When I was a teen, I met a gal by chance down in North Las Vegas while attending a Texas friend's wedding. I had been summoned to play guitar at his reception. The young lady I speak of was pretty, jovial and she played guitar too! When I first heard her sing her own composition woven in and around a mesmerizing finger-picking technique; I knew that angels do indeed exist. Her songs were all originals and the auditory stitching of her six and twelve harp strings, coupled with a hauntingly sweet voice, wove bind-runes around my young heart.
I stayed at her parent’s house during that trip due to the soon overfull house of my Texas friend. After my return to Vancouver, I almost eloped with my Ecuadorian landlady and went to South America after attending her bible group for a few weeks only to realize that it was actually a cult. I was temporarily shattered and began conversing by phone with the desert angel, who helped me figure things out. After racking up a massive phone bill, I sold my 1957 Gibson Sunburst Melody Maker to pay for it. She invited me back to her house again many months later and I accepted the invitation.
Her father was a friendly retired Air Force Colonel with a managerial position at a big name casino hotel. Her mother was a quick-witted, intelligent personal secretary at a prestigious law firm, the name of which meant nothing to me in the Seventies. Later, in 2008, I heard it mentioned on the news every night for months. The family had a horse in a backyard that was actually desert chaparral as far as one could see towards Sunrise Mountain. None of those things elicited any envy or awe on my part, but I was enchanted by that honey-haired girl.
One evening, her elder brother tried to scare us with high speed night driving on a long wash-board road into the city. Daddy's Cadillac got big air on each bump and soon the shocks began to bottom out.
Much like a character named Dwayne in one of Woody Allen's movies, her brother asked if I had ever felt like “just ending it all and driving into an oncoming car?”
“No but there are plenty of other people out there coming towards us who do,” I replied.
I didn't tell him that my father used to swerve into the oncoming lane, smash the dashboard with his hand, hit the brakes and bellow, “Christ Almighty, we're going to hit!” during obligatory family Sunday drives in Louisiana, when I was small.
Thus, big brother couldn't find my scary-button that night and he got flustered after exhausting his repertoire. We had run out of desert and were coming into the city lights. He wound up nearly losing control of the decelerating vehicle and scared himself after knocking over a traffic sign. The Cadillac was hung up on the bent pole until a crowd of Las Vegas street urchins scuttled out of the neon night like land crabs and rocked the big green boat off the bowed metal pipe before the cops arrived. I held my girl's hand, who was genuinely scared, and suggested that brother take us all home.
My angel, whom I’ll call Bee, had been born in California. As a native Texan, I decided to overlook that because she had lived most of her childhood in Panama. I have two Colombian born half-sisters that I have never met, so I felt a deep mysterious pull in the direction of the jungle.
One afternoon, during the week I was there, we were sitting at a Taco Bell and she suggested that we get married. I hadn't even kissed her, except in my dreams and I immediately said, “Why Not?”
I drove her home and made the announcement to her parents and her siblings. A carton of Marlboro cigarettes later, the Colonel put an end to the stream of questions that I had been answering from his now assembled family. I vowed to return to Canada, get a job paying $800.00 per month at a restaurant, rent an apartment and send a one-way ticket to their eighteen year-old daughter, ASAP. We shook on it and next morning I was dropped off at McCarran International early.
My plan went as almost as outlined above and I sent a plane ticket to Bee. She arrived with only a guitar and a Navajo blanket. I got a second job so we could get out of my alcoholic step-father's rental sooner than later. The immigration officials had told me that we would have to be married within six months or Bee would be deported. I rented us a nice apartment in Deep Cove with a view of Panorama Park.
Our wedding rings were crafted by me from some big hex nuts which I ground smooth and filed the threads and four of the points off of. Later we had custom gold rings made by one of my new sisters-in-law, who was a budding jeweller. During a lunch break from my cooking job, we got married by a Commissioner on Lonsdale Ave. It cost ten dollars with the single Polaroid photo. I went back to work and Bee went to share the news with my mother and step-father.
Step-father got her drunk and she was sick all over me in the taxi on our way home to our apartment that wedding night. It was nothing like the movies. During our brief marriage of thirty months, we had many trials. My father committed suicide, Bee’s sister was killed in a motorcycle accident and we two lived in a haunted house for six long hellish months on Vancouver Island. I went through a dozen jobs and we moved many times. We also hitch-hiked across Guatemala for our honeymoon, unaware at the time of the mass killing going on at night across that stricken land.
My mother and my younger sister came to stay with us for awhile to get away from the drunk. Our mother soon returned to him and my wife told my sister stay with us after hearing her story. I brought my sister back to our mother filled with anger. Praying my sister would survive and understand why someday, I was determined that our mother take responsibility and act to protect her daughter. I was desperate to find a lasting career and my wife wasn't allowed to work yet due to the immigration rules in force at that time.
