Falling Backwards: A Memoir

by Arden, Jann

  It took me an hour to make up my first song. I called it “Paradise” and it was about my parents dying. I set the bar very high early in my career to write the most depressing songs possible. Soon I was writing a new song every day. I had books filled with lyrics and chords secretly stashed away in my bedroom. I was mortified that somebody might stumble across them, so I made sure they were some place no one would think to look. There was a crawlspace you could access through a little door in my bedroom, which was more or less a junk space. The angle was too sharp for it to be part of the actual room, so it was just left unfinished. I stuffed my writing books up underneath the pink insulation. My hands and arms were always itchy from shoving them so far inside it. Eventually I had to find a new hiding place because there were just too many books to stash there.

  Writing songs was all I did. I never intended a soul to ever hear any of them, they were solely for my personal enjoyment. I don’t think I realized how badly I needed to express myself. I couldn’t wait to get out of school. I sat at my desk and stared at the clock on the wall and willed the arms to spin themselves around to 3:30. The bus ride home seemed to take nine hours. I can’t recall learning anything in school between 1974 and 1980. It’s truly a miracle that I can write my own name.

  I was surprised by what came out of me, to tell you the truth. All the songs were drenched in blues and greys. I was such a funny kid. I loved laughing, I loved humour and I loved being a jackass. To make somebody laugh was very empowering. Being funny helped me out at school a lot. Kids were afraid to pick on somebody they knew was quick on her feet. I can’t remember a single kid in my class who ever engaged me in a battle of wits. I was grateful for that. I never used my humour to make fun of anybody else either. I didn’t have the stomach or the heart for bullying. In fact, I hated seeing any kid get picked on, and I wish I had done more to stop it when I saw it happening around me. Being silent about bullying is just as bad as being the bully. You’re either the good guy or the bad guy. You can’t sit on the fence. I wish I had known that then, but wisdom is not for the young. Time doles it out. That’s the only way to get your hands on it.

  I was very seldom, if ever, serious around my house. I felt that somebody had to provide a bit of levity there and that somebody was me! It made me feel good to see my mom laugh.

  There was nothing like standing in front of a group of people and making them burst into guffaws over something I’d said or done. It was like a drug. Perhaps that’s why I had a hard time understanding the polarity in my songwriting. My music was profoundly serious and morose and reverent, while my personality was just plain zany and offbeat. There was never a morsel of humour to be found in any of my songs. Music was off limits to humour and even to irony. I don’t know why, but I protected my songs from that part of my personality. I guess there was a part of me that knew she’d have to be taken seriously someday.

  I spent hundreds of hours in the basement listening to records. My parents had a whole bunch of old albums that had been sitting in boxes for far too many years. I fished them out to discover what in the heck they’d been rocking out to before they had kids. I came to the conclusion that they never rocked out, certainly not to any of the albums I found in that cardboard box. They had Sammy Davis Jr. and Nana Mouskouri and Roger Whittaker and Neil Diamond. Duray’s collection included Frank Zappa, KISS, Jethro Tull and the Guess Who. My influences were far flung, to say the least. You wouldn’t think that Frank Zappa would be high on my list of influences, but he did teach me one very important thing and that was that you could say anything you wanted in a song. I thought that was awesome. One of the lines he wrote in a song was “Billy was a mountain, Ethel was a tree growing off of his shoulder.” I never forgot that line or that song. Frank taught me that I could say anything, so I did.

  My sensible dad, for some strange reason, had a moment of utter weakness and let us join the Columbia Record Club. I could not believe that he said yes. I don’t think he had a clue about what we were getting ourselves into. For one cent you could buy ten albums that would be rushed right to your door. Yes, right to your door!

