Back Door Man * Chapter X * Toronto

Bored with Vancouver, I try Toronto for a few years wherre many new adventures occur

X �" TORONTO

‘Light and breezy’ does not sum up hurrying, cosmopolitan Toronto where I spent the next two years. Out on the coast, experience had convinced me that Vancouver was a playpen, a nursery for drop-outs. (It can be if you let it.) I had heard it said that, if you took life seriously and wanted to accomplish anything, you had to go back east. Without a word of French, east meant Toronto to me. There I would begin another life for myself, which was no longer possible in Lotusland where I had devoted myself to pleasure seeking and willful habits of idleness. In the east, I would unearth that someone I could not find in Vansterdam.

My hopes were fantasy but I did find surprising things and fascinating people in The Center of the Universe. Desperate for change, I would make my living as an art dealer in my own small gallery, a one-man operation like Mary’s. I thought showing current West Coast art in TO would arouse interest among collectors and give me an opening as a dealer. Had anyone told me a penurious first-time entrepreneur’s chance of success, or the set-up cost in Toronto, had anyone made me realize what I had giving up for Toronto, I might never have left. Only hope and desire that in themselves qualify you for nothing could have made me believe so much was possible for someone like me. All I had in my account was youth and I was spending that like a fool. Nevertheless, I went east with a dozen pieces of unframed art and when I returned in 1973, I no longer was the person who landed at George’s door. He lived at 579 College Street, downtown Toronto in the heart of the Little Italy neighborhood.

My letter to my folks in New York, dated September 30, 1971, soon after I arrived, gives a candid impression my frame of mind. Mother kept it, (annotations in bold) and sent it back to me in the ‘Eighties, when she parted with her cache of ephemera. I talk of saving $500 to open a gallery and by specifying what I thought it would cost to launch this ambition I hoped they would help me out. They were generous people but cautious and this time they did not rise to the bait. With one glance at the deep-pocketed commercial art galleries downtown, I saw I was out of the running and took a more reasonable course.

 

 

Dear Mom and Dad,

Well, I’m still here! And I suppose if you compare my fortune to that of other newcomers to Toronto, I’m really very lucky. But so far nothing has happened. I have been looking for work since Monday and my efforts have borne no fruit. That’s my one real problem. Jobs seem to be very scarce, though at this point I had do anything. I still have some money to fall back on but that cannot last more than a few weeks so I’ll have to find work very soon. I have no plans as I cannot afford to plan. But I’m more determined than ever to open an art gallery and I intend to do that just as quickly as I can. First I’ll have to save a few hundred dollars (maybe $500.00) so first I’ll have to get a job.

Toronto weather is about half smog and half rain, as it was three years ago when we all were here. The pace is very New York-ish and so seems to be the people’s attitude �" Make a Buck!

Thank goodness George (roommate #`1 �" there are 3) has a TV �" those long cheap evenings �" and a fine stereo, or I do not know how I had overcome the frustration of waiting for something to happen. I’m spending much energy surveying myself and feel at a crossroads of my life �" there is an important decision: whether to go on “playing” or to build myself a niche. Frankly, I’m quite strongly drawn towards the “niche” idea, conventional as that is, namely an art gallery. (O how I wish I could sit down with you both and discuss all this. I do not enjoy writing letters and this is no exception. I’m writing primarily to pass time and because I feel somewhat guilty about not writing in so long.)I have self-dignity and I would like to do something to substantiate it.

I have been thinking about Uncle Joe several times a day �" it would torment me the rest of my days if he died before I have a chance to see him again. I hope that when the time comes you’ll give me the opportunity to fly down in time. I have no idea whether I’ll be able to afford the fare but in such an event I hope you would not mind advancing me. Anyway, that’s something to think about. [I always did and will provide. M.]

I’m also still anxious to have the records you left with Steve and Mattie (one of my paternal uncles and his wife.) I expect to be at this address, unless something by way of disagreement arises, quite indefinitely so they could be sent to me here. They are of no use to me in NY so I had like to have either the records or whatever money could be got by selling them. [As you know we delivered these to you in Toronto. Remember?)

Hope this note finds you in the best of health and chipper. Love and regards to all. My thoughts of him are the best “prayers” I have to give for Uncle Joe �" my special love to him.

Much Love, Paul

(This is 14 years old. Just came across it while cleaning out a chest drawer �" you may destroy after reading �" I’m so happy we still have Uncle Joe. Write to him though someone else must read his letters to him. You want no remorse �" Love, M.)

 

I wrote this after four years in Canada, still a dreamer with my head in the clouds and no sense of who I was or wanted to be. Who could blame my family if they worried? All I remember about their visit to Toronto with my records in tow is that I booked them at a boutique hotel, the high style Windsor Arms. The posh surrounding and the other guests made my humble parents feel they were living above their station.

 

Once I said that I planned to move to Toronto and not come as a tourist, George felt less warm than he did when he first offered his hospitality in July. He wondered how long I would impinge on him. Would I turn out to be a freeloader and stay forever or until he threw me out? Well, I would have felt the same. I was not disappointed by his coolness; it motivated me not to dither over job offers that never materialized but to take the first reasonable bid. He and I were bachelors, independent, and not wanting to be in anyone’s debt longer than necessary. As well, we were both inconvenienced at first - I was not comfortable in someone else’s nest and George felt the same about sharing it with me. We wondered what had brought us together in Vancouver and could not reignite the original sexual attraction. We were civil and friendly that is all. Right away, George introduced me to his friends (conventional men in their twenties with whom I could not relate) and took me to a few happening spots on Yonge Street. The most momentous and convivial of them was The Parkside. I loved it there and soon made myself at home with boisterous, demented queens, hippies, sailors, bums, and weird old relics. No women could enter but a few pranksters, dressed as men, always tried to pass, either on principal or on a lark. One such, Julie, I got to know.

 

George hoped I would form an attachment with one of his friends but none qualified. One did lead me to my first job, however. This was a desk job at the York University Bookstore. The university was an hour’s drive from Toronto on rare light-traffic days. Through the first Ontario winter, I commuted with three other men in an airtight, steamy, blue VW beetle. On our way to and fro we spaced out and wasted many highway hours dozing, or in idle chatter when our eyes would not stay shut. The position could lead nowhere, paid little, and it was dry, dull work. Yet it was a step toward financial independence and I moved into a nondescript place on Charles Street as soon as money started to flow. George and I stayed on friendly terms though we seldom saw each other after that.

 

In the late winter of 1971, while I was still living in that room, Richard phoned from Peterborough, his Dad’s place in Cottage Country on one of the Kawartha Lakes. His Mother had just died of cancer and he came back for the funeral. He was staying there to help the old man recover from the shock. Although Mrs. Wright had been sick for a few years and they thought they were prepared, it came as a shock to lose her.

 

Being gay was always a blight on his family relationships and things had worsened in his absence. His father refused to accept it and Richard and his brother, Jim, had nothing to share with each other. Living with his Dad again after being his own man in Vancouver felt like he had put on a straightjacket. It would be their last opportunity to do it but they never brought up the elephants in the room. and smoked all the pot he brought. Without his Mother to conciliate, his father and brother stayed cold towards him. In fact, they were colluding against him in secret and Richard did not see it. When they were alone, Jim convinced his Dad that Richard was an undeserving pervert and a drug addict and got Mr. Wright to make a new will that excluded Richard. While he was there and dependent on his father, when Richard ran out of money his Dad gave him almost nothing to live on and made him feel like a captive caged with an unfriendly reptile. Then, with no pot, no druggy friends, and no local dealer he was desperate to escape the rigid and passé older generation. That is when he phoned me.

 

We had a warm reunion in the city and indulged in all the things he had pined for. In fact, we packed so much excitement into that first weekend that spending Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday with me became indispensable. Toronto was a town in which he had never felt particularly comfortable, however, so, to break the ice, I took him to the Parkside to meet my new friends. In that welcoming closed society, it felt like Vancouver again. Late on Sunday afternoons, Richard would dutifully return to Peterborough with a stash where, after a weekend of revelry, he felt isolated and frustrated all over again on the five-day-long intervals. I thought he would return immediately to Vancouver once his Dad had recovered, but instead he began to talk about living with me in Toronto. I felt flattered that he thought enough of me to consider it  and soon we found a place.

