My Effin' Life, page 1
Dedication
For my family
past, present and future
with heaps of love
Epigraph
We’re only immortal for a limited time
—Neil Peart
As a comic in all seriousness . . .
—Eugene Levy, as Bobby Bittman
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Acknowledgments
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by Geddy Lee
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
You probably know me as Geddy Lee, but my birthname was Gershon Eliezer Weinrib, after my maternal grandfather who was murdered in the Holocaust. As per tradition, my mom, her sister and her brother all named their first-born male children in his honour; my two cousins and I, all of us born within a couple of years of one another, were given that same first name, Gershon.
In the old country my family spoke both Yiddish and Polish, the former being the language they used at home and whenever they didn’t want the Poles to understand what they were saying. So my family all had both Yiddish and Polish names, too. Mom, for example, was known as both Manya and Malka. On most of the official documents I’ve found, their Yiddish names were used but sometimes spelled unrecognizably, as they would have been pronounced by some bureaucrat in the Polish or German government—or, after the Second World War, the International Refugee Organization.
As was the case with my grandfather, whom I’ve seen referred to as Gershon, Gierszon, Garshon and Garszon, identification for the émigrés was never a simple matter. My father’s name, for example, had its own set of complications. His full Yiddish name was Moshe Meir ben Aharon Ha Levi, yet in an old passport that I recently discovered, it’s spelled out as Moszek Wajnryb and its anglicized translation, Morris Weinrib. I’d never even heard the name Moszek before; my mom and our family usually called him Monyek, Moishe or simply Morris.
Ready for work with my toolkit in one hand, hammer in the other, and of course, to protect my brain, what every workman needs: a tiny sombrero.
Geddy Lee Archive
After eleven days at sea, on December 20, 1948, the ship carrying my parents from Germany docked in Halifax, Canada. They barely spoke any English as they walked down that ramp, so when they registered with customs and immigration, the official came up with anglicized approximations of their names, beginning with the same first letter.* Thus Manya became “Mary” and Moishe became “Morris,” and in turn when their children were born, they gave us each a Jewish name and its English equivalent: in my case, Gershon and “Gary.”
My middle name is Eliezer, but from kindergarten through the end of public school, I answered at roll call to “Gary Lorne Weinrib.” Confused? I was too! When I turned sixteen and was preparing to apply for a driver’s licence and a Canadian Federation of Musicians card, I asked my mother for a copy of my birth certificate, which she duly requested from the government. When it arrived, I opened the envelope and found myself listed as Gary Lee Weinrib. WTF?
“Mom,” I said, “what’s going on here? It says my middle name is Lee, not Lorne!”
She looked away, thought about it for a moment and said with a sheepish laugh, “Oy, takeh. Yah. I tink maybe you vere Lee . . . Your cousin, he was Lorne. I forgot . . .”
Huh? You forgot? I’m not sure which freaked me out more: my sudden loss of identity or the fact that my own mother couldn’t remember my effin’ name.
I recently discovered that my cousin Gary Rubinstein was in fact the actual recipient of the middle name Lorne. The best explanation I have for the mix-up is that, since Mom would have been speaking English for only a few years by the time I was born, the anglicized take on Eliezer was for her just an afterthought. And after she and her siblings made a group decision to name all their first-born male children after my grandfather, she misremembered which middle name they’d agreed on for me.
But wait . . . There’s more.
My mom usually called me Garshon at home, saving Gary for when we were out in public. Then one day in my early teens, I was hanging out in front of our house with my pal Burd when she called me indoors for supper.
“Hey,” Burd said. “If your name is Gary, how come your mom calls you Geddy?”
My bar mitzvah invitation, and proof that my mother did not know my name.
Geddy Lee Archive
“She doesn’t,” I said. “Her accent only makes it sound like that.”
He laughed and said, “Well, I’m gonna start callin’ you Geddy too!” And that was that.
When I turned pro, the musicians’ union application form asked for “professional, stage or band name” and I thought, How cool. Perhaps I should be ashamed of this, but in my desperation to assimilate into a less ethnic world, I didn’t think “Weinrib” sounded very rock and roll. Lennon, Plant, Clapton, Moon and Hendrix—now, those were effin’ rock star names. (In an attempt at self-justification, I asked myself if Robert Allen Zimmerman had had similar fears before he became Bob Dylan.) So I combined my nickname and rediscovered middle name to create a professional moniker for myself and legitimize my new aspiring identity.
A few years later I took that even further and changed my first name legally to Geddy. By then, even my siblings were calling me Geddy or Ged, so it was all good. To people who asked, I’d explain that it was like in Leave It to Beaver, where the kid’s real name was Theodore but everyone, even his parents, called him “The Beaver.”
At any rate, as you can see, I had two identities right from birth: “Gershon Eliezer” and “Gary Lorne.”
And now “Geddy Lee” made three . . .
