Beautiful Scars

by Tom Wilson

  Turns out Bill was playing in a cocktail bar with a tiny stage. He looked and sounded great up there, glasses tinkling and smoke everywhere. Bruce and I got up and played a few songs, but we sucked.

  The best part of the night was the amount of hash Bill’s manager had on him. Big cubes of the stuff, about half an ounce each. We all went out between sets to smoke under the pier, and during one of those breaks I asked him what a cube of his hash went for. I don’t remember what he told me, but he did ask me if I’d be interested in selling some for him down in Hollywood. I had no money of course, but I convinced him to front me two of the cubes, promising I’d have the money back to him in a week. I told him I’d been playing for change on the boulevard and had got to know my clientele. Amazingly he said yes. Bam—I was in business.

  I went from a hack with an old Yamaha guitar banging out Merle Haggard songs to an official Hollywood Boulevard drug dealer. I knew I had to stay cool though. I had to remain the pimple-faced kid out there busking for change if I wanted to blend in and keep out of the way of the other dealers.

  I went back to the apartment and cut the hash up into ten-dollar quantities. I vowed I’d only work the trade during the daytime, high tourist flow. My little plan worked, and within the week I had the money back to Bill’s manager and was picking up four more cubes to take back and sell. Within three weeks I saved enough money to buy an airline ticket home.

  I landed at LAX unprepared, and I flew out of there a little more knowledgeable and a free man. I left my first love, folk, so that I could find an audience for my music. I stopped wearing my idols on my sleeve. I still loved Willie P. Bennett, Stan Rogers, Paul Langille and David Wiffen, but I traded them in for a Gretsch Nashville and a Fender amp. I kept writing folk music, but now it was loud. It got me an audience that was turned on and excited about music, and as a result I was excited about music again.

  INSPIRATION

  By the time I got home from L.A., it felt like everything had changed. Two months had gone by in Hollywood, but it seemed like years had passed back home. Dave DesRoches and Rick Andrew had been opening shows for Teenage Head in the late seventies, and while I was away selling hash and eating chilli dogs on Hollywood Boulevard, they were busy writing amazing songs and putting together the Shakers, a band that would flatten all bands that got in their way.

  Dave DesRoches became Dave Rave, and as the Shakers, he and Rick Andrew hit their stride, and fast. They had lots of stage time as an acoustic duo, but coffee houses didn’t know what to make of them. They played songs like “Poison Ivy” by the Coasters and “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues” by Arthur Alexander, and their original songs didn’t have any obvious reminders of Dylan, Cohen or Joni Mitchell. The folkies hated them, just as they hated Fred Eaglesmith and me. It’s no wonder Dave and Rick went in front of punk and rock-and-roll audiences, who were more open-minded and confident about their music tastes.

  Dave’s cousin Claude was recruited to play drums, and Tim Gibbons to play guitar. Tim’s parents had come to Hamilton from Newfoundland, met each other at an East Coaster social and settled about seven blocks from Bunny and George’s place. Big Bill Gibbons’s roots were country music and the whole family loved it. They once went to see Hank Snow at the Hamilton Forum and the public address system broke down. “No mics, no speakers,” said Bill Gibbons, “but you could hear Hank Snow clear as a bell.” Tim had great taste and genius instincts about what to preach on and what to leave behind. I filled napkins in diners with things he said that I later put into songs, and he didn’t think twice about the great one-line poems he shot across the table while devouring bacon and eggs. Dave Rave and Tim Gibbons were dreamers, and their music made every fibre of my being come alive.

  THE FLORIDA RAZORS

  We were all just kids, but my band the Florida Razors may have been just a bit older than the rest of the pack. I was the proper age to be in the knuckle-headed trenches of 1981, but the rest of the band flew in from different planets and time warps.

