I learn something that contradicted everything my father ever told me about myself

The Toronto Psychiatric Hospital no longer exists, having been replaced by the Clark Institute of Psychiatry in 1966. It was an ancient three-story L-shaped stone building. The men were housed on the second floor. One wing, facing the street, was where the nursing station and private rooms were located. The other wing had two open wards and a recreation room. A large bathroom, with sinks, showers, and toilet stalls, was in the crook of the L. The women were housed on the first floor. Though I never visited it, I assumed it was the same layout as the men’s floor. The third floor was for doctor’s offices, treatment rooms, and meeting rooms. In the basement was a recreation room with stage and piano, as well as the kitchen and laundry facilities.

I was first assigned a bed in an open ward. There were nine single beds, with night stands and elevated trays much as one would expect in any hospital ward of the time. There was a low wall separating the ward from the hallway where two or three orderlies would lounge during the day, occasionally making notes in ledger books. The men were kept in pyjamas and housecoats all day, meals served bedside on trays delivered by the orderlies. Though we were provided with tobacco and papers, the men in the open ward were not allowed to have matches or lighters and so would have to ask the orderlies for a light. We were also provided with powder for brushing our teeth.

One’s first impression would have been that the men housed in this ward were not sick. They spent the day playing cards, talking, rolling and smoking cigarettes, or listening to small radios. My first few weeks in the hospital were spent in that “observation” ward. One man, a truck driver, was in the process of being divorced because his wife caught him with another woman too many times. He kept us entertained with ribald tales of his exploits. Another man, a taxi driver, had broken into his ex-wife’s apartment and cut up all her bras and underwear. He told us stories about exploiting drunks who had passed out in the cab, putting the car on a hoist while running up the meter. There was a young gay man who was dragged screaming by the orderlies from another young man’s bed one night. Six years later I recognized him in a restaurant on Ste Catherine Street in Montreal, despite the intervening years and thick makeup and mascara, and we chatted over coffee. There was only one man who was out of it: a fellow who sat on his bedside chair all day muttering things like, “There’s blood everywhere.” And “The police are under the stairs.” He was soon removed to go to the real looney bin: 999 Queen Street West.

After a few weeks I was moved to the other open ward, this one not watched by orderlies taking notes. It was seen as a step upwards. I spent my days in the recreation room, learning card games like Hearts and Bridge which we played with the nurses. The nurses were students at the nearby University of Toronto; they’d do a 6-week stay on the men’s ward, and another six weeks on the women’s ward as part of their student training. The arrival of the young women each morning was like sprigs of fresh flowers bursting into bloom. They were chatty, friendly, and attended their charges with a loving kindness. They were each assigned three or four men as their special charges. One of my nurses was from northern Ontario and had a soft French accent. She called me her petit choux—little cabbage head.

My first doctor was a Chinese fellow with an accent so thick I could barely make out what he was saying. Early on he told me that they were going to give me a pill that would make me very sleepy for the first few days. I assumed he was talking about the sleep therapy practiced by Dr. Cameron at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute. It turned out that he was talking about the standard anti-psychotic of the times: chlorpromazine. Almost every patient in the hospital received chlorpromazine and, because one of its most common side effects was dehydration, each bedside held a container of sweet juice and a cup. Some of the men received electro-shock “therapy” and they’d usually be bed-ridden for a day or two after each “treatment.” I knew of one case of a patient receiving insulin shock “therapy.” But, generally, we were left alone with our student nurses, pills, and weekly consultations with our assigned doctors.

Shortly before Christmas my doctor took me to a room on the third floor where he had me lay down on a medical examination table. He injected me with what he described as a truth serum. I believe it was sodium thiopental, used in lethal injections in the USA and for euthanasia. It was also used by psychiatrists as a “truth serum” to help patients relive uncomfortable memories. The manufacturer of the drug, Hospira, stopped manufacturing it a few years ago to prevent it from being used in state sanctioned executions. I very quickly entered a state where I felt I had no control. The doctor asked me a few questions that I answered without thought—the words just flowed out of me with no volition on my part. He then asked me, “What is your problem?” I answered, unable to think or to censure, “Nobody loves me.” He left the room shortly afterwards and I, determined to shake off the effects of the drug, got off the table and tried to walk across the room, even though everything was tinged a brilliant green hue and was distorted. It was like walking through one of those rooms in science museums where perspective is disturbed so much that you wind up staggering like a drunk. After making it across the room, I returned to the exam table and lay down again, embarrassed by the “confession” that the doctor had elicited.

