Return to Canada

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 a 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 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.

In the Fire - 2

We finally found a rooming house on 13th behind the Vancouver General Hospital that was to be home for the next year or so and would witness the arrival of our son Chad, born February 2, 1973.

We put lots of love and care into painting the two small adjoining rooms and in these rooms many songs and poems were carefully crafted on twilight evenings looking out over the mountains. A miniature hotplate stove and oven cooked many a savory meal and when Roger and Cleo arrived in Vancouver, hosted many a friendly gathering too. It was to be another period of magic in our lives.

I took a job as an accounts clerk at the Shaughnessy Hospital, complete with long hair and headband and this provided an income, while I strummed guitar at home evenings but did no performing. I recall also studying the writings of Madame Blavatsky, more cabala and reading The Green Child by Herbert Read which also provided me with a song of the same name. The song Ships of Sleep came out of this period too. This was a time when there was a simple and beautiful majesty about just being home and making love and creating music. There seemed to be excitement and adventure around every corner although we lived the simplest of lives. The sound of my guitar literally filled up those tiny rooms with good energy.

Chad was born with some difficulty at the Vancouver General Hospital's Willow Pavilion but the day we brought him home and although it was still winter, spring seemed already in the air. The arrival of a baby was a big blessing in our lives that had seen such unstable times. About the same time, Roger and Cleo had a son too and we suddenly had a lot more in common than old times. Thank God for the friendship and love of those days.

My father died in the spring of that year of prolonged and painful throat cancer and I traveled alone back to Winnipeg for the funeral. It was a painful personal time for me as so much had been left unspoken between us but it was also a time where I laid to rest some old ghosts.

The train journey back to Winnipeg was a memorable one though because it was on the train I met a small group of gypsy travelers (they all seemed to be California hippies in their 20's)who introduced me to the book The Holy Science, written by Swami Sri Yukteswar the guru of Paramahansa Yoganda. They served me green tea with cayenne pepper and told me they were vegetarians. I asked one of them the purpose of their journey. "What are you hunting for," I asked. "I'm not into hunting," he replied. This same young man with long flowing blond hair who gave me the book astonished me at end of our journey by telling me he was 41 years old. It was only then that I noticed the grey hairs in his beard. These teachings and this meeting would have a deep influence on me in the years to come.

My job at the hospital didn't last too long. I couldn't seem to deal with a routine job but UIC insured us for a few months afterward, a small car came our way and we soon made the decision to abandon city life for the wilds of Vancouver Island, to a setting that was destined to become a kind of "spiritual home" for me, the Cowichan Valley. We stayed with Veronica's sister and her family in Mill Bay until we found a little place on the water. It was there that I began to pick up the threads of my life as a performer.

Reading the local newspaper one day, I came across two poems written by a local photographer, Robert James, which inspired me to make an appointment to meet with him. I remember that Robert's poetry had a powerful mystical quality about them and perhaps that's what it was that led me to make the call.  Whatever the reason, the meeting was an important juncture in my life. Robert greeted me as a fellow artist-soul newly arrived on the island and immediately called the program director Chas Leckie at Shaw Cable to do a community television program on me and my music. He also asked if I'd be interested in accompanying some of his poetry readings on guitar and offered me the use of his studio to give guitar lessons. To top it off, he paid for my first series of ads, taking my photo for them and setting them up with the paper and if this wasn't enough of a show of solidarity, he allowed me to teach evenings in his studio, rent-free. This set the course of my life for the next few years.