Last Saturday I woke up unreasonably early to stand in line for Pixies tickets. My coworker Bob and his 20 month old daughter Mia picked me up at 8:30 - no overnight madness or blue-lit five AM lunacy for us - to hang around in the Cornwall Center and wait for the Shopper's Drug Mart to open. Hold on a sec, here's a chronology:

7:45 AM - Bob phones. I wake up but don't understand the meaning behind the noise, so I go back to sleep.

8:00 AM - Bob phones again. After two rings I remember what the noise means, visualize a phone, and then realize that visualisation isn't going to work. I get up and answer the phone.

8:30 AM - I'm still not awake but somehow I have my jacket on. Bob's old station wagon idles in front of my building. Out I go, ready to queue up for the rock n roll cause.

8:45 AM - We park in front of the Cornwall Centre. Nothing is open yet. For a Saturday morning, though, the street is surprisingly busy. Inside the mall, lined up along the escalators, are a dozen or so people. We are simultaneously cheered and disappointed - we'll definitely get tickets, but we were both hoping for a greater outpouring of Pixies love and solidarity. After all, it's their reunion tour! It's a redemptive offering for people like me who never saw them live. I remember buying their first album on vinyl in 1988. With that sort of loyalty, I'm owed a reunion tour. A chance to see a much-aged Joey Santiago. The slowly dessicating Kim Deal. The always portly Frank Black. Oh yeah.

8:45 - 9:00 - We wait. Bob feeds Mia sugar, which does not prompt a fructose freak-out in the little girl but produces a tight demonic smile on her face. I've already found out that the teenage girl one spot ahead of us in the line doesn't actually like the Pixies. She's buying tickets to surprise her boyfriend with, which by my reckoning makes her the best girlfriend since the invention of sliced bread. Next to her recline two guys in blue lawn chairs, playing a game of chess on a board laid across the arms. A cribbage board protruding from a backpack suggests they've been here for a while. Past them a few more guys and a girl in an expensive ball cap lean against the escalator wall, occasionally trading lines about the boredom of waiting in line. It's not the crowd I expected; aside from the guy in the scarf and touque who sits cross-legged with a Penguin paperback and another guy with a ponytail, a grey T-shirt over a sizeable gut and faded black jeans tied into combat boots, most of the people here don't really look like Pixies fans. Mind you, it's Regina. And mind you some more, my motorcycle-jacket-wearing-17-year-old self clutching a copy of Come On Pilgrim probably wouldn't peg me and Bob as Pixies fans either. I'm 32, nearly twice as old as the guy who stayed up late and kept playing Levitate Me until his parents told him to go to bed and what was that horrible music, which makes me wonder what my teenage self would make of me now. I'm told by the few who've seen me now and then that I haven't changed, but if I showed them a few photos they'd be shocked. Personally, I think I'd be amazed at how much I've bypassed my parents and acquired my grandfather's face.

9:05 - A cashier from Shoppers comes out and hands us a pad of paper and a pen. She tells us to write down our names and the number of tickets we want. Limit of 4 per customer. There is confusion at first; somebody in line thinks that it's a contest or a Shoppers Drug Mart promotion. What, a free tube of mascara or Mach III Ugly with our tickets? There's something disgusting about the corruptibility of information amongst a group of only eight to ten people. Three seems to be the limit - a fourth person only serves to misunderstand, mishear or misconstrue, and then promptly pass it on. Eventually the confustion clears. We pass the pen and paper down the line. The girl hands it to me. Her name is Jenna Schroder.

9:12 - The cashier comes out again and announces that they're not selling Aerosmith tickets. The girl in the baseball cap, the guys in the lawn chair, are confused. What do you mean? The lawn chair buddies have been sitting there since five thirty. The cashier makes a couple of quick phone calls, comes back out and says that Aerosmith is playing in Saskatoon, about 260 km (160 miles) north of Regina. They know that. What's the problem? The cashier explains that tickets for concerts in other cities are not available in this city. Nonetheless, they hang around for at least ten-fifteen more minutes, as if convinced that all the time they put in sitting around in an empty mall on a Saturday morning entitles them to some magical Aerosmith tickets. I express my sympathy to one of the lawn chair guys as they're stowing the chess board and folding up their rock n roll furniture. He shrugs. I tell him that he should buy a Pixies ticket. "Never heard of those guys," he says. "Flyin' fuckin' tinkerbell fairies". I mentally withdraw my sympathy.

