Cigar Box Banjo (2 page)

Belinda never met Paul but it was through her that I met him. She’d worked in a college in Dublin some time in the mid-1980s when a young man from Toronto called Dave Bidini came visiting. They became friends. He stayed a summer, I think, then went back home to Canada—and Ireland breathed a giddy sigh of relief. Years later, he wrote to her, with the news that he was coming to Dublin with his band, the Rheostatics, and that they all loved a book called
The Commitments.
She wrote back with the news that she was married to the man who wrote
The Commitments.
So, I met Dave—another instant old friend. He introduced me to Paul.

I cried, a bit, as I spoke to Belinda on my mobile phone, in a quiet corner, perhaps the only quiet corner in Jaipur. I told her how I’d hoped that Paul would read the foreword, that he’d read how much I admired his work and how much I admired him, how much I just plain liked him and loved him. But, even as I spoke, I knew: Paul had always known that. He’d have seen it on my face every time we met. What made me cry was the obvious, stupid fact that we’d never meet again.

I had a great time in Jaipur. I thought about Paul a lot. He’d have loved the cows. On the way back to Delhi, in a fog as thick as old milk, the car I was in nearly—really very fuckin’ nearly—crashed into the back of a stationary truck. In the split second before I died—I was calm, terrified, certain of this—I didn’t think of Paul at all. There were no nice thoughts of the bar in heaven, where Paul would be waiting, with a cold beer for me; or thoughts of the bar in hell, where Paul would be waiting, with a warm beer for me—and a banjo. An eternity of warm beer I could tolerate, even enjoy. But an eternity of the banjo? Even un-strummed, it would be torture, squatting there waiting to be strummed.

But the brakes worked, finally, and I didn’t die. I survived, and so did my atheism. Paul is dead.

But how he died. It’s in this book. A book about music becomes a book about music and death, and Paul manages to make them hold hands. (When considering Paul’s work, I can use the present tense and it feels like honesty.) A hugely enjoyable, very funny book about Paul’s career in music becomes a magnificent book about his death and remains hugely enjoyable and very funny—in fact, funnier. He saw it coming and he took control.

Paul died. But, as this book so brilliantly reveals, and as those of us who are so, so lucky to have known him and to have been known by him understand—in all possible meanings of the word—Paul
lived.

RODDY DOYLE

INTRODUCTION

A
T THE beginning of 2009, I completed a draft of a book I was calling
The Song
. It was a slim volume that dovetailed my involvement in music (I am assiduously avoiding the word “career”) with a look at some songs I felt were noteworthy and influential: “This Land Is Your Land,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” the enigmatic “Pancho and Lefty.” The Publisher quite liked the draft—“Some fine writing here,” he said, “some of your best”—but there were problems. Apparently, when I attempted musicology, things flattened out some. My attempts to explain the intricacies of chord theory were confusing. “But,” said the Publisher, “the personal stuff is great. You learning to play the guitar, those groups with your brother, then all the songwriting stuff, the stories about Martin, Joe Hall, Dan Hill, Dan Lanois
¹
. . .”

All right. It’s good that the Publisher liked the personal stuff, because . . .

In the early spring, as soon as the weather turned at all nice, I had my racing bike refitted and took to the streets. Actually, I took to the paths that wend their way beside the ravines in our fair city of Toronto. I bicycled into Wilket Creek Park (past the pond that features in both my non-fiction book
The Boy on the Back of the Turtle
and my novel
The Ravine
) and ventured up a steep hill that the year before I had been able to climb with—well, not ease, but I’d been able to do it. Halfway up, I abandoned the bike, gasping for breath. Moreover, I was panicking, part of me not believing that I would ever intake the amount of air needed for resuscitation. “I,” I told myself, “am in pretty bad shape.” So the next day I embarked on a program of brisk walking, largely in a nearby cemetery with a hill that had historically winded me. I would walk up the hill and then gasp for breath as I continued down the roadway, checking my progress against whichever stone marker happened to be alongside when I resumed breathing reasonably comfortably. I tended to end up beside my favourite gravestone. It had been erected for a man named John Ivan Johnson, and there was an etching of a racehorse beside his name. Underneath were the cryptic words “Just by a Nose.”

