It’s a stinking hot, beautiful afternoon this third week of June. Lefebvre talks a bit about his gardener, Lynn Demers, with whom we’ve just been talking. She’s also a sculptor. When Lefebvre first arrived in Salt Spring in 2005, he noticed her work immediately and loved it. He bought some pieces, and they now stand tall in the downtown area. He also asked her over to the house on Sunset Drive to talk about commissioning and then placing some of her work on the property.
Geoff Savage took one look at the way Lefebvre became animated around Demers and thought, Uh-oh. She’s a good-looking, fit, middle-aged woman bathed in a kind of milkmaid purity, with straight blond hair, ample décolletage, and a warm, giving smile. Lefebvre’s liaison with Demers was affectionate and casual. It did not last long, maybe a year. They remained friends as well as being engaged in an employer-employee relationship. Lefebvre explains, “She’s gotten away from working with chisel and soapstone because it’s hard on the joints. She does the gardening to pay for the time to do the sculpting, but she’s good at it. She likes doing that, too. And she’s not just a gardener but a landscape designer, too. She built that whole garden at my house.”
Lefebvre cranes his neck and backs the Sequoia out the driveway, then casts one look back at Demers, bent over a bush in his garden.
On Sunset Drive, we enjoy the rolling view, and so I ask about the weather in Salt Spring, out in the gulf, where the ecology is so different from Malibu, Costa Rica, or Calgary. Lefebvre explains, “Winters here are beautiful because it’s so lush. It’s like a rainforest here in wintertime. There are two waterfalls on my property and they’re roaring in the winter.” One burbles through a drainage pipe under the driveway road and the other marks the property boundary. He adds, “The last three winters we’ve had maybe seven to ten days below zero, and it would be two and three below. It’s nippy, though—a humid cold.”
We grouse about spending numerous winters in Calgary, with its potential for both mild Chinook conditions and forty-below cold snaps that reduce all peregrinations to the bare essentials. We’re happy to see the back of those; nice place to visit and all. I tell Lefebvre Calgary’s growth astonished me when I went back in 2005 after a long absence, all helter-skelter, a boomtown with a Deadwood-like mentality and no taste for curbing reckless growth.
Lefebvre says,
Calgary is a beautiful place to be, a lot of outdoorsy people. It’s too bad the outdoorsy people can’t get their heads right about climate change. It’s the lobster boiling in the pot. It doesn’t look like anything’s wrong, with the seemingly unlimited amount of land.
That’s mixed in with a bit of people tend to believe what they want to believe. If that’s what we’re doing in Canada, imagine China, imagine Russia—imagine everything. That’s what humans do. They just go until they get stopped.
Lefebvre stops. He picks up a hitchhiker, a young woman named Alison, twenty years old at most. She’s lugging an overstuffed backpack that dwarfs her. She’s fresh out of St. Thomas, Ontario, directly south of London, and was just in Victoria for two weeks. The ferry let her off at Fulford Harbour and she then hitched a ride to Shark Road. She was planning to stay at an organic farm. “Then I found out they changed locations,” she tells us. “Now they’re actually closer to Fulford ferry, so I’m going to try to get back down there.”
“I lived in London when I was an infant,” says Lefebvre, “a place called Frontenac Road.” He wonders whether we want to stop for coffee in Ganges Harbour. He asks Alison if she’d like a drink. She would. We gas up with Americanos and double espressos. Lefebvre pays. You cannot buy anything when you are with him. He won’t let you. Then Alison has to get out and head in a different direction, toward her organic farm.
A couple of miles beyond town, heading uphill on Fulford-Ganges Road, we arrive at Stonehouse. From this vista, way below is the long, narrow inlet into Ganges Harbour. And to the east, the impressive volcanic deposit of Mount Baker juts into view. The attraction for Lefebvre is evident. Baker is playful from this vantage point, sometimes luminescent, sometimes invisible. Every day, or even several times a day, it is a different color or barely there or not there at all—a mystery, a painter’s delight.
Stonehouse contains six separate sleeping and cooking quarters, an office for Geoff Savage and his assistant, Marian Bankes, a sound studio for Lefebvre and musician friends, an outdoor concert round, and thermal heating and cooling coils underground, which Lefebvre says are expensive but actually will pay for themselves in ten years and be free thereafter. And yes, he really does want to invite the Dalai Lama and his entourage to Stonehouse. Lefebvre’s overture to His Holiness is not so outlandish. His friend Jim Hoggan is a board member of the David Suzuki Foundation, and so Hoggan knows Victor Chan, the executive director, who co-authored a book with the Dalai Lama called The Wisdom of Forgiveness.
