Falling Backwards: A Memoir (30 page)

Jean kept telling me that I was going to find myself in a whole lot of trouble if I didn’t start respecting myself. She was right. I didn’t respect myself. I didn’t think of myself at all, quite frankly. I didn’t think I was worth anything good. I used to be so carefree and funny. Now I was one of the walking wounded, and it was my own doing.

I decided I was going to try as hard as I could to find a job singing in a band. If failure was the worst thing that could happen to me, I would surely be fine with that. People who were looking for a drummer or a keyboard player would place ads in the Help Wanted section of the
Georgia Straight
, and there was also a section for bands that were looking for singers. The ads would say something like, “Singer wanted for Top-40 cover band. Heart, Pat Benatar, Sheena Easton, Journey influenced.” Some bands were looking for a jazz singer and some bands were looking for a blues singer. I thought I was more in the Bette Midler style, although nobody was looking for that. Top 40 was going to have to do.

The ad I circled said, “Must be willing to travel weekends.” Well, that almost sounded like it could be fun—I could get out of Colette’s apartment. I wrote down the address in the ad and discovered that the
audition was three bus rides away. God forbid I should get the job and be facing ninety minutes on a bus every time we rehearsed.

Anyway, I took the three buses and ended up with the band in a tiny equipment-packed basement. There were cords everywhere, plugged into every possible outlet. The whole place looked like it could blow up at any second. I wanted to turn around and get back on the bus. Two other girls and I sat in the kitchen waiting to sing our songs. I had practised “Beast of Burden” by the Rolling Stones, as it was one of the songs on the list the band had provided for us.

To make a long story short, I sang. They all looked at me like I had eaten a baby. They had me sing it again. Then they had me try a Foreigner song and then a Journey song. I must have sung six songs in total and finally the drummer and band leader, who was named John, said, “You’ve got the job, sweet lady.”
Sweet lady?
Sweet mother of God, I thought to myself. I had been called many things in my life but never did I expect to be called that. I think John was stuck firmly in 1967. Whatever, it didn’t matter—I was in a band. My very first band! It was called Executive Sweet and I had no idea what in the world that meant.

We practised twice a week and I faithfully took buses across town and back again each time. I learned about thirty songs over the next month. It was a lot of fun, actually. I felt like I was moving forward; even if it was a crap band that sounded like its four members had just gotten out of prison, it was a band just the same. Jean said she’d come and see me sing if we ever played anywhere decent. I wasn’t sure that was ever going to happen. We were terrible and I am not exaggerating. I think the guys thought that if they just played as loud as they could no one would notice they were complete shite.

Still, John got us quite a few jobs in little logging towns around British Columbia. We played B-circuit hotels, whose patrons were mainly guys who drank for a living. It was dismal. We would usually
play a forty-minute set and then, during our breaks, a stripper with a name like Dusty Blossom would come out and swing around her brass pole to badly recorded music by Pink Floyd. I hadn’t seen a lot of strippers in my life, but the ones that were on these hotel circuits were perhaps the worst in the world. They looked drugged out and lonesome. It made my heart hurt watching them. They were about my age, too, and I would always think about their parents and what they must think of their daughters out there flashing their bits.

The drunken men would whistle and holler and spew out the most vile things at them and stuff a handful of one-dollar bills into their G-strings and then the song would end and the strippers would slink off to the back room to put their clothes back on. They’d have to go out there three or four times a night because there were so few of them to dance. No wonder they drank and did drugs—who wouldn’t?

The patrons always seemed sad when the band would start up again. They would have rather seen the peelers all night long. Nobody wanted to hear “I’ve Been Waiting for a Girl Like You” by Foreigner or “Jump” by Van Halen. Especially the versions we did. Those people wanted to hear “Cocaine” or “The Gambler” or “Tush” by ZZ Top.