After the Christmas holidays my doctor was gone, replaced by a man I regarded as something of a friend for the next six months or so. Dr. Clark (I no longer remember his name) had me moved to a private room and started giving me batteries of tests, and gave me permission to take part in the occupational therapy classes held in an adjoining building. During those first few months, John Lee visited once, sitting cross-legged, his arms folded across his chest, looking smug and smirking. A group of students from my class visited me one time, bringing a tin filled with cookies, cakes, and tarts. They did not return. Mac Belt visited a few times, and after Christmas it became a regular weekly visit, as his brother was a patient in the room next to mine. Once I was in my private room Roy Strickland visited, bringing his violin which he gave to me on the condition that I return it to him if I ever gave up the instrument—a promise I kept a few years later. Some of my teachers from school started visiting, giving me homework assignments. I made new friends with the patients in the wing, including a medical doctor who had ALS and was being treated for depression. We called him “Doc.” Another new friend was a young fellow about my age who suffered severe epileptic seizures, and a man a few years older than me, an artist and teacher at the University of Toronto, who later went on to found one of Canada’s most celebrated printing houses and publishers. Stan and I were to be friends until one of my adolescent rages alienated him, much later.

Those of us housed in private rooms wore regular street clothing during the day and had more freedom of movement than the men in the open wards. I would sometimes slip down to the basement where I worked out chords and rhythmic patterns on the piano. A few times a week I went to occupational therapy accompanied by my assigned nurse. I loved working with oil paints on canvas and, when I left the hospital, the head of the hospital asked if he could keep my efforts.  They were, as I remember, mainly swirls of colour with images of women in chiffon fairy-princess dresses floating through the chaos. Instead of playing cards in the rec room we usually gathered in a small sun room at the end of the corridor. Bridge was the standard game. Patients were sometimes given permission to leave for the day and one of the older men spent his days at the race track. I spent an afternoon shopping at Eaton’s with a twenty-dollar gift certificate that the woman from Montreal whose cases I had carried while at the Sally Ann sent me care of the Boys Home.

A life-changing discovery came when a fellow patient said he saw my folder lying open on my doctor’s desk and circled in red ink was a number on the cover of a Sanford-Binet IQ test that the doctor had given me. He told me that the number was 147. Finally, an explanation as to why I had always felt so different and alienated from those around me. I suddenly understood why so much of what others did and said did not make sense to me, and why some things that seemed patently obvious to me seemed to be beyond the grasp of others. A new image of myself started to struggle to emerge.  Maybe I was not the incompetent weakling that my father had shouted at me for years. Maybe the reason that I could not pass some subjects in school was because I was operating on a different plane than my classmates. Maybe that’s what men like Roy Strickland, Mac Belt, and some of my teachers recognized when they reached out to help me. A group of medical students visited the hospital and wanted to interview me. “What is it like,” one of them asked, “to be so smart?” How could I answer him? I didn’t know what it was like to be anything other than what I was.

When spring started to appear my doctor put it to me that the government of Ontario was prepared to pay my full tuition, at the time about $7,000 a year, to attend Upper Canada College. I would live at the school and all my expenses would be covered. I never knew but I suspect that Mac Belt and possibly Roy Strickland had a role to play in the formulation of that offer. Years later I joked with my family that if I had accepted I could have written a book entitled “Black and Brown,” telling the very different stories of Conrad Black, who had attended Upper Canada College just before I would have been a student, and myself who, rather than chasing money made a career of searching for answers about who I was.

Meanwhile, I told my doctor I felt I could make a computer if I had some clear plastic and a marking pen. I had an idea to make something like a circular slide rule, but I needed transparency so I could line up logarithms. He gave me sheets of used x-ray material and I scraped off the emulsion on them, giving me the plastic I needed. Nurses and other doctors dropped by from time to time to see how I was doing, but, as is often the case with my plans, I could not translate what I saw in my head into physical reality. I could not cut the circles of plastic accurately enough, and the only marking pen I had available made lines too thick for my use.

However, as I grew in self-confidence I pinned Playboy centrefolds to the walls in my room—something else that doctors and nurses giggled over. I practiced my violin every afternoon and when the patients put on a talent show, I dazzled everyone with a virtuoso show piece. I enjoyed the time with my teachers, delighting in the attention I was getting, more than I put effort into any subject. My Latin teacher, a young Miss Hoey, took me for walks on the campus of the University of Toronto with her fiancé.  Baird Knechtel, my music teacher, took me to concerts at Hart House, on the U of T campus. He gave me sheet music of things to work on to improve my skills. Life was, in short, good.

