From This Moment On (14 page)

Very soon after first learning to play guitar, I developed thick, discolored calluses on the fingertips of my left hand. That’s the hand that caresses the neck of the guitar and forms notes and chords by dancing over the frets. At first I didn’t like these ugly, hard things on my fingers and would chew on them to keep them from getting too bulgy. I didn’t realize that calluses protect the fingers, enabling you to press down hard on the metal strings without pain. One time I decided to trim one of the thicker calluses with scissors. I cut off the top, which left a circular area of tender, pink, and sensitive flesh exposed underneath. It was raw and sore, and it took a week for it to heal so that I could get back to playing. Needless to say, I never cut my calluses again.

Even with calluses, sometimes I’d practice for so many hours straight that my fingers would bruise purple anyway. It’s amazing how much I played, yet I never became any good. Perhaps it was my lack of desire to become a great technician on the guitar; for me it was strictly a tool for composing songs. I was a singer-songwriter who used the guitar to accompany myself, not a guitarist per se.

I’m grateful for music and the many roles it played during my childhood and teen years. As much as I gave to it in terms of time and effort—exemplified not only by bruised fingers but well-exercised vocal cords and pages upon pages of lyrics—it gave tenfold in return and even saved me from getting caught up in trouble during a time of adolescent vulnerability.

My mother’s wary eye also helped in that regard. She constantly reminded me to never leave my glass of soda untended, to prevent anyone from slipping something in it. (Or drinking out of my glass and giving me something else!) I was pretty safe from being exposed
to anything harmful other than the thick secondhand smoke that clouded up the barrooms I frequented on weekends or the slobbering drunks tripping over me. As for the usual hazards, like bar fights that inevitably erupted around closing time, I just stayed out of the way. Besides, license to perform or no license, I wasn’t allowed to hang in the bar between sets, as I was under the age of eighteen. Many of the places I played featured female strippers between band sets, and I felt uncomfortable being around that. I only saw strippers dance to recorded music and was never in a band that played live during the stripper set. I guess my mother or the bar manager would have drawn the line there in allowing a child to sing while the strippers were taking off their clothes.

I was ushered out after my set and would cross paths with the half-naked girls on their way to the stage. I remember thinking how beautiful they were: fancy, feathery costumes, sparkling necklaces, bright, shiny shoes, and amazing figures. My first impressions of a woman dressing up for a man’s sake came from movies like
Cinderella,
where the concept was for the girl to look as pretty as possible. I didn’t connect that strippers stripped as a profession, not to find a husband. I was confused as to why a woman would get herself all dolled up and looking so attractive if she wasn’t trying to attract someone. Why would a girl try to look so good if she didn’t want the man to be with her? In fact, while a dancer was stripping, she often came so close to the men at the edge of the stage that they could slip bills under the strap of her thong.

In my waiting area between my sets, I could often still see the stage from an outside hallway or a room off to the side that was officially not in the lounge but had a view of the stage from a distance. Sometimes I’d hear a dancer lash out at the men, “Don’t touch me, you bastard!” The men were allowed to place money in her underwear but not touch her in any other way, and this confused me. It was hard for my child mind to understand why this was such a one-way street. The girl gets attractive only to be paid, not for the men to actually be attracted to her? This was not at all why the ladies
in
Cinderella
dressed up so pretty. They were all looking to be asked to dance and to be kissed by the prince. “Look as close and as long as you want but don’t touch” was part of the grown-up world I didn’t understand. I felt very much out of place there, which, of course, I was.

For a small-town talent like me, this was a big deal. My mother worked hard to get me on national TV as an amateur.

Just over an hour into my train trip to Toronto, I was settled in comfortably: homework out, guitar stowed above my seat, ticket in hand. My mother had arranged for a chaperone to pick me up in Toronto, and I felt confident that my first train ride all by myself was going to work out fine. What could go wrong?

Um, this:

The conductor glanced at my ticket, and his smile morphed into a frown. “Oh, this train isn’t going to Toronto, young lady,” he informed me. “You’re on the wrong train.” I remember feeling more annoyed than panicked, mainly because I didn’t really believe him! How could it be possible? All the planning, the time my parents had spent
on the phone, the process at the station buying the ticket, and he’s telling me that this isn’t the right train? It had to be!

“I’m sorry,” he said with a disquieting certainty, “but this train is going to British Columbia.”

Not only was I going in the wrong direction, I was headed about as far in that direction as a traveler in Canada could possibly go.

“W-what?” I stammered. “It can’t be! I have to be in Toronto by eleven o’clock tomorrow morning for a TV show, and I can’t be late—I have to be there!” My tone of voice was very adamant, like I expected this poor conductor to be able to do something about this, and
now.
“You have to stop the train right now,” little eleven-year-old me demanded. Looking back, I’m surprised that he didn’t pick me up and toss me out the door while the train was still moving.

“Isn’t there another train going to Toronto I can get on somewhere along the way?” I knew that geographically the lines would run parallel for a while until they split to either continue south or turn east or west, and I figured it had to be possible for me to “switch” trains somehow.

The man thought for a moment, then said, “I will make a call; wait here,” and hurried up the aisle.
Wait here?
I thought to myself.
Where can I go anyway?
I felt trapped, and every second that flashed by, with mile after mile of dense, northern bush speeding along outside the passenger car window, was taking me farther away from where I needed to be. All I knew was that I was getting the heck off that train and definitely not missing my big show. I didn’t care if they let me off in the middle of nowhere and I had to walk to the nearest train station and find my own way. It amazes me now how I was so full of determination at that age. Nothing was going to prevent me from singing on national television. I scurried to pack up all my things and pulled down my guitar from the overhead rack. Just then the conductor returned with welcome news: sure enough, they were going to stop the train so that I could get off. But to do what, exactly?

