Song of the Night, War of the Flea

 

 

Song of the night, war of the flea 

Deep inside the jungle you will find me

War of the small, war of the flea

Where the strongest bomb is a human

 Bursting to be free.

 

This is the beginning of a song written in the late 70s by my mandolin playing lover Lou. One of the songs we sang while busking in the snow outside liquor stores in Vancouver, Canada.

I'd love to tell you her surname so you can google and find out more but I can't remember it. 

I can't remember the last name of the woman I had the best sex of my life with as we travelled from Canada, across the USA to New York, London, Manchester, across France, Italy, to Lesbos.  Four months of adventure, delight and painful complications, ending in a physical fight in a rundown chateau in the south of France. 

Lou was a renegade,  a charismatic, modern day Annie Oakley. She swashbuckled all over Vancouver,  leading a small band of lesbian pirates in all sorts of politically motivated illegal activities. Live for Free off Capitalist Society was their modus operandi and they paid for nothing. They siphoned petrol from other vehicles to fuel their old van, shop lifted all their groceries, evaded fares on buses and ferries and somehow never got caught. That is until I came along.

But let me go back to the beginning of the story...

 

 

It was 1975.  I was living in a small house by the freeway in the counter-culture capital of the world,  Eugene, Oregon. I'd left Australia in April 1974 with my best friend Ruth Maddison. We had landed in L. A.  one day after the Patty Hearst shoot out.  We'd hitched up the west coast  to Vancouver then across across Canada to Montreal, and back in a big diagonal to Southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. After about six months Ruth had returned home to Oz and I headed to Oregon because I'd heard there was work there planting trees. Out on the slopes I made a couple of new friends, artist Simone Treacy and musician Scotty Warzinsky. We got on so well, when the planting season ended we decided to get a place together. 

One day there was a knock on the front door. I went to answer it and found a boyish young woman with blonde curls standing on the step. She apologised for bothering me, said she was passing through town from Vancouver, that she was looking for a certain woman who lived in this street. Her manner was serious and preoccupied. I was aware that she wasn't at all aware of me, which gave me a chance to take her in more completely. I said no and redirected her to a share house further along.  They would know, I reassured her. She thanked me and went on her way. I watched her go, all my senses alert. I had a feeling I would meet her again.  

 

Cut to sometime in 1977. I was on tour to Canada with the all girl latin jazz band I'd joined the year before before. We were a popular Portland based band (I was their percussionist), playing at community cafes and women's festivals, we'd made an album and were out on the road letting audiences get to know us. San Francisco, Boise Idhaho, Vancouver — we were hitting the big time! 

I was sitting in the back of the van as we crossed the border into Canada. It was dark so the border officer wouldn't have known how many of us there were. He wasn't collecting passports or IDs, he just called out, 'all US citizens?' He was expecting a blanket 'yes', but then my voice peeped up with a weak sounding 'no', and before I knew it he was interviewing me in one room and the girls in another, and when our stories didn't match up about how much money I earned with the band, I was sprung. Even the paltry amount of $25 per gig was not allowed under the conditions of my visa. They gave me 15 days to return to Portland and pack up my life, and if I wasn't out of the country by then I would be deported. 

We carried on and played the gig. The crowd was fabulous, the Vancouver women's scene was wild and sexy and I thought if I had to come back here it wouldn't be such a bad thing.  

Two weeks later I did as the officer advised. I said all my sad goodbyes in Portland and flew to Vancouver. At the immigration desk the officers were suspicious of my story and only believed me after making a phone call to my lovely host Giselle. She explained I was legit and admonished the officer for  making me late for dinner. I'd never met Giselle before but she was a kind friend of a friend who after hearing of my plight offered me a spare room in her apartment. 

 

I spent a couple of weeks getting to know Vancouver and managed to get a house cleaning job to supplement my savings. Checking out the notice board of a café, I saw an ad for a drumming circle in an upstairs warehouse venue on Saturday night.  I was feeling a wee bit lonely and knew I had to get out and make some new friends and this was perfect. Ruth and I had experienced the excitement and euphoria of drumming circles at Wimmin's Festivals while hitching through Oregon. A hundred or more semi-naked women drumming under a full moon in the remote Oregon woods was sight to be remembered.

I turned up to the venue and was pleasantly surprised to see Lou, the woman of my doorstep moment sometime back, seated at the drums. She was pounding out a beat and other women were following her.  There weren't enough drums for everyone to join in but when I got a turn I set up a strong latin beat and finally Lou, who hadn't registered that we'd met before, gave me her attention. We dueled back and forth challenging in a friendly competitive challenge At the end of the session as people started leaving she got out her mandolin and began singing. I accompanied her on the drums and at the end of the song we grinned at each other. We must have exchanged our contact information because before long I was following her band of renegades around town on a regular basis.

To be continued...

 

(c) Jan Cornall

Photos 1.Birmingham Museum. 2. Annie Oakley, Wikimedia, Thomas Edison. 3. Jan Cornall, Ink Drawing. 4. Deb Rousseau. 5. Lee Piggot. Thanks Unsplash.