Beautiful Scars

by Tom Wilson

  The gig went so well that the owner asked me back the next month. I took the offer and made nine hundred dollars. Back then, you could strike a deal to grab a percentage of the bar sales, and as long as the owner was honest (which he never was), you could walk away with a nice bonus. The next time in it was twelve hundred. I felt like a slut, but I liked the money and I got to play my songs, put on a show and get the stage time that I desperately needed. I knew I was doing the right thing but in the wrong place. I smoked a lot of dope back then and drank Brador malt liquor because it had a 6.2 percent alcohol content rather than the 5.0 in most other Canadian beers. The waitresses were pretty cute at the Pizza Patio too. They all wore these little off-the-shoulder kind of French-maid, kind of peasant outfits. Uniforms. It was an uncool gig to be sure, but the dope and the beer and the waitresses were all that counted for the time being.

  I met a taxi driver who worked for the Veterans Taxi company. She picked me up at the Corktown bar one night and on the way home up the mountain we diverted the cab to an empty lot at the bottom of the Claremont access and we screwed in the back seat. She was thirty-three and I was seventeen, a perfect match. We started seeing each other most nights after the bars closed down. After her rush hour. She was the first person I’d met who knew who Bukowski was. That was a big deal for me at the time. No one at Sherwood Secondary read the same books I did. She also dressed like a man. Not like a hippie man, in jeans and T-shirts, but in button-up shirts with collars, black dress pants and police boots. And she drove a cab after dark all over Hamilton in the 1970s. The woman meant business. We never went to her house or apartment. We just parked the taxi along the edge of the mountain brow or down by the old TH&B railway yard or over at the Hamilton Brick Company by Gage Park and did our thing.

  After a while she started asking if I had any friends who would like to join in with us. I said “What?” I told her no, I didn’t have any friends. None. But I was intrigued. I thought that kind of thing only happened in skin flicks like the ones Sheldon Gunters’s father kept in his basement wardrobe that Sheldon used to thread through his family’s Super 8 projector. Blurry, faded, over-seen stag films for all us guys in high school to watch.

  She showed up at the Pizza Patio early one night before I did my first set. She told me she was having a late-night party out at her house in Hagersville. She told me to bring some friends. I took her address and did my gig and asked this guy Ross Price if he wanted to go because I didn’t drive and Ross did and he had a new Ford Mustang, so we’d be riding in style all the way down Highway 6. Ross hung around my shows eating pizza and drinking ginger ale. I’d see him out there. He was a fan. He should have been my first clue that my career was going nowhere.

  Ross was a nice guy but he was even more uncool than I was. He wore double-knit pants and golf shirts with pens stuck in the pockets pulling the fabric out of shape. And often had on his head a big, fluffy toque. Like a girl’s toque. I think he thought it was hip. I think he thought he looked like KC and the Sunshine Band or Sly Stone. But he didn’t. Oh, and thick glasses. Of course he wore thick glasses. He used to get mugged all the time, robbed walking out of bars all over Hamilton. Poor guy. But he was a decent fella and I liked him.

  He jumped at the chance to go to a party. I hooked him up with a Pizza Patio waitress and I asked one to come along as my date as well. So we all piled into his Ford Mustang. It had two leather bucket seats in the front and a back seat not worth mentioning. Ross got behind the wheel, and I put my date on my lap in the front passenger seat and Ross’s date got stuffed sideways into the back. We roared up the mountain along Upper James, past Highway 53 and into the darkness of Highway 6.

  The waitress on my lap was curvy. Sensuous. I put my nose in her hair. She smelled great. I was thinking about how quickly I could work my way through the party with her to find an empty room. One challenge would be my taxi driver. I sure didn’t want her to get jealous or mad at me, and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings either. The other challenge was that I was fairly polite and I felt obligated to hang around and meet people, to be gentlemanly to the other partygoers.

  Ross pulled the car into a long driveway that led up to an old farmhouse. Some vibey music was shaking its windows, and as I got out of the car, I could hear chatter coming from inside the house. My waitress pushed me up against the side of the Mustang and started kissing me. We walked in the front door and into a crowd of older people standing around, lining the room. Ross still had his toque on, blowing our cover, so I separated myself from him for the time being.

