by Tom Wilson
During those months at the Inn on the Park, I wrote and recorded thirty songs for Planet Love, an album I would later release. I would wake up in total ruin, throw on one of those ratboy cartoon suits I had acquired and cross the manicured lawns of the hotel grounds until I reached a hole I had made in a frost fence that led into a fire station parking lot, then through another hole in another frost fence on the other side and onto the grounds of Sony music.
I’d walk past the office windows of the marketing department, the radio department, the sales department, staggering along the length of the sprawling one-floor complex until I reached the president’s office, where I would stand and look in at him through the window while he talked on the phone. I’d push my face against the glass and act out some ridiculous routine for him, crack him up and continue on to the front door, flash reception my security card and dive onto the couch in my studio. I’d go back to sleep until my recording engineer, Jeff Desil, arrived and turned up the work we had done the night before.
We’d spend the day overdubbing on the tracks, then by mid-afternoon we’d start writing another song. We were in the centre of a corporate environment but we had been given total freedom. Nobody told us what to do or when to do it. Somehow, through all my few hits and many misses, I had ended up in an amazing, leave-this-fucker-alone-and-let-him-do-what-he-does position. By nightfall all kinds of musicians would roll though the studio, as well as the inspirational company of drug dealers, bikers and wildly drunk women who’d dance on the coffee table in the middle of the studio when we hit on a groove that was agreeable.
I’m amazed at how invisible a suicide can be. It hides in plain sight. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. I was losing what I had worked so hard to get. Respect, love, money. It was all on the chopping block and the axe would come down soon.
I finally drove my life into the ditch at the end of 1999. I was out there touring solo for the most part and entertaining myself alone in my dressing room by killing the hospitality rider every night, the same hospitality rider that had been supplied for Junkhouse’s eight band and crew members just a couple of years before. The same rider that contributed to the destruction of a great rock-and-roll band. The same rider that stopped the hits from getting written and turned the shows from the spectacles they once were into drunken puddles of piss and vomit. I walked backstage every night and was greeted by a forty-ounce bottle of vodka, a forty-ounce bottle of single malt scotch, two bottles of red wine, sixty bottles of beer (thirty domestic and thirty imported) and a quarter ounce of weed, as well as phone numbers for some local coke and speed dealers. I had arrived.
I was out there jumping fences and screwing the breeze, from tour to tour, month after month, and as the miles rolled by, bit by bit I lost my footing in reality. I came off highways and into the soft centres of towns, banging on my guitar, hissing and moaning through giant speakers. I stumbled off stages, drunk and raging and hiding in the soaking wet blues of the wee hours. I’d just keep going, down strange streets back to my hotel or tour bus where I’d lie and dream of finding a taxi to take me to the airport and fly far away, once and for all, through the dark sky and up through a hole and into the brightest light. And I put my head back, and wished I was dead.
I was playing rock star, acting like I was in with Frank Sinatra or the Faces or Oasis. But I wasn’t even out there playing on any heavy-duty wild rock tours. On the contrary, I was out there in beautiful theatres playing proper concerts with Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Jann Arden, Chantal Kreviazuk, Ron Sexsmith, David Gray, Colin James. I was up there on stage bloated and sweating and cross-eyed, standing in front of well-heeled, sedate music lovers.
I was doing stupid things like chopping off my hair with room-service steak knives while standing in complete darkness in my hotel room. I wore old fur coats I found beside Salvation Army collection boxes and drove nails into the heels of my boots until my feet bled. I dyed my beard blond, coloured my cheeks with red magic marker and walked out on stage. I would stare down secretaries in the first couple of rows like I was a wild animal. They were just there to enjoy a show, to hear songs they had heard on the radio at work. They didn’t come for a madman who crawled his way in from the alley behind the theatre and somehow ended up there in the spotlights.