***

All the men were secretly in love with one of the nurses that spring and, after she left at the end of her six week assignment, the young man with epilepsy told me that she had kissed him goodbye. Instead of feeling jealous I decided I ws not going to let an opportunity like that pass me by again, so when my next nurse was assigned to me I backed her into a corner in my room, demanding a kiss. She relented and every day we necked in my room with the door closed. It was a warm spring and I started sleeping in the nude. In the mornings she’d come to my room to wake me, closing the door behind her. She’d sit by my bed talking quietly with me, a hand carelessly placed on my thigh where my ever-present erection lay just below the thin sheet. She never touched me there, but I knew exactly how many fractions of an inch her hand was from that twitching organ. Then one morning the door burst open and the head of the hospital was there, a gaggle of students he was escorting peering into my room. He must have spoken to my nurse because she stopped closing my door when she woke me in the mornings. The necking continued, however.

As the school year drew to a close I took streetcar to Riverdale to write my final Grade 11 exams. I did well enough on most that I was promoted to grade 12, though I failed both French and Latin despite the fact that Miss Hoey had given me the questions for the finale exam a few weeks ahead of time and told me to concentrate on that. I treated it like I treated all my homework assignments: I rushed through it, just to get it done, so I could spend more time playing cards and chasing my nurse around my room. I did not realize that it was the exam itself that she had given me until I sat in the exam room. With my promotion, the backup to the Upper Canada College plan was revealed to me: I was to be released from hospital at the end of June so I could work throughout the summer. In the fall, I would receive welfare payments while I attended school. My friend Stan was being released from hospital about the same time I was and had rented a third-floor room near Riverdale. There was another room available, so I took it.

The house was near a small park, just south of the Danforth. It was rented by two young men who had turned the living room into their bedroom. The second floor was rented out to another couple of men, and the third floor was divided between Stan and myself. Stan had turned his room into a mini art studio. My room had a single bed, plus another cot I used as a couch; and a balcony looking out over the quiet residential street. There were no formal arrangements for kitchen or bathroom use. Everyone fended for themselves. When it was time for me to leave the hospital my nurse asked if she could accompany me. We carried my belongings in a couple of cardboard boxes via streetcar, then spent the afternoon necking on my new bed. I saw her a few times after that, but when I showed up at the nurses’ residence for a scheduled date one evening, she told me that she couldn’t see me anymore; there was just too big an age gap was her reason. I was furiously upset and snarled at the boys on the second floor who had loaned me a suit for my big date.

I found a job for the summer as an assistant in a furrier’s shop. It was in the heart of Toronto’s garment district near Spadina Avenue. The shop made mink collars and cuffs for women’s winter coats. The furs were pinned to standard-sized plywood sheets, four feet by eight, covered with craft paper. We’d trace the templates with crayon onto the sheets. We’d then take the furs that had been soaking in water and nail them to the templates, using specially-designed flat-nosed pliers. We’d use the pliers to stretch the fur to the outline of the template, place a half inch finishing nail on the fur, then let go of the fur with the pliers and bang the nail into place all in one swift smooth movement. The sheets when covered with fur were stacked along one wall to dry. The owner, a middle-aged Jewish man, worked an industrial sewing machine for edging and joining furs together. His two assistants, both young Italians, took turns operating a second sewing machine, alternating with tacking furs to the stretching and drying boards. I spent my days stretching furs and driving nails into place to hold them. There were hundreds of small shops like this scattered throughout the district, each specializing in one aspect of the process of producing clothing. It seemed to me that all the owners of these shops were Jewish and the employees all Italian. I used to joke that I was the only blue-eyed person in that entire area of the city. One of the Italian young men and I became friends that summer. He would sometimes invite me to his home for lunch on weekends where his father would provide us with a bottle of home-made wine. His family invited me to an open-air concert featuring arias and duets from Italian operas. We played pool on the Danforth where he taught me an invaluable lesson. I won the first game with him easily, so he proposed that we bet a dollar on the second game. He cleared the table before I even got my first turn. He laughed as he took my dollar and said he hoped I had been paying attention. I had. I never again bet on a skill-game, especially when it looked like an easy win for me.

John and Jean Lee, meanwhile, had separated when John realized that he was gay. They remained friends the rest of their lives. Jack had to find new accommodations when John and Jean split up and somehow found an elderly woman who needed a live-in care-giver. Jack filled that roll in her life. She never liked me and told Jack she thought I was a homosexual who was trying to seduce him. Nothing could have been further from my mind, but I stopped visiting in his new digs though he often visited me over the next few years. Speaking of homosexuals, it was obvious to me that the pairs of men I was sharing a house with were couples, but I never gave it a second thought. What they did was none of my concern. They worked as waiters or in Yonge Street record stores and were interested in the arts scene, encouraging me to see experimental and foreign movies. That’s how I got to know the early movies of Roman Polanski and Ingmar Bergman, as well as some of the more obscure Alfred Hitchcock movies, and the films of Sergei Eisenstein.

