Cigar Box Banjo (3 page)

“Okay.” I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t want to alarm people, I suppose, and at that moment, I couldn’t really think of anyone to alarm. My most recent romantic relationship had busted up. I had an ex-wife, one adult daughter (the other still a teen), friends I figured would come to my aid. But, hell, it was probably just pneumonia, exacerbated by my severe tulip allergy.

When a new doctor, Dr. Tran, came in, he informed me that there were many reasons I might have fluid around my lungs, the most common two being infection and cancer. “Infection is eight times more common than cancer,” he said. He left, then returned a short while later with a tray full of equipment, vials and litre bottles and lengths of tubing and assorted needles. He and an aide made me sit up on my wheelie hospital bed. They placed a table beside it so that I could drape my arms across it and lean forward. Dr. Tran tapped and thumped my back with his thick fingers, marked a spot with a pirate’s X for freezing. “Little sting like a bee,” he said as the needle carrying the anaesthetic pierced the skin. He didn’t say anything before he drove the two-inch draining needle into my back. He didn’t say, for example, “Now it will feel like a rabid wolverine ripping through your flesh to suck out the life-juice.” A warm sensation spread across my back as fluid o’er-spilled the puncture. Dr. Tran showed me a test tube full of light brown fluid. “It looks like this.” He angled the needle again and pushed it hard. Before long he had collected three litres of the stuff, which looked suspiciously like beer. English bitter, of which I have had my share, and for a second I thought that perhaps at some point, in my haste, I had dumped a few pints down the wrong hole.

As painful as the ordeal was, every second it went on I felt lighter, better. They left the bottles of fluid beside me for most of the evening, and I spent the night in the emergency ward. They asked if I wanted painkillers; although my back was sore, I felt right enough. They asked if I wanted something to help me sleep, but I thought I’d be able to manage it drug-free. I was exhausted, spent. I still couldn’t think of anyone to contact. I text-messaged a woman I’d known, briefly, the previous autumn. “I’m in the hospital.”

“Yikes! What’s wrong?”

“If I’m lucky,” I punched out with my thumbs, “it’s pneumonia.”

I WAS discharged from the hospital, having had, as I say, more than three litres of fluid removed from the cavity surrounding my left lung. What I’d experienced was, to give it an impressive scientific name, a “massive pleural effusion.” The high honcho doctor, head of Respirology, had come into my hospital room to tell me it was “obviously very serious,” but he said it would take them a few days to figure out why, exactly, the fluid had accumulated. So home I went, supplied with some killer antibiotics, and in a few days I was feeling pretty good. Indeed, when my friend Shaughnessy called, checking up on me, I said, “You know what, Shaughn, I’m half-inclined to believe in God. Because, face it, I was kind of at a low point. I mean, there’s no work . . .” (the Canadian television and movie industry, which is where I’d long made my pin money, was moribund, with nothing being produced) “. . . my career as a novelist isn’t going anywhere . . .” (
The Ravine,
my last book, had been long-listed for the Giller Prize, but pretty much ignored after that) “ . . . my personal life is a mess . . .” (which was, of course, more my fault than anybody else’s) “. . . so maybe this health scare is God’s way of saying, ‘Hey, fat-boy, you should appreciate what you’ve got.’”

And that was the attitude with which I, accompanied by Martin Worthy, my dear friend and a founding member of the musical group Porkbelly Futures, went to attend my consultation with Dr. Frazier on May 11, 2009.

“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.

“I feel terrific,” I said.

“Great, just great.” Dr. Frazier picked up a file. “Well, we’ve got some answers for you. It’s cancer. It’s lung cancer—”

(“Hold on, hold on!” I wanted to shout. “Didn’t you just hear me tell you I felt terrific?”)

“It’s the non-small cell type of cancer. You have what we call a ‘sessile’ tumour. It’s not what we’d call an operable cancer it’s a you’re a and think in terms of months andjkghghjgkkljhjkghjkghghjghjlshgjhkasjhkjashdjkn . . .”

SO—WHERE DO we go from here? Well, like I said, I had just finished a little memoir about my life in music. That word, “memoir,” suddenly acquired holy heft. The phrase “months to live” fires up all sorts of engines, most of them a little selfish (I’ve got to get laid a lot, I have to eat a forty-dollar Kobe beef hamburger), some of them a little more lofty. Namely, I wanted to write some of this down. So, I had this memoir, and my Publisher had asked for a rewrite, and he really liked the personal stuff, hmmm . . .

