NECESSARY EVIL: THE STORY OF EBENEZER

A still smoking roach fills the room with gray smoke.

On the table lies a hundred copies of “Call Me Evil”, Gaelan Bleasdale’s latest rap album.  It’s been a month since he returned from tour.  During the two months on the road he played fifty shows across the United States and didn’t hear his real name the entire time.

Just EVIL .

His cell phone rings and he ignores it. Just as he has been ignoring his emails and his MySpace messages and the positive reviews that have been flooding in. After years of struggling it seems like he might finally make it.

Surprisingly, he doesn’t give a shit.

Since he returned to Vancouver it hasn’t stopped raining. Every morning he wakes up to silence and the tick tick tick of rain hitting his window.

Which is the only sound he can hear in his apartment.

He doesn’t want to listen to music because it just reminds him that his relationship is over and the reason why. Returning from tour he found he didn’t feel the same way about his girlfriend.

He hasn’t bothered unpacking from tour.

He remembers that feeling when he first saw her, still carrying the CDs, smelly as shit from life on the road. How she kissed him when he couldn’t reach out and touch her with his hands full of the music he made.

Now the CDs sit on the counter where has he left them for too long.  The apartment doesn’t smell like her anymore and where there was once some semblance of feminine order there are instead the chaos of cigarettes, roaches and the detritus of a few too many drinking binges.

Finally he picks up the phone.

He was waiting for the feeling to pass.

Only it hasn’t.

Everyone in his life is asking him what he is going to do now. His friends want him to put out a new album and see how far he can push it. His girlfriend wanted him to get a real job and become an adult. She is gone but the question remains.

Can he grow up? Does he have to?

Ring.

He wants to hang up the phone. Just wait it out. Josh is always losing his phone. He probably won’t pick up anyway.

“Allo?”  answers the voice on the other end of the line. A flush announces that once again my brother has answered the phone on the toilet.

“How is it going, sir Josh?” asks Evil.

“Pretty good,” says my brother, the Hispanic Jewish rapper Josh Martinez better known to me as Matty Kimber. “Still stinky from tour?”

“Had me about a hundred showers,” says Evil.  “Boom. Fresh and clean.”

“Been a minute since you’ve been in touch,” says Matty.  “Whassup? Decided to stop being a fucking Salinger and hit up your boy?”

“Nah, man,” says Evil. “I don’t know how to say this. But this isn’t working for me anymore.  I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

“Rapping?” asks Matty.

“Yeah,” says Evil. “I just want to let you know that I’m done. I’m out. I quit.”

“If that’s what you want then I understand,” says Matty. “You on the whole gotta grow up tip?”

“Yeah,” says Evil. “I’m 30 and I got nothing. I need to get something.”

“That’s cool,” says Matty. “I’ve been there and if you can make it work then go for it. If you ever change your mind, give me a call first.  Be good, Evil.”

“Hey Matty,” replies the rapper formerly known as Evil.

“Yeah?”

“Call me GAELAN.”

*****************************************************************************

Two 15-year olds rifle through a well stocked liquor cabinet. They are not the first and they will not be the last to get wasted on the host’s booze.  Check out the staggering girls just beginning to shows signs of becoming women. The awkward voice-cracking boys who haven’t learned how little they know of the world.  Trouble is coming, the end of this world, but for now a disgusting concoction is being contemplated.

“He says you can’t finish any of the shits,” says, his best friend Stu Raegh. “The booze is his parents.”

“So if we have a little of all of it, he won’t have a problem?” replies Bleasdale.

“You got it.”

“Let’s get ourselves a drink then.”

Some would describe the combination as Bat Piss. Other might describe it as a recipe for making yourself very sick. For the boys, it is the perfect drink.

Stu mixes the drinks pouring little dribbles of brandy, vodka, tequila, rum, and sherry into a shit mix for the gods.

“Pour in some orange juice,” says Bleasdale.

“Think that’ll mix?” asks Stu. “I do have coke.”

“Orange juice mixes with everything, mother fucker,” says Bleasdale.

Thankfully someone else has already stolen the orange juice. Thus Bleasdale has to settle for shit mix and coke. The two boys have been friends since Bleasdale moved to Chilliwack when his parents got divorced.