Eventually, I was hired as a manager trainee by a major bank. I put my pipe-threader in storage, dressed up and cut off my hair. Things were coming along fine and we got a nice basement suite in Lynn Valley way up Mountain Highway on Kilmer Road. The landlords were newly arrived Scots with a bright baby boy and I loved living there. Then something happened one Saturday.
You can't glue a vow back together but the Irishman in me decided to give her one more chance, due to our young ages. I asked Bee if she loved me or him. While she cogitated on this, the Cherokee in me told her that the answer had to be one or the other. She replied that she wanted more time to ponder. The Welshman in me asked her, “How much time?” She said about a month would do and that she would like to go to live at his place while she pondered. The German in me told her she could have fifteen minutes starting NOW and then the Swede in me began packing her suitcase. Then the phone rang. It was her mother calling from Vegas.
“Michael, I have wonderful news. Do you have a pen and paper?”
“Yes, Ma'am.”
“Well, I'll be brief. My husband and I just concluded some investment deals and have had a windfall. You are about to move up quite a few notches in your position in the bank. I have already spoken to your bank manager there in Vancouver. You will be in charge of doing some financial transactions for some people down here on a regular basis. We have opened up trust accounts for you two as well as all our other children. Each of you will have a million dollars. You cannot touch the principal but the interest is yours to do as you see fit. Now first, give me a name for your trust.”
“Cedar,” was all I could think of.
“Fine. Cedar it is. Now, write this down. Mr. X and Mr. Y will arrive Monday on flight XYZ at YVR at Z-o-clock and you are to pick them up and take them to your bank. They will have all the necessary papers for you to sign as well as instructions for you and your manager at the bank.”
As she spoke, I was doodling on the piece of paper where I had written the information. The interest rate at the time for savings accounts was over nine per cent and the monthly interest on the stated trust account would have fetched over seven thousand dollars. I was earning about seven hundred dollars per month as a trainee at that time.
A spiritual owl swooped down and snatched that part of my brain that was full of ideas with no funds to see them realized and it soared up through the atmosphere and kept going. Cocaine is but a raggedy, feeble, distant cousin to that feeling. I began to drip water from my armpits. I was visibly shaken and emotionally stirred. I could hear my wife sniffling in the bedroom.
“Mom?” I said flatly.
“Yes, honey? Not a bad day, huh? Take a deep breath. It's all real.”
“Mom, there is something I need to tell you.”
“Sure honey. What is it?”
“It's about your daughter.”
“What about my baby girl?”
“Mom, I think she's going to leave me and that we are going to split up. Does that change all the things you just told me?”
“Michael, Michael, Michael. You are honest to a fault! It certainly does change everything! Put her on the phone.”
I called Bee to the phone. She hadn't given me her answer yet and as I watched her face, I saw the pale sliver of a chance that we might have had to remain together disappear like a melting snowflake. My owl of dreams and ideas now did an abrupt about-face and reentered the atmosphere of my situation at light speed. It was akin to having fallen asleep on warm sand and then waking up on a sheet of sea ice.
I staggered out the our door, mumbling to myself and let gravity pull me down to the intersection of Lynn Valley Road and Mountain Hwy. There was a service station on that corner and a mechanic noticed my erratic walking style. He rushed out from his service bay, grabbed my arm and towed me into his shop. He sat a bucket upside down and made me sit. He yelled at another mechanic to get me a mug of coffee. I took the offered drink and muttered something about losing a wife and a million dollars at the same time and all before lunch.
“Talk,” he said.
I reiterated that morning's events.
“Fuck me gently!” said one mechanic.
“She sure pissed all over your Cornflakes,” said the other.
I slowly wound my way back uphill after thanking those compassionate fellows. When I arrived home Bee was gone with her suitcase and the instructions from her mother.
Three days later, I awoke to the sound of my Scottish landlady's voice. She was tugging something out of my grip where I lay in a fetal position on the living room carpet.
“Makool, up ye gae lad. She'll nae be back. Look, mun, ye huv nae luft aff klootchin' her shairt sunce Satday as uff she’d daid. Fling it awa. Pit it doon. She’s oonly a wee gell. Ye'll soon find luv. Dinna worrit, aye? U've made ye a posh brekkie aloft and I tole yer bank ta guv ye a few mair dee's grace afore ye hafta show oop.”
I was informed three years later by my ex-mother-in-law as I was signing the divorce papers that there had been no great fortune. She said her and the Colonel had been conned and taken in by professionals and had lost everything. The news just made me spread out my sadness over a wider area.
As an old man editing these memoirs I clearly see that life comes to all of us with its teeth showing. Communication is very often difficult and trauma takes generations to turn to good. I wouldn’t take back a single moment of my experiences and have recorded them to honour the players involved. It is my own wish to learn from this life. I am but another character in the unfinished tale of my life. There are no heroes nor villains.
fin