The Calvin Dover Show
Calvin Dover was wonderful. I loved Calvin Dover. He was absurd and gruff and brilliant and responsible for a large part of my adult brain. I was one of the writers on his sketch comedy series, The Calvin Dover Show, which ran for one under-the-radar season on a Canadian cable network. A year after the show was cancelled, and six months after stints at Letterman and SNL, Calvin went to Los Angeles for pilot season, got a starring role on a sitcom called Oodles and Smidge and vanished into all things Hollywood. Communications since have been fitful. I hadn’t heard from him in a year when out of the blue an email arrived. “Eekcm! Ima get on a plane and fly to da Big Smoke. See u Friday? Lub-blub. Nivlac.”
He was in Toronto promoting the sitcom’s third season, staying at the Sutton Place, and, as the curtain rises on this rainy evening, I am waiting for him sixteen streets away in what, for most of the year, is the parking lot of the Tranzac Club but which, during the Toronto Fringe Festival, is a licensed patio known as the Fringe tent. It’s the first Friday of the festival and I sit at a picnic table festooned with flyers and postcards advertising some of the festival’s hundred-or-so productions. A quick sampling includes Throwing Up Skipper, Hamilcar Barcalounger, Twat Honkers, Prima Donna Ding-a-ling, Halfway to Fuck It, and Hail to Thee Drunk Moron.
There is at Fringe festivals generally a spirit of randomness and adventure, everyone is looking for some kind of magic and, as I see Calvin jump out of a stretch limousine on Brunswick Street, I realize I’m sort of looking for something from him, too, though what that is I couldn’t tell you.
“Hey, McKee,” he says, “you Fringe tent slut. How long does it take to get to the airport from here?”
“On Friday? An hour.”
“My flight’s at eleven-fifty. So—” Calvin checks the time on his cellphone. “I got to be done by nine.”
He returns to the limousine, speaks to the driver, and takes from the passenger cabin a cellophane-wrapped gift basket and a bottle of Fiji water. With these in hand, he trots towards me. He has recently shaved his head—his skull and beard at a six-day stubble—and wears an inside-out T-shirt, torn jeans with a wallet chain, and scuffed brogues with no socks. All this slovenliness is a front, you should know, because Calvin is a truly quick person, his pale blue eyes alert to any change in his environment.
“So—” Calvin sets his items on the picnic table. “You want this gift basket? I can’t take it on the plane.”
I glance at its contents—a giant Toblerone bar, Asian pears, and Carr’s Table Water Crackers, among other foodstuffs—and ask how it’s going in LA.
“Great,” says Calvin, sitting down. “Except for the occasional heart attack. Heart attacks and vaginal rejuvenation. That’s what it’s all about.”
“And how’s the wife? Is Annabel here?”
Calvin’s wife had perfect brown hair, small hoop earrings, and seemed to me sleekly feminine. She used to watch the tapings with my ex-girlfriend in the green room, making sarcastic comments about everything, and for a moment I recall the thrill of writing for that comedy show, the different sketches and characters, and all that unsupervised creative excitement.
“Nah.” Calvin speedily shakes his head. “She’s in LA.”
“Is she good?”
“She’s good. Just got a promotion at work.” Calvin looks around the patio. “So do we go inside to order?”
The server on the patio is a theatre piece in her own right. Her name is Emma Follows and I took an acting class with her when she was known as Trish Follows. At that time, she was dark-haired, faintly plump, and stalled in an unhappy relationship. Tonight she has a platinum pixie cut, she’s slim, and vaguely single. She wears a sleeveless black frock with a daring side-slit and there’s an elegance to her movement as if, at some time in her youth, she apprenticed with the National Ballet School and I half-expect to see, as she checks on a far table, her fingers spread in an upflare. Emma Follows, as you may have gathered, is rather instantly noticeable but, as she stands at our table in third position, Calvin seems scarcely aware of her presence.
“You need a drinks menu?” she asks. “Or do you know what you’d like?”
“I do know what I like,” says Calvin, inspecting the flyer for Throwing Up Skipper. “I like tigers and dinosaurs and pictures of rainbows.”
“Right,” Emma says blandly. “You want a rainbow?”
“For every storm I suffer, maybe.”
I raise a finger. “I’ll have another ginger ale.”
“What?” Calvin glares at me. “You can’t not drink, motherfucker. How often am I in Toronto?”
“I’m sort of not drinking.”
“Listen to you. ‘I’m sort of not drinking.’ I got two hours in this town. You’re drinking.” Calvin passes Emma a Gold Visa card. “He’s drinking. Let’s start with two Kilkenny.”
