“You’re lying through your teeth, boy.” By the time I turned fifteen, Dad probably flung this accusation at me several times a week. Ninety-nine percent of the time he was dead on. (The other one percent I’d been merely exaggerating.) But why was it that he could lie with impunity whenever the urge hit him yet act as though I had a behavioural problem when I just covered up a minor disobedience? At fifteen, music was taking up almost all of my free time, to the point where Dad had forbidden me to take part in what he termed any “musical misadventures” after school hours. Toronto was being taken over by the folk music scene, and there were hundreds of coffeehouses and church auditoriums where, every night of the week, I could wait my turn along with dozens of other folkies for the opportunity to get onstage to sing a few of my songs. I’d tell my parents that I was studying at a friend’s house or at the school library (Dad was out of town so often that when he was home, he was too exhausted or preoccupied to cross-examine me), and then hitchhike downtown or bus it to a suburban church to perform.
Usually I was teaching classical guitar to some kid en route to these gigs, so lugging my instrument everywhere didn’t arouse suspicion. But in the excitement leading up to these performances I didn’t always get my story straight, which meant Dad would catch me in a lie—usually when my so-called study buddy called the house looking for me.
When a girl I had a crush on, Amanda, invited me to join her at an all-night party with the cast of Hair, the biggest rock musical to have ever hit Toronto, I bloody well made sure I had all my bases covered.
“Remember, Steve, no matter what, I’m spending the night at your place. If my dad calls, I’m already asleep. I’ve been trying to make out with Amanda for a year and the closest I got was barfing all over her when I drank too much gin that afternoon we skipped school. No way I’m going to blow it this time.”
“Everything’s hunky-dory, Danny. You’re covered. Just call me from the party and tell me about all the cool drugs.”
I was too proud to tell Steve the truth: Amanda was just using me. She knew, as did everyone in my school, that I’d auditioned for the cast of Hair and would have made it had the casting directors not found out at the last minute that I’d lied about my age. No cast member could be under seventeen, and I’d convinced everyone, until they demanded proof during the final set of auditions, that I was two years older than I really was.
Hair was a cultural phenomenon. All the more so in my neck of the woods, because, unlike sophisticated cities like New York or L.A., Toronto in 1970 was pretty provincial. A rock musical that celebrated “free love” and what can only be described at the time as a scandal of epic proportions—full frontal nudity—left the local media and public shocked and titillated. The auditions were held at the Masonic Temple in downtown Toronto, a huge, gothic building that left me feeling small and insignificant when I walked down into the dank basement. I was one of thousands of people waiting for a shot at being a part of a musical that we thought would turn us into big stars.
I’d selected “Yesterday” as my audition song. This was a tricky choice because I was certain a lot of other singers would be choosing it as well. But I also knew the song’s stirring melody brought out the best qualities in my voice, and I’d played it hundreds of times on the guitar. I took for granted that I’d be nervous—something I’d been getting better at controlling thanks to all my hours of coffeehouse performances—and was smart enough to know that an easy song like “Yesterday” would hold up well to any bouts of stage fright.
“Where did you learn to sing like that?” one of the three casting directors asked, looking up at me as I did my best casual “lean against the grand piano” pose.
“I dunno. I write songs, so I guess I’m just—ah, you know—always singing.”
My performance, near perfect, had ended with me stumbling over the mic cord during my post-song bow.
“If you get a callback come prepared to sing whatever we throw at you.”
I got the callback and nailed the audition. What could be easier than singing “Aquarius”? I’d spent the last month or so singing this and all the other songs from the Hair soundtrack album in my music class.
“Okay, we’ve assigned a part for you to learn for the next audition.”
My singing had taken me this far, now I had to concentrate on acting. Jogging through the front door, I handed Mom my script, guiding her to my highlighted lines, which I had yet to read.
“Look at this, Danny, they’ve offered you the role of the homosexual.”
“What!?”
Mom looked pleased as punch. Like this was a great honour.
