One Native Life (9 page)
I walked out of the library discouraged. But the book would not leave me be. I thought about it all that night, and I went back the next day determined to read it. I got through the first page. When I asked the librarian what it was about, the answer she gave me was as convoluted as the book itself. I left disheartened.
But the challenge that book represented kept calling to me. I didn’t know why it should be so important, but I felt the pull of it anyway. So I checked it out and took it home. Each time I opened the book I got a little further. Still, it was a writhing mess of aphorism, allusion, mythology and dream, conjured by a fierce intellect I was at odds to harness.
The book haunted me. It invaded my waking thoughts. It irritated me that I couldn’t grasp the narrative thread of it. I was angered to think that a story could elude me. Each time I picked it up I had to force myself to stick with it. Each time I picked it up I was confronted again with the thick hodgepodge of idea and image, and each time I fought my way through. Eventually I bought my own copy. It took me more than five months to read it.
The day I finished it was amazing. I’d allowed that book to take me over, and when I closed it I was shocked to realize that it was autumn. It had been late spring when I started. I understood then why the people I’d overheard were so smitten with
Finnegans Wake.
It wasn’t that it was a rousing story. It wasn’t that it was a captivating read. It was because James Joyce had taken language by the neck and shaken it. He’d treated form and structure like pieces of a Lego set to create something odd and fantastic. He’d shown me in the course of six hundred pages what it was possible to do with words.
I read other challenging books after that. I read Homer and Aristotle, Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, Henrik Ibsen and Shakespeare, all the writers who had influenced James Joyce in the writing of
Finnegans Wake.
I went on to read Beckett, Borges, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams and Jack Kerouac.
Reading
Finnegans Wake
proved to me that I had the intellectual mettle to tackle anything. It allowed me to construct a dream that I too might create worlds upon a page. It took everything I had to finish it, but by the end, I was bigger, hardier, full of grit and eager for the next challenge.
. . .
THERE’S A POETRY
to life that’s easy to miss. You get busy, there are bills to pay, changes to navigate, sudden tragedies, the minute details of keeping yourself on the straight and true. But the poetry is there nonetheless. You just have to live some to learn to see it.
My first car was a 1964 Rambler. It was the Typhoon model, with a 232 in-line six motor and the word “Typhoon” in script along the side. When I got the car in 1976 it was not wearing its age well. The original solar yellow was faded, and the black roof was spotty and easing to dull grey.
The car was rusty, and its seats were torn. It smelled a little funny. The exhaust kicked up smoke, one bumper rattled, and that classic engine took forever to get up to highway speed. The Typhoon sat low on its suspension, causing it to resemble those clown cars you see in the circus. Turning corners I sometimes expected the doors to fall off. But it was my first car and I loved it.
I worked at a place called Seneca Steel in St. Catharines, as a labourer on the foundry floor. My job was to push carts filled with metal plates over to the punch press operators for fabrication, then empty the discarded metal into bins. It was hard, heavy work, with a lot of overtime, and I slept in that car a lot of nights. Truth was, it was my first job in quite a while, and I lived in that old Rambler until I could afford a room.
There was an eight-track cassette deck in the car, and I splurged on music. I drove around the streets of town with The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy pouring out the window. I was twenty-one, working in a steel plant for minimum wage, with no roof over my head and no real direction in my life. But I had a car. That made all the difference.
Summer evenings seemed to last forever back then. Friends and I would cruise for hours, as long as I could afford the gas. We’d lean out the windows shouting at girls or drive to Port Dalhousie beach, where there was an antique carousel, and lean against the hood, drink beer, smoke and listen to music. That car was our clubhouse. Every night we went somewhere.
When everyone had tired out and there was only me and the car and the road, I found an exotic, irreplaceable freedom, a mix of asphalt, headlights and music. I drove into the heart of those deep summer nights, cruising secondary highways and back roads with the windows rolled down and the music washing over me.
