Back Door Man * Chapter XII * Bottom

A memoir of the years 1944 - 2008. This chapter finds me busted, homeless, broke.

XII Bottom

Gowan, the lad who saved himself by giving me up to the police, was in the phase of hormone driven sexual self-exploration that made him a bit of a tramp. He was handsome in a boyish, not an effeminate way, but not confident that men found him desirable. He wanted his way with every man in reach but he was still a bit too shy to make opening moves. He didn’t know how to signal his desire and waited for guys to come on to him. He hid these facts behind a somewhat indifferent countenance, which was part of his sexiness. It made me think he wasn’t interested in me. But being his Candy Man, his provider of drugs, I had become an especially desirable trophy and not coming on to him was a sure way of gaining his notice. That was unintentional; I was unaware of my exalted status, its implications, and privileges, until afterwards.

When the police interrogated him, my having ignored Gowan and not having tried to bed him must have made it easier to give them my name. He could have given them other names. I kicked myself. When I realized my coolness towards the boy accounted for the ill-fated resentment, I was too late in apprehending. I would have liked nothing better than to f**k him. But the real reason I didn’t try was that Ron had already begun a sexual dalliance lasting a week and I thought he was still Ron’s boy-toy. Nevertheless, that had only been a fling; it was already a minor note in the annals of history - Ron wouldn’t have cared and I should have made a move. But I thought if I did either Gowan, with his cool air of apathy, would reject me or Ron would be bothered by my intrusion on his turf.

He was a young unhappy teenager, fourteen, or fifteen, like all of them �" confused, dabbling with drugs, pressured by his peers, a sailor with no compass or chart in search of a lighthouse. He placed himself in our circle and company. If I had bedded him, made him my creature, he’d have given the police someone else. What might have happened then? Would some other disaster have awakened me to my recklessness in time? Would I be alive? What is certain is that his treachery began a long, often sputtering process of reversing the downward course of my life. I hope seeing the positive effect it had on me was enough to turn him around and save him, too.

It would be months before I learned the origins of my downfall and when they arrested me, I had no idea how the RCMP had discovered my half-assed entrepreneurial efforts. But an hour or two later, I found myself behind bars, confused and desolate and the immediate future was too awful to contemplate. There was the pressing problem of the post-party hangover that I hadn’t slept off and the first symptoms of withdrawal in the form of nausea, dizziness, weakness, depression, and agitation, which began immediately. It was a Saturday morning, the first day of the three-day Remembrance Day weekend making it impossible to be released before Tuesday at the earliest; I faced at least seventy two hours in the holding cells.

I was disconsolate over Cecil’s predicament �" facing deportation and living back in the US with who could tell what consequences. In my misery over the awful sentence my carelessness had laid upon my gentle friend, I could hear all too well a dusty old upright ring out a hard, self-pitying blues, with Self-Loathing blowing the horn and Desolation pounding the bass. These were among my first semi-hallucinatory imaginings as I sat in my cell, going through the unfamiliar symptoms of unrelieved withdrawal, and thinking that Cecil, on whom the fates were always particularly hard and unforgiving, was being severely punished just for keeping bad company.

I couldn’t admit I had anything in common with those in the cells around me, but I did. First, we were all tense and ashamed of getting caught. Though some of them were homeless and a few had no place to go, I myself was just a short step above it and we all had an overwhelming desire to be anywhere else. We didn’t trust each other, couldn’t identify with our cellmate, and held ourselves above the others. We were apprehensive; we half knew what was coming, and didn’t want the police to learn anything about us they didn’t already know. We were all unhealthy, and most of us were unwillingly withdrawing from pernicious substances. Many of the other guys came from the Downtown East Side, the neighborhood that included those rancid SRO’s and pubs around the Police Station, Chinatown, and Gastown. There was no camaraderie amongst us and the only mortar binding us was mutual disdain for the poor undervalued officers doing their jobs.

I wasn’t really like these guys. But then again. Well, I hadn’t always been. Why was I like them now? I fell to their level when I lost my grip on … My grip on what? My grip. We were the same after all though we were all different, too. But I didn’t come from a background of poverty, abuse, neglect, or ignorance, as most of them did. Raised to higher standards, I had most probably been better educated, too. I was a seeker of beauty, wisdom, and truth, for God’s sake. I had a taste for art and things of the mind, although they hadn’t been a part of my life for a long time. Taking the measure of the humanity in the cells around me, I was grateful to see myself, once again, miscast in this nightmare. I wonder if any of them saw themselves as better than I. Had they followed an arc similar to mine to arrive in a holding cell?

The first night, the deep, loud, chainsaw-like snoring of my cellmate on the lower bunk set up a constantly repeating nightmare like a reel of film played repeatedly. I kept waking up in sweats from dreams of racing freight trains colliding, an image that summarized my path up to then. The man sleeping soundly below knew how to sleep on those inhospitable bunks in that mayhem.

When Tuesday crawled around, I learned that Richard had been looking out for me. He contacted the legal aid lawyer who represented me in my shoplifting court appearance and informed him of this new debacle. He managed to have the trial date set far enough ahead that the six months time limit on the earlier offense would elapse before I appeared for trial on the new charge of possession-with-intent. Since it was a first offense, I had no money, and I was not a flight risk, they waived bail and released me. I don’t remember my lawyer’s words to me as we left the courtroom but he probably suggested I get lost. That would have been good advice.

I really needed downers. The first thing I did on my way home was drop by the office of Doctor Baker, our neighborhood scriptologist. He was a slightly senile old MD nearing, if not already past retirement age. The only reason he could have had to keep an office in a decrepit building with much office space for-lease in a semi-wasteland neighborhood like ours where no other doctors had offices was obviously to make money. He did it writing scripts for pill junkies like us. As far as I know, that’s all he did and if we were ever actually sick, we wouldn’t have gone to him. He was one of a breed of doctors who made a fabulous living doing that in every part of the city, for rich and poor alike. They were indifferent to the effects their prescriptions had on the lives of their customers �" they gave us what we wanted.

After some light arm-twisting, he gave me a prescription for Mandrax. He scowled at me when I asked for it, to save face, before scribbling the script and then left the room for a moment. While he was out, I tore a few blanks off his Rx pad. Then I went back to 11^th to muster a few other capsule popping acquaintances to assist in gathering as many meds as possible and start to rebuild my stash. I wrote one script each for thirty Seconal, Tuinal, and Nembutal, with an additional sixty-10mg. Valium on each, and forged the good doctor’s signature. I gave one to my devoted Jim and one to two other friends and sent them to different drugstores.

It did not come off without trouble. One pharmacist phoned Dr. B. to ask if he was out of his mind or if the sheet was a forgery. The doctor strenuously denied that he had written the prescription. Paul, the friend I’d commissioned to fill that script, cried foul, claimed Dr. B. (whose memory was soft) was mistaken and insisted on talking to him on the phone. Amazingly, he convinced Dr. B. that he had seen him after all and that the doctor had written the script. Paul left the pharmacy with the script once more in hand, ostensibly to go back to Dr. Baker for confirmation. Then he went to another pharmacy where the pharmacist promptly filled it without question.

