1965: The Heaps and the Dupont Street Coop

The spring and summer of 1965 I rented a room from the Heap family. They lived, at the time, near Broadview Avenue between Gerrard and the Danforth. Don worked in industry as a shop steward, though he was an ordained Anglican priest. He believed his ministry was among the workers and the poor. He had a small office on the third floor in their home with an altar where he conducted communion services. They had two daughters and four sons, one of whom was adopted. There was no doubt that Alice ran the household. Chores were divvied up and everyone was expected to contribute. My job was to keep the kitchen floor clean. Every second night, after everyone was in bed, I’d wash then spread liquid wax on the floor. Meals were simple and basic. A frequent dish was chicken giblets served in egg noodles.

When Don went to Selma, Alabama to march with Dr Martin Luther King Jr the entire family staged a sit-in in front of the American conciliate on University Avenue. I joined them when I wasn’t working. They often entertained young writers, poets, and social activists in their home and the dinner table sparkled with lively discussions on the current state of the world. Don was friendly towards me, but there was a reserve in his manner. Still, he was always supportive. He attended my going-away party when I left for Montreal and I visited the family a few times during my university undergrad years.

My first assignment as a security guard was at a major high rise subsidized housing project called Regent Park. There were guards posted 24 hours a day, usually two during the day and early evening, but only one overnight. I worked either 3:00 pm until 11:00 or sometimes 11:00pm until 7:00 am. When there were two of us, we’d patrol the grounds, but, when I was left alone overnight I’d stay in the office reading or writing poetry. It was a relatively quiet job. Only once there was a fight that I and the other guard had to break up, and one time I watched a lone police officer arrest and take two men into custody as the sun was rising. One evening a group of punks threatened to beat me with a baseball bat after my partner left in the evening. I called the office at Barnes and was advised to lock myself in the office until relief arrived. A car arrived with a senior employee at the wheel and he drove me home.

They posted me to guard a wood-working factory evenings and weekends where I walked among the machinery in the darkened corridors. Then Barnes arranged for me to work at Connaught Laboratories in northern Toronto. It was a huge sprawling medical research and vaccine production centre on Steels Avenue which, at the time, marked the end of Toronto. Across the road from the centre were farmers’ fields. There were dozens of buildings in the complex with barns for horses, cattle, and sheep used in the production of insulin or for research. Shifts were from 5:00 pm until 8:00 am and we worked every second night, with back to back shifts every second weekend. There were two guards on duty. We had our home bases in different buildings and never met during the night. We were issued time clocks and had to follow a specific route at specific times throughout the night, punching the clocks at various stations. I liked the work. It was quiet, my task was simple, and I enjoyed the animals. I took an alarm clock to work and, during the wee hours, would set it to wake me for the next rounds. Otherwise, I had lots of time to read and write poetry in the tranquil setting.

Faye, meanwhile, had been getting work as a supply teacher, something she kept at for the rest of her life. It gave her freedom, variety, and enough of an income to support herself. In the spring she joined a camp set up by the Student Christian Movement as a paid employee. She was the cook of the camp and lived on the premises. Our sex lives took a break during the time she was at the camp. I had mixed feelings about it because it was a Canadian-Cuban fellowship camp. Several students from Cuba summered there, including one who had been her boyfriend in Cuba the previous summer. When the camp ended in late August, she returned to Winnipeg to complete her final year at the University of Manitoba. I wrote her almost daily, long epistles describing my thoughts and emotions. There were typewriters at the labs and I had lots of free time.

Also that spring I wrote the Royal Conservatory’s harmony and counterpoint exams. My scores were near perfect. Mr. Knechtel drilled me in preparation for my grade six violin exam and it was shortly after that that the dean of the college gave me a guided tour of the facilities. Practice rooms all emitted music of a complexity that I felt was beyond my skills; I felt lost in the stage where they produced operas. Dr Neel told me he had heard I had an unusual talent; he knew of my circumstances and mentioned the possibility of a scholarship. As far as I knew I would have to complete highschool first, so that was uppermost in my mind. I had decided that I would try night school as the path to the highschool diploma and then I would worry about a career in music.

A problem with night school was that I was working nights. I told Barnes that I’d have to give up the job at the labs, but hoped they could find something that would fit my schedule. I had also decided that it was time to leave the Heaps and strike out on my own, sort of. There was a student coop on Dupont Street at the corner of Bathurst where a number of musicians and recent graduates from the University of Manitoba lived. That’s where I wanted to live, but as a full member, not a charity case. I would soon be 20 years old and my six months of a steady income as a security guard gave me a sense that I could look after myself.

