Cigar Box Banjo

by Paul Quarrington

  But you lose most control, I think, to the doctors. A couple of days after my diagnosis, I went to meet the team who would be looking after me. That’s how Toronto East General Hospital works. There was a team of doctors, consisting of Dr. Li (the chemo doctor), Dr. —— (radiation), and Dr. Simone (the thoracic surgeon). Of them all, I liked Dr. Simone—Carmine Simone—the best. He was a dark-haired young man, a touch on the burly side, who shook my hand and greeted me warmly as “the guest of honour.” Dr. Li was quite an attractive young woman, so you might think I would have liked her the best, but she was a bit reserved. She spoke using statistics, and you know what Mark Twain said about statistics. For example, one of the first things she said was that the median life expectancy for someone with my condition was one year.

  It took a while, a few weeks even, for me to realize what this meant. Not the “you’re going to die” part. I got that. But the mathematical meaning—that half of the people with stage I V lung cancer live less than a year, half of them more than a year, with no cap or restriction on the time thereafter— was long in coming.

  Dr. ——, the radiation guy, dismissed himself from our meeting early on. In a friendly enough way, he said that I was not a candidate for radiation, unless they were to discover that the cancer had already spread to my brain, in which case they would radiate before they did any chemo. The plan was to hit me with first-line chemicals, the ones that were most successful in most cases.

  “But,” Dr. Li said, “the statistics show that this chemotherapy on average extends life expectancy by only two or three months.”

  “Okay,” we asked. Dorothy, Martin, and Jill were with me. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that if two people both have your condition, and one receives chemotherapy and one doesn’t, the first will outlive the other, probably, by two to three months.”

  “Oh,” said I.

  Still, I was more than willing to undergo chemotherapy, because, well, I was scared, and it seemed time to fight like a puma with its ass backed up against a wall. “Besides,” I announced, “what’s the use of being a big burly boy if you can’t take a little chemo?” I have always bounced back and forth between “stocky” and, well, “fat,” but all of a sudden this was a good thing. The chemo might very well have a negative effect on my appetite (let’s see it try, said I), and I would lose weight, so it was good, Dr. Li observed, that I had something in reserve. My friend (and the Porkbelly keyboardist) Richard Bell died of cancer, and before he did he lost an appalling percentage of himself from the therapy. True, Richard recovered enough to play on our second album, but then he died. It seemed somehow to me that he had simply vanished into thin air.

  The first couple of weeks following a dire diagnosis are pure and utter chaos, and chemotherapy seemed like the best path to follow. Indeed, the doctors took me on a tour of the chemo centre at the hospital, and it was a strangely upbeat place. People sat in comfy chairs, attached to the apparatus that delivered the chemicals, and read books or played board games with their visitors. The woman in charge said that in a recent survey, the chemotherapy ward had received a 100 per cent patient satisfaction rating. That’s pretty impressive for a place where people are getting various poisons pumped into their bodies in order to destroy wild, rampaging C cells. We were introduced to a man named Wilson, who, when he was admitted to hospital, had been emaciated and spitting up blood. (See, if I’d been emaciated and spitting up blood, I might not have been quite so dim-witted with my self-diagnosis.) Wilson was on his last round of chemo (he had stage IV lung cancer, like me, so he got six doses, spaced three weeks apart, also my designated course), and he looked great. He was bright-eyed and smiling, and he’d actually put on weight!

  But then something happened. Not long after D-Day, I went to interview Joe Hall, in whose musical ensemble, the Continental Drift, I had played throughout much of my twenties. In those years, Joe was typically wild-eyed, and he trailed liquor and pharmaceutical effluvia in his wake. But for the past many years, he has been sober and living in Peter-borough, Ontario, where he’s raised a couple of new kids and written some wonderful songs. The local arts community had decided to honour Joe, and I was asked to interview him onstage as part of the process.

  Joe was always lean, but maturity has rendered him gaunt, his face a chiaroscuro, light beaming from his eyes, shadow in the shallow of his cheeks. He was very excited about this celebration of his life, which he referred to as Putting Joe out to Pasture Day. Many local musicians were on hand, and all of the former Continental Drifters were there. Indeed, George Dobo, the original keyboardist, and his wife had been living for several months in the house directly beside Joe’s.

  I would like to transcribe some of the interview for you, but in order to do so I would have to revisit the taped version, because I have very little memory of what took place. It is not so much that I was drunk or anything; the problem was that I was in some discomfort and labouring for breath. I didn’t like the sight of even small flights of stairs; five or six risers, and I was huffing and puffing. Being me, of course, I put this down to a hangover—or, at least, I was unable to distinguish hangover pain from cancer-related pain. But here’s a brief exchange:

  JOE: I remember sitting in the Dominion Hotel in Vancouver, and I said to you, “We need drugs.” And you responded . . .

  PAUL: We are drugs.

  JOE: And that’s where the title of that song you and I wrote came from.

  PAUL: Right, right. You know, I suppose I meant “our bodies are made up of chemicals . . .”

