Back Door Man * Chapter XI * Barbarians

A memoir of the years 1944 -2008. In this chapter a large invasion of young American Hippie degenerates washes up and I become ensnared

Xi Barbarians

BARBARIANS

 

Part One: Grey skies again.

 

Richard and I would share a clean and quiet mini-suite �" a bedroom and kitchen - in another cheap West End-character-rooming-house. He was waiting for me when I got back. The only clue about real estate that any rooming house renter got was his rising annual rent increase. We were too preoccupied with getting by to notice time running out on ‘affordable’ opportunities to buy. Rental anachronisms such as the rooming house soon became footnotes in the folklore of ‘Seventies Quaint’.

 

We were slow to realize that ascending property values would affect nobodies like us. That information would have bummed us out so it is just as well to be ignorant. Instead, we shed such depressing thoughts and felt free to enjoy a mild, typically wet March that brought premature rainbow of blossoms. A damp, warmer than usual spring followed this, and then came a short, sultry, wet summer. The weather that year was disappointing but Richard and I made the most of it by laying back and decompressing from the whirlwind of Toronto. If we budgeted for nothing else, we could find a few dollars for pot, and the usual inexpensive bottle bars still flourished. Richard got his fill of promiscuous sex with strangers and once again, I went to the clubs. My money ran out before my UI came through and Richard bankrolled me while I waited. Being ‘almost broke’ is never nice, especially when financial stresses remind us that it is so, but we were healthy free spirits, and still in our twenties. We coasted along on that.

 

The two of us slept as late as we liked and started our days at a measured pace discussing the night before and the day ahead over coffee. It felt like we had never left Homer. Sometimes there were new tricks to meet in the morning and some came back and stayed friendly for a while before they moved on. Work did not rear its ugly face on our agenda; UI was the new norm and employment just an occasional necessary interruption acceptable only to form the basis of another UI claim. Then, as the days lengthened and brightened, April turned to May and we adopted healthy habits: people watching at the beach and walking 8.8 kilometers around the recently completed Sea Wall. Back then, this was an invigorating way of cruising.

 

On a rare dry and sunny day in May when Richard and I went to kick the sand at English Bay, we ran into Tom Mountford sunbathing on the lush green grass. He recognized us first, called, and announced that he loved it here and was never going back. With the hide of a natural sunbather, Tom was well along in both tanning and making new friends. He had discovered Faces; Vancouver was no longer ours alone, the floodgates had lifted and barbarians were at hand. We tried to be friendly and then walked away, thoughtful over the unexpected event that had clipped our stride and knowing Tom was just the beginning. If he was here, anyone could follow and, recalling others we would have preferred never to see again, this prospect made us uncomfortable. This was the moment when I realized that I had become accustomed (Hardened? Indifferent?) to leaving people behind and never seeing them again when they or I moved. As with the ritual of burning the leaves in fall, you remember the distinctive smell and the splendor of the season and that is enough. Canada is a free country and all that but when I finish a chapter, I wish to turn the page and leave by the past behind unless I prompt my memory. It is fine for me to be peripatetic but everyone else must remain in situ and in the past. This time, I had not shaken him after all. Tom Mountford had stuck to me and breached the gates of Lotusland. Such was my reaction to seeing him again, in stark contrast to the obvious fact that Vancouver and not I brought him here.

 

Perhaps a particularly long hard winter had inspired it but, whatever the reason, that summer Richard and I witnessed one of the greatest migrations of freaks to Vancouver. Many reunions like ours with Tom occurred in Stanley Park and it was what we made it out to be - only a taste of more to come. By fall, Peter, Carl, Gerry and David (from the Augusta Street Ashram) had all appeared. (Gerry had come out well before I returned and was already living an adventure in remote Quatsino Sound.) Vancouver gave them wings and, at first, they were like strangers. They lived for a short time on top of one another in something of a party stupor in one miniscule West End apartment - a throng of crashers and a few people paying the rent, as they did it in TO. Those who paid resented the parasites and the atmosphere at this drug retreat was never welcoming. When their proprietor turfed them because of over-crowding, most of them were forgotten. The nucleus of that original group, Tom, Carl and Peter, then rented a small, rundown house on Bidwell, a lively place with a constant stream of visitors and crashers over the next year. Tom supported himself in the retail drug trade and the others had UI claims. Richard and I had claims too but we preferred the boarding house where we had a semblance of privacy.

Part Two: Kenny et al

 

Early in the fall, on a weekday night just as Faces was closing early after one of those odd lackluster gatherings �" Richard all over again - I cruised a young newcomer, a boy named Kenny Cooper. This was one of those unpredictable moments with enormous long-term consequences, and not just for the two of us. This would be the last and only time I saw him downhearted and not smiling. He was lonely and scared. Kenny turned out to be a wild-eyed American with curly auburn hair. He had on a green and black flannel shirt and blue jeans. We both had been alone all night and when I cruised him half-heartedly, not knowing why and expecting nothing in return, he surprised me by saying yes right away, and we drove direct to his apartment in Kits in his turquoise VW Bug. We liked each other well enough but nothing sexual happened; we were not a good fit that way. The next morning he told me his sexual inclination was for rough dirty sex with hairy men. I did not mind that this left me out because he was not my type either. At the time, he still had a cherubic oval face that became more masculine and more handsome as he matured, and his body was still soft at the edges. Looking at him undressed reminded me of jaded Seventeenth Century putti cavorting on clouds on gilded palazzi walls. Ken stated his preference with a clarity and conviction unusual in a young man of twenty. The discrepancy in our fantasies explained the dullness of our night together.

 

Fleeing American justice when the narks busted him for possession-with-intent in San Francisco, Kenny came here from Colorado where he detoured briefly before he admitted that he had to leave the country, and met me within the first twenty-four-hours. His Father, a wealthy Atlanta lawyer, was paying his expenses and doing all he could to keep his son out of the hands of the constabulary. Looking back, and even when I met him, I wondered - and wonder still - if Mr. Cooper knew his son. Just knowing what I knew about him, his father would not have been so devoted. Anything you do for a person with no conscience is enabling. Free of that burden and materialistic to his toes, Ken would stop at nothing - short of working, of course - to get what he wanted. The lure of a risky caper and a great score was irresistible. He was never without a new scheme be it for a better car, designer clothes, designer drugs, spring skiing at Whistler or the Caribbean sun in winter. He used people and no one could to stop him and, child of radical times, Ken also did not respect the establishment or corporate entities.

