Acid Trip

            On Saturday morning I did the last three rehearsals of the ten-minute piece I planned to do later that day at the Words and Music Salon. Then I took a shower without washing my hair because I find that at this stage after a haircut it actually looks better after three days free from shampoo. When it gets a little longer though it’ll need the suds and the conditioner more often.

            The next thing I had to do was ride around looking for a store that still had tulips, even though they were out of season. I went west on Queen as far as Sorauren and then back, then up Lansdowne to Dundas, where I’d planned on turning right, but I discovered that the Dundas West Fest was just starting. I had to get off my bike and walk, though I hadn’t expected the street to be closed off for such a long distance. I pushed my bike all the way to Dufferin where on the east side was Sham’s Florist. I walked a little further looking for a place to lock my bicycle and found a post ring near where some young women were just finishing a yoga class in the middle of the street. The instructor was not much older than her students. I’ve found that most yoga enthusiasts that frequent classes are women in their 20s and 30s and it’s hard to imagine them being drawn to lessons by me because I think they are more comfortable receiving instruction from someone closer to their age or slightly older with a body that hasn’t yet been rounded out by middle age. Another factor against me is that my style is extremely void of frills and dogma. I don’t use the Sanskrit names for poses and I don’t present yoga as a spiritual experience but rather what it obviously is: a way of connecting with and exercising one’s body.

            I entered Sham’s and asked the man at the counter for tulips and at first he shook his head, but then he remembered that there might be a few in the back. He led past all the displays and down a corridor that seemed beyond the normal area where customers are welcome. Inside a big refrigerated room there were a couple of buckets of tulips. I told him that I just needed one for a performance and so he sold me one for fifty cents. I was curious why they were considered out of season on June 3^rd since I’ve seen them in gardens in the summer. He explained that it’s just the commercial tulip season that has passed. He warned me that it would open up fast, even in an air-conditioned bar, so I should put it in water. He wrapped it in paper and I took it home with the stem facing the direction that I was riding so that it would cut the wind and not break.

            As was just pulling up in front of my building, my next-door neighbour, Benji was also walking to the door. He commented that it was a nice day but immediately complained that he had nothing to do. I suggested that there was a big street festival up on Dundas. He scowled, shook his head and declared, “There’s too many Pork Chops up there!” “Pork chops?” “You know, Portuguese!” I may be naïve, but I have spent 24 years in this area and I had never before heard the name “pork chops” in reference to Portuguese people. “So you don’t like Portuguese people?” I inquired. “I got nothing against anybody!” he insisted and then added, “But you don’t bring a donkey to a horse race!” “Donkey?” “You know! A donkey’s not as smart as a horse!” “So you don’t that Portuguese people are as smart as everybody else?” “Of course they’re not” he insisted, and seemed impatient with me when he added, “You know that!” I told him that I had never seen any evidence that was the case.

He went on to rant about how much of a mess Portugal left its colonies in compared to the other colonists and then about how they came to his native Guyana to work the plantations and got treated better than his ancestors from India. He said the same thing happened with the Chinese and then he informed me that the Chinese guy who owns the Super Land Market across the street from us came up here from Guyana.

I don’t know why, but it always surprises me when visible minorities display racist or bigoted behaviour or speech. Of course we are all racist, but we do have control over whether we manifest it or not. So here is Benji, a brown man from Guyana who has probably been the victim of a considerable amount of racism in his life, especially since coming to Canada in the 70s, ranting about another group in a way that others spew against his. Go figure.

            When I got to my place I took it out of the paper and was holding it in one hand while looking for something to put it in when the stem broke in half in my clumsy mitt. I put it in the fridge water in a little glass salad dressing server, and then I started looking for something that would hold it upright onstage at the Smiling Buddha. I settled on three wave-smoothed bricks that I’d found a few years ago while exploring the shores of the Lesley Spit. I piled them on top of one another and set the stem of the flower in one of the holes of the top brick and it both held it vertically and gave it some elevation. The ideal would have been for the stem to be longer but it was too late at that point.

            I packed up my guitar and everything else and at around 12:30 I left for the Smiling Buddha. When I arrived there was only staff setting up. There were a couple of guys carrying tables up from the basement and there was a woman handling the electronics on stage. I walked up to talk with her and introduced myself and found out that her name was Katey and that she would be both the soundperson and the bartender that day. I asked her if it would be possible for her to create an echo effect for me during a certain part of my set, which was during the time I would be lying on my back. She told me that she would put on reverb at that time and asked me to let her know just before I went on.

