009: I Take Charge of My Life

My first order of business on returning from Winnipeg was to find a place to live. All of the coops that I knew of were either full or closed. I checked the rooms for rent section of the Toronto Star over breakfast at Michael’s, then he dropped me off near the corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets as I had decided that a central location would do best and there were a number of cheaper older houses just tucked in behind that famous intersection. Michael must have loaned me money to get started and I quickly found a room in a tumble-down two story row house. As usual, it did not come equipped with a refrigerator, but there was a gas-fired hot plate that doubled as a heat source.

One of the former residents of the Dupont coop had a room nearby. He and I met for lunch every day at a hole in the wall. He paid and kept track of the expenses in a notebook. He loaned me money from time to time for cigarettes and my room rent. A couple of times I went to a day job office. Men would begin showing up at 5:00 am and wait on benches. Between 6:00 am and 7:00 am contractors looking for day labourers would arrive and select us on a first-come first-hired basis. I worked at the Toronto train yards where my job was to take crates of produce from the trains to waiting trucks. It was so cold that sometimes I took refuge in a refrigerator car, just to get out of the biting wind. The $5.00 or so that I made for a day’s hard labour was enough to buy food for about a week.

It took a few weeks of effort, but I found a job working in a bank as a ledger clerk. The bank was located on King Street, a short subway ride away, though I usually walked to and from work. The bank, The Provincial Savings Bank of Ontario, had been one of the first to introduce computers in the banking field, though it abandoned them after a short trial. I can’t imagine what sort of computers had been available in 1966 as there were only multi-million dollar mainframes that required armies of people in lab coats in constant attendance, or toys. I suspect the latter. A few years earlier, one of my teachers had introduced me to a new “computerized” learning tool. Essentially it was a plastic frame that held two platens on which a scroll of paper could be rolled. Strategically-placed windows in the plastic cover revealed questions and the correct answers on the paper. While the teacher marvelled, I thought it was a piece of junk, figuring that anyone could have replicated this wonder of advanced technology with a shoe box and a couple of pencils to act as the platens.

In any case, I was the replacement for the junked computers in the bank. My job was to take the slips of paper on which the tellers had written out the details of the transaction and duplicate the information on ledgers cards which were, essentially, pieces of cardboard with lines and columns pre-printed. These cards were kept in the vault and stored by account number. The tellers did not do the actual arithmetic of the transactions; that was my job. Every time I made an error in addition or subtraction I had to fetch the error book from the vault and take it and the card to the accountant who would initial my correction. The more errors I made, the more nervous I got, which led to more errors.

Did I mention that I hated the job?

A young teller and I struck up a friendship when we discovered we shared the same attitudes towards the bank and the other employees. She slipped me pills that she said were tranquillizers to help me get through the day. I spent my evenings and weekends with Byron and a few of his friends who had gotten together to rent a large apartment. He adored my poetry and could recite a number of my works from memory. I read on the weekends at the Inn of the Unmuzzled Ox on Huron Avenue becoming one of their regulars. I saw Marvyne, my poet friend—another graduate from the University of Manitoba—frequently, sharing writing and insights. I was becoming familiar with the works of the Montreal school: Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, buying their books when I could afford them.

As the winter morphed into spring, Marvyne invited me to share a large house that she and an elderly gentleman were renting. Expenses were shared equally and we took turns preparing the evening meals—which seemed to be mainly pan-fried pork chops, mashed potatoes and a vegetable. I had a large comfortable room with a balcony. Faye would be returning to Toronto at the end of the school year and we all assumed that she would be sharing with me. Meanwhile, I had earned enough money at the bank to pay back those who had been sponsoring me and to fly to Winnipeg to spend the Easter weekend with Faye.

The woman at the bank mentioned that her boyfriend had a good job at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Toronto and that there was an opening. So, I went to the university’s personnel office to apply. The two men I talked to were unaware of the opening, but they checked and discovered that I was right. One said that he thought the position required a completed course in high school chemistry, but I assured him that my friend who worked there did not meet that requirement. And, so I was hired. My salary was $200 a month. My friend’s name was also Ron, so there were two of us. We were lab assistants. There were five or six of us and our job was to each take responsibility for a pair of chemistry labs, ensuring that all required equipment and supplies were clean and prepped for the classes. Between each pair of labs was a supply room that doubled as an office, and we were each ensconced in one of them during the school year. During classes students would come to the window to ask for chemicals or specific pieces of equipment that we would hand them and check off on the student’s ledger card. Actual classes were infrequent and we spent the between class time cleaning the labs and restocking our supply rooms.