The Dupont coop was a lively place. One of the members, Wayne, was a recent graduate of the University of Manitoba. He played guitar and sang lusty folk songs like “The Winnipeg Whore” and “Four and Twenty Virgins” that had us in stitches. There were other grads of the U of M in the house as were some of the frequent visitors. All were trying to figure out what to do with their degrees. One of visitors was Bob Davis, one of the founders of one of Canada’s oldest political journals, This Magazine. I babysat for Bob and his wife from time to time. Another was Michael Moore, later to become a senior editor at The Globe and Mail. I took on the role of treasurer, meaning I was responsible for collecting each member’s share of the expenses and paying the bills.

Barnes found me odd jobs from time to time, such as sitting in a truck depot or a discount store watching for shoplifters (I never caught any). Then I got more regular work on the Toronto ship yards, guarding ships as they were being unloaded or sometimes standing on deck throughout the night. One of my unofficial tasks was to translate the Portuguese-English of the stevedores unloading the ships for the Russian-Italian-Swedish-whatever-English of the ships’ crews. However, in December the port closed for the winter and work became scarce.

I had decided to take grade 12 history at night school. The teacher was a weirdly odd right-winger whose theory of history was that civilization was born in Greece, moved to Europe, then to the Americas, meeting stiff resistance from savages all the way. It was now trying to advance into Asia but was meeting the usual resistant, this time from primitive Vietnamese. For some reason civilization had always moved inexorably westward and was always met by fierce resistance to be overcome, though everyone was grateful once they finally submitted. I was so angered and outraged that I sputtered incoherently as he condescendingly called me a “commie dupe” and other such idiocies. After about 6 weeks of this nonsense I quit, thoroughly disgusted.

As the fall progressed more people moved into the coop. One was a self-confessed thief who regaled us with stories of his exploits. He specialized in safe cracking and told us how he and friends would steal different types of safes and take them out to the country where they’d figure out how to crack them. He was also a teller of tall tales, telling us about an island in the Pacific Ocean where canaries rested on their migrations. The result was an island covered in guano, miles deep in places. Apparently gardeners would pay top dollar for the stuff, so, if we could raise the money to hire a ship, we could all be rich. He also had a violent temper and one night assaulted a young pregnant woman who was seeking refuge after running away from home. Don and Alice Heap took her to live with them after that, but she ran away and, last we heard, was in Quebec City. We evicted the thief from the household. I’ve met people like him from time to time: tellers of big stories with childishly violent outbursts when opposed, even with the opposition is all in their imaginations.

Another newcomer was Byron, who was to be my close friend for a couple of years. He had moved into the coop with one young woman, but, soon switched to another. He had been a student at McGill University in Montreal and had travelled to the Belcher Islands in James Bay where he stayed for a year. He had with him a trunk filled with Inuit soap stone carvings that he had brought back. He had a story for each carving, some of which were not anything like what we had come to associate with Inuit work—such as a life-sized head of a woman he called Mary, and carvings of seascapes with sea creatures barely visible below the surface. Byron had some carving tools and repaired damaged carvings, especially amulets.

Faye came to stay with me during her Christmas break, about three weeks in duration. We spent Christmas day at the Heaps. After she returned to Winnipeg, it was apparent that the house was in desperate straits. Some people had moved out and those remaining had no income. We would scrap together what we could to buy fuel oil ten dollars’ worth at a time and resorted to stripping the basement of whatever wood we could find to burn in the fireplace. One night Byron, his girlfriend, and I were so hungry we put together what change we had and went to an all-night coffee shop on Yonge Street. We counted out our pennies on the counter and determined we could afford two cups of coffee and a single donut to share between the three of us. On the way back to the co-op, cutting through Yorkville Village a police officer stopped us, asking us where we were going and where we lived. On learning we shared the same address he asked Byron’s girlfriend, “Which one’s your sugar daddy.” Byron said, “I’ve had enough of this shit” and started to walk away when the police office grabbed him and swung him up against a fence, snarling, “You don’t walk away from me!” Fortunately, at that moment, another officer appeared from across the street and calmed things down.

