Month: May 2017

Go West Young Man…3

I also met Sandy, my sister’s best friend and our next door neighbour’s oldest daughter. She and my sister decided to come out to the west coast with all the other hippies of this so called summer of love.  Go west young dude, and dude-ess was the hippy siren call of the day. With a suitcase full of “tie dyes”, with hope upon hope and a restless thumb they all hitchhiked to the promise land.

Sandy lived in a commune in the south east end of the city. It was so cool she told me. Yes it was sooo cool, figuratively and literally, but also run down and shabby: ten of her closest friends living together under one roof. The only enterprising dude in all of this was the landlord. His dependency was not the free spirited, enterprising skills of the inhabitants of his run down abode but the municipal government’s largesse of the day affectionately known by all of the caterers of the hippy commune crowd as “Welfare Wednesdays.” And commune is just a hippy expression and a Latin word for shithouse!

Sandy showed me her space, which was in the corner of a large open basement, damp, dark and dank, with just a dirty mattress and a blanket curtain marking off her personal territory: a bare incandescent light bulb her only means of artificial light. It was sooo cool she kept reminding me. And you’re so square, uptight, so un-cool she would criticise me to no end. Get with the program she would insist. Her limited vocabulary was only limited by the amount of drugs she imbibed. The letter “C” being a predominant determinant of their nondescript and boring alphabet and part and parcel of the hippy dialogue and cultural landscape. What she didn’t tell me was the amount of times she was robbed of her food and money by her cadre of close but oh sooo cool family of friends.

What did it for me in this run down abode of a dwelling was an incident that occurred while visiting Sandy. Sitting in the kitchen on the main floor, Sandy was making me a cup of coffee when suddenly the front door was kicked in by some scruffy looking Manson like figure dude of hippiedom, stoned out of his ever lovin but lifeless mind. His eye balls rolling and puffing out of his skull; his dirty unkempt beard gave him the impression of a crazed out Sasquatch, or a mountain man. Someone who hadn’t seen soap in a very long time! Foam seemed to be frothing out of the sides of his mouth. He was cursing to high heaven, tripping out I would assume, in the hippy vernacular. Paranoid perhaps. What was really scary and sooo un-cool, was the sawed off shotgun that he was wielding in his left hand and forearm. I do hope to God he is right handed I prayed. I couldn’t move. I was gobsmacked. Just as well, as any movement by us in his direction probably would have triggered his aggression, and not in a good way.

And just as quickly as he entered, he turned and left, exiting out of the now damaged front door. Perhaps he had the wrong address I thought. I almost shit my pants and when it was deemed safe I high tailed it out of there but not before I pleaded with Sandy to come with me. She declined. “But Damian is sooo cool” she told me. Damian? Damian? Damian is sooo cool? Isn’t Damian a name for a devil? Like a Griffin, a devilish name? I thought to myself. And with a sawed off shotgun as his calling card? These hippies are sooo prone to self delusion and self destruction. It must be the drugs I thought or the drinking water or the raindrops pounding relentlessly on their noggins. More than likely it was the Purple Haze in the shallow recesses of their minds or the West Coast Bud where everyone, everybody, crazy or not, is your best friend forever, or buddy. I never returned to Sandy’s commune.

I do believe that in the two month period that I lived there, 60 days I think, that it rained for 59 of them. Exaggerating perhaps but it just seemed so. It was either raining or about to rain or had just finished raining. And with the rain came the melancholy. And with the melancholy came the empty feeling of loneliness and with the loneliness and melancholy, and vitamin “D” deficiency, came depression. The suicide rate in this city was through the roof….

