Beautiful Scars

by Tom Wilson

  We took it up the road to Toronto and landed on Queen Street, where we thought it might find an audience, but instead of finding ears we found empty rooms, night after night, and fast-tongued critics of our dreamy, acid-trip vibes. Basically, they hated us.

  We kept going, refusing to give in. We knew what we were doing was good. But as time went on we got increasingly frustrated. We started drinking harder at the gigs, taking pills, turning up our amps, speeding up the tempos. Then we started getting into fights on stage. Sometimes we fought with the soundman or the club owner, sometimes with the audience. It was like some kind of Steeltown performance art, and the louder we got and the drunker we got, the more people started to come and check us out.

  Soon we were playing every song on ten and smashing guitars and kicking over amps and basically causing shit, which was our natural state anyway. We strayed far away from our kitchen table, but we had record companies and the media knocking at our front door.

  The little Junkhouse concept was put on the sidelines, and I found myself in a rock-and-roll band again. There was no sense in turning back.

  FATHERS, SONS AND A LOST BOY AT LEAFS CAMP

  Bunny had always told me, “If your father wasn’t blind, he’d have left us long ago.” As a little kid, I thought this was a bit dramatic, even for Bunny. Still, I imagine there were days when the thought of the life he had with me and Bunny being it for him must have been pretty demoralizing. Before he became lost in a pitch-black pit with a plate in his head, tapping his way through the world with a cane, he’d been quite an adventurer. According to Bunny, George was known for living life in the moment. As a young man he’d woken one morning at his parents’ farm in Cookstown, Ontario, thrown his belongings into a burlap sack and got on a bus to Toronto, leaving home forever.

  He hit the big city and settled into a rooming house shared by a handful of Toronto Maple Leafs, including all three members of “the kid line”: Charlie Conacher, Harvey “Busher” Jackson and Joe Primeau. George kept company with the players. He and Charlie Conacher raised hell in the bars around Maple Leaf Gardens, and George was front and centre for all their home games. His blood ran blue with his love for the Leafs. He must have had the time of his life.

  George pulled some pretty cool stunts in his time. He quit a well-paying suit-and-tie job at the Bank of Montreal in downtown Toronto so he could go prospecting in Northern Ontario. Sometime during his lunch break from the bank he’d decided he wanted to fight the wilderness, sleep in a tent, bake pies and live among the Indians. I guess he thought that taking the tail gunner position in a Lancaster bomber would be an adventure too.

  George’s life wasn’t the one he’d imagined. But in fairness, neither was Bunny’s. She hadn’t planned on taking care of a blind husband. She wore the badge of sadness and war-bride pride as she looked out for George every day. She loved him deeply, but life had got the best of them both.

  The summer of 1967, somehow Bunny had had enough of George, or George had had enough of Bunny. Either way, the two of them hit a breaking point in their marriage and decided they needed some time alone without me to sort things out. During a War Amps convention earlier that winter, Bunny had been walking through the lower level of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. She ran into ex–Toronto Argos great Frank Stukus, who had a storefront promoting his business interests, including a hockey school in Fenelon Falls called Byrnell Manor Hockey Camp. He edged up to Bunny, introduced himself, and the two began chatting. Bunny was a sports nut, so after she’d finished quizzing him on his pair of 1937–1938 Grey Cup victories, he handed her a pamphlet for the hockey camp. Bunny was impressed and wondered if Byrnell Manor might be just the place for me to learn some discipline.

  I am sure she was picturing a summer equivalent of a private school or a military academy, rather than the typical knuckle-headed Lord of the Flies jock camp Byrnell Manor turned out to be. Bunny loved the idea of the private school and believed its type of regimen was the answer to everything. I saw through the bullshit and saw only white snobs coming out of those types of asylums. I wanted nothing to do with any of it. But I was too young to have a say, so I was shipped off in a yellow school bus with a bunch of bow-tied, blazer-wearing kids from Toronto, Boston and Long Island, who were also getting shipped away by their parents.

  Bunny was right about there being a lot of money roaming around Byrnell Manor, and my guess is that Frank Stukus gave her and George some kind of charity rate. I was hopeful about the hockey part, though. The Leafs had won the Cup that year, and I had watched all the games I could. I loved playing street hockey with the older kids in front of my house. But I’d never been on ice before. I didn’t even own a pair of skates.

