Falling Backwards: A Memoir Read online

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2011 Jann Arden

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to quote from “Snowbird.”

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Arden, Jann

  Falling backwards : a memoir / Jann Arden.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-39986-1

  1. Arden, Jann. 2. Singers—Canada—Biography. 3. Composers—Canada—Biography. 4. Lyricists—Canada—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.A676A3 2011 782.42164092 C2011-901969-8

  Cover design by Jennifer Lum

  Cover photograph by Andrew MacNaughtan

  v3.1

  With much love do I dedicate this book to

  my parents, Joan and Derrel Richards,

  and to my dear brothers, Patrick and Duray.

  And to Bb—three little numbers you know to be true.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter One: The Grand Opening

  Chapter Two: Finger on A Spinning Globe

  Chapter Three: A Little Bit Country

  Chapter Four: Leonard and Dale

  Chapter Five: Secret Heart

  Chapter Six: My Father’s Daughter

  Chapter Seven: Growing Pains and Fishing Rods

  Chapter Eight: Parking Lots and Girl Power

  Photo Insert

  Chapter Nine: I Swear on the Orange Bible

  Chapter Ten: Being Rebecca

  Chapter Eleven: The Last Summer

  Chapter Twelve: The Expanding Universe

  Chapter Thirteen: Norman Earl and the Rehab Boat

  Chapter Fourteen: The Sound of Surrender

  Chapter Fifteen: Writing for My Life

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  INTRODUCTION

  I look across my yard every morning at my parents’ little house. They live fifty feet from me now. I can see their lights go on in the morning and shut off at night. I can see them moving about in the yard when they’re watering plants or cutting wood or when my mother is digging up her flower beds. I watch them and I smile. Sometimes I catch myself wondering what in the world I will do when they are not there anymore. I drink cold water and tell myself to stop being so selfish. I close my eyes tightly and open them again, hoping that my thoughts will be cleared away. They never are completely.

  I have fourteen acres of land west of Calgary, not far from where I grew up. Not far from where this story begins. My mother and father met on a blind date in the late fifties, before there were colour TVs and cellphones and CDs and computers and even Spanx, for that matter. My mom’s old friend Freda, who’s now deceased, was determined to set my mother up with her boyfriend’s pal, convincing her that this blind date would be different. Freda told my mom that this guy was funny and smart and had a job, for Pete’s sake! What else could a girl possibly want? Freda didn’t seem to care that my mother kind of already had a boyfriend (though my mother says she never really liked him all that much anyway), and asked what would one little date on a Saturday night hurt anybody? My mother reluctantly agreed to go out with my dad. The rest, as they say …

  It’s hard to believe that my parents are still together and going strong some fifty-three years later. They have survived things that would have crushed most couples. They persevered where others would have cracked in half. I don’t think I could have done what my mother and father did, and that was to go ever forward with their shoulders back and their jaws set straight and their faith unwavering. Both my parents lasted. They beat the odds. They survived each other, for starters, and that was—and is—no small feat. I don’t know if something was in the water, but not a single one of my friends’ parents divorced either. I thought about that one day and just shook my head. It says a lot about the company I kept and continue to keep all these years later.

  My parents are my treasures. They are my secret weapon, my shield, my strength and my faith. Whenever I went off the rails, and that was fairly often as I was figuring out how to be a person, I turned to them for comfort and solace and direction and forgiveness. They were always there for me, always.

  I sometimes see my dad standing in the yard. He’s perfectly still and quiet, with his arms resting on his rake, and he’s looking off over the fields. I wonder what he’s thinking about. I wonder if he’s thinking what I am thinking.

  I asked him once what it was like getting older, and he told me that he couldn’t feel it and he couldn’t see it in the mirror either. He said he just saw himself the same way he always was. I think about that conversation a lot.

  So many things have changed around me, but I still see the same face when I look in the mirror. I know what my dad meant. Living is a process. You plod along and hope you’re on the right road and if you’re not, well, that’s okay too. I know that from experience now.

  When I was in my early twenties, I moved out to Vancouver for a few years and managed to get myself into a lot of trouble. Not legal trouble, but emotional and spiritual trouble. I felt so lost and so down and out. I made one mistake after another. I was on some kind of self-destruct mode. Eventually I picked myself up and hosed myself down and ended up, as my mother often says, making something of myself, despite myself. She also says to me, “Thank God you could sing, or who knows where you’d have ended up.” I don’t like to think about that.

  Years later I returned to Vancouver for a series of sold-out concerts. It was a giant contrast to the days when I was busking on the streets for a buck or two to buy cigarettes and wine. I couldn’t believe I was there, standing on a beautiful, brightly lit stage, singing my songs for people who had paid to see me. I felt vindicated somehow. I’d survived the stupidity of my youth.