But this was a stopgap, a minor and dubious triumph; my prospects were perilous, bleak and would be short unless I found a way to put my life on a positive course. And when had it ever been that? Scoring more of the drugs that had made such mischief for me in the first place was a foolish thing. Making plans and seeing them through was never my forte and now that defect lay at the root of this new indecisiveness. Time was sort; the trial was set for mid-January, six weeks off. I was wired and, without help, I couldn’t see a way out, much less expect to find the calm and perspective to form a sensible plan and follow it.

When such thoughts entered my mind, I thought it would be wise to clear my head by distancing myself from the last two years, and weigh my options again somewhere else- although there was only one option, to reform from top to bottom and reinvent myself. I wasn’t ready to admit that my life had all been a failure.

Now desperate to run away from the past, I called my friend Huey, the same Huey I had known in Toronto, with whom I had stayed in touch by phone. He was working in Puppet Theater in Montréal and living with a young lover, Reid. Not wanting to frighten him, I merely sketched what had happened to me and asked if I might be welcome there until my court date. I told him I needed a breather, and a change from the people and social situations that were dragging me down. He half-understood. Though he knew me fairly well and had been something of a druggy, when I knew him, Hugh couldn’t have realized that from the relatively happy and healthy party-person I was two years before, I’d become a time bomb. He said I’d be welcome if I’d pay my way by selling Christmas wreaths, a scheme he had set up for Reid and that he hoped would be lucrative and a positive step for his lover, who showed less ambition than he would have liked. Christmas wreaths were not going to be the answer for me; there would be no one-step remedy. But I agreed.

What did I think I was doing? I’d never been to Montréal, knew nothing of winter in Quebec, couldn’t parlez vous, and was frankly terrified of trying to communicate in rudimentary French, not even if only to sell wreaths. I was nearly a basket case, a muddle, and loaded down with pills to share with friends who didn’t know what they were and would have been better off left in ignorance. Of course, I meant no harm as I blundered into blustery Montreal.

Friends, who either didn’t know Huey or who did and feared he would let me down, friends like Carl, could see my plan was an act of desperation and it would make me too dependent on my friend. I was asking too much of someone with whom I had never been as close as I’d wanted and whom I hadn’t seen in two years. I loved Hugh but our paths had deviated since I first knew him in Toronto and we were never meant to be together a second time. Behind my back, friends deliberated over what I might be bringing on myself, knowing they couldn’t dissuade me but trying to nonetheless. A period in and counseling was an option that never occurred to me; no one suggested it or saw much good in the idea - all my friends were as wired as I. Besides, I never admitted I was addicted and if anyone had suggested that I would ever be an addict I would have scoffed at the thought.

At the end of November, when my December welfare check came, I scraped up as much additional cash as I could and bought a ticket to Montréal. Opie came too, riding the rails in the baggage car; with someone from baggage security; they kept each other company. I sat up four nights in the coach and popped pills to pass the boring hours, either stoned in a half-sleep or passed out, troubled by dreams of Christmas wreaths and not speaking French - poor pill popping Paul had no rest. Whenever the train stopped long enough, I visited Opie in the baggage car to comfort and feed him, and occasionally I slipped him a Valium to help him relax. I was being a thoughtful master. He was a gentle, docile dog and they let him out of his kennel on a leash.

My self-consciousness vis a vis knowing no French, the primary language, colored my first impressions of Montreal, which I found cold and unfriendly, naturally. I became tongue-tied whenever I had to ask a question. Opie was pleased to be out of the baggage car and, with the exuberance of a large unruly pup, yanked me around the station, sniffing with an exuberance increased by four days of confinement. Outside, feeling that penetrating glacial December air for the first time, reigning in my dog and hailing a cab, I had a taste of the frustrations in store.

We emerged from the airless taxi at the corner of St. Laurent and St. Denis, an ancient and hectic crossroads populated primarily by lower working class French Montréalers. I found Huey’s apartment and he and Reid greeted us warmly. We sat down to beer and generous bowls of hashish, the common form of cannabis there. Reid listened eagerly to us reminisce over our escapades in Toronto, a time when Huey had gone under the name Doight-Doight. (We pronounced it Dwa-Dwa. We had made up the delightful story that Dwa-Dwa was the fourth, missing Gabor sister and originally they were Magda, Zsa-Zsa, Eva, and Doight-Doight. These were the days when we’d drop acid and Huey would do radical drag.) Reid loved hearing all that.

I brought them up to date on my own present circumstances, still omitting the most humiliating details. I tried to put events in the best possible light. The three of us partied and initially I felt encouraged on the possibility of maybe feeling human again. I brought out my stash of pills and pot, the latter being something of an exotic luxury in the east. They enjoyed the novelty of pot while I sated myself on hash, which I hadn’t smoked in years. They were vaguely curious about downers and I told them to help themselves. They experimented with them over the next few days and decided such things were not of any use in their lives �" the antithesis of energizing and no fun at all. They wouldn’t touch them again. And as for hash, it was alright but pot was preferable.

I respected Huey for risking his own security by allowing me into his love nest and was grateful to him for his loyalty. I knew he was prone to a paranoia that could lead to towering jealous rages. I’d witnessed it in Toronto and I wanted never to be present at or party to it again. I was never sure whether he demanded a commitment to honesty from his lovers, in which if you fooled around you admitted it, or to monogamy, in which neither partner fooled around. I think he wanted monogamy or both.

If you were his lover, you had always to keep in mind that he could lose it at the first hint of sexual indiscretion or deception. In Huey’s eyes, a good lover had to keep a-step ahead by doing everything to prevent his ever imagining such things, keep no secrets and be scrupulously honest on every aspect of the relationship. It really meant putting the relationship before one’s personal life. Few were willing or had the foresight to realize such devotion and focus would be necessary when they began a relationship with him. His type of jealousy really was insane. I wonder if it was a temporary hangover from his youth, because he was still young and insecure, and if he eventually outgrew it.

Huey had lectured Reid on the importance he attached to monogamy, laid it on, and made it clear what he expected. Reid appreciated that he had a good thing going with a lover who would spoil him if he followed the rules. However, he could not estimate his lover’s propensity for jealousy until he experienced it.

I knew Huey was libidinous but I had no firsthand knowledge of his skill at lovemaking. I assumed he was more than competent because he’d kept many beautiful men. Reid was no exception being a tall, dark haired, lean hippy, a sexy, sexual creature. When they retired to their bedroom, I could hear them taking their pleasure. Reid became enthusiastically, vocally aroused. It excites me when someone enjoys himself enough, and is comfortable enough in his own skin, doing whatever he’s doing, to express pleasure vocally while he’s having sex. I can’t say I wasn’t aroused being around Reid. He gave every indication that he would be willing. But the last thing I would have done was violate a friendship that had always been lighthearted and focused on fun. (Now I wonder if the sounds they made on the other side of the wall invitational. Was they into threesomes?)

