I had already finished high school and moved back to Canada when I started busking on the streets of downtown Windsor with Storm Corleone, “the travelling mystic” with a bullet lodged in his head. He was a black Sicilian with a reformed white nationalist sidekick and roommate named Jimmy who was our “security guard” while we played. My friend Alex and I, who have been writing songs and admiring our own musical genius since the age of about twelve until the present day, were walking down Ouellette street in Windsor one weekend evening when we spotted Storm busking. Just as countless guitarists did to me in later days when I was the busker, I asked this man whether I might play a song on his guitar. He let me do so. The rush I felt when a passerby threw coins, and bills, in his guitar case during my playing – money I got to keep, since he sent me on my way with some of it – must have been like the hit of a drug, because by next weekend, I had dragged Alex back out to the streets to see whether we could make more money and have some fun busking ourselves (It’s not the money as such — it’s making it by playing music. A dollar earned singing was not the same as a dollar earned through drudgery). As it happens, Storm was back out again the following weekend and had just broken a string on his guitar when he saw us walking past holding ours. He called us over, and we gave him a spare. This time – if my memory serves me correctly – we chatted briefly, and I said in response to a question he asked me that I want to be a blues man – oddly enough, to be sure, since my high school nickname among friends was “Britpop,” owing to my obsession with Oasis, the Verve, and bands like that, and I couldn’t have named a blues musician if you’d held a gun to my head. Storm told me to come back next week to join him on the street, to perform with him, to learn with him. It wasn’t Al’s sort of thing to do: it had been hard enough to convince him to come out to the streets when it was just going to be the two of us, without this weird Storm guy. So, Al wasn’t down. But I couldn’t say no. Not for the last time in my life, I felt possessed – by what? God knows. A mysterious force, I thought, was delivering me into an authentic musical apprenticeship with an old-soul bluesman, an apprenticeship I had no right to refuse.
After we had been busking weekends for a while, sometimes capturing the attention of large crowds of visitors, many coming from Detroit, who sang with us, recorded us, videotaped us, and cheered boisterously with excitement and joy as the showman and I performed our most-loved songs, Storm decided it was time to hit the road. We’d start with London, Ontario and go from there. Before I started busking, I was planning to attend the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology to learn how to work in a recording studio. I had already been accepted. But possession is possession, and the feeling that a transcendental force is directing you where it wants you to be, where you need to be, isn’t easy to shake. My paternal grandfather later recalled to me with dismay my stubborn, irreverent comment that I would go on the London trip even if God Himself were standing in front of me telling me not to. I thought then that I was being reverent to a profounder reality than even a manifest God might be. There was no chance I wasn’t going. For a tenth of its value, I pawned the candy-red American-made Fender Jazzmaster that my mother had bought me, just as Storm told me to do — something I later deeply regretted as an irresponsibly stupid act, showing you the limits of “possession” without discrimination — and kissed goodbye to Windsor forever.
It was a normal afternoon in London when Storm and I visited the local library for me to get him an email account. What should his email handle be, we wondered? He had once written a hell of a song called “Without You” for his girlfriend, and the recording we made of it on my little minidisc 8-track recorder was a melancholy masterpiece. How about that, I suggested? Withoutyou at Hotmail dot com? No. What then? He thought about it to himself. After a while, he said “Travelling mystic.”
Those words struck me like a blow to the gut or a lightning strike to the head. Travelling mystic? We’d never once spoken about mysticism, transcendentalism, God, God’s beyond, or anything even approximately resembling all that. It was only in my own inner sanctum that this whole strange busking episode had a religious dimension to it of old-soul apprenticeship. But here was the apprentice himself, letting slip, as it were, that my interpretation was not altogether wrong. It meant alienating the people around me – my friends, who thought I was crazy even just to busk in Windsor, let alone with this strange man; my family members, who were not particularly fond of Storm, and who worried about my stubbornness; and even regularly city-dwellers, many of whom must of thought I was a street bum low-life (whereas I was clean, friendly, presentable, and professional, at least compared to the actual street bum low-lives), but by following my inner compulsion, despite everything, I’d found myself under the wing of a “travelling mystic,” a fact that confirmed me in my belief that I was following my star.
After living in London for a few weeks, first in a shelter, then with Storm’s newfound girlfriend, I finally decided I’d like to go home. I can’t remember what exactly made me want to go, except that the magic of this adventure was wearing off and a normal life was calling me back. But I do remember all too well that my decision wasn’t welcome. I was punished for it. I was a traitor. I had gone back on my word. I wanted to leave? I wasn’t permitted to leave. I would be held. Thus began a bad time.