Lefebvre explains,
When Victor was twenty or so he was traveling the world and wound up getting kidnapped in Afghanistan by some clannish people and held for ransom. It just so happened that the Dalai Lama was running through there at the time, interceded and got Victor freed. Victor became quite a big fan, obviously, and devoted quite a bit of his life to assisting Dalai Lama. They became quite dear friends. Victor’s roughly my age, and Dalai Lama is about twenty years older. Victor spends two or three months a year with Dalai Lama. So through Jim I met Victor, and through Victor I began to take a deeper interest in Dalai Lama, commonly referred to in his circle as “His Holiness.” After I gave some money to the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education, His Holiness decided he wanted to meet me. I had actually met him before. A group of about fourteen setting up the Dalai Lama Center met him in Tucson. I committed some money, $5 million, which, eventually, I was unable to give because of Uncle Sam. I was only able to give $1 million, but I had given $500,000 before, so it was a million-five. The truth is, Dalai Lama is not a guy who is going to have trouble raising money. It’d be easy for him to get thirty million people in the world to give him a buck—but we got the ball rolling.
The Dalai Lama was curious to meet the source of the money and granted Lefebvre an audience in Vancouver. He wondered if the donor would like to bring anyone. Lefebvre figured if His Holiness wanted to know where he was coming from, he had better meet his mother. The Dalai Lama’s schedule was packed, and when Lefebvre arrived with his mother he recognized a bunch of Conservative government cabinet ministers. Prime Minister Harper had given the go-ahead to make the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen, which upset Chinese politicians. Lefebvre and his mom had to wait their turn.
Lefebvre says,
My mom was excited to meet Dalai Lama. She might have been more excited to meet the other His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, who, in my estimation, was absolutely the most un-humble representative of Christ that ever existed. So we were sitting there with Victor Chan, and in a few minutes His Holiness was shown in, and he sat down. I was shown to a chair, and my mom was to my left, sitting between His Holiness and me. We shook hands and then sat down.
We talked about walking down both sides of the street, because I was doing the Four Great Rivers initiative in China, and I was telling His Holiness how it was delicate for me, because on one hand, I was assisting the Chinese on a conservation project and meeting Chinese guys who were spying on each other in case anyone ever mentioned Dalai Lama in anything but pejorative tones. And then on the other hand, I was meeting His Holiness and setting up the Dalai Lama Center in Vancouver. So I said, “I think of myself as swimming down the middle of the river.” So he said, “Ah yes, very important. Very, very important.” And he talked to my mom. We talked for about twelve, maybe fifteen minutes, and it was fine.
At one point, Dalai Lama put his hand on my mom’s knee. My mom put her hand on her own knee, and without looking he put his hand on my mom’s hand on her knee. She was startled and right away he took away his hand and apologized. She said, “No no, it
’s fine, it’s quite lovely actually.”
Chan grabbed a few pictures of Lefebvre and his mom with His Holiness before the Dalai Lama was whisked off to a big show downstairs in BC Place. Lefebvre’s mom then sat down again, winded.
Lefebvre continues,
A guy on the Dalai Lama Center board said, “Louise, are you okay?” She goes, “Uh-uh-uh-of course I’m okay!” She was absolutely breathless from having met this cat.
Dalai Lama is a gentle gentleman, but not in the sense of being withdrawn. You know him to be a powerful guy, but he’s a gentle powerful guy. He’s tremendously learned about spiritual matters, but nothing he knows is beyond any of us, and he knows that.
By the time it was over, Mom was taking a different view of Ratzinger.
• • •
If the Dalai Lama ever comes to Stonehouse, he will want Louise Lefebvre to be there. And if he does come to ask what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding, this is what he will find: one main kitchen with an under-lit onyx center island; eight Sub-Zero fridges; gel mats on heated concrete; one cook/housekeeper (Nathalie Carles) using only the finest organic ingredients and Restoration Hardware cleaning products; a massive suspended television set; a couple of imposing sculptures hanging from the ceiling; a Bösendorfer on which to pound out Lefebvre tunes; automatic, rain-sensitive, temperature-controlled skylights; a garage with five double doors with an art gallery and vintage car collection inside; a steam bath with a wine fridge and two Sub-Zero beverage drawers stocked with sodas, mineral water, and beer; courtesy guest slippers, bathrobes, towels, almonds, tissues, and flashlights; ten bathrooms in total on the property, with five hose and rain-shower heads and wall-mounted sprayers, each with steam baths; four kitchenettes in the other buildings, along with three large-screen TVs; three freestanding soaker tubs; multi-button controls for speakers, iPod dock, radio, pot lights, and heating in every room; and a groundskeeper or two to tend the tree-lined driveways, 126 planters, and wild grass down the hill toward the inlet.
