Drew. 8 Friends. 8 Songs
- Wayne Moriarty
- Feb 10, 2023
- 10 min read

I moved to Vancouver from Montreal in the early summer of 1970. I was 14. It was my first time flying and the only memory I have of the airplane experience was my father’s drunken delight upon touchdown. I do recall the cab ride from the airport to the Bayshore Inn — the majesty of the north shore mountains, the abundance of trees, the Pacific Ocean meeker than I expected it to be.
In early July we moved to our home in West Point Grey, a two-storey stucco house with rhododendron bushes out front and a one-car garage in the back. Having lived my formative years to this point in an over-crowded three-bedroom apartment, this new place felt beyond our station.
A memory of my first walk in the neighborhood was how some streets had cement curbs and others just went from grass to dirt to road like the job of building a proper block was never completed. It seemed a little shabby and I used this shabbiness as a fulcrum to elevate my dislike for the place. Secretly, I was in love with Vancouver, but when you are 14 and all your important friendships are 3,000 miles away, you take your resentments however you can get them.
Our home was on West 13th, which seemed such an unimaginative name for a street. Just like the city couldn’t get around to finishing the curbs, it seemed no one bothered to properly name the roads.
Another peculiarity I recall from my early days in Vancouver was how dogs roamed as if wild. It may seem an improbable thing today, but 50 years ago, it was commonplace for people in West Point Grey to open the front door and let Binky or Jinx or Bruno run around unattended. Some days Binky, Jinx and Bruno would pack and for a kid from Montreal entirely unfamiliar with unleashed dogs, the experience was mostly terrifying.
The first month of my summer in 1970 was spent exploring Vancouver with my brother. Shawn would turn 18 in August, then begin a year of “special education” at Kitsilano High School in September. I would begin Grade 9 at Lord Byng Secondary in September; my sister, Charlene, would also go to Byng — her Grade 12 graduation year. Dad got used to his new office. Mom got used to her new home. We all got used to Vancouver.
In August of 1970, my Montreal friend Ricky came to visit. We saw our first slug together. Having never seen a slug, having never even known of slugs, that first encounter was really something. Slugs only added to my sense of the city as feral. The unfinished curbs, the numbered streets, the wild dogs, the primordial worms — it was like we got off the plane and civilization went back to Quebec.
Here’s another quirk: Everyone in Vancouver hitch-hiked. No one in Montreal hitch-hiked. Ricky and I hitch-hiked a lot during his visit. My parents seemed OK with us getting in cars with complete strangers, so that’s how we rolled.
I met Drew’s mom months before I ever met Drew. Ricky and I were hitching to the University of British Columbia’s Empire Swimming Pool when Joni picked us up in her pale blue Volkswagen 411 Coupe. One of us sat in the front, the other crawled into the back. We couldn’t have been in the car more than a minute when she began to lecture us on the dangers of hitch-hiking. I told her I had just moved from Montreal and was beginning school at Lord Byng in September, to which she said: “You have to meet my son Drew,” who, she informed us, was also starting Grade 9 at Byng.
Drew, she said, liked to play hockey and football and basketball and baseball ... The list of his athletic activities was dizzying.
“His last name is Clarke,” she said, as she dropped us off at the outside Empire Pool. “Drew Clarke.”
When we got out of the car, Ricky and I laughed at the very idea of Drew — that anyone could be that active, that excessively involved in sports, that superhuman. Throughout Ricky’s stay, this character of Drew was revisited often in our conversation, each time growing more absurd, more apocryphal. He hunted. He fished. He was a mountaineer who swam with the dolphins and flew with the eagles. A man-boy with shoulders so broad he had to turn sideways to get in the door. He was one-part Gordie Howe, one-part Daniel Boone, one-part Jethro Bodine, and he would walk the hallways of Byng with an axe just in case a mighty Oak needed hewing.
Ricky left in late summer and time quickly erased Drew from my thoughts. In November, I joined a hockey league and was in the dressing room when the coach ran roll call. All the names were meaningless until “Drew Clarke” was called. “Here,” he said. I looked over and there was Drew — 120 pounds in full hockey gear. I wanted to walk over and tell him about his mom, about Ricky, about how we imagined him to be this great behemoth, the personification of the ideal superhero for this feral, untamed city, but I didn’t. I just sat there, lonely, waiting for the coach to say “Wayne Moriarty.”
“Here,” I called back.
Following that first encounter, I don’t recall how or when Drew became my friend, but he became my best friend. I had no allusions the feeling was mutual, but it didn’t really matter. Drew grew up in Vancouver and had so many long-lived, deep friendships. There was Jimmy next door and Larry down the block. He liked me. He liked me a lot. That was enough.