I also became friends with a number of Stan’s friends and students. They were a loose collection of artists, actors, and writers. Two of the girls who hosted many parties called themselves Kig and Kog. I don’t think I ever knew their given names. They had special names for everyone in their circle; mine was “Worm.” Kig was short and intense and Kog was tall, slender, with waist-length black hair and a more detached manner. She and a tall young man named Denis with hair to the middle of his back tied in a ponytail were a couple, and I saw them eleven years later when I was escorting my grade seven class at the National Art Gallery in its old location on Elgin Street in Ottawa. My class and I were on a balcony over-looking the main concourse and I saw Kog and Denis entering a door marked “Staff Only.”

All of which, in a way, brings us to the subject of why I turned down the offer from the provincial government for a full scholarship to one of the most prestigious schools in North America, if not the world. I started to sense, without being able to articulate it, that my generation was splitting into two: the straights, interested in careers, marriage, and a house in suburbia, and those who were more hip to the arts and alternative life-styles. Upper Canada College, to me, represented everything I was trying to avoid: an obsession with money, high pressure careers, a dubious moral code, and an intolerance for anything or anyone that questioned that lifestyle. I didn’t realize it then, but someone who would become my next mentor, beginning in about 18 months into the future, was a graduate of that body, thus proving that even the high-pressured conformist atmosphere promoted by the teachers, administration, and students of Upper Canada College, could produce some notable exceptions.  But, then, the Rev. Dan Heap, Member of Parliament, was exceptional in many regards.

Meanwhile, there were odd rumblings going on about me in the summer of 1963. Men’s hair was slowly getting longer and women’s skirts shorter. In my case, on the subject, I stopped getting my hair cut in the juvenile delinquent duck’s ass and opted for what was called a Caesar cut: short, and brushed forward over the forehead. I had decided I was not going to waste any more time in trying to style my hair. It must have started to creep longer because I recall Stan telling me that summer that he thought long hair was okay as long as it was kept clean. When I returned to school in the fall, teachers, including the vice-principal, used to slip me a dollar from time to time so I could get my hair cut, delivering a message that I was not interested in receiving. Stan’s sister visited him as she was beginning a career as a teacher and questioned me at length about my feelings about short skirts for girls. It was becoming an issue.

Kig, Kog, Stan, and friends used to meet for espresso and conversation in the outdoor cafes on Elizabeth and Elm Streets sandwiched between Yonge Street and the Toronto General Hospital. This was the area frequented by Ernest Hemingway when he worked for the Toronto Star, a fact we were conscious of.  One of the members of the household I shared worked at Barberian’s Steak House on Elm Street and introduced me to Harry Barberian who invited me to his office a few times to expound on his philosophy of life. He believed in hard work and high standards; all I had to do was shake off self-doubts and start putting myself forward. During the winter he ordered one of his waiters to take me to a party so I could meet some influential people—an opportunity I blew—and once got me a job working for a colleague that I quit after six hours on the job. I definitely was not interested in the restaurant trade.

I also spent time that summer trying to come to terms with and understand what I had learned about myself at the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital. I learned that my IQ was close to Einstein’s IQ. His was an estimated 160 and many years later I scored an astounding 174 on a test administered by Mensa—and also learned that there are many factors affecting one’s scores on this type of test, resulting in widely differing scores at different times in one’s life. At a time when I was depressed and anxiety-ridden a therapist told me he thought I couldn’t score above 135 in my present state. As I got older I realized that no one was even sure what these tests were measuring, exactly, because intelligence is such a nebulous and variously-manifest capacity. I met people who probably could not score above 90 on such tests who I considered to be smarter than many people who could easily score 120. I also concluded over many years of observation that people in the “average” range of IQ were often not nearly as smart as they thought they were. When I joined Mensa I discovered that very many of the brightest members of our world are misfits who can barely carry on a coherent conversation and have trouble mastering simple day-to-day activities most take for granted. With the spread of the Internet, making it possible to connect with and read the thoughts of people from all walks of life throughout the world, I could barely believe the depth of ignorance and stupidity I was encountering. We have highly-placed and influential people in power who can’t grasp the basic principles of modern science and are unable to employ elementary reasoning in their encounters with reality.  