Soon after I started, university classes ended for the summer. We had three months to thoroughly clean the labs. Under the work benches were small lockers that were assigned to individual students during the school year. We removed the contents of these lockers, cleaned everything and restocked them for the next student. We also spent a lot of time socializing with the other employees. Our manager was an elderly Dutch gentleman who had been captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during the war. He was friendly and not very demanding of his “boys,” as we were known.  As long as the labs were clean and stocked he left us to our own devices. Over the summer I sometimes found a quiet corner of a lab and curled up with a book, reading the days away. I read “Lord of the Rings” in its entirety over my first summer there, and re-read the entire collection the next summer. In other words, life was being good to me. I was making more than enough money for my needs in a job that was reasonably enjoyable and non-stressful. I had a comfortable place to live. I enjoyed my walks across Queen’s Park and the University of Toronto campus to and from work. My evenings were free to work on poetry or to read at the Inn of the Unmuzzled Ox where I was making friends with other poets and musicians.

I had decided to take guitar lessons. I found a teacher who ran a Flamenco studio with his wife. He taught guitar, she dancing. Marvyne loaned me an old guitar she had, but within a few weeks my teacher said one of his students was upgrading and I could buy the old guitar for a reasonable price. I did. I still own that guitar. Because I read music fluently and had already played with a guitar a few years earlier, I progressed quickly. I was delighted with the exotic scales and rhythmic patterns.

Faye was due to return to Toronto in June. We spent her first day back making out in my room, but she told me that she did not intend to live with me and had made arrangements to live in a coop just south of Dundas Street. I was devastated. In my depression I withdrew from my housemates, refusing to eat with them or to engage in any conversations with them. I did my chores and paid my share of expenses, but otherwise avoided them. But, as my depression lifted I took stock of my situation, deciding I had enough income to afford an apartment of my own. I rented a comfortable one bedroom furnished apartment between Yonge and Bay Street two blocks south of Bloor.

I also had reached a realization that I was never going to graduate from high school. Neither correspondence courses nor night school had worked for me. That didn’t stop me from attending university, however. The University of Toronto offered non-credit courses in the evenings. I enrolled in a course on World Religions. I was thrilled to be sitting in one of those old fashioned lecture halls, with its semi-circle of ascending seats, the lecturer in the pit at the base. It did not take me long, however, to become disenchanted with the lecturer. His understanding of other religions was shallow. Instead he focused on the architecture of holy buildings, showing slides of various temples, churches, and synagogues, mainly exteriors. He giggled and waffled for a few weeks about whether or not he should show us slides of obscene carvings that graced a Hindu temple he had visited. In the end, he decided that we were all adult enough. The famous carvings were indistinct blobs scratched in stone. I don’t think any of us were impressed. The coup de grace, as far as I was concerned, in the downfall of this guy’s credibility as a university lecturer came when he told us that he once met an Indian holy man who told him that he had studied Judaism and had lived as a Jew for several years; he then studied Christianity and lived as a Christian for several years; and then a Buddhist. The holy man then told him that he had discovered that they are all, essentially, the same. What a marvellous insight I thought as the lecturer paused, then said, “Of course, we all know that’s ridiculous.”

Throughout the fall, Byron was a frequent visitor, staying with me for a week or so when he was between apartments. He and I went to a Bob Dylan concert one evening, a spur of the moment decision. Dylan was playing Massey Hall and we had no trouble getting seats in a box overlooking the stage.

One of the poet friends I had made through the Inn of the Unmuzzled Ox committed suicide by jumping from the Don Valley Viaduct. Byron told me that Henry had tried to visit me before he leapt but I wasn’t home that evening. The inquest into Henry’s death was held by Toronto’s celebrity coroner, Morton Shulman. Byron and I, with some of Henry’s other friends, went to the final hearing. A seedy-looking man was testifying that he was in prison and that Henry visited him frequently, telling him about how troubled he was by the drug trade that his friends were involved with. I was sitting with Henry’s friends and none of us had heard of this fellow before, nor of any visits that Henry had been making to the prison. Dr. Shulman then instructed the jury, telling them to rule that Henry had been under the influence of LSD. Byron raised his hand to object and Dr. Shulman told him to keep quiet or he would have us removed. During the break while the jury thought things over, Byron, I, and some of Henry’s friends, were struck dumb. What LSD? If Henry had been taking LSD he was very good at keeping it a secret from us. And who the heck was this guy telling the court such a strange story about Henry? The jury ruled as Dr. Shulman had ordered them to and the next day the headlines were filled with stories about the hippy who thought he could fly while under the influence of LSD. We all knew the story was a complete fabrication, but it got Dr. Shulman the headlines he loved and led to the eventual criminalization of LSD.

