Cigar Box Banjo (24 page)
From time to time now I encounter people who are uncomfortable with me, with the fact that I am tearing pages off the calendar and folding them carefully, making as neat and as orderly a pile as I can, unwilling to scatter the days. I understand these people, because I was just as uncomfortable with Richard. When he entered the studio that day, I hugged him, but it was the briefest of man-hugs, and I turned away and did something enterprising and useless, tuning a guitar that lay off to one side and was not scheduled to have any notes plucked out of it. Richard had lost an astonishing amount of weight, fifty or sixty pounds gone from a frame that could hardly afford to lose it. He was hunched and withered and weak, but he was keen to play music. He rested his hand on the keyboard, pulled out a couple of notes. “It’s all new again,” he announced. That was always his quest—for newness, for originality, to be in a moment that had no existence or meaning beyond what it was, a tiny bit of time where some beautiful thing happened.
Like life, it was a one-time offer.
It was wonderful, the music Richard played. Nothing he did that day was what one might have expected. Everything seemed to have been brought in from left field, and it was perfect.
He added keyboards to a song David Gray and I had written, “Sweet Daddy.” The song ended, in the unmixed version, with a great long organ chord that bubbled like primordial ooze. This chord, like everyone else’s final musical utterance on the track, would ultimately be drawn back via the board’s faders, but for now Richard let the music sound, making sure there was enough of it. Bit by bit, notes disappeared from the chord, until there was a single note, a forlorn voice. And then the note kind of tipped its hat, kicked its heels, and Richard launched into “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbing Along.”
1
Rebecca made a couple of very fine albums,
Tug
and
The Sweetest Noise
.
2
The somewhat bizarre (and Grammy-winning) recording “Believe” was the result of pitch correction. The machines—this is what I’ve heard, anyway—had to work very hard to stretch Cher’s vocals back into line. They produced a kind of wowing Doppler effect, and the producers shrugged and decided to go with it.
3
Not to mention Paul Butterfield, the patron saint of Porkbelly Futures!
I
’VE OFTEN wondered why, in popular song and fiction, people dealing with The Diagnosis decide to go mountain climbing. For example, in Tim McGraw’s popular song “Live Like You Were Dying,” the narrator lists sky diving, bull riding, and climbing mountains as activities he is planning to undertake.
I made some decisions after D-Day, but I didn’t really have to make plans. I already
had
plans, some of which involved Porkbelly Futures. The band was enjoying what might be termed modest success. We performed whenever we could, even toured a little, and in our press kit (for we had attracted some admirers among music reviewers) we described our music as “north country, born of the blues.” (In other words, we were four lads and a lass, Canadian born and bred, who had been not lured away by offers from Hollywood, New York, or Nashville.) Not long after D-Day, we did a gig at the Dora Keogh, a small neighbourhood pub. The usual fare at the Dora is traditional Irish music.
1
The musicians, perched on the tiny stage on milking stools, blend quite easily with the patrons, since people with fiddles and tambours and suchlike sit in the audience (also on milking stools) and participate. When Porkbelly Futures played there, our friends came to watch and drink and (though I love them dearly) yabber and gab throughout even the most tender songs. The crowd was full of well-wishers, and I was given much advice about how best to battle the beast.
In one of the early meetings we (by “we” I mean my medical team, Marty, Jill, Dorothy, and myself) had with Dr. Li, my chemo doctor, someone asked, “Paul sings a lot. Should he be doing that?” “Well,” Dr. Li answered seriously, “there’s been very little research on the relationship between singing and lung cancer.” That seemed odd to me. I had a vocal coach, the redoubtable Micah Barnes, who taught me to draw in prodigious amounts of air in aid of vocalization. I was even shown a method of inflating an invisible subcutaneous lifesaver ring. I learned to blow and hum and make my lips slap together with the insistence of a forty-horsepower Johnson.
Let’s take the purely practical, physical aspect. I had this sessile, squamous tumour settling on my left lung. It made perfect sense to me that bellowing for three or four hours a night would be a good way of irritating the thing. Who knew, maybe the tumour would decide to take up residence elsewhere, to disappear into the ether.