9:30 - Goodbye, Stupidest Aerosmith Fans Ever. I hope you find your Magical Ticket Portal one day.

9:32 - A short girl with a coordinated cream-and-tan outfit and ringleted hair that somehow matches her shoes queues up behind me. I wonder what band she's here for. After a few minutes, a group of what I can only describe as miniature hair stylists walks by and spots her. There is mutual squealing. One of them, memorable for the greenish tone of her blonde hair, says "What are you lining up for?" "Aerosmith tickets!" snorts Cream 'n' Tan. "What else?" They're totally absorbed in each other. Everyone in line is staring at them, and then at me, because I'm the one who needs to break the bad news. I lean in a bit. "Excuse me," I say, "There are no Aerosmith tickets on sale here". They keep talking. I have never seen two people more oblivious to another's presence. They wouldn't twig to a priest if they were about to get married. I try again, louder and closer. "There are no tickets". They look at me, amazed that I'm there. I think Cream 'n' Tan thought she was lining up behind a potted plant or something. "We're buying Pixies tickets". This means absolutely nothing to her. "There are no Aerosmith tickets here". "Oh," she says. "I've never heard of the Pixies".

9:45 - Another guy shows up in line behind me, this one managing to say "I sell mobile phones" without uttering a word. Something about his brisk haircut and the leather jacket that wants to be a great deal more expensive than it actually is. He says "You're lining up here?". I try to figure out a diplomatic response to that question. On top of that, I don't want to appear rude by saying "There's no Aerosmith tickets, buddy. Go peddle Nokias," on the off-chance that he's come for some demi-vintage alt-rock experience. So I frame it as an anecdote, explaining with a smile that people had been lining up, expecting Aerosmith etcetera, but it's clear he doesn't understand. He doesn't get why I'm talking so much. He's dropped the puzzle of decoding the content of my story and decided to focus on why I'm engaging him at all. I see this before I'm finished but I'm committed now and must follow through to the humorous conclusion. He furrows his brow and says "Oh". I sum it up: "So there's no Aerosmith tickets here". He still looks confused. He wasn't expecting Aerosmith tickets. I clarify: "We're waiting for Pixies tickets". "Pixies?" he says. He has no idea why he's in this line. At some point he sneaks away.

9:55 - A guy hurries down the escalator. He's dressed in sneakers, jeans, t-shirt, ballcap. He scans the line. "Still time for me to get tickets?" he says. Fuck this. I say: "There's no Aerosmith tickets here". "Aerosmith?" he says. "Buddy. Please. Do I look like an Aerosmith fan?" Yes, I think. But he's pointing at himself and waiting for me to admit that he's way stylish. "I guess not," I say. "But I've been shooing them away all morning. Sorry about that". "Aerosmith," he says, amused and disgusted. "Ahh, man!". I see then that he works at the record store upstairs. In fact, he probably calls it a 'record store,' even though it sells nothing but DVDs and CDs. This guy is a kindred spirit, like me having paid all rock n roll dues under the table for the last ten years or so.

10:00 - They call us in. Bob has been pushing Mia around in a cart mocked up to look like a jolly taxi. Amazingly, she's still in a good mood. And so am I, despite the wait. The others buy their tickets and wave goodbye, saying "See you at the concert" and stuff like that. We've all bonded over the thwarting of the Aerosmith contingent. It reminds me of hanging out with my friends in highschool: standing around, nowhere to go, laughing at people who liked heavy metal, taking some embattled pleasure in being a part of a cultural minority. Except Bob's got a kid, I've got a Visa and a spouse (former evil, latter great), and we've all just had ridiculous bites taken out of our paycheques to see a band that would have cost five bucks to see in 1988. Nonetheless. I wonder if "Here Comes Your Man" is a response to Velvet Underground's "Waiting For The Man"?

parode - exode