  It seemed too good to be true, and of course it was. My dad said a few goddammits about the Columbia Record Club before it was all over, let me tell you. Yes, we did receive our ten albums for one cent and then every month after that they’d send us one that we didn’t order and definitely didn’t want, and they’d charge us full price for it. If we didn’t like the album that they’d sent we’d have thirty days to send it back and not be charged but otherwise we were. (Insert small print here. I am already confused.) Who had the time to ship unwanted albums back? They didn’t exactly make it easy—there were many serial numbers to fill in on long, complicated forms and the return address was some place in Buffalo, New York, and that required postage to the States. Holy Moses, my dad was so mad that I thought his heart would explode. I learned even more swear words than I thought existed in the English language.

  For years we received wacky unknown albums from the Columbia Record Club and we never sent one of them back. Sometimes I’d know who the artist was, but not very often. We filed them all away in the basement with KISS and Frank Zappa and Olivia Newton-John. Our Columbia Record Club pile just kept getting higher, and our pile of ridiculous bills kept getting higher and higher too. My dad said he wasn’t going to pay the bastards ten red cents. (We did actually pay them the initial ten red cents, just so you know.) Sometimes it was good to have a dad like mine. Nobody messed with my dad, myself included.

  I was always excited to get the newest record in the mail from the Columbia Record Club, even if I hadn’t heard of the band. Nobody else seemed as interested as I was. I’d stare at the covers for hours. One month we received Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I played a song called “The Lonely Bull” about forty-five million times. My dad used to stomp on the kitchen floor and demand that I turn it down. That’s when headphones really would have come in handy, but sadly we didn’t own a pair. Headphones hadn’t even been invented yet. (I hope I’m kidding.)

  The one album I did get that changed my entire young life was the new Carpenters record. When it showed up in our mailbox I nearly fell over. They were so popular—you heard one of their songs on the radio at least every hour. I’d loved them since I first heard them in Judith’s music class. They were fascinating to me because they were so young.

  Michelle’s Tiger Beat magazines showed the Carpenters performing in Japan, of all places! They were becoming famous all over the world. I wondered what that must feel like. I bet it felt weird. Karen Carpenter looked to be the same age as me. All of the other singers that my parents owned on vinyl seemed to me to have one foot in the grave. Roger Whittaker whistled, for crying out loud, and Nana Mouskouri had big, thick, black glasses. Only old people wore glasses. Only old people whistled. My shop teacher whistled and wore bifocals, that’s how I knew the singers on my parents’ records were ancient. I was grateful to finally be exposed to artists with whom I had something in common—first and foremost among which was being alive.

  I couldn’t get down to the basement fast enough. I carefully but quickly ripped the Carpenters record out of its package and steadied my hand to put in onto the turntable. (I had to tape four pennies onto the needle to get it to play the records. Otherwise, the needle popped off and the record would skip. I discovered the penny trick all on my own. It beat holding my finger on the needle, as eventually my arm would freeze up.) There is nothing like hearing a song for the first time and letting it wash over you. You become addicted to it. I became addicted to the Carpenters. The sound I heard when the needle hit the spinning record was magic. That white static crackling noise that suddenly filled an entire room with possibility. (How the heck did they get the music to fit onto those plastic grooves? It didn’t make sense to me. Modern science was a marvel. What would they think of next? Pretty soon we’d be calling people from anywhere in the world using a little phone that could fit in your ear and TV would play on a sc
reen on your wristwatch. That would be the day.)

  Albums were so much easier to play than 45s. We never seemed to have that middle plastic thingy that kept the 45 from doing a loop-the-loop while you were trying to centre it. Duray used to put masking tape over the inch-wide hole and then punch the steel rod in the middle of the turntable through that to keep it steady. I always thought that was so clever. Duray was clever.

  I played the Carpenters record over and over, and then I played it some more. It was on repeat for six months. I learned to strum along to the songs by ear and eventually had them all memorized. I moved from the Carpenters to Olivia Newton-John’s Come On Over LP and then onto Carly Simon and Bette Midler and James Taylor and Jim Croce. I tackled so many records I lost track. School definitely took a back seat, if not a place in the trunk.

  The Columbia Record Club was turning me into kind of a recluse. I had a big secret, and it felt fantastic. I had something that was mine. I don’t know what my parents thought I was doing down there in the basement, but I am sure they were glad that I was home and not getting myself into any trouble. They already had one kid who was doing plenty of that.