  Bunny hadn’t thought out this part of the camp either, and as a result packed me off to hockey school without any hockey-related attire. Instead, she loaded an assortment of bathing suits, towels, outerwear and a suit for church on Sundays into an old steamer trunk she had sitting in the basement and sent me on my way.

  Everyone boarded the yellow school bus for the thirty-mile drive to Lindsay Arena, and I joined them wearing my sixties-style summer leisurewear. When we arrived at the arena, the kids gathered their hockey bags from the bus and headed inside, and although I’d never been in an arena before, I knew enough to follow the pack into one of the dressing rooms. It seemed everyone knew exactly what to do, pulling out their shoulder pads, shin pads, skates and sticks for the day ahead.

  An older guy settled down the buzz in the room and explained that we were heading to the ice for a nice long skate around the rink so the coaches could assess our abilities and place us in groups according to our skills. The room emptied out and I followed along, unnoticed. As in, nobody noticed I was wearing a bathing suit, a Chiquita banana T-shirt, socks and sandals.

  A line of hockey players, of all ages and sizes, spilled onto the ice, and as they began circling the rink in their magic blades, I hopped onto the ice in my sandals and ran unsteadily across the blue line and then the red line and then the other blue line. I didn’t have a stick and my feet froze within seconds, but I didn’t let this stop me. As I slid across the faceoff circle, a tall man in a Toronto Maple Leafs sports jacket finally put me out of my misery.

  “Hell, son—what are you doing? Where are your skates? Why are you in swimwear to play hockey?” His words were harsh and to the point, but his tone was soft and understanding.

  “I don’t have any of that stuff, sir.”

  “Okay, buddy, let’s see what they have in the lost and found for you. My name is Allan Stanley.”

  Wow—this is amazing! I thought. I knew who he was. I’d seen him on TV every Saturday playing for the Leafs on Hockey Night in Canada.

  I watched as he sifted through a box of discarded and forgotten hockey equipment, where he found a pair of gloves, shoulder pads and shin pads, along with old blue-and-white Leafs stockings and a sweater that was maroon and red (Bert Robinson, M.H.L. Detroit). He found me a pair of skates in the sharpening shack, then dressed me, tied my skates and sent me out onto the ice.

  I often think of that day. I’m kind of proud of my eight-year-old self for not backing down from the challenge of going to a hockey school without skates or equipment. I figure I must have been dumb or had big old balls as a young boy, or maybe both. Whoever that guy was, I remember him, and his bravery.

  Back home, Bunny and George figured things out. They decided they had nowhere else to go but to be with each other. They patched it up, and it stayed that way until George died.

  When my own son was born in 1993, I took him everywhere I could. I wanted him to see and do things I’d never had the chance to do. I wanted him to see a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens before they shut the doors forever. I got him there. I got him on the players’ bench too. I never dreamed of anything like that when I was a kid, so I made sure he didn’t have to just dream about it.

  He was named by his sister. Madeline thought Sandy had a baby bunny in her stomach. We didn�
��t expect a boy. Sandy used to joke that I couldn’t make boys, only girls, so we didn’t prepare. We had girls’ names picked out for the baby, but the only boy name was the one Madeline came up with for her much-anticipated baby bunny. So while I was holding Sandy’s head in the delivery room, whispering that she was doing a great job and that everything would be okay soon, she pushed him out of her body and I put my hands out to greet him and noticed a penis. A baby boy. Ha, imagine that? I thought.

  Thompson had arrived.

  He was like Buddha when he was a baby. He still is. The calm in the middle of a family of tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes. He could cool us all down, remind us that there was another way of getting on. He was the only baby I’ve known who cried to get back into his own bed. In the middle of the night Sandy and I would move him from between us in our bed to his crib, where he’d immediately stop crying and go right to sleep.

  I remember Tim Gibbons, who for a while showed up at our house every night around suppertime. Tim would knock on the door, walk in, grab a plate from the kitchen cupboard and sit down at the dinner table with us, praising the meal with “delish, delish” and “this food is amazing” and “another home run tonight, you guys—outta the park, man” and finally, “that was great—I’m stuffed….Okay, see you guys later.”