“I’ll need a couple of months with that second draft,” I told the Publisher. “I’m just going to add a new thematic concern.”

“Umm . . . sure.”

If I do my job well, this won’t be quite the motley pastiche you might imagine. I’ve become very interested in the process of songwriting. Writing songs is a way to interact with the world, to take it in as experience (employment, job dismissals, hopeful first dates, clumsy hand-jobs, bad whisky, rejected marriage proposals, accepted marriage proposals, bad love, true love, long road trips, and pronouncements of fatal disease) and spit it out in three- to four-minute units of airborne beauty and grace. And at this point in my life—way closer to the end than I thought I’d be at the age of fifty-six—music has acquired more importance than it ever had.

When I was a small child, my favourite recording was something called “The Cigar Box Banjo.” I summarized the story in
The Ravine,
but assuming you haven’t read that novel—a reasonable assumption—I’m going to do so again here.

A boy makes a banjo out of a cigar box. (How, exactly, I didn’t know at the time, and I won’t detail here. These days, there are blueprints and schematics aplenty available at the click of a key. But it was a long-standing source of frustration for me as a kid that much of what excited me in the realm of fiction was impossible to duplicate in real life. I did get my hands on a cigar box, away back when, but that only made things worse, since I couldn’t see how to attach a neck or strings.)

Anyway: this boy hears of a contest, a banjo-playing contest, taking place in the next town, some ten miles away. Despite the fact that the kid has nothing like a show piece, he decides he will go compete. So (without informing his parents, I remember, simply heading off) he begins to walk the dusty road. As he goes along, the lad hears things—a bluebird’s song, for instance, the whine of truck tires, the lowing of a cow— and he imitates these things on his cigar box banjo, layering one upon another. By the time he reaches the contest site, he has an entire song. He plays this, and he wins.
³

I loved that story, and I think it stands as a reasonable template for the creative process.
⁴
As songwriters and novelists and musicians travel through their lives, they collect little themes and motifs and whistles and airs, and they string them together to fashion their wares. This book follows my travels down the musical road, and I intend to commence that forthwith.

1
I actually have nothing more to say about Mr. Lanois at this moment. I just wanted to introduce the notion of footnotes, and I thought his name afforded a good opportunity to get people to glance downwards. Thank you.

2
I learned later the technician was reacting to the fact that when he checked the X-ray, there was only a huge white cloud where the left lung should have appeared.

3
Ira Gershwin wrote in his diary: “Heard in a day: An elevator’s purr, telephone’s ring, telephone’s buzz, a baby’s moans, a shout of delight, a screech from a ‘flat wheel,’ hoarse honks, a hoarse voice, a tinkle, a match scratch on sandpaper, a deep resounding boom of dynamiting in the impending subway, iron hooks on the gutter.”

4
I have one small quibble with the recording: the prize is a brand-new, store-bought banjo, which the kid happily accepts. I pictured him tossing away his jerry-rigged trash with disdain. This has always struck me as a poor choice, story-wise. It would have been much better if the kid had danced with the one that brought him, if you see what I mean—if he’d politely declined the grand prize.

CHAPTER
1

O
N MY father’s side of the family, everyone is either a teacher or a musician, except for those hopelessly indecisive sorts—my cousin Doug is an example—who have opted to become music teachers. My great-uncles, my grandfather’s brothers, were all musicians, and that included Rance Quarrington, who was apparently a star of the radio waves, the possessor of wondrously mellow windpipes. (My brother Anthony B. Quarrington—Tony— claims that Rance starred in a movie entitled
The Man from Toronto,
but I have no evidence to support that. No evidence suggesting he
didn’t
star in such a film, mind you.)