  When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, my mother finally came to the end of her very frayed rope. She said it took her a long time to find the courage to tell my dad he was going to have to move out. She didn’t know what to expect. She had no idea how he’d react to the news that she wanted a separation. She assumed that he’d fly off the handle like he usually did and start hollering at the top of his lungs, but he did no such thing. He was actually very sullen and quiet. He was probably shocked that such words had come out of my mother’s mouth.

  She said the hardest part of telling him was finding a moment when he was sober enough to understand what she was asking him to do. She told him that she could not live with someone who thought drinking was more important than his family and that he’d have to find somewhere else to live. My dad didn’t say anything; what was there to say? He went upstairs to their bedroom and started throwing clothes into a suitcase. He grabbed four or five suit jackets, his shaving kit, socks, underwear, T-shirts—all the usual suspects—and he walked out the back door to his company car. My mom said she bawled her head off as he drove out of the yard and then she went into her ironing room.

  The plane had finally come down for an emergency landing.

  My mom didn’t have a clue about where he was going or what he was going to do. She didn’t ask and I don’t think she cared. She was relieved to have it over and done with. That was that. Things were going to change around our house.

  I remember her having the talk with us about what was going on with her and dad and what was probably going to happen. She wasn’t sure how long we’d be able to stay in the house. She told us that she didn’t know if he was going to come back or not. She told us that he had to do something about his drinking, because she couldn’t live with him anymore. It was too hard. She told us it was up to him now.

  That didn’t sound very promising.

  It was very quiet around our house those first few days. It was like it had been raining hard for months and months, and then suddenly it stopped. You don’t know how noisy it is sometimes until the noise goes away. Patrick and I sat silently at the dinner table and ate our sloppy joes and drank our milk and wondered what our futures would be. My mom pushed her food around on her white CorningWare plate and stared out the window. I am sure she felt completely and utterly alone. (CorningWare plates were supposed to be unbreakable, so we decided we’d throw them onto the kitchen floor to test that theory out. They do break into a million tiny shards of white glass, just so you know.)

  —

  I didn’t want to have to move. I didn’t want to lose my dog, Aquarius, and I didn’t want to have to change schools and start over again. I wanted everything to be normal—whatever that meant. I didn’t think about how my mother felt. I feel terrible about that now. Looking back is sometimes harder than looking forward. At least you don’t know what the future is and there’s always hope, whereas what’s behind you never changes; in fact sometimes it seems to just get worse. The mind is a funny thing that way. It can take a memory and twist it a thousand times over.

  A week or so after my dad left, he came by the house because he hadn’t taken any pants with him. He’d been in such a hurry that he’d packed up his jackets but not the matching pants to go with them. It was awkward for everybody. Maybe he did it on purpose. Maybe he wanted my mom to say, “Just kidding! Come home!” She didn’t. He gathered up a few more things, put them into a plastic bag and drove off again. He looked incredibly sad to me.

  For the first time I felt like crying. I hadn’t done that yet. I was going to miss his Saturday morning fry-up breakfasts. I was going to miss going to the drive-in on Friday nights. I was going to miss … I couldn’t think of anything else I was going to miss, but I really tried to. I felt like my world was falling apart. It was, however, very good songwriting material.

  My dad moved into a little apartment with his friend Mel, who had also been booted out of his house by his wife, for reasons unknown to me. My mom was relieved because Mel was apparently very clean and for some reason she felt better about my dad living with someone who knew how to keep a house tidy. Mel could also cook. I knew who Mel was because he and his wife had been good friends with my parents for years. I remember visiting them at their half-built house out in Millarville, a little country town an hour or so outside of Calgary. I remember playing with Mel’s three wild kids. They were very likeable children—slightly weird and a bit rough around the edges, but I loved that.