Their ground floor apartment in a 19^th Century Victorian pile was overpriced, even at the low rent, that I seem to recall was only $65 a month. But then, what is a fair market price for a cold, sunless stone sepulcher set far back from the street in a courtyard? It stood at the end of a narrow alley that cast great shadows and funneled the wind into numbing gusts. This was an apartment for poor families, I thought, a perch for people just getting by, hoping life would give them a break. People have to live somewhere; Hugh was not rich and he had a lover to look after. He had few alternatives. Huey had probably rented it because it was cheap and spacious, maybe in summer when it was hot and heating it in winter didn’t enter into his planning.

But it was winter now and, as at Homer Street, the only heat came from the kitchen stove and a miniscule amount that seeped from one sporadically functioning heater in the central hall, which warmed the hall and nothing else slightly. It faced a glazed foyer door that admitted frigid drafts from the street as we came and went. Unlike the one on Homer, which had sufficed in Vancouver, the heat from the stove barely relieved the nippiness in the mostly empty Montreal apartment. There were three cold bedrooms with drafty single pane windows off the hall. The heat, which was feeble, never found its way into any of them. The dining room had no windows �" suddenly a virtue �" and opened into the kitchen where another glazed door led directly onto the Siberian courtyard, and did almost nothing to prevent the flow of cold air.

The bathroom was also unheated, and featured a commodious, old-fashioned tub that held at least fifty gallons. It might have been luxury somewhere else but that bathroom was like a meat locker, like the rest of the apartment but even colder. The hot-water tank in a far corner of the kitchen held one gallon. The tepid tea colored tap water unnerved us; we only used it for washing The tank stood beside the stove at shoulder height, midway down a pipe that ran from the ceiling through the floor. A single, sputtering, open gas jet far off in a distant corner of the kitchen was all that heated the hot water tank. The flickering light from it served one use �"to light our way when we ran to the bathroom in the night. Ice formed outside on the windows, and blocked the daylight on the short winter days, making our interior space more claustrophobic.

Opie could not dally with us long for he, too, found conditions uncongenial. I’ll never forgive myself for what happened to him. Caring for him filled me with anxiety; I couldn’t calm him and his need for exercise and fresh air were ignored. The weather conditions were inhospitable and Opie was not a Husky. He grew restive in our new surroundings of stone and pavement. He was used to the soft sweet grass of Vancouver and didn’t adapt readily to real winter. Whenever we left the apartment, I put him in the courtyard, attached by a rope to the courtyard clothesline, which allowed him some freedom while also confining him. He was calm inside with us in the daytime but he had separation anxiety and barked all the time when left alone.

I cannot explain or justify my decision to leave him in the courtyard at night. It was senseless, cruel and an inexplicable throwback to my parent’s belief that pets should be kept outside �" but more than that, it was wildly out of character for me. And his manic behavior at night, yowling and running back and forth the length of the clothesline, was also a throwback to Flushing in that it reminded me of poor Lady, the Collie who lost her voice in a similar confinement. The arctic temperatures and wind were such that he had to run and bark just to keep from freezing to death. Had I kept him inside with me, where it was slightly less cold, we could have warmed one another and bonded more closely.

The neighbors at St. Dennis and St. Laurent, none of whom I ever met, couldn’t possibly ignore his nightly lamentations any more than we. They may have been circumspect because he was large. Be that as it may, one morning, instead of hearing barking, I heard silence. I looked into the courtyard. Had he frozen to death? No, Opie was gone; his rope hung limp from the clothesline. After a few nights of cold torture outside either he had broken free and run away, or someone �" another resident of the building? Huey? Reid? �" had freed him. No, they had freed us. I could only hope Opie either found a good master who could give him a warmer, happier life that I, or that he was euthanized with mercy.

As ashamed as I felt over this, it was a relief. Now I had only myself, which was enough, to look after. I should have left Opie in Vancouver. Reid and I hit the streets of Montréal with holly wreaths. The supplier had led Huey to believe he could make a profit selling wreaths. But business was slow; people didn’t seem to want them and I couldn’t sell more than one or two over the entire season. But that’s me and it shows how hampered I was by my shyness in trying to say a few phrases in French. Reid, who spoke some French, sold many more than I. As Christmas drew closer, we had to admit the experiment was looking more and more like a failure. It was not entirely of my making but I had the feeling Huey blamed us. We all felt discouraged.

Thick frozen snow covered the streets, and without proper winter boots I could barely walk around. I had no spirit for the project from the start and quickly lost heart. I stopped going out with Reid in the mornings; ceased pretending I was interested in selling the damn awful things. I hated Christmas, especially that one. Reid and I met up in a pub a few times, from which I slinked back to the apartment where I would wait for their return. Huey worked in another part of the city and we only got together at night. Neither of us mentioned I had given up.

Meanwhile, Huey continued to develop as a puppeteer with a company based in Montréal. He had learned French as a child at a bilingual school and his bilingual colleagues respected him. He had his hands in every aspect of the work, from designing puppets to making costumes and writing scripts. Not as madcap as I remembered him in Toronto, Hugh was now more focused. He had a career as a puppeteer ahead of him and I was happy he’d found himself. His lover was twenty, eager and confident. His French was not as good as Huey’s but it was adequate and he was a quick learner. He had not yet found himself and seemed content, for the time being, to be Huey’s lover.

During the few weeks before Christmas, despite my shortcomings and our miserable living space, which really depressed all of us, we made the most of it and were happy, though each of us was individually frustrated in different ways. I had thus far taken no steps to reform before my court date. Reid’s frustration lay in his dependence on Huey, though a sugar daddy relationship isn’t abnormal for a gay man of twenty. And Huey was saddled with two needy men depending on him for everything. His own constant feelings of jealousy and paranoia, which stemmed from Reid and I being together while he was elsewhere - though it was nothing like he imagined �" impeded his making personal progress in his career. The three of us stayed stoned as much as we cared to, avoided discussing our frustrations, and sought consolation in all the wrong things - Seconal, hashish, and alcohol.

There was a storm brewing over money: Huey owed the wreath supplier and early on a Saturday morning, unannounced and upset, he appeared at the apartment to collect it. We were still sleeping when he knocked threateningly on the door. Huey had failed to mention this debt or that it was due, not wanting to upset us; it was only then that I learned the balance was in arrears. I stayed in my room while they talked in the dining room. Hugh kept his own voice calm and low, and spoke with reason and confidence, saying he had some of the money and would pay the balance before Christmas. But the man didn’t believe him; he wanted all of it and became irrational.