Emma dips her head. “We don’t have Kilkenny.”
“Of course you have Kilkenny. I came here for Kilkenny. This is the Fringe tent sponsored by Kilkenny.”
“Maybe ten years ago it was.”
“What’re you saying?” Calvin looks around, bewildered. “Everything’s changed now?”
“We have Amsterdam Blonde, Amsterdam Nut Brown, Harp Lager—”
“Please—” Calvin lifts a hand in protest. “Don’t say any more beer names. I don’t want to hear word descriptions of any more beer names. Just two pints of whatever. Harp Lager.”
Emma gives Calvin a you-might-be-more-interesting-than-I-thought glance, then neatly turns to her left and strides away.
“McKee,” says Calvin, picking up the Fiji water, “our waitress has the most beautiful legs I’ve ever seen.”
“Emma Follows.”
“Does she?” Calvin opens the Fiji water and brings it to his mouth. “And how do you know Emma follows?”
“She’s an actress from Montr—”
Calvin spit-takes the Fiji water. “An actress?” He wipes his lips. “Where the fuck have you brought me?”
“This is the Fringe tent. It’s part of a theatre festival.”
Calvin considers the other patrons. “Do you mean to say that all of these women—”
“And all of these men—”
“Are actors?” Calvin replaces the cap on the Fiji water. “Ah, yes, I remember now. Look there—” He nods at a woman three tables away. “Red hair, peasant blouse. She’s a drama major open to life and looking for an agent.” He examines another. “And there? Nose-ring on the outside, anarchy on the inside? She’s going to do Brecht any way she can. And everyone’s got a show at the Fringe.”
“After this, they go to Lee’s Palace and dance in bare feet.”
“Wow.” Calvin sighs. “We’re oldsters. We’re middle-aged. It’s not all keggers and random hook-ups anymore.”
“Speak for yourself. I like keggers.”
Calvin’s cellphone rings. He pulls it from his pocket, checks the call display, and answers. He listens some seconds then tells the person he’ll call back.
“Annabel?” I ask.
“Paula,” he says. “The publicist.”
“How’s Paula the publicist?”
“She wants to know how the day went.”
“How’d the day go?”
“Fucking exhausting. I was up at five for a radio thing. It was one of those”—Calvin adopts an overexcited announcer voice—“‘Bowser and the Bear!’ morning shows. Then eTalk, Movie Television. Plus a bunch of phoners.”
“But you’re done?”
“Canada’s done. Paula’s trying to organize a day of American media. She’s pitching ‘Us Weekly’ and ‘In Style.’ But you have to have a nice house for ‘In Style.’”
“You do have a nice house.”
“Yeah?” says Calvin, watching Emma approach with two pints of Harp Lager. “I don’t know if I do.”
Emma places the pints on the picnic table beside the gift basket. “You want to run a tab, right? So I should put these on your card?”
“Hey,” says Calvin, “I see you’re checking out my basket.”
“Nope.” Emma makes an odd smirk. “Can’t say I was.”
“If you want the Toblerone, you can totally have the Toblerone.”
“Yeah, no. I’m good. Thanks.”
Up to this point, Emma has had an aura of indifference—as if involvement with anyone requires energy she’s too bored to muster—but I sense from her now a sparkle of quizzicality. Which might be why, after stepping away, she spins back to ask Calvin, “Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You seem really familiar to me.”
“I get that all the time. I kind of look like the guy in high school who was in the car accident that later turns out to be gay.”
“No,” says Emma. “We didn’t go to the same high school. But I’ve seen you before.” She frowns. “Did you go to Banff for musical theatre?”
“Nope.”
“Mmm. It’ll come to me. I just don’t know when.”
“Jesus.” Calvin stares with worried eyes into his Harp Lager. “This is going to be an emotional roller coaster.”
After Emma leaves, he nods at the Toronto Star scattered on the picnic table and asks, “Why are you looking at apartments?”
“Because I’m looking at apartments. There’s a two-bedroom on Euclid for sixteen hundred. But I can’t afford it. I’d need a roommate.”
Reaching for his pint, Calvin says, “What about Emma?”
“Totally. We took an acting class together. But I think we’re the perfect match. In fact, I’ve got an apartment all lined up. Here’s the nightie I want you to wear—”
“It looked good on my last girlfriend—”
“It looked great on my mom—”
Calvin snorts. “Cheers, motherfucker.” He clanks my pint. “Good to see you, McKee.”
As his cellphone rings again, thunderclaps explode overhead, downpours resume, and the canvas tent-tops fill with rainwater.