Drew’s family liked me, too. Through the early years of the 1970s, my family began drifting apart. My brother started working. My sister was off to university. My parents were breaking up. So, I took great pleasure in the company of the Clarkes. Drew’s family was large and wildly diverse in its makeup, each person like a character from a TV show — deeply considered and immensely interesting.
The first time I went to Drew’s place, I was surprised to learn his grandmother was living upstairs. Drew’s Grannie was spry, lucid, darling, and almost 100. She was an august presence in the home and the family treated her as such.
Drew’s father Dean was a pencil thin man who carried himself in ways only heroes in novels carried themselves. He looked a little like David Niven, and while I never saw him dance, I knew he danced like Fred Astaire. He was always so kind to me. And, my god, he was funny. It was the trait he had most in common with my father. Both were funny, funny men. Dean also had a bit of a dark side. A mood. Some days he would appear preoccupied and distant. I never saw him angry, but I sensed Drew knew better than to provoke his father in those moments.

Only recently, in considering this story, did I connect those moods to his six years overseas during the Second World War. Dean was a Sargent Major in the Canadian Light Infantry. His troop fought Erwin Rommel (the Desert Fox) through North Africa and then carried on fighting Nazis through Italy, Austria and into Germany. So, of course, on those days when this jolly man would vanish, it was PTSD.
Drew’s mom, Joni, ran the house, which some days had eight people living in it. No doubt she lived in all parts of the home, but I only remember seeing her in the kitchen where she cooked, cleaned, and talked with the rest of the family as they passed through.
Drew had three older sisters and an older brother. Two of the sisters I saw only occasionally — Janet, the younger, and Teresa, the older. I remember them both as adults, ready for whatever the next scene might be now that the subplot of high school was behind them.
The youngest older sister, Cathy was still in high school and pretty much the party every time she walked into a room. Cathy was blonde and athletic and Icelandic — utterly Godlike in the pulse of a 16-year-old boy.
I believe we learn things from people without really being aware what it is we are learning or that we are even learning at all. I was always shy and a little reticent to engage the opposite sex for fear of many things, most notably rejection. It was impossible to be shy around Cathy — she was simply too overpowering with personality. Cathy taught me how not to be shy.

Drew’s older brother Denny was a cat unlike any other cat I’d ever met. He was most always home, most always with a beer in his hand, most always quiet and disconnected from the world around him. Whether it was a form of drug related psychosis or simply a psychosis that sadly affected so many young adults, Denny’s mental health was not good.
Occasionally he would say something to Drew and Drew would light up. You could tell how much he loved his big brother and how he sometimes struggled with the loss of who his big brother used to be.
Drew’s relationship with Denny meant something profound to me. I had a big brother, too, who had cognitive challenges, yet unlike Drew, who talked often of his brother with tremendous pride, I spoke rarely of Shawn. Here’s something my dear friend Drew never knew until right now: His wonderful relationship with Denny taught me something about unconditional love.
More than 50 years have passed since I first walked into this family’s home. Drew’s bedroom, if you can call it a bedroom, was a bed in the corner of the basement with bedsheets hanging from the ceiling to create an enclosure. Not a lot went on in that room. We didn’t drink or smoke drugs there; we didn’t even smoke cigarettes there. I can’t recall ever seeing a girl in the room and we didn’t have sleepovers, as such a thing would have been impossible given the size of the space.
What we did have was laughs. We laughed about Mad Magazine. We laughed about National Lampoon. We laughed about It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Start the Revolution Without Me. We laughed about the songs Signs by The Five Man Electrical Band and Coconut by Harry Nilsson. We laughed about our friend Simon whose glasses tilted to the right in the high school yearbook, then, in the reshoot, they tilted to the left.
After my father, no one was as responsible for my sense of humour as Drew.