It may have been a bad year for Christmas wreaths; he may have had financial woes of his own; he may have needed money as much as we. He didn’t want to leave without all of it. Huey gave him what he had but it didn’t cover the bill. He was angry and distraught when he left, slamming the door hard. After that, we redoubled out efforts and as Christmas drew closer, it grew easier to sell wreaths. But money remained tight and we never sold enough to cover his investment. Huey wasn’t making much himself as a puppeteer and we couldn’t cover all our expenses no matter how we skimped.

Our financial shortfall added so much weight to Huey’s anxieties that he lost his grip on reality and gave in to his paranoid delusions. He now believed Reid and I had been carrying on behind his back. As we were innocent and trying our best, neither of us suspected his paranoia was going to flare. We were astounded when it came to light suddenly in a bizarre and violent incident. Late on the night of Christmas Eve, we spent an hour or two at the table smoking up and quaffing a brew or two. I wished them a Merry Christmas and excused myself, retiring into my icy bedroom to bury myself under a pile of blankets and a down sleeping bag in an effort to sleep. We had enjoyed a pleasant evening up to then trying not to think about the holidays, which for us would be virtually non-existent, my court date, and the more immediate financial pressures we faced with the bill for the wreaths being now past due. Huey had given us no hint that anything else was on his mind. If he had revealed his obsessions, we could easily have put them to rest; after all, we were innocent.

Shivering under my heavy cocoon, I listened as their voices rose quickly up to a shouting level and erupted in loud argument, accusation, challenge, and denial. I could not understand what they were saying. I heard chairs shoved rudely out from under the table, which they pushed back and forth over the floor. More harsh, loud, but incomprehensible words delivered in a staccato, accusatory fashion followed that, ending with a hair-raising explosion. The suddenness and unexpectedness of all this drama filled my gut with foreboding; I ran out to find Reid clutching his hand soaked in blood. A geyser was rushing from the broken hot water tank that now bent rakishly to one side, creating a flood seeping through the floor.

But I understood nothing except that this unstoppable fountain was the result of Huey falling against the pipe when Reid pushed him away in self-defense. Huey also had Reid’s blood on him and wore his floor length Montréal overcoat. All I saw was his back as he slammed the door, hurling accusations and oaths behind him. I didn’t catch what he said until later when Reid calmed down enough to tell me what had happened. Hugh had petulantly accused us of having an affair at which point Reid vehemently and justly denied it, making everything worse. Then he had attacked Reid with a small pair of scissors, causing the bloodshed. People had been right to warn, “You don’t want to be around when...” But why had he said nothing to me?

I didn’t know what to do first. The smell of gas leaking from the heater got my attention first and was the most readily fixable of several urgent issues. I simply shut it off. Then I saw that Huey had also stabbed Reid’s hand with scissors when he held it out to protect himself from a second blow aimed at his heart. The bloody weapon lay at our feet. I washed and wrapped his bleeding hand and made him sit still while I next addressed the flood.

Fortunately, there was no apartment below ours and it was seeping through our floor; I could assume there was space below it, but not that it was bottomless. I couldn’t find a shut-off valve for the geyser, which continued to gush, necessitating a call to the landlord, an ancient French Jew whose accent was atrocious and nearly impossible to decipher. It was around one o’clock when I woke him with news of the crisis. Gradually, after repeating himself many times, I understood that the shutoff valve was under the kitchen floor directly below the pipe. To get at it I would have to go down there through a trap door in the foyer. There was no electricity under the floor and the ceiling stood at just five feet or less. I had a pack of crumpled paper matches to light my way through the inky blackness. The floodwater was waist deep by then and the valve I sought was twenty feet from the trap door. But I found it and shut it off, emerging from the cavern wet. I put on dry clothes.

Reid and I were now exhausted. Huey had stabbed him twice; he had a shallow wound in his chest as well as the one in his hand, which was deeper. We disinfected his wounds and I tried to talk him into going with me to the Emergency Room at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur, a block away but he wouldn’t hear of it. There was nothing left for us poor, soon to be homeless guys but to let time mend our trauma �" time was the only cure we could afford. Since Hugh left us as he did, I set my scruples aside. Reid and I fell into bed together and gave each other comfort and warmth through the night. We had kept it in our pants until then because we were both grateful to Him for helping us.

The next morning was Christmas Day of 1974. We went to the hospital where they admitted him. I left him there alone with no friend but myself to visit him. I went back several times to check on him and I think he came home the following day. On the 27^th, he left for Toronto where his family lived. I didn’t see Reid again and the next few days are now a blank. Then I learned that Huey was back. I convinced him nothing had gone on between Reid and me and that his jealousy was delusional. I said he alone was to blame for the debacle, that he should never have allowed himself to lose Reid and that I would be only too glad to disappear with no resentment or regret if he would give me the train fare back to Vancouver. Huey was easily convinced and probably relieved to rid himself of me. I went to see him at the studio where he worked and he gave me the fare.

I never saw Huey again, but this year I found his obituary online. In 1979, he moved to the United States where he lived with his lover, David, in Chicago, for thirty years. He was a successful puppeteer who helped Hugh settle there and make a career in the field. Hugh died there of cancer in 2009, having achieved some degree of fulfillment in the theatre world and that stability with a partner that he always needed.

Four days later, my train arrived at the depot at Main and Terminal. I was not inclined to return to the house on 11th, where things were more dismal than when I had left. I moved into the 14th Street house. There I was welcomed back and I felt glad to be with friends who had seen me at my worst and still accepted me. My appalling account of December in Montréal - a city Richard and Carl had known well and still held dear, if only in memory - with every detail still raw and in need of no embellishment, produced gales of laughter and prompted them to recall tales of their own Siberian Yuletides in the Francophile city.

My life continued unmanageable as my day in court closed in. A friend brought my buddy Jim for a visit. We sat, talked, and had a beer or two and a few tokes and then, for some reason, Jim rolled up his sleeve. I couldn’t believe the sight of his arm now. He had continued shooting that s**t until one night when he was doing it alone, missed his vein, and injected into muscle. If doctors had not operated, he would have lost his arm. With the cruelest irony, a deep, purple-red scar now almost obliterated the dagger on his inner forearm, as permanent as the tattoo had been. They had melded into one grotesque design on Jim’s once beautiful arm. If anyone could bear to look closely enough to see the remaining bits of what had once been the tattoo, the tragedy of what he had done to himself under my influence felt sharp. The image haunts me; it’s unforgettable. His repulsive scar reminded me of illustrations of muscle tissue from anatomy books.

Time ticked slowly on and I could not keep busy enough to keep my court date off my mind. I slipped back into the groove of drugs, alcohol, and nightlife. We either held all-nighters at the house or went out to the clubs, sometimes both. On one of those nights, at Faces, I met a handsome stranger named Monty. He was a Californian who had stayed with friends in Seattle in December on his way up to Vancouver to check out our infamous gay scene.