 

He took a two-bedroom apartment, the top floor of a house at 1335 Walnut Street on Kits Point, a small, isolated enclave just over the Burrard Bridge from downtown. Although it was a nasty dump, it suited Kenny and he never moved. To a young man on the lam, an apartment was just an address and a place to sleep.

 

He was also infatuated with his landlord, a young European bachelor named Franz who gradually moved into Kenny’s powerful orbit and began to supply our young American hero with quantities of Grade A pot and good psychedelics. His being straight did not bothered Ken and Franz, though indifferent to men, played along with his tenant’s flattering but fruitless advances. It was new to him. In time, they became fast friends. To Kenny, Franz was fair game and as their relationship went on for years, it is possible that he succeeded in landing his prize.

 

He schemed to defraud capitalists with ideas that ranged from the grand to the simple. Kenny once talked his way into leasing a green and white TR7 convertible that he ran for a year without making a payment. Threats from corporate entities or banks or governments did not intimidate him but acted like a transfusion of plasma. Ken also defrauded Ma Bell repeatedly by getting his phone service in patently false names like Dudley Doright and Frederick F****t (pronounced F*g-oh’). His last phone number was listed under Hugh G. Rection, a name that eventually found its way into a newspaper expose’ of blunders at Ma Bell. It was not that he could not pay his bills, he did. No, at that time he detested rules and authority and had to push limits and mock corporate entities whenever he could. Insatiable, he lived to the full.
Although he was hiding out here illegally and living on his Dad’s dime, Kenny made contacts with drug wholesalers and began to middle. Although they had busted in the States and he was in Canada with no legal status, he was compelled to do what he did and nothing could have stopped him. Middling drugs was the only livelihood he ever knew and he had fallen into it naturally while in school. Up here, he honed his techniques and became more careful and adept at going about it. Kenny was a randy young thing from Atlanta so we christened him Scarlet O’Harlot.

 

Though no sexual epic was in the cards for us, Kenny and I liked each other in a wary sort of way until we could trust each other. I was in awe of him. I introduced Kenny to my circle and we became his close friends and steady customers. Richard and Peter were also sexually aggressive and rapacious and so the three of them became sex buddies and intimates in every way. They formed a relationship that endured over decades and several changes of location. He became the pivot in our lives as well as the source of new experiences and new acquaintances. Richard’s attachment to Kenny grew stronger and with that, our own attachment weakened though our lives remained close and parallel. Ken introduced a broader range of drugs and much flowed from that pharmaceutical cornucopia. It would never again be just pot, hash, and LSD. Kenny, Richard, and Peter’s all desired rough, dirty, anonymous sex and they amplified their excitement and pleasure with MDA, cocaine, and meth.

I cannot state that I failed to follow their lead because my Wee-small-voice, my intuition warned me against it. Intuition does not limit libido. The fact is that by then I was becoming asexual in stages I did not register. My abhorrence of participating in-group sex, of performing with total strangers in semi public places grew along with my diminishing enthusiasm for the nitty-gritty close-up of sex. Coupling that with a fantasy of unattainable airbrushed males further clarifies my not join them and not taking the drugs they took. Nevertheless, just being on a different track did not prevent me from getting sick. While less active, I also continued having unprotected sex with strangers. What spared me was the very thing that took them: it was luck.

 

At the time, I set a high value on continuing to live, even if at times life was a bore. Ennui was painful to both of us but Ken had no tolerance for it and went to extreme lengths to counter it, always adding to the chemical cocktail and finding someone new to relieve dullness. It reached the point that the element of danger became essential and his compulsion to raise the bar left safety behind. In balancing the constant whiff of tedium with a flagrant ‘catch-me-if-you-can’ attitude, it is fair to say he trifled with jeopardy. (Kenny had lived as a spoiled, self-indulgent urban savage. Only the onset of a debilitating disease could bring him to a standstill and that is what happened. Still a material animal as he lay dying in his mid-thirties, he did all he could to cheat death. Death, however, cheats us all and it stole his last trick. This early descent of darkness denied him time to attain a degree of blessed philosophical resignation and he left us still unfulfilled.)

 

In less than a month of meeting him, Kenny’s American friends began to arrive. They came here from Denver and San Francisco with every intention of staying. This inflow increased the strength of the barbarian invasion with bilateral attacks on both the eastern and southern fronts. It proved what we had been hearing, that the US/Canada border was porous. At first, they acted as though no border existed and there were no differences between our two countries. Nevertheless, Kenny saw the differences and disabused them of their naiveté. These disparities were things for which I had always been thankful and these immigrants would come to value them, too. His acquaintances were all parasites that had enjoyed high times on Kenny in the past and he let them down when he abandoned them. He was flattered when they followed, at least at first.

Among the first to arrive were Carol Claire and her son Daniel. They brought a few of Kenny’s most prized possessions in a brilliant yellow Beetle convertible that Dan christened the Top down Tuna. The car belonged to their friend, John Weatherford, a half-Mexican - half-American wild card attached to them Carol and Ken. They moved in at 1335 when she was twenty-seven and Dan, five. She fell in love with BC and stayed the rest of her life; Dan also loved it here; he soon forgot his American past, which had been sheltered and brief, and made BC home.

 

Their personalities were alike and Carol put Kenny on a pedestal: they loved drugs and hated convention, broke rules and did what they could to paralyze bureaucracy and corporate culture. Carol was secretive about her past and never volunteered a word on it. When I asked her who Dan’s father was, she said, “Some football player”. When I asked her what she liked best about Wisconsin, she said “Cheese”. Those answers discouraged further enquiry and I dropped the subject. She was looking for an easy life and free drugs and Kenny was willing for a while to provide both: he loved her as best he could, was grateful to her for bringing certain of his things with her, and glad to have familiar friends from the past to tide him over while he made new friends. Here, with no legal right to public assistance and no possibility of working - or inclination for it - Carol had to scrape by on Kenny’s more than adequate allowance from his father.

 

As generous as he was though, one cheque was never enough. His stipend needed regular augmentation connived on long-distance calls with absurd tales of incredible crises. Kenny was smooth. He had been at it since he was a boy and his father always bought it. There was something of the performer in him and a likeminded audience gave him a thrill. Listening to his side of the conversation, we laughed in the background. It was as if Kenny was mentoring us in how to con our own parents. This was the only use he had for his parents. They answered with larger cheques that Kenny used to keep himself and his freeloaders afloat, fed and stoned. No one but Kenny could do it with such style and complete absence of conscience. How did he live with it? How could we measure up?

