Читать книгу Strange Way to Live - Carl Dixon - Страница 9

“Dammit! Idiot! Idiot! Stupido!” This abusive self-talk, accompanied by the pounding of my palm on the steering wheel, rang in my ears in the early evening of April 14, 2008. I’d got lost again during evening rush hour attempting to drive out of Melbourne, Australia. A mere two nights remained of my already shortened visit with my wife and our younger daughter in the small town of Daylesford. We would have no more time together until their scheduled return home to Canada, more than two months hence.

That April day I’d driven the hour-plus in the morning to Melbourne to work in a small recording studio. We’d planned a beautiful evening back in Daylesford, a sort of joyful send-off. Sadly, my return was delayed as I somehow bungled the directions and got turned around not once, not twice, but three times in the attempt to navigate the Ring Road out of Melbourne. I felt keenly the loss of precious time from our special night and was becoming increasingly distraught.

At six-thirty I pulled off the road after another wrong turn and called my wife on the mobile for one more try at sorting out my directions. This time, with her calming voice, it made a little more sense. I think high emotion is a block not only to thinking clearly but to hearing clearly. There was a Bottle Shop across the plaza from where I’d stopped, and it seemed wise to take a bit of extra time to buy a nice bottle of champagne for our little celebration.

The fact was my wife and I had ends to mend. There’d been months of forced separation as she chaperoned our daughter on the Australian set of the TV series Saddle Club, as required for our little girl’s new acting career. There was also a malaise in our then fifteen-year marriage, partly the result of my endless travelling as a professional rock ’n’ roller. This had been keeping me away from home fully half of each year. There was more wrong here than I knew, unfortunately.

I had sensed on my two prior visits to the set that for her, life on the other side of the world away from husband and home was actually a welcome change. When I turned up for those visits I felt, to quote a Fred Astaire movie, like “something of an igneous intrusion” in her freewheeling life around the TV production. On this third visit, though, I thought I had found a hope of renewal for our vows. April 14 was meant to be a tender, loving night to reflect that hope. For this brief time remaining, I just wanted to put everything aside and forget about the career, the ambition, and the spotlight I’d pursued for decades. All my life I’d been swept along by the trade winds of popular music. They were waiting to sweep me away again in a couple of days to the next show in America. This night was to be special ... if only I could find the bloody way there!

Angry self-recrimination was a bad habit of mine. To yell at myself was both an outlet and a form of punishment, to teach me not to make that mistake again. I realize now that it actually makes me weak and rattled instead. Though my drive to Daylesford was now finally on the right course, I continued to smoulder in self-reproach as I drove. About forty minutes later, there I was, far from home, this “rock star” in a strange land — a man who’d stood in the lights of thousands of stages around the world, now suddenly confronted by a blinding light far more glaring and ominous.