Distressed Pavement: Madawaska Joe

Second excerpt from my book Distressed Pavement, To Ottawa With Love, due out this fall.

The Saturday after the Earth swallowed Madawaska Joe whole, his fellow musicians and friends gathered at Irene’s for a celebration of his life and legend. 

 

The Mayor was there to accept good wishes after the city quietly paid for his funeral and paid out a tidy sum that would take care of Joe’s ex-wife who had threatened to sue. Manon Giroux hadn’t laid eyes on her husband of thirty years in more than a decade, not since they buried Joe’s eldest son after he succumbed to a heroin habit. But here she was, not shy to come forward to claim the $100,000.

 

“I deserve that money for what he put me through,” she told Irene as she dug into a feed of hot wings at Joe’s wake. “He was a son-of-a-bitch, and I don’t care he’s gone.”

 

Many in the crowd were not aware that Joe was even married. He wasn’t of course, married, except on paper. Joe had been a terrible husband who often left Manon with a black eye or worse in the trailer they shared that was a stone’s throw away from the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield, Quebec.

 

Joe hadn’t remembered beating up Manon as most of the instances occurred while he was black out drunk. 

 

“I love her,” he told a Sûrete du Québec cop who responded to the 911 call. “I just hate her. Look, if she was your wife, you’d beat her up, too.”

 

Manon Giroux stayed in the trailer after kicking Joe to the curb. He wasn’t welcome in the village anymore, either, and got a life time ban at the Black Sheep.

 

No longer feeling the love, Joe hitched to Ottawa where he’d been ever since in various states of inebriation.

 

Eric sat in the corner nursing his third beer and listening to Chopper McKinnon and Chris White from CKCU radio tell Madawaska Joe stories. Every musician had one.

 

Like the time Joe brought blues brother Dan Aykroyd to the club to host an open mike. When asked how he knew the Ottawa native turned film superstar, he blew a few chords on his blues harp.

“Didn’t you see me in the Blues Brothers? I was in the band with Pinetop Perkins backing Ray Charles!”

 

After the eulogy, Tony D began to wail on guitar, backed up by an assortment of good local players including Drew Nelson and Jed Rached. Then Guy Del Villano took the stage and played Joe’s favorite song originally written by The Band. 

 

 

 

They say everything can be replaced

They say every distance is not near

So I remember every face

Of every man who put me here. 

 

I see my light come shining

From the west down to the east

Any day now, any way now

I shall be released. 

 

“Eric?” his wife Lilith said softly, stroking the young officer’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

 

He shook his head.

 

“I didn’t realize it until just now,” he mumbled. “Joe was my best friend.”

 

Eric rubbed his right elbow and adjusted the sling that held his broken arm. He smiled and got up and went to the bar.

 

He wasn’t okay, not okay at all. 

 

Irene looked at Eric with sad eyes. She was tired of hosting these wakes for musicians who were so broke they couldn’t pay their bar tabs, let alone for their funerals. 

 

She reached behind the bar, brought out a mug and poured two fingers of whiskey and handed it to Eric who, in his grief, looked more like a four-year-old boy than a strapping thirty-two-year-old.

 

“Here you go, Eric,” she said. He raised the mug that had belonged to Madawaska Joe, while Irene picked up her own mug of coffee. “Here’s to Joe!”

 

They drank deeply.

 

Then Irene opened the long cupboard that housed her lost and found collection of amps, harmonicas and picks. She reached to the back and brought out a scratched, beaten up and bent guitar case plastered with stickers, autographs and other memories of a life well-travelled. There were stamps from across Canada, the U.S. and even Europe. Eric opened the case and found a familiar Les Paul. 

 

“Take this, Eric,” Irene said, tears welling up in her eyes. “It belonged to Joe. He promised he’d be back for it someday when he had enough money to pay his tab.”

 

That’s when Constable Eric Laframboise lost his shit. His shoulders started to shake, and the tears flowed and dripped onto his checked shirt. 

 

Irene reached across the bar and rubbed his shoulder.

 

“Don’t be sad,” she said. “Joe always liked to leave a set with the audience wanting more.”