            I was concerned that the audience might not be able to see me during the lying down portion of my set, so I asked Katey if I might be allowed to temporarily set the middle monitor onto the floor so there would be a clear view. She let me know that they didn’t like to let people move the monitors because that could cause them damage. It looked like the alternative would be to manoeuvre my body in such a way as to lie down between monitors with my head sticking out to the edge of the stage while avoiding getting my back poked by the plugs that were inserted in the electrical outlets on the floor.

            I avoided sitting at a table because Katey was still arranging the chairs, so I just put my stuff on a bench along the wall. I tried to have a conversation with Katey about the Velvet Underground music that she’d been playing there last month. I told her I thought it was ironic that the crowd that comes to the Words and Music Salon are old enough to have been Velvets fans in the mid 60s when the band started out, but that they seem to be more of a crowd that appreciates the folk music of that era while the people that liked it more were mostly her age. Maybe I didn’t communicate my point well enough or maybe she was too busy to listen but she seemed to have the impression that I was criticizing her choice of music. She responded by telling me that she’d play anything I wanted.

            I started putting my things at the table furthest back and to the right in the stage viewing part of the bar. The attractive elderly woman whom I’d seen there last month arrived and proceeded to sit at my table, saying that it was her usual one. I remembered her sitting at the front last time but I didn’t want to argue with her or push her away. I suggested, “Maybe I should move my stuff to another table.” But she insisted that I stay there. I hinted that I would be meeting friends but she assured me that was okay. She bragged that her son would be playing that night at Hugh’s Room and asked if I’d been there. I told her that I hadn’t. I settled into the idea of my friends having to sit around her, and then I concentrated on tuning my guitar. Hen that was done I looked up and she had moved to a table at the front.

            I got up to step onto the stage and get a feel for the space. After having practiced for the last two months in my living room I had to mentally adjust to doing my performance on this stage, which was not exactly like I’d envisioned. Though it was wider than my living room I was surprised to see that the distance from back to front was actually shorter than from my desk to my window.

            When I stepped off the stage I suddenly at one of the tables a familiar tall silhouette backlit by the brighter light from the daylight-flooded front of the room. My friend Brian had arrived. Brian Haddon and I have been both friends and colleagues since the mid 90s and for a few years he was my band and we played several venues together around Toronto. I had offered to collaborate with him on this gig as I do whenever I’m invited to perform. His response is always, “Not this time, but don’t stop asking!”

            I invited Brian to join me at my table and noticed that for the first time that I’d known him he wasn’t wearing glasses. I remembered then the main reason that he couldn’t play with me this time: he’d had cataract surgery a month before and with his time of recovery he wouldn’t have been able to rehearse. He recounted as we chatted that he’d had his natural lenses replaced with artificial ones and now he only needs spectacles for reading.

            Linda Stitt came up to greet me with a hug and I asked her when I would be going on. It turned out that I’d be the very last of the invited performers. Brian bought be a pint of draft but I deliberately nursed it for the next three hours so as to keep my head in place for my show.

            Next a young man with dreadlocks came up to shake my hand. It was Du Juan, who I barely know but see from my window every weekday for the last year or more as he comes up Dunn Avenue. When he crosses the street he looks up and sees me playing guitar and singing, waves and then disappears into the donut shop to get his coffee. We only met on ground level by chance a couple of months before when we both happened to be building bicycles at Bike Pirates. Perhaps it was easier for me to recognize him since he’s always outside in the daylight while I’m framed by a window in the shadows of my living room. He was surprised when I explained that I was the guy he always waves to. When I’d told him about my gig, he wrote it down, as people often do, but I was pleasantly surprised that he actually came. Du Juan joined Brian and I at our table.

            A little while later a slightly familiar woman approached me to say hi. I half knew before she introduced herself that it was K. J. Mullins, who I’ve known online for the last three of years but had never met. K. J. publishes News4U.ca and I’ve been sending reviews to her for the last three years. We’ve been friends on Facebook for the same amount of time. I confess that I’d always thought she was a big person and was surprised to see that she isn’t.

            When K. J. went to get a glass of water from the bar she made the declaration, “I’m the only journalist in town that doesn’t drink!”

            Just as the event kicked off with some music by Linda’s co-host, Magic Mike accompanied by Tom Hamilton on violin, a hand on my shoulder turned my head and I saw that it was my friend Hans (Dutch) Jongman. I tried to get him to sit with us but he thought it would be too much of a disruption for us and so he went to drink his beer at the bar.

            Tom Hamilton needed his mic turned on and he shouted to Katey but called her “Amy”, and did so more than once. Finally she got annoyed and corrected him, adding, I was gonna let it go but it’s gonna be a long night!” I yelled, “At least you got one syllable right!” Mike’s first set consisted mostly of his own songs, which I’d heard him play before. Du Juan was impressed by Tom Hamilton’s energy.

