By Bob Armstrong
I got to the location Mara had provided but all I could see at first glance was a scrap yard, a derelict building covered in graffiti and a skinny kid with long, dark hair setting up a drum kit.
“Is Mara here?”
The young guy poked his head up from his bass drum. “I think she’s rounding up the audience.”
They’d obviously been working, but they hadn’t exactly transformed the place into Coachella – not that I’d know what Coachella looks like. There were amplifiers, microphones, lights on stands and wires that snaked off toward a van parked behind a row of old fridges. I noticed a couple of guys in concert t-shirts and trucker caps beside the van, taking a smoke break.
“I’m Dave,” I said. “The meat guy.”
The drummer laughed.
“I’m Meat, the drum guy.”
Another skinny dark-haired kid showed up, this one with a pony tail and glasses and carrying a guitar case.
“And this is Payn. The guitar guy.”
The guitar guy put his case down and shook my hand.
“Actually it’s Jason. And he’s Lincoln.”
“So, I guess, what do you call it, stage names?”
Meat, or Lincoln, gave me a thumbs up. Guess he was on side with the stage name. Maybe that’s a drummer thing. Or maybe he just appreciated that it was spelled normally. Payn, or Jason, sort of rolled his eyes and opened his guitar case to get to work. I guess you have to suck it up and do some stupid things when you’re in a band. Like set up in a scrap yard to shoot a video covered in raw meat, which is where I came in.
“Mara said I should look around, get a sense of what’ll work best on camera. I should add I’ve never done anything like this before.”
Jason, I think I’ll just call him Jason from here on, plugged in his guitar and started tuning it. It looked like a Fender Stratocaster, but I noticed on the head it said “Stratocaster by Squire.” When you’re starting out, you must have to make do with off-brand instruments.
I turned to the drummer.
“So Mara said she thought maybe 250 pounds?”
Meat, I think I’m going to keep calling him Meat because that seems more appropriate for a drummer, although you might say I’m stereotyping, did a couple of rolls with his snare and tom tom and kicks with his bass drum.
“Yeah, you’d have to talk to Mara. She has a . . . she calls it a vision.”
I looked around and searched for traffic coming down the dead-end road.
“Where’s the rest of the band?”
Jason looked up from the neck of his guitar, where his fingers were running up and down scales.
“There is no rest.”
“Like The White Stripes?”
Jason’s wounded expression and pained sigh told me he’d heard that question too many times before.
I looked around the place again and it dawned on me that I’d listed it years ago during my short, miserable career in commercial real estate, before I went to work at my father’s butcher shop. There was no scrap yard then. The junked cars and appliances were piled up in what used to be the parking lot and loading zone of what had once been some kind of factory. Furniture, I think, before that work was all moved off-shore. In my mind I erased the foreground and scrubbed away the spray paint. I saw high ceilings, big wooden beams: the kind you don’t see anymore because the old-growth white pines are long gone. I’d pitched this place to every kind of developer and government program I could find. Even had conceptual drawings done, but everybody was worried about contaminated soil, particulate matter, heavy metals.
I think Meat and Payn were more thrash metal, or maybe speed punk, but I’m too old to know. I’m an Eagles man. Embarrasses the kids no end when they bring a friend over and I’m at the grill singing along to Hotel California.
Finally, another car pulled up and out came Mara in her tall leather platform boots and black cocktail dress, talking to the air and carrying a cooler half as big as she was. I could tell she’d have trouble stepping around all the scrap metal so I ran over and took the cooler from her and she just kept talking.
“Su-Lin’s coming at four. No, with Andrei and Kieran. So I need you to pick up Briana and Iqbal. Well, time’s tight. That’s why we call it guerilla marketing. In, out, bang! Go viral!”
She turned to me and tapped her ear bud.
“We’ll use the trunk of that car as the bar.”
The cooler was heavy, and I spend a lot of time hauling slabs of beef. I set it down behind an old Crown Victoria. Mara reached in the cab and popped the trunk and I placed the cooler inside.
Mara looked at my van and then at me with a searching expression. “So, where’s the meat?”
“It’s still at the store.”
“Oh my god. Go get it. Hurry!”
This was moving fast. She’d asked me the day before if I could provide meat for a promotional event for a band she managed. I’d said sure, burgers? Smokies? Steaks? And she’d pulled out her phone and showed me a photo of an old Beatles album cover where the lads were wearing butchers’ smocks and holding decapitated dolls and slabs of meat. Something bloody, she’d said. Something that’ll make an impression.
“We never decided on what cuts,” I said. “You said to take a look around and use my professional judgment.”
