the comedian just met at the airport. Most people expect you to behave like a chat-show guest, but perhaps Felicity doesn't. I should be glad of that.

We pass some shops and a park. She pulls a festival program out of her bag, and tells me there'll be a T-shirt but they come in two different styles and she thought it might be nice for me to choose. She says Elliott King and the TV people are looking at Saturday and they'll get back to Emma with the details. She goes through the last couple of minor items on her list, and seems to relax once they're all crossed off.

I ask her if there's a gap somewhere in the itinerary for me to have coffee with a friend and she says ‘Sure' and she makes a note of it. ‘Easy.'

So, that's business attended to for now, in a conversation that never quite worked the way it should. But that's probably just me, this day, these weeks. Roger Sanchez plays on. Adam taps the wheel sometimes. The Perth CBD appears ahead of us.

W
HEN YOU ARRIVE
at the PanCanadian Comedy Festival, it's the big gift-wrapped box with the plush bag and the genuine steel pen and pencil set that give it away – the festival's name
comes from PanCanadian Petroleum, the principal sponsor.

The box was on the bed in my room at the Fairmont Palliser Hotel, wrapped in gold paper, with a matching gold ribbon. It was the first thing I saw when I shut the door, my suitcase in tow and my other hand full of envelopes, a warm shower my only immediate plan.

I flew to Calgary from Melbourne via Los Angeles and Vancouver, and I was met by someone who said, ‘You must be Meg Riddoch. I've seen your picture.'

She was holding a festival program above her head to rally the necessary passengers, and she kept it there while she spoke to me, her arm sticking straight up into the air. There were two other festival comedians on the flight, one from Vancouver who had flown only over the Rockies, one from New Zealand who looked in better shape than me. The Canadian was dark and wiry, the New Zealander
looked like a dissolute Viking. He looked unstoppable, and it was only when I stood next to him at the baggage carousel that I could see how bloodshot his eyes were, and that the flight might have taken its toll.

‘I met you in Melbourne, I think,' he said, and it might have been bourbon that I smelled on his breath. ‘At the festival there, a couple of years ago.'

His name was Dave Stone, and his voice was quieter than I'd expected. I didn't remember him, but I covered well enough. He'd had a break from stand-up after that, after Melbourne, and he'd been getting back into it in the past couple of months. He told me he'd been filming
The Lord of the Rings
, not that I would have seen him. He ended up on the cutting room floor, every frame he was in.

‘It pays, though,' he said. ‘I had some lines, and lines pay. And they've brought me back for the director's cut on the DVD.'

We loaded our bags into the back of the brown station wagon, and I sat in the front passenger seat next to our driver, whose name I can't remember. She was a festival volunteer.

We'd flown over mountains, serious snow-capped Rockies, to get there, then circled Calgary over a dry brown plain that I supposed must be prairie. On the way into the city in the car, we passed low buildings built for snow, the Winter Olympic ski jump, dry leafless trees and people turned shapeless by the sheer volume of clothes they had to wear to walk outside.

‘Winter must be cold here,' I said, as some drops of rain hit the windscreen and the wipers shuddered and scraped them away noisily and the leaden sky seemed to go a long long way off into the distance.

Our driver
turned to me, wanting to offer better news to a new visitor, and she told me brightly, ‘Oh no, it's much worse in Winnipeg.'

She wasn't the last person to tell me that, or to explain the particular weather systems at work, the Chinook Arch you see sometimes in the clouds, the way winter operates in these parts when it's really set in.

I told her Brisbane city had never recorded a freezing temperature and she said, ‘I can't believe that. How can it be? It must be strange for you. How do you know when the seasons change?'

Later, after my shower, I wanted good coffee but I had no idea where to get it. I went down to the festival office – in a suite on a lower floor – and kept myself awake by talking to the people there. They had coffee and it was offered to me I don't know how many times, but it was in a large pot kept warm on a table full of Danishes, and for quite a few years now I've had a serious attachment to the big silver machine and a fresh genuine skinny latte.

The time for the reception came, and my next Calgary fact came along with it. The reception was in a different building, but we never went close to outside to get to it.

‘It's the fifteen-plus rule,' one of the staff said. ‘All the downtown buildings are linked fifteen feet above the ground, so you don't have to go outside in winter.'

To me this sounded like a theme park idea, some kind of urban maze, but they all seemed to think it was normal, passing from one building to another at altitude. It stopped me putting together a map of the place. I left Calgary without ever being quite certain where the PanCanadian building was, though I'm sure it's one of the big ones – it must be near the hotel and I ended up in it several times. But I have no compass indoors, it turns out, and each time I had to go to the PanCanadian building I needed help, and our arrival there took me quite by surprise.

There
was food in abundance at the reception, stand-up canapé-style food, and my body decided it was a meal time though it can't have been later than five p.m.