“Don’t worry, Danny, it’s probably because you’d be the youngest cast member and you look the least masculine.”
This was supposed to make me feel better? Too embarrassed to talk, I started singing the song that came with my role. Barely ninety seconds long, the melody was a cinch, but the multisyllabic lyrics, most of which I’d never heard before, were a mouthful. The one word I knew, “masturbation,” I hummed through, this being Mom I was singing to and all.
“That’s very good, Danny.” Mom was laughing. Inappropriately.
“Mom, what do all these words mean? ‘Sodomy,’ ‘cunnilingus,’ ‘pederasty,’ ‘fellashee—’?”
“That’s ‘fellatio,’ honeybun, the a is like ‘ay’ not ‘ah.’”
After correcting me, Mom went on to calmly explain the meaning of these words.
“No. Stop,” I said, as Mom was going into detail about “cunnilingus.” “What kind of weirdos do this stuff? I sang that song over and over on the bus on the way home. I could have been arrested.”
“Don’t worry, dear,” Mom said. “Very few adults understand the meaning of those words.”
Well then, how on earth had she learned them? I wasn’t going to ask.
Each time I survived another cut for Hair and was called back for another audition, I’d rush to a payphone and share the news with Dad. Dad’s response never varied: “If you wanna stand naked as a jaybird in front of all of Toronto, well, that’s your business, son. But remember something: you’re gonna be scrambling in and out of your hippie-dippie jeans a dozen times a night. So you better make damned good and sure you’ve greased your zipper.” Dad knew me well enough to understand that, while I would’ve been more than happy to view nudity onstage from the voyeuristic remove of the audience, I wasn’t too keen on exposing my wonders in full view of thousands of people a night.
At my final callback, upon surrendering my birth certificate, I was scolded for lying about my age and wasting their time. Then they told me to get lost, with a pie in the sky promise that they might consider me for an understudy role if the show was still around in two years.
As consolation (and entirely due to my parents’ connections), the Toronto Telegram published an article I wrote describing my half-dozen Hair auditions, and paid me more dough than I netted from weeks of guitar teaching. My story in the Telegram gained me some extra popularity at school, which resulted in girls like Amanda, normally way out of my league, reassessing my dateworthiness.
And so, the night I was supposed to be sleeping over at my friend Steve’s, I went down to the Royal Alex theatre, snuck through one of the fire exits after the show and managed to bluff my way backstage. Amanda, the high school babe who’d invited me to meet her for what I assumed would be an all-night orgy, was nowhere to be found. No one I talked to had heard anything about a cast party. Disconsolate, I called Steve, needing a place to stay.
“Your Dad called here a couple hours ago and told me to tell you to ‘come home and face the music,’” Steve told me, clearly shaken up by whatever else my dad said to him.
It turned out that Amanda had called a few hours after I’d left the house for my “sleepover.” Whether Amanda was as clueless as she was gorgeous or a sadistic prankster didn’t much matter. Either way the message she passed on to my dad couldn’t have been more damning: “Would you tell Danny that I won’t be able to meet him downtown for the all-night cast party?”
When I arrived home Dad and I went through the same old circle game. He’d start with the inquisition, I’d respond with increasingly improbable lies and he’d come back with a snarling, “You’re still lying, boy. Smarten up and start talking before I slap the truth right out of your mouth.”
Dad could have saved us both a lot of time had he revealed that Amanda had phoned him and blown my cover. But that would have made things too easy for me and too boring for him. Finally, after he dropped the “Who’s Amanda?” bomb, I fessed up, busted, broken and awaiting Dad’s verdict.
“Your mother and I know how badly you wanted to make Hair. So we can understand why you’d want to go to their cast party. So we’re not going to punish you. This time. But don’t lie to us anymore.”
The thing about Dad was, just when you thought you had him figured out, he’d throw you a curve ball.