She rolled her eyes.
“They’re called Meat and Payn. I want something meaty. Something that makes you think of pain!”
We were joined by one of the smoke-break guys. He was carrying a camera.
“It’s gotta make an impression on video,” he said, rubbing his forefinger along a waxed 19th-century mustache. “You don’t want the red washed out in this light.”
I thought about it for a few seconds. It was kind of outside my wheelhouse.
“Could you put white sheets on the amplifiers, for contrast?” I asked. “Then maybe pile on beef briskets? Maybe beef hearts too?”
The camera guy walked over to one of the amplifiers and placed a little lens thing to his eye and looked around from different angles.
“How about ribs? The bones would be a good touch.”
“Sure,” I said. “Long ribs, I think, not short.”
Mara nodded and turned to Meat and Jason.
“Where are your white coats?”
The guys set down their guitar and drumsticks and dug out white lab coats. The cut wasn’t quite right for a butcher’s smock, but it was too late to bring that up and really how many people would know the difference?
“We need to get these coats bloody,” Mara said.
“How about,” the camera guy said, “if they had meat hanging off their coats?”
Mara clapped her hands and turned to me.
“Can you do that Dave?”
“You want them to have meat attached to their coats? It’s kind of going to smell.”
“They can handle it.”
I took a look at Jason, who had his coat on and his guitar strapped around his shoulders again. He played the guitar low on his thigh, like a Ramone or something. That probably left room for something to hang from his chest without getting in the way.
“Maybe rouladen. I like to cut it nice and thin. I could sew it to their coats with butcher’s twine, maybe?”
Mara rattled off an order. “So make that four briskets, a few beef hearts, a couple of livers, some kind of rack of ribs and let’s say two rouladens each?”
The camera guy spoke up again.
“Maybe too beefy. Do you sell rabbit? Those little carcasses creep me out.”
Mara nodded and took out her phone again and began texting furiously, then gestured for the camera guy to join him as she pointed out something of concern in the backdrop of junk.
This was adding up. I took out a pocket calculator and started estimating. Fifty pounds of brisket at six dollars a pound. One good-sized rack of beef ribs for maybe eighty dollars. Nine pounds of beef heart at eight dollars per pound. Four pounds of liver at five per pound. Four rouladens at maybe fifteen each. Throw in a couple of rabbits for fifty.
I jotted my estimate on an order pad and approached Mara, who was negotiating that ride for Briana and Iqbal and tapping out a text faster than any of Meat’s drum beats.
“Uh, Mara? I’ve got an estimate here. It comes out to about $565. I can do a fifteen per cent discount for a bulk order, but that’s still, let’s say $475.”
She paused mid-text.
“I thought you were going to do it for the exposure.”
“The exposure?”
Unger’s Meats has been in business in the same location since my dad opened the store 55 years ago. We’ve got customers, we’ve been doing their Father’s Day barbecues for three generations.
“I don’t think we ever said that.”
“Well, clearly, I don’t have the budget for that. I mean look at this, we’re doing a video shoot and song release party in a junkyard.”
“I thought you had a vision.”
“You don’t know how tough things are in the music industry now. You know how much a band gets for having their songs on Spotify?”
I shook my head.
“You don’t want to know. I’m asking you to do something for these kids. This might be their one shot. Two struggling Indigenous kids from the Rez.”
“Actually we live in Oak Haven.”
That was Meat. He’d put his sticks down to adjust his stool.
“My mom’s a public health nurse. She has a master’s degree.”
Oak Haven’s an older neighbourhood a few minutes from the store. We have a lot of customers there. Sometimes I do deliveries myself when we’re swamped. Lot of really nice renovations and fancy infills in Oak Haven.
“Okay, okay,” Mara said. “But the music industry’s still a tough place. We can’t afford $475.”
The details were different, but the pitch was familiar. “We’re trying to start something exciting here and the odds are against us. Wouldn’t you like to be part of something big?” I’d used a version of it myself trying to bring this exact property back to life as some kind of art centre, community office space or affordable housing development. I’d invested my own money in it. I’d tried to convince architects to give me a break on the sketches, the city to offer a tax holiday for whoever would buy it, the media to hype it as post-industrial cool.
Mara saw me wavering. She directed Meat to go back to his drums, took me by the sleeve and lowered her voice.
“I’ll level with you. It’s not just for them. I’ve maxed out my credit cards. I need to pull this off and make an impression or I’ll be out of business. Then I’ll be back at work for my dad.”
“Your dad?”
“Scheduling kitchen and bathroom renos. Posting before-and-after spreads on social media.”