There was no desperation in my life then, no anxiety, no worry. There was only the road twisting away into the night, and Bruce Springsteen and his classic song “Thunder Road.” I’d drive and play it again and again until the early morning, when I’d find a place to pull over, get my blankets from the trunk and fall asleep.
That song seemed to come from where I lived, a land of yearning and loneliness with redemption teasingly out of reach. “Thunder Road” was about cars and girls and the way you sometimes find yourself alone on a charcoal stretch of highway wanting nothing else but to drive and drive and drive.
My job bottomed out about the same time the car did. The exhaust system fell off one day, and the drivetrain started making horrendous noises. I sold the car for parts, for about fifty dollars. I tapped it on the hood one last time to say goodbye.
I hitchhiked some after that, explored the country, found whatever work I could. I was a dishwasher in the Salvation Army hostel in Regina, Saskatchewan, when I finally stopped, living in the basement of a rooming house with just my clothes and a stereo. It would be a few years before I had a car again, but I was never without a copy of “Thunder Road.”
There was something in the whine and wail of the harmonica at the start of it that touched me. It was as if a resonant chord lived within me, unresponsive until I heard that sound. It filled my chest, made me want to carry on, made me happy and sad and lonesome all at the same time. Whether I was driving or not, the song recalled old cars, carousels, buddies and shiny, beautiful girls forever out of reach. The nights busting open, those two lanes that can take you anywhere: that’s what Bruce sang. That’s what called to me. The idea of hope, of answers, of salvation just beyond the horizon.
Sometimes now, when the night is long and deep and quiet, I’ll remember an old Rambler and a kid playing a song called “Thunder Road.” Life is filled with poetry. It may not be pretty all the time, but it’s there nonetheless. Our job is to find it for ourselves.
. . .
IT WAS
1976, and the dimness of winter in St. Catharines trapped me. Life was a drab slog of warehouse work. I was lonely in my small room above an alley, with yellowed peeling walls and only a radio for company. Slush permeated me, and everywhere was chill.
As always, I sought respite at the library. One afternoon I happened upon an oversized book of paintings that had been left in the carrel where I often sat. At first I shoved it aside to make room for the handful of books I’d brought to study that day: Rimbaud’s poetry, a play by Eugene O’Neill, essays by Susan Sontag and a biography of Willie Mays.
But the big book kept drawing my eye. Its cover promised colour and warmth, a contrast to my grim working-class tiredness. When I finally flipped it open, a door opened on a new and exciting world. Not just colour, but hues and tones I had never seen, combinations and textures that snared me.
The book was about an artist named Gustav Klimt. He was a rebel, and in the world of the late 1800s he was criticized for his work. I couldn’t see why. Page after page presented a vision that was startling in its genius. I was awestruck by his ability to see feeling in common things, to paint it, leave it there like a message.
After reading for a bit, I came across
The Kiss.
It was painted around 1907, and Klimt had used gold in it as he had in a number of his other works at the same time.
The
Kiss
showed a man and a woman wrapped in gold sheath. There was a two-dimensional quality to it. Klimt had used the paint to create an ancient feel, Byzantine, hieroglyphic almost. It was stunning.
Maybe it was the loneliness I lived in then. Maybe it was the longing I carried for the warmth of arms or the desperation born of hanging on from paycheque to paycheque in a small room in a grey world, but
The Kiss
captivated me. The passion between the man and the woman was so powerfully rendered.
The art in the homes where I’d grown up was the functional domestic art of the late 1960s. If there were paintings at all, they were amateur oils of landscapes. This was from a world I had never seen, never imagined, and I sank luxuriously into the vision on the canvas.
That art book led me to others. I discovered the expressionism of Wassily Kandinsky, the impressionism of Mary Cassatt, the pointillism of Georges Seurat and the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein. Each of them taught me to see the world in a wild, unexpected, triumphant way. I’d passed by the art galleries of the city but had always been too embarrassed by my poverty and lack of acumen to venture in. Now I felt confident about visiting. What I entered into was a spectacular world, a dimension parallel to my own. I bought art posters I couldn’t afford and transformed the dull walls of my room into a pastiche of jubilation. Winter melted into spring and everything got brighter.