 

She could be loud and opinionated, direct and sharp tongued with a sarcastic, biting wit. Carol was a big, blond alpha female, and I first saw her as an assertive Earth Mother, or a lioness with no need for a lion except to reproduce. Yet, I soon saw incongruities in this impression: it faltered when I found that Earth-Mothering did not extend to the common run of details of raising her own boy. She loved Daniel more when he acted precocious, and less when he behaved like a normal child of five. Moreover, there were times when she felt resentful because her responsibility for raising Dan held her captive. These things taxed her time and energy. She could not always dodge them, and she balked and kicked with the bridle on. To lighten this burden she chose to do things in different and not always rational ways. Dan was a personable child and raising him in a communal setting made it possible to share the burden with like-minded Hippies who readily adopted him. Nevertheless, fiendish moods still came over her predicated on whether she was stoned and what she had taken. Not yet addicted to a particular drug but to drugs in general, Carol was subject to the euphoria and mood swings induced by cocktails of various ingredients. When she first arrived, she denounced alcohol and advocated using drugs without adulteration. No one agreed, however, and that attitude morphed into "Liquor is quicker”.

 

One of the lesser but vociferous demons she brought in the Top down Tuna was her untrained German shepherd, Poppy. She had one virtue and that dubious - predictability. High-strung, and nervous, when a stranger or friend knocked at the door or entered a room Poppy barked, sometimes at Daniel and Carol. Her bark was frightening and it was an effort to stop her before the urge to kick her got too strong. Of course, one knew better than to do anything that would provoke Poppy’s master so it never happened and I am glad it didn’t.

 

Though the dog never bit anyone, she acted like she would, growling, showing her teeth, and demonstrating the traits of an overprotective female. As she directed her paranoid state of mind at everyone, we all wondered whom Poppy was protecting. Whatever the explanation, Poppy was a tiresome animal and she never made friends. Kenny just went about his business, ostensibly unruffled by the three Claire’s. When such things happened Carol would go, “Oh, Poppy!” No one dared lift a finger and no one among us was motivated to learn how to train her for fear of offending a strong willed irrational woman who did not believe in constraints. Instead, we tried to calm the dog with petting and sweet talk that encouraged more of the same antisocial behavior.

 

Because, it was antithetical to the hippie creed of laissez faire, she was un-spayed and less than a year later delivered a litter of seven healthy mutts’. Tom Mountford took one and, when I said she looked exactly like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, he named her Jackie. Jackie lived with Tom her whole life. I took one of the pups too, a shortsighted, decision since, under Carol’s influence, I was now using Valium and barbiturates for recreation and could not look after a dog. I named him Opie after my young hippie friend from happy Comox days.

 

The person I loved most, with more vitality and joy than all the rest of us and no flaws, was Daniel. Carol had never cut his feathery straw-blonde baby hair so that at five it almost reached to the middle of his back. He was then a merry, curious child, and a warm ray of sunshine. Communal living in different settings made him seem socially precocious when, in fact, he felt comfortable with adults because he had been raised among them and he had no peers. Carol believed that the age of play in childhood and early schooling was unnecessary and even dangerous. As a result, he would become prematurely cynical but when we met, he still trusted the adults his mother trusted. He thought it was great to be in Canada with Kenny and Carol in neither of whom he found any flaws. He adopted Richard and me as the uncles he did not have and we felt the same affection for him �" the child we would never have. We gave him little boy presents Carol could not afford but took no responsibility for him. My Wee-small-voice indicated a serious deficiency in the people raising Dan, a large deficit of selflessness required for parenting. The boy was a sensitive sponge soaking up the bad conduct of dim, immature, selfish role models. My own was not what he needed either but I had only to recall my childhood and my parents to know that the boy was not getting the consistent performance modeling necessary to make a well adjusted adult. Dan would not forget the unpredictable irregularities of his childhood and knew precisely how they contributed to his adult personality.

 

The first thing we did with Dan was share a joint. I was shocked when he asked and Carol let him. As no one cared to know what I thought about it and it was obvious in the expression on my face anyway, I kept mum and focused on how he fit right in. After that, Dan joined us a few more times for a toke. We treated Dan like a circus sideshow. Carol stood by, proud and scarcely bothered with doubt. This was the only time I ever saw it. As with anything that shocks you once, I grew to want his occasional participation in the smoking circle.

 

Whenever we got high, we would invite him to join us. He only toked if he felt like it, which was less and less, and we could not talk him into being sociable. He stopped completely and I admired what I mistook for self-control. His abstaining was a gut reaction, a visceral dislike of the pot headspace and not a rejection of drugs. Unlike us, he did not have heavy psychological baggage of which pot frees you. Pot aside, Dan wanted to know about hallucinogens to which his friends gave high praise.

 

He loved traveling around and exploring with us but he could not begin to comprehend our world of stunted needy adults. Of course he did, it was a relief from the boredom at Kenny’s when the novelty of Canada wore off. We did not see how negatively our company and the absence of friends were influencing him. These experiences were not normal for a child and not worth the price of childhood. His upbringing was grossly weighted towards meeting Carol’s needs. In early childhood, Dan grew up in emotional and social isolation. He was not socialized in school and with no peer group friends. He had to make the most of benign neglect and live in the world of his own imagination. Like any child raised by one parent, he adored his Mother, saw everything through her eyes, and looked to her for his needs.

 

His childhood crippled him so Daniel could only exist in her shadow. His mother’s gay male friends as well as her boyfriends were conniving scoundrels and rogues. Among all of them, he would never find a male parent he could respect, thus making the shared umbilical life support between them ever more vital. For a while, he had more than enough love in him to go around but it was love born of desperation. No matter how she neglected him, he would love his mother to the day she died. None of this was clear at the time, however, and we were sure that with all his potential Dan would be a star one day and make us proud.

 

If his emotional needs went unfulfilled and left psychological scars, child Daniel had a way of getting the things he wanted. Thanks to his adult memory recalling them for me, I can reconstruct a few incidents that I would have otherwise forgotten. At one time, I was one of those who gratified his desires. The first thing he wanted was a black Superman Cape and Kenny got one for him. Dan believed it would confer super powers, such as the ability to fly. He had a high degree of conviction about it but we thought it would pass and not be necessary to disabuse him of it. We knew he would outgrow this stage but not how soon.

