The only language that we understood in those days was rock n roll. It was the only thing that we knew anything about, the only place where we felt anything close to love, and the only place we might feel comfortable enough to express it. We didn’t care about the stupid stuff. The details. The fish food that they hid in liner notes, the facts that the chuffed and breathless scensters regurgitated over lagers at the fourtops near the bar. No. We had the jackets and the boots. The purloined instruments acquired in alleys and underground parcades, the scars on the chin from the lovers ring that caught us just right as we tumbled from the bed.

Jordyn was a ghost on a bench in Grandview Park that summer. Past midnight he’d sit there among the dope smokers and the hippies and the stragglers making their way to a speakeasy on the Drive. We didn’t think anything of it until much later. After he was gone and The Chemical Spray was no more. Parker was just a whisper by then, too. A rumour that we heard about when some acquaintance or other told us that they’d seen her serving tables in Brooklyn or at an art opening in Montreal. Different now, new style, fresh approach, but definitely her. Nobody ever had a chance to say hi, they’d blink and she’d be gone.

Alice said that she knew what Jordyn had done that summer. And how it made everything else, all the stuff that seemed to get lost in a blur of heat and thrash and music, powders, foil, and liquids - the fabric of our ethos in those days - come into focus. The jackets and boots a flimsy distraction from the truth of what Jordyn had accomplished those very late nights before the end. | image @christopher_wool