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The Toronto Psychiatric Hospital no longer exists, having been replaced by the Clark Institute of Psychiatry in 1966.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.”