New Directions

In the spring of 1964 Prime Minister Pearson was campaigning for a unique Canadian flag to replace the Red Ensign that Canada had been using. At the same time, Stan’s plans for a printing company were starting to jell. He organized a company to print hundreds of copies of proposed flags, as well as some joke ones, and a team of seamstresses finished them off. They were a massive hit and Stan was beginning to make enough money to realize his dream. One afternoon he and I went to visit a carriage house he was thinking of renting to use for his printing business. Like all carriage houses, there was a double hinged door big enough to admit the carriages. The ground floor was barren, except for a horse stall in a back corner. The upper floor, that once housed the hay needed to feed the horses, was a massive open space with a single half door formerly used to hoist the hay bales as the only outside light source. He didn’t commit to it then, but it would soon become the home of “Coach House Press,” one of Canada’s most outstanding and frequent award-winning printers of books.  http://www.chbooks.com/about_us

The home of Coach House Press, Canada's most celebrated independent publishing house. Stan Bevington, its founder, was awarded the Order of Canada in 2009.

The owner of the house where Stan lived let me camp out after I left Hans’ and Maria’s. I slept on the floor of the unused dining room. I packed flags into boxes for shipping and listened as Stan and his friends discussed the publishing arm of Coach House Press, House of Anansi, named for an African spider goddess. I didn’t pay much attention as I was trying to put my plans into action. I had decided I was going to return to Kitchener, appeal to a school principal to admit me as a student and apply to the welfare department for support. I needed some cash. Stan gave me a bundle of ten flags that I could sell and I phoned one of the teachers that I knew at Riverdale. He agreed to lend me fifty dollars and invited me to visit his home to pick it up. He sat close to me on the couch, his hand always on my thigh as he asked me about my plans. When it got late he asked if I’d like to spend the night. My head was filled with my idea that I would board a bus for Kitchener in the morning, so I said no thanks. He hugged me. I saw him next a few years later when I visited Riverdale when I was a university student, hair down to my waist, the same length as my girlfriend’s. He died soon afterwards of a brain aneurysm. I don’t need to name him, as nothing happened that night when he gave me fifty dollars.

I walked from the bus station in Kitchener to the YMCA, only a few blocks away, where I paid to rent a room for four nights. It was a Monday afternoon and I figured that five days would be enough to accomplish what I set out to do. The next morning I took my breakfast at a lunch counter near the YMCA and the owner agreed to take my ten flags and sell them on a consignment basis. The flags I had were the most popular of the proposed designs: a red maple leaf on a white square in a blue field. They were designed to be slipped over car radio antennas.

My first order of business the next day was to visit one of the high schools. I put my case to the principal that I should be admitted to grade 13, as I figured that I could tough out one year of high school on welfare, but two years would have been too hard a grind unless I could manage to find part-time work to supplement my income. He turned me down, saying he’d be willing to accept me into grade 12, but that was all he could do. I said I’d think about it.

Wednesday morning when I returned to the lunch bar, the owner told me he had to return the flags. Many of his customers were so angry that they had threatened never to enter his establishment again if he did not get rid of the flags. He explained that he had no problem with the proposals, but he could not afford to upset his regular clientele. Kitchener, in the heart of the most conservative part of Ontario, was not an environment where one could freely discuss new ideas. I was going to get another lesson in that later that day.  About four years later when I returned to visit with my sister, my hair now shoulder-length after a year in university, as I waited for a municipal bus, cars of angry looking young men circled the block to get a better look as this hippy in their pristine city, some shouting insults at me. Fast forward a few years after that incident and those same angry young men had hair even longer than mine had been that day. I am sure that today the customers of that lunch counter would be equally angry if someone were to propose that we change the current flag of Canada back to what it had been prior to 1965.

However, on my way to the welfare office I stopped at a small confectionery and the owner agreed to take my flags on a consignment basis. Two days later she had sold all the flags and insisted that I take the entire proceeds, foregoing her agreed-upon share. She wanted me to get more flags for her. As I sat in the waiting area of the welfare office, I could clearly hear the woman in charge addressing a client, from what I could overhear a young woman whose husband had abandoned her, leaving her with two small children. Instead of assistance, the welfare official was bragging that Kitchener held the record in Ontario for the lowest welfare rate and she was not about to let a healthy and fit young woman spoil that record. “But I can’t feed my kids,” the woman pleaded. “Then get a job,” she was told. “But who will look after my kids?” “That’s not our problem,” she was told. Nothing would move this official, not even the mother’s tears. She left quickly, baby in arms, holding the hand of a two year old.