We hit it off and a most welcome, lusty and distracting sexual relationship kept us together for a while. I related the tale of my desperate circumstances and told him I needed a way out. He knew that, aside from having been AWOL for seven years, there was no reason I couldn’t hide out down there if I kept below the radar. He offered to take me with him to Seattle on his way back to San Francisco, and to introduce me to friends there. He thought they would welcome me, as they were sympathetic druggy-hippy types. I hated the idea but eventually, as my court date drew imminent, I caved and decided, with terror, misgivings, and loathing in my heart, to give Seattle a try rather than face a judge.

I had been to Seattle enroute to Vancouver in 1967. That time I disembarked at the airport and bussed into the city to catch another bus for Canada. During the layover, I went into the Sally Ann thrift store by the bus station and bought warm clothes and a heavy overcoat that I kept and still wore on Vancouver’s occasional wintry days. I wore it again now on this occasion, on my first return in eight years to the USA.

We traveled down by bus without an incident at the border and took city transit to Queen Anne Hill, where Pauline and Phil lived. They had two girls, Torrie, the oldest, and Kate, the middle child, and the youngest, a son named Jed. Pauline was a thin, troubled woman from Victoria, BC, somewhat Americanized after living there for years. She and her husband fought. Nam traumatized Phil severely in ways he hadn't gotten over, scarred him with experiences he couldn't discuss. No one had yet coined the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but that’s what Phil had. There were, yet, no effective treatments for it. Doctors gave him prescription medications for undiagnosed anxiety. These probably helped him little; they may have made life with Phil more difficult, not less.

Phil was paranoid. He hardly talked at all, not to any of us; when he did, he usually became loud, threatening, and occasionally violent. His children had watched him treat Pauline with hostility and they were traumatized by it and afraid of him. As a day worker, he was seldom with us. His family was much more at ease when he was absent. At home, he isolated himself. He just barely tolerated me and I thought I would do best to bury my opinions and make myself invisible around him. He had contempt for Pauline’s obsession with scoring drugs, which she was seldom able to do, but never left off trying to do, as well as for other reasons - real and imagined no doubt - that I didn’t want to know. Her compulsion to score really was a wearisome exercise in futility.

Occasionally, over the five months I spent there, Phil lost his control and struck out at her in frustration. That’s how it seemed. These events left her bruised, frightened, and bitter. Her alternatives were to kill him or to take the kids and strike out on her own. Neither was feasible. She stayed with Phil because he owned the house and with three young kids, she had nowhere to turn. Phil wouldn’t give her money and Pauline had to raise them on welfare. But when she had cash hardly any went for food and most was spent scoring or, more often, trying in vain and keeping the car running.

Pauline was jinxed. I usually went along on these hapless missions, and the children did too - we had few choices other than to stay in that big dark house by ourselves with nothing to eat. Sometimes we spent the entire day driving around Seattle, visiting her friends - just acquaintances really - who never seemed to be that happy to see us. They were people who, she thought, might help her score. None of them was helpful or particularly worthwhile; I made no friends in Seattle. We were hungry all the time. I have not a single memory of a good meal, or any meal for that matter. Hunger consumed and distracted Pauline’s sad, scrawny children from everything else. I at least half understood what was going on but I don’t know how well her children did.

After a week or two at Pauline’s Monty realized he’d had enough of Pauline, of Phil, of me, and of Seattle. I had, too, but I couldn’t just up and leave like he did. He invited me to continue down the coast with him. I wanted to go north, not south, but felt I had to remain there. Pauline told me I could stay on and I wasn’t going to mind having the mattress that I’d been sharing with Monty to myself. He soon hit the highway for California and then I became Pauline’s token f****t. How I longed for Canada �" home - and worried that I would never return. After I cut my ties by skipping my court appearance, I was sure there would be trouble the next time I crossed the border. It was a while before I could set aside my fear. I wasn’t in a legal position to work or to collect welfare in Seattle; any check of my legal US ID papers would only have revealed that I had been AWOL for the last eight years.

Their house could have been great were it not cold and dirty. No one ever did housework. Her washer and dryer had long since died leaving Pauline to try to launder everything in their bathtub. On the rare occasions when she could rouse herself for the terribly heavy task, her energy ran out halfway through it and the laundry was left to soak, sometimes for weeks, before it was cleared away. While it soaked, no one could shower or bathe.

There was never food in the fridge. Dishes no one could wash for the unaffordability of soap and the absence of hot water stood in disorderly piles in and all around the sink. Cheer was impossible around the children, who were too unhappy and weak to care about anything but food. They didn’t fit in at school and couldn’t concentrate. Pauline and Phil were dysfunctional and needed a separation and therapy.

Withdrawal, poor diet, and anxiety, which precluded making any practical moves to change my direction, affected my changeable mood. I was never so profoundly miserable. But it was necessary to go through it; I didn’t realize it but this was the cleansing of my system �" it was that or slow death. Although I kept asking Pauline’s so-called contacts if they knew where I could score Barbs, apparently they were the wrong people to ask.

Not to have them was best for me and my inquiries became half-hearted as I realized that my addiction was my predicament. This belated epiphany coincided with steady slow improvement in my overall vitality as the process of withdrawal became less harrowing and my health improved over several months. I never want to forget those feelings of desperate emptiness during the dark winter and spring of 1975 and how they gradually lifted and I began to feel alive again. By the beginning of May, I was weary unto death of the misery and despair in Seattle. I felt stronger and now had the energy and positivity to contemplate doing something.

For some reason I remembered that my parent’s thirty-sixth wedding anniversary was coming up on Memorial Day. My remembering the date was as likely as snow in July �" that had to be significant. For years, I hadn’t thought of their anniversary. I had hardly thought of them, except to feel guilt for my neglect of many family events over the previous years. We hadn’t seen each other since we met in Toronto in 1972 and in the last two years, there had been only letters �" a constant stream of consistently loving ones from mom and dad and short, inconsistent, brief replies from me.

My disengagement from them stemmed from a lack of self-esteem, addiction and my avoidant personality. I had not talked to my family during the six months of my withdrawal in Seattle and once again, they didn’t know where I was. I knew in my heart that whenever I turned up, no matter what I might have to tell them, they would never turn against me. It was time to go back and patch up this relationship. I decided to surprise them with a visit on their anniversary.

Once I made up my mind, nothing could stop me. I had less than ten dollars to see me across 3000 miles but I stood to lose a great deal more than ten dollars by not going. With almost nothing but resolve, near the end of May, Pauline drove me to the highway and I started to hitchhike. I made it to New Jersey on May 31^st, the day after their anniversary. The whole trip had lasted only five days; rides came one after the other; and the drivers were generous, often buying me food. I never had to sleep by the side of the road but was always comfortable and warm in someone’s car, heading east.

At the time, I thought the best one can hope to say regarding a hitchhiking adventure is that it was uneventful. Aside from running out of money before it was over, my trek to the coast was just that, smooth, and uninterrupted. But I was out of cash when my last ride dropped me off on the outskirts of New York. The North Eastern US is the most dangerous hitchhiking area in the country. For one thing, it is illegal there; for another, traffic of all kinds is heavier; and lastly freaks cruise the highways looking for victims. That’s what they said.