In my attempt to understand all this, I relied on the meaning of the word perception. I could perceive things that the average person could not, like patterns where others saw random numbers. I drew a bell curve along an x-axis centred on a y-axis representing 100. The curve almost flattened out at 80 and 120. And then I drew a horizontal line from the high point of the curve to the right, above the highest IQ scores. The difference between the value of that line and the line representing the percentage of the population that scored that value is what I understood to represent the difference between what brighter people were aware of and could perceive and that of the average person. I pictured it as the ability to “see” further than the limits of one’s self. The trouble with such associations is that one can very readily be accused of having an inflated ego, compounded by the fact that it is often very difficult to articulate what one can “perceive” to someone who sees nothing. For example, in analysing the music of Johann Sebastien Bach, one of the brightest minds the world has known—in any field, not just in music—one can encounter musical progressions that defy reason and all the so-called “rules” of the musical theories of the times, and yet they make sense from a perspective of someone playfully poking holes in the boundaries as if to find what lies beyond… and most people hear nothing but pretty sounds. In such encounters terms like “elitist,” “long-haired freak,” and “snob” get tossed about freely, often leaving the one trying to explain or instruct feeling a bewildered hurt. After a few years I simply gave up trying to explain the reality that I inhabit to others. The few times I’ve ventured to attempt a description of the gap between my perceptions and what others were telling me they experienced I was slapped down hard. Unknowingly, I was embarking on a life-time of underachieving, of riding, for the most part, under the radar, rising momentarily to shine, then sinking once again below the horizon. I never lived up to the promise of my adolescence and the people who were supporting and encouraging me mainly, I think, because of that very telling heartfelt cry when my doctor injected me with sodium thiopental and asked me what my problem was: “Nobody loves me.”

The Third Mentor: John Lee

In the spring of 1962 while I was in grade 10, Jack left the Boys’ Home and moved in with a local couple, John and Jean Lee. Jack had a lot of enthusiasms. I recall once he described in great detail the vetting process Leonard Bernstein went through to become conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Another time he described Joe Frazier’s hands before he fought Cassius Clay. On my 18^th birthday, a few years later, Jack bought me a book written by one of Picasso’s mistresses,  Françoise Gilot. Jack had a self-depreciating humour and a love of detail. John Lee became, that spring, another of Jack’s enthusiasms.

John and Jean were radicals. They were openly socialists and strongly opposed to the Viet Nam war, still in its nascent stages. They opposed the death penalty, still in force in Canada, and fought for nuclear disarmament. They believed in sexual openness and Jack reported actually seeing Jean’s “bush” as she worked about the house dressed carelessly only in a robe. He told me that they allowed him to cover the walls of his room with Playboy pinups and that John once told him that he and Jean had made love in his room inspired by the posters.

While my world was falling apart, I sat in their luxurious garden talking with John. He told me of the philosophies of Emmanuel Kant and his concept of a prime mover. They were both devoutly United Church of Canada at that time, though John later converted to Quakerism. At that time John had a master’s degree and was working for Ontario Hydro, but he eventually received a PhD and taught sociology at the University of Toronto and York University, wrote books, and became an outspoken champion of gay rights. Jean was employed as a social worker, later to become head of Social Services of The Hospital for Sick Kids. They had two small children: Ruth, aged 18 months then, and Peter, a newborn. Their house was filled with art works, records, and literature, especially magazines, like Paul Krasner’s “The Realist,” Pierre Trudeau’s “Cité Libre,” and other “socialist” material. They were educated, disciplined, and passionate in their beliefs.

Jack had moved in with them at a time when they had taken in a troubled boy, Philip, and were attempting to modify his behaviour to help him adjust to the world. John kept a detailed journal about Philip for about two years. I met Philip and found him to be aloof and withdrawn. I learned many years later that he was imprisoned in Spain because of involvement in the drug trade. Philip left the Lee’s home shortly after Jack had moved in and Jack invited me often to their home.

As my world of upper middle class musicians and disappointed caregivers was melting away, I found welcomed relief at the Lee’s. They had a large painting in their living room that John told me had been executed entirely with a trowel. They had recordings of the music I was discovering and I spent hours listening to Beethoven’s piano sonatas. But, mainly, they treated me like an intelligent being and spoke to me on their level. They knew about my emotional difficulties and, if they were concerned, they never let on.

At Jack’s urging, I finally asked them if I could move in. They agreed. Mr Strickland said nothing. I packed my belongings into a few cardboard boxes and Jack helped me carry them the few blocks north to the quieter residential area where the Lees rented an older three-story house. The Lees and the children occupied the top floor. I don’t recall ever being up there. The 2^nd floor was for me and Jack. I had the front room with bed, bureau, and desk with chair, and Jack occupied the middle room. The 3^rd room was the bathroom for the entire household and jutting off the back of the house was a small sunroom built over the rear porch. It housed a comfortable old couch and TV set. The Lees never watched television, so it was my and Jack’s rec room.