I was a monster, and there was nobody to destroy me. No mob to storm my castle with pitchforks and pots and pans and fiery torches. No one brave enough to stop me from what I was doing. I was on my own and I think I may have wanted to die, but I was too afraid to just cut my wrists and I was too dramatic to let the pageantry of it all go unnoticed. So I just marched on. Standing in front of dressing room mirrors hating myself, talking to myself, cursing and threatening myself. “One day I’ll have my death of you. I’ll find you in the poets’ graveyard and dig up what’s left of you.”
Madeline and Thompson were young then. I had wanted to be successful for them, to be a dad they could be proud of. Instead I had become a threat to their happiness and well-being. I was going to be the dad who died on them. Who didn’t love them enough to save himself. The dad who was too lazy to swim to shore, or too far gone to jump through the flames in the burning building, pick them up and carry them to safety.
These were the days when Bunny and Janie lived on the first floor of our giant house at 82 Stanley. Sandy had made a home for us all. The first real home I’d ever known, but one way or another I pushed it all away. I wanted to be there when I wasn’t, but when I got there I walked from room to room trying to get away from myself.
The possibility of a blissful family life was there. The kids would wake up every morning and go down to Bunny’s kitchen in their pyjamas, and Bunny would make them toast and cereal and cups of tea. Sandy would get ready for work and I’d get dressed, and then Madeline would take off for Ryerson Middle School and I would walk Thompson up Locke Street to Allenby Elementary on Hunter.
Then I’d walk back home and clock in for a day in the darkness. I couldn’t calm down. I should have had my head examined by a doctor, medicated. I should have taken the drive up the Queen Street hill to the Chedoke Hospital psych ward. Instead I drank and did blow and never looked anyone in the eye.
So there I was, driving at full speed over every goddamn bump and curb I could hit. Luckily I didn’t roll that mess. It just went flying over the gravel into the ditch across a field, and I stopped somewhere out there in no man’s land. Actually, where I stopped was at Sandy’s feet on December 12, 1999.
I had returned from a tour, and Sandy and I were sharing a bath when she said a woman’s name and asked me who she was. Turns out Sandy had been worried about how much cocaine I’d been doing. She had stolen my cellphone, checked my call history and written down a few names and numbers in the hope of tracking down my dealers. One name though had stood out in particular. “Oh she’s just some hippie horoscope woman who’s been doing my chart.” She was a hippie horoscope woman but she had been doing more than my chart. Sandy had heard this line too many times before. It was a lie, and this time she knew it. I sat there still in the water. Frozen. Terrified.
I was about to start trying to lie my way out of this, but there was no way out. There had been so many strangers, women. Each one proved to me that I was part of the world somehow, that I was alive, that I was not a ghost. How could I explain that to Sandy? The woman I loved. The woman who had given me a chance at having a family. There was no lie even I could believe. No lie convincing enough, big enough to change the course of what was happening in front of me.
I looked down. Then, as I looked up, about to say who knows what, she began to scream. She was shrieking, howling, as if she were being clawed apart. It was not a sound I had heard before, but I knew what it was. It was the sound of her heart breaking.
“Please don’t make me do this,” I pleaded with Sandy as she sent me upstairs to say goodbye to the kids. It was the longest walk of my life.
We were meant to be heading out for a Christmas tree. Madeline, who always t
ook care of her little brother, had dressed herself and Thompson in their winter coats and they had sat on the couch, like a couple of good angels, waiting for Sandy and me to catch up. To this day there is nothing that Sandy and I regret more than our children having to listen to their world come crashing down. When they’d heard what was going on between their parents, they had crept up to Madeline’s room on the third floor, and that was where I was now heading, up past the landing, counting the last five steps to the top level of the house. As I rounded the corner Madeline looked at me like no one has ever looked at me, and in that instant I thought that she, Thompson and I were done. The air was poisonous. I was sure we were all suffocating together.
I entered the bedroom and just started repeating, “I’m sorry….I’m so sorry, honey.” Madeline’s stone-cold eyes softened and her mood broke. She walked across her bedroom and put her arms around me. This was tragic. Like nothing else I’d felt in my life, and like nothing I’ve experienced since. “I’m sorry, honey.” Thompson, taking his sister’s lead, came over and hugged me too. From over my shoulder I could hear Sandy’s voice, explaining, “Your father has to leave. Say goodbye to him. He’s going away.”