So that was the notion behind the Porkbelly Futures Health Tour, the name we gave our forthcoming trip to the Maritimes. We took not only our musical equipment but a juicer, a blender, and a very elaborate espresso maker. That last wasn’t technically part of the Health Tour paraphernalia, but Chas, our stalwart bass player, had lately developed an affection for extremely fine coffee. He’d previously possessed an affection for merely fine coffee, but an encounter with a certain cup of joe had ratcheted this up a notch; thus the gleaming chrome espresso maker. The juicer and blender were there to be wielded by Rebecca Campbell, who, following the holistic nutritionist’s commandments, was going to supply me with a steady diet of mulched vegetative matter. We climbed into our van, the equipment packed with molecule-crunching density into a horse trailer, and headed toward the Atlantic Ocean.
Marty and Chas did most of the driving, assisted by a GPS unit that spoke to us in various accents, the most annoying of which was Australian; we tended to select Australian (“Stop, yer gawing the wrong why!”) so that we could tell it to fuck off. Rebecca likes to travel in an old-fashioned manner, that is, with a paper map unfolded on her lap. She would study the blue highways and search for routes that the Australian would never consider. Rebecca is younger than the rest of us by more than a decade, but she is the veteran. She has been on countless tours, and she is always eager to see parts of the country she has not seen before. (There are very few parts of the country she hasn’t seen before, and those take some getting to.) Stuart Laughton’s favoured posture was hunched forward beside a window, a pair of binoculars at the ready. “There is,” he’d announce, “a golden eagle nesting in that tree.” We travelled in such manner for a couple of days, and then we reached Fredericton, and the home of Wayne Walsh, at which point the Health Tour pretty much went off the rails.
Meeting us at Wayne’s were our booking agent/manager Bob and his wife, Joanne. A few words about Bob. He has been many things in his life—labour negotiator, radio and television producer, public relations consultant—and he is a long-standing friend of Marty’s and mine, as well as an unflagging booster. He is wildly enthusiastic about my novels and our songs, and when I say “wildly enthusiastic,” I mean it literally. Bobby punctuates his speech with exaggerated motions, suddenly ripping a large set of knuckles through the air, usually taking out the set of chinaware left to you by your great-grandmother. During his bouts of wild enthusiasm, his voice rises ever higher in pitch, and words start jostling and bumping each other in their eagerness to get out of his mouth. Often they cancel each other out, and for very long moments you’ll hear nothing but extended dipthongs, draped and flapping like sheets drying on the line. It’s hard to resist such enthusiasm, so when Bobby suggested that he act as our manager, we all agreed.
Bobby did not select, as a model for managerial style, Brian Epstein, the sophisticate who guided the Beatles to stardom. Rather, he seemed to invoke the spirit of Colonel Tom Parker, the former dog catcher and pet cemetery proprietor who oversaw the careers of Tom Mix, Minnie Pearl, and, most famously, Elvis Aaron Presley. Bobby deals not only in grand visions but in minutiae. He has ideas about how we should dress, how we should conduct ourselves onstage, the order in which we should play our songs, etcetera, etcetera. We, of course, resist any and all attempts on his part to be a Svengali. The one advantage of middle age, I think, is that it gives one the right to look potential Svengalis in the eye and say, “Piss off.” After all, if one could be moulded, one would have been moulded long ago, when there might have been some point to it. So, in our affectionate way, we tell Bobby to piss off. We do allow him to deal with certain minutiae, things like where we should be and how we should get there and when. He attends to this stuff with a spectacular disregard for numerical values, seeming to feel that any number between one and ten is just about the same (so that we arrive for sound checks at six o’clock, when the sound man expected us at five o’clock) and also that any sequence of three numbers will identify the required highway. He also ignores the fact that Canada is the second biggest country in the world; he calculates the distance between most cities as “about five hours,” even when they’re in separate provinces, even when there’s a third province in between ’em.
Bobby had lined up eight or nine gigs for us in the Maritimes, and he—as always—weighed our prospects with cautious optimism, calculating that somewhere between, oh, fifty and a hundred people might show up at each venue. What with merchandise sales—we had our two CDs and some very large t-shirts, which appeal exclusively to very large men—this would make the scheme semi-profitable. (We count as “semi-profitable” any enterprise that does not immediately render us street people.) Usually, Bobby was insufficiently cautious. We tended to draw not “crowds,” but rather “clutches,” disparate individuals who sat as far away as possible from one another, making the empty seats all the more apparent.