The Clarke’s home was some 10 minutes from Lord Byng, so when morning classes ended, four or five of us would regularly pile over to Drew’s for lunch and watch game shows like Password which in our day often featured a little-known Indiana weatherman named David Letterman.
We laughed at David Letterman.
Some days, if lunch got too crowded in the family room, what with Gordie, Larry, Jimmy and others leaving only floor space for the latecomers, I would wander into the Clarke’s living room. The living room and the adjacent dining room were immaculate. The sitting furniture had plastic on it, as was the custom of the day. The plastic was only ever to be removed in the company of the esteemed, never for the likes of me, a 17-year-old who would just as soon eat over a sink as get a plate.
Also in the living room was this beautiful console stereo chockablock with the magic of hi-fidelity sound. Whereas I would never dare to remove the plastic from the Chesterfield, I had no problem welcoming myself to the majesty and magic of the music machine. I would pop open the lid, the thumb through the 20 or so albums that were alphabetized randomly like tiles in a Scrabble bag.
At this point it must be said that Drew’s place was always a fine source of new music for me. It was there I found Garland Jeffreys and Dwight Tilley; it was there I first heard Jim Morrison sing LA Woman, and if you played The Door’s Been Down So Long, Denny might pop into the room singing and dancing, holding his customary beer, careful not to spill a drop.
This one day, I came upon a curious disc by a group called The Chambers Brothers. I pulled it from the console and asked Drew “what’s this?”
“Play Time Has Come Today,” he said.
I flipped the disc to side B and dropped the stylus on to an 11 minute something that sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. It was soul but it had this infectious rock groove, and two cowbells to create a tick-tock sound that would alternate tempo. Tempo rubato I believe is the musical term for this gimmick.
Time Has Come Today was my gateway to the amazing world of black music that was not Motown. That’s not a slight on Motown. Motown will be forever unassailable. But Time Has Come Today opened the door for me to Funkadelic, Alabama Shakes, Michael Kiwanaku; it gave me a new groove and the soul of that groove can be found in almost every album I have loved since 1972.
Time Has Come Today taught me that the very best thing about the Rolling Stones is the funk, and that Bob Dylan the blues man is even more timeless than Bob Dylan the folk singer.
(Link to the 11-minute version of Time Has Come Today at the bottom of the page)
POSTSCRIPT: Drew and I have remained good friends for 50-plus years. He was the best man at my wedding. He married Sandra, who was my closest university buddy, and the two of them are still together. They have two wonderful children and a grandchild, who I am guessing is 2 now.
His parents have both passed away, as has his brother. His three wonderful sisters enjoyed stellar professional lives and raised children who regularly show up on my Instagram, some of them with their children.
As for Drew’s professional life, well, the lad’s been a superstar. After high school, I went off to college, and Drew got work in an electrical store. He quickly advanced from being the guy behind a counter to managing the sales team.
He then went and worked with his dad, before joining forces with his life-long business partner Bob, Sandra’s brother. Drew and Bob opened a little muffin café by VGH called Cinnamon Beach. When they sold the café, they had enough money to open a burger joint in Richmond, which they eventually sold for another handsome profit.
No longer interested in the food-services industry, Drew and Bob bought a couple shovels and bid for a contract digging holes for BC Hydro. They got that contract, then another. Every time they made money, they reinvested. Soon this little business they named Hole Cats Contracting had trucks and employees and contracts and buckets of profits.
In 1999, they merged Hole Cats with McRae's Tank Services and formed McRae's Environmental Services, where today Drew and Bob hold significant shares and still go to work every day. Drew’s title is President & CEO.
When I speak with him about his work, he still sounds chipper — not at all burdened by time. It’s clear he brings to his career every day the stuff he learned from Dean and Joni: Work hard, work honestly, be kind, be smart, enjoy the day.
It’s not a stretch to say my dear friend became a real-life version of that mythical Drew Clarke I created in my imagination before we ever met.
Editor's Note: 8 Friends 8 Songs is a series of stories about 8 important friends in my early life and how those friendships brought me to 8 magical songs. Drew and The Time Has Come Today is the third in the series. The first two, Ricky/Frank Zappa's Montana, and Larry/Bob Dylan's Threw It All Away, are posted on this site.
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