Sometime after I had told him I want to go home, after he had said no, and after the immediate period of darkness that ensued had passed, Storm came to talk to me. Calmly, coolly, he made it known to me that he was, as he said, always ten steps ahead of me. He had taken my wallet from me the previous night, for instance, without my knowing it, he said (I checked my pockets: no wallet), and he could easily do anything he wanted to punish me for asking to leave (be warned, young aspirants: you do not break such apprenticeships without a cost — better yet, be careful getting into them!). But he didn’t want to do that anymore. He had mulled it over and decided I could leave. He understood. He’d get over it. He’d even buy me the train ticket. He didn’t want bad blood between us. Maybe we’d busk a few more times to make some money before parting ways. But I was no longer being held against my will. It had been a turbulent interlude, but things were back to normal. I’d be going home. Soon.
The day came quickly. I packed my bag and my guitar. Storm said we were going to have coffee before sending me on my way. To the café we went. And then he started talking. My ears still ring, my heart still pounds when I recall that dreadful moment. He said – I won’t be able to tell you the exact words. But he said, in effect, that his friend in Windsor, a fire starter, would be paying a visit to my grandparents’ house, where he himself once had stayed when we were still in that city. He said that there was no train ticket, that I should not have crossed him. Fuck you, he said, menacingly embodying entirely the presence of one of those terrifying mobsters DeNiro or Pacino might play in a film. And then he stormed off. The other patrons were staring with jaws dropped. I was suspended - afloat, but sinking - in a state of absolute disbelief, stunned and in shock. I gathered enough of myself out of the stupor to chase him down the street, to beg him not to harm my family, to reconsider. But he didn’t stop. I knew, or believed, he could make good on his threats, and I was lost in uncertainty about what to do next. I stumbled in a daze to the shelter through traffic, the world around me liquid and surreal. Who could I call? What would I say? What had I done?
That’s how, expecting to be homebound after a nice cup of coffee and a few months of craziness, I had instead been left at the café with a big, unexpected “fuck you,” and told that my family’s houses would burn. Storm didn’t mess around. Back when he first rebuffed my wish to leave, I melodramatically grabbed a steak knife lying on the kitchen table and told him he could just kill me there and then. Gangster style, as I imagined, he said it’s too easy to kill someone who wants to be killed, that he would target my loved ones, instead. Well, here he was again, after I thought we’d made our peace, repeating the threat.
My world was still spinning and suddenly got worse when a few hours later I saw Storm crossing the street toward me in the vicinity of the shelter. Calm down, he said. Come with me, he said. Calm down. Come on. Around the corner to the nearest bar. He sat me down, ordered us a drink. Calm down, calm down. I was furious, he said. I wanted to make you pay. But after I left you at the café, I walked. I walked and thought, long and hard. And then, I remembered. Before we left to London, he said, your mom came to visit us (I was then living in a house with Storm, “Jimmy,” and some other people, and yes, she had come to the house to visit. He told me that evening to stop hiding the fact that I smoke cigarettes, to smoke in front of her, thrusting a pack towards me on the table as she watched). Before she left, he said, she prayed. She prayed for our trip. “I’ve never bowed my head for a prayer before, but I bowed my head then. And since I left you, I haven’t stopped thinking about that prayer.” That prayer, he said, however he said it, had penetrated into him, and its love conquered the hate he harbored towards me during the weeks he planned his cold act of revenge, which would have left me stranded, afraid and unprotected. Again, he said to calm down, and that this time he meant it. This time he would send me home. He would buy me a ticket. He would do no harm, neither to me nor to anyone.
This time he meant it. He busked without me and hustled without me. He made sure I was alright, and I was. He had transformed. The situation had transformed. In a way, my life was in his hands, or at least that’s how we both experienced things then. If twice he was ready to crush it, this time, transfigured by a prayer, he would protect it, heal it, and set it free. I left him my guitar, so that he could continue to busk without me. When I first met him, that guitar shone like a diamond. I polished every fingerprint. It was pristine. But early in my apprenticeship, he took a quarter out of the guitar case and slashed a large scratch across the front of the guitar. Your guitar’s too pretty, he said. A bluesman’s guitar should have some scars. There’s soul in that guitar, the guitar that stayed with him as I boarded a greyhound bus back to Windsor. I wonder who has it now.
Storm sent me off with a note and a list. The list was movies I must see and music I must hear: DeNiro’s gangster movies, Robert Johnson’s music. The note? Three little words: “Don’t forget me.”
We spoke once again by phone a few months later, but never after that, and I haven’t seen him since. I always expect to, a bit anxiously, to be honest, whenever I visit cities that remind me of those days, of “the travelling mystic” and my mother’s prayer.
Holy moly, quite a story. Thank heavens for your Mom’s prayer.
Is this a story that you have made up, or is it something that you did in your younger days?