“Sorry to be a jerk,” says Calvin, reading the call display. “But I have to take this.”
He moves inside, away from the storm, and it’s my turn to survey the surrounding area. With the recent cloudburst, the Fringe tent has filled and the game I’ve been playing, in which I’m auditioning to be the Cutest Person Present, is no longer even remotely plausible, so attractive the competition has become. I am looking at these Fringers—in their tank tops, cut-offs, and sandals—and wondering if I will ever go on a date again, when a flyer for another production is dropped on the picnic table.
It’s a Pick-of-the-Fringe show called Devil in the Dark: A Star Trek Musical. The flyer shows a blonde woman—dressed in the gold tunic of the original series—aiming a phaser at the viewer. This woman is vaguely familiar to me.
While I am reading her name, Calvin returns from his call and sits down with a scowl. “Everything okay?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He drinks from his pint. “I have an audition in LA but the casting director’s changed it three times. It was last week. It’s next week. It’s tomorrow. It’s stupid.”
“What’s it for?”
He shrugs. “I might be Hoss in the new ‘Bonanza’ movie.”
“There’s a ‘Bonanza’ movie?”
“If it goes—” He glances at me. “—I’d get four hundred grand for six weeks. Doesn’t the money blow your mind?”
“Um, yeah. It doesn’t seem real.”
“I know. It’s like when Farley got six million for ‘Beverly Hills Ninja.’ Everyone was like, ‘What the fuck?’” Calvin examines what’s left of his pint. “But I’ll never get it. I’m up against some big deal actors. Matt LeBlanc. Kiefer Sutherland. People actually know those guys.”
“People don’t know Oodles?”
“People in jail, maybe.”
I pass Calvin the flyer for Devil in the Dark. “Remember her?”
Glancing at it, Calvin carelessly shakes his head.
“That’s Peyton Dean.”
“Are you out of your mind?” asks Calvin. “Peyton Dean is one of the most gorgeous women we’ll ever know.”
“Ten years ago she was. Our friends aren’t twenty-six anymore.”
Calvin turns the flyer over and reads the cast list. “Jesus Christ, that’s Peyton Dean,” he says. “She was like Belinda Carlisle in the ‘Mad About You’ video! What the hell happened?”
“She was in ‘Mamma Mia!’ last year.”
“And now she’s doing a Fringe play?”
“It’s all good. Everybody wins.”
“Oh my God.” Calvin sadly drops the flyer. “That’s Peyton Dean.”
Emma Follows returns to the patio. She wears a bicycle helmet and carries a copy of NOW Magazine, the cover of which features a photograph of Calvin and the cutline “Oodles Brings It Home.” Emma throws it down on the picnic table, much in the manner of a prosecuting attorney dropping Exhibit A in front of a jury, and asks, “So you’re some bigshot TV star, is that it?”
“Um,” says Calvin, “just trying to finish a Harp Lager actually.”
“You’re in that sitcom with the alien?”
“I like to think of him as my friend.”
“I haven’t seen it. The bartender told me. I don’t have a TV.”
“Who needs a TV when you have a bicycle and a degree in musical theatre?”
“Emma,” I say lightly, “this is my friend Calvin.”
“Well, tell your friend Calvin his bill’s been paid.”
“What?” Calvin spit-takes a sip of beer. “Emma, what the heck?”
“My shift is done.” She drops his Gold Visa card on the picnic table. “So there’s your rainbow.”
“Christ on the cross,” says Calvin, disgusted.
“What kind of human being are you?” He motions to the downpour. “And where are you going? It almost seems like you’re cycling somewhere. In your helmet. And defiance.”
“Why?” Emma arches an eyebrow. “You have a car?”
“Well—” Calvin turns to me. “We could probably just take the limo.”
Emma splutters, as if in response to a lame joke, but then, spotting the limousine on Brunswick, she asks, “You have a fucking limo?”
“Tonight I do.”
“Sick,” says Emma, bringing a hand to her chin to unfasten her helmet. “Give me two seconds. I’ll meet you in the limo.”
A frisson of intimacy has arrived in the air and, as I finish my pint, I am thinking to ask Calvin what his intentions are regarding this young woman when he becomes newly absorbed in the Devil in the Dark flyer. On its flipside is an image of a molten-looking space creature called the Horta. Calvin spreads his fingers above this image and, as if in the midst of a particularly demanding mind-meld, pretends to be in sudden agony. “Pain!” he says, closing his eyes and jerking his head to the side. “Pain!”
