There’s a Fire Truck on My Ceiling

by Michael Ryan

Wind EarthwormIn 1978, the first time I met Windi Earthworm, he was sweeping (there’s no other word for it) out of the apartment of a mutual friend as I was entering, his grinning face framed by a flaming bush of hennaed red hair, wearing a loose-fitting shirt and a skirt your mama would’ve died for.  A quick introduction and he was gone.

It wasn’t the first time I had seen Windi, mind you.  I was familiar with him as the most idiosyncratic and mesmerizing of Montreal’s legion of buskers.  Among the Dylan and Beatles covers, the occasional tasteful jazz or classical and the many traditional Latin American bands playing for quarters, Windi stood out.  Aggressive, frenetically in motion, chiding, cajoling, even baiting his audiences – sometimes in drag, not feminine drag, no one would have mistaken Windi for a woman, this was a guy in a dress.  His lyrics were hard and real and torn from his own life:  drug deaths, homophobic attacks, militant resistance, street youth suicides, slumlords, ravaged prostitutes.  But Windi wasn’t just some street poet of the underbelly, and his relationship to the street wasn’t reserved for his riveting performances.  Many were the frightened young people who ate his food and slept on his couch, or perhaps you’d see him on the street dressed in his nun’s habit, so realistic that I once heard the cops address him as sister, handing out condoms or clean syringes.  Never as part of a movement.  Windi didn’t do movements – movements had rules – Windi wasn’t very good at rules.

Eventually, Windi and I became good friends.  Brought together by the Vancouver 5 defence campaign.  Windi had known some of the 5 well during the period he had lived in Vancouver.  But again, Windi didn’t join the Free the Five Defence Committtee – groups and all that.  The Vancouver 5 simply became part of his act.  When AIM activist Gary Butler was transferred to a Montreal area prison, some of us set up a support group; Windi developed a rant that became an overall lesson in the oppression of Native people in North America.  How many people read the leaflets we so painstakingly created?  How many people stopped to listen to Windi’s rant?  I’m pretty sure Windi wins.

Then, when I was living in West Germany in 1985, a letter came from Windi.  He’d been diagnosed HIV-positive, still a death sentence at the time.  By the time I got back to Montreal a year later, Windi had moved to the country.  He was living in a shack with no electricity or running water – and trust me, Quebec winters suck.  He was raising chickens, had a few goats, a garden and a sheep dog named Taj.  For the next few years, Windi was my source of eggs and occasional fresh vegetables.

When Windi’s health started to noticeably deteriorate, he left Quebec for the West Coast, settling in Victoria, B.C.  He knew his time was short, and he had a daughter in B.C. he wanted to be closer to.  Windi died in 1993; I had visited him in Victoria a few weeks before.  The disease had ravaged him; his once long red hair was cut short, gray and wispy.  He slept most of the time I was there.  From Victoria, I went to Colorado to visit friends.  Shortly after I left, Windi was hospitalized for the last time.  Every couple of days, I would call the hospital and we’d make small talk – what really was there to say – he was dying, and we both knew it.

The last time I spoke to Windi, he was less than 24 hours from death and in the grip of dementia.  The last thing he said to me was, “there’s a fire truck on my ceiling.”  Of course there was.

Notes from Kersplebedeb

Unlike Michael, i never knew Windi very well - by the time i left home and joined the anglo anarchist scene in Montreal in 1986, he had the somewhat unreal quality of being well known and well loved by almost everyone i met, and yet he just wasn't around so much any more. So apart from a few casual conversations in friends' homes, at the Café Commun/Commune, at the Art dans la Rue anarchist arts festival, i never really knew him.

 

Windi Earthworm Singing
photo: Jacques Drapeau

Earthworm Given Day in Jail
Lethbridge Herald, April 1, 1977

 

So i guess like many others, my relationship to Windi was a relationship to his music. And of course to stories of his exploits - stories that he himself would recount as he performed - the mental image i have constructed of his chaining himself to Anita Bryant is as real as if i had seen it with my own eyes. But over time he became to me someone who existed as his music, recorded on tapes that slowly degraded as they were played year-in-and-year-out. (Don't believe what anyone tells you: the advent of mp3s was a very good thing as far as recorded music was concerned!) And then finally, most likely in the fire that gutted the apartment i was living in back in the early nineties, the tapes themselves were no more.

So when my pal loaded up my usb key with music earlier this year, and i saw folders full of Windi's music, it was a both very pleasant and surprising! i'd just assumed those old bootleg tapes were the only form the music had existed in, while in fact people had been translating them into mp3s and sharing them around, quietly and low-key, amongst his friends and family.

