From This Moment On (24 page)

In August we played several weeks all the way on Canada’s East Coast: New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. Getting from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland required a thirteen-hour overnight ferry ride. I’d never seen such a large ship: the open vehicle ramp to the cargo bay reminded me of a giant whale’s gaping jaws, and here we were driving right into its belly. I looked at all the cars, trucks, campers, and cargo containers parked around us and simply could not believe how much the ferry could swallow.

I was hoping we’d spot some real whales during the crossing, this being the first time I’d ever seen an ocean. In fact, I’d never traveled on a body of water so large that you couldn’t see land in any direction. Nor had I ever been off the mainland before. As we pulled out of the port, I was so excited. I paused at every opportunity to listen to the exotic accents around me, which were sort of a musical cross between Irish and French Creole. I barely understood a word.

Being an inexperienced traveler, I made the mistake of assuming that Newfoundland and Northern Ontario shared the same climate. At home, August temperatures usually average around twenty-five to thirty degrees Celsius during the day. I packed accordingly, but it was much too cold for the shorts and T-shirts I’d brought along.

This hunk of metal was not a fancy boat. It was very much a transport vessel and not something you would take for any other reason other than to get from point A to point B. It was a grim gray color, with chunked and lumpy layer after layer of paint that had obviously
been washed on over salt and rust. I’m glad I hadn’t seen the movie
Titanic
yet, as I would have imagined that if a ritzy, expensive prize like the
Titanic
could sink, surely this mass of metal could without much trouble. Especially in iffy weather, which is what we were in.

The journey turned out to be safe, but it was not fun. We were only a couple of hours out to sea, and we had eleven to go. “Frigg,” I moaned out loud. I was thinking like a four-year-old who asks repeatedly, “Are we there yet?” The other passengers started scuffling off the outer decks to go to sleep for the night, and I was ready to go, too. Only I wasn’t sure where one was meant to sleep! There were no designated seats like on a Greyhound bus or an overnight train, just general tickets. “General” meant that you could spend your time anywhere on the upper or middle deck. The upper deck was an open-air free-for-all, but in the rain, it was not an option for me, and the middle deck, although covered by the upper deck above, was only half shielded with Plexiglas to keep out the elements.

I wasn’t very savvy about thinking ahead and claiming my spot for the night, not knowing how the whole thing worked and figuring that surely there would be at least somewhere dry, if not a seat for every passenger on board for an overnight trip. Much to my dismay, this was not the case, and once I caught on to the fact that the more experienced ferry travelers had already staked their claims on all the dry spots on the boat, there was no room for me. The bow deck with no sides had room, but rain and sea mist were spraying in, although if you stayed in the center just a bit, you’d get damp but not soaked. I tried this for a while alongside a few other poor suckers who’d obviously also boarded with “I’m a Dumb Tourist!” written all over their faces.

I was so uncomfortable that I finally gave up and accepted that I’d have to just stand all night. I was feeling sorry for myself—cold, damp, tired, and pissed off. I felt I’d been tricked, not knowing what kind of ticket I’d bought, and if I’d known ahead that I’d have nowhere dry to at least sit, let alone sleep, I would have changed it. Of
course, now I realize I probably had the ticket I had because that was all I could afford.

In the hopes of warming up a bit, I headed down a floor to the bathrooms, and I could see from a distance a line of women queuing up outside the ladies’ room. What else is new? But there was a funky odor drifting up as I walked down the stairs, and soon it became clear that it was vomit I was smelling. I hated that smell! Now, I admit that’s a pretty witless comment. I mean, who doesn’t? What made it worse, though, was that I had no choice but to go down there at some point no matter how revolting the stench was, since eventually I would have the urge to pee, and I couldn’t just walk up the street to find a cleaner public restroom. This was it!

Finally, I was so exhausted that I was ready to sleep
anywhere
.
Where was the rest of the band this whole time?
I wondered. I was the new one in the group so at this point we were pretty much still strangers, but I still felt a tinge of
Thanks for looking out for me, guys!
Having done the trip before themselves, knowing the every-man-for-himself routine, they most likely had the savvy to secure their spots for the night, while I was milling around looking for the best spot to take in the view.

The trip got better once we were back on land and I had the chance to encounter the friendly locals. Happy to be back on land, I wanted to explore some of the local beaches. I could just picture myself lounging on the warm, sandy, sunny shore, listening to the gently lapping ocean waves. However, this was the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern coast of Newfoundland, not Florida. Although the beaches were stunningly beautiful, they weren’t at all what I’d expected: rocky, not sandy, with loud, crashing waves of inky black water. And, needless to say, cold. Nevertheless, I was determined to take my first swim in salt water, no matter how overly idealized my vision of the ocean had been. I squealed and screeched as I inched into the freezing, frothy water, but it was so ominously dark, and the undertow tugged me so insistently, that I was afraid to go in over my head. When the water reached my waist, I quickly submerged my whole body, then
dashed out as fast as I could before hypothermia set in. I was used to subzero temperatures at home, but not swimming in icy water.

I turned eighteen during Flirt’s East Coast leg, and it was as if my world was starting to expand exponentially. If I was back home for the summer, I’d be in the bush planting trees with my dad. He wasn’t thrilled with me for missing the plant, and in phone conversations he sometimes intimated that I’d let him down.

I have to admit to carrying a little guilt along with me during that tour. Certainly, I worried about my family while I was away, since I wasn’t just going off for a short period, then coming back. I had made the decision to start my own life and that made me feel selfish. As I didn’t only feel I was leaving them, but that I was leaving them
behind.

