In the Fire – 1
By the time we reached London, Veronica and I had come to a parting of the ways. My sickness in the final stages of our journey had somehow brought to the surface some deep antagonism that had been growing inside her towards me. This separation was only to be temporary but it would underscore a theme of disagreement between us that would ultimately lead to our breaking up for good, five years down the road.
I went back to my old digs in Chelsea, broke this time but resolved to find my way back into the music scene. Barry and Denise Shearing, who rented me a room in their flat, were sympathetic and didn’t press me for rent when it was not available, yet another instance of the aid of friends that was to support me over the years.
I tried to go back to the open mikes at The Troubadour, Les Cousins, The King’s Head and other folk clubs that had welcomed my earlier arrival on the scene. But the old adage that “you can’t go back” was to begin to prove its truth to me. Things had changed over the past year, the biggest changes being within me. Where I had so confidently arrived on this scene and begun performing in the past, this time it seemed as though the juice had gone out of me. I was not able to perform with any confidence. My hands trembled badly, my voice was weak and even as I tried to project the words of my new songs to the audiences, I sounded to myself like a beginner, someone who had never performed in public before. I couldn’t figure out what had happened to me. The healing I had felt in Greece and the confidence I felt while playing in public there, had mysteriously evaporated in the English climate. The change was so unbelievable that I retreated completely and avoided playing.
My state of mind was remedied somewhat by the return of Veronica who called me out of the blue one day and agreed to try again and so we took a one room flat in Shepherd’s Bush. To make ends meet we both took day jobs. She got work in a tobacconist’s shop and I took up the unlikely occupation of barman and with a little training was soon passing out the dark and bitters to the clink of the cash register and the pull of the pump handle. I was also reading Dion Fortune’s “The Holy Qabbalah” and trying to decipher the ancient Zohar while continuing to plunk away at my guitar, squabble and make up with Veronica and go back to working for a living. My sister Marilyn appeared one day from Canada and she and Veronica bought me a book on the Tarot by the author Mouni Sadhu and I also took up that study in earnest.
I walked off my shift about a month later, in the middle of one of our fights and that was it for bartending. Then I applied for a position in the warehouses of the J. Lyons Company, and was flabbergasted to find myself walking out with the position of newly appointed junior auditor to their new chain of European hotels, this on the strength of my year of articling in Chartered Accountancy in Winnipeg for a year after high school. By the time I was finished congratulating myself on my good fortune, about one week later, my head had cleared and I never did report for that first working day.
About this time I also submitted, with the help of another friend, Roy Woolnough, a manuscript of poems written in Greece to publishing house Chatto & Windus, which was rejected. For a while, before I received the rejection slip, I even saw myself as a latter day Durrell, newly converted to the literary arts after my Grecian sojourn. Hopever, with the advent of that rejection slip, my current self-image crumbled and I was forced to admit I was still a musician.
Veronica and I had decided by then to return to Canada and my sister advanced me the money for airfare to Toronto. Veronica said that she had a lot of connections there and that we’d be able to make out. It was a journey that appealed to me too, because of my familiarity with the city and the knowledge that it was still the Canadian “music city”. Perhaps things would change for me there. After all, it was my homeland and I was clearly homesick for the wide open spaces of North America. In this sense of panic was an echo of the same frustrated state of mind in which I left Greece.
Toronto did provide me with a little relief. Somehow we found an upstairs flat on Brunswick Street, near the Jewish Market, in the house of a wonderful Guayanese immigrant named Carmen who cooked like an angel and treated us like her grandchildren. I began to play the local coffeehouses, something I had not been able to do as an aspiring rock singer. I attribute this resurgence of strength to the fact that I was not literally going back, (I could never have played bars then) but was trying something new. I met with enough small success to keep me focused and found my music being praised by some local more established artists and poets, which boosted my confidence considerably.
At this point I began sitting meditation in earnest. I can recall the decision to begin and first sitting down cross legged on the wine-colored second hand Belgian carpet Veronica had bought for the apartment. But the fighting was continuing between us, reaching a new feverish pitch. At times it seemed as though we were both going crazy. We smoked a little marijuana then but nothing regular enough to cause this much confusion. Something was genuinely wrong but there was a lot of real love between us too and so we hung on.
At a coffeehouse restaurant on the University campus called Meat and Potatoes, I tried a mix of singing and poetry reading but the whole thing felt somehow unnatural so that I couldn’t get comfortable with it. I wanted to sing and my soul cried out to do so, with all my strength and energy. A few gigs came my way and I met a few more musicians who praised my music and helped me along my path. It seemed that I was regaining my strength. But the rocky relationship between Veronica and myself continued, perhaps forcing us to look for greener pastures, this time on the west coast.
One day I received a letter from a friend of my California days, Roger Apperly, who was now working as a bartender at the Banff Springs Hotel and who suggested I come and visit this newly discovered paradise. Veronica had already been in touch with her parents on Vancouver Island and we needed no further prompting but in the dead of winter, guitars in hand, hit the Trans Canada highway, Rocky Mountain bound.
The hitch across the country was so difficult that it brought up a lot of the bad blood between us again. I suppose that we’d been through so much by now that both of us were determined to grit our teeth and simply persevere in hopes that we’d come to an end of this struggle. Our meeting with Roger and his mate, Cleo, seemed to be the medicine we both needed to pull us out of our slump.
Roger was another of those wise big brothers in my life whose friendship had been a kind of panacea to me. Ten years older than myself, he’d kicked around the world and picked up something more than scenic pictures to share with others. He’d stayed with me again in London, briefly, on his way to Majorca and we’d had a few more adventures that had cemented the friendship begun years earlier in Los Gatos. He was genuinely glad to see me arrive on his doorstep and greeted us both warmly. “Cleo, put the kettle on.” a perfunctory one liner that spoke volumes to two tired and cold travelers.
After two weeks with these kind souls, we traveled on to Vancouver, Roger promising to join us there later after his gig at the Banff Springs was over. But our difficulties were not yet over and we pawned a typewriter for $17 dollars to pay for a week at the Terminus Hotel in Gastown, an establishment at the absolute bottom rung of local accommodation standards. The halls and stairwells, in an advanced state of mouldy dilapidation, stank of piss and dampness. Junkies could be seen shooting up through open doorways. I think there was one functional bathroom for about 30 rooms. How we managed to survive that, I don’t know. I guess there was still the romance of being struggling artists that carried us through it.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.eagalicmusic.com/in-the-fire-1/trackback