  One dinnertime Tim walked through our front door and the entire household was in the front hall. Sandy and I were screaming at each other about something; Madeline had every book in the house off the shelves and stacked high at the front door, teetering on collapse as she built an apartment for her Barbies; the two matching Samoyeds or huskies or whatever they were, were barking and circling us, knocking things over; the food was burning on the stove; and there was probably an unattended bathtub about to overflow upstairs. But Thompson just sat there in his stroller with his hat and mitts on, quiet as could be, watching us all freak out. Tim said, “Look at this guy. Look at how calm he is. He’s surrounded by a giant mess and he’s just chillin’, taking it all in.” We all stopped in our tracks and looked down at him. Tim was dead on. Thompson was the guy with the only good idea in the room. The watcher with the right answer.

  From the very start Thompson had a natural feel for music. When he was still a baby I’d come home from the recording studio in Toronto and pick him up out of bed, put him in his car seat in the back of my Crown Victoria and drive him around playing a cassette of what I’d just recorded. If he responded, if he rocked himself back and forth like a wild man, I knew we might have a hit of some kind on our hands. When he was four years old I gave him a harmonica to blow into. With me on guitar we’d play the usual kid favourites—“This Old Man,” “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” “Old MacDonald”—after Sunday dinners and family gatherings. Our first public performance was for Thompson’s kindergarten class.

  I didn’t want my kids to have to work as hard as I did. If they wanted to do something, I’d make sure they had a chance to do it. In Thompson’s case, it was hockey. Every night after dinner the two of us would face off in the living room for a game. It was the highlight of the day for me, and it always ended in a fight. Dropping the gloves and wrestling down on the carpet. When I was away on the road he’d miss our nightly games, and eventually he’d have to attack his mother or his sister to get in his weekly fight quota. He was three or four when I put him into hockey school at the Coronation Rink in Westdale. I didn’t want him to have to ask or beg to play. I didn’t want him to have to jump through hoops for the simplest things, to have to figure it out on his own. And I sure didn’t want him to have to wear socks, and sandals and swimwear to play hockey.

  BUNNY WILSON AND DOCTOR GOD

  Bunny Wilson was always there in my consciousness. Standing in her apron, thin grey hairs trying to escape the bun she had put them in that morning. Everything she did was always immediate and everything was often a disaster. She had jaw-dropping, quick-cutting opinions on neighbours, passers-by, the old, the young, the crippled and the blind. She was a Montreal tavern wisecracker and Catholic-guilt survivor, and her knee-jerk, sharp-tongued observations would leave all of us shaking our heads, hiding our faces and stifling laughter, floored in our disbelief that someone, anyone, her—Bunny—could mock the world so perfectly.

  In this spirit, Bunny may have hinted at the fact that I had come from another planet, dropped out of the sky onto the small square of backyard, brown grass bordered by a paint-chipped, rotting white picket fence out behind 162 East 36th Street. She told me several times when I was just a preschooler that there were secrets about me that she would take to the grave, secrets that no one, including me, would ever hear.

  And there were the turtles. Sometimes she’d buy a ceramic turtle, push it across the table towards me, and stare silently at me for a moment before telling me I came from “The Turtle Clan.”

  “Okay,” I’d think. “What the hell does that mean?”

  She changed character in these moments. Instead of being her usual high-strung, French-Canadian scalded-cat self, she would act embarrassed or humbled by what she was telling me. Her voice would drop into a lower, slower, more understanding tone, but when I would try to push for an explanation she’d spring out of her kitchen chair and dash over to the sink, putting an end to the topic with something like, “I’m not the person to answer your questions.”

  “Well if she’s not, then who is?” I’d think to myself.

  Mysterious gifts were always coming my way. Gifts that didn’t make any sense to me. Gifts that the other kids on the street were not getting, that’s for sure. No white kid on the East Mountain received Canada Post parcels with sage and sweet grass, beaded buckskin jackets, handmade lacrosse sticks and Indian rubber balls.