This is a chronicle of Calvin Dover but as you may be coming into this cold, and because my night with him sets in motion a number of adult-strength themes relating to romance, realization, and the problematics of involvement—all of which play out in upcoming installments—it might be helpful to know a little about the chronicler, that is to say, me, thirtysomething Aubrey McKee. It’s fifteen years since my last appearance, when I was a drunken man on a Halifax pier, and after fleeing that city, I became deeply entangled in Toronto with a woman from whom I have recently split. So I am, in a word, incomplete. I live in an extended remix of my own glumness and, to be honest, Calvin is one of the few people in the world I look forward to seeing.
We met in residence at the University of Toronto. I was from Nova Scotia, Calvin from Ontario. His family owned Adanac Packaging, a plastic wrapping company with offices in Calgary, Brandon, and Pickering. Calvin’s visits home were mostly for holiday dinners and his little brother’s hockey games. He and his brother had a private language where Calvin was Nivlac and Brian was Nairb and knits were stink. So the Dovers were rich and Calvin, presumably, could return and live in suburban comfort any day he wished. But he didn’t. He stayed in town and played Tetris and read Neuromancer. He joined Theatresports. In certain moods, he had a lunatic brightness—reminiscent of a kid I knew in childhood—and his thoughts flashed with lively invention.
Invention was often followed by Reverie so I’m not surprised—when I join Calvin in the limousine—to find him zoned out beside his gift basket. Without altering his eyeline, he shifts the gift basket to make room for me and I recall how Calvin is always thinking of other people, whether they’re sixteen streets, three time zones, or two feet away. Palpable in all directions is Calvin’s respect for other spirits and, as this night goes forward, you should take for granted his interest in the common good. As Dodokin, another writer on The Calvin Dover Show, put it, “The fucked up thing about Calvin is he thinks he’s everyone’s father.” Applicable, too, is my ex-girlfriend’s assessment: “Very funny, very generous, and very complicated.”
“Hey, Wardell—” Calvin bends forward to talk to the driver. “We’re going to drop off some people before the airport. You cool with that?”
“Not a problem, boss,” says Wardell. “Everything criss.”
“The person we’re waiting for,” continues Calvin, “it’s a woman. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in that situation.”
A gruff chortle rises from Wardell, as if he knows only too well what such waiting implies, and for a moment we three share in an understanding of the women-dependent meanings that can seem to swirl beneath all social relations.
“So the promotion Annabel got,” I say, sitting down in the back. “What’s it for? Social work?”
“Art therapy.” Calvin lowers an electric window. “Palliative care with the elderly. She helps them draw pictures of the pony they’re going to ride to heaven on.” He blows an imaginary dust-speck from his hand. “What about you? Do you see Gudrun?”
“Uh—no.”
“Ever talk to her?”
“No.”
“Huh.” Calvin slowly nods—as if I’ve made a surprising, but possibly very relevant, comment regarding the laws of the universe—and then pats my knee. “Probably a good thing. I mean, Gudrun? Gudrun was bright. God, she’s bright. No, she’s great except for the occasional lesbian affair.”
There is a squeal from the patio and we turn to see Emma standing at the edge of the Fringe tent. Although the rain has subsided, the furls of the tent-top have swelled with pooling rainfall and Emma, wary of the slops of water, now makes a mad dash for the limousine. As she bounces inside, I see she has freshened her lipstick and there is a brazenness to her energy.
“I just did two bar shots,” she says, pushing a hand through her damp pixie cut. She points at the mini-bar. “The bar open?”
“Drink your face off, crazy lady,” says Calvin.
Emma shares with Wardell her destination—an opening night party on Dupont Street—and takes a champagne flute from a velvet glass-holder.
At the intersection with Bathurst, a squeegee kid in a soggy hoodie appears and wipes at the limousine’s rain-splashed windshield.
“Ew,” says Emma, opening a bottle of Prosecco. “That guy’s disgusting.”
“I don’t know,” Calvin says philosophically. “I mean, he’s drunk. He pooped his pants. But at least he’s in the moment, Emma. Can we say that?”
“Speak for yourself,” I say. “I pooped my pants.”
The light turns green, the limousine turns right, and the squeegee kid lurches backward, his sleeve leaving a grimy smear on the windshield.
“And so,” says Calvin, craning his neck to watch him, “our little homeless entrepreneur returns to the madcap world of Bloor Street West.”
Emma is staring at Calvin, beginning to appreciate the workings of his mind, perhaps, or simply noting Calvin’s eyes which, in beaming summer sunlight, are Samoyed blue.
“So hey,” she says, “you were nominated for an Emmy?”