Every weekend we played in some new crummy hotel that looked exactly the same as the last crummy hotel. I hardly ever made any money. After we paid for gas and our hotel rooms and our meals, it was eaten up. I was still drinking a lot. You’d kind of have to drink in self-defence around the people who’d come to see us play. Some plastered logger was always sending a round of shooters up onto the stage. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have ten drinks a night; in fact it was the norm. Alcohol seemed to lower my intelligence to the point where I could communicate with pretty much anybody in the joint.

I got sick of working in awful places. But when I told John that I couldn’t do it anymore, he was devastated. He asked me to stay long enough for them to find someone to replace me. That could
have been an entire year for all I knew. I told him that I would finish out the month and then I was moving back home to go back to school. (That was one of my favourite lies.) I felt bad about leaving the band in the lurch, so of course I got drunk and had sex with John just to show him how sorry I was. I cried all the way on the long bus ride back to Colette’s apartment. For the life of me, I could not figure out what the hell I was doing. I kept repeating
slut slut slut slut
in my head.

In what was perhaps my best move ever, I found, with Jean’s help, a little one-bedroom apartment just a few blocks from the clothing store where Jean, bless her heart, still let me take some shifts around my unpredictable band schedule. I was nervous, but happy to be moving into my own place, though I didn’t have a thing of my own. Jean collected all sorts of things for my big move: tea towels and plates and pots and a frying pan. She got me a few bath towels and forks and knives and a tea kettle. I couldn’t believe the huge hampers she hauled into the apartment from her car.

Jean also gave me an ironing board, which I used as a kitchen table for several months. I never did own an iron. I had a cassette deck and my guitar and a couple of table lamps that looked like baskets of lemons. I felt like I was set, though I didn’t have a bed. I slept on the floor on a big quilt until I could come up with something better, like a mattress. I found one of those one day in a dumpster. It had a few stains on it, nothing I couldn’t scrub out with a little elbow grease and some Comet cleaner. I dragged it up to my apartment and put it into the bathtub. I worked on getting those stains out for two days. I used three gallons of bleach and a heck of a lot of scorching hot water and I got them all to disappear. It took a few days to dry, but when it did it looked like new. I was thrilled to be sleeping on a real bed.

The building I’d moved into was really old. My door could have been smashed down by a two-year-old with a plastic Fisher Price hammer. There was always somebody screaming in the hallways. There were loud footsteps constantly running up and down the stairs, fists pounding on doors and thumping walls wildly. It was a scary place in a sketchy part of town, but the rent was incredibly cheap.

I wanted to find a job where I could sing my own songs, but I didn’t know how to go about it. I needed to find a gig in a lounge somewhere, but how? I met a young woman named Marion at a café and she told me that a person could make really good money busking in Gastown.
Busking?
I could probably do that. All I would have to do is stand there with my guitar case open and sing songs for a few hours. It couldn’t be that hard. Marion had told me that she’d done it quite a few times and made some pretty good cash. Gastown was a really touristy area and it had a lot of pedestrian traffic going through it. It was full of shops and bars and restaurants and, presumably, folks with spare change to throw at me. It was right on the water in a beautiful part of town, so I assumed it was fairly safe.

The first day was the hardest. I took the Seabus across the harbour from my apartment and found a little niche to set myself up in. There seemed to be quite a few people milling about, and it looked bright and sunny. I would execute Operation Sing for Your Supper and see what happened.

I stood there alone in the sun and started playing my songs. It felt really strange. I felt very exposed and vulnerable. Everybody simply walked by as if I was invisible. Once in awhile somebody would dig into their pocket, toss two quarters into my case and keep right on going. That wasn’t so bad, I thought to myself. I could build up a fairly good stash if I stayed out there long enough.

That first day I made about forty bucks in five hours. My fingers were ready to fall off my hands and I couldn’t feel my fingertips. They
were completely numb from strumming so long. I went home and soaked them in warm water and salt.

I counted the money out on the bed. It was mostly quarters, so it took me awhile to sort. I thought it was marvellous. I went back to my spot almost every day for two months. It was summertime and the entire area was bustling with people shopping and drinking beer on outdoor patios. I had regulars who came and sat in front of me to eat lunch while I sang. I was even getting applause once in awhile. Some people dropped five-dollar bills into my case and told me how much they loved the music. Busking was so much easier than lurching around in hotel bars in the BC interior with a bunch of stinky guys in a van. I was glad to have that behind me.