Soon after publishing my Hair story, the Toronto Telegram published another article I’d written, entitled “On Being Black” (based on how I felt being raised Black in Don Mills), paying me enough money to allow me to purchase a couple months’ worth of pop albums. My newspaper publications, combined with banging out biweekly opinion columns for my high school newspaper, had my English teacher taking me aside for one of those inevitable career lectures: “The music business is too risky. Stick to writing. You’ll always be able to find work in journalism.”
But I was only pulling off A-pluses in his class because I wrapped up my mandatory course poems in pretty guitar chords and melodies, thus distracting him from my “poor me” lyrics. Dad, as leery of my prose skills as he was my songwriting, glanced at my A-plus in English and advised, “Forget about poetry and start knuckling down on your maths and sciences.”
“Math and science aren’t gonna do much for my singing career,” I sniffed.
“My Uncle Bill was also a brilliant writer and poet,” Dad answered, managing to make the word “brilliant” sound tragic. Not knowing, till that very moment, that Dad actually had an Uncle Bill, I gaped back, curious, but knowing better than to ask any questions.
“Poor Bill, he was best friends with James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. But that didn’t help him much in the end. He died destitute and disgraced.”
Baldwin and Hughes. Damned if there wasn’t something about their names that made me uneasy.
“Okay Dad, you got me, what happened to Uncle Bill?”
“You didn’t know?” Dad asked, watching me fall into his trap.
“Know what?”
“Uncle Bill was a homosexual.” Dad eyeballed me frostily, lest the connection between writer and homosexual was lost on me. This wasn’t the first, and by no means the last time, that Dad would suspect that I might be gay. When I was eleven, I had been desperate to win the attention of girls. Along with my deepening voice had come a keen awareness of my body’s emerging flaws. Deciding the time had come for me to develop a he-man body, I purchased magazines of musclemen and taped their pictures to my bedroom wall. There they gleamed and glistened—serving as motivation, with their shaved, waxed bodies and bulging, Popeye muscles—wearing leopard-skin bikini briefs.
The next day, Dad (tipped off by Mom) flew into my room, took one look at my new male role models and ripped the pictures off the wall.
“What’s got into you, boy? Don’t you dare start getting all funny on me! I never wanna see those kind of pictures on your wall again.”
He marched off with the photographs crumpled in his hands like some kind of contraband.
“Donna, Danny’s going into junior high soon. It’s time to buy him some more Playboys,” Dad’s voice gibbered up from the kitchen, over the quick and decisive hand shredding of my eight-by-ten glossies of steroid-chiselled musclemen. Mom started to object. Dad quickly countered, his voice dropping in volume so that all I could pick out was “homosexual leanings.” At eleven years of age, I had yet to really twig to what “homosexual” meant. Now at fifteen, I understood Dad’s implied warnings and laughed them off, keeping my focus on my music and songs.
With my resolve building daily, Dad and I, being the eldest males in the household, began to assume the roles of two superpowers locked in a cold war. This left us reaching out for allies—Larry, Karen, Mom—to buttress our respective sides. My siblings, preferring to stay neutral, developed a sixth sense for when Dad and I were about to get into the thick of things. “Danny, get in here, on the hop!” Dad would bray from the kitchen, and Larry and Karen, who’d been sprawled across the couch listening to me play my latest song, would take off up the stairs, disappearing into their bedrooms. Trying as it may have been for my siblings—always steeling themselves for the next father-son land mine to go off, anxious to improve on their already impeccable behaviour to make up for their older brother’s offences—Mom bore the brunt of Dad’s and my power struggles.
Mom, unable to flee to her own bedroom like Larry or Karen, was an unwilling spectator forced to sit at ringside till the latest breaking father-son spectacle had run its course. As a teenager I was too selfish to think of how hard it must have been for her, watching two people she loved deeply cause each other so much pain and aggravation. The following excerpt from Mom’s diary, written in 1970, offers a glimpse of what she was forced to endure. On this particular night I’d been competing in a songwriting contest downtown called the Davenport Music Festival. I’d won third place, along with six hours of free time in a state-of-the-art recording studio. (The following year I was awarded first place.)