“That’s me. Two-time Emmy-nominee.”
“What’s that like?”
“Pretty special,” says Calvin. “You sit there for three hours to learn you lost to the guy from ‘Ally McBeal.’ But here’s a question—” Calvin nods at a bluebird tattoo on Emma’s upper arm. “Would you ever get another tat?”
“Maybe.”
“What would you to get?”
“I don’t know.” Emma pours herself a glass of Prosecco. “I don’t want to get something gay. Like, I don’t want to get a quotation.”
“Quotations are so gay,” says Calvin, nodding his head. “What about a werewolf? Like a werewolf riding a Pegasus!”
“A what?”
“Or maybe a squirrel giving the finger. Right smack in the middle of your back.”
The limousine arrives at the Dupont address. It’s a century-old warehouse converted into office units where some tenants, Emma’s friends among them, are living illegally.
“Where have you taken us?” asks Calvin. “Whose party is this?”
“My friend Mike. From Guelph.”
“Mike from Guelph—” Calvin nods as if Emma has added new and relevant information regarding the laws of the universe. “Nice.”
“Why? You want to go?”
“Calvin would love to go,” I tell Emma. “But he’s on his way to the airport.”
“Or he’s too pussy to go.”
“Let me see if I understand this,” says Calvin. “You want us to crash some sleazy artistic party? Mike from Guelph may not be cool with that.”
“Want me to ask?”
“I think it’s the appropriate thing to do, don’t you?”
“Fine,” says Emma, pulling on the door handle.
“And if you’re not here when I get back, I’ll know you pussied out.”
“Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady.”
Emma inserts her empty flute into the glass-holder and then, after a provocative glance at Calvin, bobs out the door.
“So Calvin?” I say. “Stupid question—”
“There are no stupid questions. Just stupid people.”
“You sure you know what you’re doing?”
“That’s right, Aubrey. Turn it into a problem.”
“You’re the guy who’s flying to LA.”
“You’re the guy who needs a roommate. It’s just an actor party.” Calvin grabs the open bottle of Prosecco. “What could possibly go wrong?”
I’ve always been jealous of Calvin Dover because I’ve always wondered if I could do what he’s done. Write for Letterman. Write for SNL. Star in a sitcom. So my reaction follows from this derring-do as well as his ability to walk into a hall of three hundred strangers and within twelve minutes have them all wildly laughing. I don’t care who you are—circuit judge, theologian, tugboat captain—such talent is a wizardry. As indicated, Calvin’s quixotics belong to the rhythms of his moods which might be why, after Emma leads us into the party, he lingers in the outside hallway. When I check on him, he’s either talking on his cellphone or picking up an empty pizza carton so he can scribble down a note or number. Finally, after twenty minutes, he joins the party—jittery, distracted—impatient for the moment to be broken by some antic turn of event.
“Yo, bro,” says a heavyset man in a Maple Leafs jersey. “You’re the guy from TV? Calvin Driver? I’m Mike.”
“Mike from Guelph?” Calvin fist-bumps him. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“So Calvin—” Mike watches Calvin take a Coors Light from the refrigerator. “What do you call a guy-with-no-arms-and-no-legs nailed to the wall?”
Calvin turns to him, delighted. “You’re seriously telling me this joke right now?”
“Art,” says Mike.
“Mike from Guelph crushes it,” says Calvin, giggling. “A laser from the big man.”
“Wait,” says Mike. “What do you call a guy-with-no-arms-and-no-legs water-skiing?” Mike smirks. “Skip. What do you call—”
“No, Mike,” says Calvin, “Mike from Guelph. I got one. What do you call a guy-with-no-arms-and-no-legs trying to answer the phone?”
Mike shrugs.
“Gerald,” Calvin says simply.
“Huh? I don’t get it.”
“Well, that’s actually his name. His name is Gerald. And the thing is, he can’t answer the phone because he has no arms and no legs. He just knocks it over. Fucking Gerald, man.” Calvin smiles at the room. “Anyone need a beer?”
Something in the night is appealing to Calvin. What it is, I’m not sure. It might be the result of his finishing that bottle of Prosecco, or swiftly drinking three Coors Light, or his oblique admiration for Emma’s pixie cut, but, whatever it is, when I find him on the fire escape, sharing a joint with a young woman with a lip piercing, I can tell for Calvin some happy illogicality has begun.
“Anyway, this piece I’m workshopping,” says the woman, “it’s basically like I don’t think there is a true personality to be expressed.”
“Right,” Calvin says thoughtfully. “We have no self. No one is a person. Wow.”
