Strange Way to Live. Carl Dixon
got out of the car with shotgun still at the ready and demanded to know what we were doing. I turned on the innocent-kid-from-small-town-Ontario charm and glossed over the unpleasant parts of the story. I explained our predicament: that we had a long trip ahead and we were almost out of fuel, and said we had come to the police station hoping to get help but found it closed. That much was true, just a few gaps in the tale.
The police relaxed a little, and I think they even liked that we were a band. One checked with the call centre to verify that, yes, someone had called from the outpost call box asking for help maybe an hour ago. The two officers told us they were in town responding to a local complaint that there were strangers in town doing some funny stuff, but they felt sure now that our actions had been misinterpreted.
Unbelievably, they now took it upon themselves to help us get on our way. There was a Shell station maybe ten miles up the highway. They called the owner and asked him to get out of bed to come and pump gas for these poor musicians. They even gave us a police escort. They were such nice guys that I felt bad about fooling them. However, the pulse of our mission was still beating, faintly. That was all I cared about that night.
We now had a full tank to resume a run for the ferry dock, but there remained the oil leak problem. None of us was a mechanic but we could hear well enough that our engine was going da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, louder each hour. We were stopping every fifteen or twenty minutes now, and that wasn’t good. The engine was overheating over and over, but we had no idea what to do except drive on grimly and see how far the doomed vessel would carry our weary crew.
Just about the time I was beginning to see double from being up all night, a ferocious pounding din broke out as if someone had crawled in under the hood to wield a ball-peen hammer. There was shouting and steam and fumes and hissing as we pulled off to the shoulder and then … silence.
Within a few miles of the New Brunswick border, but still only halfway to the ferry, we had created an immovable object. That cube van was dead.
I know it will seem like I’m always at the centre of the story, but I think I just clamoured to be there because it always seemed as though that was where I should be. In this case I decided that we had to find help to continue our quest. I believe I still hadn’t quite surrendered. Somehow, I got a tow truck involved to pull the van into the next town, a little place called Dégelis. We were exhausted. We got the local mechanic to look it over. His diagnosis was swift: blown gaskets had led to oil leaks, which led to overheating, which led to the pistons seizing and the engine block warping when we kept driving. A rebuilt engine would have to be dropped in, to the tune of four hundred dollars. Was that a good price? We had no idea. It had to be done, though. We couldn’t stop there, and we weren’t going home. Good thing I had my dad’s credit card.
We had to cool our heels for a day or two in a little motel at Dégelis and spent most of our pocket cash. Poor Brad tried killing time by kicking a soccer ball around with Curly in the parking lot, but he gave the ball such a hoof that it flew up and smashed a hole in the motel’s neon sign. Brad had to cough up a hundred and fifty dollars to pay the bill and was now just as broke as us.
With all this aggravation before we’d even played a note, you might expect that the story would now settle down, that the band would figure it out and get in a routine once things got going a bit. In fact, the start was only a harbinger of one unlikely event after another.
Obviously, the goal of arriving on time for the first week in Newfoundland was not achieved. We did get our new engine and the van running well in pretty short order. Meanwhile, our agent, Dan, contacted the Kirby Agency in Halifax to ask them to help find us something on an emergency basis; he’d been able to salvage our second week of two in St. John’s. They got us a weekend gig at the Red Lion Pub in Dartmouth, which seemed a bit rough to me, but the Red Lion was willing to let us play and pay us for it. We were directed to the Inglis Street Lodge in Halifax as a place where musicians often stayed while visiting that city, so we paid for rooms there and in fact did meet some of the East Coast bands going through the place.
Unfortunately, all was not uneventful. I’ll quote from a letter I wrote home from Newfoundland when the memory was fresh. It went like this:
… The night I spoke to you on the phone from Halifax an arsonist struck at our lodgings at about 3 in the morning. The story is that a long-time tenant had a falling-out with the owners and decided to have his revenge. Brad, Blair, and I were sharing a 2nd floor room while Chris and Hal were in the basement. The fire was set in two places: just outside our door where some highly flammable curtains were hung, and in the bathroom which opened onto the only stairs. I awoke to a muffled commotion of human voices and an odd hissing sound. I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
The hall, when I peered out the door, had a strange white light in it. I then realized that it was smoke-filled, which muffled the voices. The hissing sound was the automatic sprinkler spraying down. I turned and yelled at the others and we skedaddled out. Luckily I had slept in my grey track pants, but Blair and Brad were in their underwear and it was a very cold night. We were all barefoot and shirtless, wondering where the fire department was.
Blair ran back inside to get his leather football-team jacket at possible risk to life and limb because he refused to stand out there freezing any longer in just his underwear. He returned swiftly wearing the coat. After a minute I looked over to where our van was parked and saw a girl trying to climb out a window about seven feet above it. She felt trapped by the fire but was afraid to jump, so I scrambled onto the top of the cube-back and helped her and a guy friend get down. The fire department showed up in a couple of minutes and they found that the only real damage was smoke and water damage….
Before we could leave the Red Lion, our music store demanded the return of our rental lights to Ontario. We left them behind in the bar for the Halifax agent to ship back for us on Monday. Agents don’t like those jobs.
We drove up Cape Breton in fine sunny weather to North Sydney to catch the night ferry — a week late but, by gar, we were getting there! We’d never been to sea, so the crossing was exciting. Hal and Blair got a berth and took turns sleeping in there.
At about 6 a.m. our vessel emerged from the fog to our first sighting of “The Rock,” at Port aux Basques. On one hand I felt an exciting kinship with the first Europeans who landed there centuries before. On the other hand it looked to me like we were approaching the end of the earth. Was this a hint of foreboding?
The Alvin Shoes band disembarked and started driving across the entire island to St. John’s to begin our delayed conquest of the Rock. Hoorah! Only, as it turned out, the Rock conquered us — or more accurately, we defeated us.
We got into the Atlantic Place Strand, right downtown, for set-up and began the week’s run. Our lack of lights was embarrassing, and the musical performance was leaden and amateurish. Everyone had been traumatized by the journey to get there, and we had no idea that we were supposed to be this “hot new band” from Toronto.
I thought we were doing “better” after the first night, but our dispirited show was still bad enough to provoke an outraged article in the local newspaper’s entertainment guide the next week, in which the reviewer asked the priceless question, “Does the mainland think they can send us any old crap like this Alvin Shoes band and we’ll just take it?”
On the Thursday night everyone in the band came to me to tell me they were quitting, only agreeing to finish up our existing booked commitments till summer so we could pay my mom back more of the cube van purchase price. I felt very guilty about the band collapsing after convincing my mom to help us out financially.
As I wrote to her:
I guess I should tell you the main thing which motivated this letter. Last night things fell apart and everybody (me included, but last) announced their intentions of quitting when this tour is over.
Anyway, you’re now up to the minute. I had better get to bed soon or that will make three nights in a row I’ve watched the sun come up.
Love to everyone, Carl
P.S. Not to worry.
“Not