by Tom Wilson
DEATH OF A WARRIOR—ONE
On a Sunday night in 1984, having been on the road for a while, I rolled off the 403 into Hamilton, crawled up the Jolley Cut, along Concession and home to George and Bunny’s apartment on Ben Lomond Place. When I opened the apartment door, Bunny was waiting in her apron and looked tired and upset. I got the impression she’d been waiting there for a while.
George was becoming very forgetful, losing interest in the news on the radio and his favourite TV programs, drifting off and changing subjects during simple conversations. They had been in Niagara Falls for the weekend, and George had struggled to remember where he was or how to get around the small hotel room.
Bunny always mapped out foreign territory for George by leading his hand along the walls, counting steps from one point to the next, directing him away from furniture that might be bumped into or knocked over along the way. But that weekend he couldn’t follow Bunny’s careful instructions or remember the map. He had no idea where he was and kept asking her to go get Bunny. When she told him that she was Bunny he became aggressive and called for his real wife.
George was falling down the long dark hole of Alzheimer’s, and Bunny had just noticed. She was devastated and confused herself, and she was looking for someone to blame. But there was no one. Bunny was about to lose another piece of the man she loved.
It’s one kind of misery to forget, to not know your loved ones or your surroundings, to lose your sense of time and space. But to lose all this and be blind too is a merciless torture for everyone.
Bunny spoon-fed George his meals. She kept watch over his every move, through every sleepless night. I watched them together and realized theirs was a true love story.
Bunny saw George for the first time across the floor of an armed forces dance just outside Montreal. He was wearing his uniform. She took one look at him, leaned over to her sister Doris and whispered, “There’s the man I’m going to marry.” And that was that.
They got married in a flurry, and then she watched him hop on a train at Montreal’s Windsor Station with thousands of other Canadian Forces servicemen and disappear into war. She was there when he came home blinded, addicted to morphine. She sat beside him on barstools at the El Mocambo, carried him home to their apartment on Huron Street, and now, forty years later, was still front and centre to love him through his final battle with the son-of-a-bitch disease that steals you from yourself.
After a while Bunny couldn’t deal with George at home. One day, I drove them to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, where Bunny checked George into Warrior’s Hall. Hospitals are horrible places to begin with, but this one was infused with all the sadness that comes with an unwelcome finale. Wheelchairs lined the hallways. There was no clean corner to stand in. There were no magic answers.
I wheeled George out of the elevator and down to the end of the hallway, and got him comfortable in his room. Bunny insisted on unpacking his things, organizing them in his closet and drawers. I watched her arrange what seemed like ancient artifacts in the bathroom’s medicine cabinet. The razor George used when, as small child, I would stand watching him shave. George would pretend to put Aqua Velva on my face and I would use my Dennis the Menace razor beside him. Now Bunny shaved George every morning with George’s same razor, and she’d brought a bottle of Aqua Velva too.
His leather winter hat and his boots were placed in the closet, but he wouldn’t need them again. George Wilson wasn’t going anywhere.
I wanted a drink. More, I just wanted to wash all this from my brain. I pushed away my selfishness and stood tall to support Bunny. She was acting like everything was all right and that this was all just temporary. I stayed true to the pretense. I would not betray the weakened fringes I saw all around her. I pretended her pain went unnoticed.
It was a game the two of us had perfected through a lifetime together. We might have folded. Kept each other company. Consoled one another. But I was too scared and weak. And Bunny was just Bunny. Hard-shelled outside, soft centre, with a veil over the whole mess, disguising her every move.
I sat there with Bunny and George for hours before Bunny finally tore herself from his side and we left the ward and took the drive home to Hamilton. The next morning, though, Bunny was up and out the door, on the GO bus to Union Station, and then onto a subway all the way up to Davisville, then onto the Bayview Avenue bus that took her to Sunnybrook so she could feed George lunch.
This went on for four years. George was emptied out. Held upside down and all the contents shaken from his pockets. He sat outside his hospital room in a wheelchair, unidentified to the universe. Who he was had disappeared through a pinhole of light.