Sometimes, though, I found myself beside this marker with no lessening of the gasping. “Hmm,” I told myself, “perhaps something is wrong.” I Googled my symptoms and came up with a long list of possibilities, including the somewhat rare “vocal cord disorder,” as I had had, over the previous months, some issues with my singing voice. (And I am a singer, you understand: I sing with the group Porkbelly Futures and play the rhythm guitar, although the actual rhythm section, the lads on the battery of drums and bass, might quibble with that designation.) So I went to my doctor, suggesting this iffy self-diagnosis, and he checked my throat and nose and diagnosed “post nasal drip,” which had infected my vocal cords. I liked this diagnosis, although some inner part of me cautioned that he hadn’t eliminated any of the really dire possibilities.

Things worsened. I often found myself beside the “Just by a Nose” gravestone still sucking in huge quaffs of air. “I,” I told myself, “am asthmatic. Or else allergic to something. Air, for example.”

The first weekend of May, I was scheduled to make a couple of appearances in Ottawa, Ontario. I had been invited to speak at a symposium on the Friday evening, and on Sunday I was giving a house concert. I drove up to Ottawa, checked into a rather nice hotel, and, as soon as I stepped outside, noticed I was having much more trouble breathing. Even a little rise, hardly apparent in the landscape, would have me inhaling heavily. I went back and put in some time on the stationary bike in the hotel workout room. I set the machine at a low level—two, I think, perhaps one—but I managed to get through about fifty minutes without too much stress. Thus, when I walked outside only to be rendered windless once more, I came to the sole conclusion an intelligent, right-thinking man could: I had an
extreme allergic reaction to tulips.
After all, Ottawa’s famous Canadian Tulip Festival was in full swing, and those fucking bulbs were sending up blossoms everywhere.

The symposium, at the University of Ottawa, was about film and literature. My talk was the keynote address, as one of my novels—
Whale Music
—had been made into a fine motion picture by Richard J. Lewis. Indeed, I might mention, given the intended purview of this book, that my biggest success to that point as a songwriter had arisen out of that film. The film’s soundtrack was created by the Toronto indie rock band the Rheostatics, and the script called for the main character, Desmond Howl, to write a song. He is inspired by a young woman named Claire, and I suggest, in the book and the movie script, some lines that might come to him: “Purify me, purify me, Claire.” The Rheostatics took these words and expanded upon them, and when the song “Claire” was done I was listed as one of the writers. “Claire” went on to win a Genie award (that’s the Canadian version of the Oscar, or so we Canadians like to aver) and subsequently got quite a bit of airplay.

I made it through my address—I had to clip quite a few sentences, chop them up into tiny aspirated phrases—then went to the hospitality suite of the Ottawa Writers Festival. Hey, it was in my hotel. I stayed quite late and got drunk with festival fun-guy rob mclennan and some of his colleagues, sound poets jw curry, Max Middle, and Carmel Purkis. The poets performed some of their stuff in the wee hours of the morning, emitting strange inhuman noises.

The next day—after an inexplicably exhausting journey to the store to purchase some medications (Buckley’s Cough Mixture and lozenges for my croaking throat, a big bottle of Tums for a certain sloshing heaviness I felt about my gut)—I drove out to Chelsea to visit my brother Joel. Also in attendance was Robert Wilson, who is the manager/booking agent for Porkbelly Futures. We barbecued many kinds of meat and drank many bottles of wine, so when I lay down to sleep and found comfort an impossibility, I had no reason for undue concern.

Now, I know you people out there are observing a certain irritating disregard for reality on my part, an ability for self-deception that would rival a three-year-old’s. For what it’s worth, over breakfast I did instruct Joel to Google many ailments: the aforementioned “vocal cord disorder,” “pneumonia,” “pleurisy,” and, yeah, “lung cancer.” But we ruled out lung cancer because a) I had not been coughing up blood and b) I had not experienced a “sudden and unexplained weight loss.” I drove back to the hotel.

The following day was the house concert. In case you are unfamiliar with this concept, I was, essentially, going to sing in someone’s living room. The people who were invited paid a small entrance fee, and the money would all be turned over to me. Interestingly, the woman who invited me, Renate Mohr, was someone I had known as a child. Her father, Hans, and my father were colleagues, and every so often their family would visit. Renate’s nickname all those years ago had been Tutti, which is how I addressed her. “Tutti,” I said when I arrived, “this is Carmel.” Yes, I had conscripted one of the sound poets from the Hospitality Suite to drive me, because, as I explained to Tutti, “I think in order to do this I’m going to have to get pretty drunk.” I had a bottle of whisky with me, I had my Buckley’s, and I hoped that the combo would loosen up the vocal cords and give me the requisite energy. It worked out pretty well. I sang some songs, and I read some poetry.