For the first time in my life, I needed to ask for a handout. I don’t remember exactly where I was but I saw a schoolyard with children at play and a priest with them. I was reluctant to ask for money, but for some reason I felt less hesitant approaching a priest because I knew they are bound to help men in need. I had nothing to lose. I explained that I’d hitched from Seattle for my parent's anniversary and was nearly home and that if he would give me $10 for bus fare I would mail the money to him as soon as I could. I must have looked the part of a classic, dusty, road weary hitchhiker because the truth was enough and he handed me $10 with good wishes for a safe arrival and his blessing. I left with that and his name and address.

This Man of God’s unquestioning kindness, his actually doing for me, a stranger, what ordination enjoins every priest to do, impressed me. Confidence that, when I surprised them at the door, instead of the despair that had dwelt in me, I would now radiate hope and joy energized me.

I was amazed at how easy all this �" breaking away from Seattle and crossing the continent �"seemed after the tragicomedy of the preceding eight months. To say I was grateful doesn’t cover it; my trek across the continent had been charmed. It marked a crucial turning point for now, after bottoming with a thud in Seattle, there was a new spring in my step.

Years later, in one of many small packages of memorabilia Mother sent, there was a mimeographed one page Christmas handout addressed to them from a Father Raymond Dundon of St. Mary Magdalene Church in Springfield Gardens, New York. He had loaned me the bus fare to New Jersey. Upon arriving, the first thing I did was repay it with interest. These details - his name and that of the parish - only remembered because of Mother’s scrupulous sentimentality - flesh out my skeletal narrative.

Like the journey, my arrival and our reunion provided another reference point for what preceded the event and for what followed. It was the first time in many years I had done anything momentous to make my parents happy. When I knocked at their door and let myself into their tiny home for the first time, as though I had never really left but just stepped out, they forgot and forgave all my transgressions and neglect. I didn't need money to make my parents happy. I was thrilled to be with them again.

I was free of that itch for the drugs that had dragged me down, glowing with the achievement of hitching across the continent and ready to see my parents again. I was amazed at what I had been able to do on foot - with pennies - and at how quickly I'd already forgotten how awful it was to withdraw from downs.

I spent most of my two weeks in the east with Mom and Dad, including a few days in Brooklyn and Queens, where they showed me, the prodigal son, to relatives. I also talked on the phone with other relatives I hadn’t seen in many years, and their long forgotten but unforgettable voices were instantly familiar again. They had not much to say to me and spoke loudly and in a rush, to keep down the long distance charges.

I made a brief visit to my brother, Joe and his wife, Anne, who had recently married. Before they met, after high school Anne had lived some years in a convent where she was preparing to be a celibate nun. She met Joe after she gave up her vocation and returned to her parent’s house. They were both thirty-something when they fell in love. At the time their wedding took place I was too indifferent, too preoccupied to attend or to acknowledge it. I’ll never forgive myself for that. But they were good enough to forgive me and we spent a few pleasant hours in their apartment. That’s all I saw of them on that trip.

Joe was always detached and dispassionate but he betrayed a new and thinly veiled reserve toward me on this occasion. I wonder if he resented my returning and acting as though nothing had happened to come between us, as if my disregard of their momentous event could be forgiven, and all the years I’d left him solely responsible for whatever care and attention our parents needed, which yet had been little, was of no account. If he did, I could hardly blame him. But he didn’t ever bring those things up and I gave them no thought until much later. In time, he passed over whatever it was about me that bothered him in 1975.

Uncle Joe was now on light duty, semi-retired at the Seminary across the road from Miramar. He gave up his rector-ship in favor of a younger priest in good health. This change occurred because he suffered from a creeping brain disease that soon devastated him and left him speechless and paralyzed. While we visited with him for a few days, on one occasion he drove us somewhere. It must have been the last or one of the last times he drove a car because it was clear immediately that he could no longer manage the mechanics of it and keep his attention on traffic, stoplights, and direction signs. The experience, thought brief, was extremely alarming and we had to tell the priest in charge what had happened as we could see he should no longer drive. He had become vague; he was no longer the vital, positive man I remembered. Mother was, naturally, the most upset by his decline, which at the time was still undiagnosed.

I felt cheated that we didn’t cross the road to visit Miramar while we were there. But a retreat was in progress; we weren’t invited, and they told us a drop-in would be an imposition. That was the last opportunity when it would have been easy and convenient. After that, I never went back and one by one, all the people who would have remembered me died. I’ve always wanted to see it again, to confirm those early florid impressions of the Big House and the grounds around the estate, which remain vivid and were formative to my taste. However, those memories are fragile gold and best enjoyed as they are.

Before I left, we spent the rest of my time together in LV. Our relationship was on a new level because of the lift and greater positivity I felt after shaking my drug dependence. These changes in me, my buoyant spirits, impressed them greatly. But they didn’t understand how I came to feel so bright, not having seen me in Seattle. They didn’t have that for comparison. Naturally, they were concerned about my plans for the future. I had none and couldn’t pull something out of thin air. It troubled me as much as it troubled them. They thought I should ask God for guidance; I made no reply. Some things don’t change.

After two weeks, their world was closing in again and it felt like time to return. I had enjoyed hitching east so much that I was determined to hitch back. Mom and Dad gave me some money but couldn’t persuade me to take a safe, conventional means of travel. I took a Trailways bus to a destination outside the tri-state area where it would not be too difficult to begin. Unlike the first trip though, this one would be eventful.

Getting rides west was much more difficult than it had been heading east, but I reached western Ohio by evening on the first day. Being June, there was still daylight. The same highway patrol car stopped and took me off the highway twice. The first time, they informed me politely that it was illegal to hitch on the highway and that I should stay on the onramp. Well, stopping for a hitchhiker on a ramp is dangerous and no one would. After the first incident, as soon as the police drove off, I slipped back onto the highway and started again.

I waited some time and as darkness enveloped everything, a slow moving car crept to a stop. The way it happened struck me as odd. But when I entered, I found myself with five young black men, one of whom had a large bag of pot between his legs �" odder still. I felt extremely nervous and disoriented in their company. They didn’t talk much and when they did, I could hardly make out what they were saying. I smiled and tried to be friendly. They didn’t act threateningly but with a disconcerting naiveté. I talked a stream of nonsense to calm myself and made sure to mention that I was a Canadian, praying that would soften their attitude to whitey. We smoked a few joints but I was in no state to enjoy it.

Then from behind there appeared the same police car that picked me up the first time. They pulled us over and hauled us out. Fortunately, no one resisted. They had stolen the car but the cops handcuffed all of us and drove us to a close by station. I was extremely nervous that my AWOL status would turn up on a police check, imagining myself back in military custody. But no such thing happened. Once they questioned us, it was obvious that, as I kept repeating, they had picked me up hitchhiking and we were not associated.