 

When I met my new friend, Tom Mountford, at the Parkside, this man with whom I would share a spotty thirty-year-long acquaintanceship had just left Rochdale College where he had been a ‘student’ resident for a year. He held the place in high esteem for not only did he come out there, it was there that he also learned of practical things that had no academic application. Rochdale was the name of the English town created in 1844 expressly for the first Cooperative Society. A hundred-and-twenty-four years later, in 1968, the University of Toronto established Rochdale College was as a student-run experiment in alternative education and cooperative living. While serving as the nursery for and hive of political radicals, dope dealers, freaks, hippies, and not a few loonies, it became an unmanageable and debt-ridden failure and closed in 1975. Out of this seven year chaos came a number of bright scholars and intellectuals. Most of them were not purists, dividing their loyalty between academic pursuits and dope. Some of them grew wise that way while others found despair.

 

Tom, who had grown at least street wise and would never despair, was an example of a dope peddling urban hippie intent on making money and living a day at a time. He was making the Parkside scene when he told me of an available living situation that piqued my interest. I followed up at a private home on Wellesley Street East at the foot of a steep, ravine-like entrance to Riverdale Park. There I rented a room from a gay-loving divorcee named Jean Templeton Mclean. She owned it as well as the house adjoining, two in a block long stretch of attached brick houses where she lived with her children in the renovated one and wanted to rent the other room by room. This latter house, which Jean planned to make a gay cooperative rooming house, was a neglected a maze of rooms on two floors that had not been touched in decades. Less than a week after Tom and I moved there, Richard left Peterborough and joined us in our gay ashram.

 

Tom was given to gossiping and, when I asked him about JT, he began with “I don’t know much about her, but…”. By the time he was finished, however, I thought he had informed himself well about our new landlady. The juicy unverified details: at thirty JT was on the skids twelve years after a short run as Princess Summerfall Winterspring in the CBC version of the Howdy Doody program. In her starry eyed and innocent (?) twenties, she married a closeted gay CBC producer, Ross Mclean. They had a daughter, Cathy, who was eight years old in 1971. Upon discovering that her husband was gay, and indifferent to her, she tried to rescue their marriage by adopting Laura and Michael. Playing the role of the Princess left her with an inflated pride and the belief that she could succeed at it again. I do not know what other roles she played or if there were any. (She was reticent about her past and the internet seems to have been wiped clean of her under the name JT or JTM. She is there somewhere but under another name.) Soon however, we all shared the same stage on Wellesley Street, our own daily unscripted soap.

 

Pride makes fools of us, leading us to foolish choices and asinine mistakes, and in this instance she herself by her own imprudent actions brought about this exercise in futility. True, Ross had deceiving her but her attempt to bind him to her by adopting children backfired when he ended his heterosexual charade. This inevitability was so clear that her shock and anger when it happened could have had just one pretext: hope and desire. After adopting the last child, baby Michael, with willful blindness, Ross divorced Jean and left her to raise her three children alone. When my turn to help came, I proved to be a better Mother to them than she would ever be. When I met her, JT was reeling from a divorce that left her in the worst possible circumstances. Her pain made her greedy; now she would take him for everything. Her payoff was the two houses, alimony, and child support �" not enough for an expensive lifestyle and two mortgage payments. I do not know how Tom got so much personal information on her. He gave me the basics about her and I filled in the details on my own solely by observing. JT never talked about her personal life; she could not admit that she had confused true love with a man who made her his beard to legitimize himself in the eyes of those he thought mattered.

 

Previous to taking on JT and all it entailed, after hundreds of wasted hours commuting to North York, and then working with textbooks again at the University of Toronto, I overdosed on the trade and switched back to UI. This was something I knew how to do but, as always, forty percent of a book clerk’s salary was not enough to live. I happened to be looking for a way to supplement it when tryouts for Wellesley Street began. Jean loved gay men and she thought Richard and I were just the ticket for her immediate difficulties. She could not handle her responsibilities to her children and offered to employ us as housekeepers - a position with some child duties attached. Weighing the pros and cons, we saw no overwhelming snags in this vague job description. Richard had reasonable reservations but the novelty of it appealed to us and I wore down his hesitation. In the final analysis, we had no other options and working so close to home had the convincing advantage of convenience. What neither of us knew was that JT was living according to the whims of her banker. He was infatuated with her and she manipulated him handily by that string. Bit by bit the scales of our innocence fell away.

 

I took the day shift, six to three, which began with getting the kids up, and seeing to it that they were dressed, fed, and that they had brown bag lunches for school by eight o’clock. The rest of my day, I did the bare minimum of housework and looked after the real ‘baby’, the lady of the manor herself. Richard’s shift was six hours; he took over at three and saw them through the rest of the day, in addition to looking after Jean who went back to her bedroom around three, when the children got home from school, he made dinner for them and coaxed them to bed around 9PM.

 

 Granted, she and I were immature but she had responsibilities I did not have. No matter; she paid me to transfer her duties onto my shoulders. What was I worth? Three dollars an hour. She would not listen to her accountant or her lawyer. I had little patience with her facile good cheer and optimism, tiresome ruses to avoid making urgent and drastic lifestyle changes. She was addled by pills and dysfunctional; this was the making of her downfall.

 

Jean was a tall, attractive woman; her best feature was firm, rounded, youthful breasts. She was not shy in the least but dressed to capitalize on them. Her make-up was always perfect and she wore her long hair up in a flattering chignon. Ms. Templeton managed all her beautification in the morning, before she got too stoned. I soon understood why she needed help, she was on downers. She was a basket case without them. When I started working for her, by one o’clock her head was off in the cloud. She knew nothing of the black market and got prescriptions from several GP’s.

 

There were four bedrooms upstairs and one bathroom served the entire house. Each child had a bedroom and shared the facility. While I helped Laura and Michael get ready for school, Princess dozed or lazed in the master in the Hollywood Regency bed she had once shared with Ross. Feather-light Jean could not take up half of this monster by herself, however, for with two abutting queens it was the widest bed I have ever encountered. Her room delighted the eye, painted and decorated with varying shades of white in the Syrie Maugham vernacular.

 

Several design choices were impractical, however. One was the color of phones. She had two numbers but four princess receiver phones, two on each side of the bed, instead of one with buttons for each line. If they had been color coded it would have been fine but instead all four were the same shade of white with the same ring tone. Only the rigors of interior design could account for this choice, which must have been Jean’s. It was impossible to know which phones were ringing and the din, when all four rang, was disconcerting. This would have been comical if such interruptions were only occasional but they rang all day long and were a sharp reminder of how the household teetered on the brink of chaos and therefore an irritant to my level headedness at work.

In my kitchen, both lines came through one receiver and the hot one flashed red. If it was before noon, I knew it was JT asking for her breakfast tray; later in the day I ignored the phone while she was there. Another obstruction in the master was the long-haired, white sheep skin throws sprinkled like banks of cloud around the bed, over deep shag carpet. I had to be careful not to trip when I brought her breakfast of juice, hot coffee, a soft boiled egg, and toast. The tray impeded my view of the floor. These little but dangerous traps tended to grab at Jean’s high-heeled slippers, a risk when she was woozy on pills. They swallowed-up small lost or dropped items, and, from a practical housekeeping standpoint, they became dingy fast and were impossible to keep clean and white. The hazard remained, however, for in this case jeopardy was the price of glamour.