Dan comments that Danny is very late. The audition was supposed to be at 7, now it’s past 11 … Dan is fussing and fuming. Talks about a “trend” being established, of being out on school nights. I submit that it is no trend. He decides that since Danny has been out two school nights in a row (movie at school Wednesday night, this audition Thursday night), he should therefore spend Friday and Saturday nights studying. Danny gets in at midnite. He messes around (eating) for 10–15 minutes. Dan yells for him to hurry up. He comes up. I ask how the audition went. He says the adjudicator said he did the Joni Mitchell thing badly; but when he sang his own song, completely different—great meaning, great message, great communication. The adjudicator—connected with CHUM—urges him to write out the lyrics and music and send it to him—he’ll try to get it published. The audition and adjudication took till 11, so Danny’s arriving home at 12 wasn’t really unreasonable. Dan tells him to bring home all his school books because he’s going to have to study Friday and Saturday, from 7 to 9:30. Danny says, quietly but firmly, that he’ll bring home the books he likes and study what he likes for as long as he likes. Dan is mad.
“Don’t get lippy with me.”
“I’m not being lippy—but that’s what I mean.”
“I’ll ground you, and take away your guitar.”
“Ground me. I’ll play someone else’s guitar.”
Dan is furious. He jumps out of bed. I, who have been silent through this, beg, “Dan, keep cool.’
Dan grabs Danny’s guitar and brings it into our room. “He can’t get away with that, being lippy with me.” I’m close to tears. I close the bedroom door. “Can’t you see what you’re doing? If you take away everything important, why should he do anything we want?”
“As long as he lives here, and I’m supporting him, he won’t talk to me like that.”
“That’s just it—in two months, he’ll be 16. He won’t have to stay here, he won’t have any reason to stay here.” Dan scoffs: “He’d never leave home. He doesn’t have the guts.” I say, “When you were seventeen, you nearly punched your father in the mouth. How can you be so angry when he’s simply said, quietly and without violent words, that he’s going to do what he feels is important?”
Dan brushes that aside: “He’ll do as I say. He won’t be lippy with me.”
What Mom fails to mention in her diary was that she banished Dad from the bedroom that night. This was the only time in all the years I’d lived at home that I’d known Mom to do this. My guitar was back in my room the next day.
As is typical of many parents, Dad’s difficulties with my career choice in particular, and me in general, were not so openly expressed in letters to his friends and family. In fact some of his observations regarding my so-called development revealed a degree of optimism: “Danny received his report card a while back and came within one point of receiving first class honors.” Upon catching himself in a gross misrepresentation—or maybe he got my report card confused with my sister’s—he allowed a bit of his frustration with me to show through: “Danny sings (or rather groans) for his friends and plays a good game of chess. He’s turning out to be quite a fine boy in spite of some of the headaches he gives to me.”
Still in the close quarters of our house, Dad was careful not to offer any signs of encouragement for fear that it would doom me to chasing an impossible dream.
Until I could win his approval, Dad was better off avoided. My bedroom was just a few feet down the hall from his and Mom’s, which meant that whenever I risked singing at a decent volume, Dad would barrel into my bedroom saying something to the effect of, “Cut out that racket, now! Or I’ll chop up that guitar with an axe and use it as firewood.”
My solution was to practise high-volume singing down in the relative isolation of the basement. I was entering my Led Zeppelin stage, which meant I had to sing so crazy loud to keep up with Robert Plant’s keening tenor. One Sunday morning, I was down in the basement reviewing the chords to Led Zeppelin’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.” I loved the song’s haunting A-minor descending chord progression, as it reminded me a lot of the classical guitar exercises I used to practise. Sailing over the galloping guitar part was the steady, dramatic rise of Robert Plant’s vocal. Plant’s Olympian performance was a great lesson in the importance of vocal dynamics, range and control, something I was determined to emulate.
