Cigar Box Banjo Read online

  The next day—after an inexplicably exhausting journey to the store to purchase some medications (Buckley’s Cough Mixture and lozenges for my croaking throat, a big bottle of Tums for a certain sloshing heaviness I felt about my gut)—I drove out to Chelsea to visit my brother Joel. Also in attendance was Robert Wilson, who is the manager/booking agent for Porkbelly Futures. We barbecued many kinds of meat and drank many bottles of wine, so when I lay down to sleep and found comfort an impossibility, I had no reason for undue concern.

  Now, I know you people out there are observing a certain irritating disregard for reality on my part, an ability for self-deception that would rival a three-year-old’s. For what it’s worth, over breakfast I did instruct Joel to Google many ailments: the aforementioned “vocal cord disorder,” “pneumonia,” “pleurisy,” and, yeah, “lung cancer.” But we ruled out lung cancer because a) I had not been coughing up blood and b) I had not experienced a “sudden and unexplained weight loss.” I drove back to the hotel.

  The following day was the house concert. In case you are unfamiliar with this concept, I was, essentially, going to sing in someone’s living room. The people who were invited paid a small entrance fee, and the money would all be turned over to me. Interestingly, the woman who invited me, Renate Mohr, was someone I had known as a child. Her father, Hans, and my father were colleagues, and every so often their family would visit. Renate’s nickname all those years ago had been Tutti, which is how I addressed her. “Tutti,” I said when I arrived, “this is Carmel.” Yes, I had conscripted one of the sound poets from the Hospitality Suite to drive me, because, as I explained to Tutti, “I think in order to do this I’m going to have to get pretty drunk.” I had a bottle of whisky with me, I had my Buckley’s, and I hoped that the combo would loosen up the vocal cords and give me the requisite energy. It worked out pretty well. I sang some songs, and I read some poetry.

  It occurs to me that I might add one of those poems into these very pages. After all, it has a thematic connection, and it includes a suitably dramatic bit of foreshadowing.

  Crossroad Blues

  When I was 15

  My mother died and I

  Started playing the blues on

  A Zenon guitar and

  Drinking Four Aces wine,

  Which was not really wine.

  Just like Robert Johnson.

  Who made a deal with the Devil

  at the Crossroads.

  Robert Johnson sold his Soul

  To the Devil,

  Which was like selling his shoes

  When he knew he had to walk down

  A road of horseshoe nails.

  I would listen to the records

  And learn the licks with

  Tongue-biting concentration.

  I was pale and chubby and little-dicked.

  I would drink Four Aces,

  Which was not really wine,

  But it was alcohol.

  I would play the guitar,

  Drunk in my bedroom,

  Hiding from my father,

  Who was drunk in the den

  Of our house in Don Mills, Ontario,

  Canada’s first planned community.

  One night the Devil

  Appeared in my bedroom.

  The Devil has some personal hygiene issues

  Which we need not get into.

  The Devil offered me the same deal

  He offered Robert Johnson

  At the Crossroads.

  He said, “I will make you

  The best guitar player ever.

  You will make strong men cry

  And you will make women wilt

  With their desire for you.

  The songs you write will haunt

  Mankind forever.

  It will cost you your Soul.”

  I thought about it.

  “Well . . . what would it cost

  If you just showed me how to play

  An F7?”

  Afterwards, Carmel drove me back downtown; we parked the car and went out for a drink and a bite. I didn’t eat much, despite having not eaten much all day. Indeed, it was perhaps the only time in my life when a female dining companion was given the opportunity to point to the remaining eighth of quesadilla on my plate and say, “Are you gonna eat that? Because . . .” I didn’t eat much, but I drank some. Then we walked out onto the street, sat down on a bench and Carmel— whom, I should mention, is a very attractive young woman— said, “I guess I’ll grab a cab.”

  “You could always spend the night with me at the hotel.”

  Carmel cast her eyes downward. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea. You see—”

  “Okay.” I kissed her and put her in a cab. As I stumbled away into the night, only then was it impressed upon me that, indeed, something was very, very wrong.