 

Shortly before we met her, Jean was in a minor car accident in her ex-boyfriend’s T bird. This man was Marvin. She was not hurt but the whiff of opportunity proved irresistible to this unemployed daughter of Thespis. Act One: JT had her lawyer launch a personal injury suit citing whiplash cause by the accident. She tried to hide the fraud from Marvin but he lost his mind and their relationship ended when his premiums went up. It was fortunate that Marvin had no evidence but he did not sit by and watch it become an open and shut case; he countersued. She kept up her charade with equanimity and grace while justice grinded on and their lawyers billed two hundred an hour. (The matter was still pending when I moved on.)

 

I met them at the beginning of this episode while she was still adjusting to a neck brace. Her children were reasonably well adjusted, healthy and indulged with everything except their mother’s personal attention. Cathy had been the most warped by living with both parents for seven years, a period to which neither of them alluded. Having been raised by nannies, the kids did not miss Ross nor did they need Jean the way I had needed my mother. When they were not with their mother, the girls did not mention her. They took security for granted, as all well-off kids do, but it was a mirage. She would have shed blood not to lose them yet she entrusted their care to two gay men who started out as virtual strangers. It was just luck that she found conscientious and kind housekeepers like us.

 

Cathy was thin but not scrawny, a dirty blond with bobbed hair; in the physical sense she took after her Mother in being tall and there was also a lot of Jean in her personality. Her attitudes, preferences and taste tended towards the superficial. She dressed herself but only after I pried her out of her bed and started her motor with three or more calls, each louder and more urgent than the last. She started the day cranky but Laura, six, was bright and sweet when she awoke. Like Cathy, Laura looked after her own grooming and wardrobe and, for a girl of six, she was surprisingly adept. She was winsome with the face and features of a porcelain doll: a perfect pink complexion, big brown eyes and heavy lashes, rosy cheeks, pouting Cupid’s bow mouth, and dark shimmering hair. Cathy’s jealousy over Laura’s beauty led her to provoke her sister and they bickered over trifles. Though two years younger, Laura stood up for herself.

 

I hurried the girls to finish in the bathroom before I got around to their brother. Unlike them, at two-and-a-half Michael required my full attention. His toilet training had been piecemeal and inconsistent and all attempts at it were suspended when the last nanny fled during the break-up, another residual blow from the divorce. There were several reasons Richard and I did not try to rectify this omission. Madame did not make it our job to toilet train him and took no responsibility while there was someone else to clean him up. I only had him before school and during those frantic hours, I had to scrub, dress, and feed him. When all is said and done, however, we ought to have done it. It would have been easy to get a book on the subject and not toilet-training him cast a shadow on my conscience.

 

To make matters worse, the darling was a s**t painter. He slept in two disposable diapers but they only provided a form of elastic containment. When he woke after a bowel movement, he used it to ‘draw’ graffiti on the wall, smearing himself and much else - including his white crib. (If this was the creative expression of a budding artist, Michael either lacked taste or he was way ahead of the brief and now passé (?) vogue for feces as a medium. However, the market for s****y paintings remains immortal.) Having to face that, before sun up, was paralyzing. It called for mental and physical agility to gird myself for it as well as a strategy to get him down the L shaped hallway to the bathroom. For this, I wrapped him in a bath towel but no matter how careful or quick about it I tried to be, some got on the doors, walls, floor, and on me. I wore rubber gloves to rinse Michael under the shower - and the s**t down the drain - before I bathed him and dressed him in his grey woolen uniform for pre-school.

 

All this, which took up thirty to forty-five minutes, was just a prologue to the day ahead. To start them off in a constructive frame of mind, I put on my cheeriest face and tone to create a familial mood. As they sat at the table with their breakfast, I hurried them along and moved around the kitchen making three lunches and doing what was called for. This might include arbitrating fights between the girls or advising them on the choice of clothing to suit the weather. They threw all manner of surprising questions at me while they dawdled. I had to be alert to not reply glibly, as I might with adult friends, but to give them honest answers couched in terms suited to their particular minds.

 

Timing was everything as we raced towards eight o’clock and the yellow school busses - one for the girls and another for him. A thorough scrub transformed Michael into innocent cuteness as he toddled off to pre-school with two paper sacks, one for his lunch and one with three diapers. Throughout the tumult, as I went back and forth to the second floor for any number of reasons, I could hear footsteps crisscrossing her carpet as well as snippets of phone conversation through JT’s closed door while she left all this for me. Having looked after three little boys for a summer a decade earlier, I had some aptitude for nurturing, doubtless a motherly gift to me. I had never changed a diaper, however, or answered to the dissimilar needs of two singular little girls and a s**t painter. These new universal maternal proficiencies came through trial and error.

 

Despite preschool, Michael had not begun to talk in words and the result was that I had to differentiate his moods by facial expressions - glowing smiles of approval or tears and foot stomping censure. The boy’s social skills were behind the norm and yet Michael was not slow. The attention of his teachers and the company of schoolmates would have to remedy his deficits. However, Michael was stubborn and unhurried about progressing in speech or in potty training and during our time there, we lacked the skill, patience and time for it. More than that, we had no inclination for it; far from being natural parent material, we were just two hippies larking at something new that quickly turned to drudgery. Together we talked about it but neither of us could face the tasks. I dwelt on Michael’s problems with a heavy heart and Richard was not indifferent but JT never mentioned it.

 

At the start, I was enthusiastic about being a housekeeper. It challenged me in ways I could not have imagined when I began. Our new role called on me to learn new things and make amateur  psychoanalytic judgments while selling textbooks was static, dull and lacking in depth. The change of pace from penurious indolence to paid employment that required quick thinking and frantic activity invigorated me. I could not help but be revolted by some of what I had to do, but the only time being a nanny was dull was when the kids were not present with their needs to be a shock absorber between their Mother and me.

 

I now understand what lay behind our limitations when we were in our twenties. To begin with, nanny-ing was a stopgap measure and all we had on our minds was to finish up and get to the bar. Diplomacy came hard to Richard. Dealing with this woman,  with her pride and her ploys, and the children was abhorrent. What he feared and hated most, however, was the task of preparing dinner. Although I advised him on it, my encouragement had little effect and he struggled to do it. He had no knack for cooking and, four out of five times, the results of his effort embarrassed him. This put him in a foul mood. While Jean was often asleep or out during my shift, on Richard’s she was awake and made constant calls on his patience.

 

She would have lived every day in her bedroom if she did not have to face the world for appointments with doctors, lawyers, therapists, and spas. The kitchen phone would ring soon after the kids were off and in a sleepy whisper, Jean would ask for her breakfast tray. The menu did not vary - toast and coffee, juice and a soft boiled egg. I took it up to her with the Star. She would receive it propped against a mound of pillows and I would sit on the foot of the bed and run through an edited version of my morning with the kids. After that, we would proceed to discuss what chaos she had planned for the day ahead and anything else on her mind. She nibbled her toast and glanced at the obits and I would begin the first load of laundry. Laundry was my first opportunity to unwind but in no time she would call me back to look for whatever she could not find that day �" usually a shoe, an earring, or a glove. I did not always stay until the missing item was found; if the search became tiresome I would excuse myself. There were always better things to do. While putting on her makeup and trying on outfits to wear for the roles she had to play on any given day, JT chattered under the haze of barbiturates. She paid us to listen and was oblivious to the resentment that I concealed well if I did not start my own day tired or hung over and was not too harassed by the clock. On a day such as that, I could be patient, nonjudgmental, and commiserative.

 

The girls changed their outfits at least once a day and Jean was just as fastidious. The washer and dryer were always going. I would begin with Michael’s odious pile, which had to be rinsed by hand and only then run through two washer cycles �" one to rinse out the ca-ca and the second to wash the linen. With this in progress, I washed down the crib, the mattress, the walls and the floor, and changed his linen in his crib, after which I was left with more s****y rags to clean. More time passed while I tidied the house before we discussed the grocery shopping, which I ordered by phone. The store delivered it and charged it to her account. This kind of shopping could not be done with any economy as only the best grocery stores offered this service.