  Later on down the road, when Bunny was in her early eighties and I was in my late thirties, and cancer had gotten inside her body, I would drive Bunny up to the old Henderson Hospital, where she met with doctors and prepared for a hysterectomy. The Henderson Hospital on Concession Street, one of the three hospitals where Bunny said I was born.

  Doctors were like gods to Bunny. In fact, they were more like priests or shamans. Their words came directly through the clouds from the sky above, from the mouth of our Lord and Saviour. Bunny gave servant-like respect whenever she was in the presence of a doctor. It was at one of these meetings on the mount that Bunny had to answer a lengthy verbal questionnaire. The doctor was sitting on one side of the desk, Bunny on the other, and at Bunny’s insistence I sat quietly in the corner, making myself as small and as close to invisible as I could.

  The questions went on and on and on, with inquiries about Bunny’s medical, family and sexual histories, all those x-rays she had back in the fifties for that rare skin outbreak. X-rays that, by the way, were a very odd choice for a doctor to order for a skin rash, but who was Bunny to challenge The Voice of God? Finally, the doctor gets to this question: “Mrs. Wilson, have you ever given birth?” And Bunny answers, “Oh no, doctor, I have not….Never.”

  The doctor puts a check mark on his paper and makes a note, and there is this (and please excuse me for my choice of term here) PREGNANT SILENCE that fills the room. Bunny is sitting there transfixed by the doctor, and I’m sitting there transfixed by Bunny, waiting for I don’t know what, and I can feel the panic growing inside of me, and I feel like I can’t quite get my next breath, and I actually feel myself lifting off the chair and reaching my hand towards Bunny and the doctor like a ghost that has wandered off course, or maybe more like Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet when she’s naked and messed up on Kyle MacLachlan’s front lawn and she obviously shouldn’t be there. That’s where I was.

  Naked and lost in another dimension and obviously in a place where I was not supposed to be, and yet somehow this was the moment of truth I had been waiting for all my life. I had just heard for the first time what it was that was wrong with me. Why I felt so out of place all my life. There it was, spilling out so easily from Bunny’s mouth. Had Bunny ever given birth?


  “Oh no, doctor, I have not. Never.”

  So now I’m standing and the only word I can muster dribbles out of my mouth, out of the dark corner of the doctor’s office, and that word is put out there in the form of a question, and that question is “MOM?”

  Bunny’s head whips around towards me, and she responds like greased lightning. “Tommy, not now. Can’t you see I’m talking to the doctor?”

  And that, folks, was that.

  The moment of revelation passed by like so many other moments of revelation had passed by for years and years, dutifully discarded. It was like Bunny was the wizard, instructing me once again to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I had no Toto to bark and yelp and bite at the wizard’s ankles. In that split second, I became the fool that I was asked to be and played along with Bunny’s lie to me and about me, the secret she would take to her grave. That moment faded and in the next we were all back in our roles of son and mother and doctor, and like I said, that was that.

  HITS AND MISSES

  JUNKHOUSE

  Coming of age as a musician in Hamilton, I had the good fortune of meeting Barbara Sedun. She worked at a Mr. Print-All on Hughson Street near Gore Park in the city’s downtown and took pity on me and a bunch of the local bands, printing for free our street posters for shows in Hamilton and beyond. The Florida Razors, Teenage Head, the Shakers, the Trouble Boys all benefited from her support. By the early nineties, Barbara had a job at EMI Music Publishing, finding writers and acts for the label to sign and develop. It was Barbara who introduced me to Mike Roth, and in Mike I found a fellow outsider who understood me.

  Bingo.

  I gave Barbara a tape that my pal and CBC producer Bill Stunt recorded. Bill had managed to get Junkhouse standing still in one room, playing and hitting tape. It was a wonder, because what he didn’t know was that we had driven up to Ottawa with nothing but gas money to get us there and back. We were staying illegally in an abandoned, bare-bones apartment. A friend had got a key to the place and had left it for us. There were no beds or chairs or tables or lamps—no electricity. Nothing was hooked up. Every night we’d sit on the dirty wall-to-wall carpet and get super stoned and fight with each other in the complete dark. Yelling and spitting, aggressively arguing about who knows what. We were idiots. Every morning we’d go to the studio closer to knuckles than chuckles.