“You wait by the side of the tracks,” he instructed, “and within the hour, another train will come by and pick you up.” I got off that
BC-bound train—and it
was
in the middle of nowhere, as a matter of fact—and stood there in the bush with my backpack and guitar, looking just like a little hobo. All I needed were a walking stick and bandana, and the scene would have been complete.

There was no sign of civilization anywhere, but I was fine with this. I had the presence of mind to know that train tracks always ran along the outskirts of towns, so if worse came to worst, I could always start walking back along the tracks to the nearest town and find a pay phone. Being all alone in the bush did not really concern me; the only thing that I was afraid of was being late for the biggest break of my career so far.

I didn’t have a watch, so it was hard to gauge the supposed hour’s wait until the other train came by.
If
it came by; for all I knew, I’d still be standing here come the next morning. To help pass the time, which just crept along, I pulled out my guitar, sat on its case, and starting singing. I waited patiently for about ten minutes, beside the tracks, then started to wonder if maybe I should start following them to the nearest town to try to find another way to get to Toronto. Maybe there was a bus I could catch or someone already driving down that I could hop in with. After this long, ten-minute wait, I was sure the BC train had just washed its hands of me, knowing there wasn’t going to be another train to pick me up after all, knowing that once it was gone, there was no holding it responsible for abandoning me here. It was no longer their problem; I was on my own. Every ten minutes felt like an hour.

At last I heard a rumble in the distance. I hurriedly packed up the guitar and waited for the train to stop. Stop? It didn’t even slow down. My hopes flagged as the cars thundered past. I couldn’t believe it.
Maybe it didn’t see me,
I thought, half in shock. But how could the engineer not have seen someone standing beside the tracks? I strained my memory to see if I could work out how far back the last town was that I saw from the BC train on my way here to nowhere. I guessed it would take me way over an hour to walk it, but at least I’d get there while it was still daylight. This was now my new worry, to
get somewhere civilized before dark. I had no matches, and the mosquitoes would be out soon. I really wasn’t looking forward to that, as a fire would at least help smoke them off and give me some warmth once it cooled down.

Just then I heard another rumble from down the tracks. Another train. This time it did start to slow down, much to my relief. As the train was coming to a stop, a man leaning out of a door asked, “Are you the little girl going to Toronto?” “Yep,” I replied brightly, and hopped on with my things. Once aboard, I asked him how I could have gotten on the wrong train to begin with. He explained that in order to have caught the Sudbury-to-Toronto train, I’d needed to have taken a bus connection from the station. My parents, not being experienced travelers, didn’t know that.

It must have been a hoot or, if not funny, at least an extraordinary event for the conductors on these trains to message each other about some little girl and her guitar with a determined attitude train hopping along the Canadian railway. It’s not like these were subway trains or streetcars, these were massive passenger-cargo trains crossing the vast, wild landscape of Canada. They couldn’t just stop anywhere, and they normally did so only at designated locations.

Amazingly, I made it to Toronto right on time. My chaperone was waiting for me as planned, totally oblivious that his young arrival could easily have been practically to Manitoba by then. At eleven o’clock, I was walking through the doors of the TV studio, ready to rehearse as if I’d had a perfectly restful trip. Just another page in the life of a child whose mother lovingly called her “my gypsy.”

I’d already appeared on TV before, but those were charity telethons on local television and were nothing like the lottery shows, each of which claimed a huge viewership all across the country. I eventually made my way onto
The Tommy Hunter Show
as well, in 1980. Tommy Hunter, known throughout Canada as “the Country Gentleman,” was a country music performer and radio-and-television personality. His TV show debuted in 1965 and would air for twenty-seven years, making
it the longest-running weekly program of its kind in the world. I’d been a faithful viewer from the time I was about six years old, watching it on a black-and-white screen; in fact, I grew up watching Anne Murray and a long list of other big stars he’d presented.

The Tommy Hunter Show
was the big time in Canada, with real dressing rooms, professional hairstylists and makeup artists, an elaborate set, producers, directors, and, of course, a celebrity host. I sang “Walk On By” by Leroy Van Dyke.

I felt quite legitimate and professional being led to the glam chair in the hair and makeup room to be fussed over like I’d seen in behind-the-scenes films of movie actors: with combs and brushes tugging and wafting hair, and faces being powdered and glossed, dabbed and blotted. I felt like a movie star.

The show’s house band was the slickest I’d ever played with, and I even had backup singers. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like a music princess with so much production behind me. It was daunting having to remember all my cues: when to enter, where to stand, when to walk, when to stop, which camera to face, and so forth. But I was excited by the buzz of the live television experience, and the adrenaline was pumping. It’s too bad my mother couldn’t be with me. It was obviously a time when money was too tight for her to be able to make the trip, as I know she wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

My mother pushed everything to the limit in order to keep me developing musically. The more time, effort, and finances she devoted to my career, the greater the strain between her and my father. From most people’s point of view, music is little more than a side interest or a hobby. Not to my mom. She was determined for me to make it, and was entirely convinced that I would. This belief was deep in her soul, and there was no hurdle too high for her when it came to my music. My father, I should emphasize, was very supportive of my music, too, but he was always more practical about things.

Well, my mother wouldn’t listen to his common sense, and her fierce drive for my success often drove the whole family crazy. I almost
felt that she wanted it more than I did. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that she
needed
it more than I did. I’ve noted how music was a great escape for me throughout my childhood, and I suppose that was true for her as well. It preoccupied her mind, helping to keep depression at bay, and it provided hope, which she clung to like a drowning person clutching a life preserver.