 

As is only natural, he was always up first. He donned his cape and decided to ‘fly’ on his tricycle down the long stairway to the front door. Nothing could go wrong. Fearless, he hurled himself forward only to find, when his head crashed against the door, that Superman’s cape was a fraud. He was not badly hurt but the fall knocked his front teeth askew and they were realigned afterwards at St. Paul’s. There was a cut and a bump neither of which led to complications, not so much as a headache. Dan outgrew his belief in the powers of capes without any of us saying anything.

 

Next on his wish list was a two-wheeler, which Carol could never have bought him. With a credit card from somewhere (I do not remember what ruse I used to obtain it), I bought him a burgundy CCM ten-speed with whitewalls, a spiffy Christmas present - every boy’s dream. On New Year’s Day, Richard and I took him to Kits Beach for his first ride and, without training wheels or any help, he balanced himself on it and rode it on the first try. I still have a photo of the event that Richard snapped in the park. Dan’s hair was still long and flowing in the wind, and so too was ours.

 

Dan was a creature of words. He was always trying new ones and making a nuisance of himself by distracting us with a constant stream of questions on word definitions. It can be difficult to come up with precise word definitions spontaneously and one should be conscientious about it. (So exasperating was he on words �" as well as on other perfectly normal topics - that Carol nicknamed him Ed, short for ‘energy drain’. Intending no harm, we all took up this charming acronym and substituted ‘Ed’ for Dan. He thought we meant it, however, and took this disparagement to heart where it added to his feeling of inferiority.) Richard and I wanted Dan to build his vocabulary and enjoy English and so we give Ed the big Webster’s Unabridged. It was a gift he treasured and kept by him through most of his life. Webster’s gave him some of the rudiments of English that he should have learned in a classroom but with no mentoring, misunderstandings of some of Webster’s abbreviated lexical entries I realized what had happened when he peppered his conversation with inappropriate howlers.

 

Carol’s manner of raising Dan came from some hair-brained theory taken from R. Crumb in the Summer of Love; sometimes there were no rules, and at other times, they were flexible and changed from day to day. She rarely told him when he did something that pleased her and never failed to when he did not; and we praised him when he did something precocious. Though too lazy and indifferent to educate him herself, Carol thought school would have a pernicious effect on him and she would not enroll him. As a consequence, he remained isolated from his peer group and begged to go to school. Still Carol could not make up her mind and he bristled for two more years. She relented when he was eight or nine and by then he was a misfit, too. He gravitated towards kids like himself, outsiders - the children of other freaks. Having no other role models, his behavior copied ours until he adopted theirs, and a haughty masquerade to conceal his lack of social confidence.

 

In 1974, there were thousands of illegal immigrants living in Canada. Many of them were American draft dodgers too paranoid to apply for status. The rules on landed immigrant status were flexible, ambiguous, and simple. That year, Ottawa declared an amnesty for all illegal immigrants for a prescribed length of time. They only needed to have been living here for a certain length of time, two or three years, as I recall. Then, without paperwork to back it up and no more than a sworn avowal of residence by a Canadian citizen, Ottawa granted them landed immigrant status. This process would normalize the status of as many illegal’s as possible and be easier and less expensive than ferreting them out and deport them. Upon learning of this, Richard and I decided we would vouch for Kenny, Carol and Dan so they could stay in Canada legally if they chose. They thought it was a wonderful idea and I vouched for Carol and Richard for Kenny. It changed nothing but their status.

 

Part Three: Downers

 

Phil Godwin, a straight jazz musician who played piano, sax, clarinet, flute, and other wind instruments, a longhaired freak from Toronto, was living in the house on Bidwell Street. Carol and Phil (she called him Flip) met there and began a sexual and emotional relationship. She introduced him to the delights of prescription meds as recreation and he took to it with gusto. A taste for heroin soon followed. They were together a great deal but did not cohabit until the two of them, along with Daniel and me, moved into a deep pink house two doors north of Kenny’s on Walnut Street.

 

It was high summer when we decided on a tour of the Okanagan Valley. Carol and Dan were still living at Kenny’s, and Phil, Richard, and I at Bidwell Street with Tom, Carl, and a throng of others. I was using downers and had been dealing them at a low level for a little while. I could still have managed without barbs had I wanted to try. The five of us would travel in Phil's clunker. I took a stash of six or eight reds, a smaller number of Tuinal, Nembutals, and Valium for Richard and me. Trusting my friends, I put it in a separate bottle alongside their stash in the glove compartment. On our second day out, I looked in the bottle and it was empty. Carol and Phil stole them. They denied it with unanimity but there could be no doubt. Richard and I were infuriated that we could not trust our friends. When they continued to deny the conspiracy, we left them with acrimonious hearts to hitch back to Vancouver only to find Bidwell House smoldering. It had burned down the night before.

 

Tom told me I had lost my stash in the fire but I always had doubts about that. He was not dishonest but anything might have happened in the chaos of a fire. Regardless of that, my supply was gone and this psychological and financial blow compelled me to stop using. What should have been my awake-up call was only an intermission while I regrouped. For no reason, though she continued to deny any part in the theft I forgave Carol when the Claire’s returned two weeks later. She used the denial mechanism to deal with all accusations of wrongdoing: just deny everything �" “I’m guilty of being innocent, your honor!” No longer would I trust her with pills and I could not say why I had ignored my intuition against putting them in the glove compartment in the first place. From Bidwell our now homeless ‘Family’ dispersed, eventually moving into two other houses in Kits, at 14th and Arbutus and at 11th and Maple. Both pods proved to be fertile and increased like bacteria cultured in a Petri dish.

 

At first, the narcissistic American confidence of these merrymakers worked to charm us. John Weatherford, a freaky clown with a huge, shiny black Afro, was lean, hairless, and almost blind without his coke bottle glasses. He talked an incomprehensible jargon in a high-pitched voice, which he constantly interrupted to laugh at his own malapropisms and mispronunciations, which encouraged Dan in his. John wanted people to like him. Unfortunately, his was a tiresome act and it wore thin right away. Always high and laughing with abandon, his arms flailing against the wind and his hands rarely touching the steering wheel, JW raced back and forth across Vancouver in the Top Down Tuna. He often chose the wrong side of the road in the small hours when we came back loaded from the club but Tuna had the road to itself. Luck aside, he avoided accidents narrowly. Kenny set us up and I succumbed to the dual pleasures of John’s supple and eager young body and his preference for pillow biting - two things dear to my heart. However, a week later, I decided that as he lacked dignity and intelligence, I would not die for his a*s alone and we stopped screwing.