Chapter 1
Geddy Lee Archive
You may naturally assume that I grew up in a house rich in music, that my desire to play must have grown out of musical influences all around me. But music was in little evidence in my childhood home. The radio was always on in the car, but I don’t recall Dad ever speaking about music, or mentioning any artists he liked, or even humming along as we drove. I just thought music didn’t register with him.
It wasn’t until many years after his death, when I was playing a show in Detroit and reconnected with the family of his only surviving brother, Sam, living in the suburbs of the Motor City, that my aunt Charlotte let slip some startling information.
“It’s so nice zat you have become a musician,” she said casually. “After all, so was your father.” As my brain reeled, she continued, “Oh, yes, back in za old country, he played za balalaika, I zink. Parties, bar mitzvahs, weddings and so on.”
All I could muster was a “Really?” It seemed so out of character with the man I thought I’d known that I wasn’t ready to believe what she was saying. Was he really a “player”? If so, music must have thrilled him in his early life and . . . oh man, what questions I would have loved to ask him. But foremost in my mind was why my mother had never mentioned it. Seeing as I was a professional musician by that time, you’d think it would have been a pretty vital tidbit to share with me, no? I was more perplexed than angry, and immediately after getting home from that leg of the tour I asked her to verify the story and give me an explanation.
Visibly embarrassed, she proceeded to relay this to me . . . For a while after their liberation my parents lived in Germany at the Displaced Persons camp at Bergen-Belsen, formerly the officers’ quarters of the concentration camp where my mom, her mother and her sister had been incarcerated for the final months of the Second World War. (Obviously this is a much bigger story, and one that I will be telling you.) They then moved into an apartment in a nearby town, trying to put their lives back together as so many survivors were, and finally committed to emigrating to Canada. As they were readying for departure, my dad declared that he was packing his balalaika, but my mom refused to allow him to “schlep dat feedel” across the ocean with them. She regarded the instrument as superfluous, his musical endeavours an indulgence they could ill afford as they forged a new life in a new land. This, she now told me, was a decision she’d long regretted. It was a heartfelt and meaningful confession, and for me a revelation as to my own inherent musical aptitude. I guess I came by it honestly! It’s in my effin’ genes! Yet, sadly, it also goes a long way to explain my father’s silence on all things musical and so many other joys of life. Looking back all those years later, I had to wonder if I’d missed any signs of his musical soul. Perhaps the decision to buy a piano so my sister, Susie, could take lessons was his way of planting a musical seed and, as such, connecting with his buried past. But I will never know.
I was six or so when my parents bought that piano—primarily for Susie, who was two years older than me. Apparently, they thought this was what well-raised Canadian schoolchildren did. A piano teacher was hired, and as Susie did battle with the keyboard, I’d quietly listen to the lesson from the next room or hiding under the table. She came to play well enough to participate in a school recital but didn’t stick with it. After I’d enjoyed some success in music, by contrast, my mom liked to relate how, once the teacher had left, I would hop on the piano stool and, by ear, pick out the melodies Susie had been learning—“prefectly,” as she insisted. Like any big fish tale, this story was most definitely enhanced over time. I do recall tinkling the ivories after Susie’s lessons, but I can assure you I was no Glenn Gould.
Geddy Lee Archive
In the earliest memory I have of my father, the three-year-old me is at the picture window of our Shaw Street home in downtown Toronto, waiting for him to return from work. The winter light of day is fading into dusk—always a melancholy time for me, even now—and I can hear the tinny fanfare of The Mickey Mouse Club on television in the background. I watch him coming down our street from the streetcar stop at the corner, up the walkway and into the house with a tight smile and a weary Ich bin shoyn aheym!—“I’m home, already!” He brushes by me on his way to the kitchen, goes straight to a high-up cupboard and takes out a bottle of Canadian Club rye whiskey. He pours himself a snort, knocks it back, then smacks his lips and makes a sound I always remember with a smile of my own, “Ahh . . .” It was only after he’d had his schnapps* that he felt rid of the day’s grime and could pick me up and give me a kiss, playfully scratching my face with his five o’clock stubble. (I can smell the liquor on his breath as I type these words.) Then he puts me down and goes on to do the same to Susie, and finally hugs and kisses our mom.
This handsome man with dark European looks came to Canada in 1948 with the proverbial ten dollars in his pocket and the love of his life on his arm. Moishe and Manya stepped foot on their new homeland as Morris and Mary—anglicized personae for an anglicized world—seeking a fresh start in a dominion unscarred by war and genocide. Morris already had family here: a sister, Rose (Ruchla), who had left Poland for Toronto before the war. For someone who had lost both of his parents, five siblings and countless other family members, all murdered by the Nazis, reuniting with her was the urgent and natural thing to do. Soon after their arrival, the remainder of my mother’s family chose to join her and Morris in their great Canadian adventure: her sister, Ida; brother, Harold; and their spouses, but most important, her mother, another Rose and the heroine of the Rubinstein tribe, as I will show you in time.
