Falling Backwards: A Memoir (26 page)

I had no idea what I was going to do with my life when I got home from Oahu. I didn’t like thinking about it too hard or too long. I felt like I had to grow up overnight. My mother used to tell me that one day I would have to be the one buying my own toilet paper and toothpaste. One day I would have to be responsible for my own well-being. One day I wouldn’t be able to live at home and just pull things out of the fridge and scarf them down. One day I would have to be my own person and look after my own life. What an outrage.

There was nothing carefree about the rest of the summer in Springbank. The days all felt fragmented and chaotic. I wasn’t going back to high school in September to daydream the hours away, hanging out with my friends and playing basketball and badminton. I wasn’t going to be standing around my locker in the hallway gabbing about who was going to be having a party on the weekend. I was going to have to grow up and find a job.

My parents prodded me about what I wanted to do. I kept telling them that I wanted to go into drama. (
Drama?
I didn’t even
like
drama.) Why the hell that came out of my mouth I will never know. What I really wanted to be was a teacher of some kind, but my grades weren’t good enough to get me into any of the college-level courses I’d need to take. To upgrade my high school diploma would take time and effort. Teaching would have to be put on the back burner—in fact, teaching wouldn’t even be making it onto the stove.

I decided to enroll in the drama program at Mount Royal College in Calgary, even though it wasn’t even remotely what I wanted to do. Drama wouldn’t require me to do anything but breathe in and out, and I wouldn’t need to upgrade my academic status. I never once thought that I could go into music for a living. Someone like me didn’t do something like that. I let any grandiose ideas about that just pour out onto the basement floor.

Thank God my parents helped me to buy an old Ford Pinto that summer, simply because they were sick and tired of driving me around. Now I had a way of getting myself into Calgary. The Pinto was white with a red racing stripe, and I thought it was gorgeous. My dad’s friend had painted it in his garage, but it still looked really good. It only had 270,000 kilometres on it, which made it practically brand new! The radio worked and it had a functioning cassette deck so I felt like I had hit the vehicular jackpot. You could get it up to a whopping fifty miles an hour in twenty seconds
if
you were headed straight down a mountain with the gas pedal matted to the floor.

Note to self: Check the oil if the little red oil light is on.

P.S. If the oil light is on, it’s probably too late.

It dawned on me one day in my parents’ basement that I had never actually heard myself sing before. I mean, I had recorded my songs into my little cassette recorder but they sounded pretty terrible. I started going through the Yellow Pages to see if there were any professional studios in the city where I could go and record a couple of my songs for real. I found two, one of which was called Circa Sound and the other of which was too far across town to even consider getting to it in my Ford Pinto. I didn’t know how to go about booking anything, or what I was actually looking to do, so I figured I should simply call the number in the book and take it from there. A guy named Bruce picked up the phone. I probably gave him too much information about myself and what I wanted to do because he kept saying “I see” and “I understand.” He told me that he had time available that Thursday and that all I needed to do was come in with my guitar and he would do a demo of my songs. It sounded simple enough. It would cost
thirty-five dollars an hour to record them onto a two-track, whatever that was.

I was excited to hear what I sounded like on a real recording. Surely I could come up with thirty-five dollars. All I had to do was get there! I practised like mad trying to decide which two songs to record. The songs I chose to record were two of my very best: “Never Love a Sailor,” penned on my Oahu graduation trip, and “Disillusioned.”

When Thursday finally rolled around, I realized that I didn’t have any gas in my tank. I ended up siphoning gas out of my mom’s car and, trust me, it’s a really horrible thing to do if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. But Duray was a good teacher when it came to things like that, and I soon had a quarter of a tank, which would get me to town and back if I didn’t get lost or go too fast. I grabbed my mother’s giant Yamaha guitar and I was off!

