Cigar Box Banjo (6 page)

Now, what I’ve been withholding from you is that Conrad’s stepfather wasn’t simply a drummer. He was Ed Thigpen, whose musical career included stints with people like Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and, most famously, Canada’s own Oscar Peterson. Ed Thigpen was a bona fide jazz legend. Mind you, the term “jazz legend” didn’t signify much to me back then, and it’s only now, in adulthood, that I realize what an honour it was to make his acquaintance.

Which I did in the following manner. Imagine the lads down in the music room, gritting their way through “Satisfaction.” We performed it with grim sobriety, our entire beings occupied with technical matters: the riff, the structure of the song (recall that at one point, everything falls away except the drums; leastwise, that’s the plan), the lyrics. Ed Thigpen entered, listened as we arrived clumsily at the musical finish line, and then waved Conrad off the stool. “Let me play with these boys,” he said.

Okay. Conrad hopped down, Mr. Thigpen took his position, and Joel and I began the riff. Ed—I guess I can call him Ed; after all, we were jamming, weren’t we?—allowed us to execute the lick once as establishment, and then he began to play along.

Well, I never. My initial thought, I’ll confess, was that Conrad’s stepdad was lying about being a professional drummer, because he appeared to be, well, spazzing out, waving his arms in broad circular motions, the sticks just happening to deflect off cowhide and metal. Drummers were supposed to move with robotic precision, and if they wanted to hit a cymbal, it seemed to me, they should turn and look at the thing for a full two seconds, addressing it, making sure it hadn’t moved away somehow, before whacking it. Ed’s eyes were elsewhere, and while I don’t suppose they actually rolled up into the inside of his skull, that is certainly the impression I received. But soon I became aware that there was a presence in the room, a force with the power of a tidal wave. At least, it was far, far stronger than my twiddling little Keith Richards lick.

This was rhythm.

I had never encountered rhythm at close quarters before, certainly had never been trapped with it in a basement, where it bullied me up against the wall and slapped me around. “This Land Is Your Land” does not prepare a fellow for rhythm. Oh, certainly, that song has rhythm, but it has rhythm like an old woman might have a poodle, a dog with clipped fur and papers that give its legal name as “Lancelot of Les Halles.” This rhythm was like an atavistic mastiff, only a mutated gene away from ferity.

It was scary.

Joel seemed to be battling rhythm more valiantly than I. He was playing with exhilaration, and a broad grin had blossomed across his freckled face. Indeed, if rhythm were a bucking bronco, he did his eight seconds. But you’re right, I should dispense with metaphors, not only because I keep mixing ’em up, but because they are weak and unnecessary. Rhythm is elemental, something we have inside us like bile and marrow. The
access
can be a little problematic, since it is protected by self-consciousness and notions of seemliness. Let me put it this way. The fear I felt as Ed Thigpen played the drums was not
like
the fear I felt when I considered asking Mathilda to dance—it was
exactly the same fear.

I’M TALKING about the fear of giving oneself over, I guess, of abandonment to the unknown, surrender to the moment. I suppose that’s the connection back to my new thematic material. I’m not referring simply to the fear of death—we will talk about that in the pages to come, I’ll warrant—but the fear of losing control. Especially since everyone wants to wrest control away from you. The people who love you want to take care of you, which makes sense. In their eyes, you may be demonstrating an inability to take care of yourself. People also have much advice: how to spend the few months left to you, how to best deal with this thing they call “cancer.” People come to visit, which is great, except that sometimes you need to be doing other things. I wanted to write; I had this second draft to complete and a television show to develop. I had songs to write and record. I probably wouldn’t have time to write another novel, but I thought a novella might be a possibility, perhaps just a long short story. But people had all sorts of notions of things I could and
should
be doing. Visiting Ireland, for example. My friend Jake communicated an offer from my fishing buddies, those lads with whom I make an annual journey to the bonefishing grounds that surround Cuba. “Anywhere in the world you want to go,” said Jake, “we’ll take you there.”

“The truth of the matter is, Mako,” I told him, “if I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn’t be one of my big regrets, that I didn’t fish enough.” That fact is entirely due to Jake, who dreams big and then connives ways to make things happen. We have gone many places in the world, on assignment, our adventures paid for by the editors of various magazines, often the generous (and fishing-obsessed) Pat Walsh, editor of
Outdoor Canada.
Jake and I call each other “Mako” and “Thresher,” both appellations being species of shark. If that seems hopelessly ten years old to you, well, it kind of is. When I’m with the boys, I’m ten years old. When I’m with a woman, I mature slightly, and I mean ever so slightly, to fourteen or fifteen, giddy and hormone-addled, unable to believe that I am actually
with a woman.
Anyway, I said to Jake, “If I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn’t be one of my big regrets, that I didn’t fish enough. So I’m thinking maybe . . . Paris?”

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.