No Walls and the Recurring Dream by Ani Difranco

Author:Ani Difranco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

ANDY

There are a lot of Ukrainians in Canada. You notice this if you hang out there long enough. I guess migrating people like to stick to their latitude. In the family photo, Andy Stochansky’s babushka’d grandma sits stoically in the middle of a clan of pale potato people, all thoroughly white and Eastern European except for Andy, sitting on his mother’s lap, dark as all get-out. Like the Turkish postman dropped off a little package for his mom one day or something. Andy’s hands alone, crossed on his own lap, looked like they belonged to a different family. “Blood of the wolf,” his grandma would hiss under her breath while shuffling away, shaking her head at him.

I first heard Andy play at the Tralfamadore Café, a club commonly known as the Tralf, in downtown Buffalo. The evening was a split bill between myself and a Toronto-based pianist/singer named Anne Bourne. Andy was Anne’s sensitive, back-up-singing, djembe-playing accompanist for the evening and he was very tasteful and vibey. His dark curls fell mysteriously around his eyes. Hmm, that guy is good, I thought and, after the show, I got his number.

We met above his grandma’s grocery store on Queen Street in Toronto to jam together for the first time. I was pierced and jackbooted with a shaved head and his grandma didn’t seem to much like the looks of me, either. Andy was so very Canadian, with his accent, his gentle manners, and his red and black flannel, I had little choice but to be charmed. We immediately felt each other when we played music together because we were both so dynamic and fluid with volume. Finally! Someone else who knows how to breathe with it! Here, finally, was someone I could really jam with.

I hired him immediately and we started gigging in and around our triumvirate of cities: New York, Buffalo, and Toronto. Andy had just started playing drum kit and before we could embark on too much road tripping, he needed to procure some cases. Instead of dropping any dough on legit cases, he and his father built some plywood jobbies and stuffed them with foam wedges and blankets. The wheels at the bottom were too small and they were tippy and tricky to roll. Any bump would invariably mean a shin-splintering disaster and a lengthy cleanup. At the top were angry latches sticking out everywhere that would gouge you as soon as look at you, but Andy had an affection for these cases because he and his dad had made them together. I had affection for them, too, actually, because I loved his dad. Our dads were a lot alike.

Andy could speak Ukrainian fluently and he used to work the waitresses at Veselka on Second Avenue in New York pretty hard. One day I walked in there to meet him for a bowl of borscht and when I sat down I got the full once-over from our matronly waitress. They were obviously tight already. She frowned at me and turned to Andy and I watched while they exchanged a few words.

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