Track 4: BEFORE YOU GO-GO by Kim June Johnson
I don’t remember how I learned Vanessa was dying. Was it an email from a mutual acquaintance? Did I run into an old childhood friend who mentioned it in passing? I found myself looking her up on Facebook one evening, clicking on photos of her in a head scarf, dark circles around her eyes. There was an old post about a marathon for cancer survivors, a link to a recent fundraiser her sister had set up for her. My eyes fell on a photograph of her sitting with a man who was clearly her partner, and between them, a girl who looked to be about six or seven, with dark orange hair, pale skin and freckles—a mirror image of Vanessa at that age.
She has a daughter too.
It had been years since I’d last seen her. Vanessa and I spent a good chunk of our childhoods living across the street from each other. Bachelor Heights, the middle-class subdivision we grew up in was a neighbourhood of quiet streets where kids played hopscotch and four square in the cul-de-sacs and rode bikes up and down the roads after school. Where people kept their sidewalks shovelled in the winter and their flower beds weeded in the summer. Where families took evening strolls through the dry, open hillsides that sloped behind the houses.
Our friendship was one of those things you can’t remember the beginning of. It had always been there, the way the sidewalks and the road signs and the sky had always been there. It was not idyllic, as some childhood friendships are. Vanessa could be bossy and mean, and I could be overly sensitive and a bit of a pushover. She could be fickle and spread herself among the neighbourhood girls, claiming a different best friend every week, while I was devoted and perhaps too attached. Her stormy moods were a lot to take, and once, I lost my temper and punched her in the nose when she refused to give me back my Cabbage Patch doll.
But we also traded stickers under her mountain ash tree and built blanket forts in my basement. The spring she fell and broke her collarbone, I spent hours colouring at the end of her couch while she lay propped up on pillows and painkillers. When she was better, we spent three weekends straight making a hideout at the edge of a large outcropping of rocks in the hillside at the top of our street.
Sometimes Vanessa’s older sister Tonya let us hang out with her. Tonya was tall and blonde and beautiful and knew everything about everything. Tonya had the best sticker collection, but she rarely let us touch any of the stickers, even though we both longed to run our fingers over the smooth puffy stickers and smell the scratch ’n sniffs. Tonya liked to cut each sticker out individually, the backings still on to preserve them, before placing them in neat rows under the plastic sheet of a photo album page. Once in a while, if we asked nicely, we were allowed to lift the plastic and smell the scratch ’n sniffs—popcorn, strawberry ice cream, bubblegum—but we were forbidden from actually scratching them, and instead, had to rub gently with our fingertip to release the scent.
The summer after Vanessa and I finished grade five, it was sweltering, and Tonya holed up in their air-conditioned living room all day, dressed in tiny shorts and a tank top, replenishing her ice cubes and orange Tang every half hour or so while Much Music videos blared on the television set.
I didn’t know anything about pop music or music videos. My mother listened to the classical music station on CBC, and my dad liked The Eagles and Kenny Rogers on the truck radio. We only had basic cable TV, but Tonya and Vanessa had all the extra channels. Tonya, three years older, knew all the words to all the songs, knew the names of all the singers and band members and even who some of the band members were dating. That summer, pop music became the focal point of our lives as Tonya poured two extra glasses of Tang, plunked us down in front of the TV, and taught Vanessa and me everything she knew.
During videos we didn’t like (Phil Collins and Twisted Sister were our least favourite) Tonya let us into her bedroom so we could gaze at her massive collection of posters that covered most of two entire walls. Billy Idol, Belinda Carlisle, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, the Eurythmics, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Lionel Richie. She named them all for us and I stored the information away in my brain as if I’d one day be tested on it.
The posters had come from the Bop Magazines Tonya bought with her allowance. Vanessa had a few Bop magazines too, it turned out, though her poster collection was not as impressive. Sometimes Vanessa and I were allowed to look through Tonya’s large stack of Bop magazines and if Tonya was in a really good mood, she’d let us spread her Bonnie Bell fruit Lip Smackers across the floor and smell each one while we read interviews and learned random trivia about pop stars and sitcom actors. (VISIT JOHN TAYLOR AT HOME! FIND OUT WHAT THE STARS SEE FOR YOU AND COREY HAIM!)
Back in the living room, in front of the TV, we’d wait for our favourite videos to come on. Tonya’s favourites were our favourites—Anything by Duran Duran, Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling, A-ha’s Take On Me. We’d grab a hairbrush from the bathroom down the hall, lean our heads together and belt out the choruses like we were famous backup vocalists. Sometimes Vanessa and I leaped off the arms of the couch.
“There’s a great new British band about to be introduced in North America,” Tonya told us one afternoon, while a Twisted Sister video played on mute. The reason Tonya knew so much about music—especially British pop bands—was that she had older cousins in London. Tonya and Vanessa had gone to England once to visit them, and they returned with slight accents, which made me jealous.
“You think all British bands are the best,” I said, feeling a bit left out of their shared English heritage. I didn’t know a single Canadian band; the rest of them seemed to be American.