The Lees soon packed their kids and Jack and I into their car and we headed off to a campground for a week. The camp itself was owned by the New Democratic Party, itself a new organization recently developed out of the old Canadian Confederation Party, or CCF. It was used for retreats and regeneration of party workers. This particular week it was being used by members of the Student Christian Movement, a campus-based national organization that set up summer work camps across the country where students would live together and work on community projects or study different social issues, such as mental health or unionism. John and Jean were active participants in the organization which was to assume a much larger role in my life in a few years.

There was a bunk house, but most of us stayed in tents, some large enough to include cots for half a dozen people. Meals were prepared co-op style, which meant that everyone in camp had certain specific tasks to perform throughout the week to ensure that everyone contributed. We ate indoors at long tables and discussions of the current political situation were animated. Of primary concern were the Bomarc missiles that the Americans had installed at North Bay, Ontario and in La Macaza, Quebec. They were meant to carry nuclear warheads to thwart any Russian bomber attack on the United States. The missiles would be launched into a group of bombers and their nuclear warheads detonated to destroy all aircraft with the massive percussion wave. They would also destroy anything that happened to be on the surface below them at the time, as well as poisoning everything for hundreds of miles downwind from the radioactive fallout, but that was dismissed as collateral. Far better to fight a nuclear battle over sparsely-populated northern Ontario and Quebec than over American soil.  There was good reason that the policy of the Cold War was called MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction madness. John Diefenbaker said no to the nuclear arms, making the Bomarcs almost useless, but Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester Pearson, leader of the opposition Liberals and soon to be Prime Minister,  was in favour of giving in to the demands of the Americans. The students were angry and talked about setting up a sit-in to blockade the missile sites. They did so the next summer and I was there with them. They made the cover of MacLean’s magazine and a picture of me alone holding a sign graced the cover the Student Christian Movement’s national newsletter in the fall of 1964. But I had a lot of life story to experience before then.

In the fall of 1962 I entered Grade 11, charged full of determination to make a success of it. I practiced my violin long and hard. I had always been made to feel ashamed of my hand-writing, so I went through the alphabet determining how to form each lowercase and capital letter so that it was clear and easily makeable by my clumsy hands. I discovered a combination of printing and cursive that worked for me. I created my signature—with a stylized uppercase R, J, and B overlapping each other and the rest trailing off into indecipherable squiggles. I had a study schedule that I followed rigorously, trying to make sense of Latin and French, my sorriest subjects in high school. And, on the weekends Jack and I watched science fiction movies on the old black and white set, while toasting entire loaves of bread that we slathered in peanut butter.  We were both inspired and enthralled by “The Forbidden Planet,” accepting its premise, in keeping with popular interpretations of Freud, that humans harboured a dark and violent secret nature that had to be controlled by the intellect. One evening when I was out Jack told me that a group of students gathered in front of the house and sang the new school song I had written the spring before. When I asked him what he did he said he just stared at them until they left.

In September, the school principal set up an appointment for me to meet a sociologist at the University of Toronto who was doing a study of juvenile delinquency, which was the popular term then to describe any youth who did not fit the approved stereotypes of the times. I met the young woman in an office on the main campus. She told me she was doing a study of the causes of juvenile delinquency and had a few questions for me.

After jotting down my background profile, she began by asking me when I first started to notice signs that I was delinquent. Was I deliberately acting in socially unacceptable ways, or was it something beyond my control? How often did I feel like striking out at society? Why, she wondered, did I think I had such a deep-seated desire to trash the norms of the civilized world about me? Did I secretly admire gangsters? Did I sympathize with the criminals in detective stories?

I was humiliated into virtual speechlessness and could only grunt non-committal answers. But when I returned to the Lees, I lashed out, vehemently and sarcastically repeating the questions, shouting them at John, demanding to know when he first noticed signs that he might be a delinquent and did he secretly admire gangsters. He telephoned the grad student conducting the study and told her I would not be returning for the follow-up session in a week’s time. She was upset, saying she needed the data to complete her study, but John was firm. He then suggested that I go to my room and calm down.

John and Jean were members of the New Democratic Party, whose provincial branch had been formed just a year previously. At their urging I attended a meeting of an NDP youth group and was selected to represent them at the upcoming convention. Jean was attending as a delegate, so we went to the convention together, sitting at a table littered with pamphlets and studies. I had no idea what any of the issues were and even less what the various speakers were talking about, but I rose to vote as Jean did trying to look like I knew what was going on. The youth group was expecting me to provide them with a report on the weekend’s activities, but I kept making excuses not to attend meetings. I had no idea what I could tell them.