The police knew I was a hitchhiker; they removed my cuffs, drove me back to the highway, and left me on a ramp. I still wonder why those black boys picked me up. Could they have been trying to help me out? I doubt they planned to torture, molest, rob, and kill me because they seemed harmless. Were they joyriding, too stoned to drive faster? They were driving like some people stoned on cannabis drive, and that may have been why the police noticed us and ran the plates.

Outside and uncuffed again, it was dark and cool and it felt like rain. As I expected, no one stopped for me on the ramp and I slinked back onto the now deserted highway. Rain was falling but I kept walking along, my thumb extended, my backpack, and my clothes getting wet and heavy. When the familiar lights of a cruiser appeared again behind me, I climbed up the slippery incline to farmland bordering above the highway that I had not suspected was there. I trekked for a while through the soft, deep mud of the freshly sewn field while this quicksand filled my low-rise boots and pulled at my tired limbs until I could hardly move without pain apprising me of muscles I’d never known I had.

The police car had long since gone by. My clothes were drenched; the backbreaking effort to lift my legs was unsustainable. I saw the shelter of an overhead bridge crossing the eight lanes of highway below me and lumbered down, sliding part of the way on my a*s and making myself muddy, too. I waited a long time until a car skidded to a halt. The front passenger door opened wide and I wondered what Ohio had in store next.

This driver was a white man traveling alone, a bit older than I, and down low in his seat. At first, I was thankful and told him many times. He was driving erratically and the scent of booze was everywhere. He swigged from a Mickey he felt no need to hide. This was a new pickle. These are the risks when you hitchhike after dark, I thought. No one wants to die like that. But after all I’d gone through already in Ohio and the pain wracking my body, I still felt torn between staying in his warm car, and the dread of losing my life in a road accident.

I tried to keep him alert by talking to him. He opened up slightly by telling me he was coming from a family funeral, consoling himself for his loss with a Mickey. It became clear that he was drunk when he tossed the empty one on the floor and cracked another. He offered me some but I declined. If I had taken a few swigs, it would have left less for him. But he was so far-gone that it wouldn’t have mattered. I couldn’t have stomached warm straight bourbon at the best of times, and this was not one of them.

We continued weaving across lanes with hardly any traffic for a few more miles and crossed into Indiana. When I spotted a motel sign, the thought of a clean soft bed was irresistible and he dropped me off at the exit. After Ohio, Indiana looked good as daylight began to show through the tapering rain. With cash in my pocket, I could afford to buy a bed, clean linen, and a shower.

When I left the car, surprised to be alive, my deliverance appeared near at hand. I didn’t realize until I got out that I still could hardly walk after my previous battle with Ohio mud. The pain, cramps, and stiffness had gotten worse as I sat in the car and I had to stop and rest many times before I reached the motel. I rested my strained leg muscles and my back for the next two days and nights until I recovered. Then I returned to the highway and finished my journey. I don’t recall any other incidents during the rest of the journey �" at least none comparable to those in Ohio.

In my absence, nothing had changed on Queen Anne Hill. Having regained a modicum of confidence after detoxifying and successfully carrying out a reunion with my family, I was no longer fearful of returning to Canada. I had enough money to go back. I could face whatever lay in store there; it would be preferable to anything that could happen to me below the 49^th Parallel.

There were no surprises at the border and I soon stepped off the Arbutus bus at 14^th where I looked down at the curb and found a lovely fat bag of pot at my feet �" an auspicious welcome indeed. It had been months since I’d smoked pot. The house was rockin’ when I entered, the usual suspects hung over in the living room with someone wailing on the stereo and a crowd around the kitchen table, smoking, and drinking coffee. Home at last.

My return surprised everyone and my hippy friends embraced me. I threw the pot on the table as my contribution to the general welfare and felt alive. These freaks were my friends; I didn’t fit into the confines of the straight world. Poor Canadian freaks lived far better communally here than poor Americans living conventionally in Seattle. Pauline, Torrie, Kate, and Jed would have been much happier in BC.

On the top floor at 14th there lived a nest of wild-eyed, young, bare-chested dykes; the leader a rambunctious, athletic, butch, drummer named Jory and the rest an odd assortment, including Miriam (Sequin) and Kathy, who were still together. Carl, Peter, Michael, and David shared the main floor. The latter had discovered that the flaky Krishnas were his kind of people: gentle vegetarians who would happily provide all his needs (except drugs) as long as he appeared to follow their principles. During my absence, the others had christened David with the Krishna name, Govinda.

Tom Mountford was keeping himself terribly busy peddling dope and he now managed Faces. He lived downstairs with his lover, a roommate or two, an entourage of pretty, young, male hippies, Jackie and her new litter, some cats, and other pets. Carol, Phil, and Dan had their own place, and Kenny and Richard now lived together on Walnut. We visited regularly.

In only a matter of days a light within came on and showed me what would become my role there. Previously the kitchen at 14^th was a place where real cooking did not occur with regularity. Kitchen responsibilities had been deferred and neglected. Meals had been haphazard with no standards of cleanliness and no pattern of mealtimes. They were not balanced repasts but snacks. Often individuals cooked something for themselves and ate alone. This lessened everyone’s overall satisfaction with the otherwise suitable and easygoing living arrangement. I could see that resolving these issues would add considerable joix de vivre and sociability to our communal life. I decided to become a kitchen slave and create a viable communal kitchen by assuming the responsibilities for shopping, menu planning and cooking.

Dinnertime became an event; people invited friends; everyone enjoyed the conviviality of it as well as the surprises I constantly set forth for their pleasure, and everyone put on weight and grew in health. Those who were at home ate together, those who were not helped themselves to leftovers. No one had to cook or shop for food or clean up �" I did everything. People sometimes made suggestions for menus that I attempted to cook and it was necessary to feed a few vegetarians, which was new to me. People contributed as much money as they could afford when they had money and I shopped for bargains every day. When they saw how much I gave them for their money, which before had been miniscule, they became more generous and food grew to be more plentiful. At that point, without my new role, I would have had no purpose in my life and left myself more vulnerable to depression and backsliding. I had no income and did this in lieu of paying rent. They could see I worked hard and took pride in what I did. Everyone was pleased to see my comeback.

None of them could have done what I did in the kitchen, the result of schooling and experience that I now at last put to some use. I felt content in this self-appointed role and an appreciative audience; my self-esteem revived. I felt centered at the stove, which became my stove, and the kitchen, which became mine, too. No one tried to take them away from me. It was a pleasure to work there. Our highly talented resident artist, Dale who was Peter’s lover at the time, painted the ceiling and the floor in traditional Asian motifs. He was inspired by the fine food and the new social cohesion of dining en famille to leave his mark on the dining area, which was just a small table and chairs by the window in the kitchen. He painted them while stoned on acid and it showed. He decorated the floor with devilishly intricate Chinese dragons chasing a flaming sacred pearl, and the ceiling with psychedelic art nouveau swirling motifs and dazzling colors. Our friends were amazed when they saw it. The Chinese landlord, who didn’t mind the way we lived, was impressed enough to bring friends there to show it to them. He said to Dale, pointing up and down, “Floor on ceiling, ceiling on floor!”