“No, I don’t,” she corrected me with a sly grin. “But all the best bands are British. Anyway, this is actually the best band ever! The video to their hit song will be released here in August. They’re called ‘Wham’.”
And so we waited for August to come.
Tonya saw the video first of course, parked, as she was, day after day in front of the television set. She flaunted it the way she flaunted her posters and her Bonnie Belle Lip Smackers. Vanessa phoned me and I rushed over and we sat on the couch for over an hour waiting for the video to come on again.
Tonya recognized it immediately even before the lights shone fully on George Michael’s all-white outfit and full head of fluffy hair. “Jitterbug” chorused a few times, with finger-snapping in between, and then a single high organ note crescendoed before the band kicked into an instantly-infectious rhythm. Tonya was dancing, and Vanessa and I leaped to our feet too. Vanessa knocked a lamp off one of the side tables, and her mother came in from the kitchen to scold us, but we weren’t listening. It was the chorus, and Tonya was belting “Wake me up!” into the hairbrush while Vanessa and I shook our hips and flailed our arms like the backup singers on the video.
As August wore on, Vanessa’s mother started forcing us to go outside, so the three of us would make the long trek to the convenience store at the bottom of the hill, where we bought Fun Dips and gobstoppers and gummy five-cent candies in tiny brown paper bags. We bought Bop magazines too, of course, paying particular attention to any breaking news about Wham or just George Michael himself. My walls began to fill up with posters; I’d scored a centrefold of George with a single cross earring dangling from his left lobe, gazing intently into the camera. I taped it front-and-centre above my bed.
Time shapes itself differently when you’re a kid. Those days of watching Much Music videos in Vanessa’s living room felt like they went on for years. In reality, it was probably just that summer, with a smattering of times throughout the next fall and winter. But back then, it felt like a fixed, solid thing: we would always be there, with the hairbrush and the half-empty cups of orange Tang, the music blaring.
The following spring, Vanessa’s family bought a bigger, fancier house on the other side of town and without much warning, one Saturday afternoon, a moving truck pulled up in front of their house. By the end of the weekend they were gone.
Vanessa and I agreed to stay friends, and once in a while I rode the city bus across town to meet her at the mall where we bought Orange Julius drinks and bulk jelly beans from the Bay candy counter and sampled perfumes from the long glass display racks in Sears. Our friendship continued for a few more years in spurts, but our shared Much Music days were over.
After I found Vanessa on Facebook, I wrote her a note with a humorous and apologetic reference to the time I punched her in the nose when she wouldn’t give me back my doll. She responded a few weeks later, saying that she didn’t remember the nose-punching incident, but had many great memories of our childhood together. She paid me a compliment on one of my blog posts and asked if I had plans to write a book. I asked her about her husband and daughter. She told me what I already knew but was hesitant to bring up: she was undergoing treatment for cancer. She messaged me again a few months later, saying she was sorry, she hadn’t been feeling very energetic and didn’t spend much time on the computer. I told her I understood and hoped she would feel better soon. I wanted to ask about her health, but worried that would be exhausting for her, so I kept my end of the conversation to kids and work. Soon after that, our correspondence petered out.
I went online to message her one evening the next fall. She’d been on my mind; I had sent her a message in May, but hadn’t heard back. My daughters and I were sitting at the kitchen table after dinner, trying to decide what to do with the rest of the evening. The summer had been busy, and school had just started again after a prolonged school district strike; I was bone-tired and irritable. It had been raining all afternoon, and the three of us felt cooped up. The girls started to argue about their preferred activity, and I told them to work it out and let me know what they decided. That’s when I logged onto Facebook and noticed a post for Vanessa’s celebration of life, which had happened a few months before.
My heart sank. For some reason, I thought our connection would have made this news available to me. But how? Her family hadn’t known we'd started keeping in touch again. Those faraway years of childhood had been swallowed up by all the years that came after. Still, I felt as though I could reach through that thin slip of time and touch us there, trading stickers under the mountain ash or flipping through Bop magazines on Tonya’s bedroom floor.
“Mom! Mom!” Ella, my youngest hollered. “We’ve decided we want to play Just Dance.”
I looked up from the computer screen. They’d gotten a Wii for Christmas, which came with the motion-sensitive dance game, Just Dance. The idea of loud music at that moment made me cringe. A walk would have been ideal, but outside, rain was still slashing at the windows. I agreed, and they went into the living room to turn it on.
I was just beginning to gather up the plates, when I heard the familiar intro.
“Jitterbug . . . Jitterbug.” The organ’s penetrating high note. The band kicking in.
I watched as my daughters bopped around the living room. It would be months before they’d know the words, but I knew every one. I stood watching them, crying a little and then laughing. Then I put the dishes down and joined them.
Kim June Johnson is a singer-songwriter, poet and trauma coach from Vancouver Island, Canada. Her poems and short essays have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, River Teeth's Beautiful Things Blog, FOLKLIFE, TNQ, Prairie Fire and elsewhere. She lives in a draughty house beside a creek with her teenage daughter and a collection of well-behaved animals.