Their relationship began over a common interest in Tribe Called Quest. Hanging out at Stu’s place the music came on and BLEASDALE rapped over the beat, having managed to memorize the verse beforehand.

Years later he will be Stu’s best man at his wedding.

For now they are scouting out the teen hotties, trying to see if the shit mix will make them more charming. Bleasdale almost lost his virginity at the age of 13 on an airplane with a pretty black girl who was interested in pursuing a career as a professional dancer. Unfortunately he had to settle for dry humping and frustration.

While the drink doesn’t make Bleasdale more charming it does make him slightly more confident in his emceeing skills.

The beatbox is provided by the sounds of retching emerging from the bathroom. Someone got too shit-faced on the shit mix.

“Larry, are you okay?” asks a pretty girl in a pink dress. Her name is Holly. She developed breasts before the other girls her age and as such has been popular since puberty.

“Yo, is he good, not very, oh hey, it’s Lightweight Larry, look he’s puking, hit ya with vomit like Ken hit Ryu with a hadouken.”

“Stop it,” says the pretty girl.

Bleasdale’s vision is blurry and his courage is incredible.

“Light Weight Larry keep puking your going to mop it, sticking to the topic, hope there is no carpet, because puke don’t come off it,” says BLEASDALE to the growing disgust of the girls and the uproariously laughter of a barely standing Stu.

“You are Evil,” says the pretty girl in a pink dress.

Pause in being pissed drunk. Here is a complete moment of clarity. She just said it. He has a fucking rap name now!

“Yeah it’s Evil G, in the place to be, the incredible Emcee,” proclaims Bleasdale, staggering towards future stardom.

Light Weight Larry ignores the commotion and continues to empty his stomach of the vile remains of the shit mix.

Within a half-hour, Evil will puke in the back yard with no witnesses except for Stu who can’t control his laughter as his friends succumbs to the shit mix.

And that’s how a boy named Gaelan Bleasdale became a rapper named EVIL.

******************************************************

Months have passed since that fateful phone call to Martinez.

Nothing much has changed in his life other than the absence of music. Evil continues to work as a waiter at a family restaurant spending his tips on booze, weed and cigarettes. To satisfy his creative side he has been drawing comic book villains and buying frames at local thrift shop to make his home into an art gallery.  His apartment has become a den of heroes and villains. Watching the cartoon war unfold on his wall, he remembers his own days on the road as a hero. Only he also remembers that these super heroes can’t have real lives when they take off the mask.

He thinks about getting a government job, something boring that he can sink his teeth into and work towards having some sort of adult life.  BC Hydro or even working as a cop.

He refuses to pick up a mic at parties and the shows he attends. He won’t go back even if he doesn’t know what he is moving toward.

To BLEASDALE, music is the evil that destroyed his childhood home and threatens to destroy every love he has ever had.

His parents got married young.

His father was a loose cannon, torn between pursuing a master’s degree in sociology and a career in music. He went away to Waterloo, became a teacher and was ready to start a new life. He was going to work the 9-5, and be there to raise his family with the woman he loved more than anything in the world.

Only music wasn’t done with his father.

Within a month of returning from Waterloo he was racking up $600 phone bills talking to EMI about making something happen.

In 1983, his father put up $15,000 dollars to put his record out and get a professional video made for his group Unit E. He toured around British Columbia always on the edge of that moment where he became a household name. Sacrificing time with his family for the things he would get for them when he hit the big time. Living out his childhood dreams but not seeing his children.

His wife felt like she was raising the kids alone. She can’t stand how much time he dedicates to music and how much of the family money is being spent on pursuing his childhood dreams. One day she decided she couldn’t take it anymore and left him.

EVIL was 12 years old and living with his father and 16 year old sister.  There were band rehearsals most evenings and often there was no food in the refrigerator.  His father couldn’t give up the dream and had trouble being a normal person.

Living on cheese on toast, shitty spaghetti that tasted like chili and strung together stir fry it became clear the arrangement wasn’t going to work.

His mother moved back in and his dad tried one last time to make it as a musician.

Stubborn in his faith in his music his father turned down a deal from a record label to produce a single. His father was a natural born hustler and sold ten thousand copies of his country album Looking for Love door to door proceeds of which would take his son and daughter to Hawaii in the early 1990s.  As a father he never mastered the middle ground between shitty spaghetti and fantastic trips.