  HAVING GIVEN a rasping, panting house concert in Ottawa, having delivered a half-assed pass and then not worried one bit when it was deflected, I drove back to Toronto the next day. I felt reasonably fine, although my hands kept seizing up, the muscles constricting, so I could keep only one on the steering wheel at a time, the other requiring stretching and bending. I was scheduled to go out to dinner with an old flame, and when she called me at home in the middle of the afternoon, I reiterated my intention of supping with her. Roseanne listened to me for a little less than a minute. “Paul,” she said, “stay right there. I’m coming to take you to the hospital.”

  “All right.” I had already considered going to the hospital, you see. I packed a bag, including a night kit and a book. Then I added another book, because I entertained, very vaguely, the idea that I wouldn’t be coming out for a long time.

  The emergency triage nurse put a stethoscope to my back to listen to my breathing. She called over a nearby paramedic. “I can’t find the left lung,” the nurse said. The paramedic announced that she could hear it, albeit very faintly. “Don’t worry,” she told me, “it’s there.” If you want to be hustled over the hurdles in an emergency ward, it’s a good idea to have something very wrong with you. In no time I was sitting on a hospital bed, dressed in the undignified backless Johnny shirt.

  I was wheeled down to X-Ray, where a nice young man rendered an image of my innards, blasting the rays through my back. “Just wait here,” he said, ducking through the door, “until I make sure I have it.” A second later he called, “Paul! What have you done?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . they’re going to want to keep you here, I think.”2 Back in my emergency cubicle, I waited. The woman in the cubicle next door wouldn’t lie on her bed, choosing to curl up on the floor and call out loudly for drugs. After some time, a young physician came in and reported that a lot of fluid had accumulated around my lungs. “We’ll try to get rid of some of it,” he said, “so you’ll be more comfortable. Then we’ll try to figure out why it’s there.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t want to alarm people, I suppose, and at that moment, I couldn’t really think of anyone to alarm. My most recent romantic relationship had busted up. I had an ex-wife, one adult daughter (the other still a teen), friends I figured would come to my aid. But, hell, it was probably just pneumonia, exacerbated by my severe tulip allergy.

  When a new doctor, Dr. Tran, came in, he informed me that there were many reasons I might have fluid around my lungs, the most common two being infection and cancer. “Infection is eight times more common than cancer,” he said. He left, then returned a short while later with a tray full of equipment, vials and litre bottles and lengths of tubing and assorted needles. He and an aide made me sit up on my wheelie hospital bed. They placed a table beside it so that I could drape my arms across it and lean forward. Dr. Tran tapped and thumped my back with his thick fingers, marked a spot with a pirate’s X for freezing. “Little sting like a bee,” he said as the needle carrying the anaesthetic pierced the skin. He didn’t say anything before he drove the two-inch draining needle into my back. He di
dn’t say, for example, “Now it will feel like a rabid wolverine ripping through your flesh to suck out the life-juice.” A warm sensation spread across my back as fluid o’er-spilled the puncture. Dr. Tran showed me a test tube full of light brown fluid. “It looks like this.” He angled the needle again and pushed it hard. Before long he had collected three litres of the stuff, which looked suspiciously like beer. English bitter, of which I have had my share, and for a second I thought that perhaps at some point, in my haste, I had dumped a few pints down the wrong hole.

  As painful as the ordeal was, every second it went on I felt lighter, better. They left the bottles of fluid beside me for most of the evening, and I spent the night in the emergency ward. They asked if I wanted painkillers; although my back was sore, I felt right enough. They asked if I wanted something to help me sleep, but I thought I’d be able to manage it drug-free. I was exhausted, spent. I still couldn’t think of anyone to contact. I text-messaged a woman I’d known, briefly, the previous autumn. “I’m in the hospital.”

  “Yikes! What’s wrong?”

  “If I’m lucky,” I punched out with my thumbs, “it’s pneumonia.”