When I hit the song’s climax, where Plant screams like he’s possessed, over an impossibly high C, I quickly replaced my guitar with a pillow, singing into it with all my might. But when I removed the pillow from my face and opened my eyes, Dad was standing right over me.
“Have you finished your homework, son?” An accusation disguised as a question. This was how it always started with him.
“Yup.”
“You’re spending too much time on that blasted guitar. You’re throwing your life away on this music foolishness.”
“I’m practising for a fashion show at my school. They’re paying me ten dollars to perform in between the runway events.”
The idea that I could make money through music seemed to further antagonize him. Like the difference between smoking pot and dealing it.
“Time to face the hard cold facts, boy. Accept your limitations. You’re never gonna be a Bruce Cockburn.”
I was about to tell Dad that I couldn’t care less what he thought of me, or my music. But I couldn’t risk speaking. Dad would have picked off that dumb tremor in my voice and realized he’d really hurt me. You’re never gonna be a Bruce Cockburn. That was really hitting below the belt.
“Put down your guitar and get cracking on those schoolbooks, this instant. I don’t wanna hear so much as a peep coming out of this basement, or I’ll come back and personally put a stop to the noise.”
Dad continued to glare down at me, waiting, daring me to make the mistake of saying something even remotely disrespectful. Slowly and deliberately, so as not to appear too intimidated, I placed my guitar back in its case. At that moment, I honestly and truly hated him.
As I got older, I tried my best to make sense of Dad’s many inconsistencies: Hills were “blessed with superior genes,” but when it came to music, I had to be aware of my limitations; playing sports was “a waste of a good mind” (Dad had forbidden me to participate in school sports, though naturally I did anyway), but watching them on television was allowable. “Look at that, Donna! Whoopee!” he’d yip while viewing an NFL game, knowing that if he called out Mom’s name enough times, she would come into the family room and stand beside him for a few minutes. Mom understood that the real entertainment lay in watching Dad watch football: he’d hop up and down on the couch like a child on a serious sugar high, hurling all sorts of outrageously comical comments at the players, coaches and refs till he lost his voice.
Even Dad’s constant crowing that “Hill kids and straight As are inseparable” was frequently undermined by his need to put us in our place. Imagine Larry’s confusion when Dad discovered he’d decided to write the entrance exams to UTS (University of Toronto Schools), an elite private school for the academically gifted.
“Trust me, son,” Dad had scoffed, “you’ll never pass the test.” Larry had no intention of actually going to UTS, but being blessed and cursed with “Hill Competitive Instinct Disorder” he needed to prove that he could pass the test. Which he did. Not surprisingly, Dad enrolled Larry at UTS despite my brother’s protests.
Meanwhile, Dad’s consistent dismissal of Larry’s and my respective abilities throughout our adolescence caused us to dig even deeper, fervently hoping that one day our achievements might impress him, or at least earn his attention. If this was part of Dad’s master plan, it worked. Just like Dad with his dad, I wanted, more than anything else in the world, to make him proud. The critical difference between Dad and me as teenagers, however, was this: Dad constantly told his father that he desperately wanted to earn his approval and respect. Never would I have opened myself up to Dad in this way. “Don’t lie to me, boy,” Dad scoffed, when, at eighteen, I informed him that I’d been offered a recording contract with RCA. I wasn’t going to let up in my quest to be a famous singer until I made Dad eat his words.
There was more fuelling my ambition than figuratively shaking Dad by the throat and saying, “I’m here! I’m worthy. Honestly, I’m not the fuck-up you think I am.” The idea of girls, adoring girls, gazing up at me and my guitar with their half-closed eyes suffused with desire, well, yes, that definitely put some extra oomph into my singing. And, just like Dad’s approval, that kind of female reaction was not exactly on the immediate horizon. It would be too convenient to blame my sad lack of action on Dad (rather than my overbearing intensity, which sent girls running in the direction of the more rugged, silent and strong football types), but nonetheless, Dad’s before-its-time safe sex speech hadn’t made intimacy sound all that appealing.