Evil remembers a friend of his mentioning that his parents bought his dad’s album. This friend also mentioned that upon selling this album his father took a shit in their home and the smell was terrible.

He wanted a full album and believed if he only hustled a little while longer the break would come.

Only it never came.

His son quit music when he realized he was on the same path.

Throughout every relationship he has ever had Evil has been terrified that music would end up taking it away.

Music was a demanding mistress, constantly fighting for his attention. Forcing him on the road for months at a time to make a name for himself. When he was home he never had time away from the emails, calls on his cell phone, the grant applications and the creation of the next project.

He couldn’t offer 50/50 in any relationship he was in and knew it wasn’t fair.

Scared to death he left the one thing he loved doing in order to be able to love the next girl the way she deserved.  It would take his best friend in the world to change his mind.

******************************************************************************

After a few beers Stu pitches his idea.

It’s called Velvet Woods. What Stu describes as Forest Rap.  An album without pop culture references that would be relevant whenever it was released.  A psychedelic rollercoaster ride featuring god, monsters set in a wooded area circled by train tracks home to a terrifying train locking the inhabitants inside the forest in fear and panic. Stu wants to make a film to go with this mysterious project.

Best of all it has nothing to do with Evil and the life he is living.

“So you want to make a song about black flies?” asks Evil.

“That’s the basic idea,” replies Stu. “Not just a song though.  Whole album. You can be the train conductor.  You can be a ghost.”

“Like actual black flies?” Evil asks.

“That’s pretty much the point of the song,” Stu replies.

“And it’s a rap song?”

“Boom. Velvet Woods, motherfucker.”

“Alright then,” says Evil. “I’ll be a fucking black fly if I have to.”

Things have changed a lot since the days the boys were getting drunk on shit mix. Stu has made a career for himself making music videos.  Which began in Grade 8 with Stu being the cameraman and Evil the star. The years since have seen them make nearly a dozen rap videos and two of Stu’s short films cultivating a Twin Peaks image for Evil.  Since they were boys Evil has followed his best friends ambitions and found his own as a result. In the beginning Stu ghost wrote the raps for Evil to spit and made the beats himself.  Evil was the actor and Stu the director.

Evil was a child actor, his ADD made him a prime candidate to seek attention in anyway he could. He featured in such movies as 1991 Stephen King’s It, and the CBC TV series the Odyssey shortly afterwards. He competed for movie roles with Ryan Reynolds and Devon Sawa. Evil would later encounter Sawa fucked up on coke, doing lines in a bathroom.

He loved to perform and hip-hop was just another venue for that desire. They played shitty shows where audiences came for the five-dollar all you can drink kegs. Held a weekly night where they witnessed Vanilla Ice ream out his manager for 45 minutes straight.  Opened for Sir Mix-a lot, Shaggy andSwollen Members in their hey day and created great music together. At the height of their collaboration, Evil decided he couldn’t do it anymore. For four or five months they didn’t speak.  In ten years of always being best friends this was their longest time apart. Stu was angry. After all he had put it down, Evil walked away.

Now they are drinking beers at Stu’s place and Evil is writing raps for the first time in almost a year.

The project is called Velvet Woods and may never be released. A historical and surreal album-taking place in the forest.  He is not Evil. He is a miner. The monster in the woods. This story doesn’t have anything to do with his life. In the darkness of the studio he can forget about the girl he loved, the life he doesn’t know how to lead and lose himself in his creative outlet in the comfort of the best relationship he has ever had, the one that could never be taken away by music.

While everything else seems to change, being with Stu stays the same. Two boys ready to get shitfaced on the worst of liquor and have the best of times. Friends who made rap music and were superstars in the privacy of their basement. Now adults ready to put their dreams to the test.

Finally one day he picked up the phone.

“Whaddup,” says my brother.

“Nothing,” says Evil. “Whatchu doing?”

“Taking a shit,” replies my brother. “Long time no see. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to tell you something,” says Evil.

“Whassup?” asks my brother.

“Evil’s back.”

The toilet flushes and a rap star gets a new beginning.

Cop Evil Eye. Now in stores and available on the website.