I felt especially anxious about my mother. Was she okay? What if she and my father were fighting? But then I’d tell myself that I was an adult now and needed the chance to follow my dreams and be out on my own. After all, my parents were adults; they were supposed to be capable of managing life and the family without me. Maybe I overestimated my family’s need for me to carry so much responsibility, and perhaps they were perfectly fine without me there. But I had deep concerns that stemmed from the years of being under the Twain roof, and it was hard for me to let that anxiety go.

A few weeks into the tour, my father called me up, frantic. “Where are you?” he demanded gruffly, the implication being that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I reminded him that I was on the road, performing. It turned out that my mom had suffered a miscarriage. She and my dad were asleep when he was awakened by something wet. When he peeled back the covers, he discovered my mother unconscious. Her blood soaked the sheets. He rushed her to the hospital.

My father scolded me for not being there and for the fact that he’d been unable to reach me during the night. Well, the accommodations we stayed in were pretty funky, with no one at the reception desk to man the phones after hours.

“Your mother could have died, you know, if I hadn’t woken up when I did!” he said accusingly. Although I felt he was being unfair, part of me was pleased to hear him sound so shaken up by the prospect of losing her; it meant that he still loved my mother. Maybe this would serve as something of a wake-up call for him, reminding him how much he needed her.

Before we hung up, my father tried pressuring me to come home at once. “Family,” he lectured, “is more important than being in some bar band.” It seemed to me that I’d always shown how important family was to me. As I pointed out to him, my mother was in good care at the hospital and didn’t really need me. Besides, I was something like 1,500 miles away; I couldn’t just pick up and come right home. Overall, though, my father succeeded in making me feel extremely guilty.

Furthermore, I had an obligation to the guys in the band, who were always good to me, although I pretty much kept to myself. On Canada’s East Coast, it was common for bands to stay in “band houses” paid for by the bars that featured live music. Act after act passed through. If the walls could talk? Personally, I wouldn’t want to hear all the lurid tales of what probably went on there. Nonstop booze, sex, and drugs. Never mind what secrets the bedsheets could have divulged.
Ew.
I observed a few ground rules in these places: (1) never walk around barefoot; (2) always check to see that the sheets have been washed (although burning them probably would have been preferable); (3) shower with the plastic curtain pulled open so that it never comes in contact with my skin; and (4) put lots of towels on the floor so the soles of my feet never touch it.

One good thing about these band houses was that they had kitchens. After a while on the road, you can get real tired of eating in restaurants, so I relished the chance to cook for myself. I’d shop for groceries (and disinfectant), using my own money. I usually ate only one meal a day, around noon, as our nights typically didn’t end until three in the morning, but what a meal: pancakes made from scratch, drenched in maple syrup and melted butter; a tall glass of milk,
always;
bacon, fried up crispy; two eggs, cooked in the bacon grease, done over easy; and toast for dipping in the yolk. And for dessert? A bowl of cereal, usually Honeycomb, Cap’n Crunch, or Froot Loops.

I was tiny, but, boy, was I stuffing myself like a pig. I loved these meals. The liberty of eating what I wanted, when I wanted, and however much I wanted was an experience of independence I’d never had before. As a vocalist, you don’t want to eat just before it’s time to perform, as it’s hard to use your diaphragm properly if your tummy is full, taking up space you need to fill up with a good intake of air, so I’d usually skip dinner. I was so gorged anyway, it’s little wonder that I didn’t need anything else.

The guys in Flirt and I lived like roommates in these band houses. One day I needed to borrow a pen. I went out into the hall and, forgetting to knock, opened the door to one of the rooms and was about to ask “Does anyone have a pen I could borrow?” But I never got the first word out.

One of the guys was lying in bed with the covers pulled up to his neck, and there was a curious pumping motion going on around his groin area. Of course, I realized he was masturbating. Crimson with embarrassment, and hoping to God that he hadn’t noticed me (he seemed to be pretty, um, engaged), I silently backed out of there, closed the door, and tiptoed back to my room, petrified that at any moment I would have one angry musician screaming in my face for having invaded his privacy.

I
knew
that men masturbated; stumbling upon him in the act just caught me off guard, that’s all. However, I have to admit that I was a late bloomer—make that latecomer—to the concept of masturbation. Even though I’d been sexually active since the age of fifteen, I still didn’t know that girls masturbated, too. I only discovered this a bit later when I was chatting with a girlfriend on the subject, as she was so open about it, and sex in general. I admitted to her that I was surprised she did it and that I didn’t even know a girl could. She couldn’t believe it and told me she’d been masturbating since she
was thirteen. She was amazed that I was so new to this awareness, exclaiming, “Where have you been?!” I wasn’t really sure. It had just never dawned on me.

I would still say that in most ways I grew up fast, the result of singing in bars from the time I was eight, as well as growing up in a harsh family environment that demanded uncommon maturity from me, and now, at eighteen, touring with a rock band. But in many other ways of the world, I was still naïve.

Probably because I’d been around the bar scene so long, I harbored no illusions about how hard it would be to sing professionally full-time. Believe me, I’d seen many women performers in their thirties still playing dive bars, painfully aware that they had long since passed the point of becoming the next Tanya Tucker. I accepted the reality that the same fate might await me. Part of the reason that I was so restless to get on with this next phase of my life was to see if I could, in fact, support myself as a musical artist. One thing I knew
for sure was that I had no intention of becoming marooned in clubs for the rest of my life. At some point, if things didn’t pan out, I would quit to go do something else—although I hadn’t decided exactly when and what that would be.