  Carl Keesee was a bass player from Oklahoma. An American who came to Canada for a gig and never went home, he was like an exotic desert creature you’d find on the side of the road. There was no one like him around town, and no one who could play the bass as well as him. He was in Lazarus with Bill Hughes, so had the Life Savers success as well. I met Jason Avery at the Knight II Coffee House. He was a folkie guy who loved country music and the French gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt—which was not on the listening list for most punk bands around town. He played every note loud and with unexpected phrasings. His guitar solos made our audiences dance like they were auditioning for parts in a shaky pre-war cartoon. Greg Cannon was from the East Mountain. He was a total rounder and looked like an ex–speed freak, but his claim to fame was having played in a popular local band called Buxton Castle. He wore that era head to toe: handlebar moustache, long dirty-blond hair, bell bottoms, and platform shoes that he’d strut around in to give himself extra height. He hit his drums like they were running away on him. He was a monster.

  We were from Hamilton: we were nuts and our options were limited, so we played rock and roll because it was all we had and it was all that made sense to us. I think all those young fellas like the Tragically Hip who came to see us sensed we meant business and that’s what they loved about us. They sensed guts. They felt the fear and excitement of Hamilton. There was a danger in what was coming out of Steeltown.

  Teenage Head marched into Toronto and made off with the whole scene for the same reason. While most Toronto punk bands were posing with guitars and safety pins through their noses, Teenage Head was in the basement practising, getting it right so that when Gord Lewis turned up his Marshall amp, the sound that came out was like nothing else north of Johnny Ramone.

  I had no idea what we were doing. I just wanted to play in a band that could play fast and loud and without apologies. We strayed off the beaten path and brought our frantic rock and roll to the draft room, Legion Hall and tobacco-country hotel circuit of Highway 6. It was tough down there, and if you didn’t want to get a screwdriver in your ear or a fist up your arse, you’d better think fast and play faster. So we did.

  We rode the 401 from Detroit to Montreal playing every hole and Queen’s Hotel we could find. We hit town in those days with the intent to survive, and I had a “to-do list” of mental and physical chores that had to be executed to keep us in tip-top shape and keep the wheels on the road financially. Because we played six nights a week in the same spot, and played three or four shows a night, we lived upstairs above the bar. We felt right at home to run up a mighty bar tab, stole food from the kitchen after hours to cook on a hotplate we carried with us, sold weed and speed to the patrons under the nose of the local dealers, partied with the locals after hours, screwed the waitresses, got in fist fights with owners, waited for the cash—no cheques ever—and on Saturday night, we got the hell out of there.

  You do stupid things, when you’re hungry.

  THE HONEYED CENTRE

  Looking back, it seems impossible that we were ever that young. I was twenty-four, she was twenty-three. We seemed so old at the time.

  I was with the Florida Razors in Kingston for a week after doing shows in Detroit, London and Trenton, Ontario. The gig in Trenton had been a low point. We played at the Sherwood Forest Inn for six demoralizing nights, going on between stripper shows during the day, and at night performing three forty-five-minute sets. The place was so bad that all the strippers quit except for one, and I ended up sleeping with her. She looked like Liza Minnelli from Cabaret. Well, not quite.

  Sandy was waitressing at the Prince George Hotel in Kingston, and was wearing what I would later refer to as her Barbarella dress—it was black and tight and had two holes cut into the sides revealing wide-open flesh. Sandy slid over to the table I was sitting at between sets. I think she thought I was some kind of badass, which was not at all true. I felt more like the Johnny Cash line, “Made up of bad parts, but trying to do good.”

&
nbsp; Something like that.

  We made an impression on one another, and a couple of nights later I watched her serving tables through a window from the bar next door as the radio played Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” and Madonna’s “Borderline.” Two songs I still can’t hear without thinking immediately of the moment and that crazy dress.

  Somehow we ended up sitting on the couch in Sandy’s rooming house, smoking dope and laughing until the world turned blue. I wore an old trench coat that was too flimsy for the early winter freeze blowing off Lake Ontario. We went to breakfast at Morrison’s Restaurant down on King Street. I sang Pablo Cruise songs into the sausage I had impaled on my fork. I looked across the table at her, and her eyes were laughing. I knew I had done something, something I couldn’t take back.