I was surprised to arrive at an old house—nothing like what I had pictured—but I parked outside and went up to the front door to ring the bell. Bruce was about forty-five years old. He had little round glasses like John Lennon and was very soft spoken. I thought that he looked a bit nerdy. He wasted little time getting me set up to sing. He got me a stool, propped me in front of the microphone and said that we could begin anytime. He told me to relax and be as natural as possible. So that’s what I did. I started strumming and singing, and about forty-five minutes later I had my two songs on tape.

Bruce told me he was amazed at what came out of my mouth. I told him I had written the songs myself; that seemed to amaze him even more. We sat behind the console in the studio and listened back to what I’d just done. I was so surprised to hear my voice clearly for the first time. I thought it sounded pretty good. Bruce asked me a million questions about my writing and where I had been performing and how long I’d been singing. He went on and on. I told him
that I had never performed anywhere but at my grad. I don’t think he believed me.

As I turned to the door with my cassette tape in hand, he said that for $1,500 he could hire a band and really do a professional demo for me of the two songs I had just recorded. Fifteen hundred dollars was a far cry from $35. I had no idea how I was going to swing that but I really wanted to.

I told him I’d get back to him and I started off again towards the door. Then he said, “Well, I could probably do a good job for $1,000.” A thousand dollars seemed a little more doable to me but it was still a stretch. I only knew two people who might have that kind of money: my mom and dad.

I told Bruce I’d have to call him in a few days, that I’d talk to my parents and see what they thought of the whole idea. I told him it was a lot of money and he told me that he thought he could get me played on the radio. I couldn’t believe it. I was completely twisted up inside just thinking about it. Me, being played on the radio. How in the world could that be?

I was nervous about bringing it up with my parents. I didn’t have a job and I wasn’t going to school. I kind of already knew what the answer was going to be from my dad. It was going to be no. In fact, it was probably actually going to be a “No, goddammit,” and “Do you think I’m made of goddamn money?” Believe it or not, instead he said, “When do you need it?” He wanted to meet this Bruce to see if he was on the up-and-up. He told me that I would have to pay him back in full or that would be the last goddamn dime I ever got from him. I thought that was a fair enough deal.

Bruce hired a band and I went in a few weeks later and recorded my very first professional 45 rpm. It seemed too good to be true and, of course, if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. Bruce somehow talked us into ordering two thousand copies of the 45 and
it ended up costing my dad a heck of a lot more money than a thousand dollars.

I drove myself right to the radio station downtown and handed my 45 to the lady at the front desk of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; I told her to give it to the DJ if she didn’t mind. I told her that I hoped he would play it on his show that day. She looked at me like I had just been let out of the loony bin. Obviously I had no idea how these things worked. I was just naive enough to be a tiny bit confident. A few days later I was in the car with my mom and we heard “Never Love a Sailor” come on the radio. We both looked at each other in utter disbelief. After the song played, the CBC announcer said my name and called me a local singer/songwriter. I just about died and so did my mother. It was exciting beyond anything I had ever experienced. I never heard it again, although a few of my friends did.

I had made it onto the radio and that was something. A few short weeks later, I was feeling so very low. I wasn’t really enjoying adulthood. It was far too serious, as far as I was concerned. I still had 1,999 bloody copies of my 45 and I had no idea what I was going to do with them. I guess I would be storing all those boxes in my parents’ basement, right next to my dashed hopes. My parents could have said “I told you so,” but they didn’t.

One day in late August, I got a call at my parents’ house; the voice on the line asked to speak to Jann Richards. (I thought that was really odd because I seldom got phone calls—when the phone rang it was either work for my dad or the police looking for my brother.) I told him that he was speaking to Jann Richards. My heart skipped for a moment because I hoped it was going to be something about me being on the radio. Maybe it was a big record producer from Los Angeles who was going to ask me to sign a recording contract.