One morning, as a way of spicing up our Sunday family breakfast, Dad decided to share with us the army’s advanced method of treating venereal disease back when he was enlisted.
“The cure back then for VD was a big fat needle straight into the head of the penis.”
“Oh no! Stop!” I coughed, gagging on my breakfast.
Encouraged by my choking, Dad passed me a glass of water before continuing. “This was followed by the patient resting his member on a level surface. Then the doctor would smash a hammer down on the head of the penis in attempt to force out what remained of the disease. The soldiers would beg to be left to die from venereal infection rather than undergo the cure. Two weeks later, they’d be back in the clinic with another infection, facing another juicy needle and the bonk of a hammer.”
If Dad’s method for scaring his kids off sex was as original as it was crude, well, what else was new? Beyond not wanting to sound prudish (Dad saw himself as something of a libertarian), he knew that the more typical “sex is wrong” approach wouldn’t have worked, and, beyond that, it lacked any theatrical punch. Dad’s gruesome scare tactics notwithstanding, to be fifteen in Don Mills in 1970 was akin to living in a sexual wasteland. When I departed on a high school choir trip to Washington, D.C., one of my female classmates was branded a slut because she was seen, briefly, in the hallway of our hotel in her flannel pyjamas. It didn’t matter that the only skin showing happened to be on her feet and face; this was considered, by my God-fearing classmates, unrepentant sexually provocative behaviour.
The combination of all these influences—Dad’s hellacious VD images, a sex-paranoid community, my shyness when it came to approaching girls and my extensive knowledge of erotic literature—managed to contribute to my archaic thoughts on girls and sex. I don’t claim to be the only boy at that time who’d managed to divide potential girlfriends into two immaculate compartments—one for sex (however unlikely), the other for unblemished, platonic love—it’s just that, as I did with everything, I took this Victorian notion to the extreme.
The latter category, that of the airbrushed, untouchable kind of undying love, was reserved for a girl named Cynthia whom I’d met when I was fifteen, not long after I’d been betrayed by Amanda. I first saw Cynthia, who’d recently moved to Toronto from St. John’s, Newfoundland, at a junior high school dance. Despite a cast on her right leg she was dancing so fluidly, and with such unreserved joy, that I couldn’t take my eyes off her. In my school, dancing was the one situation, the only situation really, where a girl was allowed to be sexy without fear of being judged. But Cynthia was the only girl on the dance floor who appeared unconcerned, oblivious to everyone around her. For the rest of the night I stood in a shadowy corner of the gymnasium, content to do nothing but watch her dance. I didn’t dare approach her. That would have ruined everything. She was too perfect. I fell in love with every song she danced to that night, even ones I’d previously hated.
A month later she contacted me. A mutual friend had given her my phone number. She was a competitive track athlete and needed a running partner. (I’d recently made my school cross-country team—keeping this news from Dad—and was one of its better runners.)We agreed to meet every weekday at 7:00 a.m., for a three-mile run.
A month is an eternity to nurture a crush when you’re a fifteen-year-old boy with enough testosterone to power a team of racehorses. So, when I waited for Cynthia to fly out of her front door for our first Monday-morning run, I was determined not to like her. Amanda had taught me that if I allowed myself to feel too much I’d just wind up horribly disappointed.
“G’morning, Danny, don’t you just love running in the rain?”
“Huh? Oh yeah, right … it’s raining.”
I’d been so caught up in my track star posturing that I could’ve been standing in the middle of a hurricane and I would have scarcely noticed. Not the first impression I was aiming for.
“Whatever happens, Danny, don’t let me slow you down. If you want to run faster, I can hang back. Don’t feel like you have to wait up for me.”
I hadn’t expected a sprinter (a female sprinter, no less) to attack a three-mile course with the aggressive confidence of a middle-distance runner, particularly after recovering from a broken ankle. Too out of breath to waste any on conversation, I tried focusing on Cynthia’s running form.