Oh, and customized sleek black polyester-nylon-spandex bomber jackets with small, fine white print in capital letters across the shoulder blades: STONEHOUSE.
On the drive back to Lefebvre’s place on Sunset Drive, we take a route that hugs St. Mary Lake. Randy Bachman, the former Guess Who and BTO guitarist, now host of CBC’s Vinyl Tap, lives at the end of the lake. He sometimes performs in public with his son Tal, also a musician, but isn’t seen around the island that much. No matter, Lefebvre can always be counted on to be his inadvertent stand-in—he’s been mistaken for Bachman more than once. Lefebvre can imagine why Bachman maintains a low profile. “He meets people who, as Brian Ahern says, ‘gurm’ him, that is, suck up and take his time, which can be annoying. If people just responded, ‘Hey, you’re Randy Bachman of the Guess Who!’ and then walked on, it’d be okay. But many people are into this celebrity thing and want to cling.”
After a few more conversations, Lefebvre is forced to cut his June hanging-out time short by a day. He has to fly to New York for his three-month checkup. Pissing for the Man. What’s in his urine has nothing to do with his crime—“conspiracy to use the wires to transmit in interstate and foreign commerce bets and wagering information”—but urinate he must. If any drugs are found to be in his system, he breaks parole, he breaks the law, he gets charged, he’s strapped to the DOJ’s anvil, and the hammer will come down with Promethean regularity.
Which is why it is might a little bit reckless, if not crazy, that Lefebvre smokes pot for the first few weeks after he pisses. He calibrates it this way: it takes two weeks for traces of THC to leave the body, so at the six-week mark he starts to curtail his marijuana-smoking habit. He starts to shut the valve down. By the time he gets within two weeks he’s been well clean for a while—just in case.
Why does Lefebvre take the chance? Good question. Pot smoking and long hair are crucial to understanding Lefebvre. Pot smoking should be legalized, he thinks—except that in the U.S., Washington and Colorado notwithstanding, there is too much money to be made in the prison industry to ever consider doing that nationwide. And the long hair? Well, as mentioned, Lefebvre’s been arguing in favor of long hair ever since he was twelve.
• • •
Now it’s October 2008, and I fly to Calgary to meet up with Lefebvre again so he can show me his residence and his airplane hangar and to chat some more. He invites me to see another property, south of Calgary—his wild, rustic, prairie foothills land. Sure, why not? Let’s go. Oldman Dam is about two hours from Calgary. Lefebvre scooped up the parcel for a million bucks and hasn’t done a thing to it. He’s thinking about it, but he also thinks about just leaving it the way it is.
Lefebvre phones up a buddy of his, Mick Verde, who’s at work, and cajoles him into coming along. We drive south on Macleod Trail. It’s so windy a dust storm blows across the main drag. Then a huge blue tarp disengages from a construction project and flies across. Then insulation tiles go airborne like tumbleweeds. Then more dust. Later, after we reach our destination, we’ll get pelted with wet snow from a massive black cloud before the sun breaks out to warm us. A routine Cowtown apocalypse.
Lefebvre’s doing the driving, and what is he concerned about most? Getting pulled over by the cops. Why? Well, the one thing that could wreck his pot-smoking strategy during this DOJ interregnum of his life would be to get pulled over for speeding, get run through the computers, be identified as a parolee—with the whiff of pot smoke inside the Lexus hybrid SUV. Lefebvre would be a target, a prize for some cop patrolling Ian Tyson–land down near Longview, right? What cop wouldn’t want to say, “Hey, I got Lefebvre smoking pot in his car. He’s breaking the terms of parole as well as the law, right? He’s fucked, right? We got ’im!”
Yes, that is Lefebvre’s biggest fear right now, so the conversation between the two old buddies goes something like this:
Verde: Johnny, what’re you doing now?
Lefebvre: I’m keepin’ an eye on it, Mick. About sixty-five.