  I WAS discharged from the hospital, having had, as I say, more than three litres of fluid removed from the cavity surrounding my left lung. What I’d experienced was, to give it an impressive scientific name, a “massive pleural effusion.” The high honcho doctor, head of Respirology, had come into my hospital room to tell me it was “obviously very serious,” but he said it would take them a few days to figure out why, exactly, the fluid had accumulated. So home I went, supplied with some killer antibiotics, and in a few days I was feeling pretty good. Indeed, when my friend Shaughnessy called, checking up on me, I said, “You know what, Shaughn, I’m half-inclined to believe in God. Because, face it, I was kind of at a low point. I mean, there’s no work . . .” (the Canadian television and movie industry, which is where I’d long made my pin money, was moribund, with nothing being produced) “. . . my career as a novelist isn’t going anywhere . . .” (The Ravine, my last book, had been long-listed for the Giller Prize, but pretty much ignored after that) “ . . . my personal life is a mess . . .” (which was, of course, more my fault than anybody else’s) “. . . so maybe this health scare is God’s way of saying, ‘Hey, fat-boy, you should appreciate what you’ve got.’”

  And that was the attitude with which I, accompanied by Martin Worthy, my dear friend and a founding member of the musical group Porkbelly Futures, went to attend my consultation with Dr. Frazier on May 11, 2009.

  “How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.

  “I feel terrific,” I said.

  “Great, just great.” Dr. Frazier picked up a file. “Well, we’ve got some answers for you. It’s cancer. It’s lung cancer—”

  (“Hold on, hold on!” I wanted to shout. “Didn’t you just hear me tell you I felt terrific?”)

  “It’s the non-small cell type of cancer. You have what we call a ‘sessile’ tumour. It’s not what we’d call an operable cancer it’s a you’re a and think in terms of months andjkghghjgkkljhjkghjkghghjghjlshgjhkasjhkjashdjkn . . .”

  SO—WHERE DO we go from here? Well, like I said, I had just finished a little memoir about my life in music. That word, “memoir,” suddenly acquired holy heft. The phrase “months to live” fires up all sorts of engines, most of them a little selfish (I’ve got to get laid a lot, I have to eat a forty-dollar Kobe beef hamburger), some of them a little more lofty. Namely, I wanted to write some of this down. So, I had this memoir, and my Publisher had asked for a rewrite, and he really liked the personal stuff, hmmm . . .

  “I’ll need a couple of months with that second draft,” I told the Publisher. “I’m just going to add a new thematic concern.”

  “Umm . . . sure.”

  If I do my job well, this won’t be quite the motley pastiche you might imagine. I’ve become very interested in the process of songwriting. Writing songs is a way to interact with the world, to take it in as experience (employment, job dismissals, hopeful first dates, clumsy hand-jobs, bad whisky, rejected marriage proposals, accepted marriage proposals, bad love, true love, long road trips, and pronouncements of fatal disease) and spit it out in three- to four-minute units of airborne beauty and grace. And at this point in my life—way closer to the end than I thought I’d be at the age of fifty-six—music has acquired more importance than it ever had.

  When I was a small child, my favourite recording was something called “The Cigar Box Banjo.” I summarized the story in The Ravine, but assuming you haven’t read that novel—a reasonable assumption—I’m going to do so again here.

  A boy makes a banjo out of a cigar box. (How, exactly, I didn’t know at the time, and I won’t detail here. These days, there are blueprints and schematics aplenty available at the click of a key. But it was a long-standing source of frustration for me as a kid that much of what excited me in the realm of fiction was impossible to duplicate in real life. I did get my hands on a cigar box, away back when, but that only made things worse, since I couldn’t see how to attach a neck or strings.)

  Anyway: this boy hears of a contest, a banjo-playing contest, taking place in the next town, some ten miles away. Despite the fact that the kid has nothing like a show piece, he decides he will go compete. So (without informing his parents, I remember, simply heading off) he begins to walk the dusty road. As he goes along, the lad hears things—a bluebird’s song, for instance, the whine of truck tires, the lowing of a cow— and he imitates these things on his cigar box banjo, layering one upon another. By the time he reaches the contest site, he has an entire song. He plays this, and he wins.3

  I loved that story, and I think it stands as a reasonable template for the creative process.4 As songwriters and novelists and musicians travel through their lives, they collect little themes and motifs and whistles and airs, and they string them together to fashion their wares. This book follows my travels down the musical road, and I intend to commence that forthwith.