Only Cynthia didn’t run so much as glide, her arms swinging loosely by her side, a far-off smile never fading form her face. As the miles flew by, Cynthia talked and I grunted, hurting too much to make out a thing she was saying. Fifteen minutes into our run, Cynthia, unable to maintain any semblance of running protocol any longer, took off up the last, long hill on our course. I tried gamely to stay with her but after a few choppy strides I slowed to a trot, praying the lactic acid that was turning my quads into sludgy cement would let up. As Cynthia’s sculpted sprinter’s legs picked up speed with each quick turnover, I considered telling her she was going to have to find another running partner.
For a fifteen-year-old male ego, it’s difficult to feel attracted to someone who’s left you feeling woefully inadequate. Cynthia’s muscled legs looked pretty amazing as she torqued into her finishing kick, but not in that typically feminine way. I knew I was reaching for flaws, exaggerating and even inventing imperfections along the way, but still, after some serious effort, I managed to convince myself that she wasn’t quite my type.
At an age when other girls affected all manner of gestures and attitude, Cynthia seemed so natural that it struck me as almost unnatural, like she existed on another plane than the rest of the kids at our school. While everyone I knew sweated over their marks, their interfering parents, their future, their lack of girlfriends or boyfriends, Cynthia didn’t appear concerned about much of anything. Everything seemed to come absurdly easy for her—marks, popularity, good looks, filthy-rich parents—which normally I would have used against her. Except that she appeared unaware of her unearthly advantages.
Her disarming ability to get anyone to open up to her, often in the most touching ways, fascinated me. All the more so because she avoided ever revealing anything significant about herself, deftly answering questions with questions.
Little by little, our running dates spilled over into other activities. Nothing to get cocky about, as most of our get-togethers revolved around me dropping by her place once a week and listening to records. After just one or two listening sessions Cynthia understood my musical tastes so well that she could predict what songs on the radio I’d like or hate. Matt was the only other person who could do that, but unlike Matt, who went out of his way to hate my favourite singers just to pick a fight, Cynthia always loved the same stuff as me. Could her love of music possibly extend to musicians? In my dreams. To imagine Cynthia feeling any kind of romantic stirrings for anyone was beyond me, as she took wholesome to a whole new level. It was one thing for Cynthia to never swear, but when someone else did, her face went blank, as though—pfff—she’d instantly wiped the profanity out of her memory.
I knew I was in trouble when I started looking forward to our morning runs a little too much. Her brown hair frizzed out just like mine when it rained, and I could pick out her smile as she ran down her street to meet me, even on the darkest, dreariest February morning, when the sun was still an hour from surfacing.
“Find a fault, find a fault,” I kept telling myself each day as our run came to an end and I found myself already impatient for the following morning.
Finally, she gave me something to hold against her: she was totally disinterested in current events. “What would my parents think?” I caught myself wondering one day, following our first argument.
It happened after I’d played her a protest song I’d written about America’s involvement in Vietnam. Cynthia usually loved hearing me play and sing, but this time she just sat across from me looking distracted, as if she wanted to be somewhere else.
“Don’t mind me, Danny,” she said apologetically, once I’d finished, “it’s just that I like your more positive songs.”
I channelled my hurt into self-righteousness, telling her I thought that Nixon should be tried as a war criminal, for murder.
“You can’t say that, Danny,” Cynthia answered, appalled. “President Nixon has children. He’s a devoted father and husband. Someone like that can’t possibly be a murderer.”
I started to snicker, thinking she was having me on.
“What’s so funny, Danny?”
“Nothing. I was just wondering how Nixon would feel about his kids fighting in Vietnam.”
“Don’t be silly. President Nixon has girls. Girls can’t get drafted.”
It was as if Cynthia possessed some kind of weird filtering aura, so that all potentially sinister things conveniently escaped her awareness. But the problem was, much as I wished otherwise, I liked that about her.
It wasn’t until Cynthia casually told me, towards the end of one of our runs, that she and her family would shortly be returning to live in St. John’s, that I had to confront my utter foolishness. How could I have allowed myself to get sucked into feeling so much for this person?