 

Once out of bed, to showcase her long and shapely legs, she wore bikini panties under a short transparent chemise trimmed with white marabou, and playful high heel slippers. To go out, she presented her delicate feet in slip-on stilettos with Lucite heels filled with silver and gold confetti and Lucite straps at the toe to hold them in place. The flip-flop they made as JT descended the stairs was the first signal that she was on her way. And, since she had whiplash and could not appear without it, she also wore a stiff foam neck brace that I thought absurdly high. In those shoes and with her nose up, her serene, determined decent was no less a thing of beauty for its also being hazardous. It gave the impression that she had been taught to walk with an egg balanced on her head. She had to wear it in public but she had turned it from brace into something almost fashionable by wrapping it in a white cashmere sheath, which lent her a preposterous regal air. She did not need to wear it at home but sometimes she practiced it anyway. As a neck prop, it was très chic but she could not navigate the stairs with it on.

 

People on downs lose things and she was no exception. Every day she would set me on a chase for something - shoes, purses, jewelry, or eyeglasses but I gave up before she did. Towards noon, Jean emerged from her soft, snowy refuge the same way a butterfly leaves its chrysalis, on the wing. Needing to be helpful, she did not come down the stairs empty handed but rather, like a circus juggler, with her tray in hand. Wearing a wide smile of perfect white teeth, perfumed, lipstick and nail lacquer matching, I would go up the stairs to her, take the tray, and guide her down. She had transformed herself into a coiffed, well-turned-out, confident woman in huge dark shades. Then she would ask if I had found her missing shoe, her blue purse, or her gold loop earring and I would answer, no; I had not. The search method I followed was to stop looking at some point and wait for the object to appear.

 

Jeans physiotherapist was an attractive professional man and on days when she had an appointment with him, she spent extra hours making-up, arranging her hair, selecting a flattering shorts and blouse combo, and choosing the right pair of ersatz Manolo’s. She had money or taxi meters and no compunction against keeping a meter running for as long as it took to find her stray fashion accessory. The driver read the newspaper while we searched.

 

It was now obvious that the mess JT paid Richard and I to manage was not just circumstantial but worsened by a mild to moderate drug-induced psychosis. Without having to explain it, we were hired to facilitate and manage the things she could not face doing for herself while we held our breath on the edge of disaster.

Paydays were anxious times. An attractive white woman with a respectable family name, and a skilled manipulator of men, Jean seemed to charm her banker into extending her credit and none of her checks to us bounced. Nevertheless, expenses far exceeded income and JT had little room to maneuver under a threatening cloud of debt.

 

The reader might wonder if our ‘lifestyle’ -  a labor-intense roadmap-to-nowhere - was worth such fear and trouble. However the work we did for Jean was more exciting and more fun than a conventional job. We did it because we could and for its daily surprises and challenges that made terrific conversation at the Parkside. I did my best to dismiss my intuition that every passing devil-may-care day made me more irredeemably unfit for anything else.

 

Towards the end of my six months with JT, at the height of a broiling Ontario summer, something exceptional occurred that was unique in my experience. I still have questions about what happened. The fourth character in our drama was a young carpenter with a physique and face of preternatural beauty tanned by working outdoors. Add to that Missy’s presumptuous confidence in her beauty and a foolish game of one-ups-man-ship and you see the plot in brief. Without mentioning it to us, she chose his name at random from ‘Carpenters’ in the Yellow Pages and scheduled him so far in advance that she forgot.

 

It was exceptional that all three of us were there together when, with a shiver of alarming delight, he appeared outside unannounced. There he stood, a dark angel almost within reach, with a small chainsaw in his large hands and a bulging leather tool belt slung low at his waist. With that Jean remembered and told us he was there to repair the deck railing. She touched up her makeup and went out to introduce herself. and returned flushed and misty eyed to tell us that his name was Roger. One point for Missy.

 

We were too misty eyed ourselves to know whether our rapt gaze offended him; he batted his eyes back at us, and tossed his long dark curls. No doubt Roger felt our eyes mauling him and enjoyed our struggle to appear unimpressed. He had come to work almost naked �" his brown bare chested n*****s front and center, wearing only low-riding, short jean cut-offs that showed off his legs tanned and oiled with sweat. If he did not want to be ogled, he should have covered up, I thought. Although it was ninety-five degrees and not our business how he dressed for work, could Roger have wanted us not to look at him?

 

I made coffee and snacks while he worked with a economy of graceful movement and the three of us debated whether he could be gay. That would have been too good to be true; Jean decided on her preference - Roger was straight. Unable to make up my mind, I kept asking myself if our attention gratified or irritated him. He moved with the same body language of children after a hug, coaxing with the sing song phrase “You can’t touch me”.

 

Roger never returned our smiles but stared right through us in the uncompromising manner I first saw in the eyes of Dancing David. His beguiling indifference gave nothing away. Richard found him as confusing as I did and, in the end, I decided that his coldness was spooky and his alpha male sneers, a threat.

 

Jean had a different interpretation; she found his movements and facial expression warm and inviting. She had no doubt that, as a worldly-wise female, she could manipulate him and win our contest. Which of us would get him? (Get what?) Her reservations melted in the heat and she went out to speak with Roger again. A few minutes later, she came back, victorious and coy, to say the two of them were going for a walk in the park. We were dumbfounded by the smooth success of her frontal assault and jealous as well.

 

Off she went with him, in her stilettos her brace, and her nose in the air. They were holding hands as they disappeared down the hill towards the gorge far below. It was large and forbidding green terrain that only the physically fit could navigate and we had never been tempted to explore. Nothing about what they were doing felt right but all we could do was wait. Richard and I vacillated from concern to wishing we had made a move first.

 

We had no time to air the possibility that Jean may have put herself in harm’s way. We speculated on the delights they were sharing, and the unlikelihood of a responsible workman taking a romantic break with a client. Neither of us was ready for the sight of her when she reappeared, twenty minutes later, crying, neck prop and shoes in hand, hair disheveled, face red, and arms scratched and bruised. She told us that he turned her part way down the hill but did not say why. What did she mean by ‘turn on’? Rape?

 

I could see that her story made no sense. She did not tell us what Roger had said to her as he went about it. I assumed that, in relating the story, she was performing for us, making up one thing to cover for another. Her bruises have been could just as easily caused by a fall or a tumble in the brush as from a rape. I set my doubts aside to comfort her, tend her wounds, and restore her pride.

 

Then, to our amazement, Muscles came back to finish his job, unscratched and blasé. Would a guilty man do that? He looked directly at us �" as if to say, “Don’t believe what she’s telling you”. This added doubt. What she told us did not correspond.

 

Indeed, just what had happened? Did Roger make disparaging remarks about Richard and me as two gays obviously lusting for him? Did Jean come to our defense? Did that drive him to lash out? Did she keep silent about it to not affront us with the truth?

 

Richard and I considered calling the police but none of us was blameless, and Roger’s reappearance increased our reservations. It could only come down to “he said, she said” Just what would we tell them? Jean must have been at least as doubtful as we were; she would not hear of phoning them.

 

We did not know what Jean said to Roger on the deck but it was fair to assume she gave him an invitation that included certain unstated propositions. He could not have misunderstood. It stumped me why he would attack or reject her for simply making her willingness clear? Being in heels, she might have fallen and hurt herself climbing up the steep, grassy slope, leaving her with time to make up a story. If he knew that he would get violent if she came on to him, why had he walked off with her? I have known men like him, who spare themselves nothing to cultivate their bodies; these inviolable temples are not for recreation. Narcissists like Roger with a volcanic temper are controlled and indifferent to sex with anyone but themselves; they do not rape.

 

Did he rape her or just rough her up? It is too late now, forty-five years later, to grasp what happened, how they behaved and why. Being with us in her own kitchen had somewhat restored and emboldened Jean. Her fury increased and she began to repeat herself when Roger returned for this changed the game. Seeing him again upset all three of us as we watched him finish and wait for his pay. This was not standard behavior for someone who had just attacked the woman just a few feet away.