 

The comic as well as dramatic displays at Walnut Street reminded me of Wellesley Street. When more Americans joined him, satellite stages sprang up next-door, downstairs, and in neighboring houses. Now old friends surrounded him, too many, including his wife Donna and her boyfriend, Beau, who got nothing for his devotion but sex with Donna, which must not have been great. Fed up of wifey-poo, Ken wished she and her boy toy would move on.

 

Donna was an airhead, dumb and lazy. As well as that, she was a front-runner for the most grasping, shallow, and materialistic of his many past acquaintances who fit that description. Even after knowing Kenny from High School to the present, she pursued a vision of him loving her ‘again’. He was not the least bit pleased when she and pretty boy appeared hat in hand, at his door but he put on a somewhat convincing welcoming act.

 

Because they had wed sixteen months earlier, Kenny felt a slight degree of responsibility for her at first. However, one should not think of Donna as Kenny’s wife but rather as his partner in a caper crafted to cause a cataract of valuable gifts and thousands of dollars from guests who did not bother to shop. It was a big and expensive wedding and it worked to perfection. However, they ran through the windfall in no time while staying invested in fulfillment through material possessions. Donna wore out Beau and several other boyfriends until junk food made her stout, flaccid, and undesirable. Then she gave up on converting Kenny and headed south.

 

There were three young straight freaks buzzing around at that time. They roomed together and made the scene in Kits. This ‘making the scene’ necessitated many visits to our string of houses, for reasons I did not understand. There was the homely, ignorant Gummer who was boring to be around and did not like Dan; a dirty blond named Don Juan; and the pasty-faced Phil Hanko. I did not care much for any of them but they had a hold on Carol and Ron Day. Though straight, Hanko became Ron’s creature and Gummer was Carols. I wondered why for these boys were just vagabonds, parasites, and losers. Forty years later, I was to learn, from a mutual friend, that heroin had been the link and until their premature demise, they had been slaves and suppliers of ‘white lady’. They were so good at it, so reserved that I never knew. Carol had been into H long before I knew of it but she kept that a secret. I always knew Ron was a junkie, as he made no bones about praising its wonders. At the time, Don Juan worked as a junior trader at the Vancouver Stock Exchange and later died young of AIDS. Gummer overdosed in Mexico. Hanko may have survived but no one seems to know. He was from a family of Czech junkies and, like his father, Hanko would spend more time in jail than out of it.

 

I could not resist Ron Day �" another smooth Dancing David with fine features, the same self-confidence, and the same grace. He, too, cultivated his body through exercise, Yoga, diet and physical discipline. Like David, he respected his body and treated it like a temple, a vessel of life. At the same time, in seeming contradiction, he was a devotee of the poppy.

 

He would never respond to, or be flattered by a sexual advance. Such things degraded both parties. Boys are for pleasure and he himself was only interested in young pups. When we first met, he was too guarded to discuss these things. Among the common run of Canadians, homosexuality was alarming enough and Ron would not invite more social wrath by letting people think of him as a pedophile. People would not have distinguished between pedophilia and boy love. He was not ashamed but he would not risk his freedom by broadcasting his disposition. No one needed to know. He trusted me enough to admit it when I pressed him but he said nothing more. Throughout history, boys have seduced older men. They are curious and, with mature men, they learn more and faster. To distinguish between pedophile and boy lover, pedophiles are aggressive sociopaths who do indecent and traumatic things to innocent children. Boy lovers, on the other hand, will go so far as to seduce boys accepting occasional disappointment, and would only have consensual sex. They mentor their boys and want them to enjoy their sexuality. With no love and no commitment, it is of the essence that each boy and his mentor move on with no residual shame.

 

Ron loved children as well as boys but this was not libidinous in nature. He did volunteer work with children and they took to him because he understood them. He interacted with them on their level but found their immaturity tiresome. He would take none of these to bed �" their wellbeing was his responsibility �" but, outside of this, his sexual relations never went on longer than a few weeks and there were many long gaps.

 

He, too, had lived in Rochdale while Tom Mountford lived there. Ron’s brother, Rob, with whom he disagreed on everything, also lived there, as well as Phil Godwin. Ron found nothing to admire in any of them and he tried to ignore them when they let him. The Day brothers had a tendency to paranoia in social situations and Rob became so deeply paranoid that he was in an out of institutions. One by one, the four of them joined the Invasion of 1973-74. We were neighbors on Walnut Street when we met and I saw him most days. Ron was the most beautiful, physically perfect man I had yet seen. He was tall and almost hairless, with a straight well-proportioned body, fine understated muscles, hazel eyes, and dirty blond shoulder length hair; his clothes and person were spotless

 

This self-taught genius got more from books than anyone I have known. Nine parts reading and one part experience had refined Ron’s political instincts and turned him against the status quo. He declined to engage socially and, indifferent to money, did not travel. Ron was a multitasker and, too poor to pay bus fare, he exercised by walking with his face buried in a book, scarcely noticing the life around him as he did so. When I would spot him on his peregrinations, his sure and graceful carriage put me in mind of someone floating or walking on water. In summer, he ambled barefoot and, in the rain, did it with while encumbered with an open umbrella.

 

Ron did not dissemble when someone could get him to give an opinion. He spurned religion and most of society �"relatives, as well as acquaintances - but said little except when cornered. Then he would speak with clarity and stay on point. He rejected nothing without a thorough study and, if something interested him, he read everything he could find on the subject. He could remember information, sort it into true and false, and keep it organized in his head until he needed it. A disciplined academic, Ron Day believed university degrees were for small minds. He was not arrogant but humble about his intellectual gift and had no desire to teach or pontificate.