  It was November 30, 1983, and three years later to the day, Madeline would be born. That’s some strange, beautiful magic.

  Sandy and I had a romance on the streets of Kingston. It was a milk-faced little place where you couldn’t go wrong if you came from money, had money or knew how to make it. The streets were packed with the privileged. The future bankers, politicians and engineers of Canada. All scrubbed clean and sent off to Queen’s University. Sandy and I ran with the bikers and bartenders and waitresses and the invisible working dead that populated the nightlife of the town. We fell out of bars wrapped up in threadbare second-hand-store three-quarter-length coats, army boots, black eyes and hearts beating like Salvation Army marching drums. Dive bars, public houses, professor hangouts, the grad club, the Prince George Hotel, the Pilot House and the Old Royal Tavern—the haunts of that old piss tank and Indian killer Sir John A. Macdonald.

  Sandy had it all. A cutting sense of humour, hair-trigger temper, raven-black hair, an intellect that stumped me most of the time. Our priorities were different but our passion was on even ground. Sandy brought out the poet in me. She was the queen of the slipstream, a force strong enough to pull me along behind her, almost.

  When Sandy told me she was pregnant, I was still playing music, travelling from gig to gig. I was still making Hamilton my home. I was still in a permanent state of coming down and getting high and coming down. I would get up in the middle of the night and drive the 401 to Kingston, arriving by sunrise and parking outside Sandy’s apartment. Sometimes she never knew I was there. I was lost.

  A wild man was raging inside me. I overdosed, drove drunk, got in fights and took chances with my own life. I was punishing my baby with a fatherless existence before she was even born. I was trying to throw myself in the garbage, where I felt I belonged.

  It would take Sandy years to teach me how to connect myself to the people who loved me. She stood by, she stayed strong, even though I rocked her ship with waves of stupidity. She was about to give birth and was living without a permanent home, surviving off the loving kindness of friends and strangers.

  Madeline was born on November 30, 1986. I was on stage banging out shitty rock and roll at Call the Office in London, Ontario, when the bartender yelled through the crowd, “Hey, Tom! You’re a dad!”

  I was stunned. All the blood ran from my head and I just froze there on stage with my band. I held on to my old orange Gretsch and stared straight ahead into the smoky nothingness of the London barroom full of punters and hangers-on. I felt like the ten-year-old James Ellroy in the photo the L.A. Times took seconds after the LAPD told him his mother had been killed. I was in shock. Totally alone.

  It took me twenty-four hours to make the six-hour drive to Kingston. I can’t explain where that time went, why it took me so long to get to Sandy and our daughter. I can tell you, because years later Madeline would tell me in a way I had to hear, that every five minutes for those twenty-four hours Sandy would ask if I was there yet. When I finally did arrive and saw Madeline for the first time, I knew she was the best thing that had happened in my life. I didn’t know how I would come through for her, but I knew sooner or later I would figure it out.

  As it turned out, it was later.

  It took me several months to raise enough money to feel safe bringing Sandy and Madeline to Hamilton so we could start our life together. I had a little operation going at Moondog’s Record Bar on the third floor of the Gown & Gavel in Hess Village. I stayed open after hours serving bagels and coffee to the drunks, while selling drugs and skimming money off the till. The cops caught on to my dealings before the owners. On a quiet Sunday night they sent a plainclothes officer into Moondog’s. The guy was a good actor. He played the only drunk in the room, and I was keeping my eye on him when he rolled up to the bar, leaned in to me real close and told me that I should stay away from the Gown next Saturday night. “We’re coming to close ya down,” he said, then staggered away to the door and down the stairs.

  I took heed and stayed away, and sure enough the place got raided. I had pulled anything suspicious out of there, so I remained clean except for a possible file on my comings and goings and ties to local coke dealers and a few spotty characters in the neighbourhood.

  Madeline. My saviour. She and I were deep in each other’s hearts even when we were three hundred miles apart. Sandy and I would split up for months at a time because we’d get in a fight, then a bigger fight and then one bigger than that, and I’d load up the van and go back to Hamilton, where I’d ache for Madeline.