  After one of the shows I had the limo driver take me across the Lions Gate Bridge to the North Shore, where I’d gotten myself into so much trouble. I had him drive by my old apartment building on Third Street, where I had lived twenty-five years earlier. It was boarded up, to no one’s surprise—least of all mine. It stood there like a tombstone. The pouring rain added nicely to the movie I was creating in my head. I saw my young self, staggering in drunk through the beat-up front door. I closed my eyes and clearly pictured the old mattress on the floor, the ironing board I used as a kitchen table, my beloved cassette deck. I sat in the car for ten or fifteen minutes with the window down, looking out at the street. The cold rain was spitting at my face.

  I won, I thought to myself. I won. I felt a weight lift off my heart. I said a prayer in my head about gratitude and forgiveness, and then I had the driver take me back across the big bridge to my hotel. I lay in my bed that night and thought about how I’d gotten to where I was that day. I fell asleep smiling.

  chapter one

  THE GRAND OPENING

  I was reluctant, to say the least, to get here. My mother tells the story on pretty much every birthday I have ever had. She most often smiles—a laug
h lurking inside of her little bird-like chest—and says, “When you were born, I said, ‘Let me die, let me die.’ ” She really isn’t kidding.

  For some reason, that line always made me laugh too. Not that it was a prelude to a happy tale, but it was a funny one nonetheless. She’d go on to say that the doctor just let her suffer through two long days of pushing and pushing and pushing to no avail. I guess I was backwards or feet first or probably just refusing to come out of her at all. Why would I want to fly out into the abyss without really knowing what in God’s name I was getting myself into? I’d still be in there now if I’d had my way.

  One thing about being born: it’s hard for everybody involved. You learn within a few seconds that it’s not going to be easy being a person. That first breath must really be something. I am kind of glad I don’t remember it. The human body is an extraordinary thing. What it is capable of doing is, quite simply, miraculous.

  I can’t even begin to figure out how an eight- or nine- or, God forbid, twelve-pound body inches its way out of something that seems to be smaller than the slot in a slot machine. And never mind that, after the twelve-pound body has fought its way out of the womb, the whole bloody layer-upon-layer works suddenly just folds itself back together like a book with a few ripped-up pages. Like nothing ever happened. Kind of like a Slinky.

  My mother would disagree with me, I’m sure, as something did indeed happen. I am in pain just thinking about childbirth. In fact, I suddenly have to fold my legs together and hum “Happy Birthday.” My poor mother; all that suffering, and for what?

  Oh yeah, me.

  My mom said that back in those days they didn’t just give women C-sections like they do now. I mean, now women pick the day they’d like to have their baby.

  “Ah yes, Doctor, I have March 27th open after 4 p.m. after my pedicure.” I can just picture that in my head. In 1962, they made you push until you thought you couldn’t push anymore. Epidurals weren’t even that common. It was natural childbirth or bust. She almost did bust.

  “I thought it was either going to be you or me,” she’ll often say. I tell mom that I am really very glad that it wasn’t either of us.

  I always ask the same questions. Where was dad? Wasn’t he in the room? Didn’t they let men in the birthing room?

  “He didn’t want to come in,” she says. “He went home and went to bed while I was lying there thinking I would die.”

  My mom was apparently just about to throw in the towel on the both of us when the doctor appeared. They were finally, after two days, going to do a C-section. They had to call him at home to come in to do the operation and, according to my mother, he took his sweet time getting there. You’d think they could maybe have found another doctor who was in the hospital? To top things off, I think he got caught in a snowstorm. Yes, a snowstorm in March, which is fairly typical for Alberta. It can snow in Calgary in July.

  Fortunately for my mother and for me, we didn’t end up needing him after all—not for a C-section, anyway—because I decided to come out into this complicated world all on my own. I think all the doctor ended up doing was grabbing my legs and turning me around. I mean, turning a person around? In a womb? My dear mother said it was nothing short of agony. I have given her the odd sympathy card on my birthday. It seems fitting, somehow. The card simply reads, “I am sorry about your vagina. Love, Jann.”

  The nurse at the hospital told my parents that they wouldn’t be able to bring me home until they had a name for me. Velvet was an early contender. My mother was an Elizabeth Taylor fan, and she loved the movie National Velvet. Thank God that never stuck. My parents didn’t even smoke pot, so that’s not an excuse. I ended up being named after a cartoon strip called Jane Arden that ran from 1927 to 1968. My mother loved that cartoon strip. Jane was a reporter and a crime fighter and a force to be reckoned with, and I guess mom thought I would be too. But mom didn’t like the name Jane, so she substituted an n and called me Jann—Jann Arden Richards. Maybe they were just desperate to get the hell out of the Calgary General Hospital, but that was their final answer. Final answer: Jann Arden.

  I could have been called “Baby Girl Richards,” which kind of has a stripper ring to it. (My real stripper name would have been Louise Bentley, if you were to base it on the first street you lived on and your mother’s maiden name. Or is it your first dog’s name and your mother’s maiden name? If it had been my first dog’s name, I would have been Aquarius Bentley.)