Anyway, as I was saying, the Health Tour got derailed at Wayne’s house. There was something of a lobster feed, in which we exhibited the decorum of ravenous bull sharks. Huge quantities of wine were consumed, along with all manner of other liquor, although Rebecca—bless her heart—did steam me up some spinach. Porkbelly Futures, as an entity, enjoys its food. Indeed, our traditional after-concert activity has long been something I call “the Massive Caloric Intake.” We enjoy these most at Boston Pizza, because the menu is the same regardless of the city. We order spicy Caesars (doubles, please!), chicken wings, riblets, nachos, and, oh yeah, while we’re at it, let’s have a little pizza!
This time around, as it turned out, Bobby’s calculations were on the low side. People showed up at the venues on the Health Tour. Part of the reason for this, I must admit, is that I had decided to be vocal about my predicament. As I was lying in the hospital after the pleurodesis, a reporter from the
Toronto Star,
Greg Quill, communicated though various sources that he wanted to speak to me. Greg is a newspaperman I respect. As a music critic, he has helped the career (such as it is) of Porkbelly Futures. Moreover, he’d had a distinguished career in his native Australia as a singer-songwriter with the band Country Radio. So I was well disposed toward Greg; I felt I could trust him. Like anyone, my first inclination was to clam up about the whole death deal. For hundreds of years, people have been tight-lipped about terminal illness, probably for no better reason than that by speaking about the Dark Thing you may risk attracting its attention.
But what the hell, I thought. I agreed.
When the call came, I picked up my mobile phone and wandered out into the hallways wearing two Johnny gowns, one forward, the other a’rear, to conduct the interview. What I hadn’t anticipated was how upset Greg would be. My manner—off hand, matter of fact, and humorous—was designed as much to cheer Quill up as anything else. (Still, you must ever remember, the tumour hates laughter. It hates laughter, and it loves fear.)
When I was released from the hospital a couple of days later, another reporter wanted to talk to me. Again, I tried to be light-hearted. In a desire for exactness here, I should explain I am often, even usually, light-hearted. When I am discussing little pockets of emotion with intimates, this is likely very irritating. When I’m discussing my impending demise, I think it’s more palatable.
Then the radio stations called—I had no idea—and again, I was, um, puckishly forthright. The informative content of what I said was that, well, I had plans. We had the Health Tour upcoming, and I assured the listeners that we would be there.
So when Porkbelly Futures rolled out to the East Coast, the venues—small venues, true—were quite full. The gig that stands out most in my mind was in a town called Mount Stewart, Prince Edward Island. For one thing, we’d had to take a ferry there, and nothing makes you feel so connected to the Maritimes as a ferry ride. The gig was at a restaurant, and early in the evening the dining room was jam-packed with diners. My stomach lurched, because this restaurant, the Trailside Inn, served the best chowder we’d ever had, and there have been too many times in my life when music competed with good food, and music lost the battle. But when we started playing, the diners cradled their silverware and folded their hands together attentively. They listened and smiled, and when we announced the audience participation portion of the evening, they participated.
“How fortunate we were,” one gentleman said to me afterwards, “those of us who got to hear you.”
But how fortunate I was, I reflected, to have been heard. I felt much, much better by the end of the evening than I had at the beginning. Some months earlier, I had happened upon the podcast of a talk delivered by Andrew Solomon, author of the award-winning book
The Noonday Demon,
in which he recounted a ceremony he’d taken part in in rural Africa, a ceremony designed to alleviate his depression. This ceremony—it included, I recall from listening, live rams and dead chickens— did Mr. Solomon a lot of good. The entire village showed up to cheer him on, even though by the end he was naked and bedaubed with dried blood. Solomon asked a villager about some Western doctors who had once been there and had since disappeared. “Oh, they had a lot of strange ideas,” recalled the local. “Do you know what they did if someone was feeling sad? They’d take them into a small room without windows and make them talk about sad things.” The Western doctors made the afflicted go through all this alone. There was no notion of getting out the village, having everyone show up to witness both the ordeal and the deliverance.