“Oh, I forgot, Cynthia—I can’t run with you tomorrow. I gotta study for a math exam.”
At my words, Cynthia came to a full stop in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at me, as though she was waiting for me to say something else. Angry at her news and confused by the emotions it triggered in me, I abandoned her on the sidewalk and took off down the street, running as hard as I could. When I got home I rushed up to my bedroom, picked up my guitar and wrote a song. Really, it wrote itself. It was the first love song I’d ever written.
I agreed to Cynthia’s request that we run that weekend, even though it meant cancelling several hours of teaching guitar. We ran faster than usual that morning, as if we both wanted to get it over with.
“Is everything all right, Danny?” Cynthia asked as we flopped on her front lawn, post-workout, gently stretching out each other’s hamstrings. This was the only time we ever allowed ourselves any physical contact.
“I’ve been thinking about this new song I just finished writing,” I answered.
“Can you play it for me, I mean right now?”
“Yeah, I guess.” On the way to my house, Cynthia peppered me with the usual questions—”What was the song about, when did I write it, what was it called?” She was the only person I knew who seemed more excited about my songwriting than I.
Relieved that everyone in my family appeared to be still sleeping, I led Cynthia into my basement, where she sat on the bottom stair. Grabbing my guitar I squeezed in beside her.
As I closed my eyes and started singing, I tried to convince myself that perhaps Cynthia wouldn’t think my new love song was about her. For instance, McCartney’s “Yesterday” could have as easily been written about losing his mother, as, say, breaking up with a girl. But my lyrics were as specific and inelegant as McCartney’s were universal. Into my second verse I sensed my song was backfiring, badly. Trying to change my words on the spot I froze, hummed a few lines and then reverted to my clumsy musical confession. Before my last guitar note faded, Cynthia tore out of my basement and the house, nearly tripping over my incredulous dad, who’d chosen the worst moment possible to sit on the front porch puffing on his Saturday-morning cigar.
“Daggum, son, what did you do to that poor little girl?” Dad cackled as I burst out the door and looked forlornly down the street for signs of Cynthia, who had already swung right at the bottom of our hill and disappeared. “Heaven’s sake alive, I never knew a white girl could run that fast!”
“Dan, stop it, right now. No more teasing Danny about girls, you know how sensitive he gets,” Mom scolded, catching the tail-end of the commotion.
How did I manage to end up with parents like this?
On our final run, Cynthia and I channelled the building tension between us into a punishing pace that left us both bent over, sucking and wheezing, when we pulled to a stop in front of her house. What I did next just kind of happened. Still bent over, I pulled the ring off the third finger of my left hand and presented it to Cynthia. The ring itself was nothing much, tiny blue and green beads haphazardly strung together—some of the beads were even missing—but it had always been special to me. As I awkwardly slid the ring up the third finger of her right hand, I felt her palm go clammy and limp.
“It’s too late to get involved, Danny,” she whispered, looking sadder than I’d ever seen her before. Then she gave my hand a slight squeeze before springing up the stairs to her house and out of my life, still wearing my ring.
The following week, I couldn’t bear to jog by the house where she used to live. How could I be so badly broken up—everything, eating, running, even songwriting, seemed unbearably dull since she’d left—over a girl who was never going to be more than a running buddy? She’d always described me to her friends as “nice” and “sweet,” the worst two words a girl could say about a boy. Why did I keep writing songs about a girl I’d never see again? Why not simply write songs for Princess Grace of Monaco? I was learning that you can’t choose what songs you write.
And my new love songs were way better than that first one I’d mistakenly played her. I owed it to myself to send her the lyrics, so she could see that I was improving. It was no big deal, she’d asked me to write her and keep her updated on all my singing projects. And if I was going to go to the trouble of sending her my latest songs, I might as well send a little note along with them. Within a month of Cynthia’s departure, we began exchanging letters every week, a correspondence that would continue for five years.