But maybe he had escaped. Maybe his shell, his skull, his arms and legs were stuck sitting in Warrior’s Hall at Sunnybrook Hospital, but in his long-gone mind he was running along a beach somewhere, watching the sun set into an ocean. Or maybe he was back in Cookstown with his mom and dad, taking off across the fields on a tractor, or back in Ireland, skinning his knees in the Dublin streets.
I wondered how long he would hold on. No sight, no legs, no speech, and as deaf as you could get before turning to stone. Sometimes I’d pull up a wheelchair and sleep beside him. I didn’t know what else to do.
I tried not to think about the two if us getting haircuts together at the Fennell Square barber shop when I was little, or about him laying out towels for us in the front yard to have snacks on. I didn’t think about building blanket forts around him in his chair in the living room. I didn’t think about him drinking rum and smoking Export Plains at the kitchen table, or whistling along with Don Messer or cursing Dave Hodge on Hockey Night in Canada. All that was gone for both of us. I shared the darkness in his head and the nothingness that he felt as I sat in the chair beside him drifting in and out of sleep.
And then on December 12, 1988, I got a call from Bunny telling me that I should come in right away. “Your father is dying.”
In slow motion, I watched myself get out of bed, get dressed, find my car keys and head out the front door of our rundown house. I knew I should have been rushing, I knew George was dying. I saw the big flakes of snow falling and filling in any colour of the day with white, but I just could not adjust my speed. I brushed off my old Crown Victoria, backed out of the driveway and, without snow tires, skidded down Barnesdale Boulevard to King Street, turned left and headed through downtown Hamilton towards the 403.
Somewhere around Bay Street I spotted an old rounder I knew from the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto. He was standing in the snow just off the curb, hitchhiking. I used to buy coke off him. He was living in Hamilton now, hanging around Hess Village, causing shit, playing in bands, screwing everyone’s girlfriends, and he had recently developed a large, unhealthy appetite for heroin. He was mostly drunk whenever I saw him, which was weekly because I was causing my own shit around the village at the time and we’d bump into each other in the wee hours after the bars closed down. And there he stood with his thumb in the air in a snowstorm. George was dying, Bunny told me I needed to hurry. But I pulled over, rolled down my window and asked this ne’-er-do-well where he was heading. Turns out he’d had a cheque waiting for him at the Horseshoe for a year but he was now so broke he was finally going to pick it up. I told him to hop in, that I’d get him there.
Why did I do that?
Maybe I thought he was holding and he’d have a couple of lines to wake me up, help me face what waited for me at Warrior’s Hall. Or maybe I just wanted to avoid the obvious face of death. Maybe I was scared. I don’t know, but the guilt I hold in me for picking him up, dropping him off and getting to Sunnybrook forty-five minutes after George Wilson died will eat at me until the day I myself die.
LOST ALONG THE WAY
I spent most of the eighties riding the 401 playing rock and roll in punk bars, fern bars, draft rooms and tobacco-country hotels. I was still a joker, a fuck-up, but now I was a joker and a fuck-up with a daughter and a girlfriend. I had been working, delivering const
ruction materials to sites in high-rise office towers and performing demolitions, then driving to the dump where the ground at my feet breathed, raising and lowering me like I was standing on the old dance floor at the Commodore Ballroom. It teeter-tottered the entire truck of garbage and blew toxic waste through little holes in the earth, puffs of stinking smoke and dust five or six feet high. It was very sci-fi. I dropped out of music except for a few bar gigs I did with an acoustic guitar and sometimes my best friend Ray Farrugia on a snare drum, just a way to make an extra fifty bucks here and there.
Growing up, I knew Ray Farrugia by reputation only as a scrapper and shit disturber up on the East Mountain. I used to see him from a safe distance downtown. He was skinny as hell with purple-tinted coke-bottle glasses and a giant head of black hair halfway down his back. I’d see him flying out of storefronts, walking out into traffic on King Street like he owned the road. Fearless. He was running around making the fur fly, picking up chicks, selling drugs or possibly stolen goods, getting out of moving cars like he didn’t have time for them to come to a complete stop. In the early eighties, when I finally met Ray Farrugia, or Ray Curse as everyone called him from his time in the punk band Slander, we became instant best friends. We pooled our madness to form a bond of survival that has lasted ever since.