            After Mike’s set, Dutch came back to lean over and chat. This time I insisted that he join us and so we made a space for him and he sat between K. J. and I.

            Nick Cushing arrived and I suggested we find a seat for him but the table was pretty crowded, except for a space with its back to the bar. He opted to sit nearby but then moved closer to the stage to take pictures. Later he sat at the back of the room.

            Two more friends that I’d invited arrived: Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom, and since there were others, the management added some non-table, row-seating along the borderline where the back room narrows to the front room.

            I counted heads and, according to my calculations, the people that had come specifically to see me made up a third of the audience.

            When K. J. learned that I’d be the last performer she kindly suggested that meant that everyone else were the opening acts and I was the headliner.

            At most events like this I sit taking notes and making a conscious effort to pay attention to what is being said onstage. In this case, with a table full of friends beside me it didn’t feel appropriate to zone out in writing mode. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have paid attention more, but I was distracted and I confess that I missed most of what the first featured poet of the afternoon, Susan Helwig. I have heard her read before though and seen her work online and I can attest to the fact that she has some good poems.

            Next we heard from guest author, Shane Joseph, who read from a collection of short stories. One tale featured two characters, a teenage girl and an old man, strangers to one another who had coincidentally made the decision to commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of a train at the same time and at the same place, but from opposite sides of the track. The old man’s motive was that he was tired of all the medications he had to take and the girl wanted to kill herself because of some photos of her that had been posted on the internet. Another story was from the point of view of a dog that was the pet to a family whose patriarch had died and it felt because of this the urge to be extra protective of the rest of the family. The problem with Shane’s readings was that he offered only snippets of each one. Perhaps if the prose had been more interesting than the stories it would have been okay to leave the conclusions unread, but in this case he should have just read at least one whole chapter as a courtesy to the audience.

            Du Juan turned to me during the reading and enthusiastically thanked me for inviting him.

            The last literary guest of the first set was Stanley Fefferman, whose work stood out for me as very good. I especially liked his poems that described music and the playing of musical instruments.

            To play us up to the halftime break, Magic Mike and Tom Hamilton returned to the stage. They were just in the middle of a cover of “Blue Yodel #1”, popularly known as “T for Texas”, by Jimmie Rodgers, when Stanley Fefferman approached the stage and ran a finger across his throat to signal them to stop. Then he announced that one of the elderly members of the audience had fallen down the stairs leading to the basement and the ambulance was on the way. Mike and Tom decided to take an early break.

            During the break we all got to talk a bit. Dutch and Brian already knew each other since the 90s but hadn’t seen each other for at least a couple of years so they got a chance to catch up and Dutch chatted quite a bit with K. J. as well. Knowing that Dutch would be there I brought along the two books that he’d given me before saying goodnight a couple of weeks before and asked him to sign them for me.

            After the break we heard from featured musician, Glen Hornblast, who I’ve heard play many times. I guess because he was playing for a somewhat literary crowd that he opened with a poem, but it seemed that the main reason that he did so was so he could name drop that he’d written it while taking Irving Layton’s poetry class at York University. That would have had to have been sometime between 1969 and 1978. The short, amusing poem describes an existential quandary and than concludes with, “I really need to get laid!” I don’t think that he played anything in this set that I wasn’t familiar with. That’s why it was strange when he announced just before playing “When Will I Get Over You” that he’d just written it this year. In reality it’s his signature song that he’s been doing for years. I seem to recall that he’s said the same thing of that piece before, so maybe it’s a running joke, though he didn’t say it like it was meant to be funny. Another of his well-known songs that he did was about a homeless woman named Mary, with the punchline: “Mary’s only crime is being poor.” I think that K. J. mentioned that she liked it. Accompanying Glen of course was Tom Hamilton, who Glen declared to be the best violinist in Toronto.

            Later on, Brian brought up Glen’s set and complained that he spends more time introducing his songs than he does singing them. “Just play the fucking song!” I joked that Glen’s super positivity onstage is a cover to keep people from knowing that he has a stash of axe-murdered bodies somewhere.

            I’d had my purple tulip sitting in water the whole time I’d been there but, contrary to what the florist had told me, it hadn’t opened up at all. I started trying to force it open with my fingers.

            Following Glen was Mark Ripp, who is a good guitarist with lyrics that either tone down his cynicism with humour or tone down his humour with cynicism.

            I think that both Glen and Mark left together before my set, but Tom Hamilton stuck around.

            Linda had asked me to provide a short bio for her to introduce me with and so I decided to mark moments of my life with critical things that others have said to me about myself over the years. Here are some of them:

            “Some guys get really smart on acid!” – said by a dumb guy that Christian dropped acid with in 1972.

            “The only good song that Christian ever wrote was Angeline” – said by Angeline in 1995.