  1 I actually have nothing more to say about Mr. Lanois at this moment. I just wanted to introduce the notion of footnotes, and I thought his name afforded a good opportunity to get people to glance downwards. Thank you.

  2 I learned later the technician was reacting to the fact that when he checked the X-ray, there was only a huge white cloud where the left lung should have appeared.

  3 Ira Gershwin wrote in his diary: “Heard in a day: An elevator’s purr, telephone’s ring, telephone’s buzz, a baby’s moans, a shout of delight, a screech from a ‘flat wheel,’ hoarse honks, a hoarse voice, a tinkle, a match scratch on sandpaper, a deep resounding boom of dynamiting in the impending subway, iron hooks on the gutter.”

  4 I have one small quibble with the recording: the prize is a brand-new, store-bought banjo, which the kid happily accepts. I pictured him tossing away his jerry-rigged trash with disdain. This has always struck me as a poor choice, story-wise. It would have been much better if the kid had danced with the one that brought him, if you see what I mean—if he’d politely declined the grand prize.

  CHAPTER 1

  ON MY father’s side of the family, everyone is either a teacher or a musician, except for those hopelessly indecisive sorts—my cousin Doug is an example—who have opted to become music teachers. My great-uncles, my grandfather’s brothers, were all musicians, and that included Rance Quarrington, who was apparently a star of the radio waves, the possessor of wondrously mellow windpipes. (My brother Anthony B. Quarrington—Tony— claims that Rance starred in a movie entitled The Man from Toronto, but I have no evidence to support that. No evidence suggesting he didn’t star in such a film, mind you.)

  My grandfather himself had a long succession of careers. He was a travelling salesman for a while, back in the days when that vocation was conducted mostly by rail. He accumulated years and years of bumpy seat-time, and during this period he learned to walk a coin across his knuckles. As a child, I was greatly impressed with this little piece of legerde
main, constantly inveighing the elderly Jewish fellow who was my grandfather to walk a nickel or a quarter back and forth atop his fist. (No, I’m not Jewish, but I’m pretty sure my grandfather was. If you saw a photograph of Joe Quarrington, you would be convinced.) He was also a photographer, and set up shop as a portraitist. This was in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and those times being what they were—every bit as strange as these times—my grandfather attracted many customers who were interested in having their Kirlian auras captured on film. “Please take my portrait,” they would say, “but not before I meditate for a few minutes.” I imagine these people concentrating so hard that their faces coloured and steam shot out of their nostrils, but when my grandfather emerged later from the darkroom, there was never any evidence of Kirlian auras. I like to believe it was because he could not abide their disappointment that my grandfather took to dusting cornstarch onto the negatives before slipping them into the chemical bath. The resulting image showed the subject surrounded by a halo of feathery cloud, the air pregnant with luminous parhelions. Business picked up quite a bit.

  I write of these things—the coin-knuckle thimbleriggery and the photographic flummery—because they both, to me, indicate personality traits common to musicians. Let’s say, the willingness to invest thousands of hours toward a small, inconsequential end and the desire to please people. And indeed my grandfather could play many instruments and was a violinist in the no longer extant Ottawa Symphony.1

  Tony, who is my older brother, acquired a banjo when we were kids. There was a folk revival going on, the movement that would spawn Bob Dylan. So Tony got a banjo, and the elderly Jewish fellow showed him how to play some chords. It was in this manner that live music entered our household. There were, to be sure, instruments in the house prior to this. An old, hulking piano resided in the basement. An African drum was spotted here and there, a small, exotic animal looking for a place to get comfortable. And there was an ocarina, too; my father would periodically pop the mouthpiece between his lips and wheeze out the theme from The Third Man.