My grandfather himself had a long succession of careers. He was a travelling salesman for a while, back in the days when that vocation was conducted mostly by rail. He accumulated years and years of bumpy seat-time, and during this period he learned to walk a coin across his knuckles. As a child, I was greatly impressed with this little piece of legerdemain, constantly inveighing the elderly Jewish fellow who was my grandfather to walk a nickel or a quarter back and forth atop his fist. (No, I’m not Jewish, but I’m pretty sure my grandfather was. If you saw a photograph of Joe Quarrington, you would be convinced.) He was also a photographer, and set up shop as a portraitist. This was in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and those times being what they were—every bit as strange as these times—my grandfather attracted many customers who were interested in having their Kirlian auras captured on film. “Please take my portrait,” they would say, “but not before I meditate for a few minutes.” I imagine these people concentrating so hard that their faces coloured and steam shot out of their nostrils, but when my grandfather emerged later from the darkroom, there was never any evidence of Kirlian auras. I like to believe it was because he could not abide their disappointment that my grandfather took to dusting cornstarch onto the negatives before slipping them into the chemical bath. The resulting image showed the subject surrounded by a halo of feathery cloud, the air pregnant with luminous parhelions. Business picked up quite a bit.

I write of these things—the coin-knuckle thimbleriggery and the photographic flummery—because they both, to me, indicate personality traits common to musicians. Let’s say, the willingness to invest thousands of hours toward a small, inconsequential end and the desire to please people. And indeed my grandfather could play many instruments and was a violinist in the no longer extant Ottawa Symphony.
¹

Tony, who is my older brother, acquired a banjo when we were kids. There was a folk revival going on, the movement that would spawn Bob Dylan. So Tony got a banjo, and the elderly Jewish fellow showed him how to play some chords. It was in this manner that live music entered our household. There were, to be sure, instruments in the house prior to this. An old, hulking piano resided in the basement. An African drum was spotted here and there, a small, exotic animal looking for a place to get comfortable. And there was an ocarina, too; my father would periodically pop the mouthpiece between his lips and wheeze out the theme from
The Third Man.

Soon I wanted to play an instrument. (All this predates, by a few months, anyway, the advent of the Beatles, after which everybody and their brother decided to take up an instrument.) I started strumming along quite spiritedly on a mandolin, chosen because it was a small instrument and I owned a small hand. The first song I learned to play was a classic, “This Land Is Your Land.” As first songs go, this was a pretty good one. There is wonderful power and poetry in the lyrics, and in adopting “This Land Is Your Land” as an ideal, a basic template, I had (unknowingly) set the bar rather high. I say “(unknowingly)” because I was preoccupied not only with fingering the chords but with trying to remember the words. It is a geographical song, and at least off the top is concerned with naming places. I have trouble retrieving mere lists from the memory banks. Moreover, there was a Canadian version (“from Bonavista to Vancouver Island”), and I was torn between this version and the “real” one, so often I bellowed out an odd combination of the two.
²

WOODROW WILSON Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, the son of a businessman, landowner, and Democratic politician. (I mean, his father was all those things; it wasn’t my intention to suggest some Satanic trinity.) Woodrow was a bright lad, and he read constantly. That didn’t prevent him from leaving high school before graduation. It is said he picked up harmonica by hanging around a street corner beside a black man and his shoeshine box. He learned a little guitar in order to accompany his cousin, a fiddler. And that’s what Woody was, a widely read kid who could play a little music, when he joined the thousands of Okies travelling westward to California, where, it was said, there was work. This was the Dust Bowl era, and out on the coast was the mythical “pie in the sky.”
³

I don’t know at what point Guthrie became “politicized,” a word I’ve put in quotes mostly because it makes me kind of uneasy. I sometimes conflate Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck’s fictional Tom Joad. In
The Grapes of Wrath,
Joad is made increasingly aware of injustice and suffering; he discovers the worth of every single human being, regardless of wealth or origin, and he goes out into the world to fight for the dignity of all. I believe something like that happened to Guthrie; indeed, one of his most enduring songs is “Tom Joad.” Guthrie was also inspired to write a song about Thomas Mooney, a labour leader imprisoned for bombing the Preparedness Day march of 1916 (killing ten and injuring forty), a crime virtually no one thought he actually committed. But as the fine songwriter Steve Earle once remarked, “I don’t think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times.” I’m guessing that Guthrie was inspired by a good story as much as by his outrage. After all, he did write “Pretty Boy Floyd.” The song makes an eloquent point about the callousness of banks (“some rob with a fountain pen”), but Charles Arthur Floyd was pretty much a murdering thug.