 

She could not speak to him and had me pay him. I put on my poker face, went out, and put one of Jean’s dubious cheques into his powerful brown hand twice the size of mine. Why would anyone write a check to someone who had attacked her an hour earlier? I believed she was lying. Actors can find drama anywhere but this episode of Wellesley Street closed with a disappointing whimper.

 

With weekends off socializing kept Richard and me sane. We went out together and almost everyone assumed we were lovers. When we disabused them of this misconception, they went after Richard, not me. I was used to this. What could I do?

 

We met friends at the Parkside. The linchpin at the table was a clowning party boy, Carl Rodgerson. Carlotta’s existence was a vicarious one; he lived the lives of friends, social contacts, and people he did not even like. Gossip and small talk were his life’s blood. He devoted himself to learning what others were doing, broadcasting it, and discussing it ad infinitum over the gossip hot-wire, a great waste of time. Carl could not relate to those who were more focused, dedicated, and ambitious than he was - almost everyone. He could not understand their dreams or why they chose to follow them. The laborious pursuit of some imaginary ideal that might or might not come to fruition would never motivate him. It seemed to me that I myself had always lacked ambition and I could relate to him on that level. Pot is said to rob users of their drive but I cannot state with any confidence that pot addiction caused this in me; goals were always absent from my hopes and desires. With all the trouble Carl took to learn about other people, you only had to hear his gossip to see that it was self interested, dismissive, and unfair. Tittle-tattle is always that way; it is wicked. I liked Carl from the start anyway; he was so devilish funny that I forgave his flaws and learned to ignore them.

 

Carl was born in Halifax and lived at home until he turned sixteen. His father was a wrestles gambler as well as a poor business man with some entrepreneurial ability. He never worked for anyone but himself but never amounted to anything. Yet he had five children and loved his family enough to provide for them and stay close. Towards the end of his life, having turned his hand to many things, Mr. Rodgerson owned an insulation business. He referred to his Dad as the funniest man alive but not an easy man. Carl was restless, too, and moved out to see the world. First, he lived with friends in Montreal for a few years and perfected his high school French. When his friends moved south, Carl went to Boston with them and then to New York before he landed to Toronto. He went back to Halifax to run the Rodgerson Insulation office for six months until he had a falling out with his Dad and returned to TO. When Tom introduced us at the Parkside, Carl was twenty-four.

 

By cueing, I led him out of gossip mode into the sublime ridiculous. That is what we all liked in Carl, how he could keep us laughing. His Dad handed down his sense of humor to Carl. The thin skinned sometimes found Carl’s humor offensive. To get along with Party Boy you had to be able to laugh at yourseelf.

 

His social life was not exclusively gay and that appealed to me. Unmixed gay company is a bore. With no regard for their sexual orientation, Carl brought freaks and druggies into his circle but only if they were ‘interesting’. In his view, straight men were fair game and you could make them if you were patient, played with a poker face, and kept your cards face down. Some of the straight men in his orbit were older and wizened; their youth spent seeing the world. This had left them with odd talents and an original perspective leavened with experience. The younger ones were just beginning their passage, in a growth spurt of self-exploration and experimentation. The burgeoning open market in recreational drugs, pharmaceuticals, and psychedelics propelled them. Getting stoned and having a good time was the common interest that kept us together.

 

To the boys coming up a few years behind him, Carlotta was a high-spirited chaperone, like Auntie Mame but without her sense of responsibility for her ward/protégé, Patrick. Most thought is necessary to say they rejected convention but after they left it to look around, they fell back into step again when they tired of freaks and bohemianism. Meanwhile, they loved his company until they realized their mentor was a scandalmonger and not motivated to a higher purpose. He would never grow up but his barbed inanities would reverberate among his friends for a long time.

 

We did not discuss our sex life or our preference for straight men. I could never fulfill this desire until I learned the signals and the protocol. Carl knew both and played it like a vet. It would interest me to know how often Carl had sex with those straight boys who, after all, were there to experience life. One reason he was smooth was that either he had no standards in men or he set them low. He out-drank everyone and sometimes gave a blowjob to one of his more attractive young men while he was in a semi-comatose state. Does that behavior constitute a sex life? Who is satisfied with sucking off someone who does not know it is happening?

 

When we met, he shared a duplex in a rented house where daytime and nighttime blurred. This warren of rooms behind heavily curtained windows was on Augusta Street in Kensington Market above an open-air used clothing stall. This was close to Spadina and Grossman’s Tavern, a friendly bar where he and his friends celebrated Saturday afternoons with live jazz and oceans of beer. The house on Augusta bulged with an ever-changing assortment of freaks. More than half were gay; all were into drugs. There I found so many faces that I never knew who paid the rent. Many of them were damaged goods from backgrounds of abuse, and dysfunction. Carl was the gluten that held this loaf together; his confidence, and ready wit made him the alpha male of the pack. Parties took place around the kitchen table with plenty of weed or hashish, powders, hallucinogens, and alcohol. What kept us from destroying ourselves was the great food that also reached the table. It was a counterweight to our growing dependence on mood-altering substances.

 

When kitchen parties became over-subscribed, they spilled into the living room. The latter also served as a generic barracks or sleeping place for guests who were too loaded to leave. Hideous but trendy tie-died sheets of the era covered lumpy ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties overstuffed furniture, which was propped up with whatever was at hand to keep it level. Dirt, dust, and duct tape held the threadbare carpets together. Lights were low under torn lampshades trimmed with colorful bold kerchiefs. Rangy spider plants looking for somewhere to go in dusty macramé plant hangers reached for the screened out. Inevitably, there were also mice and cockroaches. The composition of these disparate elements was de rigueur in the lexicon of hip urban- interior decoration. Disco resounded while we stewed in fumes of pot, alcohol, and tobacco. People, to be cool, adorned themselves in tie-dyed clothing, bell-bottoms, and pucca-bead jewelry. Most everyone had long hair and bearded faces.

 

Richard and I had weekends off and sometimes we visited Augusta on the Saturday. The end of the week was our unstructured time, two days to stretch and fain some perspective. It was often noon or later when we arrived but no matter when we did, we found no one up. Out all night, if not for our arrival they would have missed the light of day. For prying them out of bed, we compensated with fresh sweet-rolls and yeasty golden Danish redolent of butter and fruit, as well as bagels and cream cheese from the local noshery. Augusta became a second home. Knowing what would happen, we would put on a pot of coffee, smoke a joint, and banter. Soon a colorful assortment of humans would straggle in, each chasing the material satisfaction of cannabis and coffee, the very aromas that had coaxed them up in the first place.

 

One of Carl’s close friends at Augusta was an oddity by the name of David. His avoidant personality made him a follower. A bit daft, he was either unable or unwilling to bother to support himself. His psychological makeup would have made him a textbook case of something. David stole money from his Mother to spend weekends on Augusta. He deserved something for putting up with her all week long. His Mother was Nellie, widow and parasitic mental lightweight. She grafted herself to her son like the Chinese dragon chasing its flaming pearl. Nothing they did made sense. He did not mind living with and on Nellie when it suited him �" during the week - and went through the more superficial and less strenuous motions of caring for her while the money lasted. They were alike in being shallow: while they could look after themselves, they pretended not to be capable as they lived like pampered paupers. David had no self-esteem and shocked you by telling you so, acting as though he did not care. All he wanted was to be high and in reasonable comfort provided by someone else. A youthful looking man of twenty, he gave himself time to apply expensive stolen balms and serums that would give blush to his cheeks and banish the imagined signs of aging from his epidermis.

 

David was also germ phobic and would not dry himself with towels that someone else might have used. Thus, he would dry himself with toilet paper after showering and flush the toilet paper. As a result, toilet paper often plugged the toilet and he did nothing to clear the drains himself. David was too embarrassed to mention his part in these repeated occurrences and too phobic to do otherwise. The next unsuspecting man-in-need of the toilet faced an overflowing toilet and an empty toilet paper roll. It was weird funny if you knew David but not so otherwise. Despite his timidity, shallowness, lack of skills, and his asinine preoccupation with celebrities, the gossips, and other superficialities, and precisely for these reasons, all things David were fascinating to Carl. David did not mind having his foibles on display and willingly played the foil. Telling others about the peculiar things David did became one foundation of Carl’s story telling. While he was housed, fed, and high on someone else’s dime, David tolerated things at which most would have balked.