  After the interview, the newly reconstituted Joe Hall and the Continental Drift played “Nos Hablos Telefonos,” one of the band’s most famous tunes. It was just like old times, except that George played the guitar, as he has for some reason abandoned the keyboards. The song was still programmed into my bass-playing fingers, since the group played it at every show we ever gave. Then I cleared off the stage, making room for J.P. Hovercraft, my bass-playing successor, and Jill said, “Come on, I’ll take you back to Toronto, and we can go to the hospital.”

  Now, I don’t mean to be giving such a matter-of-fact account, but it was this little setback that put me on the real journey. At the hospital, a doctor poked a long needle into my back and drew off another three litres of fluid. I wasn’t even admitted on that occasion. I spent most of the night in emergency, then managed to convince the doctor in charge to let me loose. Not that I was developing an intense hatred of hospitals or anything. Quite to the contrary, I was reforming my opinion of them, which had previously been quite low. When Richard was in hospital, for example, I only visited on a couple of occasions (one of which he slept through), and I found the experience depressing. I even announced to some friends that, when my time came, I was going to eschew the institution, because I didn’t want to be in a hospital, and I didn’t want people to come visit me in a hospital. I think now what I was really reacting to was the fact that Richard was dying, cancer slowly draining his life force. Hospitals are pretty amazing, and the people employed there, everyone from the surgeons to the guys who pushed me down the hallways to radiology, are overworked and caring. But I managed to get sprung on that occasion, sometime around dawn, and I went back to the house on First Avenue.

  Dr. Li was concerned that I’d had to have more fluid removed. The chemotherapy, she said, might well compromise my immune system, and if I had to get tapped again during the process, I was in danger of infection. Maybe, she suggested, we should deal with the fluid before starting the chemo. Dr. Li thought I should talk to Dr. Simone, the thoracic surgeon. “You could see if he’s in,” she said. “His office is just upstairs.” We—my health crew, Dorothy, Jill, and Marty, were there with me—went to the third floor, and, remarkably, Dr. Simone told us to come on in. He listened to what we had to tell him and scheduled me for a pleurodesis.

  Listen, if I’m being dreadfully boring about all this, please just toss the book in a corner. I hate it when people go into detail about
their surgical procedures, but I do think this one is reasonably interesting, and it’s not one I knew anything about. Indeed, I still knew very little about it long after it was done to me. But basically, after I was put under, Dr. Sim-one punched a hole through my side and stuck in a tube that would drain off the fluid. See, fluid collecting in the pleural cavity was my big problem, essentially crushing my left lung. That was the havoc my tumour was wreaking. The issue was not the fluid, because we all produce it, but the tumour not allowing me to reabsorb it. So, having drilled a hole in my side and stuck in a tube, Dr. Simone then blasted in talcum powder.

  That’s my understanding of things, anyway. I have learned that doctors like to speak by analogy, and they especially like visual aids. For example, we had asked Dr. Simone why he couldn’t simply remove the tumour. He was sitting behind the desk in his office as he answered this, and he immediately scanned his desk top, seeking the means of illustration. He picked up the mouse for his computer. “Paul’s tumour isn’t like this, you know, where it can just be removed.” He then picked up the blotter pad. “It’s like this, you see. It’s thin, but spread out.” (I believe the technical term, which I first heard from Dr. Frazier, but didn’t inquire about, having had my concentration scuppered sometime around, “It’s cancer, lung cancer . . . ,” is “sessile.” Mosslike.) When explaining the pleurodesis, Dr. Frazier found nothing suitable on his desk top, so instead he rubbed the palms of his hands together. “Imagine that you have two plates of glass, and you put sand in between them. At a certain point, friction would cause them to”—Dr. Simone stopped his rubbing abruptly.—“stick together.”

  This is what was done to me. The procedure was successful. I knew, we all knew, that it would not hold indefinitely. But it did give me a little time to consider how best to proceed. Margit Asselstine, a woman I’ve known for a very long time, did some work on me. I’m not sure exactly what sort of work; she used her hands a great deal but tended not to touch me. Anyway, I felt much better after seeing her. And one thing she told me was, “Paul, you have a lot of health still in your body. And there’s a lot of health in the world that you can draw on.”

  Yeah, I thought. I am healthy. As funny as it might sound, it occurred to me the one thing I had going for me was that I was healthy. Big and burly. I began to wonder why, exactly, I was so eager to make myself sick. Especially since the chemo was palliative. Especially if it might only buy me a couple of months. Suppose those months were February and March. Here in Ontario, that might not seem such a great gift.

  Okay, thought I, let’s have a re-think. I assembled the health team. We conferred. The decision was to forgo chemotherapy, at least until I found myself in trouble. In the meantime, there were shows to play, songs to write, people to see, and places to visit. I may only have a year, I thought, but it’s going to be one hell of a year.

  And it revolved around music.

  1 Part of the problem is that designation rock’n’roll, which I feel stupid even typing, seeing as I had to use two apostrophes. I suppose if we accept the term as referring to a very restricted sub-segment of popular music, the three-chord assertion makes sense. Actually, three chords might represent the upper limit. “Bo Diddley,” for example, is a one-chord song, or one and a partial, although I myself play two full chords. But when we were thirteen years old and figuring out chords, it wasn’t to play “pop” music—we applied the term “rock’n’roll” to everything. I guess we would have averred, without blinking, that Mrs. Miller singing “A Lover’s Concerto” was rock’n’roll.