It was summer, the doors and windows were left open, and a flood of out-of-towners and tricks passed through. The limbs of the fruit trees bent with the weight of cherries, pears, apples, and plums. I couldn’t turn them fast enough into pies, Danish, and crisps that just as quickly disappeared. The sun shone brightly every day; my friends became darker than tan; and I was busy at my avocation. This was as much happiness as anyone is entitled to enjoy but it couldn’t go on forever. My concern for the future, particularly the outstanding legal charges and my failure to appear, did not allow me to forget what might happen. I vacillated between satisfaction in what I was doing and a longing for invisibility.

Around this time, Richard’s Father passed away and he went back to Peterborough for the funeral. While he was there, his brother Jim, with whom he did fought over everything, told him their father had rewritten the will and disinherited Richard from his half of an estate of several hundred thousand dollars because he was queer. It’s not hard to imagine his bitterness. He knew Jim had everything to do with it. Jim lived close to their father with his own family. While Richard lived in BC, Jim had taken advantage of the old man’s loneliness and vulnerability to manipulate him. Sore and disillusioned Richard returned and then appealed to Jim’s sense of fair play. When the lawyer finished probating the will, to relieve his conscience of any pesky guilt, Jim sent Richard $10,000 and told him to be content with that. Richard never forgave them.

On queue to satisfy both our desires, the appearance of new friends and the reappearance of former ones pointed to a possible solution. Among those from Toronto were Gerry Hawke and her partner Bob Langston, another Torontonian refugee and a new acquaintance that had moved up island and reinvented himself as a fisherman with a small trawler. They were living on Gerry’s float house in Quatsino Sound, where Gene Sanger had lived for a few months. The two of them enjoyed an idyllic life there and praised the novel experience of life in the bush. While I was in Seattle, Carl and Kenny had visited Gerry and left a resounding impression on the locals. Carl couldn’t stop story gossiping over the wonderful people he’d met and his adventures with Kenny, up island. It sounded peaceful and simple �" and wild.

Then some of their friends, in Vancouver on culture soaks, or here to see doctors and to stock up supplies, began appearing, either to crash for a few nights, to meet us, or to visit on their way to or from town. Thus, we met a number of North Islanders. They were all straight but showed no concern that we were not. They seemed to be open-minded and a few saw us as a breath of fresh air. We found each other agreeable company; they were boozers and druggies, to a point, and that helped compensate for our differences. Suddenly we were getting a great deal of North Island energy.

Joe Cook was one of these, and the first to catch Richard’s roving eye. Joe, who also had a roaming eye, was a draft dodger from California who came to Canada alone and met his wife, Lynn. He was a Hippy, an ace carpenter and a boat builder. They settled far out on the sound in remote Koprino Harbor, a speck in Quatsino Sound, once a log dump or booming ground before it slipped back into the hands of Mother Nature long when they arrived. Prior to moving onto the shore, they had lived on the thirty-foot double-ended fishing boat that Joe had converted to a live-aboard he unimaginatively named the Green Boat. He even helped Lynn give birth to Wheatie on it. They named him Tom but called him Wheatie. At that point, the three of them had outgrown it and moved ashore into the boathouse Joe had also built in preparation for his next great project.

When they first moved into it, tarps and plastic made up a makeshift temporary roof on this huge structure while he hurriedly constructed a permanent one. Eventually he built a forty-five foot long Ferro cement sailing yacht, a process that consumed ten years, saw him and Lynn separate, and reunite several times. In a section of the boathouse, he included a tiny, impractical loft in which the three of them lived while work progressed. He had never intended it for three. They had outgrown the Green Boat, which was tiny, but the loft was only twice as big. Being on land and inside a much larger structure, it mattered much less.

He acquired a fine small speedboat to use for transportation instead of the glacially slow and cumbersome Green Boat and now he wanted to sell it. Meanwhile Gerry had tired of the float house and disillusioned by life on the water in the bush. She wanted to go back to Ontario where her children, siblings, and parents lived and dreamed of resuming the artistic pursuits she’d left behind. These turns of events coincided. Joe offered the Green Boat to Richard at the same time Gerry told us we could live in East Cove as long we liked, knowing better than we that we, too, wouldn’t stay forever.

His inheritance put him in a position to buy it and take me to live with him in the bush. It wasn’t much money and he wanted to do the best he could with it. He held tightly to most of it, waiting for the right opportunity to come alone. Buying Green Boat and moving out to the boonies, where we might eventually decide to stay and buy a small piece of land with the rest of his money, seemed plausible. And that’s why we did what we did.

Thanks to the kindness of these old and new friends, escape from my problems and gritty urban realities seemed within reach. A world of new experiences and possibilities in the bush could be ours. That’s how the North Island became our next home. Ironically, we would live in the remote Inlet or Sound in the middle of nowhere, the place with that extraordinary, unpronounceable Indian name, Quatsino, that had buzzed around in my brain for eight years.

Richard and I hitched up in September to reconnoiter and see for myself the wonders in store. While we were there, I had my first look at the famous Green Boat. Under the bow was a low flat-roofed cabin with a square hatch with a glass porthole let into it. The hatch could be lifted off or tilted up. It was only there, when I propped it, that I could stand erect. Joe built a narrow bunk for Wheatie under the bow, which became mine. The galley was in the same cabin and to cook there was just a tiny oil stove only large enough for one small pot. Suspended above a narrow bench with storage under it, opposite the stove, Joe built a drop down table, eighteen inches by two and a half feet, for dining. Fresh water came through the pump in the galley by gravity feed from a twenty-gallon tank stowed on the deck above. Lastly, Joe had installed an extremely noisy one cylinder antique East Hope engine that propelled the boat at four knots. It was behind the bulkhead that separated the engine room/galley and my sleeping bunk from Richard’s stateroom. The latter had a small double bed with storage lockers below and cupboards built into the starboard side under a narrow bench. There was no head (toilet). To relieve ourselves we would have to piss over the side and s**t the same way in open water. In port, we would use a bucket, throw wood ashes on it, and cover it to keep down the smell, and empty it in open water.

When we decided to go up together or not at all, before we left Richard explained that he wanted me with him for a few reasons. He knew I needed to make changes in my life; he trusted me above all his other friends to devote myself to our enterprise - I was enthusiastic when everyone else was wishy-washy. And he couldn’t do it alone. I had compelling reasons to go. I felt flattered that he wanted me with him. I knew neither of us could do it alone. I thought the change of lifestyle would broaden my experience and adapting to new experiences would renew self-confidence, which had been recently tested and strained. And it seemed wise to be invisible again. The weather that September was lovely, as it always is in my favorite month. I absolutely loved the Green Boat; the people I met up island; and Koprino Harbor. I didn’t have to think twice; if Richard was ready, I was ready for anything.