All I wanted to do was perform my own material and I was more or less doing that now. It wasn’t the perfect situation but in my mind it was an improvement. I was writing new songs while I stood out there. In eight weeks I must have written about thirty of them. And I thought they were getting a lot better—they were more economical and straightforward. My confidence had grown noticeably. It was getting a lot easier to stand in front of people and sing. I pretended they weren’t there at all; that helped. I didn’t think anyone would notice me singing my own stuff. People came and went by me so quickly they’d never figure it out. I was making my rent money and writing new material. Things were looking up.

One Saturday afternoon I went over to Gastown, as I had been for months, and started playing. I might have been standing there maybe a half-hour and had a whopping three or four dollars in my case. It had been raining a fair amount, and so there weren’t a lot of people around. They were inside somewhere keeping themselves warm and dry, right where I should have been. I was thinking about quitting and just calling it a day. I was gathering up my stuff when all of a
sudden, I turned to see a very large person was rushing towards me. Before I could react he punched me in the side of the face so hard that I saw not only stars, but planets.

All I could make out was a large man hovering over me, picking the money out of my case and cramming it into his jacket pockets as fast as he could. I would gladly have given him all my money and spared myself the fist in the head. He didn’t say anything to me. When he had every penny fished out, he walked off as if nothing had happened. I just stayed down on the ground and watched him disappear down an alley.

I felt like bawling, but I was too upset to shed a single tear. I could hardly pull a breath into my lungs. Maybe I was in shock. I was soaked from being on the ground, and freezing, and by now I was shaking so hard I could barely latch up my guitar case. I had a forty-five minute ferry ride across the harbour to where I lived, but the guy had taken all my money so I didn’t have the fare to get me there. I would have to sneak on and hope I didn’t get caught.

What kind of person can just punch you in the head and steal your money? My face started to swell up into a bruised and bloody mess. The blood vessels had been broken in my right eye and it looked awful. All night I felt like throwing up. I thought that maybe I had a concussion or a blood clot. I hardly slept, fearing that I might never wake up again. I would have called my mother, but my phone had been cut off. I didn’t want her to know what had happened anyway so it was just as well. I should have gone to a walk-in clinic but decided not to. I didn’t quite know what I was going to say about what had happened. I was embarrassed and very shaken up.

My career as a street performer was over. I didn’t ever go busking again. I was too scared. I kept thinking that, had he hit me any harder, he could have actually killed me.

I laid low for at least a week. I stayed in and read books and slept and ate Kraft Dinner, which had become a staple at this point. I could buy three boxes for a dollar, so it was an affordable meal. I didn’t want anyone to see me with my head banged up so I didn’t go anywhere except to 7-Eleven to buy more Kraft Dinner. One half of my face turned green and yellow and my blood-filled eyeball took two weeks to clear up.

In every letter my mom sent to me—and she wrote every week—she begged me to come home. She knew I was miserable and she knew I was stubborn. She tucked twenty dollars in each letter and I was so grateful to get it and so sad at the same time. Sometimes it was all the money I had to last me until the next letter came. I had to find a way to make ends meet.

A girl named Janice, who used to come into Jean’s store, told me that there was sometimes part-time work down at one of the piers. She wasn’t specific and I couldn’t imagine what kind of work was available, but I wandered down there anyway.

The pier turned out to be a commercial dock where the fishing trawlers tied up and unloaded their catch. I walked around for half an hour, watching the boats come and go and the giant fish being unloaded. I wasn’t sure where to start. The whole place stank of something that smelled like a combination of bad breath and dog crap. I didn’t know how everybody seemed to be ignoring it so successfully. There was a sign nailed up on a post that said “Deckhand required—no experience needed.” The small print on the bottom of the sign read “See Norman Earl for details.”