Prince of Wiles
fiction by
Colin Morton
colinmorton@sympatico.ca
1
Momma gave birth to me in the ballroom of the Elsinore Hotel, on the same table where she had served prime ribs and saskatoon pie to the King and Queen the year before, during the 1939 Royal Tour. She was standing on the table to dust the chandelier when her first contractions came. Mrs. Nilsen said the table was the best place for her, near the kitchen with its hot running water and clean towels, so there she stayed. I gave them no time, anyway, to drive to the hospital in Drumheller.
I came out bawling like nobody’s business and kept bawling all the way to the Country Top 40. Fish gotta swim, coyotes gotta howl, I gotta sing. That simple for me. It’s these young kids I worry about, who when you ask what it is they gotta do in life just look at you blank. I call that a living hell.
King is my name. You’ve heard my voice on the radio. My whole career is summed up in 751 words in the way-out-of-date Encyclopedia of Canadian Country, more sketchily in the standard reference books. My driver’s licence has always said King Sallybanks — Momma’s name plus the one she gave me despite the wall-shuddering curses of her father, Big Al Banks. To most people I’m simply King. The former artist known as King, that’s me. I haven’t written a new song this millennium. It’s Senator King to some, though technically, I’m only senator-elect. The Prime Minister will never appoint me to the upper house. Nothing personal; it’s just who I am.
If you’ve only seen pictures you might not recognize me in person, because a cowboy hat hides a lot. I grew up in wheat and cattle country, more familiar with the stale smell of beer at the back of the tavern than a field of barley. I could tell the year and make of any car from the far end of the street but didn’t know a steer from a bull when my life depended on it. Though we lived a few minutes from the Bar None ranch, where Momma practically grew up in the saddle, I never rode as a child. That never stopped me from taking a cowboy song and making it mine.
In my earliest memory, I’m dancing to an old-time fiddle reel played by Alice Valentine of the Wild Rose Stringband in the Elsinore ballroom. I feel it in my soles — the floor heaving under the dancing feet at somebody’s wedding. Then Momma appears in her blue dress and white apron and swings me up in her arms and dances me around the floor. I remember her perfumed hair and all the faces smiling at us.
Look at King, someone laughed and everyone looked.
Two years old, the first moment that stuck in my memory, and there I am in front of an audience. “Over-determined,” a shrink once called me, but hell, if you’re not determined you’ll never get anywhere in the music business. You’ll end up where you started, playing for drunks more likely to throw bottles at you than dollars. You’ll do anything to get past that.
Another memory, almost as early: I’m in Nilsen’s grocery store, eye level with candy hearts and sugar babies and licorice twists, black and red. Beside the candies lies a stack of newspapers with a picture on the front page of King George inspecting a bombed-out house in London. Thin as a flagpole in his Navy blues, His Majesty is obviously in pain. He sent his children to the country for safety (in fact, bombs hit his palace), but he won’t leave the people in their time of need. With the Queen at his side he visits hospitals and orphanages to keep up morale. None of this means much to me as a three-year-old, but I remember staring at his rigid face in the photograph like a baby first discovering himself in the mirror.
I ate restaurant food every day of my childhood. Momma and I lived just upstairs, in the hotel’s half-finished attic, right over the royal suite (where it’s said the King and Queen did not sleep on their stopover during their 1939 tour, preferring the familiar discomforts of their Pullman car). At night, after closing the coffee shop, Momma brought a greasy brown bag upstairs and set the table so we could sit down to supper together like a family. Hamburgers and chips most nights, sometimes fish. You could tell when the grease in the deep fryer needed changing, but Momma ground the beef herself so we always had the best. Burgers and chips were bread and butter to me, long before my life on the road began. The doc has me on these fool cholesterol pills now, but he says I should have started taking them years ago.