Go West Young Man…2

…My sister met me at the station then took me to their abode in the downtown core. They had rented an apartment in the City’s west end, very close to the beach of a British sounding bay with water that was so cold as to render it un-swimmable. One would have an extremely difficult time finding one’s privates and taking a piss after a swim in waters such as this. And who was one anyway? Close to that were funky looking shops and high rise concourses that spread their way along narrow streets, avenues and boulevards toward a massive green expanse of a park that adorned itself with towering trees of old growth forest. But in the rain these towering, magnificent giants of nature were mostly obscured by the fog in the midst of a city that was blanketed for the most part of the year by a canopy of clouds and mist. With all of this rain the buildings of the downtown core exuded a depressed aura of doom and gloom being grey on the mind, grey on one’s thoughts with an outlook of a grey depressing world in the midst of all of this precipitation. “But at least it’s not snow, you don’t have to shovel it,” I heard over and over again. Yes, but saying this was really a defensive mechanism on one’s part, a sense of insecurity or rationalization by some idiot who chose, regrettably, to live in such a grey expanse of concrete within what is, in reality, an urban concrete rain forest. After a few days of this I wondered how anyone in their right mind could live here. The dampness of the place was bone chilling and mould worthy. But then again I guess home is where the heart is.

I don’t want to dwell too much on this place; needless to say I got a job at a paper, cardboard packaging company that had an international flavour to it. My sister and her partner welcomed me with open arms and made me feel at home. In their old beater, they took me on day trips around the city and surrounding country side. I must admit that when the sun did come out on those rare occasions, the city’s natural, geographical setting was spectacular. Only problem was that these occasions were as remote as a west coast hippy’s tendency to find a job. Me, I worked…

Go West Young Man…

My employment prospects, while numerous, were never really career worthy. In between jobs, or between a period of steady employment I would sometimes hit the road and do some travelling.

My first bit of travel occurred just after working for A.C. Wickman. Working there, polishing the fat wide ends of the tiny drill bits, I was let go just one day before my three month probation period ended. All of us rookies, who had all started at this factory on the same day, were all released, terminated, let go, made redundant, superfluous, surplus, unused, outmoded, unnecessary….fired. It didn’t matter how or why or what you said to describe your circumstances, situation or bit of bad luck. It all meant the same damn thing. Pogey! And how I love that word redundant!  Code for fired.  A nice English bit of linguistic mumbo jumbo, confusion-speak to tell someone that they’re sacked.

“You’re being made redundant” someone once told me. Great! I thought I was getting a promotion. Redundant… wow.

I decided to head to the west coast. By train! The Transcontinental…all the way to the Pacific coast. All by myself. Well not really by myself because when I got there I stayed with my penultimate oldest sister who was shacked up with a Japanese fellow. Her best girlfriend, my next door neighbour’s daughter, was also out there. You see, this was 1968, the year prior to the summer of love.  Yet 1966-69 was, in reality, the longest summer of love in history.  In the day, go west young man was hippie-speak for the wider, greener pastures of acid rain, or West Coast Bud. And I could stay with them until I got settled.

“Why not just stay here and be a stoner” someone once said. “Why go all the way out there?”

“Well, man, sunsets are really, really weird out there.”

“How so?” they queried. “You can’t see them anyway cause it’s always raining out there.

“Well man… because man, it’s like, wow man, out of site…there is no land anywhere west of there. Don’t you think that is soo cool. Soo out of site. Land I mean. You can’t see any land man. It’s out of site”

“Well yes” they thought of this stupid idiot. “Land is out of site west of there cause it’s all Pacific Ocean from there on in. Until you hit Japan.”

“Japan? Like wow man! Japan? Really? Man, that is so weird, so cool, that is so profound man.”

Good gawd I thought. The future of mankind!

My parents were fine with this although they were entirely tuned out of the reality of the drug culture. Unbeknownst to them they were letting their young son, at 17, to hit the long and winding, purple hazed road of personal freedom. I can say this now, looking back on those years, but at the time I was scared shitless.

