Dancing in the Dark Read Online Free Page A

musicians except for Karen, Scott’s girlfriend, who was sitting with her legs stretched out in a long line and her back against the low brick & tar wall of the roof with her beautiful short-cropped pale brown head asleep against Scott’s shoulder. These guys are all about my age, I’m 23, and mostly from Toronto, although I’m from Manitoba, Dick is from New York, and Paul used to play with a couple of groups after school in Halifax. Halifax is in Nova Scotia.
    Ned was talking about music, and how important it is, guys playing in bands, changing the world or something, and how we all want to be famous, but we’re only going to be famous for about 15 minutes.
    I didn’t say anything. It was late, it had been a long day, the air was just starting to get lovely and cool. And I’m usually a fairly quiet guy. I hold myself in. I’m a hot bassist, that’s what I play, that’s what I do in life, dude, I play bass, people have been saying I’m pretty hot; but if you come from a town south of Great Slave Lake, just a bit north of the Dakota border, and you’re in a city like Toronto, with all these different groups, or New York, then I think it’s sort of dumb to come on mouthy whenever you get the chance. I’d rather be just easy-going reflexive, take my time and give myself time to think about some of the ideas that people like Ned rap down. It always comes together for me a few days or a few weeks later, and I’ll say, O yeah, I see what I think about that. Whether it’s music, or maybe art, or something to do with economics, how the Japanese are buying into the entertainment industry or something like that, or, perhaps, something to do with fame. Like, what is it, what does it mean?
    I’m 23. I haven’t lived in Toronto for very long. Well, about 11 months.Manitoba is sort of classical. Toronto is an incredible hodgepodge. I think a lot of that goes into people’s music.
    Anyway I’m not a punk. Not since I was about 12. Before I began playing and took up bass in high school. None of these people sitting around eating fake Kraft yellow cheese and listening to Ned trying to act like a talk show host or a media guru or something like that are punks either. I don’t look like that or dress like that. As for the playing, well, that’s different. I like songs that seem to be about an issue of some kind. I like people like this guy Adrian who has started hanging around a lot who can write songs that are really sort of “in your face.” That’s a term, it just means, direct, challenging. But I’m more interested in the bass lines of a song, and how the bass lines can take over the song and make it into something really incredible. What went wrong with Johnny Rotten? He didn’t understand the idea that bass is more important than lead, that’s what went wrong, so all his stuff with PiL sounds incomplete and sort of tinny, like not quite whatever it’s supposed to be.
    There’s a girl here with the same name I have, almost. Her name’s Samantha. She’s sitting on a little flat car cushion of some kind, in the circle, across from Karen, and she has one of those really light frilly around the shoulders pink & print summer dresses on. Sounds frilly but she seems to be a really ballsy girl, super pretty, with a ton of honey blond hair. She’s talking to Paul about some of the young kids who come into the store, a trendy brass fittings place just off Queen Street West, where she works, and she says, “They’re just a bunch of high school kids who like Duran Duran.” and Paul laughs. That’s how people communicate. We’d be lost if we didn’t have these 1000s of different groups to use as designations for what we’re talking about. A teacher I had in Tremlo, Grade 12, I think, said it was sort of like the Greeks and Greek mythology. The Greeks had a lot of Goddesses like Diana and Hecate.
    I’d like to say something to her, start a little rub of some kind, but I’m too tired. Now she’s talking about