Talk radio shows had been shouting about “hippies” for the past year or so, with callers complaining about how they couldn’t tell the boys from the girls and stories about innocent girls falling prey to “free love” and other such nonsense. I never really thought they were talking about me or my friends specifically. For one, none of us partook in illegal drugs, though we were generally sympathetic to those who did. I did know a few artists who wore their hair very long, but, generally, hair did not get much longer than what the Beatles were sporting. What we did do that people might have been talking about was not visit a barbershop every two weeks to get the back of our heads shaved up to the crown. The reasons were partly to do with our anti-military biases, but mainly to do with insufficient income. We lived together in co-ops not for the orgies (which I never heard of happening) but to share expenses. Many people were paired up into couples and enjoyed sex without benefit of clergy and, in that, we were probably the first generation to do so openly. The pill, recently invented and available, took a lot of the risk out of such relationships. But, “free love” existed mainly in the overheated imaginations of people who didn’t understand what was going on in the minds and environments of young people during the 1960’s.

What really seemed to raise the ire of the talk show hosts was the area around Yorkville Avenue. Because of the cheap rents a number of coffee houses and bars featuring folk artists like Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Joni Mitchel, Peter Paul and Mary had sprung up. Ronnie Hawkins’ “The Hawk’s Nest” was just a few blocks away. Young people, drawn to the music, flocked to the scene, causing general hysteria in the louder aspects of the press. When I walked through the area on weekends it seemed that most of the traffic was people who had come to stare at the “hippies” and make fun of anyone who was dressed in blue jeans and whose hair covered their collars. Though we sometimes went to hear specific groups perform in Yorkville, generally speaking the true “hipsters” gathered in expresso bars on Elizabeth and Elm Streets near the Toronto General Hospital. I recall sneeringly referring to the ones gathering in Yorkville on the weekends as “hippies” meaning “little hipster.” Bob Dylan sang, “The Times, They Are a Changin’” and, in a sense they were, but not in the ways the press was focused on. The American war in Vietnam was slowly making its way into the public’s awareness and American draft dodgers were starting to appear in co-ops throughout Toronto.

At the end of January I received a letter from Faye in which she said that her typewriter was broken. Students, then, needed typewriters. So, I crated my typewriter, packed some clothes and boarded a bus for Winnipeg, coming to her rescue. I think that I may have also been looking for a way to escape the oppressive and depressive atmosphere of the co-op as it disintegrated. I boarded the bus at midnight. The trip took about 36 hours. As I headed further north in Ontario, then swept the high arc over Lake Superior it grew increasingly colder. At the bus stop in Port Arthur I heard Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” for the first time. It seemed it played, with increasing loudness, at every bus stop after that. We stopped every three hours. Every second stop would be a quick 20 minute break—just enough time for a coffee; the alternating stops would be for about 45 minutes—enough time for a full meal. We move through the tundra west of Lake Superior throughout the night and when I awoke in Manitoba, I was bewildered, wondering why the bus was in the middle of a frozen-over lake. I then realized this was my first glimpse of the prairies. The taxi driver I caught at the bus terminal told me on the way to Faye’s apartment that the temperature was -100F with the windchill. I believed him. During the two weeks I stayed with Faye in Winnipeg that winter it was unbelievably and unrelentingly cold.

Faye’s typewriter had been repaired by the time I arrived. She took me to her classes with her. I recall one where the lecture was on the employment of onomatopoetic devices in Beowulf. Mainly what I remember of those two weeks in Winnipeg was the intense cold. I kept an extra pair of jeans handy that I’d pull on over the ones I was already wearing before venturing outside. I was impressed by the fact that store owners did not mind when we waited for buses in their doorways—something no Toronto business owner would have tolerated. But, in the end, I rode a bus back to Toronto, joining a group of three other young people on the journey. I was thrown out of a bar in Sudbury for ordering a beer during a stop (the drinking age at the time was 21). Two of our group paired up, cuddling together on the long ride through the night. The other girl and I necked for a while, but there was no spark and we both dozed off.

We arrived in Toronto in the early morning and I invited my travel companions to the co-op I had left two weeks before. We taxied there, but the front door was locked with a new, strong lock. (We had never locked the door.) So, I took them to another co-op on Dundas Street, but we couldn’t rouse anyone there. In the end we returned to the bus station and I phoned Michael Moore, a recent grad of the UofM, who picked me up and took me back to his place. I spent the night, then the next day set about searching for a place to live.