One night in 1989 I ran into Dan Lanois at a local artists’ romp in a studio space above the old United Cigar Store at King and James. The party was hosted by Denise Lisson, who had arranged for lots of booze and records and great lighting, but Lanois walked in with guitars and some drumsticks and decided to give the local artists some unpretentious, down-home music to add to the evening’s fare. I joined Tim Gibbons and Dave Rave and Lanois for a little kitchen table party in the middle of the room. It was a moment that made me want to leave my job at Pollock Interiors and play music again.
Dan Lanois had become record producer Daniel Lanois and left town, and was now responsible for massively popular records by Peter Gabriel and U2. Lanois was always a fashionable outsider. He and his brother, Bob, had killer wheels and a fancy house that hung off the side of Hamilton Mountain, overlooking the city and beyond. It was at that house on the brow and at their Grant Avenue Studio that Brian Eno and Lanois gave birth to ambient music. But Hamilton was nowhere near big enough for the Lanois brothers. I remember Bob standing on the front porch of Grant Avenue with a cigar in his mouth, pointing a make-believe rifle into the night sky and telling me to aim high. He practised what he preached, and so did Dan.
That night at the United Cigar Store, I felt the unity of the moment and the commitment to making something happen, and it was Lanois who created that feeling among us. We dropped our drunken egos and became all about the music and doing the most with the moment. We each took lead on a few songs. I did an old Florida Razors song, “Italian Sunglasses,” and the Carl Perkins classic “Matchbox.” Tim and Dave did a few old Shakers numbers, and Lanois sang a couple of tracks off his new album Acadie, “Jolie Louise” and “Under a Stormy Sky.” I loved “Under a Stormy Sky.” It told the story of Dan’s mom, Jill, migrating from Quebec to Hamilton in the sixties, a reference to my hometown I knew would be heard around the world.
After our little concert, we were hanging around in a tiny closet area in the back drinking beer. Tim and Dave were asking about the place Dan was setting up in an old French general’s house on Esplanade Street in New Orleans. I could imagine the smell of the food and the sounds of the accents and bands playing in the bars of the French Quarter. “Wow—that must be amazing, Dan,” I said.
He turned, looked me in the eye and said, “Then you’ll have to come down, Tom.” I was knocked over. I didn’t say a word, just looked back at him as he continued talking to Tim. But I knew in that instant what I was going to do.
The kitchen table approach let all the elements I love about music come to the surface. It was natural and unrehearsed, and the songs cut through the grease that drips out of the radio speakers. Music without ego that travels on the wings of tones, blues and greens. I found what I was looking for. I listened to and loved records like Muddy Waters’s Folk Singer, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session and Daniel Lanois’s Acadie. I wanted to communicate in the language used on these records.
Later that year I got on a plane in Buffalo and flew down to New Orleans. I arrived unannounced at the Lanois house and the home of Kingsway Studios, on the edge of the French Quarter. I walked through the side door and my life opened up for me. I knew right away this place wasn’t for me, but I did want to lasso the creative energy that was there.
The kitchen was the centre of the house. A long table running through it seemed like the meeting place for both inhabitants and visitors alike. Two sets of servants’ stairs ran up the back of the house, a rude memory of where I was and what had gone on here over the years. Originally it had been two French townhouses, but the wall that separated them was brought down either by demolition or erosion, and the house was now one grand, mirrored image staring back into itself. A broken, high-pitched hum was ever present. It had a life of its own. A ghost, or time trails, captured forever within the walls of the house. Or maybe Lanois had dragged the buzzy Hamilton guitar sound down with him.