The voice identified himself as a teacher from my former high school and said that he had some very tragic news. The worst possible things started racing through my mind—one of them being that I hadn’t graduated after all, that it was all a huge mistake and I was going to have to go back and work some more on the shit-spreader. I wish that had been what he was calling me about, but it wasn’t. One of my good friends, Marilyn, had passed away from complications following a colostomy. I remember hanging on to the phone like it was a life preserver. My ears buzzed with the emptiness of silence. I felt my heart begin to beat madly in my chest, and I broke down sobbing. I didn’t know anybody my own age who had died and certainly not anybody I’d loved so dearly. It was so beyond my comprehension.

I loved Marilyn; everybody did. She was athletic, smart, funny; she glowed. She was one of those people who honestly never said a bad word about anybody. She floated around like she wasn’t human. I know people always talk about the dearly departed like they were saints, but she really
was
a saint. To think she was somehow just gone broke my heart and everybody else’s too.

I had known Marilyn since the fourth grade. I sat beside her in many of our classes and we’d laugh our heads off at silly things and write goofy love notes to boys. We didn’t hang out much after the bell rang, but we were still very close “school friends.” Marilyn was there when I had to pick my wiener out of my Thermos with my pencil. Marilyn was there when my Thermos exploded from having atomic chili in it. Marilyn was there with all of us, standing around at the bonfire parties with a beer in her hand, singing along to Fleetwood Mac. Marilyn was on all the teams with me, basketball and volleyball and baseball. When I did silly things she’d throw her brown hair back and just giggle like mad—nothing was off limits when it came to making her smile. She had the whitest teeth and the most beautiful skin. I remember her putting Jergens lotion on all the
time. Every day after gym class, she’d slather half a bottle of the almond-smelling liquid all over her body. She always looked tanned to me, like she lived in Miami half the year. She seemed far more mature than her years let on.

She missed a lot of high school and none of us really knew why. There would be months when she just wasn’t there. Her friends finally found out when she gathered up a few of us to tell us about her illness. She had struggled with colitis for many years and had finally, after a long battle with the disease, opted to get the “bag” installed. She was only eighteen, and I am sure it was a monumental, life-altering decision to have to make. She had so much going for her. She was engaged to a great guy named Gary, and we all thought she was destined to be the most successful of all of us.

I had just seen Marilyn at a little cocktail lounge in Calgary a few months before. She was heading out to British Columbia to go to college. We all got together for a bite to eat and a beer to see her off. She looked so happy and healthy.

The voice on the line told me that there was going to be a memorial service for Marilyn in Kamloops, British Columbia, later that week, and asked me if I could go to represent our class. I was trying to absorb all the information coming at me. I didn’t know what I should do. Kamloops was nine hours away and there was no one to get a ride with. I was going to have to figure out how to get there myself.

My Ford Pinto had blown its engine a few weeks earlier, so it wasn’t going to be an option to drive the 442 kilometres—through the Rocky Mountains, I might add—without it catching on fire. By the time I hung up the phone I decided I was going to have to borrow a bit of money out of the grad fund to take the train. I wasn’t going to borrow any more money from my parents at the risk of my own life.

I was the grad chairman, after all, and I still had access to the leftover funds in the bank. Our graduating class had yet to decide what we were going to do with the $1,500 we had left over in the bank. We had talked about having some kind of stupid big rock engraved and plunked in front of the school that said “Grad ‘80,” or repainting the gym floor with the school emblem, neither of which I thought were interesting options. I knew that attending Marilyn’s funeral was the best possible thing to do with that leftover money. I was going to represent the entire class and go to her memorial. I took out $600, bought train tickets for myself and a few of her closest friends and a large bottle of Alberta vodka, and off we went to pay our respects to a really wonderful girl.

We stayed for a couple of nights at a hotel in Kamloops; we ate out at some crummy little restaurants; we visited with Marilyn’s family and cried buckets of tears in between. I was so glad to have gone.

A few days after I had come home from the funeral, I got another call from a teacher who wanted me to come out to the high school to see him about some missing money as soon as I possibly could. Feeling defiant, to say the least, I took my mother’s car and drove out there the next day.