The story of Sodom and Gomorrah was also appealing. The authors certainly outdid themselves here. Imagine: Two male angels show up at Lot’s house, and they become Lot’s honoured guests. But the town is full of hooligans, and sure enough, a posse of men descends on Lot’s house and demands that he “bring [the men] out unto us, that we may know them” (“know” of course meaning “experience sexual congress with”). Lot says, “Look, these men are guests, they’re under the sacred umbrella of hospitality that we’re obliged to provide.” He says, “Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing.” Hospitable! But the hooligans aren’t interested in the virgin girls; it’s male flesh they want.
The angels intervene and temporarily blind the would-be rapists swarming outside. They tell Lot to collect his family and get out of town because God is going to nuke Sodom, and he’ll destroy Gomorrah as well just for good measure. “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” The angels had also admonished Lot’s family to “look not behind thee,” but as we all know, Lot’s wife does look back and is turned into a pillar of salt, which sounds very nuclear . . . reminiscent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when people were turned to pillars of ashes to be blown away by the wind, leaving human shadows on the concrete.
From homosexual rape, fathers offering their virgin daughters to the mob, and nuclear annihilation, the story moves right along to . . . incest! After everyone is killed and Lot and his daughters escape Sodom to live in a mountain cave, the girls lament a lack of men to give them children. “And the firstborn said unto the younger, our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us. . . . Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father.” Next night: same thing, different daughter. “And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him. . . . Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.”
My friends and I read the Bible for that stuff because it was enticing and, while not exactly suppressed, was certainly de-emphasized—the irony of which, like the study of faith itself, can become the lesson. We’d trade stories. “You wouldn’t believe what I read last night.” You’d show somebody where it was. Judith, one of the few heroines—one of the few women even named in the Bible, has sex with King Holofernes, who was attacking Israel, and when he falls asleep she decapitates him. Simple as that. Similarly, there’s an Old Testament account of a woman saving her husband from murder by grabbing the testicles of his assailant. But this turns out to be a tactical mistake, at least for her, because women aren’t allowed that close to non-spousal loins. Her people are left with no other choice than to stone her to death, which they do. Maybe the guy wasn’t enough of an enemy of Israel.
These stories and others added up to a chronicle of horrors that fed our shared suspicion that “religion” was hypocritical bullshit. What about love? The Prince of what peace? Of course love and forgiveness are well represented in the Bible, and that was the content that was mostly taught to us. However, they’re mixed with, even overshadowed by, a misguided attachment to a culture dominated by male insecurity and human hubris (which is nearly all cultures, isn’t it?). The tendency has not weakened with the passage of time. The current swelling wave of fundamentalist fanatics of various stripes invoke the ideals of wholesomeness, love, benevolence, sharing, caring, hugging, praying, all the while hewing tightly to passages in the Bible that appear to sanctify violence and hatred in order to justify messing with the lives of people the fanatics don’t like.
This was the Christianity of my childhood, the slogging through church until we didn’t have to go anymore, the groping of the Bible for juicy bits. Jesus instructs us to love, to seek the Divine in the everyday, to foment real peace and real freedom, to share bounty among the poor, and to challenge malevolent power even if it means placing yourself at great risk. Now and then we run across a human being who actually does that. They don’t always identify themselves as Christian.
3
To this day I don’t know if I graduated from high school. Grade twelve, which I did pass, was not the end. In Ontario at the time one could, and was encouraged to, take grade thirteen, providing an extra year of college-prep high school. I took the courses and wrote the exams but never went to a ceremony, never received a letter, don’t recall seeing a diploma. Which was fine with me. I was glad to escape.
The arts, languages, history; these subjects I enjoyed, and found relatively easy to learn. I did not appreciate regimentation, ill will, and capriciousness on the part of some teachers, and all things mathematical. I hated being asked questions in class to which I could not give an answer. It was humiliating to be tittered at by classmates. I tended to retreat further into my private universe, and adopted a “so what” attitude toward the formalities of school. Once we were given a mandatory IQ test. Intelligence Quotient? The idea of it made me resentful, so I filled in the multiple-choice ovals in a random pattern down the side of the page, without even reading the questions. Whatever my score was, it wasn’t bad enough to get me institutionalized. During the first of my two years in grade eleven, my attitude got me a score of eleven out of one hundred on the math final. The next year, on my second go-round, I scored almost three times better: thirty. After that, they didn’t make me take math anymore.
Of course my parents were dismayed. They had strong academic backgrounds—my dad was a radiologist, my mom had been a medical lab technician—and they expected their children to do well in school. An education was considered the only road to a decent future.
They expected their three boys to attend college. When confronted with the idea of more school, I was horrified. There was nothing I wanted to be. I had no hopes or dreams that I recognized. I just wanted to hang out and play guitar. I said so. “What about music school?” they asked. I needed to pursue some form of higher education so I would “have a degree to fall back on,” the logic went.
“Music school would be okay,” I said.