It occurs to me that I might add one of those poems into these very pages. After all, it has a thematic connection, and it includes a suitably dramatic bit of foreshadowing.

Crossroad Blues

When I was 15
My mother died and I
Started playing the blues on
A Zenon guitar and
Drinking Four Aces wine,
Which was not really wine.

Just like Robert Johnson.
Who made a deal with the Devil
at the Crossroads.
Robert Johnson sold his Soul
To the Devil,
Which was like selling his shoes
When he knew he had to walk down
A road of horseshoe nails.

I would listen to the records
And learn the licks with
Tongue-biting concentration.

I was pale and chubby and little-dicked.
I would drink Four Aces,
Which was not really wine,
But it was alcohol.
I would play the guitar,
Drunk in my bedroom,
Hiding from my father,
Who was drunk in the den

Of our house in Don Mills, Ontario,
Canada’s first planned community.

One night the Devil
Appeared in my bedroom.
The Devil has some personal hygiene issues
Which we need not get into.

The Devil offered me the same deal
He offered Robert Johnson
At the Crossroads.

He said, “I will make you
The best guitar player ever.
You will make strong men cry
And you will make women wilt
With their desire for you.
The songs you write will haunt
Mankind forever.
It will cost you your Soul.”

I thought about it.

“Well . . . what would it cost
If you just showed me how to play
An F7?”

Afterwards, Carmel drove me back downtown; we parked the car and went out for a drink and a bite. I didn’t eat much, despite having not eaten much all day. Indeed, it was perhaps the only time in my life when a female dining companion was given the opportunity to point to the remaining eighth of quesadilla on my plate and say, “Are you gonna eat that? Because . . .” I didn’t eat much, but I drank some. Then we walked out onto the street, sat down on a bench and Carmel— whom, I should mention, is a very attractive young woman— said, “I guess I’ll grab a cab.”

“You could always spend the night with me at the hotel.”

Carmel cast her eyes downward. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea. You see—”

“Okay.” I kissed her and put her in a cab. As I stumbled away into the night, only then was it impressed upon me that, indeed, something was very, very wrong.

HAVING GIVEN a rasping, panting house concert in Ottawa, having delivered a half-assed pass and then not worried one bit when it was deflected, I drove back to Toronto the next day. I felt reasonably fine, although my hands kept seizing up, the muscles constricting, so I could keep only one on the steering wheel at a time, the other requiring stretching and bending. I was scheduled to go out to dinner with an old flame, and when she called me at home in the middle of the afternoon, I reiterated my intention of supping with her. Roseanne listened to me for a little less than a minute. “Paul,” she said, “stay right there. I’m coming to take you to the hospital.”

“All right.” I had already considered going to the hospital, you see. I packed a bag, including a night kit and a book. Then I added another book, because I entertained, very vaguely, the idea that I wouldn’t be coming out for a long time.

The emergency triage nurse put a stethoscope to my back to listen to my breathing. She called over a nearby paramedic. “I can’t find the left lung,” the nurse said. The paramedic announced that she could hear it, albeit very faintly. “Don’t worry,” she told me, “it’s there.” If you want to be hustled over the hurdles in an emergency ward, it’s a good idea to have something very wrong with you. In no time I was sitting on a hospital bed, dressed in the undignified backless Johnny shirt.

I was wheeled down to X-Ray, where a nice young man rendered an image of my innards, blasting the rays through my back. “Just wait here,” he said, ducking through the door, “until I make sure I have it.” A second later he called, “Paul! What have you done?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . they’re going to want to keep you here, I think.”
²
Back in my emergency cubicle, I waited. The woman in the cubicle next door wouldn’t lie on her bed, choosing to curl up on the floor and call out loudly for drugs. After some time, a young physician came in and reported that a lot of fluid had accumulated around my lungs. “We’ll try to get rid of some of it,” he said, “so you’ll be more comfortable. Then we’ll try to figure out why it’s there.”