I talked to a festival board member, an accountant called Tina, who worked for PanCanadian and who said, ‘Oh, yeah, we're a big part of the community here, so we feel it's important to give something back.' She told me Calgary was often called the Houston of the north, that it started as a wheat town, that the company loved events like this. They were behind a few festivals throughout the year, and the writers' festival was just last month. ‘There were Australians here for that, too,' she said. ‘I think we get three of them, two or three. Your government helps. But I don't know the details of that, not as well as I should. We were gearing up for the comedy at that time also. I just love comedians. You're all just so darn . . . funny. Well, most of you. I've got to admit there's the occasional guest who remains a mystery to me. But it'd be no good if all our tastes were the same. I mean, what kind of world would that be?'

She had a severe fringe, and a glass of non-alcoholic punch with an umbrella in it, and she chose only the neat canapés that were easy to handle. I drank wine and had tartare sauce sticking the fingers of my free hand together, and I'd already spilt soy on my boots. She seemed like the kind of person a festival such as this would find essential, but who would keep themselves determinedly low-key and who quite enjoyed it when jet-lagged comedians daubed themselves with food in front of her. That way, she could go home and tell the family something like, ‘Hey, kids, quite a crop we've got this year. I met this Aussie . . .'

Dave Stone arrived
at the door about then, and came over our way lifting an orange juice from a tray as he crossed the room.

‘Goodness,' Tina said, ‘
two
of our international visitors. I can't keep you all to myself. I should leave you to mingle.'

She took two steps away before being caught by someone with festival business to discuss, and they walked off with their heads down.

Dave Stone had washed his hair and now it seemed to blow back from his head as though it was wind-tunnel affected. He still looked like a Viking.

He caught me noticing and said, ‘Can't do a thing with it,' and he shrugged his shoulders theatrically.

He told me he'd had no idea where the reception was, and a volunteer had caught him in the doorway of the hotel as he'd been about to wander onto the street in search of it.

‘Wrong, wrong, wrong,' he said. ‘And she set me straight. “Comedians freeze till they snap out there.” Apparently.'

I
told him they say it's much worse in Winnipeg, and he laughed and said he'd heard that.

He clinked the ice cubes around in his glass, and took a mouthful. He shook his head to clear away the seediness of flight. He told me he only drank orange juice now, not even Coke, but that he'd flown from Hawaii smelling of the drink someone had spilled on him and it had been good to get his clothes on their way to the hotel laundry.

‘How about the bloody gift on the bed?' he said, as he took a handful of prawns on sticks from a passing tray. ‘Did you get that?'

‘The gift from – how shall I put it – the naming-rights sponsor? Yes. Did you know about that?'

‘No, I just thought it was going to be big, a big festival. Like, drawing people from all across Canada.'

‘Sure, Pan-Canadian, from the Greek. Meaning “all across Canada”.'

He laughed, and set his prawn sticks on the windowsill, all the prawns in his mouth already. The rain had stopped outside by then but there was a blustery wind blowing, trees bending, and not too many people out in it.

We agreed it couldn't happen where we came from – a festival taking its name from an oil company – but we also agreed the people were lovely, every one of them, and we'd feel dirty if we went home and crapped on them in interviews: ‘Well, I said Yes thinking, Pan-Canadian, that's got to be one of their big festivals. Then I got there and it was PanCanadian
Petroleum
!'

We had a festival in Tasmania not so long ago which
had the timber industry as a minor sponsor. The organisers emailed months in advance to let us know, and to tell us there were protests being planned and the protesters would attempt to contact us and get us on side, and that they, the festival and its representatives, defended utterly our right to free speech, etcetera, etcetera. It was several hundred words of numbered points about how fine it was that we would have our own views, and that was enough for me. It reminded me that I'd prefer pristine forests
and
a way of keeping people in work and I wasn't sure how that would happen, so I lay low, put Emma between them and me and just did the job when the day came.

But Calgary wasn't like that. Dave Stone and I paid private lip service to the ozone layer, confessed to each other our motor vehicle ownership, and agreed that we were both probably as dependent on fossil fuels as the next person, even when the next person was someone in an executive position with PanCanadian Petroleum, as was likely to be the case in the room in which we'd found ourselves.

I helped myself to a third glass of wine, he took another orange juice and we agreed we were as conflicted as all right-thinking people must be from time to time, and that a lot of what we did might or might not be seen as hypocritical, depending on how you were disposed to look at it. Dave Stone, some caviar caught in his shaggy Viking beard, confessed he even bought Nike shoes, but only because he couldn't get others to fit. I told him to call me the moment he started to contemplate buying his young nieces and nephews gift packs of cigarettes for Christmas.

We went
off separately and schmoozed. I told myself people who work in the fossil fuel industry are, of course, people too. I spent a good ten minutes being silently intensely political, wondering if I should be more committed to public transport at home – catch a bus once or twice, write a letter to the papers about it – and then I gorged myself on the Pan-Canadian Petroleum canapés. There are people less shallow than me who have already evaporated.

Quick, more prawns. There's no compromise in me, only surrender.

T
HE CANAPÉ DIET
: you know you're famous when you never have to deal with food bigger than your own hand. Actual meals mystify famous people, and cutlery is something they're almost nostalgic for, from childhood.