Malcolm Burn, another Canadian-born music producer, took me up a massive stairway that led to the identical left and right layouts of the bedrooms and inner servant passages routed behind the main walls, and showed me a bedroom where I could sleep. There was a worldly kindness I had not experienced before. It came by way of experience and travel and sticking to the task. A guy showing up unannounced from Canada didn’t bother anyone.
Lanois and Malcolm called us “canoes”: Canadians who had set their course for the old mansion in the French Quarter. This was a place where art came first, and I was welcome to join in on whatever was being born here. The whole city had a musical pulse. Marching drums and gunshots and singers’ voices time-travelling up and down the corridors of the French Quarter. The madness on the streets never stopped. It was all tits and bar shots, slipping and slumming over the cobblestones.
Meanwhile the walls inside the Kingsway were whispering, and the hum never stopped. I lay low, listening, trying to hear beyond the crowds outside, beyond the swaying dresses, vomit and booze. Lanois was starting rehearsals for his upcoming tour. He had assembled a fantastic rhythm section—Daryl Johnston and Ronald Jones—to join Malcolm Burn and himself. He twisted the arrangements and brought them to the edge of the stage, giving the songs new life. I loved how Dylan did that, keeping the listener guessing, questioning what they were hearing, throwing out art instead of repetition. Lanois asked me for some suggestions for covers for his show, songs that represented Canada. I thought Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On” was a good idea, and a little Willie P. Bennett. He settled on the old Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman number “Little Sister.” He said it reminded him of Hamilton and the bands that roamed the bars there. Teenage Head, the Trouble Boys, Dave Rave—these were the musicians that laid “Little Sister” at Lanois’s feet.
As usual, Lanois wanted his own take on the song, and one night after the band went home, he asked me to help him rewrite a few verses. He wanted his version to burn a brand into the side of the classic rock-and-roll song. I thought that was interesting and bold, and I happily wrote a few verses without thinking much of it. But what that little request did was instill the confidence in me that I could write something that could make contact with listeners outside the borders of Hamilton.
Sometimes all a guy needs is a little push in the right direction. The lyrics I wrote were a good trade for me. Lanois got his own version of “Little Sister,” and I got to go home knowing that what I had was worth something.
Back in Hamilton, Ray thought I needed a band that put the spotlight on my song writing. He was thinking the same way I was, so we started hanging around my kitchen table on Barnesdale after Sandy and Madeline had gone to bed, and we played the songs I’d been working on from my time i
n New Orleans. We liked what we were doing. Enough that we went out looking for players to join in. We called ourselves Junkhouse. First we found guitarist Dan Achen or Dan O as we called him. Back in the early eighties, Dan O had skipped out of his hometown, Regina, to dodge a huge drug bust. He got tipped off and knew it was going down. Someone was going to be left holding the bag, and it wasn’t going to be him. He was young. He was the devil that would stay on the loose. Dan O was a live wire, making it all up as he went along—sometimes genius, sometimes stinking the joint out. But that’s what I loved about him and his playing. Other musicians mocked him. When he, Ray and I were putting together Junkhouse, there was always some asshole in the crowd who thought I needed to be told to get rid of Dan O. But I never considered losing him. Ever.
New band members would come and go, mostly bass players. Some would complain about Dan O. Some were embarrassed to be seen on stage with us. But I knew there was something missing in their playing. There was no chance in the notes, no moral in the hymn, and most of all, no desperation.
Russell Wilson was the last piece of the Junkhouse puzzle. A living, breathing monster. A bass-playing giant with all the humour and rage of a cartoon genie, and the intensity we needed to push our limits. He took us from being just another band to being a wandering gang of wild men. We met Russell when we were playing at a bar up on the East Mountain that was owned by the Hells Angels. Russell was the bouncer. That’s right, the bouncer.
There’s an innocence that comes with growing up in Hamilton. That innocence is often mistaken for ignorance. We don’t rely on other people’s words to define who we are. We don’t rely on movies and books to define our character because we’re born with plenty of that. We’re angels and devils and hard-nosed, blue-collar survivors.
I’m not worldly. I’m a home-towner. And I was in a band of outsiders.