I boarded coach on the continental at the very large cavernous platform of the enormous train station that served my hometown for over a hundred years. I could imagine then and there, at that very moment in time, how the soldiers of the Great War and World War Two felt while leaving the familiarity and warmth of families and loved ones for the trenches of France and Belgium, or the training fields of England, knowing full well that many of them would not be returning to the comforts of home. Why did I feel this way? Think this way? At this particular moment? I don’t really know but the images of troops on trains in cavernous train stations like this one just seemed to just pop into my head for no apparent reason. It was as if this thought had been ingrained into my psyche from such a young age that their individual and collective sacrifices paved the way for my very own freedom of choice at this very moment in time. As I was waving goodbye to my parents, just as the Transcontinental was slowly leaving the station, I could almost see or visualize the spectres of long lost loved souls roaming about this station waving goodbye to their friends, their families and their loved ones for the very last time, for eternity. These willowy images dissipating slowly like some mist of memory in the stillness of time.

It took over three days to reach the coast. I was dead tired as it was extremely difficult to sleep in coach. The scenery for a young lad was extremely boring. Trees, and lakes; trees and lakes; the occasional hill covered with trees then more lakes with trees around them. Muskeg, Muskox and Muskrat – it was rather musky out there with a lot of musky critters running or scampering through the musky forests of trees and lakes and streams. Then more trees and more lakes and more trees and… trees. Finally, no more trees. Just flat grassland. A sea, no an ocean of grass. More grass, then a lake, maybe a river bounded by grass on all sides, but no trees, just grass. As far as the eye could see. Grass! Sometimes a small rise would come into view, a small hill covered with grass. I dreamed of grass, of trees, of lakes of grassy knolls. It was weird man and I was no stoner.

Finally hills, as barren as Sister Mary Bernice, my elementary school principal, morphed into bigger hills which transformed into very large hills with deep, deep valleys. Valley’s covered with trees. The mountains, the Rocky Mountains: all the granite one could ever imagine. Most people see these mountains as majestic, beautiful, God’s handiwork, a reflection of his power: the very smallness of mankind in full view when measured against this spectacular backdrop. Yet all I could think of was granite. Enough granite to cover every kitchen counter top on the planet. But wait, that wouldn’t occur for another thirty years. What was I thinking?

Mountains, and more mountains, snow covered, nature’s monuments. Mountain passes that scoured a route for the early explorers: Lewis and Clark, Thompson, Fraser, Carson, DiCrapio, Morrison I thought. Unbelievable! Then darkness. What? These idiot trainers scheduled the very best transit, the transit through the mountains, to occur at night? Dopes! And they called us stoners! We would arrive at our west coast destination in the morning? Try to sleep I thought.

Waking up to a slow moving chugalug train inching its way it seemed into the outer burbs and run-down industrial sites of this so called magnificent coastal city. Magnificent in that it was a large metropolitan area surrounded be the majesty of the coastal mountain range and the Cascades: a nice name for a string of active, dormant and extinct volcanoes. Think of Mount St Helens, Rainier, Hood, Baker, Shasta and other non descript names for mountains that have the potential of reeking natural havoc, cascading death and destruction on an unsuspecting, unassuming public. These mountainous, frighteningly natural megaliths formed a formidable barrier to the north and east of the city’s metropolis but then offset by the calm waters of the Pacific Ocean bordering its northwest, west and south-western flanks. Only problem with this visual description was the curtain of rain, drizzle and mist that permeated my vision out of the coach’s dirty windows. These titans of nature and the oceanic beauty and seemingly calmness of the Pacific were really just figments of my active imagination in all of this rain, or as a described picture by some nature magazine article I read about the place.

My first impressions were not good. I found the outer fringes of this city in disarray: disorganized, third worldly in its ardour and its feel. Low rise buildings of various sizes and shapes with facades of every colour of the rainbow. Ugly purples, grotesque yellows and grim orange décor trims added to this canvass of dirty grey stucco buildings and rusted out arches and gantries of the numerous bridges that spanned the delta of a mighty river. With the dreariness of the rain and the drabness of the grey skies these colours and contours were transformed and morphed into a visual scene that reminded me of some hippy’s bad acid dream of an undulating kaleidoscope landscape of a barf induced wasteland. When we finally reached the western terminus of this national journey and could go no further, a young fellow like me could only sigh a sigh of relief that the torturous three and a half day trek in coach was finally over….