Look. Meat and Payn is probably the dumbest band name I’ve ever heard, even if you spelled Pain correctly. And I never really even liked The White Stripes, except maybe for that one song they play during hockey games. But I remember how hard it is to be young and have a big dream, what it’s like to be a mouse trying to run with the wolf pack. Mara and Meat and Jason were about the age of my kids and I found myself searching for fatherly advice, but all I could think of was: “Whatever the asbestos-abatement guy quotes you, double it.”
“Okay. How about I go back to the store and I get all the trim I can find and add a bunch of cheap stewing meat? We can have some big bloody piles everywhere. I’ll even throw in a couple of rouladens. But do not tell anybody you got it for free.”
She thanked me and we shook hands and she went back to texting.
It took better than an hour to get back to the store, fill up the van and fight early rush-hour traffic to return. I heard Meat and Payn play from a couple blocks away. When I got to the scrap yard the gate was shut. I pulled up next to it, stepped out of the van and peered through the chainlink. In the gravel parking lot was an old school bus labelled “The Par-T Express.” Mara had bused in an audience. Attractive kids of various ethnicities danced, cheered and pumped fists in the air, maybe a little too enthusiastically to be fully spontaneous, amid the wreckage. Lighting trees gleamed in the overcast. One camera guy stood behind Meat, getting shots over his shoulder at the crowd. Another crouched below Jason, who roared indistinguishable sounds into the microphone.
I thought I could make out an Iqbal, a Briana, a Su-Lin, an Andrei and a Kieran: older, maybe more fashionably dressed, standing near the open trunk of that Crown Vic. Mara held a champagne bottle and topped up glasses. She had the look of somebody whose business was at least temporarily out of peril.
I nodded along to the music. It had been a long time since I’d listened to anything this unhummable. Not since bars allowed smoking. Not since I was a smoker. Still, the energy of the crowd was infectious, so I stuck around until the end, watching Mara introduce the band to the flashy-looking industry guests. Hands were shaken. Fists were bumped. Cheeks were air kissed.
The audience filed out past my van and the guests piled into a pair of SUVs. As Jason and Meat and the roadies loaded up gear, Mara came my way, eyes and teeth gleaming.
“I’m so sorry we wasted your time,” she said. “It was looking like rain, so we couldn’t wait. Plus Briana and Su-Lin are vegan.”
I said it looked as if the day went well for Meat and Payn and she said they had a boutique label ready to sign them and a streaming crime drama all set to license one of their songs. Plus, they landed a great festival gig – down in the fine print on the poster, but still playing for a big crowd.
“The guys are so excited. Meat – Lincoln – says he knows how Ringo felt playing the Ed Sullivan show.”
I didn’t remind her that Ringo only joined the band because the Beatles’ manager made them give poor old Pete Best the sack. I didn’t tell her it’s all a fleeting fantasy. I didn’t tell her that people like us are closer to the bottom of the food chain than the top, our dreams only appetizers for the apex predators.
Instead, I thought of the vacant lot beside Unger’s Meats. We’d just bought it to expand our parking lot and make room for our new food truck and maybe a future expansion. Get a liquor licence and some picnic tables, put up a small stage and you could fit 150 people there, easily.
“You manage anybody else?”
“The Wandas. They’re an all-girl surf rock band. Just starting out. And Wyatt and the Earps. Psychedelic rockabilly.”
I imagined girls in bikinis playing guitars on a sunny day while crowds bought beer and barbecue from the food truck. And Wyatt and the Earps? A band like that would attract a meat-eating audience. Oh, it’d be a pain in the ass getting the liquor licence and zoning approval and dealing with neighbours complaining about the noise. But it would be a blast while it lasted.
“How’d you like to come by the store? I’m looking to start a series of outdoor concerts with up-and-coming bands.” As Mara asked me questions about the venue and audience and launched into her bands’ fees and the sound and light systems they’d need, I remembered that I’d grabbed a couple of plastic-wrapped pepperoni sticks because I hadn’t had time to stop for lunch that day. I took one out of my jacket pocket, peeled off the plastic and held it between my index and middle finger while pondering whether or not I was losing my mind. Then I handed a pepperoni stick to Mara and gave a nod of agreement to everything she said.
“Cigar?”
Bob Armstrong lives in Winnipeg and has written everything but poetry and ransom notes. His second novel, Prodigies, won the 2022 Margaret Laurence Prize for Fiction and his western story Clay Allison’s Girl won the 2024 Longhorn Prize. His writing has been published in more than a dozen Canadian and American litmags and anthologies and on his Substack @wanderingwriterbobarmstrong.