  I led my date through the crowded house into the kitchen and poured her a big glass of booze. I told her I didn’t know whose house we were at, and I figured I’d act surprised if the hostess approached us. I had two dates in one house at one party. I’d never done anything like this before. Later in life, women would be my downfall. Actually, too many women at one time would be my downfall. I saw hope and beauty in all of them. They proved that I was in the land of the living. On the planet. But as my neighbour Mrs. Cannon used to say, “I can’t tell the players without a program.” This first time, though, I was just more proud than anything else.

  My date was secured in the kitchen with half a dirty glass of pure booze. I excused myself and probably said something stupid to her like, “Don’t go away now.” I headed down the hallway to find the toilet, got in, closed and locked the door, started to pee, reached in my coat pocket, pulled out a joint, lit it up and settled into the moment. High. I fell into a dream and came out of it with piss all over my shoes, my stage shoes, which were Converse All-Stars. Canvas, so the pee was already soaked into my socks. It’s hard to be a Romeo with piss-soaked feet but I figured I’d give it a try.

  I flew out of the bathroom and wandered down the hallway, following the music in the darkness. I thought I was heading back to the kitchen, where I had left my date, but instead I was walking back towards the bedroom. Fleetwood Mac was playing at mid-volume. The door was slightly ajar and I pushed it open. The room was bathed in red light and full of people. Some shirtless, some standing in their underwear, all drinking and smoking, some giggling uncomfortably and others just taking pulls of their beers and staring straight ahead intently.

  As I rounded the corner I saw the bed, and on the bed was this famous local artist I knew from around town, naked, with his head down between a woman’s legs. As I got closer I could see the woman was none other than my taxi driver. The crowd around the bed were eager and excited. Another guy stripped off his underwear and stepped onto the bed, then a couple got brave and joined in. Pretty soon half the room was giving each other some kind of sex.

  I kept my eye on the bed scene and felt my way along the wall and stopped. I looked away from the bed to get my bearings, and across the room, in the clothes closet, was Ross Price. I saw his groovy toque first, then his glasses. He was in there alone, eating a bowl of popcorn he’d picked up in the living room, laughing and watching the party-goers get it on.

  Fucking Ross. I liked him even more in that moment. He was actually cooler than anyone else at that party. “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” I said from across the room, and he put the giant bowl of popcorn down and we headed for the door. We walked outside, I took the roach from my pocket and lit it up and we both started laughing. Laughing like we’d been in on some secret we weren’t supposed to be in on. Laughing like you laugh at a teacher who has a weirdly shaped head or food in his beard.

  We thought our dates would be long gone, but as we approached Ross’s car we were surprised to see them, fast asleep in the front seats of the Mustang. We resumed our positions, quiet and passionless, and headed back down the mountain.

  LIES

  HUNGER

  I never wanted to do anything else. I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show when I was four, and yeah, I know you’ve heard that old tale before, but I was four years old and these guys were slick and had great hair and I liked their songs right away and girls were going crazy. I grabbed
a broom out of the kitchen, stood in front of the TV set and joined the Beatles.

  I grew up in a place where I was encouraged to do nothing—to stay put, stand still, not move, lie low. Nothing was expected of me out there in the world. It was the sixties. Kids still wanted to be cowboys. Men were going into space. Kids wanted to be astronauts. The Leafs won cups. Kids wanted to be George Armstrong and Terry Sawchuk. Not me. All I ever wanted to do was to write songs, play guitar and sing. That was it. That simple.

  I entered adulthood unsure of who I was, where I belonged or where I came from, so I made up my story as I went along, and in that, music was my answer to everything. Rather than having the world tell me who I was, on stage, through my songs, I could tell the world. I was free there. No teachers to tell me how to do it. No cops to tell me not to. Just my own wits and guts to lead me. The path forward wasn’t always an easy or straight one, but I was willing to do anything to find my way.