Now the kids were crying. I was crying. I said, “C’mon, Sandy. Let’s cut this out.” But there was none of that. She was done. She dragged me like a rag doll out of the bedroom, down the stairs and into Bunny and Janie’s kitchen on the first floor. They had heard everything. I said sorry to them too.
In her way, Bunny loved Sandy like she was her own. Both women were strong, and each respected the other’s strength. The first time they looked each other in the eye they decided right then and there that this better go well or the war would be lifelong and of epic proportions. Sandy and I were married in New Orleans while I was down there making a Junkhouse record at Daniel Lanois’s Kingsway Studio in 1995.
I asked the studio engineer, Ethan Allen, to take me to the airport in one of Lanois’s classic Lincoln Continentals, black with suicide doors, my dream car. The plan was to propose at the airport, go buy a couple of rings and then head straight to city hall to get hitched. When I arrived at the airport Sandy was nowhere to be found. It took an hour after her flight landed for her to get up to the luggage level of the airport, and when she finally did she was a bit tipsy and on the arm of a Delta Airlines pilot. That’s my girl, I thought.
We did end up getting married in New Orleans, but it was Easter so we needed to wait until the following Tuesday. In the meantime, Sandy went wandering the streets of the French Quarter in her sundress, still a little drunk, I think.
The morning after our wedding I called Bunny. She was excited. “Put Sandy on the phone,” she said. I could hear Bunny’s voice coming out of the phone against Sandy’s ear. “Well, good morning, Mrs. Wilson.”
Mrs. Wilson. It didn’t take Bunny even a second to know just what to say. She wrapped it all up in a bow and tied it around the two of us. And now that ribbon lay in tatters. Sandy took my cellphone, threw it on the kitchen floor and smashed it into pieces. “There. Get out. You’re leaving the way you came—with nothing, and that’s what you deserve.”
She walked me out towards the front door. I thought the whole time that she’d give in, that we’d go upstairs and start patching things up. But there wasn’t a patch big enough for this. Nothing was big enough for this. I stepped out onto Stanley Street. Christmas lights were everywhere. The city was silent, insulated by the falling snow. I walked up Locke Street, past the West Town Bar & Grill. I looked through the window—rosy red faces all drunked up on horse-piss draft and grease. A horror. I got to a pay phone and called Ray.
SOBER TRUTHS
I didn’t know what an intervention was, but I was about to find out. Gary Furniss, president of Sony Publishing, called and told me there were a few things we needed to talk about, so I got on a bus and headed to Toronto.
For three days I’d been sitting at Ray’s house drinking beer and gin, snorting blow and trying to forget what had happened on Stanley Street. This was different from the other times I’d been tossed out. This time Sandy meant business. I was shaky, white and puffy. I was lost, but had no idea how lost.
It was all a bad, bad dream, and I hoped to stay medicated until I woke up. Then I’d take a deep breath, shake my head clear and walk back home to tell Sandy and the kids about the terrible nightmare I’d had.
In this messy haze, I started writing a song I would finish months later. A song called “The Truth.” I was digging into the trauma and looking out from the hole:
Wake me up when it’s over,
it’s something I can’t live through.
I’m starting my car
and I’m driving it right back to you.
It’s been such a long time, strangers passing me by,
each face looking in at me, they don’t ask me why.
When I got to the front door of Sony, the receptionist looked me up and down and told me straight out, “Tom, man—you look like total shit.” She buzzed me in and I walked into Gary’s office. He was behind his desk. I sat down in a chair across from him and said, “Gary…I fucked up.” The words rolled out of my mouth, words I couldn’t take back. Then, in walked Mike Roth, my friend and the man who’d given me a break, believed in me. President of Sony, Rick Camilleri, was next, closing the door behind him and taking a seat beside me.