“Because we kind of become the mask we put on.”
“How true. How sad.” He takes the joint from her.
“And yet how human.”
“I also have a movement piece I almost have a finished version of. The concept of it, it’s pretty out there, and my friend’s choreographing something for me for this benefit. What about you?”
“Me?”
“What is he telling you?” interrupts Emma as she steps onto the fire escape, one hand held behind her back. “Because everything he says is a lie.”
“Oh, hey.” Calvin moves the joint in a strange pattern in the air. “You guys know each other?”
“I actually don’t know your name,” says the other woman.
“That’s Calvin Dover,” Emma says.
“Calvin Dover. Why do I know that name? Do you know Tippy Friedrich?”
“No way!” Calvin drags on the joint. “You know Tippy?”
“Because I feel like I know you.”
“You may have seen me,” says Calvin, returning the joint, “I’m in the touring production of ‘Stomp.’”
“Holy Mother of God,” says Emma, half-closing her eyes. “Don’t listen to him.”
“Okay, Emma?” Calvin pokes her shoulder.
“What’s up? Because it’s starting to get really weird between us.”
“Okay, Mr. Crazy—” Emma grabs his poking finger and from behind her back produces a tall can of Kilkenny. “Look what I found.”
“Emma!” says Calvin. “You amazing space elf!”
“A what?” She swings the Kilkenny away. “Did you just call me a space elf? You’re a freak.”
“It’s true,” says Calvin, shrugging at the other woman. “I’m a super freak. But here’s a question. Has weed changed? Because this shit’s ridiculous. Like I’m flying right now. No, Emma? I’m freaking out. I’m going to have a seizure, I swear to God.” Calvin lifts up his T-shirt, reaches for Emma’s hand, and places it on his chest. “Feel how fast my heart’s beating right now.”
“Uh, no.” Emma pulls her hand back, appalled.
“Think about where you are.”
“So um—” The other woman waggles her finger at Calvin and Emma.
“How long have you two been going out?”
“We’re not going out,” Emma says quickly, as if the idea were repulsive. “We only met an hour ago.”
“You met an hour ago?”
Emma turns sharply to Calvin. “Does this normally work for you?” she asks.
“If you’re asking if this is normal for me, no. This is once-in-a-lifetime.”
“I mean does this routine work on other women?”
“What other women?” Calvin gazes soulfully at Emma. “There are no other women. At least—” He takes her hand and holds it to the stubble of his cheek. “—not to me.”
“Ew,” says Emma, yanking her hand away and trying not to laugh. “Just—no. Stop. Gross.”
Inside, a doorbell rings and Calvin, as if resigned to the day’s eventualities, sighs and moves toward the door. “All right, Follows. Where’d you find the Kilkenny?”
“You’re so smart, you find it.”
“You think I know where everything is?” Stepping inside, Calvin spins around to face her. “Who am I—Mariah Carey? No, Emma, I’m not Mariah Carey. I can’t see into the future and I don’t know where everything is.”
At the front door, Mike talks with a deliveryman who holds by its straps a very full pizza bag.
“What the fuck?” asks Mike. “Did someone order ten pizzas?”
“Mike,” Calvin says. “Mike from Guelph, I’m on it.”
“You fucking didn’t,” says Emma, following Calvin inside. “You bought those, didn’t you?”
“Don’t take it personal, Em.” Calvin signs for the pizzas. “But you got beat by emcee Cee.”
“This is because I paid your bill, isn’t it?”
“Shit got real.” Calvin carries the ten pizzas to the kitchen. “Shit just got real.” He slides them onto a counter and checks the time on his cellphone. “Okay, kids. Have fun in your craptastic suck world. I’m out of here. Let me get a pizza for Wardell.”
“Wait,” says Emma, tugging on his T-shirt. “I’ll walk you out.”
At the limousine, Calvin places a pizza in the passenger seat. Then, pulling his plane ticket from his back pocket, he checks which terminal he’s flying from.
“Calvin,” says Emma, skipping up to him. “I want you to star in my short film.”
“Uh-huh. Do I wear an eyepatch?”
“You’d play my ex-boyfriend.”
“So I do wear an eyepatch.”
“Can I email you the script?”
“I see where this is going. If you want my email, just have the balls to ask for my email.”
“Or actually,” says Emma, uncapping her lipstick, “you can just email me.” She takes Calvin’s plane ticket, writes her email address in red lipstick, and passes it back to him. Staring into his eyes for a flirtsome moment, she kisses his cheek, twirls around, and runs past me and back to the party.