 

Cupid’s arrows could not pierce him for ‘irresistible love’ was an irrational folly born of weak minds and die-hard Nineteenth Century romanticism. It was easy for Ron to avoid this trap, as he himself had no gift for it. He was a loner and confided in no one but himself. He did not debate or clarify what he believed �" assuming he believed in anything �" but spoke only of the beliefs of respected thinkers and how they diverged and conflicted. He left it to us to inform ourselves and so I did. Ron never took a job but chose to avoid wage slavery, embrace poverty, and make the most of his time. Paid work holidays were a meaningless institution and only created with reluctance by a few quasi-democratic institutions to mollify unionized workers and keep them in line. Just remaining a free spirit, which state of being he exemplified better than anyone else was refreshment enough for Ron. Absolute poverty was the price of his independence and he accepted it without complaint. What he valued was time and this was his way to live his allotted hours in freedom.

 

Ron lived in a way that would leave no ecological footprint. He was vegan at the same time that he maintained a heroin habit and kept well informed. He supplemented welfare by helping himself to food in stores as well as to reading matter in newsstands and bookshops. He never mentioned this petty thievery; it was just a necessary measure and, in all those years, I do not think anyone caught him. The least possessive of men, Ron never needed anything as self-important as a library and, when he finished a book, he passed it on.

 

Part Four: Candy man

 

Soon Kenny introduced Hop Sing, a frustrated Asian man who, like me, got little pleasure from his gay fantasies. They met on the circuit. Hopper had a bottomless supply of pharmaceuticals and now we could. Some of us overdosed while others advanced from pills to heroin. I had seen the pernicious effects of downers before and rejected them for myself but this time I fell into the trap headfirst. I would try it but just for kicks, I said when I started, when the fact was that peer pressure trumped intuition. I asked myself, what harm one tiny pill could do; for a long time, they just put me to sleep. Taking them in the daytime after a night’s rest, the body can more readily fight drowsiness and I learned to overcome it and get off on that hypnotic downer high which sapped drive, reduced focus, and eliminated inhibition. Just a few months on, I found myself wired to cocktails of barbs, pot, and alcohol.

 

Richard, Carl, Tom, Peter, John, Kenny, Carol, Phil, and Ron, they all liked pills. Handled correctly, Mandrax would relax you and increase the pleasure of anal sex. Several of them would take downers to Richards Street and be willing bottoms all night long. We forgot what a sober state was like, and spent the day in a barbiturate haze, scoring, and stealing food when we remembered to eat. Our neighborhood grocery store was at the corner. It was one of the last independently owned small grocery stores, and poorly stocked. If you bought one or two things, it was astonishingly easy to leave with more under your jacket or stuffed down your pants. The owners were a Chinese family and the clerks were their sons. They were always gracious and, though we stole from them for a year, if they ever knew they never called us to account. I became a confident petty thief functioning on the very drugs I had always feared and my companions were dropouts.

 

How Nicholas came to share with us on Walnut or whose protégé he was, I can no longer recall. He did not belong there and was not a good fit for us. This young drifter from the east, a pasty-faced straight geek in dark rimmed glasses and a void in his head and his life, was one of several young crashers who stayed with us on a temporary basis. When he saw that we were stealing groceries he hoped to endear himself by proposing that we fill our cupboards and fridge with comestibles from Woodward’s. He said he had done it several times and so we listened to him talk. We were tired of the dull fare from the corner store but were too deep in funk to ‘shop’ anywhere else. Nick grew tiresome as he pressed us to take advantage of the superior delicacies at Woodward's. He stressed the ease with which we could load up with a great variety of high quality foodstuffs. I doubted that he knew what he was talking about, especially on the security issue, when he said Woodward’s had no security, and I should have reconnoitered. I did not, however, and, he won me over the same way Bob Schultz did it before him, by wearing down my resistance. Nick was pleased.

 

Soon after, we went to Hastings and Abbott to score groceries. Phil drove us there and waited outside. I had not been to the area since I bought Emily Rose a traveling dress at Ray’s Style Shop on the street level of a seven-story building that is now a SRO and pit of despair called Regal Place. The Food Floor was a world apart, a fantasy of plenty in an impoverished and ruined district, held-over from the days when the Woodward’s name stood for quality and Hastings was respectable.

 

The selection was all and more than Nick had said, with aisle upon aisle of fabulous edible luxuries - everything for indigent gourmets like us. We laughed as our cart filled with things we had not tasted in years - marbled steaks, fearsome live lobster, fat ham, and aromatic French cheeses. We imagined the meals we would have and the glory we would derive from our success, as we wheeled our cart of unbagged stolen groceries through crowds of puzzled main floor shoppers towards the street exit.

 

Phil Godwin was waiting for us but six poker-faced representatives of Woodward’s security stopped us at the doors. The police were ready, a phone call away, and one, two, three, they hauled us off and charged us with shoplifting.

 

It had seemed too good to be true and so it was. I never trusted Nicholas and I suspected all along that something had to happen. Therefore, when it did, what came to mind was not ‘Why us?’ but rather, ‘Finally!’ It was almost a relief when something that ought to have happened unfolded as it should.

 

A few days later, the two of us appeared in court. Richard, Ron, and Carol were there, fascinated. Who is more hardened to crime than a judge is? Ours, having listened with world-weary attention to the list of delights in our cart, stated the obvious: we were common thieves with “Champagne taste and a beer budget”. We were white and it was our first offense so he handed down a six-month suspended sentence. If either of us were arraigned on any other charge within that time, the judge would sentence for both transgressions and otherwise the court would drop the shoplifting charge. I took the insult of capture hard. It left me ashamed and humiliated, blaming myself first, for listening to him, and Nick for starting it.

 

Shaken or not, my life went on in the same way and I soon put that disgrace behind me and took on a second identity. This is how it happened. When I found the amusing name of Sequin Pallidini in a novel, it stuck in my head. Soon after that, for a lark, I applied as SP for a Social Insurance card, wondering if it would come through. I do not remember what identification I provided, but a while later the card arrived. Then, to see if I could take my prank a step further, I decided to apply in Victoria for a welfare check in that name. I went to the Island, and without trying too hard, gave the bureaucrats a story about never having gone to school. (I wanted to keep it simple but you have to tell them something.) I made SP twenty-years-old and told them that my parents - stoned-out hippie-Gypsies who had left Canada and could not be contacted - had no use for education and never allowed me to go to school. They had taught me to read and write but little else. Thus, so the story went, no one would hire me and I needed welfare because I was uneducated and broke. The result was that Sequin got on welfare with no investigation. They gave me money there and then, which was more than I had expected, and sent me a check every month to the address of willing co-conspirators who knew the scam and got a small cut.