My turn.

The woman listened to my story and then told me that Kitchener held the record for the lowest welfare rate in Ontario and that no healthy young man was going to spoil that record. “But I can’t hold a full-time job and still go to school,” I argued. “Not our problem,” I was told. Then the woman softened and said, “Why don’t you go home? I know your father. He’s a good man.” When I got back to the YMCA that afternoon, the desk clerk gave me a ten dollar bill. “This is for you,” he said. I don’t know who it was from, but I was getting very low on cash and appreciated it.

Through that hot and muggy week, I visited the homes of friends from elementary school days. The stories were all the same: they’d be pleasant to me and their parents would advise me to go home, my father was a nice man, etc., etc. It was as if the entire city knew my father and what a good man he was. I could not answer any of them. I did not have a vocabulary able to express the sense of oppression I had in his presence. No one understood what I was about and I wasn’t even sure about that myself. Hot, sticky, muggy evenings, I sat in my room, looking out the window at a small park across the street. Nothing was working out the way I had hoped it would.  I could not explain to anyone what it was I wanted. I picked up a pen and started to write on a sheet of paper on the ledge of the window.

Simple words. Keep it simple. No explanations or expositions. Just words. “He big,” I wrote. “I small.” “He big/ I hurt.” “Small me.” And so it went, one page filled and became another. “Big hurt.”

I looked at the park across the street. “Park/ green/ so green/ cool/ dark.” Keep it simple. Just write what was there, nothing more. “Bright cars/ dark trees.”

The next day after I returned from my breakfast the desk clerk told me that he had a phone message for me. “Mr. Brown” and a phone number. Someone had told my father I was here. I felt panicky, afraid he was going to show up. I quickly packed, checked out, and walked quickly to the bus station, worried that his car was going to screech to a halt across my path. As the bus pulled away from the city I felt as though I had just escaped prison and was headed for the freedom and anonymity of the big city.

Over the next three years I called myself a poet. I filled books with neatly typed pages, numbering some 300 poems in all. I read regularly in coffee houses, like “The Bohemian Embassy,” where Margaret Atwood, Milton Acorn, and Gwendolyn MacEwen read their poetry between performances by Ian and Sylvia Tyson. Here’s a brief description of The Embassy: http://torontodreamsproject.blogspot.ca/2011/02/canadas-first-beatnik-happening.html. I read often at The Inn of the Unmuzzled Ox, a poor cousin of The Embassy, run by The Student Christian Movement, a Canada-wide campus organization where some of the most radical ideas in Canada, such as the early discussions of gay rights, were being discussed. The Inn is mentioned in an article here: http://www.scmcanada.org/files/Epistle-2009.pdf. One of my poems was published in an anthology of Canadian poetry edited by George Bowering, and a number were published at McGill University when I was a student there in 1974-75. Poetry became a vehicle through which I could say things I could never put into words before and it helped me articulate and define who I was becoming.

The Encroachment

(May 13, 1966)

the ambivalence of cold cheap stone

in amber lights

a room flashes on, one off

over hypnotic ritual of apartment buildings

can I say this pyramid

will not collapse on fulfilment

of its ten year lease

while this ancient home

can legate to its legacy?

and can I say this cold, this warm

this house, this home

this and all and no more?

and will I say this doomsday

book will outlive its inheritors

this scrap, the dust? I will be

free as birds which dart though the one hole

in the tangled interwoven twigs

be quick

before the foliage fills them in

Seen in Passing Eyes

(November 3, 1966)

The loneliness of people’s eyes

moves in a slow inner dance

like a buttocks bone grinding into a chair

it eats.

Like a young girl

tears streaming down her cheeks

writing on her window

for passing pedestrians the word

Happy.

the movement increases

till mind and body

are divorced in a frenzy

and ceases

in a cumulative

sleep.