Falling Backwards: A Memoir (21 page)

I
wanted to learn how to play the guitar just like my mom, but I didn’t want anybody else to know—not my mother, not anybody. For some reason I felt embarrassed about it. It seemed like such a serious thing to do, and I wasn’t a serious girl. I was a funny girl who wasn’t really passionate about anything in particular. I liked doing everything, but I didn’t know what being passionate was. Sue was passionate about skiing and Sue’s mom was passionate about painting, so I knew what passion was but I didn’t know what mine was. I guess I was waiting to see what I’d be good at but it just hadn’t happened … yet. My mom was always telling me that I was good at everything I tried, but moms are supposed to say that. Being good at something doesn’t mean you’re passionate about it. I loved watching
Star Trek
, but I was pretty sure that didn’t count as a passion.

I didn’t think anybody would understand the sudden interest I had in learning an instrument; I certainly didn’t. How could I possibly tell anybody that singing pulled at me like a giant red magnet? It seemed so detached from my goofy personality. I didn’t dare hope that I was even the slightest bit musical but I must have decided at
some point in my heart that I was willing to give it a whirl. It was going to be my secret, and a tricky one to keep.

What if I picked the damn thing up and couldn’t make it play one simple chord? I’d seen enough people playing guitar on TV to sort of know how to hold one, but not really. If it was too big for my mom, it was going to be even bigger for me. When I finally strapped it on to my shoulder and placed my arms over it, I felt like I was trying to strum a canoe. It seemed impossible. Maybe I was crazy to think I had a hope in Havana.

For the first time in my life, it felt like I was experiencing a grown-up desire. I felt like I was falling in love, whatever that meant. I would even go as far to say that it was an awakening of sorts. I was waking up (and I wasn’t really a morning person at all—my mother would have to bribe me with cartoons and cereal to get me to come downstairs and get ready for school). This desire was a new feeling for me. It stood on my shoulders and yelled “amen!” at anything that moved. Desire took up a lot of space in my head. It was like God saw me standing there in the middle of my bedroom and he handed me a silver bolt of lightning and said, “Here, put this inside your heart.” I don’t know how else to explain it.

After my mom finished her own practice sessions and put the guitar away in its case, I would find a way to fish it out and drag it down to the basement. I’d listen carefully to make sure nobody was going to come down the stairs to surprise me. I knew every single creak in the floor, so that came in very handy in establishing each separate individual’s whereabouts upstairs. When everybody was accounted for, I had some time to be alone and begin to figure this thing out.

I opened up her big orange song bible with all the songs in it and flipped through every page, looking for a song I knew. The first one I recognized was Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen.” I started with that
one. I had that record so I knew how it was supposed to sound. (I couldn’t have chosen a more difficult song to learn if I tried. To this day, I cannot play it properly.) I became convinced, after having tried to form the first chord on the chart, that Ms. Ian had seven fingers on each hand.

There was an illustration on the very first page of the binder that basically showed you where to put your fingers on the strings to make the various chords. The fingers were labelled one, two, three, four and five. That made sense so far … The C chord had three numbers, which meant that there would be three fingers on three strings, and so that’s where I began. That first attempt was nothing more than a buzzing mess of noise that didn’t sound like anything at all. It was so disappointing. I expected something to ring out into the air that sounded like angels singing. I kept trying and kept trying and kept trying until finally the buzzing stopped and something that sounded like a note droned past me towards the rust-coloured brick wall in front of my face. I was giving myself a headache and I had to remind myself to breathe. It was only music, after all.

I must have spent at least three hours trying to make one chord sound decent before I was forced to quit. My fingertips had divots in them and were close to splitting apart. I had never had anything hurt quite as much as this. Theresa used to sneak up on me and crack my knuckles when I wasn’t watching, but not even that hurt as much as learning to play guitar.