 

It perplexed me that his closest friends were women. The stranger they were, the more he would welcome them with droll surprises. Julie was a tireless party girl twice his age and the only one who could wear him out. This free spirit had left her husband and family to become a drifter, and, from time to time, Carl’s roommate. She challenged every rule by which most of us live and had no tolerance for anything dull. With no warning or apparent reason Julie could become rude and obnoxious. This quick-witted female was somewhat paranoid and always ready to debunk an insult �" real or imagined - with a terse, scathing rejoinder. It was wonderful see her put people down as long as it was not me.

 

Her sense of entitlement was unrestrained. If, for example, she walked by a flower garden and in the mood, she would help herself not just to a flower or even a bouquet but masses of flowers. God help the gardener who tried to stop her. Julie had no use for reality, loved drugs, and gorged on whatever was going around.

 

Julie sat in bars - Grossman’s on Saturday afternoon was a favorite - conning drinks from strangers rather than paying with her own. She fraternized with the bands, which always seemed to be recognized her as “Julie”. She was more than a rounder: when she felt like it, she became a fabulous, inventive, and resourceful cook who could produce a Ukrainian feast from little. If ingredients were missing, she pinched them here, there, and everywhere. Her perogies were famous and we were always ready to eat them up. As uncontrollable and unpredictable as Julie was, Carl kept company with her as well as with David for those reasons but principally because their foolishness made perfect set pieces for chatter. He peppered his conversations with Julie’s mischievous adventures and quoted her one-liners whenever she coined a new phrase inspired on the spot.

 

Gerry Hawke was another friend of Carl’s and Julie’s whom I met in that bountiful place. She was a mature, sweet, and bright artist, who also had left her husband but not, like Julie, turned her back on her family. Gerry was better adjusted and got just as upset as anyone did by Julies psych’opathic acting out. Carl, in his fashion, became acquainted with Gerry’s sisters and her sons, visiting and partying with them in Toronto and in the suburbs. I did not get to know her well in Toronto but after Gerry moved out to BC - with her boyfriend, Bob Langsdon - we caught up in Vancouver in 1975.

 

If a friend is not physically near and a presence in my life, I let relationships slip away. As long as the effort is mutual, Carl cultivates and maintains friendships over great distances and many years. He has no tolerance for people who do not know how to ‘have a good time’, as he sees it and keeps abreast with friends with terminal illness through third parties rather than personal contact with them. Serious, driven people bring him down. Once he likes someone, he wants to meet their siblings and even their parents - if they are ‘fun people’. Not only does he meet them, but, in many cases, he stays in touch with far-flung people by phone and by mail, friends he knew twenty, thirty years ago and never sees. He likes nothing better than to chat on the phone for hours about the lives of people he met once or twice. He updates me on acquaintances from my past lives, people I have not thought of in decades.

 

In some respects, we are opposites, Carl and I. He directs all his energy outward while I direct most of mine inward. I was always somewhat introspective and am much more so today. However, I socialized more at that time, wanting to share my life with someone special and believing I would find him in a bar somewhere.

 

Hugh (Huey) Manning was another I met at the Parkside. His energy was creative and more than a match for Carl’s, who showed some reservations and a certain disdain toward him. Distrust was mutual between them. I wished they would find a way to set their doubts aside but it was not in the stars and I maintained separate friendships with each of them.

 

Huey’s energy moved freely into and out from himself but when we met it was directed outward and inexhaustible. A multitalented entertainer, he was focused and unwavering in his determination to become famous in some way in the theater. He was also young and yet unwilling to decide which avenue to follow, however, and kept his hand in many different kinds live performance modes from puppetry to burlesque to leather to gender bending bearded drag. In Toronto, he pushed the envelope before anyone else did it.

 

Carl and Huey were alpha males with markedly different personalities. As a leader, Huey stood in no one’s shadow and his humor was visual and verbal; Carl used words only and reserved his joking repartee and gossip for an intoxicated audience. Huey’s energy level soared as he performed and energized his audience, while Carl wore people out with one dimensional observations of other people. These incompatible talents kept them at a distance and mistrustful of the other. They stood at the head of two opposed camps �" the ambitious, focused, and foresighted versus the muddy, immediate and Dionysian. I respect ambitious people and Huey’s friendship flattered me but Carl walked away if the spotlight fell on someone else. He had nothing in common with overachieving dreamers. Recognition and success were elusive, difficult, and ephemeral. Instant gratification was everywhere, easy, and ephemeral. He would always follow the easy way; in that sense, we were alike.

 

When we met, Huey was twenty-one and I was twenty-eight. He hailed from Ontario but got a bachelor’s degree at the University of Winnipeg before taking on Toronto. At the time, he was a large, somewhat chubby, flamboyant young man, with long reddish-blonde hair, and hairy body. He did not miss or deny the irony of how his physical features exemplified male dominance contradicted his need for a dominant partner and a mentoring relationship. Instead of trying to hide it, he used it as a physical prop and capitalized. Enthusiastic, energetic, smart, and in love with life, Huey was a naughty boy experimenting with radical cross dressing and challenging old definitions of gender in every way he could. Huey thought that ‘fun’ could be anything; it had a dual purpose and the point of it should to change people. He backed his performances in the belief that, if you exemplified your lesson in a surprising way and made fun of yourself while you were at it, you could teach an audience anything.

 

He combined talent with textiles, makeup, and costume in avante garde performance-events that sometimes came off and sometimes flopped. When something failed, he did say discouraged long but moved on after he found his mistake, thus, sharpening his skill. I remember one uproarious performance at a makeshift second floor space on downtown Yonge Street. He came on in dominatrix drag with paddles, whips, and glitter in his short red beard and the troupe performed a witty satirical skit with bravura and a self-deprecating humor. The audience was made up of open minded creative people like those in the cast. They had been entertained and amused the whole time, and roared their understanding and approval when it the skit ended. This was a phase of self exploration for Huey that he soon outgrew. A year later, after I had left, he found his calling in puppet theater. I knew nothing about this until I Googled him after we had been out of touch for more than thirty years.

 

The other side of Huey was no less of a sign of frailty for its being pedestrian and square: he could not abide being unmarried. This temperament surprised me in one so keen on participating in politically and socially incorrect theater. He aimed to be a singular actor but being single was, to him, an admission that he could not love or accept love back. This is not a given quality; it must be paid for and learned over time with experience, forgiveness and patience. He was learning but didn’t know and it was such a pressing, visceral need that, alone, he felt incomplete. He thought licentiousness was unnatural and, to make matters worse, he insisted on monogamous relationships. An attraction to superficial qualities such as youth and looks ruled his heart, and one after another men with superb physical features but less talent and little drive fell for Huey and vice-versa. After all, this was the stage and it was 1971; the temptation to wanton behavior was everywhere and fell on everyone. In that nursery of make-believe, his coworkers scoffed at monogamy while Huey fell into justified and unjustified jealous rages every time a new lover cheated or did anything suspicious. The consequence of this was a tinge of paranoid suspicion that became entrenched in him and it spoiled Huey’s relationships. Yet, his quest for monogamous love continued.

 

Like all of us, Huey loved drugs - at least he did then and for some years to follow. He struggled to strike a balance between his energy and his vices. He once told me that if he moved here, Vancouver would be his nemesis and, true to his word, he never came. I wanted to be his friend but I could not make him understand me. I did not understand myself or my lack of motivation but drugs enervated him and he recognized this in me That put him on guard; a closer relationship between us would have broken his trajectory and threatened his career. For obvious reasons, I did not see us in that light but Huey had foresight and he was correct about all of it.

