Again. Very little to do. Very little to say. We exchanged words of some sort, and then I announced, “Well, I think I’ll go for a little drive.”
I headed, without thinking, toward the east, way out into Scarborough. As I drove, I said, under my breath, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck” over and over again.
My cell phone rang. It was Shaughnessy, who often phones up to see how I am. I dare say he didn’t expect such a blunt answer: “I’ve got lung cancer.”
“What?”
“Non-operable.”
“Shit shit shit shit.”
“No, it’s fuck fuck fuck fuck.” I tried to be stoic, saying as how I had led a good life, and had lovely friends and loved ones. But then the sight of a very pretty girl reduced me to convulsive sobs. “I’m going to miss this so much,” I managed to get out, although my throat was so knotted with remorse that speech seemed hardly possible. I told Shaughn that I’d call him back later, and I drove on down to the Bluffs.
Some brief earth-science history: over many millennia, the eastern end of the land that modern Toronto sits upon eroded, and the effluvia ribboned across the water to the west. Over time, it formed a long, bent peninsula; a storm in the nineteenth century severed and separated this landmass, which now forms the Toronto Islands. The Bluffs are fascinating, to me, on several counts. For one thing, they are beautiful, in a bleak and desolate way. They rise hundreds of feet into the air, with the kind of naked nature, lifeless and alien, that one encounters in hoodoos and mesas.
The Bluffs are also associated in my mind with death. I don’t believe this was at the forefront of my mind as I drove there on D-Day, Diagnosis Day. But throughout my childhood I heard stories of people meeting their end on the Bluffs, either by suicide or when a part of the cliffside suddenly collapsed. A very popular art teacher at my high school lived on the Bluffs; his young daughter was standing close to the edge one day when the earth disappeared from beneath her feet, and she was gone. So maybe this was leading me down to the Bluffs, on some level: it seemed a place to go to begin battle with the Darkness. (“To begin negotiations” might be more accurate.)
Various species of birds inhabit the Scarborough Bluffs, evolution having brought them to this particular place of endless bickering and squawking. Any scrap of food is the epicentre of a convergence of ungodly screech and ululation. Wings are beaten menacingly, necks ruffled. The only relatively quiet species is the swan. Those elegant creatures maintain their silence, for the same reason the crazed and homicidal do: to keep their victims unsuspecting and unprepared. I mention this because, having driven down the huge hill and left the car in the lot, I stumbled out to the shore and bawled like a baby. Not non-stop. But every minute or so I would emit a long wail of, oh, who knows what the emotion was at that point? The truest thing to say would be that it wasn’t a single emotion, it was quite a few of them stumbling into each other to get out, like drunkards in a doorway.
In the midst of all this, a swan snuck up behind me and bit me on the ass.
I was of course very indignant, but the creature had a point. Get on with it. I started back toward my car. My first resolution: no more cheap wine. I drove back to First Avenue, stopping at the LCBO on the way to buy some Borolos and Amarones.
We held an impromptu wake.
1 Here’s another bit of family lore I just learned from my brother Tony. Apparently, for a while, my grandfather played in a band that supplied entertainment on some sort of pleasure vessel, a huge paddleboat or something, that cruised down the Don River. That’s a lovely bit of family lore, but I’m not going to fact-check it too aggressively, if you see what I mean. If you could see and smell the Don River these days, you would share some of my misgivings. But the story goes that Joe Quarrington played in the band, and also featured on board—her act consisting of “Recitation and Elocution”— was Nora Fleischer, who was to become my grandmother. Tony says he has seen the playbill, even thinks that he possesses a copy of it, but Tony is a pathological collector, and the chances of finding any one thing in his collections is remote.
2 There is also, I’ve since learned, an Irish version of this song (“from the hills of Kerry to the streets of Derry”), a Scottish version, a Swedish version, an Israeli version (“from the Negev Desert to the heights of Golan”), and so forth.
3 That phrase, “pie in the sky,” was coined by Joe Hill in his song “The Preacher and the Slave.” Hill, another honorary godfather of the folkie protest song, was executed for a murder he didn’t commit.
4 Although Guthrie wrote 174 “Woody Sez” columns for The Daily Worker, he was never an actual Communist Party member. I don’t know why I bothered to include that as a footnote; I think it’s just a knee-jerk reaction for a kid of the fifties to note whether an individual was, or had ever been, a member of the Communist Party.
5 Lomax was the son of pioneering musicologist John Lomax, and had travelled widely with his father recording authentic folk music. At the Angola Prison Farm, the Lomaxes encountered a man who was physically intimidating and immensely popular with his fellow inmates for the songs he sang. They recorded hours of this fellow, then sent the warden a request for clemency, including a recording of this fellow’s most popular song, “Good Night, Irene.” Huddie Ledbetter—Leadbelly, as he was better known—was pardoned.
I HAVE ONLY a handful of vivid childhood memories, and here’s one of them: I was on a sleepover at my friend Kenny’s house. I was in the top bunk normally occupied by his brother, because his brother was out somewhere, and we were watching television late at night, because, well, I became a television addict early on in life, and Kenny was more addicted than I. We had managed to pull in an American signal—not always possible in those days of rabbit ears—and were watching The Jack Paar Show. I don’t suppose the show interested us much, for the most part, but it was American and therefore superior to anything the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation might put on the airwaves.
Jack Paar said something about something being a sensation in Britain, and our ears perked up. The television screen filled with the image of four young men, similarly suited. All four men sported “Buster Brown” haircuts, a term I use because that is what I read subsequently, somewhere in the thousands of pages of Beatles-related material I ingested. I associated that particular hairstyle with Moe Howard, the nasty, eye-poking leader of the Three Stooges.
That T V event heralded a trip we all went on back then, one that took us to England, and to India, and to recesses of our minds no doubt better left untouched. Not a lot of that is germane here. The important thing to note is, we all started forming groups.
I don’t suppose I’d be a songwriter today if it hadn’t been for Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Their songs appeared in my life one by one—each wondrous, almost miraculous, each announcing itself boldly as a Lennon/McCartney composition. Lennon/McCartney, as an entity, seemed to be the most creative force ever unleashed upon the face of the earth. Of course, we eventually learned that Lennon/McCartney didn’t really exist, that it was a label of convenience. If John wrote a song, he credited it as Lennon/McCartney. Paul did likewise. I recently heard a rumour that Sir Paul is trying to change the order of the names, to alter the designation legally to McCartney/Lennon. It might seem a bit small-minded, but I say, hey, he’s the living one, he’s survived hellish marriages and kept playing music, so he should get the credit he deserves.
I must admit I don’t have much to say about individual Lennon/McCartney songs. I enjoy “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and often introduce it into impromptu sing-alongs,