My dad was a loving father, but strict. He had an explosive temper, but it took a lot to trigger it. I pause here, because it seems unfair to mention any of the few bad moments in my short life with him; unfair because the fact that he survived the war, the fact that he made it to the blessed shores of Canada at all, is a miracle. Suffice it to say that I was pretty accomplished at provoking him, and as with most parents of his generation, if any of us kids did something really wrong, well, we’d get an ass-whooping.
We knew that he and Mom cared deeply for each other. They argued sometimes, but hey, that was life in a Jewish home. What seems like shouting to gentiles (or “white people,” as we sometimes referred to them) was just a regular conversation around our dinner table. When the whole family got together for the High Holidays . . . my god, it was a shouting match! But the love my parents had for each other won out over any argument, and they were demonstrative about it. I remember when I was about eight years old, Dad must have been feeling amorous. We were watching TV when he surreptitiously raised his arms above his head to get my mom’s attention and made a scratching motion with one hand in the opposite palm. I didn’t know what that meant until the kids at school told me it was a signal for sex. Wow, really? Ew!
The greenhorns enjoying a typical summer weekend on Toronto Island. My mom is second from the left; my dad, with his dashing pencil moustache, is in the middle.
Geddy Lee Archive
Both our parents worked hard. Motivated to build a new life and raise a family, they held down factory jobs on Spadina Avenue, the hub of Toronto’s shmatte industry, which, like many greenhorns when they first landed, they referred to simply as “on Spadina.” Once my mom had Susie, and me two years later, she stopped work and it was up to my dad to hustle a living and pay the bills. It helped that they also received reparations from the German government, but we were a decidedly working-class family without much spare cash or time for the pursuit of frivolous hobbies like music. With no money for hotels or fancy holidays, we did like many immigrants still do in Toronto: on Sundays we picnicked with my family and cousins on Toronto Island or in High Park. The men would sit on a blanket playing cards and laughing, and I always could hear my dad’s voice louder than the others’. They drank Red Cap Ale and Carling Black Label; if you’re a Canadian, you’ll remember those stubby little bottles. (I remember sneaking away once to taste a Black Label, but to me at that age it was just god-awful.)
At one point Dad was hired by a distant cousin to work in his “shoddy mill.”* He rose in the ranks to a position of some authority, but one day came home ranting that he’d been unfairly treated by his own cousin and in a rage had quit his job. It didn’t take him long to bounce back, though. He found a partner and proudly started a business of his own, Lakeview Felt. I remember going there with him and wandering around the wide-boarded floors in awe of the machines and the odors of wool and oil. But that, too, came crashing down when, at the first sign of struggle, the partner panicked and made a quick deal behind his back with his former boss. After that betrayal Dad was unemployed for a lengthy period. I remember him being around the house and down in the dumps while he looked for opportunities. Then he decided he no longer wanted to worry about partners or factory life at all and started looking for a small retail business instead. He eventually found a little variety store called Times Square Discount in the burgeoning town of Newmarket, Ontario. That was a pretty bold move on his part, since he’d never worked in retail before, but he ran it well, the locals liked him a lot and there was even an article in the local newspaper reporting on him as a boon to the community.
After the war and throughout my childhood, Toronto’s immigrant population was bent on moving north. My mother used to say the Jews were the first, and when they went even farther out the Italians would move in and so on, like hand-me-down neighbourhoods. It was an exodus from Toronto’s crowded, grimy downtown, where they had little choice but to live and work when they’d first arrived. The charm of a home with older bones was lost on them. This was the New World, after all; they wanted a New World house with a new kitchen, a two-car garage with a backyard and space between the houses on either side, as different as they could get from the crowded, battered buildings they’d left behind in Europe. Our first house had been a rental on Crawford Street, in what’s now known as Little Portugal, which is where my sister, Susie, was born; when I came along we moved to another, one block over, on Shaw Street. By the time I was five they had scraped enough money together to actually buy a house, and that investment took them north to 53 Vinci Crescent, a small bungalow in the North Toronto suburb of Downsview.
In every early picture I have of me, I look like a total doofus. Either my pants are up to my tits or my corduroys have checkered cuffs, and with that haircut I can imagine people saying, “Oh, the poor boy. Where did they get him from?”
Geddy Lee Archive
Situated on the crescent, we were blessed with a large triangular slice of property and a rare bower of plum and apple and cherry trees in the backyard, a blissful Garden of Eden that transcended our humdrum location. I’d play there with my friends and, towards the end of summer, pick off the ripest fruit. The blackberries were pretty sweet, though the plums were never as ready to pluck as my parents insisted they were. Maybe it was wishful thinking on their part, but most likely they were relishing the fact that, after all they had survived during the war, here they were now in their own home, growing their own fruit, which, ripe or not, tasted of . . . well, freedom. And to this day I, too, have a taste for plums that are a little hard and tart.