 

I also met my long-time friend Peter Reijm at the Parkside. Peter was a Dutch immigrant who came with his family. A few years younger than I, he was a gawky but flamboyant hippie who amused us with a put-on nellyness �" a caricature of queen-ification flavored with Dutch vulgarity from his incongruous but robust six-foot-two male frame. We all acted like queens sometimes, for laughs, but Peter loved doing it and kept on it all the time in company �" it was his social persona and in time it dominated everything else about him. His mother, for instance, always knew Peter was gay and treated him with more deference and sensitivity that she had for her other three sons. He was her favorite. Although he had always been out in every other sense, now, while remaining close to them, he was independent of his family and reveling in freedom.

 

He had poor judgment and little discrimination when it came to decision making and as ‘Mister Peter of Amsterdam’, he worked in a shop called the Wig of the Month Club. He knew nothing about wigs but his job was to help customers select and try on wigs. He had also given himself the delightfully smutty gay name of “Daphne Manure”. The Wig gig, did not last and he moved from there to Peoples Credit Jewelers and pinching the salesgirls behind the counter. He said they rather enjoyed this attention because Daphne was très gay and très harmless. Though he loved to gossip, too, Peter was not malicious and wanted only to clown. He lived with another group of gay friends for whom I never cared much. I usually only saw them at the Parkside, all of us laughing and braying like asses.

 

Meeting Robin Gridley, a youth of twenty-one, had a different kind of effect. Robin had immigrated as a child with his parents from Scotland. When we met, he was reserved and timid at the Parkside, a gangly wallflower trying to fit in with flash and bluster and with nothing about him to hold our interest. Our focus shifted readily from one exaggerated character to another, each one better at it that the last. Robin was a good-looking boy with a strong, clean-shaven and somewhat over-prominent chin. Though he had joined us on a number of occasions I held myself in reserve. As his presence at our table regularly increased and as his reticence wore off he and I grew friendlier. His explanation for his monetary restraint was relatable: he was unemployed and poor. From time to time, that induced me to buy beer for Robin, my kindred spirit, and that I did so meant something to him.

 

I did not shun him for being poor and he let down his guard fairly soon thereafter. He was infatuated with me and let it be obvious. I did not feel the same thing for him but I liked him well enough to take him to bed and then to do it again. He grew on me and we became comfortable with each other.

 

Robin had just come out and he wanted the fantasy of all gay boys �" a lover. Too young to be dependent on welfare and too old to still be living with his parents, he was eager to be working and independent. Yet ‘eager’ is perhaps too strong a word to us to describe how he felt about finding work. Powerful forces preventing this from happening; they were things he himself could not understand and he tried to keep them from me. His current living arrangements were embarrassing and a deterrence to love and attachment. I was sympathetic and hoped to do something to advance him towards that goal. Robin seldom mentioned to his parents. Frustrated by what seemed like a lack of ambition and motivation in their only son, they may have made him go on welfare to support himself. Or maybe he didn’t want to live on their money. It was simple to get him out of his housing situation: I invited him to live with me and, hoping I would learn to love Robin by sharing my life with him, I became his lover. There was an awful lot of risk in this but Robin turned out to be grateful, amenable, well mannered and agreeable.

 

At once, I had to put my ideas for helping him on hold when he became incapacitated with the symptoms of hepatitis. I did everything for him while he remained ill for three months, too weak to walk without a cane. When he recovered, I tried to motivate him to find a job and contribute something to the kitty. Without understanding the cause, I soon saw that his low self esteem was based on something other than immaturity. He could not even face a job interview. With few jobs for men without university education, interviews were scarce. Yet, when friends took the trouble to set them up for him he took a flyer. I remained patient but frustrated by what I didn’t know.

 

Having a lover, even a poor one, improved Robin’s life. It freed him from the burbs and gave him some bragging rights. However, staying on the dole showed a disconcerting lack of healthy narcissism. Not only did it amount to an expense for me but I believed he was personable and intelligent enough to hold a job. I could scarcely look after myself - not even combining UI with working for Jean and economizing by living in a communal setting. He was much better than I about money: not greedy for the superficial, status ‘things’ money buys, unencumbered by that strong male need for a roll of bills like a big hard pecker in his pocket, and conscientious about spending it. He even turned his welfare cheque over to me and asked for what he needed. Even so we just managed to live and there could never be forward momentum on my income. He agreed that I could not support him forever, but I did so as long as we lived together and nothing changed.

 

It was nearly summer before Robin felt well enough to look for work. The warm sun inspired me to buy a second-hand ten-speed and spend the summer cycling across Canada. Richard would cash my UI cheques and forward money to me and Robin would be welcome to step in for me at Jean’s where I worked until the last minute. They liked each other. While I planned my escape from Toronto, I gave my lover instruction on the challenges he would face next door. He seemed confident that he could do my job, s****y diapers and towering egos notwithstanding and this gave me confidence that I could handle a personal test so absurd and anomalous as cycling a thousand miles. This endurance challenge would test us both. It would introduce Robin to the rigors of employment with the carrot of a closed-end commitment. If he stayed the full course, it would change his perception of himself. For me it would be a long holiday adventure. We both needed these things.

 

Then, without ever having biked on a highway before or anywhere else either for fifteen years, after many kisses and reminders of how much I would miss him, I left Robin in our mattress-on-the-floor and rode off to the East Coast. I felt straight jacketed by my cumbersome backpack and a travel kit of chosen at random sunscreen, skin balm, etcetera, secured to the rear fender in leather saddle bags. It would take fortitude to get used to these things but I was optimistic and believed I could do it.

 

Although none of my friends believed that in me, I would show them. How hard could it be to cycle a thousand miles? After a few hours on the highway, self-doubt had crept in. I was healthy but as I cycled along, invisible, through the dusty vortices of traffic and wind at the side of the road, I could see my body was in poor shape. I chain smoked two packs a day and a lot of pot so that it would have taken me a season or longer to clear my lungs and get in shape. Cycling that first day took all my concentration and with incredible stamina �" for one such as I - I got twenty miles out of the city before I stopped at a campground, exhausted and burned. Until then, the terrain had been flat but without one vista for swooning.

 

Pain and muscle ache allowed me a fitful sleep through the night. The next day I did not remount and go on but recuperated in the same bright and open spot, debating whether to continue or go back to face the ‘Didn’t I tell you’s’. If I went on, I would have to follow the highway out of urban areas �" I guessed at another day or two - and find a quiet bicycle route to follow. I estimated the sunburn I would suffer before I tanned, the fatigue, and the time it would take to reach the coast and weighed these things against the humiliation of turning back. Embarrassment seemed to be the only negative and I decided that I had been rash and would go back come-what-may. The next morning I set out a few hours before sunrise to recross the same level landscape and reached home before Robin awoke. I admitted my folly. However, with no training, I had cycled almost forty miles in two days and there could be no shame in that. Though the adventure did not pan out, it was still something: I had not fallen, been side swiped, held for ransom, beat up, robbed, or murdered. If others smirked at me, I did not care.

 

When I woke him, Robin was shocked, then delighted, and then relieved that now he would not have to go to work. I had not expected else but nonetheless I came as a relief to find him there alone and not in bed with someone else. Happy together, we cuddled a while before anyone knew I was back. Richard was the next to wake and see me. He was relieved too; fearing that anyone taking over for me would create upheaval.

 

It was then that I determined to go off UI, find viable employment, and set up house for Robin and me somewhere more private. Soon after, overdosed on Toronto, Richard hitched back to the coast. We had both been spinning our wheels and, if that was to be his life, he preferred to waste his time in Vancouver.

 

I resigned and found work in a bookstore and, that fall, I set us up in an apartment. Then I faced the heavy obligation of taking back two pieces of BC art, which I had had framed at great expense and followed me everywhere I lived in the Big Smoke. I had ‘sold’ them to Jean but on credit and she had not paid. Robin came with me for moral support and to help pry them away from Madame it that were necessary. She now thought of them as hers and would not be parted from them. Needing a getaway car, we went there in a taxi. After telling him what we were about to do, I told the driver to wait with the motor running.