“You’ve been doing a lot of drugs, Tom. Your drinking owns you and you’ve been running around on your wife,” Mike said. “Now you have some decisions to make.” I started to cry and tried to speak, but I wasn’t making any sense. He told me to shut up.
“We’ve made arrangements for you in a rehab for drugs and alcohol. They’ve accepted you and they’re ready to admit you now. You’ll be in there for eight weeks. You have a choice: You can get in Gary’s car right now and we’ll drive you there and admit you. Or you leave here now and never come back. We’ll have nothing to do with you from here on. It’s up to you. What’s it gonna be?”
“But what about Sandy and the kids?” I said. “Eight weeks? I’m going to miss Christmas.”
“Sandy knows where you’re going. She knows we’ve made these arrangements for you. Now, make your decision.” These three guys were more than record executives; they were friends and they were giving me yet another shot.
“Okay…I’ll go.”
Gary stood up, grabbed his coat and disappeared out the door to get his car. I just sat there, broken again.
Gary pulled his car around to the front doors of the building. Rick wished me good luck. Mike walked alongside me and told me to get in the front seat, then took a seat in the back. We drove off, north up Leslie Street to the Don Valley Parkway. Gary stared straight ahead at the snowy road. Mike stared out his window. I stared out mine. Three men with nothing to say.
We arrived at the rehab hospital, and Gary and Mike walked me to admitting. The attendant came out to meet me and buzzed me through the security door. Mike and Gary watched me go, then turned and headed back to the car. It was snowing. Christmas was coming. I hoped the kids had a tree.
Inside rehab I was sent to an office where I was asked a long list of questions. The woman asking them could see I was too shaky to write for myself, so she handled that duty. She was exhausted or burned out. Either way, she had admitted one too many losers, and the sooner she got me out of her office the better. There were rules. Lots of them. The main one for now was that if I chose to leave, I would not be allowed to come back. The end of the line, I thought. I had nowhere to run. I felt relieved. For years I had wished that someone would put me in line. I had needed George to wind up and slap me across the head and tell me to get it together, and when I needed it the most, he couldn’t do it. Finally, that slap I’d been waiting for had come.
The woman handed me a bottle of water and a cup containing two pills and told me to swallow them. I did. “I have to call home and let my wife know where I am,” I said. She dialled the number for me and Sandy answered. I told
her that I was going away for a while.
“I know,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Is it? Is everything going to be okay?” I began crying, suddenly hopeful. I wanted to leave and go right back home. “I’m sorry.” Sandy asked if I needed anything. I told her that I needed a suit. A suit—that’s what I wanted my wife to bring me.
The woman raised her voice for the first time, letting her frustrations out with a loud, “You won’t need a suit here—no suits!”
On the dining room wall in our Stanley Street house was a photo of me at Eaton’s sitting on Santa’s knee. I must have been three years old. I was smiling widely. Sandy and I had hung other photos along that same wall: a picture of us with the kids in Wildwood, another of the kids on the beach at Long Point. A happy, innocent, framed family. Later I would return to Stanley Street to find those photos gone, and Sandy would tell me she had smashed them all after she hung up the phone that day.
I was led by two orderlies to my room. The pills were kicking in. I dropped onto the bed and the orderlies strapped me down to the bed frame. Then I drifted into a beautiful, carefree, dreamless sleep.
It’s human nature to justify one’s personal condition and shortcomings by comparing them to those of someone less fortunate. So it’s common, and important, when you’re shovelling powder up your nose, to point out that at least you’re not as bad as so-and-so. We gossiped, like old women gossip over cups of tea and pink sandwiches, only we did so over rolled-up bills and blow. “I saw this girl cut an entire gram into one line and do it in the bathroom at the Gown & Gavel,” or this guy had to sell his car, or boat, or lost his house because he fell so behind on his mortgage but kept on drugging. War stories. The kind of stories I’d hear around mirrors when I was using, I would hear again in rehab. Twelve steps to heaven and all the second-hand smoke you can handle. I never bought into the “old glory” of those meetings—it was like a pissing contest for the quitters.