I imagined, based on my formal piano and theory training, that the classical schools, Julliard, Oberlin, or the Royal Conservatory itself, would require a rigid, technical commitment. That was intimidating. It wasn’t at all clear to me that I had the qualifications to get into those places. We were planning to visit Oberlin when I came across a reference in DownBeat to the fact that Boston’s Berklee College of Music, which the magazine frequently lauded, was now offering a degree program. The sinking feeling in my gut began to abate. I pointed out the new information to Mom and Dad, and they went for it! I suppose they were so relieved that there was a program of study I would actually embrace that they got into it too. They had considerable skepticism about the life of a musician: smoky bars, no money, the company of those with low moral standards—an atmosphere that had a certain appeal for me. A bachelor of music degree, however, would allow me the safe prospect of teaching music in high school. Berklee it would be.
In the mid-sixties it had a solid reputation in jazz circles, but was not known much beyond that. Academic issues didn’t matter a great deal to the Berklee administration. Robert Share, the registrar, was sufficiently impressed with my theory studies, including a book called Composing for the Jazz Orchestra by William Russo (Share said: “If you can make it through Bill Russo’s book, you won’t have any trouble here!”), to consider me qualified. They also may have noticed that my father would be good for the tuition.
It was clear to me that before getting locked into another educational regimen, I needed to travel, something bigger and freer than a family vacation. We’d had some good ones, but they were safe and control
led. I was all pumped up with the headlong trajectory of Kerouac and Ginsberg. I craved adventure. I needed to throw myself into something unknown, travel with only vague destinations, expose myself to the elements, sail the seas. I was already a wanderer in my mind; I wanted to be one physically. Without realizing it I was inaugurating a peripatetic life, sowing the travel seed deep in my psyche, where it would thereafter thrive. I was on my way.
At the Port of Montreal I hauled my duffel bag and an ugly-sounding but indestructible Stella guitar (nestled in a vinyl-lined canvas case my mother had sewn) aboard a small freighter (nine-thousand-ton displacement), which I expected to deliver me to Kristiansand, on the southern tip of Norway. At five in the afternoon we set sail, sliding through the languid June twilight into the St. Lawrence current, under the steel webbing of Pont Jacques Cartier and down the ancient passage toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the world’s largest estuary. After a brief stop to pick up cargo at Port Alfred, near the north of the Saguenay (where we were boarded by customs agents who, on a pretext, confiscated or perhaps simply stole much of the crew’s liquor supply), the ship sailed on to the Strait of Belle Isle, past the forbidding cliffs of Labrador and into the infinite, stormy Atlantic, reversing a journey initiated by Norse Vikings a millennium before.
The trend in shipping had begun to swing toward massive container vessels, but the Mokefjell was old school. In design it followed the pattern of previous generations of steel ships, with a central superstructure that contained the bridge, the officers’ quarters and mess, and accommodations for twelve passengers. I liked the ship. It was graceful and fast, capable of twenty-five knots, and inherently romantic. Freighter passengers could fraternize with the crew, a seemingly logical contact that was disallowed on luxury liners, such as the one I’d been on during a family vacation a couple of years before. On the Mokefjell I was free to explore the ship, and in the process discovered the cavernous, storeys-deep engine room. The chief engineer allowed me the run of the clanky steel ladders and precarious walkways. With its constant roar and throbbing resolve, and spare pistons the size of whales bracketed to the walls, the engine room was a massive display of industrial power even on this relatively small vessel. It wouldn’t be long before giant container ships, with their thirteen-hundred-foot decks and “intermodal” transport boxes, would bully the tidy freighter into oblivion.
Canada Customs notwithstanding, there was still a lot of booze aboard. The sailors ate and drank almost constantly, as a preventive for seasickness, I was told. I followed their example assiduously, and it seemed to be effective. Gale-force winds buffeted the ship during the entire journey. The vessel pitched and yawed, waves frequently broke over and doused the decks, but I felt no discomfort. I made friends with Terje Holst, an oiler in the engine room. (The chief took it upon himself to warn me against this, as in his opinion Terje did not come from a very good family and was likely to get me into trouble.)
One night my new friend invited me to drink aquavit, a vodka-like Norwegian beverage, with him and his mates in his four-man cabin in the sterncastle. After midnight, when the party wound down, I stumbled across the deck toward my quarters amidships. The wind screamed just as we slipped into a deep trough, and a great wave swept across the steel plating. When it passed, I found myself dripping wet, hung on the railing, my arms overtop and my feet stuck underneath. I felt only a small rush of adrenaline, but the awesomeness of my situation was clear. We were in deep ocean. The nearest land was two miles down. Even if someone had seen me go overboard, there would have been nothing they could do except write that sad letter to my folks. I dragged my soggy feet the rest of the way to my bunk. I was calm. I was so drunk it didn’t even scare me. But the next day I thought about it a lot.