 

We immediately found ourselves in a fight. It was always difficult for Jean to admit she could not afford something and this was another such instance. Justice being on our side, we had more momentum than she. We did not let her interference stop us but took the paintings off her wall and out to the taxi. She staggered two-steps behind us down the front steps in Baby Dolls and her neck brace, calling “My paintings, my paintings”. Such drama! This would be the last time we saw her, standing alone in the street and clutching her chemise. Her ultimate Wellesley Street tableau was played offstage, a tragic and pedestrian scene that closed the show with a whimper and quite a while before someone informed me of how she played it. Less than two months after the scene of the taxi and the paintings, the white carpet on the stairs finally caught her heel causing her to fall and break her neck.

 

My new job was that of a clerk at Classics Books on Yonge Street, a five minute walk from our proper one-bedroom. We lived in a nameless, tired 1930’s two-story yellow brick walk-up at 63 Charles Street East. The apartment was small but expensive, desirable for being on a venerable downtown street with towering shade trees. It had all original mullioned windows that I loved, solid wood doors, hardwood floors, and a galley kitchen off a two-person size dining alcove with a window on the leafy streetscape. Our living was a large bright space for entertaining and had a guest Murphy bed behind mirrored French doors, also original. The bathroom with a tub and shower combination, and a bedroom, into which I squeezed the king size bed bought with my new Eaton’s card, composed the rest of the space.

 

We gradually acquired enough new traditional furniture for a semblance of the bourgeois comfort necessary for complete happiness. I became a combination breadwinner and hausfrau, working, buying groceries, and preparing meals. Robin looked after the place and cleaned up after dinner. I had no objection to wearing many hats, but he was still not self supporting. Nothing had changed. His welfare cheque came to almost nothing scarcely enough for  cigarettes. I could not afford this life: not the rent, not the furnishings, and not the carefree barfly habit we continued to enjoy. I rented it while still deluding myself that Robin would find work and contribute. We could not be viable as a couple otherwise. Again, I put the cart before the horse and I myself was the beast tethered to a cart rolling downhill with no breaks.

 

Robin had three women friends who were acquainted. I liked them all: two were single working girls and the third, Susan, was a married painter in a happy relationship with her family and living within walking distance in a freestanding house. Robin, Susan, and Susan’s family were devoted. They were relieved that he had come out and found a lover but almost as worried as I was that he would never find work. While I earned the bread, he and Susan met for tea or to window-shop. At times I could not blame him: I, too, had loved unstructured free time and for a while longer vacillated between days of rage at the static situation and believing everything had a way of working out.

 

For a short while I used my credit card to cover expenses that my income did not. It was my first experience with credit cards and I had two. Between them, we lived well until my credit was gone and I was left with balances I could not begin to pay.

 

Classics promoted me to assistant manager with the incentive of a tiny increase to the pittance they paid. My work was stupefying dull and I hated it. As at Duthie’s, I worked the afternoon-to-closing shift. Part of my job was to ring up sales and, when I saw the opportunity, I started to skim cash. It began with small amounts until I saw how easy it was. I grew greedy and soon graduated up to between fifty and a hundred dollars a night.

 

Once again I was stealing. It made me more cautious when they installed a surveillance camera trained on the cashier but swiveling ninety degrees. Were they on to me? But by then I was addicted and, with an eye on the camera, I kept at it until I could not stand any more guilt and suspense. I stopped the caper in time to get away with it with no repercussions except the wear to my self-esteem.

 

I never told Robin and he never asked how I supported a lifestyle of living well with good food, copious alcohol, pot, and pubbing. Robin did not need things like I did, but he did not object. ‘Things’ were short term relief from anxiety and habit calmed my fear. He did not drink with me as his liver could still not tolerate it and it made him ill. I, however, was shallow and not impressed with sobriety.

 

Robin was immature and just discovering himself while I, a bit older, was immature and in denial. The spark in Robin turned out to be a creativity in painting but it would continue to lay dormant for years to come. My attempts at ‘first aid’ as his partner and advocate had not helped him deal with his personal inability to find work and I still did not know the reason why. His neediness had become an imposition. After eight months, we had nothing in common. We called ourselves lovers but aside from being faithful, there was scant love between us. As lovers we had no spiritual lift, and I thought our relationship was in a nosedive.

 

At the turn of the New Year in 1973, after a week of splendid and frivolous Holiday celebration, two things happened. The first affected only me: on January 26th, I became a Canadian Citizen. We celebrated with a dinner party at home and a few friends. The second came soon after, when I built up my resolve and, for the final time, told Robin to either find a job or move out by the first of February. I had backed down before on similar ultimatums and did again. This time, however, I meant it and only postponed the day of our parting until March 1^st when a tearful Robin went back to Downsview. He took only the meager personal things that he had brought when we started out and left all my expensive gifts to remind me how unsuited my selections had been.

 

Today my former lover is an artist and has lived twenty years with his partner, Ryan. They married at Toronto City Hall. He learned that he is dyslexic and suffered from ADD as a child; he reads but he cannot write. In school, his teachers called him stupid and lazy, and for a long time he believed them. The acute embarrassment of inexplicable illiteracy was what stopped him from looking for work. At the time, the word ‘dyslexia’ had yet to be coined. At thirty, he found help that changed his life and later began to paint. I was surprised and happy to learn of his creative talent and that he had made a success of it. Even more handsome in maturity, I almost did not recognize him when I Googled his name

 

I had to admit that I still had no idea how to help someone like Robin. My commitment had failed. I tried to raise his self esteem with confidence building talk sessions and by providing an atmosphere of security in the form of bourgeois luxuries for which he never asked or cared much. He was scrupulous about taking nothing for nothing from me and, unlike me, Robin needed none of it to be happy. He had been honest and down to earth about everything except himself. Although when he left me I was on the brink of a financial debacle, it was of my own creation. Nevertheless, with Robin out of my life I felt relieved to be single. I cast off the burden and decided to stop indulging myself in luxuries and no longer steal to make ends meet.

 

More foolishness on my part. As soon as Robin left the apartment, it felt empty and Toronto no longer had anything for me. After two hectic years, I was finished with it. I missed the coast, Richard, and other friends I had left behind and decided to go back. It could not hurt to leave the place where I had gone into debt; perhaps the bank would not find me. Richard would put me up and we would strategize later over the future. I sold the king size bed and the other fine things we’d accumulated, including the BC art, for about twenty cents on the dollar. And, just as when I did the same and left Vancouver in 1971, I had the train fare back and enough to survive on in Lotusland for the six weeks wait until my first UI cheque. Now I was a Canadian with rights and a guaranty of protection.

 

I executed one final splurge with Huey, Carl, Peter, Tom and a few other friends at a farewell luncheon party. As a setting, I chose in the Art Deco splendor of the Round Room at Eaton’s. While I cannot recall the bill of fare, the memory of the elegant room with its marble floors and columns, tile murals, chandeliers, fountain, arched windows and drapery, the large comfortable banquette and our table above the dance floor is set. It may have been because it was a slow weekday lunch or because it had vanished from Toronto’s collective memory as a destination for dining, but the restaurant was almost empty when we sat down.

 

Our conversation, stimulated by infusions of French Champagne and good food, quickly became uproarious and helped fill the gloomy emptiness. The waitress, who might have been idle if not for us, was welcoming and let none of our fooling around and laughter ruffle her. Our mood was gay; after all, my friends were bidding me the same goodbye that I was giving to them and to Hogtown. Knowing them was one of the best things about my stay in Toronto. I used my Eaton’s card for the last time to pay the tab and left a cash tip. We were well fed, intoxicated and no one ever paid for it. What a lark!

 

I left wintery TO in March 1973 and, few days later, arrived in Vancouver for a lush and green if still chilly spring. I had traded dirty ice and blackened snowdrifts for misty pearl grey days and puffs of pink and white cherry blossoms. It was not long before all but one of my guests at Eaton’s drifted west individually, drawn by the tidal flow of wandering lost souls.