Otherwise, life was starting to be good again. And then…

…the grade 11 classes took a train trip to Stratford for a performance of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”   On the trip there an attractive young woman I didn’t recall seeing before in the seat before mine. She reached up to the overhead stowage compartment, arching her back so that her breasts jutting towards me. She saw me and blushed. When we left the train I asked friends what her name was and ran after her, asking for her phone number, which she gave to me, still blushing. I was besotted with this dark-haired young woman.

Meanwhile, the Lees were also supporting a troubled young woman who had just been released from a reformatory. Sarah visited them on weekends and one weekend she and Jack spent the night on the couch, she lying atop him. He told me later than they had “done nothing.” But the next weekend on a whim I asked her if she wanted to go to a movie and she agreed. We saw “Phantom of the Opera.” As a gentleman I accompanied her home, a trip involving several streetcar and bus changes. I walked her to her door and she suddenly turned and kissed me full on the mouth. I was stunned. No one had ever done that before. It was now so late that the streetcars had stopped running, so I phoned John from a telephone booth and he came to fetch me. It was after 2:00 am.

The next weekend I had my first date with the girl from the train. Her name was Letitia. She told me she hated the name and preferred to go by Lee, but I loved it, the way it rolled around in one’s mouth. We took the streetcar to a movie theatre and decided to walk home. I stopped at the Lee’s on the way back to her place, thinking it funny to introduce her as “Lee” to “Mr and Mrs Lee.” I babbled non-stop about my new-found passion for socialism and the New Democratic Party and when Letitia told me her grandmother was a member of the Conservative Party, my energy and passion-levels accelerated as I denounced conservatives. At her door, now emboldened by Sarah’s kiss the week before, I moved in and kissed Letitia hard, long, and passionately. Her arms snaked around my neck, pulling me closer. After what seemed like forever, she pulled away and dashed into the house.

She told me later that she thought I was a dreadful bore until I kissed her, but had fallen in love when I did.

At school a few days later she asked me to walk her home. She lived with her parents and grandmother but from after school until about 5:30 or 6:00 we had the house to ourselves. The first time I visited her, her girlfriend from next door was there. Letitia sat beside me on the couch, took my hand and draped it around her shoulder. Her girlfriend left the room for some reason and Letitia took the hand I had around her shoulder and placed it firmly on her breast. I could hardly believe what was going on and squeezed her breast, kneading it, until her girlfriend returned and I quickly withdrew. Her girlfriend left soon afterwards and we started necking in earnest, entwined full-length on the couch, kissing passionately while I explored her breasts. This became our daily after school routine. By the second day I had worked up the nerve to unclasp her bra and nuzzled and kissed her breasts until a few minutes before her parents were due home from work. I was enthralled, completely.

Her parents seemed to accept me and often invited me to stay for dinner. When I would call John he’d ask about my homework. I’d tell him I’d do it there. I’d glance at my books briefly, skim through any homework questions, then resume my necking sessions with Letitia on the cot in the dining room while her parents watched TV in the living room. Letitia had a male cousin, maybe five years older than me, who sometimes visited and would encourage us to get married, saying that one should either marry at 16 or at 60.

While I was wrapped up in passionate love for this girl, world events continued. President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev were engaged in a war of words over Russian missiles housed in Cuba. Khrushchev sent warships to accompany supply ships heading to Cuba; Kennedy sent warship to blockade the island. As tensions increased, the Toronto Board of Education decided to do its part by asking all it students to cower in school basements. I had access to a lot of information about nuclear war and concluded that where our school stood there would be nothing but a 200-foor deep crater if a smallish 5 megaton bomb detonated over downtown Toronto. The day of our civil defence exercise I wore my “Ban the Bomb” pin to school and took a number of pamphlets urging a little sanity regarding the insane situation of nuclear armament. Letitia was furious with me when we met just before class, tearing my button from my shirt and throwing it down the hall. When the announcement came that we were all to head to the school basement, I sat in my seat. The teacher smiled and left the room, never saying a word to me. Jack had also defied the order to slink away to the basement and was hauled into the principal’s office where he was threatened with suspension for his insubordination. Apparently the vice principal backed Jack to some extent and the threat was not carried out.

Otherwise, I spent every waking moment with Letitia, other than going to school and sleeping at the Lee’s. John was getting concerned and started to insist that I be home for dinner school nights to ensure that I spent time on my homework. But my desire to be with her overrode everything else in my mind and I stayed at their place for dinner, despite John’s directions. John could not leave such a direct challenge with no response and told me that I was not allowed to leave the house the next weekend. But, Letitia and I had a date. Her parents and grandmother were taking us to a reception and she had been looking forward to going with me for weeks. I told John I’d stay in the rest of the weekend, but I was going to the reception. He said no. He and Jean were going to be away that weekend, but he was going to phone Saturday evening. If I didn’t come to the phone, I’d have to move out.