  THE HAMILTON PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL

  The Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, or HPH as we all referred to it, was set at the top of west Hamilton Mountain on a lush green lawn surrounded by trees at one end and a sheer drop into the belly of the city over dragon limestone at the other. The hospital was perfectly situated for any poor under-medicated lost soul to stroll across the grounds, climb over a three-foot stone wall and jump off into a bloody, broken eternity.

  I knew a bunch of guys who ended up in the hospital. They smoked too much dope and halfway through high school started to lose it. By the time they were of graduation age, they showed signs of high anxiety, manic behaviour and schizophrenia. My friend Harry made it through high school, but soon after that he climbed out of his parents’ pool, went to his father’s bedroom, grabbed the gun from the top drawer, walked out the front door onto Rendell Boulevard and turned left on Mountain Brow Boulevard. He went barefoot and still soaking wet down Concession Street and into the Royal Bank with the pistol shoved in his Speedo. He pulled it out, pointed it at a teller’s head and ordered her to give him all the cash, which she did. Harry then jumped through a glass door and rolled onto the sidewalk. Cut and dizzy from his bank escape, he went up Mountain Park Avenue, over the jagged three-foot stone wall and leapt off the side of the escarpment into limestone, tree stumps and, luckily, mud. Still, he broke both ankles.

  When the cops showed up at the Royal Bank, all the tellers had to do was point at the broken glass door and up to the brow, where the entire bank staff had watched Harry disappear over the edge. Harry entered the Barton Street jail, where he did the better part of a year before anyone noticed just how crazy he was and arrangements were made to have him carted back up the mountain to finish his time behind lock and key and lost inside a bottle of anti-psychotic medication at the HPH.

  I ran into Harry and a couple more familiar faces when I took a little gig playing guitar and singing songs for twenty-five dollars every Wednesday to the droopy medicated eyelids of the criminally insane who were locked up for life in the HPH. The gig came my way via Bill Powell, who owned a three-storey house on Augusta Street, the first floor of which contained the Canvas Gallery with the Knight II Coffee House located on the second. The house was also home to Bill, his wife, Lynne, and their kids, Kim and Stefan. A palace of cable-knit sweaters and Earl Grey tea, it was also the headquarters for Festival of Friends, which happened every year down in the moneyed centre of the city on the wide green lawns of Gage Park.

  Bill was always full of ideas, usually bad ideas that involved desperate young guys with acoustic guitars who would do anything to play in front of an audience. Besides running his giant festival, he also had handfuls of crappy gigs, from the African Lion Safari’s food patio to the opening of a Burger King restaurant to a ridiculous wandering minstrel show in the basement of the old Eaton’s department store.

  I took them all, every single one of them. I even drove all the way to Pittsburgh to play at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in a tent full of deep fryers and drunk clowns making lame balloon animals for kids who’d been towed down to the city’s cultural centre by their half-witted parents. For three days, I walked around the tent with my guitar playing for people who obviously hated me. The deep fryers, the barbecues and the August sun beating down on the tent got to me and I almost passed out hourly. The extreme heat didn’t seem to affect the drunken clowns, but I guess I was just a little more delicate back then.

  I wasn’t the only one to take Bill’s bait. Future members of the Shakers, Dave DesRoches and Rick Andrew, and Fred Eaglesmith took it too. Today Fred is as wily and gnarly and successful as any independent businessman strumming a guitar can be in this country. But back in the late seventies Fred was just another guy who needed twenty-five bucks, and for some reason getting locked behind barbed wire fences and steel doors to go deep inside the hallways of the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital didn’t seem to bother us. The gig may have scared off many less-driven, soft-handed folkies for life, but not me and Fred, and Bill knew it.