As enchanting as this rom-com moment seems, it rather provokes in me a feeling of loss, and, as the skies begin to pour again, I thank Calvin for a wonderful evening, yelling over another crack of thunder, and set off for Dupont station.
Behind me, I hear a burst of honking from the departing limousine and, when I turn around, I see Calvin on the sidewalk holding his gift basket. “So, buddy,” he says, “you up for one last drink?”
I will see Calvin Dover often in later life—chasing after a Springer Spaniel on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, at his mother’s memorial service at Pickering Village United Church, making his triumphant return to stand-up at Largo—but most memorable to me is this random night in July when, instead of getting myself comfortably home, I choose to walk the streets with him in drenching rain.
“Calvin,” I say, “how drunk are you?”
“Drunk? I’m ripped to the tits.”
“Don’t you have to be in LA? What about Hoss?”
“Fuck Hoss. Let Keifer be Hoss. He can gain fifty pounds and win The Golden Globe.” He studies Emma’s email address on his plane ticket. “Yeah? Like I’m going to star in your short film.” He scrunches it up, pitches it into the rain, and watches an older couple scurry toward a taxi on the other side of Dupont. “Look at those weather-beaten pedestrians. Fuck them. Fuck them ragged.”
Calvin is crazed, disinhibited, and without warning he sprints south, running so fast he stumbles, splashing into a deep puddle and collapsing to one knee. Jumping up, he holds his gift basket as if it were a machine gun and shoots at different spots in the street—a stop sign, a mailbox—and then he’s off and running again.
I struggle to keep up, my clothes sopping, my loafers squashing, understanding that for some reason my friend has to do this. Do not think I am happy. For some blocks, I fantasize having a firm Granny Smith apple which—when I furiously throw it—hits Calvin smack in the temple. But in these wet minutes, I only follow along, sensing my role has shifted from Drinking Buddy to Psychiatric Nurse.
Finally, on the other side of Bloor Street, Calvin slows to a walk. Although he is sodden and his T-shirt soaked to transparency, he raises the gift basket over his head as a rain cover.
“Those kids at the party,” he says, “they’re kind of heartbreaking. They have no clue what’ll happen in the next ten years. They’re still like, ‘Theatre’s the only thing that matters!’” He smiles. “Remember when we’d finish a taping? I loved those nights. We’d go to a bar on Queen Street, someone would be visiting from Montreal, and six hours later I’m pissing in Kensington Market.”
“Sounds magical.”
Calvin burps. “You ever see Jib and Dodokin?”
“Jib’s in suburbia. Dodokin at Second City.”
“Pete Zhu?”
“Not since they had a baby. But I don’t really see those people anymore. That time you’re talking about, when we were doing the show, that was a really fun time for everyone. But that doesn’t exist anymore. You think it does because you left when it was still going on. But it’s gone for me, too.”
“Everything’s changed now?”
“Kind of.”
“Fuck,” says Calvin. “You’re on and off the shelves so fast. Soon I’ll be past my expiry. Like Peyton Dean. And this river of money is going to end.”
“Calvin, you’re on a main network sitcom.”
“Yeah, I’m kind of not.” He squints. “Remember first season when they sent the whole cast to the upfronts? Now it’s just me. The show won’t get renewed, I can feel it. And if I don’t book a gig soon, I’m fucked.”
“You’re not fucked.”
“Yeah. Something I didn’t mention.” He glances at me. “Annabel and I are splitting up.”
“What do you mean? It’s over?”
“Oh, it’s over, dude. My lawyer told me not to talk to her anymore.”
“You have a lawyer?”
“Her father hired this high-powered divorce firm? It’s fucking hardball. I could owe her thirty grand a month for the rest of my life.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Even if the show’s cancelled, I’d still owe her half what I made when we were together.” Calvin notices my look of utter bafflement. “Look, I’m contesting it. Trying to pay in a lump sum. But this legal stuff? It’s not as fun as it sounds. It’s actually pretty stressful.”
“Calvin, I had no idea.”
“No one did.” Rain drips off the end of Calvin’s nose. “We fought almost every day. Every day. Then I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I can’t spend the rest of my life fighting.’ So two years ago, I stopped.”
“So that was good?”
“No. Wasn’t good. We stopped fighting, we stopped having sex. We had sex once in two years.”
“I thought she wanted to have kids!”
“Before we got married she did. Changed her mind.” He wipes his face.
“Gets worse. When we bought the house, my folks gave me money for a down payment? Annabel paid into the mortgage, I paid into the mortgage. So it’s a co-owned asset. Which means we split it in a divorce. If I want to keep it, I’d have to buy her half. That’s another six hundred grand.”