            “You dropped the F-bomb on one of our hosts. We don’t want you at the Art Bar!” – written by Stephen Humphrey in 2011.

            “You have no credibility as a writer because you aren’t published!” – said by Lucile Barker in 2013.

            I reminded Katey of when I needed her to put the reverb on my voice. It took me about five minutes to get the stage set up the way I needed it. I set the tulip on the bricks in the light near the end of the stage, but I don’t think it was all that recognizable as a tulip there. I unwound the microphone cord from the stand so I could easily grab it after taking off my guitar, but then I changed my mind as to what mic I wanted to use and forgot to unwind it till the middle of my performance.

            I announced that I would be doing a ten-minute piece called “Temporary Eternity” and that it was a true story. It was an abridged version of a story-song that I’d written many years ago. The original piece was meant to be sung all the way through, but I’d chosen this time to only sing three choruses near the beginning and to recite the rest while acting out the story. It was the account of an acid trip that I took with some friends on Centre Island one night in the summer of 1972. Almost everything happened the way I told it except that I poeticized the story and added some images. For instance, one of my friends really did say that he’d seen Toronto go up on top of a mushroom cloud, but I spiced it up with “like a hat”.

            I’d decided while watching the stage during the earlier performances that the part of my performance during which I would be lying down didn’t really need to be in between the monitors at the edge of the stage because there would be enough visibility further back. The echo effect was supposed to have been turned on while I was on my back but I didn’t hear it. I thought I’d heard Katey call out “Oh!” about halfway through that part, in a tone that one might use when they realize they’ve forgotten something. Brian told me later that he hadn’t noticed any reverb having been added either.

            During my rehearsals leading up to this event I had debated with myself whether or not it was pretentious for me to act out the story with gestures and body movements, but decided to do it anyway. Brian offered the view that it was a very effective choice because it drew the audience into the performance.

            My set seemed to go over well, and in addition to what all my friends had to say, I got positive comments from Linda Stitt, Stanley Fefferman, Tom Hamilton and one of the staff of the bar as well.

            Once I was back at my table I mentioned that the tulip prop hadn’t worked out that well because the stem had broken and it hadn’t opened. K. J. told me that I should have asked her, since she has lots of them in her garden. If I ever do the piece again I’ll do that.

            Now that I didn’t have to keep my mind precisely focused I could drink my beer more quickly and Nick bought me another. I was still drinking it when Mike and Tom finished their closing musical set. Not all at once but not far apart, after offering their final compliments, Dutch, K. J., Du Juan, Bänoo and Cy left. With Brian and Nick still at my table, Linda came up to invite me to her place on St Joseph for tea, which I think is a Words and Music Salon tradition. I told her that I was with my friends and she said that I could bring them along, but Brian was heading out and Nick wanted to do some voice recording with me, so I turned her down this time.

            Brian, Nick and I stood outside the Smiling Buddha for a while chatting, then Nick headed for his car to meet me later at my place. Brian and I lingered a little longer, and then we hugged and separated.

            When I got home, the phone in my backpack was vibrating, so I pulled it out and called Nick back. He was already in front of my building, so I went down to let him in. He’d brought four cans of Zywiec and offered me one, but I definitely needed to eat if I was going to drink another beer, so I made us each a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich.

            After lunch he recorded me reading a script from his ongoing animated series. The character was named Hector Nectar and Nick described him as being like the “smoking man” from the X-Files. He’s the third character that Nick has had me do but so far he hasn’t used any of my voice recordings for the story. It’ll be interesting to see if he does this time.

            After Nick left I went out to the supermarket, but I took the long way around because I first wanted to go down to King and Dufferin to take photos of a bike post ring. The ring that I wanted to capture though was tied to a bicycle, so I went to Freshco.

            I bought a tomato, grapes, two mangoes, a package of Italian sausages that were on sale, three containers of yogourt and some old cheddar cheese.

            I decided to ride east on Queen looking for bike post rings. I caught images on my camera of a few with abandoned locks but couldn’t find any with multiple locks like the one at King and Dufferin. I went all the way to Spadina, down to King and back to Jameson, and then I rode up to Queen and west to Roncesvalles. I noticed that Allen Sutterfield was downstairs from his apartment and in front of his son’s comic book store, selling his books. On the way back I stopped by to chat. There was an extremely loud and tall mentally ill man hanging around and ranting nearby and he was making Allen nervous. I talked with Allen for a few minutes and found that other than his back not being in great shape everything in his life is pretty much the same. He’s still contemplating going to China and his girlfriend in China seems to be continuing to not be considering coming to Canada.

            We chatted till almost 20:30 and then I went home to make a quick dinner of beans and toast.