Later, when I encountered the art of my people, I realized those vibrant works had taught me to glean meaning and intent from brush stroke, form and perspective, to find the expression of myself in it, to make it my own. There was no translation necessary then. I’d learned the lingo from the masters.
. . .
I REMEMBER THE
1970s as a series of departures. There was nothing for me to hang my life on, no peg, no permanence, so I just kept travelling. If you stayed out there long enough, I figured, you were sure to stick to something, somewhere.
I had a friend who travelled with me some. His name was Joe Delaney. Everyone called him Joey Chips, after a character in a
TV
commercial. Even though he hated the nickname, Chips was how we came to know him.
When I met him we were both hanging out in St. Catharines, at loose ends and trying as hard as we could to be hip and slick and cool. Mostly we hung out with a crowd of street kids who gathered at night around the old courthouse on James Street, across from the Hub Tavern.
The first time Chips and I took off, we had an old 1963 Buick that threw a rod outside Iron Bridge, east of Sault Ste. Marie. We hitchhiked to a small town called Echo Bay, where a group of locals took exception to our long hair. We had to fight our way out of town. We were aiming for Vancouver that time, but we turned back in Winnipeg.
On our next try we wound up in Thunder Bay, where we hired on with a railroad section gang. We stayed in trailers outside a
CNR
stop called Shebandowan, halfway between the Lakehead and Atikokan. It was fall when we arrived. and we worked right through that winter, levelling track, sweeping snow off the switches and freezing in the minus thirty-five degree air.
In 1977 I got a job in Regina, working as a manager trainee for the
S
.
S
.
Kresge company. Chips thumbed his way out to join me, and we rented an apartment. But he was used to a faster life than a prairie town could provide, and he left after a few months. When the Kresge job bottomed out, I called Chips and he came back west, ready to continue our highway jaunt to anywhere.
That didn’t happen, though. There was something in me that longed to be rooted. When I found another job, I prepared to stay. Chips hung in for a while, but there were places he needed to see. If he didn’t know exactly what they were, they called to him anyway.
The last time I saw him was on a sunny April morning in 1978. We stood at the intersection that led to the Trans-Canada Highway and drank coffee until the talk ran out and he turned to go. He shouldered his pack, gave me a gap-toothed grin and walked away. I remember watching him until he disappeared, the road seeming to fold in on him and carry him away.
My life banked up in a long slow curve after that. But he was my last best friend, Joey Chips Delaney. There’s a union that happens when you’re disenfranchised. There’s a gap in you that only another nomad understands. You don’t have to speak of it. It shows in the way you take so easily to the road, to departures sudden, sharp and sad.
Chips and I travelled a lot of hard miles. We stuck together through soup kitchens, flops, fist fights, drunk tanks, hangovers and the back-breaking, mind-numbing work of unskilled men. We shared a lot of lonely highways, each of them leading us somewhere in our hearts and in our dreams. He was my Dean Moriarty. Wherever he is now, I wish him all the grace that those highways finally brought me to.
. . .
I DIDN’T HAVE
any native heroes when I was growing up. When they took me from my people and dropped me into the world of foster homes and adoption, I was lost in the cascade of mainstream influences. The baseball players I cheered for, the musicians, poets, novelists, movie stars and artists I embraced as icons were all non-native. But they shaped my world nonetheless, framed my intellect and defined my tastes. They helped me to become the person I am today. Heroes, after all, assume heroic proportions beyond colour, caste or community. They are sublime.
In my early twenties I was a record collector. Not merely someone who bought or sought out the new and trendy. No, I was one of those rabid
LP
–buying fools who waded through the bins in thrift shops and record stores and scoured garage sales, looking for the great lost album or classic collector’s edition. I read collectors’ magazines and price guides. My shelves bulged with reggae, ska, jazz, country, blues and rock ’n’ roll.