“So maybe you don’t have a nice house?”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Holy fuck. So Annabel’s a millionaire now?”
“Listen, I’ll give her everything. The house. The leafblower. I just want my clothes.” Calvin is abstracted for a few moments. “Annabel didn’t have much of a childhood. She didn’t get along with her mother. But when we got married, it was the happiest day of my life. Aubrey, you were there. You saw.” Calvin is crying now, his tears mixing with the rain. “But I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
I watch my friend weep. I will spare the reader my rather extensive introspections—I thought if you were successfully funny then your life would be wonderful—and simply say I had much to learn.
“Calvin, I am so sorry, dude.”
“So am I.” He manages a smile. “It’s bizarre I have to come to Toronto to talk. People in LA, they just want to hear good news. No one wants to hear about a nightmare. So you act like there isn’t one. But my heart’s been so twisted with this shit—” He sniffles. “I mean, it’s funny? Except it’s not funny.”
“It’s anti-humour.”
“Yeah,” says Calvin. “It’s anti-humour.”
We’re somewhere on Harbord when Calvin takes a turn down Lippincott. At a certain fire hydrant, he walks between two houses and into a backyard containing a coach house, concrete bird bath, and an upended shopping cart. He holds the gift basket under one arm and—returning to his earlier impulsiveness—bangs on the door with his fist.
“Calvin,” I say, “what’re you doing?”
“Waking up Nairb.” Calvin opens the letter-slot, bends down, and yells, “Get up, idiot!”
“He’s in Toronto?”
A light flickers on and Brian Dover, no longer a hockey-playing kid but a slim hipster with an auburn goatee, comes to the door and ushers us in.
The rooms are oddly furnished—mismatched chairs, stolen garden gnomes, a mandala tapestry pinned over the front windows—but splendidly clean.
Calvin sniffs the air. “Why does it smell like Mom and Dad’s house?”
“Eulene was here.”
“You little fruitcake,” says Calvin. “You got their housekeeper to clean your place?” He belches. “Where’s the beer?”
Pleading with us to be quiet because his girlfriend is asleep, Brian directs us to the kitchen. We are given bottles of Heineken. A glass bong is produced. I sit at a slanting kitchen table as Calvin launches into a giddy description of the party and a pitch-perfect imitation of Mike from Guelph. After some minutes, I am noticing that the meniscus of my beer is about seven degrees off the horizon, and realizing the entire house is on a tilt, when Brian points upward.
“Yo,” he says. “Want to go to the room?”
“The room!” says Calvin, his eyes pink from a bong hit. “Let’s go to the room.”
Brian guides us to an attic loft, empty except for a stereo system, two giant speakers, and three La-Z-Boy recliners.
Calvin lounges in the recliner closest to the speak-ers, the gift basket held to his chest. I sit behind him, a Heineken in my lap.
Brian switches off the overhead light, revealing hundreds of little glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. He inserts a compact disc and now begins a musical voyage, Brian playing obscure electronica, Calvin and I travelling within their floaty soundscapes.
I cannot finish my Heineken. Very soon, I doze off.
When I awake, we are still in the dark.
“Play it, Nairb,” says Calvin, gazing at the stars.
“You know the one.”
Brian changes the music and on comes a mixtape—a recording of William Shatner performing The Beatles and Elton John in lushly orchestrated arrangements. The songs are astonishing and ridiculous, Shatner forcing emphasis into spoken lyrics like “kaleidoscope eyes” and “rocking horse people.”
After some seconds of reverent silence, Calvin convulses with sudden laughter. Something about Shatner’s repetition of “I’m a rocket man” sends Calvin into hysterics, his recliner teetering on the sloping floor, and, as it topples sideways, he and the gift basket topple with it.
The instant it collides with the floor, the gift basket, arranged and paid for by the Disney ABC Television Group in Burbank, California, splits open and its entire contents—a Toblerone bar, six Asian pears, Carr’s Table Water Crackers, Tazo Zen green tea, Napa Valley Honey Mustard Sourdough Nuggets, salt water taffy, Ghiradelli chocolate cocoa, Wolfgang Puck European Style Coffee, Baci chocolate pralines, and a truckle of pecorino cheese—spill in all directions. Calvin is twisting and laughing on the floor, declaring Shatner a genius, when his fingers find and close around an Asian pear, and, as the curtain falls on this performance of The Calvin Dover Show, let’s leave him there, this moment convincing me, more than ever, that Calvin Dover is wonderful. I love Calvin Dover.
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