There was no question in my mind that I was going on the planned date with Letitia and her parents. I told them about John’s ultimatum and they told me I could spend Saturday night, after the date, at their home and that they would arrange something for me. The hall where I went with Letitia, her parents, and grandmother was directly across the street from an old stone building signed, “The Toronto Psychiatric Hospital.” I had no inkling, of course, that that would be my home in a few weeks. We had dinner, there was music and dancing, and Letitia’s grandmother kept sniffing my glasses of soft drink to ensure there was no alcohol in them. The next day, Letitia’s mother drove me to the Lee’s and waited in her car while I packed boxes of my belongings under John’s watchful eye. I don’t think we exchanged a word. She then drove me to a rooming house where she said she had paid the first two week’s room and board, but after that it would be up to me to raise the $18.50 a week.

My school work was all but forgotten. I was obsessed with Letitia and now dependant on her. After school we’d walk to movie theatres hoping I could get a job as an usher, but no one was hiring. I didn’t know what else I could do at 16. Our love-making intensified, as my hand started creeping up her inner thigh. Above the top of her nylons on her bare flesh, less than an inch from that magic centre I was so afraid of yet drawn to, was heavenly. I started to tell classmates that I was getting married. And my hand edged ever closer, brushing the edge of her girdle. One afternoon, sweater and bra pushed up around her neck and her skirt riding high she whispered, “Go ahead, do what you want to do.” I stopped, not knowing what she could possibly mean. After all, girls were not really interested in sex; they had to be cajoled, bribed with gifts, and overwhelmed before they would submit; and, even at that, nice girls simply didn’t. At least, that’s what I had been taught.  A few days later she was planning to spend the night at her girlfriend’s. As I walked with her, she carrying an overnight case, she said, “Why don’t we go to a hotel?” I laughed, thinking she couldn’t be serious, and said, “They’d throw me in jail.”

The next night she called me at the boarding house and said it was over.

I couldn’t believe what she was saying. After all, we were in love. She wanted to spend more time with her girlfriends, she said. Okay, so we compromise and see each other less often I countered. Besides, she continued, I was a pervert who was probably queer. “What?” Whatever I said didn’t matter because I was a liar. Then she laughed and said, “So what are you going to do?”  And, just as casually, I said, “I guess I’ll have to kill myself.” “Don’t make a mess,” she said and hung up.

I did not know what to do. There was no way I could come up with $18.50 a week to pay my landlady and the initial two weeks that Letitia’s mom had paid for was nearly up. My one lifeline, Letitia and her parents, had just been yanked away. Looking back from a perspective of more than 50 years I realize I had a number of options, but I could not see them at the time. I was surrounded by people: Roy Strickland, John Lee, Mac Belt, my teacher Baird Knectle, Denis Bolton, the teacher I knew through the Boys’ Home who would all be willing to step in and help me out, and they all did so at various times in the future, but that moment, that night, in my room, isolated and bewildered, my ex-girlfriend’s last words ringing in my ears, I took the blade out of my safety razor and held it in my right hand poised over my left wrist. After a few moments I realized that if I was going to do it, then just do it and get it over with. I slashed, dropped the blade and clutched my injured wrist. After a few moments I went to the bathroom and wrapt my wrist in a towel, but the blood quickly soaked through it. I stood in the hallway called my landlady’s name. She screamed when she came out of her room in her nightgown and raced to the phone to call the police. I sat slumped in the hallway, blood seeping through the towel until a policeman arrived. When he asked what had happened, I said I had cut myself while shaving. He drove me to the emergency room of a local hospital where they stitched the wound closed and wrapt my wrist in a thick bandage. I was taken back to the Pape Avenue police station and put back in a cell. In the morning I was loaded into a paddy wagon with the drunks and petty criminals they had picked up during the night and taken to court in the old city hall where the magistrate released me into the custody of the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital for a 60 day evaluation period. The next time I saw Letitia she said, “I didn’t think you’d really do it.” And after she left the hospital ward I cried like a baby whose heart had been broken while a nurse held me telling me that everything would be alright.

Forty-five years later I was visiting the now-retired Professor John Lee and he asked me why I had left his home so long ago. “You threw me out,” I said simply. There was a pause and then he said, “I sincerely and fully apologize for that.” I shrugged and said, “We were both young and stubborn.” We hugged a long time when I was leaving and it was the last time I saw him. Somehow, after that apology, something had been completed.

John's autobiography: http://johnalanlee.ca

A video made by John shortly before he died:

http://www.ronaldjbrown.com/images/john_alan_lee.mp4