Send the funny little fiddler kid with the missing teeth. Tell her to meet me on the bench at Beacon Hill Park at high noon on Sunday. Tell her to have the five hundred, in cash, in a paperback book. I’ll have the van papers in a book. We’ll do the switch there.” Rosalyn always had to do stuff as if she was a spy. I’m not sure why. At the time she didn’t even have a bank account, so The Man couldn’t track her down. She was an outlaw.
DD and I went to Russell Books, the used bookstore there on Fort Street, and looked for the perfect book. We found a pulp soft-porn novel from the fifties called The Timid Virgin. That seemed appropriate, since we were tour virgins. As a band, we’d never played further away than Duncan.
When DD returned from her “clandestine” meeting, the book she had with the papers in it made us feel like the van was a Vehicle of Fate. It was a paperback from the same series as The Timid Virgin, called The Happy Hooker. In the book’s margins, Rosalyn had handwritten a list of bars and house concerts that spanned the country, along with their contact numbers. How we vibrated over that. The whole exchange had been done in complete silence. They had both worn hats with brims that covered their faces. Looking back, I think Rosalyn was already recruiting DD, back then, for various purposes. She was laying tour eggs to catch a future road dog, for sure.
On our way to the ferry, we stopped at Chambers Towers to say goodbye and thanks. It was 1:00 p.m. Rosalyn came down, bleary-eyed, in her bathrobe. “Oh, you’re going now? All right then, kids. Have a good tour! Drive fast, take chances! Safety third!”
Jasmine McKittrik
Dharma Lodge, Galiano Island, B.C., 2015
People can be negative if they want to be. If that’s how they want to perceive reality. It’s sad, but some people, so many people, still haven’t figured out that we create our own realities with our minds. This has actually been proven by physicists at the big Halon Collider in Switzerland. You manifest things, and they happen. And if you manifest gossiping, and always criticizing, well, you know, you’re going to have a negative life, very frankly. And you only have yourself to blame for that. You manifested it. I’ve made several trips to India, and in India, let me tell you, the amazing people I met, they understand this. People who manifest negativity there are called Untouchables for a reason. You know, there’s a story about an old First Nations grandfather and his grandson, and I’m not going to tell the whole story but basically the grandfather says you have two wolves inside you, fighting each other in there, grandson, and one of them is the positive, “Yeah! Let’s do this!” wolf, and the other is the negative wolf with negative attitudes, the envy wolf, the always-seeing-the-glass-half-empty wolf. And they’re fighting. And the grandson says, “Which one is going to win, grandfather?” and the grandfather says, “The one you feed.” Aha? See what I mean?
I don’t have time for that kind of negativity. I don’t feed that negative wolf. I think the reason that some people talk negatively about me can be summed up in one word — the green-eyed monster: jealousy. At this point, my life is pretty self-actualized. I travel, I lead seminars. I get a lot of time in nature, which really recharges me and connects me to the Earth. I don’t mind if people call me a hippy. That’s their damage. I get things done. I don’t smoke the weed at all now, and even back then I certainly never smoked as much as DD used to, probably still does.
I was the one who found the houses we lived in. I was the one who made sure the rent and hydro bills got paid every month. I was the one who took her to the doctor’s when she inevitably came home sick from tour. I was the one who held her tight through her freakout nights, when all of her demons would come rushing out at her at once. And I’m still loyal to her to the point where I am not going to share what that was like. It was not pretty, I can tell you that.
For all the people who enjoyed DD in her touring persona and all of her so-called wild and free behaviour, I was the one keeping her alive so she could recover enough to go on the next adventure. And I can tell you that got just a little tiring sometimes, but I did it because I loved her and I knew she needed to do that, to live through that. That’s why with these women who claim to have been with her … I have nothing to say to them. They’re jealous because they know that I’m the love of DD’s life. She was with me for the longest, and I set her free, but she always came back, and I know that she will come crawling back someday. I don’t know if I’ll be in a place where I wish to take her back, but I know that her destiny is to return to me, because I’m manifesting that.
Amy Williams
Her Kitchen, Fernwood Neighbourhood, Victoria, 2014
That epic tour we did. We were the Supersonic Grifters. We roamed the country from soup to nuts starting in Fernwood, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, heading due east, all the way to goddamn Signal Hill, Newfoundland, a million thousand kilometres away, back west into Quebec for a while, then continued west and wound up in Calgary during the Folk Festival.
Yeah, we met Campbell Ouiniette there. He said he was gonna make us famous like the Low Johannahs, but then he disappeared. No, I wasn’t there when they did the Stampede, that was later, that was a different tour, later. They kept the band name that I had helped come up with, but they replaced me with Giulietta on that one. Yeah. On my tour we were in Calgary during Folk Fest, not the Stampede. They’re total opposites. Then we headed for home and finally imploded, or exploded, at the ferry terminal at Swartz Bay outside of Victoria again.
At first we let Jacob be in charge of the money. I don’t know why we did that. I guess he was sort of our leader at first, anyway. Artistically? Or something? It’s funny how you tend to give up leadership to anybody who just acts sure of themselves a lot. And Jacob always had that swagger to him. He always had an opinion, that’s for sure. And he was very, very handsome back then. What a handsome, lovely boy he ruined. Himself.
So, we would get to a gas station, fill up, and then somebody would have to wake Jacob from his drunken unconsciousness and get him to reach into his duct-taped wallet and hand us some nasty, sweaty, wet bills. And always, always, he’d grumble about it. One time I remember him reaching into his unwashed pocket and saying, “This shit has got to stop.” What the fuck does that even mean?
So after a while, I just started being the one to collect the money from the promoters, because I had a baby to feed. I mean, Wyatt was Jacob’s baby, too, but that did not seem to be a major factor in Jacob’s decision-making process.
I was in charge of the food money. We had two rules: nobody who’s drinking whisky can drive, and nobody eats the baby food but the baby.
God, we were poor. So damn poor. I’m not rich now, but then, we would sometimes spend our mornings digging in our pockets to pool dimes and nickels, even pennies, to get something to eat. Some gigs only paid enough for gas in the van, to get us to a show that we were hoping would pay more than that. Sometimes we just stayed in a town because we had no money to move on. Because I was the mother, I somehow got nominated by default to be the responsible adult in the band. Looking back on it, my level of responsibility only existed in comparison with the others, who were basically living like stray dogs or something. DD had to remind Tom to take off his shoes at the end of the night. Then she’d have to stop him from pissing in them.
I’m proud that I was able to keep us all alive on a food budget of just over twenty bucks a day for five people. The baby’s milk and a can of baby food came first and that was about five bucks a day. So, basically, most of the time you had to go to a Safeway or a Loblaws or a Sobeys and get the roast chicken. You got the roast chicken and a big bag of dinner rolls from the roll bin in the bakery department. We got our vitamin C from the bars we played, drinking screwdrivers, Caesars, and gin and tonics with a twist. So we never got scurvy like some bands we knew.