  Getting thrown into a locked-down ward full of volatile madmen and madwomen was one of those things I didn’t notice myself doing until way after the fact. I took my cues from Bill Powell, who believed in me, but he was half-carney and half-artist himself. He wanted to sell my act under the banner “Indian Tom,” with one, only one feather sticking out of the back of my head. He had faith in music and culture and knew both were desperately needed in Hamilton. Folk music, independent art galleries. Long before Toronto turned its eyes towards us and decades before hipsters coined phrases like “art is the new steel,” Bill was the guy who took chances when no one else would. But I took a look around town and saw there was nothing happening for me to latch on to, and nothing that wanted to latch on to me. I’d heard someone say once that you’re not always born where you’re supposed to be. I thought maybe that was my cosmic problem. I had to get out. George Thorogood put a song of mine on hold for his new album and my friend Bruce Cameron was living in Hollywood, so I saw an opportunity and went off to take on the world.

  L. A.

  Johnny Lee’s “Looking for Love” was playing up and down Hollywood Boulevard day and night through every speaker, in front of every storefront and from the transistor radios and boom boxes held by lost souls wandering through time and space in L.A. The song was my soundtrack to failure.

  Every morning I walked up Orchid Avenue and turned the corner towards the Howard Johnson’s for breakfast. Breakfast was mostly coffee and toast and peanut butter. It wasn’t that I couldn’t make that at home. It was just that I needed to get out of the apartment to feel alive, and there’s nothing that makes you feel more alive than being surrounded by death. I flew to L.A. in 1979 to give myself a bit of a change in scenery. I was reading Bukowski and listening to Tom Waits, and I knew Jim Morrison’s ghost was somewhere around here too, probably roaming the parking lots with Bobby Fuller and Sal Mineo and maybe Gram Parsons. The place stank of people dying to be stars, and of others dying as stars. It was crazy town, a neon morgue. Disney-style tourist traps hadn’t swooped in yet to clean up and take out the dead, so the stains were still on the bedsheets.

  I was staying on Bruce’s couch in the living room of his apartment on the corner of Orchid and Franklin, a block from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Hollywood’s famous Magic Castle (the most unusual private club in the world) was in one direction, and the wilderness beyond the red carpets in the other. The world of people who didn’t quite make it.

  I’ve often said I was in L.A. for months, but the fact of the matter is I went there to make a life and lasted about six weeks. I just couldn’t crack it. I felt frozen stiff, as though the world was racing ahead of me and I couldn’t get its attention. I remembered feeling this way when I was small and Bunny and George would shut down the house at five o’clock and go to bed. The world outside was alive, but I was dead, lying in bed like a prisoner as the summer sun went down. L.A. seemed to nail me to the floor in the same way.

  The weeks went by and the money ran out unti
l I was living off chilli dogs and playing my guitar for change in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I was earning enough to get by, but not enough to get out of there. At night, I’d drink wine and watch the low-riders show off, see drug deals and fights played out under giant billboards of Olivia Newton-John and Xanadu. I’d end up back at the apartment wishing I could fly off the couch and through the ceiling, over the mountains and into the deep blue, straight north to Ontario and home to Hamilton.

  The only music connection I had in town was a singer I knew from Canada named Bill Hughes. I had opened some shows for him at the Knight II Coffee House, and he was a vague but approachable way in. Bill was a gifted songwriter and high-tech acoustic guitar player. He was also the writer of a catchy Life Savers TV commercial jingle that sat on the tip of North Americans’ tongues in the mid-seventies.

  Bill had been in a band, Lazarus, who were signed to Bearsville Records and had lived in ultra-hippie Woodstock in the late sixties and early seventies. Rumour was they’d come up to Canada to do some gigs and stayed to avoid the Vietnam draft. They were managed by Albert Grossman, who also managed Bob Dylan, the Band and Janis Joplin, to name a few. I imagine the royalties for the Life Savers ad went into Grossman’s pocket and up the Band’s nose because Bill was not living the high life when I met him. Oh sure, Lazarus had a star quality that most coffee house performers in Canada lacked, but they were still hacking it out with the rest and the best of them.

  I called Bill up and he was really cool. He’d been signed to Epic Records and was making a record for them, and he had a manager in L.A. He invited me out to play a few songs at a gig he had in a club on the Redondo Beach pier. He even got his manager to pick us up on Orchid Avenue. We all drove down to the gig in his manager’s BMW, Bill and his manager lying back in the front seat lighting up joints and passing them back to me and Bruce.