  I don’t know why they didn’t finish building their house, but they never did. Its lonesome frame stood in the middle of a big field with plastic sheeting over the windows instead of glass. The sheets would flap back and forth like an old, tired flag. The prairie wind blew through the tar paper–covered walls, causing a constant faint whistle. It was a singing house, complete with dancing arms and legs. The floor was covered with planks of wood that you could look down through to the basement. The appliances just stood in the middle of the kitchen, waiting to be put into place. None of the cupboards had doors. There were plain wooden shelves filled with unmatched plates and glasses. It all looked sad to me. It felt sad, too. There wasn’t a tree in sight. No matter which way you looked, there was mile after mile of nothing—just a whole lot of dirt and endless open range. I guess that’s why they call it the prairies. Maybe that unfinished house was why Isabel kicked Mel out.

  In happier times, mom and dad used to sit around the kitchen table with Mel and Isabel and drink pot after pot of coffee and laugh. (There may have been something in the coffee, one never knows.) We kids would throw back a pop and a handful of potato chips and head outside to play. It didn’t matter what the weather was like, we’d be out there running around like a pack of wolves. We always had fun because Mel and Isabel had a barn full of horses and cats and giant piles of hay. Patrick nearly died after playing in that haystack; he could barely suck in a single merciful breath after ten minutes of climbing around on the bales. It was a risk he was willing to take, though—that’s how much fun it was.

  Mel and Isabel’s wild kids, Billy Ruth, Bobby June and Tyler (Tyler was the only boy), were skilled yet creepy horse whisperers. They could make a horse do things that defied rational explanation. Their horses could sit and stay, shake a hoof and practically roll over. I swear they could almost talk! I heard it with my own ears. Those kids had been on the back of a horse before they could walk or talk, and they made sure they told us that every few minutes.

  “We been ridin’ since we wasn’t walkin’ or crawlin’ …” (Yeah, you just told us that). Patrick once asked me if they were “normal” kids. I told him that they weren’t. I told him that I didn’t quite know what they were. I think Patrick was really asking if they were dangerous. Fearless is what they were. They were completely themselves, which I thought was spectacular. I envied them. I assumed that they we
re real country kids, complete with running noses and red necks, unlike us. Patrick also asked me if they went to school. I honest-to-God didn’t know. I never thought about it. Let’s assume they did.

  I don’t think Mel was a big drinker; I think he and his wife split up because she just didn’t love him anymore. That was a fate worse than what my dad had suffered. Yes, he got kicked out, but my mom still loved him; he just had a drinking problem. Mel, on the other hand, had quite simply been set adrift.

  I guess my dad started going to AA shortly after he moved in with Mel, because he called up my mom and told her that he was sober. Even though Mel was a good housekeeper, and a somewhat decent cook, my dad wanted to come home. My mom had laid down the law, though, and she had a list of things that he had to do in order for him to qualify for re-entry into our house. I’m not sure what was on that list, but no drinking was at the top of it. I was proud of my mom for sticking to her guns.

  My mom was constantly worried about money so she balanced her chequebook a lot. I would see her hunched over my dad’s desk, shuffling through piles of papers and bills. “It never ends,” she’d lament. It couldn’t have been easy being there alone with us, paying bills and fixing things and driving us all over hell’s half-acre and all that other stuff you have to do when you’re running a household. It must have been scary at night, thinking about people breaking in and murdering us all. (Maybe she didn’t think about that but I did.) We didn’t have an alarm system. We did have Aquarius, but he wasn’t much of a guard dog. He licked complete strangers like they were cheeseburgers.

  We didn’t talk about my dad for weeks. We all tried to keep busy. The first time my dad came home for a visit sober, he came bearing a brand-new iron for my mother. It was a very weird gift to bring to a woman you wanted to woo back into your life. She said to him, “What’s this?” and he replied, “Well, I knew you needed a new iron.” My dad knew the way to my mother’s heart. You’d think he would have brought flowers or chocolates but no, he brought a new Sunbeam steam iron. I think my mom was happy to get it, though; it’s the thought that counts, and she did iron more than an entire legion of Chinese dry cleaners.