Verde: Maybe just keep it at the speed limit, Johnny. You never know around here.
I interject: Are the cops well-known for issuing speeding tickets down here?
Verde and Lefebvre: No, no, just the smoking.
I avoid the obvious follow-up: “Why would you risk the rest of your life just to smoke pot?” Lefebvre himself will be happy to take you on a legal tour through the minefield of the American parole system, how so many inmates, bored out of their skulls, or perhaps addicted, risk getting more time slapped on. And many do get caught and have their sentences extended, which is why the U.S. prison system is filled to the brim, why the U.S. has a drug problem, and why there is a War on Drugs—because the government created this black garden in order to maintain it. So Lefebvre will go on like this and then smoke pot every hour or two for six weeks, then start the stop process, then go clean, then piss, then do it all over again.
Why? Because Johnny likes smoking pot. He likes getting high, or maintaining a bit of a high. Not a blowout high, just a kind of go-through-the-day-a-bit-high kind of high. It’s a social drug. Is it a coping mechanism? I don’t know. Does it create agitation in him? I don’t know, although both his mom and Jane McMullen, with whom he intimately shared his life for nine years and who to this day runs part of his financial affairs, say they’ve never seen him so agitated and quick to anger as lately. He’s chafing at being unable to smoke up whenever he wants and buckling under pressure from the authorities always watching him. Pot smoking when he can is a reflexive response, but the longer the DOJ pecks at Lefebvre’s liver, the stronger the possibility he’ll lose his grand insouciance. He’s being tested. The great bon vivant-ism is suffering. And then there’s micromanaging his daughter’s wedding.
We get to Oldman Dam, step out of the car, and take a walk along a ridge. Below to the south is a lazy oxbow in the river. To the west is an angry sky dumping white stuff on the fo
othills. The mountains are already covered. The wet stuff blasts in our direction soon enough. We get soaked, then it’s over. We pop beers and laugh. The vista of foothills and mountains and farms and dancing sun and big black cloud is mesmerizing. Yeah, delete that action item for a weekend hideaway down here. Sometimes the best move is no move at all.
• • •
While in Calgary this time around I’ve been staying at a hotel for a few days before shifting over to a friend’s house. One day I end up back at Lefebvre’s house in lower Mount Royal—digs he bought in 2006 that he’ll put on the market next June for $1.6 million. We’ve been talking about DeSmogBlog, how it’s trying to raise the environment’s profile in the federal election campaign by mapping the greenest candidates for voters. In tight ridings where centrist or left-of-center parties compete with conservatives, the website suggests which candidate has the best chance of defeating the conservative. One of Jim Hoggan’s hires is on television talking up the issues. Lefebvre records it.
Later on, Emily and Pádraig drop by the house. They’ve arrived from Dublin to put the final touches on their wedding, which will take place October 18 at some secret, undisclosed location in the mountains (probably Lake Louise, maybe Jasper, but Lefebvre isn’t talking).
It’s time for me to take my leave and make way for family time. Lefebvre insists on giving me a lift back to the hotel, even though I enjoy the walk. I soon find out why. He lights up a joint in heavy traffic, heading along Seventeenth Avenue. At around Eleventh Street he notices an officer in a police car behind him. Instinctively he cups the short stub and lowers the window just a bit to exhale and rid the Toyota SUV of the potentially incriminating smell. False alarm—the cop is not after Lefebvre. He hasn’t run the plate through his computer and found out who the known felon is in front of him. Again, I wonder about the risk.
• • •
The next afternoon, a week before Emily’s wedding, Lefebvre and I go shopping. We’re looking at flatware and wine. We don’t need to go far. The Seventeenth Avenue SW commercial strip is two blocks south of his house, just down the hill. We head east and park the Toyota SUV a few blocks down, across from Rubaiyat. Lefebvre fishes for change. I offer a two-dollar coin. He says he’s thinks he’s got it. Then he encounters Calgary’s recently installed paperless parking system. You have to register your license plate with the meter. Lefebvre has more than half a dozen vehicles. He hasn’t yet memorized every plate number for every vehicle in Malibu, Salt Spring Island, Vancouver, and Calgary. He’s momentarily stymied. I run back to the vehicle and look at the plate number. I yell out the required combination of letters and numbers. “You know, this paperless system is supposed to be good for the environment and make parking more efficient,” he says, visibly agitated. “But it takes away the one fuckin’ thing you can’t get back—your time.”
Life Real Loud Page 29