When Faye told me she had been sleeping with a young writer I was, at first, deeply upset, but, oddly enough, soon became adjusted to the idea. We were not married or living together and saw each other infrequently. Where we were drifting apart was over her new-found interest in Eastern spirituality. I was curious about it—after all, I was taking a course in world religions—but I resisted attending meetings with her and her guru—or bikkhu, as she called him. Though she followed him for the rest of her life, I never met him or saw him in person. Despite this—and I don’t fully understand this—we decided shortly after Christmas to begin living together. The idea was I would rent a small room—a closed-in porch really—at the coop she was living in, but we would actually be sharing her room. As far as I knew she continued to see her writer friend from time to time until I left for Montreal. I never knew what became of their relationship and never asked. After a few months, because of friction in the coop, Faye and I moved to the Dundas Street coop where we rented a room on the third floor overlooking the street.

In something of an effort to find a common interest, we both signed up for an extension course at the University of Toronto for the winter session on Psychology and Literature. We studied Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and punishment” in class. Faye also began taking a course in Flamenco dancing at the studio where I was studying guitar. In the spring I signed up for a course in life drawing at the Ontario School of Art, and, after a week or so, Faye also joined the class. When her mother suddenly died we went to Winnipeg for a week, staying with Faye’s relatives who promised to throw us a genuine Ukrainian wedding when we took that step.

My life probably would have continued along pretty much the same lines—living in an uneasy relationship, working in a minimum-skills job while writing and reading poetry and taking courses in whatever caught my fancy—except for the fact that a young man joined our crew in the Chemistry Department for a few weeks. He told me stories about Montreal and about this fantastic university there where everyone was high all the time, despite the presence of the RCMP headquarters across the street. What caught my interest was the fact that one did not need a high school diploma to enroll. The only requirement was that one be 21 years old—and I had met that criteria a few months before. I wasn’t interested in the drug angle, but the fact that this might be the entry to the world I longed for fired my interest.

I went to the Toronto Public Library and examined the calendar for Sir George Williams University. The young man was correct. I needed to be 21 years old—check—to have worked for at least two years—check—and have two confidential letters of recommendation forwarded directly to the registrar—that I could arrange to have done. I examined the calendars of other universities and discovered that mature matriculation wasn’t restricted to Sir George Williams, but the requirements were tougher elsewhere. Twenty-five was a common minimum age; it was 30 for the University of Toronto at the time.

I applied and phoned Mr. Strickland who agreed to write the recommendation letter for me. When I called the Big Brothers the receptionist who answered the phone sounded surprised when I asked for Mr. Belt and handed the phone to someone else. “Can I ask what this is about?” the man inquired. I explained that I was one of Mr. Belt’s cases and that I needed a recommendation from him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but Mr. Belt passed away about a year ago.” I’ve always been sorry that he never knew that his faith and efforts with me would eventually pay off. Don Heap agreed to write the second letter. I was accepted. Classes would begin in early September. I applied for student assistance from the Ontario government who agree to give me a $600 bursary and guarantee a student loan for about the same amount. That gave me about $800 for living expenses for a school year after tuition, which was less than $400 at the time. It was enough.

Montreal, as seen from atop Mount Royal.

Alice Heap gave me the name and address of the Student Christian Coordinator in Montreal and I sent him a letter asking if he could give me any assistance in locating a place to live, preferably a student coop. He never replied. Faye threw a party for me two days before we were to leave for Montreal. Ironically, I never saw any of the people who attended the party, with the exception of Don Heap, again. In the middle of August, 1967, Faye and I took a train to Montreal, planning to visit Expo 67 and locate somewhere to live while she returned to Toronto. We stayed with friends who had recently relocated to Montreal and our first night there Faye and I climbed Mount Royal and looked out over the city, glowing in the night, that was to be my home for the next several years.