NECROFILE: Five Years... My Brain Hurts A Lot
eye WEEKLY
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eye WEEKLY October 10, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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THE NECROFILE THE NECROFILE
FIVE YEARS... MY BRAIN HURTS A LOT
by
DONNA LYPCHUK
The two Bills, Greg, Malene, Ed, C.J., Konrad, Laura, Steve, Jason,
Kevan, Peter, Bob, Gemma (the writer, not the dog), Bertha, Deanna,
K.K. and I were goofing around in my Mental Wreck Room the other
night, like we have done every Saturday night for the last five years,
playing Sorry and Twister, scaring ourselves with the Ouija board and
listening to old Bowie records on the mono record player from Sears
that my parents gave me when I first started writing for eye a long,
long time ago, when it suddenly occurred to us --"Hey! eye is now five
years old."
"I guess we should do something," said Bill Reynolds. As a group, all
of us immediately grew somber at the thought of actually having to do
some extra work.
"I'm not doing it," exclaimed the other Bill, Bill Burrill, looking up
momentarily from the Chinese music he was plunking out on his
unplugged electric guitar like he always does. "I did it last year."
"I left the magazine last week," said Edmund Lee, thoughtfully. "So it
wouldn't be appropriate for me to do anything."
"Me too," piped up Steve Jarrett. He broke into song like he was wont
to do all the time. "Memories... light the corners of my mind. Misty
water color..." We all glared at him until he stopped.
"I have get off my ass and do the listings and the film section," said
Malene, looking at her watch. "Oh my! Oh my!" Then she scurried down a
black hole.
"I have to spend all weekend polishing my mother's iron lung," said
Jason, eye's fresh young music editor, with a flippant toss of his
Dorothy Hamill haircut.
"I'd like to do it," drawled C.J. O'Connor in that strangely American
yet mesmerizing accent of his. "But I promised this girl I'd spend the
weekend helping her do her blond roots."
"After five years of sampling excellent Chardonnays, I'm too drunk,"
burped Konrad Ejbich. "Sorry, I have to save the whales this week,"
wailed Bob Hunter.
"I have carpal tunnel syndrome from working the remote on my VCR,"
said Gemma Files, showing us a plaster cast autographed by Bruce
McDonald. "I'm scared I might write something negative and alienate
you all," said Chris Winsor. "I burned my corneas out surfing the
Internet," said K.K. "I'm an artist, not a hack," said Kevan Buss.
Laura, who is married to Bill, gave him a look. The look said, "How do
you feel about sleeping on the couch for the rest of the week,
buster?" Enough said. Greg Boyd turned around and pointed at me. "Make
her do it. She's nothing but a lazy, navel-gazing ingrate. She owes
us!" The rest of the group, especially those in administration and
marketing, cheered. It was true. I'm a freelancer. I'm never in the
office. If something happens, I am always the last person to know. I
have absolutely no idea what's going on at eye half the time.
Naturally, I am the perfect person to mark eye's fifth birthday.
Oh yes. I remember... (dream music, shimmery veil over vision)
Smoking cigarettes with Steve Jarrett and Bill Burrill outside the
office at 33 Draper St., watching the clowns emerge from the
theatrical makeup school across the street. I warned them I was a
"psycho magnet." Burrill scoffed at this until he found himself
pursued by a woman wearing a tiara who demanded that eye publish the
blank pieces of paper she submitted to him every week.
Also, during the Draper St. days, somebody sent me a box of what
appeared to be a box of Chloe perfume, shrink-wrapped in plastic. It
sat on Jarrett's desk for a week. Burrill and I opened it carefully,
knowing full well that nobody would actually be nice enough to send me
perfume, and were greeted by the worst stench that had ever assailed
our nostrils. Without even looking at the box's contents we dumped it
down the toilet. I thought it was a soiled menstrual pad. Later, I
found out, it was a "live" clam, sent to me by my good friend Peter
Evanchuk all the way from Halifax.
There was the time, at an eye party in our new offices at 57 Spadina,
when Mike Dent sat on the copying machine and Xeroxed his ass. This
somehow ended up as an item in Fran magazine, only Fran confused
Mike's sorry ass with that of Steve Jarrett's.
I recall the day when Gemma Files finally told me that Alexandra
Highcrest was really a guy -- or a girl. Like I said, I'm always the
last to know. It took me three years to figure out that Laura Lind was
actually Bill Reynolds' girlfriend. It finally dawned on me, a couple
of weeks ago, when they introduced me to their baby daughter. I
remember getting drunk with Ed Lee last Christmas and sitting with him
on a couch watching the other members of the staff dance on the coffee
table.
I remember when Greg Boyd changed his "look," trading in his Fred
McMurray-type sweater for a leather jacket with serious-looking black
laces. I remember when Bill Reynolds finally got an office with a
door. I also remember, with glee, finally seeing my first necrofile in
print, an open letter to the world, and then getting my first letter
from an angry reader, who quite correctly, chastised me for wrongly
attributing a quote to Emily Dickinson.
Unfortunately, I don't have enough room to list all of our
accomplishments over the past five years, but here are a few... Chris
O'Connor's Pulitzer Prize-winning last interview with Kurt Cobain,
Laura Lind's "Talkin' Film" spot on Regis and Kathie Lee, Gemma Files'
cameo in Quentin Tarantino's last film, Steve Jarrett singing the
anthem at the Blue Jays game last year, Bill Burrill falling off one
of the stools at the Black Bull and getting right back up despite all
odds, and Bill and Greg jammin' with the Ramones.
And me winning $500 at bingo last week... a hundred bucks for every
year that some wise-ass has come up to me and said, "Hey, you know
that eye thing? It's never going to last."
Hope you didn't make a bet on that. Five years and counting... what
more could you ask for free?
Donna forgot to mention her book of columns, the necrofiles, published
by eye and Sam Hiyate's Gutter Press. It's still out there, so go get
it. And come celebrate five years of getting high with eye at
Atlantis, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 10:30 p.m.
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