For the next few months that was all I did. I didn’t care how much it hurt. I ran off the bus right after school, snatched my mother’s guitar from her bedroom closet and practised for hours in the basement. I was usually alone in the house after school. It was just me, Janis Ian and a big orange binder full of songs to tackle. The first few weeks were hard, but after three or four months I had mastered five or six chords and was able to play almost every song in the
binder. I was amazed with myself. I couldn’t read music, I just knew the finger charts and had memorized their corresponding positions to make the chords, but that was almost like reading music, wasn’t it?

The only chords I was having trouble with were the bar chords, which involved having one of your fingers lying flat against all the strings to cover them up entirely while using your remaining digits to form a chord higher up the neck of the guitar. I still had hands the size of golf balls, so it was next to impossible for me to make bar chords. But it didn’t take long for me to learn that I could make up my own techniques and it would still sound like something. If it sounded like music, chances were that it was. That was my motto. I loved every second I spent in the basement all by myself. The rest of the world disappeared and my soul soared around my head like a meteorite.

I had managed to teach myself the guitar and learn how to sing along without anybody in my house knowing. I don’t know how I kept it a secret but I did. Nobody would have a clue about my hidden talents until I performed at my high school graduation ceremony, six years after first strapping the thing on.

Upstairs, my parents were struggling to get Duray back on the right path but trouble followed him wherever he went. They put him into counselling and enrolled him into a new school with tutors that they couldn’t afford. They enrolled him in Cadets, which he actually attended for awhile. They tried tough love. They tried to get him involved in sports. They tried bribery. Nothing worked. My dad tried yelling a lot, but that only seemed to make things worse. Duray’s troubles were getting bigger and bigger and they took up all his time and stole his happiness. You could see his troubles perched on his shoulders, chuckling to themselves, and now they invariably involved the police in some way, shape or form. The long arm of the law reached into our house in Springbank and wrapped itself around Duray’s throat.

He was now headed towards jail time—no more slaps on the wrist. There were court appearances and probation things and sentencing things. There were people he had to report to now, and there wasn’t a thing any of us could do about it. Duray was in his very own version of hell, complete with demons and wicked temptations. (At least he had a constant flame burning so he could fire up a joint whenever necessary.)

My brother was this guy who came to our house once in awhile to change his clothes and rummage around for change in the bottom of my mom’s purse. (We all did that, though; it wasn’t just Duray. I think my mother would have been a millionaire had she been able to keep all the coins we stole.) I never really saw him anymore; not around the house, not at school, not anywhere. Maybe he was around somewhere, but I don’t remember him. He wasn’t even in his room downstairs anymore. I know that because I was in the basement all the time.

After I tore through my mother’s orange binder of songs, it dawned on me that perhaps I could make up my own songs. If John Denver could make up a song, well, by hell, so could I! “By hell” was one of my dad’s favourite curses.

“By hell, I’m gonna ring your neck!” he’d holler. (He never really rang anybody’s neck.) Sometimes “by hell” was a good thing. Like if the Stampeders, Calgary’s beloved football team, happened to win the Grey Cup, my dad would yell, “By hell! They did it!” It was a very versatile curse.

I remember gazing at the back cover of Janis Ian’s album
Between the Lines
and reading with much amazement that
all
the songs—words and music—had been written by Ms. Ian herself. I was in shock sitting there thinking about what that meant. It had never occurred to me that somebody had to write the music that was on the radio every
day. It had never crossed my mind. I also couldn’t believe that Janis’s real name was Janis Eddy Fink. I had read that in a
Tiger Beat
magazine. I assumed that all singers must have to change their names to make themselves sound more professional, but I wondered why Janis’s parents thought it would be a good idea to call their daughter Janis Eddy Fink. It might have had something to do with Woodstock.

My friend Michelle, who had all the
Tiger Beat
magazines, was also the only person I knew lucky enough to have her own record player. It had detachable speakers that she had spread out on her dresser. Michelle loved music too, and she took great pride in playing all her favourite songs for me. She had a lot of records I had never heard of. She played me songs by a band called the Runaways that was made up of all girls. There wasn’t one all-girl band in my entire record collection, so this was truly an incredible discovery. As I pored over the liner notes on the back of the Runaways album, I found more proof of people—girls—writing their own music and playing their own instruments!

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.