These mp3s of Windi's music were recorded in the 1980s, one set live at the Café Commun/Commune - a collectively run restaurant that was cornerstone of the anglo radical left at the time - the other, Alive!, was a collection of some of Windi's favourite tunes, assembled as a demo in the hope of drumming up potential shows or possibly even a recording contract.

They are made available here with the permission of Windi's daughter.

 

DOWNLOAD THIS MUSIC!

Windi Earthworm -
Live at Café Commun/Commune

Windi Earthworm
Alive!

click on the above links to play the song - right-click to download or else click on the following to download all of the above in a great big zipfile (203mb)

Windi and friends
Windi and friends

Windi and friends

Working on putting up this webpage, i googled Windi to see if there was anything up on the net i should be aware of. While there are a few mentions, as of this writing it's not much.

i did find two articles mentioned at the National Archives, which i went down and photocopied. They're both from Montreal gay newspapers from the 80s, and both are in French. Each in their own way, they both recount the constant harassment Windi endured from the Montreal police, who would routinely arrest him for playing on the street - and this despite the fact that he paid to have a permit to do so. As he explains in the audio news report accessible here, "I draw a large crowd, I sing anti-socially I suppose as far as the police are concerned, I am a transvestite at times and that does stir up the police's blood I think..."

You can read these two articles here:

"Windi Earthworm" Berdache Septembre 1981

 

WE

"W.E. pour Windi Earthworm" Sortie Juin 1984

 

With the help of google, i learned that there is also a brief entry in Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology , 1964-1975, that in May 1975 one John Windi "a.k.a. Windi Earthworm" was the first chairperson of the newly established Gay Information and Resources Calgary, a group that offered "weekly meetings, a speakers' bureau, political action, and a library."

Enticingly, i also learned that in 1986, Claude Ouellet produced a short film about Windi, entitled Ragged Clown, which was presented at the Gay Film Festival that year. In the spring of 2012, this film was made available on youtube, and can be viewed here. As the filmmaker Claude Ouellette explains, Ragged Clown was

Filmed in 1984-1986 as a year-end film school project. I first met Windi in 1976, in Calgary on the 8th avenue mall. My friend D. and I wanted to hitchhike to Vancouver but ended up in Calgary. That first night, when we arrived there with no where to go and no one to contact Windi took us in for the night, at his pad he shared with a visual artist/bus driver lover. I had never met a gay person before. I later found out that this is what Windi would do, bring in wayward youth for the night, feed them and send them on their way. I stayed in Calgary for a few months and would see Windi performing every once in a while, in a skirt but not as a woman, in Calgary, in 1976...I didn't know or realize what he was singing about at the time but I sure thought he was courageous. I then met him again a few years later in Montreal. A few more years later, needing a year-end film school project, I decided to do a portrait of this man who, more than most, lived his life according to his principles. Windi was, of course, full of contradictions, like us all, but somehow that didn't matter with him.

 

Also, in not too distant past, Viviane Namaste has mentioned Windi in two of her books (C'était du spectacle!: l'histoire des artistes transsexuelles à Montréal and Invisible lives: the erasure of transsexual and transgendered people). Both times she refers to the same incident: in 1980 Windi (who had trained as a nurse) was refused employment by the Montreal General Hospital because he wore the "female" nurse's uniform. Seeking support for a human rights complaint, Windi approached l'Androgyne, Montreal's gay/lesbian/feminist at the time; but the bookstore collective refused to write a letter of support, citing the criticism that transsexuality was "sexist". (Note that by today's definitions, Windi clearly was not trans - he liked to be referred to as "he", he made no effort to pass, he stated that he would not perform at a women's festival "because that's for sisters" - but back in the day of course the term could easily have been used by and for someone who liked to dress in drag.)

Windi Earthworm lived at a time where it was still true that to be openly gay was to put yourself in opposition to the way the world was, no ideological hidden agenda required. And the leap to being not "just gay", but to seeing through the other lies of capitalist culture, was not so great as it is now. It was certainly a leap that more than one person made. It may be a different world today, but the lessons of our past, the joys and power of being yourself, of saying what you think, of sailing away from cookie-cutter America and not just hoping to recreate it, all these are worth remembering if not rediscovering.

And while you're at it, enjoy the music.

 

Windi singing

 

if anyone out there has anything else they think belongs on this page - in the way of information, photos, changes to be made, whatnot - just let me know: info@kersplebedeb.com - thanks to all those who helped make this page possible.