  Once, after one of those separations, I came back to Kingston to take another crack at making it work with Sandy. We’d agreed to meet on Princess Street. I was waiting at the corner by our friend Ann Marie Rousseau’s Chinese Laundry Café. I could see them coming up the street from about a half a block away. Sandy rolled up to me with Madeline in the stroller. I looked at Sandy and then down at Madeline. As she looked up at me the late morning sun got in her eyes. She was squinting, trying to make out who was towering over her. She put her hand up over her eyes and saw it was me. Now I couldn’t tell if she was smiling or still squinting. She held a few fingers in the air as if to say, “Just a minute.” Then she spun around in her stroller and went digging through her blanket and the padding in the seat. A few seconds later she came up with a bagel in her hand. She reached out her arm to offer it to me, and stared up into my eyes like, “Here ya go, friend.”

  It was time to settle into some good old drudgery and elbow grease, a straight job, and Jim Pollock’s Construction and Interiors was an easy gig to hitch onto. Old man Pollock had been known to hire local out-of-luck musicians as unskilled manual labourers, including Steve Mahon, Teenage Head’s bass player, and local psycho country crooner Ralph Nicole, who both drove and unloaded cube trucks full of drywall. So I joined that rock-and-roll circus, and Sandy, Madeline and I moved into a third-floor walk-up at the corner of Garfield and Main.

  Quietly, Madeline and I knew we were in this for life. No questions asked. I loved picking her up at daycare and bringing her home on the Main East bus. We’d walk up Sherman Avenue to King and cut across the traffic to the Apollo Restaurant, where I’d watch her eat scrambled eggs and french fries while I drank coffee or a beer if I had any extra cash. It was calm and almost too perfect.

  I had a thirst for booze, and Sandy had itchy feet, so there was always conflict swirling around us. I’d get drunk and stay out all night, and Sandy would get jealous of women she suspected I was running around with, and sometimes she was right. So the hammer would swing, and I’d be out the door and down Garfield Street to live at Pat Gibbons’s house, a place that had officially been named the House of Men by the local rounders. Pat had his broke-musician brother Tim living there, and Steve Mahon, who had just been thrown out by his wife. Except for Pat, none of us had any money. We’d save up and pitch in for cases of beer, and then we’d play hockey in the living room, watch the Leafs and listen to records. It was a land of broken toys with hair and body odour.

  I stayed at the House of Men until Sandy cooled down and let me back in the apartment. But I just couldn’t behave. I spent more money than I made, disappeared on Sandy for days, got d
runk, got in dust-ups, never paid the bills. I was a problem.

  It was mid-winter, late afternoon, it was dark and our arms were full of groceries as we all walked home in the snow and up the stairs to our apartment. Sandy turned the key and opened the apartment door, switched on the light and…nothing. No lights. No electricity. She turned around and sneered, not even bothering to ask if I had paid the bill. She put down her bags and walked straight into the darkness. I stayed outside in the hallway with Madeline because I knew what was coming. I heard her pick up the phone and start dialling the hydro company. Then I heard her scream bloody murder. I hadn’t paid the phone bill either. We were stuck in the apartment with no lights, no phone, no stove and the food in the fridge heading bad. That was the routine. Fuck it, I thought. We have each other. We have beer. We’re okay.

  I never managed to pay the rent on time either. Our landlady had somehow lost a leg, maybe to cancer or a train mishap. I taught Madeline to listen for the sound she would make as she came up our stairs looking for rent. Madeline would hear the clunk, step, clunk, step, up to the second floor. She would grab her toys and we’d jump into bed and pull the covers over our heads and laugh. Bang, bang, bang, the landlady would beat away at the door, and we’d hear, “I know you’re home, Mr. Wilson. I know you’re in there. You owe me rent again and sure as hell you know I’ll be back….”

  “Yeah that’s right, you old cow,” I’d think. “And Madeline and I will be waiting here ready for ya too.” Then the landlady would hobble back down the stairs and Madeline would play with her Barbies and I would imitate the wind for her, and we would fall into a nap.