  2 Some people don’t bother to stop that low string with their thumb, either, the idea being that they will thence avoid smacking the open, dissonant low E string. They rarely do.

  3 There are some songs that abound in “guitar logic.” The introduction to “Knock on Wood,” for example, is a power-chord ascension up the guitar fretboard. It was written by Steve Cropper, who then reversed things and came back down for the introduction to “Midnight Hour.”

  4 Guitar chords in their most simplistic fingerings are often given the appellation “cowboy.” A Cowboy G, for example, created with three fingers (there’s also a better sounding formation that requires four), allows the B string to sound boldly. Because it’s impossible to tune a B string precisely—and I don’t mean difficult, I mean impossible— the chord sounds in a rowdy manner, the fanfare for a plaintive yodel.

  5 B–B–B–C#–D, when playing in the key of E. And there’s no other key you can play it in. I mean, of course there are other keys, eleven if my sketchy music theory suffices. But this is another instance of guitar logic, something that makes illuminating sense given the mechanics of the instrument. The last note is usually played upon an open string, allowing even a struggling twelve-year-old guitarist the opportunity to finger the accompanying chord—which is impossible to do without executing the swaggering pelvic twitch that possesses Keith Richards when he plays this little riff, his most famous composition.

  CHAPTER 3

  I’M GOING to continue detailing my musical education. Condensing it to a few pages, however, whilst useful in terms of pacing, fails to adequately convey the time given over to the process. I spent months, maybe even years, sitting in the basement. It might take, say, a week to learn a song, which involved much lifting and replacing of the phonograph needle on the platter. Even though I tried to do this gingerly, I purchased a new needle practically every other day. After the week spent learning a song, another week would be devoted to playing that song, executing it with pride and exultation.

  It is during this early period in a musician’s life, I believe, that he or she acquires a unique cluster of predilections. Some tricky little licks, through a quirk of anatomy or some other manifestation of blind luck, come more easily to the fingers. A chord change affects some dim recess of the soul. Why? Who knows? Some combination of personal memory and cultural resonance, probably. And these become a songwriter’s personal memes, the basis upon which the compositions that lie far ahead in the future are built.

  Are you familiar with memetics? I hope you are. Otherwise, what I’m about to say may confuse you. The “meme,” according to Richard Brodie, author of the book Virus of the Mind, is “the basic building block of culture in the same way the gene is the basic building block of life.” “Memes,” Brodie states, “are the building blocks of your mind, the programming of your mental ‘computer.’” The concept of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins, so there is an easily discernible neo-Darwinian context. Let us say that caveman Og, beating a hollow log with a bone, hits upon a rhythm that has a curious appeal, not only to himself but to the others gathered nearby. This makes Og more sexually desirable than Nood, who insists on emphasizing the first and third beat and never approaches what we might call ur-funk. In these terms, rock stars are the epitome, using music to make themselves sexually attractive and then disseminating their genes far and wide. Indeed, this is how Charles Darwin accounted for the existence of music in the first place, likening it to the peacock’s lurid herl. I also like to imagine that musical memes contribute to the evolution of music itself, that they shape it to become increasingly beautiful and stirring. My thinking here has very little scientific credibility, so take it with a grain of salt. But, for example, I believe I have identified one such “meme,” a small musical idea: five-one-two, so-do-re (in solfège). To me, that little phrase has deep resonance; it states the interval of the fifth, the note that splits the octave in half, and then it launches into the unknown, leaving us without solid musical footing. That meme serves as the beginning of Handel’s “For Unto Us a Child Is Born.” It turns up several times in Brahms’s work; think of the lonely oboe that announces the arrival of the lovesick piano in the First Concerto. I myself use it all the time.

  So, as I’ve said, every songwriter has his or her memes. A Randy Newman song has a distinctive quality. Newman is from a musical family—his uncles Lionel, Alfred, and Emil all wrote music for the motion pictures—and Newman
’s memes (the intervals and inversions he chooses, his chord structure, the melodic intervals) come from a very particular place. To my way of thinking, they have the same poignancy as, say, the musical memes of Charles Ives or Aaron Copland. Newman’s success has as much to do with the genius of his lyrics as anything else, I should add, but we’re not discussing lyrics, we’re discussing memes.

  Memetics were at play during my own formative years, then, but any kind of payoff was still years in the distance. PQ’s People failed in our quest for global domination. Joel became distracted by the double bass, anyway. He’d been allowed into the music program at our junior high school, shunted into the string section. When asked by the teacher which instrument he’d prefer, Joel pointed at the hulking, oversized viol standing in the corner. It is my opinion that his reasoning proceeded thus: that thing over there is big; if I were a guy who played that thing, I would therefore myself be big, despite all the physical evidence, which would indicate that I am kind of a shrimpy little fella. So he began to play the double bass right then, and indeed, he has not played anything else since.1