My cabin mate on the ship was a flamboyant man named Richard, a blustery German in his thirties who was going back to visit family for the first time since emigrating to Canada as a youth after the war. He was travelling with his girlfriend, but in keeping with the moral imperative of the era, they were not allowed to share the same quarters because they were not married. This arrangement upset both of them, and I had to listen to a fair amount of grumbling. The girlfriend was Eastern European, older, in her fifties and self-conscious about it. Richard was shipping his 1956 Lincoln Premiere convertible back to Germany so he could show off his Canadian success to the relatives back home. He may have also wanted to wind it out on the speed-limitless autobahns, but he would have to navigate some pretty tight roadways to get to them from Norway. When we docked at Kristiansand, Terje and I caught a harrowing ride with this odd couple along Norway’s narrow mountain roads (where an oncoming bus almost finished the job started by that wave) to Oslo, and a warm welcome by Terje’s parents to their home. Fru Holst was very sweet, but insisted on adding a syllable to my name—Bru-seh—because Bruce sounded like Brus, which was the name of a popular soft drink.
Terje and his father took me around. I have a vague memory of eyeing an enormous ski jump built for the recent Winter Olympics, but what made a deeper impression was the visionary Vigeland Sculpture Arrangement, one of the great wonders of human creation: 212 beautifully executed sculptures of robustly healthy humans, all of them nude, appearing to thrive on life itself in an eighty-acre section of Frogner Park, Oslo’s largest public space. The sculptor, Gustav Vigeland (who also designed the Nobel Prize medallion), began installing the sculptures in 1939, one year before the Nazis occupied Norway. The project was completed in 1947. His sculpture garden might best be viewed as a war memorial, commemorating man’s regenerative spirit.
The Holsts owned a cottage on a pretty lake in the wild and densely forested Holmenkollen area north of Oslo. We travelled there for a weekend, bought two cases of beer, and ended up drinking it all with a hulking handyman who at first glance presented a frightening mien until you realized he was harmless in the way that a Doberman is harmless enough to its owner. He had massive hands that looked like they could punch through steel plate. Terje described him as “a really good guy who doesn’t do well in the city,” owing to fights and other such troubles.
In due course Terje’s father repaired to his bunk, leaving me and Terje and the big guy chatting at the table. While the dad snored and farted, we philosophized about the existence of God in the way young people do when they’ve been drinking all that beer. Terje translated for me and the hulk. At a certain point he said, “This is really weird. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m not having to translate. You guys are understanding each other without me having to do anything.” Our friend would say something in Norwegian and I’d respond in English, but it was the appropriate response, and vice versa. It was my first encounter with that aspect of alcohol—the telepathic, or perhaps empathetic, factor. It wasn’t the only time I have experienced it, but it’s probably the most memorable.
Leaving the Holsts’, I took a train through the marshlands from Oslo to Stockholm, across the Scandinavian Peninsula, which is the largest peninsula in Europe, and edged along Lake Vänern, the biggest lake in Europe outside Russia. (It was here around the year 530 that the Swedes and the Geats fought each other on horseback in the Battle on the Ice of Lake Vänern, as described in the Norse sagas and in Beowulf.) The journey took a day. I was met at the station in Stockholm by Per Fagerholm, a young man my age who had visited Ottawa the previous summer, which is when I met him, through our mutual friend Bob Lamble. I don’t recall if it was my parents’ idea or mine, but somehow it was decided that for my post–high school adventure I should travel to Scandinavia and visit Per. Sounded great to me. When I finally got there, the Fagerholms welcomed me to their Stockholm apartment and I stayed a couple of weeks.
When we weren’t spending time with his family, Per and I went to parties and clubs. We especially enjoyed Stockholm’s folk music venues, the most interesting of which were carved out of mothballed Baltic fishing boats moored along the jetties in the older part of town. One night I stayed out very late at one of the boat clubs, exchang
ing caresses in the shadows with a girl I’d met at a party some days earlier. She called herself Miss Sand. She had befriended me out of pity for my inability to follow the flow of Swedish conversation. As with most of the Swedes I met, her school English was very good. She was pretty and gave me the time of day, and I became desperately enamored of her. I spent as much time as I could in her company, hoping with equal desperation to lose my virginity, by which I felt greatly burdened. On this particular night Per went home around midnight, but I lingered with Miss Sand, eventually making my way on foot, some hours later, toward the Fagerholms’ apartment.
At that lonely hour the waterfront took on an edgy, slightly dangerous atmosphere. Per’s place lay about forty-five minutes away. The night was unseasonably cold, even for that latitude, and I burrowed into my borrowed overcoat. I was stepping briskly across one of the city’s many bridges when a solitary car approached. I was aware of a man’s sallow face, obscured by reflected streetlight, behind the driver’s window as he passed. I didn’t want to make eye contact, but when I heard him make a U-turn I knew I was in trouble even before he pulled alongside to keep pace with me. The imagery of this encounter remained vivid, so that more than thirty years later I rendered it into the first verse of “The Charity of Night,” the title cut from my 1996 album of the same name. The song is an audio triptych that connects three formative events of my life during a thirty-year period, shaped into the abstraction of a love story. People have asked me to elaborate on the predator on the bridge, but I have declined. Let it be known, however: no shots were fired.
Rumours of Glory Page 5