 

For six months, I took the seaplane back and forth to Victoria. The planes that took me on these half-hour trips followed a low flight path from Vancouver Harbor over the Gulf Islands to the southern tip of Vancouver Island and Victoria Harbor. It was great to travel with such speed and so little fuss direct from inner city to inner city, if you could afford it. When the weather was beautiful, I would drop LSD or MDA, which made the flight more wonderful and the views more splendid. In the capitol, I would cash the check and, with a pocket full of downers, head to the Churchill, Victoria’s Parkside, where local freaks gathered. On my visits there, they got to pop pills, which I sold at rock bottom, until the drinking ended. Sometimes, before last call, many sleeping patron’s heads were on the tables and the bartenders left to scratch their own. A spendthrift with a windfall, I spent all of it there on my mini-holidays. Tempting fate in this way was droll but, when the bureaucrats determined that SP would have to start elementary school to stay on the dole, I dropped it. The first act in the curious life of one Sequin Pallidini had been lively fun, even missing much of it in a druggy haze.

 

Then, at Walnut, a black lesbian striper named Miriam appeared at our door one terribly rainy day with a young gay male companion. They had just arrived in the city from Oakland and they were lost. We liked them, Carol and I, and she impressed me as a wily survivor when she explained that she came here to escape an impossible marriage with a straight-laced hetero military man. Her hair was short and kinky but she was tall and her skin tone was light. As soon as she reached Vancouver, she knew what she had to do and put on a long hair wig to audition at a club on Granville. The owner liked her and offered her work but she needed a Social Insurance Number. I liked Miriam and wanted Sequin to live so I gave her the SI card in his non-gender-specific name.

 

Thus, Sequin had a life for three more years in the guise of a black Canadian pole-dancer and, as Miriam, she earned a degree at UBC. She was a practical minded woman and kept these worlds apart. She was not at all flirty except when performing but rather an academic who could turn it on and off and do what she must to pay her tuition. She had the stuff to make the straight men at the club and the dykes at the New Fountain adore her. Pole dancing paid little but the tips were fabulous so she took her work in stride. With the name Sequin, she had a moniker to match her stage persona. After living with us for a short time with a young Asian-Canadian named Cathy, they left together. Gay women moved in a different circle and we lost touch with them.

 

After a few months crashing with Kenny and prior to the incident at Woodward’s, I moved a few doors away to a large old-fashioned coral bungalow. It was there that I met Miriam and there that, after she left with his ID, Sequin Pallidini spurted back to life as the fall guy for unpaid rent. The new owners of that house were innocents and rented us the house in that name. Month after month, the landlords came for the rent, and Carol was ready with a story to explain why we did not have it. (Her aplomb in handling our proprietors impressed me.) She always blamed Sequin for taking off to Victoria with the rent, or other such rubbish about him, while we listened from the kitchen. For three months, the property owners believed her but it went on too long. Then, mostly because of Daniel’s tender age, they let us stay for another month. We spent the rent money as you would expect and took eviction in stride. However, we were sad to leave Walnut and that spacious, comfortable house. We moved south to Big House at 11th and Maple.

 

We had previously met some of our new roommates at another Walnut Street address. They were a large group of ill-assorted freaks, misfits, and social rejects. Rob and Ron Day were among them. It was here that Daniel, now six, took his first acid trip. He was in the basement with one of our dealer roommates watching him cut hundred lots of Orange Sunshine into hits. Dan did not understand what acid was but his friends raved about it. He thought he ought to try it one day and the dimwitted dealer gave him a hit.

 

The effect was rapid and, feeling disoriented and a bit anxious, Daniel came upstairs to the kitchen for company. There he assumed the lotus position on the table and proceeded to spout wisdom for several hours. Calm and smiling, his eyes ablaze, the boy announced that if we had questions on Life we had better raise them while he still knew the answers. Carol went livid when she realized what had happened �" most likely, because the dealer had not asked first or offered a few hits to her. She berated him until he moved out. We were all upset and stayed with Dan until we were certain he would not freak on us. There were calmatives on hand for that and we kept our little hero company until he fell asleep the next morning in the small hours.

 

 

My UI had long since run out and I now lived on welfare. With that and the steady profit from selling drugs, my income was not bad. It was not bad at all. I had no intention of holding down a straight job or working ever again. Oblivious to my changed behavior - selling downers and living with other dealers and addicts, mooches and sociopaths all - I let myself dream of the heights in the illicit pharmaceutical industry.

 

At the house on Eleventh, I sold drugs to a whacked-out crew. I injected heroin a few times but did not care for it. Of course, heroin was not close to pure; they cooled it down with additives and called it junk. If I had had a taste of the heroin, I might have become a junkie. Then I started to inject Seconal and Tuinal, a dangerous practice. If you ever missed a vein and help came too late, it would cost you your arm. I did this on a rotting old couch in the basement, sometimes with Carol at the top of the stairs shouting “Shame on you, Paul. Injecting Barbs is suicide.” The rush, which was extreme, peaked with a momentary loss of consciousness. The buzz lasted a few minutes, and left you wanting more. The after effects - impaired balance, blurred vision, and mental disorientation - made each succeeding injection more difficult. Yet again, in that degraded mental capacity, fortune smiled upon me: this phase was brief and I never shot-up in muscle.

 

I was now operating with the help of a young, ostensibly straight nineteen-year-old named Jim. With just a cursory glance at them when they joined the fold, I assumed him and his girlfriend Lisa had kept up normal relations prior to taking a room in the Eleventh Street ashram.

 

Jim had well- but not overstated muscles and a hairless upper torso that he had made a canvas for tattoos. I don’t care for them but I had to admit that Jim’s were fabulous; he had a dagger the length of his right forearm and an eagle that covered his upper chest and left shoulder.

 

Jim’s nineteenth birthday fell at around the time they moved in. Carol, who loved to celebrate for any reason, had also taken note of Jim and she made him an iced layer cake. I wanted to contribute, too, and made a zany arrangement of barbs on the icing �" nineteen, one for each year. (We were adults and I thought candles were beside the point.) There was a rainbow colored Tuinal in the middle surrounded by six red Seconal forming a center ring and twelve yellow Nembutal around the outside. I interspersed them with hits of windowpane.

