There’s a fair number of parts of the book where I was there like that, and I’m just not mentioned anywhere, so yeah.
This is something that happens to me a lot, I have to say. I know it’s partly my fault. Probably my fault. Maybe because I’m the second youngest in a family of six kids, and I’ve always wanted to be a drummer, or I’ve always been a kid who drums, like since I can remember. I am a drummer. Of course I’m a human first, but I experience the world as a drummer. Probably only other drummers will understand what I’m talking about.
I was always practising, even when I didn’t have a stick in my hand. Everywhere I was, I was always tapping out paradiddles and little patterns with my fingers, and it just bugged the heck out of my mom and my older siblings and my dad, too. When I was quite young, when they would notice me tapping, they’d get irritated, and you know how kids can be. They’d slam down on my hands to stop me tapping. You know, like, “STOP that tapping!” and it would really kind of hurt. I still remember it now. So, I kind of learned how to practise without anybody noticing.
That’s how I developed what DD calls “Pete’s incredible superpower of invisibility,” which is really something where I can virtually disappear from peoples’ consciousness and still be right there, doing my thing. I mean, I don’t even think about it now. I almost have to work to turn it off, so that I can actually have people pay attention to my opinion or let me contribute to a decision that’s being made. It’s a power that’s really benefited me over the years, but maybe also led to me not always getting noticed or credited by people for the things I’ve done.
Or servers at restaurants will forget to take my order when I’m out with a group at dinner, and I’ll have to say “excuse me” a few times or maybe even get up and tap them on the shoulder to get their attention.
Or I’ll be up onstage and I’ll notice there’s actually no drums whatsoever in the monitor, and I’ll have to get the singer to shout into the mic that the drummer needs his wedge turned up with more of him in it. And the tech will say “drummer?” and kind of look at me like he just saw me teleport onto the stage out of nowhere, even though I introduced myself to him earlier in the day.
I’m not saying this for my own horn-blowing here (although okay, maybe partly I am … I mean, I don’t claim I don’t have an ego. I mean, that would be silly because of course I have an ego; everybody does). But I’m just doing this because Geoff specifically asked me to talk about DD. Here’s why:
I actually met DD before anybody else did, when she and her band — what were they called? The Speedy Zippers? The Supersonic Grifters. Right. Anyway, I met her first when they were busking outside the Calgary Folk Festival gates, because I was kind of tapping along on the fence and DD noticed me.
She noticed me. Right away. She looked at me just grooving, tapping the fence, but doing it in my own way, which is that the first thing in my mind is how to serve the song. How to make a rhythmic contribution that helps the song. It sounds obvious, but actually most drummers — I’m sorry, maybe not most drummers … well, actually, yeah, sorry, most drummers — are kind of thinking more about their own playing, and whether or not they’re being cool, or “check this fill out” and that’s fundamentally not what I do, as a drummer. I serve the song. I love, love great songs. Sometimes I serve the song so much that people don’t remember there were drums, and in a way, that’s a compliment. But true musicians hear the drums and get what I’m up to. And when I was only just tapping on the fence, DD locked on my eyes. She locked right in with me and shared a part of herself with me. I know that sounds kind of hippy. Sometimes Mykola mocks me for being a little bit hippy but, to be fair to him, he wouldn’t mock me about that, because he knows about this stuff, too. That’s why we play together. And I looked back at her, and she gave this little nod. And I knew what that nod meant without either of us saying anything, and what it meant was, “I see you, you’re a real musician. We’re making something together now.”
I know that sounds silly, but actually it’s completely true, and I stand by it. My invisibility power doesn’t work on DD. She sees me as who I am, which is a damn good, song-sensitive drummer, an artist. Not to toot my own horn too much, and I realize that the more I say that, the more I’m undermining what I’m saying, which is super frustrating for me.
[Pause.]
I’m just saying DD saw me. Right away. I was never invisible to her. I don’t know if that makes sense but anyway that’s what I wanted to say. Okay. I know I was supposed to try to think of clues about where she might have gone, and I don’t think I’ve really done that. I’m going to take a break, and I’ll try to say more later.
Jasmine McKittrik
Dharma Lodge, Galiano Island, B.C., 2015
As I said, it took me a while to truly figure her out, but I now clearly see DD’s music thing for what it was: a way for her to disconnect from people who were close to her, a way to step away from the real work of communicating with people, heart to heart. It was her armour, and, of course, an excuse to not really grow up. That’s sad. But at one point, I totally fell for the idea that music was this magical thing that made her magic and all that false wisdom.
I mean, after she played, people would look at her like she was some kind of priestess or something, like she had access to a special, special spiritual thing. And I’ll admit that at that point in my own journey, I may have been jealous. I can admit that now.
Now, I mean, now at this point in my life, that all seems pretty amusing to me, since I’m now at this point in my life where, as a shaman myself, people come to me to help them through their journey, help them work on themselves, and I’m not ashamed or afraid to say that yes, they’re willing to pay a significant amount of their wealth-seed to make those changes happen in their lives. I often have people asking to pay more, because, I’m telling you, they tell me themselves that the work we do here has been so invaluable in their lives. But I don’t wish to get off track here. What I’m doing here is trying to tell you a story about how lost we both really were, in some ways, at that time in our lives. How this idea of musical ability as some kind of window on wisdom, well, frankly, it fooled both of us.
I had started to take up the violin, not because DD played the violin, but just because I loved it. I thought that maybe I might have a special connection with it because my great-uncle had played the violin at one time in a symphony in England. Whenever he came over to our house in Kitsilano I always tried to just hold it, but of course my mother was always afraid I would break it so I’d get my hands slapped each time I reached out for it. Please, don’t get me started about the repression I had to deal with in that house. Later they did get me lessons but by then the repression of the earlier incidents had marked me, and there was so much else to deal with that I was never really able to apply myself. This is why later, when I was living with DD on the island, I thought I should maybe try again — to regain what I had lost.
I got a hold of a violin at a pawnshop in Victoria, without telling her, of course, and it came with a bow, and I was very keen on practising. The first time I pulled it out and started doing some scales, DD was out visiting someone or fucking someone or something, I don’t know, but then she came back, she came into the house, which was more of a cabin, really, and the first thing she said was, “Hey, who’s ass-fucking a Siamese cat with a hot poker in here?”
Which I should have expected, really. That kind of derision. It was typical of her when it came to music, which, of course, was her exclusive domain.
But I persevered. I kept