  As much as my mom teases me about how hard it was getting me out of her body and onto the planet, I don’t actually try to imagine the pain she endured. I have a bad period and I’m ready to call in a midwife with a morphine drip. They could at least have given my mother a big glass of vodka. Forty-eight hours is a long time to be stuck in a canal of any kind. The Panama Canal only takes a day to float through and that involves a giant ship. (There’s not a goddamn thing to look at going through the Panama Canal, according to my dad. I sent them through there once on a cruise.) Two days in a birth canal? That’s beyond cruel and unusual.

  My mother told me that my head was so pointed that she kept a hat on me for a year, but that I had a cute face—like that was supposed to make me feel good about the pointed head bit? I’ve seen a few pictures that were taken of me in those first few months of my life, but I’ve never been able to ascertain whether I indeed had a pointed head or not. Maybe it’s because I was always wearing a hat.

  She should have known I would be difficult, considering that my older brother Duray nearly killed her while he was being born three years earlier—he was a lot fatter than I was. I guess it’s true what they say about forgetting the pain of childbirth, because that’s what my mother did. She forgot all about the misery and went ahead and tried it again. I guess she figured things would be all stretched out, and I would just drop onto the ground after one push.

  My parents adopted my little brother Patrick five years after I was born, which made a lot of sense. They wanted another baby, and mom couldn’t put herself through the whole almost dying by giving birth thing again. My mom was not childbearing material, although she does get an A for effort from my older brother and me. Her thing-a-ma-dingy had seen enough pain for one lifetime. (I just want to say “vagina” instead of all these other ridiculous euphemisms, but my friend Nigel said he did not want me to write down the word “vagina” in this book. He said his mother wouldn’t read a book with the word “vagina” in it and he did not want to read the word “vagina” either. He said it would make him feel really uncomfortable, so I promised him I would neither write or use the word “vagina,” and a promise is a promise.)

  A few years after we were blessed with Patrick, my mom had a hysterectomy. Right about now she will be saying, “Why would you write that in your book? Maybe I don’t want anybody to know that I had a hysterectomy.” She was thirty-seven years old when she had her uterus out, and I would be very happy to give her mine if she’d like to have another one put in. I am not using mine for anything special. I don’t see why my mother couldn’t bear me a child, since she is home more than I am. If she wants grandchildren from my branch of the family tree, she’s going to have to have them herself. (I don’t know how to record that on the family tree; I will have to consult some of my Mormon relatives, if they’re still willing to talk to me after they read this.)

  Not every life starts with a giant bang like mine. Some people just slip into the world, seemingly unnoticed by anyone or anything. They fall into the cracks that nobody seems to see but God. Thank God for God is all I have to say about that. From the beginning of my life, from what I have pieced together, I have somehow felt noticed. I don’t know how to explain it other than it feels like the Universe has one eye following me around no matter where I go or what I do. It’s creepy but comforting at the same time.

  I have always felt observed by something or someone. Something catches my eye and I turn to see what it is, but it’s just shadows or dust floating through the air. I may just have a multip
le personality disorder, which could mean that I have just been following myself around all this time. If that’s the case, I am a nice bunch of girls.

  My mother said that when they finally did take me home, I refused to eat. I wouldn’t breast-feed or bottle-feed or any kind of feed. Not milk, not cereal, not formula, not even KFC. Well, I am sure they didn’t try KFC, but if they had I bet I would have eaten that. At least the popcorn chicken, for crying out loud; it’s smaller. I would have eaten popcorn chicken for sure.

  My parents had to have a nurse visit our home and stuff food down my throat. She waltzed in—the nurse, that is—and, according to my mother, took out her own special spoon, loaded it up with some horrible concoction and crammed it down my throat. Our family doctor told my parents that I was very anemic, and that if that nurse didn’t get me to eat he was going to send me to Africa to live with the Masai people. Maybe the Masai people could get me to eat goat meat and white corn and curdled milk from a gourd. (Well, the doctor never said that, but I’m telling the story, so I’ll say what I want).

  My mother said she couldn’t bear to watch the nurse holding me down and shoving that spoon into my head. She had to leave the room. I guess I bawled the entire time, very loudly, like I was being killed rather than saved. Didn’t this woman know I was destined to be one of the greatest singers the world has ever known? Okay, that Canada has ever known? Okay, that the Canadian prairies have ever known? Okay, that my local community centre has ever known? Didn’t she realize that my voice would one day become a golden tool for all things musical and melodic and, from time to time, depressing? She could have damaged my precious vocal cords. I guess she didn’t realize this because that nurse came back time after time until my tiny body pulled itself out of an iron-depleted slump. I find it amazing that they even had nurses who made house calls back then, but then again they had people who delivered milk and ice cream and eggs and diapers and Fuller brushes and Avon and newspapers and mail and pretty much anything else you wanted to have delivered. They even had folks who came to your house to give you accordion lessons. I am not sure what happened to all those home delivery people. They died, I assume. Those were the days. Customer service was the rule, not the exception. That sounds exactly like something my mother would say. Good grief. Each and every moment I sit here, my mother slowly takes over each and every one of my cells. I will wake up and be her and the circle will be complete. Kind of like in The Lion King … (I am hearing African drumming in my head.)