 

They had only been in the house for a week and we had scarcely talked before that night but Jim turned out to be an eager and innocent sweetheart and loved feeling our attention all over him. Lisa knew at once, what we were up to �" grooming her boyfriend �" but Jim seemed either unaware or pleased about it. There could be no doubt, however, that our little surprise party - the homemade cake and the assorted party animals in the house - made a lasting impression on him. He had never tried a downer but, insisting that he was in for a treat, he let us feed him one of each color with a short space of time between each and he handled that heavy dose surprisingly well before he passed out later. That was a night for the annals, everyone très stoned, music blaring �" and, as always, no toilet paper.

 

How proud it made me to have won him when he proved it by the sweet fawning attention he gave me in front of everyone. He designated me his drug guide. Though it felt odd to have him as my creature, I had pined for Jim since I met him and did nothing to stop him. He was a foolish headstrong boy who wanted to explore drugs. We became buddies and he began emulating me; I could do no wrong. That is why in no time, we began to inject each other. I could scarcely resist this nonsexual erotic intimacy with such a beautiful young man when he offered me his arm to inject him with Seconal or the touch of his hand on my arm when he injected me. I was too stoned to make a move on him, and too afraid but I hate myself for my timidity. I know much else would have happened if I seduced him but all of it would have been bad.

 

I had two small rooms upstairs; Jim and Lisa lived in two rooms down the hall and we shared a common toilet and bathroom facilities with two other acquaintances who lived in a third mini-suite. Lisa had understood immediately that living with us was asking for trouble and she grew frantic watching helplessly as Jim took up drugs. Her pleas had the opposite effect and he became as incorrigible as the rest of us. He screamed at her to shut up when she said, “Look at what you’re doing to yourself!” He screamed back, “I told you when we shacked-up that I want to do drugs. If you don’t like it, take off.” He wanted her to leave but she held firm while I knew them. I did not see myself as the cause of his behavior. I was blinded with mad pride and hoped we would soon hop into bed together. I would never have hurt Jim but events decided otherwise.

 

From his birth until this point, I had kept Opie with me. There were a number of Poppy’s pups, now full-grown, spread over our communal houses making nurturing and training him less of an issue. I paid little attention to him. Other people were kind to him and Opie had Poppy and his siblings for company. He did not even know that I was his master.

 

Opie slept in my place, which consisted of a small kitchen with a walk-in cupboard on one side where I stashed my drugs, and a smaller sunroom/bedroom with a pitched ceiling, an add-on at the back with windows on three sides where I crashed on a foamy on the floor. During the day, I preferred to be downstairs with the others. I was not paranoid over what neighbors might think and whether the police knew about our activities. I never felt paranoid, not even when I should have, and these things were not on my radar.

 

I was not selective about my customer base either; the market for downers was spotty and I would sell to anyone. I basked in the aura of being the Candy Man. No one told me when Gowan, one of my youngest customers, got in trouble with the police. I assume to this day that no one else knew about it either. The RCMP told him that if he gave them someone higher up the chain they would let him off and he gave them me. This became known some time later and meanwhile the Candy Man carried on.

 

When Hopper announced that he was leaving Lotusland, I had cash and invested in stock before he took off. I threw a bon voyage for him at my tiny place and invited far too many pill poppers to come and say goodbye. I set out bowls of pills, acid, and Thai stick, and provided beer to wash that s**t down. It had to be ‘The Party of the Century!’

In the event, people, |Gavin among them, dodged in and out all night long, and left with pills in their pockets. Strangely, no one stayed long and I wondered why. Did I smell? A few friends, like Carl and Carol who lived below me and who would never miss a party, later told me they stayed away because they were afraid. When the last guest left, I felt that the party had been a success. (People remembered and talked about it for a long time.) I had done right by my friend, Hopper, having spent a great deal of money on the party. Now my cupboard bulged with candy.

 

To make room for guests and provide floor seating around a low table, I moved my foamy from the sunroom to the pantry. Afterwards, when we were alone, I threw it back down on the kitchen floor, and crawled into it with Cecil, a man I had wanted to bed since I met him a year earlier. He was a gentle, handsome southern boy in flight from an abusive family and the draft. He arrived here with a gay friend from San Francisco. The two of them stayed in Canada without legal status trusting that they were in no danger if they kept their heads down. With patience, boys like Cecil can be had if they trust you and they are confident that their sexual experiment will not be painful or headline the next day’s news. Now, at last, Cecil stripped off his clothes and lay beside me. What more could one ask of life? We were too stoned to have sex then but it felt wonderful to fall asleep against his warm young body. My head swam with sweet fantasies and I looked forward to waking in his arms.

 

This memory is sharp. Fade to black. Then, in slow motion, the following things happen: distant doorbell rings. My eyes open only to close right away and I do not stir. Cecil is warm and still in the sack beside me. It is early, the sky overcast and gloomy; the birds have not yet begun to twitter. Jim’s knock wakens me from a sound sleep and I jump out of bed, unaware that I am naked. He is my door attendant, supposed to greet familiars and screen new customers. He whispers hoarsely that two men are outside wanting to do business. “Do we know them?” I ask. He says, “No.” “Well, what the hell - send them up. Business is business,” says I, and Jim, sensing no danger, does as I tell him.

 

In the few seconds before they come in, I have my last glimpse of Cecil’s white cheeks as he slips on his jeans and vanishes behind the curtain in the sunroom. I do not sense his fear. He may have been afraid of being seen in my bed or just afraid period. Still naked, I greet the two customers in a businesslike manner. I have no idea what is going on; they are just strangers with long hair and they need to score from me and I am one hell-of-a-hung-over Candy Man.

 

“A friend told us about you,” they say.

 

First, we conduct our business. “What do you want? I have everything.” One of them gives me an order and I begin to count out pills. With long, razor sharp upholstery shears, I cut-off twenty hits of blotter for them. They pay attention to the shears but, meaning no harm myself, it does not register until later. At the point of exchanging drugs for cash, they flash their badges and slip the cuffs on. I look down to notice my genitals: they are out there, staring back at me. They let me put on jeans and a shirt and, while I do, they arrest Cecil.

 

This happened on another Friday, November13; seven years after �" fresh and innocent - I got Landed Immigrant Status. It is 1974; I am thirty. As a Canadian, they cannot deport me but they deport Cecil after he serves six months.

 

I never saw him again and later I heard that he overdosed in San Francisco. He had been living there with a junkie girlfriend.