with people like Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and, most famously, Canada’s own Oscar Peterson. Ed Thigpen was a bona fide jazz legend. Mind you, the term “jazz legend” didn’t signify much to me back then, and it’s only now, in adulthood, that I realize what an honour it was to make his acquaintance.
Which I did in the following manner. Imagine the lads down in the music room, gritting their way through “Satisfaction.” We performed it with grim sobriety, our entire beings occupied with technical matters: the riff, the structure of the song (recall that at one point, everything falls away except the drums; leastwise, that’s the plan), the lyrics. Ed Thigpen entered, listened as we arrived clumsily at the musical finish line, and then waved Conrad off the stool. “Let me play with these boys,” he said.
Okay. Conrad hopped down, Mr. Thigpen took his position, and Joel and I began the riff. Ed—I guess I can call him Ed; after all, we were jamming, weren’t we?—allowed us to execute the lick once as establishment, and then he began to play along.
Well, I never. My initial thought, I’ll confess, was that Conrad’s stepdad was lying about being a professional drummer, because he appeared to be, well, spazzing out, waving his arms in broad circular motions, the sticks just happening to deflect off cowhide and metal. Drummers were supposed to move with robotic precision, and if they wanted to hit a cymbal, it seemed to me, they should turn and look at the thing for a full two seconds, addressing it, making sure it hadn’t moved away somehow, before whacking it. Ed’s eyes were elsewhere, and while I don’t suppose they actually rolled up into the inside of his skull, that is certainly the impression I received. But soon I became aware that there was a presence in the room, a force with the power of a tidal wave. At least, it was far, far stronger than my twiddling little Keith Richards lick.
This was rhythm.
I had never encountered rhythm at close quarters before, certainly had never been trapped with it in a basement, where it bullied me up against the wall and slapped me around. “This Land Is Your Land” does not prepare a fellow for rhythm. Oh, certainly, that song has rhythm, but it has rhythm like an old woman might have a poodle, a dog with clipped fur and papers that give its legal name as “Lancelot of Les Halles.” This rhythm was like an atavistic mastiff, only a mutated gene away from ferity.
It was scary.
Joel seemed to be battling rhythm more valiantly than I. He was playing with exhilaration, and a broad grin had blossomed across his freckled face. Indeed, if rhythm were a bucking bronco, he did his eight seconds. But you’re right, I should dispense with metaphors, not only because I keep mixing ’em up, but because they are weak and unnecessary. Rhythm is elemental, something we have inside us like bile and marrow. The access can be a little problematic, since it is protected by self-consciousness and notions of seemliness. Let me put it this way. The fear I felt as Ed Thigpen played the drums was not like the fear I felt when I considered asking Mathilda to dance—it was exactly the same fear.
I’M TALKING about the fear of giving oneself over, I guess, of abandonment to the unknown, surrender to the moment. I suppose that’s the connection back to my new thematic material. I’m not referring simply to the fear of death—we will talk about that in the pages to come, I’ll warrant—but the fear of losing control. Especially since everyone wants to wrest control away from you. The people who love you want to take care of you, which makes sense. In their eyes, you may be demonstrating an inability to take care of yourself. People also have much advice: how to spend the few months left to you, how to best deal with this thing they call “cancer.” People come to visit, which is great, except that sometimes you need to be doing other things. I wanted to write; I had this second draft to complete and a television show to develop. I had songs to write and record. I probably wouldn’t have time to write another novel, but I thought a novella might be a possibility, perhaps just a long short story. But people had all sorts of notions of things I could and should be doing. Visiting Ireland, for example. My friend Jake communicated an offer from my fishing buddies, those lads with whom I make an annual journey to the bonefishing grounds that surround Cuba. “Anywhere in the world you want to go,” said Jake, “we’ll take you there.”
“The truth of the matter is, Mako,” I told him, “if I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn’t be one of my big regrets, that I didn’t fish enough.” That fact is entirely due to Jake, who dreams big and then connives ways to make things happen. We have gone many places in the world, on assignment, our adventures paid for by the editors of various magazines, often the generous (and fishing-obsessed) Pat Walsh, editor of Outdoor Canada. Jake and I call each other “Mako” and “Thresher,” both appellations being species of shark. If that seems hopelessly ten years old to you, well, it kind of is. When I’m with the boys, I’m ten years old. When I’m with a woman, I mature slightly, and I mean ever so slightly, to fourteen or fifteen, giddy and hormone-addled, unable to believe that I am actually with a woman. Anyway, I said to Jake, “If I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn’t be one of my big regrets, that I didn’t fish enough. So I’m thinking maybe . . . Paris?”
But you lose most control, I think, to the doctors. A couple of days after my diagnosis, I went to meet the team who would be looking after me. That’s how Toronto East General Hospital works. There was a team of doctors, consisting of Dr. Li (the chemo doctor), Dr. —— (radiation), and Dr. Simone (the thoracic surgeon). Of them all, I liked Dr. Simone—Carmine Simone—the best. He was a dark-haired young man, a touch on the burly side, who shook my hand and greeted me warmly as “the guest of honour.” Dr. Li was quite an attractive young woman, so you might think I would have liked her the best, but she was a bit reserved. She spoke using statistics, and you know what Mark Twain said about statistics. For example, one of the first things she said was that the median life expectancy for someone with my condition was one year.
It took a while, a few weeks even, for me to realize what this meant. Not the “you’re going to die” part. I got that. But the mathematical meaning—that half of the people with stage I V lung cancer live less than a year, half of them more than a year, with no cap or restriction on the time thereafter— was long in coming.
Dr. ——, the radiation guy, dismissed himself from our meeting early on. In a friendly enough way, he said that I was not a candidate for radiation, unless they were to discover that the cancer had already spread to my brain, in which case they would radiate before they did any chemo. The plan was to hit me with first-line chemicals, the ones that were most successful in most cases.
“But,” Dr. Li said, “the statistics show that this chemotherapy on average extends life expectancy by only two or three months.”
“Okay,” we asked. Dorothy, Martin, and Jill were with me. “What does that mean?”
“It means that if two people both have your condition, and one receives chemotherapy and one doesn’t, the first will outlive the other, probably, by two to three months.”
“Oh,” said I.
Still, I was more than willing to undergo chemotherapy, because, well, I was scared, and it seemed time to fight like a puma with its ass backed up against a wall. “Besides,” I announced, “what’s the use of being a big burly boy if you can’t take a little chemo?” I have always bounced back and forth between “stocky” and, well, “fat,” but all of a sudden this was a good thing. The chemo might very well have a negative effect on my appetite (let’s see it try, said I), and I would lose weight, so it was good, Dr. Li observed, that I had something in reserve. My friend (and the Porkbelly keyboardist) Richard Bell died of cancer, and before he did he lost an appalling percentage of himself from the therapy. True, Richard recovered enough to play on our second album, but then he died. It seemed somehow to me that he had simply vanished into thin air.
The first couple of weeks following