Take This Job and…9

…I was beginning to dislike this job and dislike these cheezies, so much so in fact that it felt like I gained about 50 pounds in my first week of work. What would I look like after a year I shuddered to think? What to do? I had just started this job. It wouldn’t look right if I just quit. So get fired I thought. But how? The foreman seemed to like me and the way I picked up on this job so fast. Then, it came to me. There was this guy in shipping that kept coming over to me and the cheezie barrel, scooping up a handful of these cheezie morsels for his own confectionary benefit on his way to shipping. Rather than having him come to me I’ll bring the whole operation to him. I’ll wait until Friday to do it.

When the moment came I decided that the first thing I should do is walk over to shipping to ensure my cheezie prey, this cheese-head, was working. Sure enough he was there at one of the loading bays. I walked back to my cheezie machine and fired her up for the first main batch of the day. Everything was working fine. Prior to starting the round black, brake drum like contraption where the heated corn meal is forced through these tiny holes only to expand and be cut by the thin bladed knife on the cool side, the heart of the cheezie operation, I decided to remove the blade and see what would happen. If I was lucky I envisioned the longest and largest cheezie in the whole wide world would be possible to construct. It would be a world record!

I disconnected the knife but let the entire operation proceed. Sure enough, when that souped up cheezie corn meal was thrust through those ten holes they came out the other side and expanded into ten puffed up strands of bland coloured, bland textured and bland tasting cheezies. I removed the tray and let all ten strands snake their way through the drum and through the bath of salt, oil and cheese. Coming out the other side they were cool enough to touch if not a tad bit slimy with all of that cheezie drippings. I carefully grabbed a hold of the ten strands and with careful abandon, and ever so gingerly, directed the strands out of the drum and off toward the other side of the room where the open door led down a short hallway to the shipping dock of the bays. This was careful deliberate work pulling this bundle of ten individual strands of cheezies, not unlike the sensitive work in laying cable on those Trans Atlantic cable laying ships. It would not take much for one of those strands to break, to part or to unravel during this delicate operation. Finally, I arrived in shipping. Everyone there took one look at me and at what I was pulling and in silent amazement began to laugh. George was there too and couldn’t believe what he was witnessing, at least that is what I thought by the startled look on his face.

“Where’s Henry” I asked. “You know, Henry, the corn head Gallant.”

Then I saw him. “Hey Henry,” I yelled in his direction “Chomp on this will ya.” And with that I dropped the entire bundle of Cheezie’s on the floor, watching how slowly it was being pushed by the force behind it as it angled its way from side to side toward Henry, leaving orange streaks from the individual strands in its wake. Everyone was laughing. “Holy shit” I heard someone say. I turned and got the hell out of there. And as I was walking back through the factory floor I saw the plant manager coming toward me. I could tell he was mad, mad as hell, mad as a Mad Hatter in a Humpty Dumpty potato making factory!  He was cheezed off no doubt as I heard him scream:

“Morrison, you’re fired. Get the hell out of here.”

I ran up the stairs that skirted beside my Cheezie machine, unemotional as to its most inner machinations. I almost ran through administration and reception, out the front door, requesting as I flew by that they mail me my last cheque to my home address. Out in the parking lot I ran and almost fell into my ole beater and high tailed it out of there. As a last and final gesture I saluted ole Humpty Dumpty as he sat up there precariously on that wall, that last vestige of confectionary horror, grinning back at me.

They’re all gone now. Sherriff’s, Moo Miller’s, AC Wickman, Kodak, Inter-City Truck Line, Dow Chemical Plant, Lake Simcoe Ice – even the 7 Up Booth and the Exhibition Stadium. All gone.

The Kodak campus looks like a war zone today. Abandoned buildings with glass shattered windows, boarded up or shuttered doors. All of those promising career like jobs, as my parents would tell me at the time, are all gone. Who would have guessed or predicted that Eastman Kodak would disappear. If I had stayed at any one of those establishments I would have been screwed.

Ah yes, the digital age. Don’t ya just love it?

I always wondered what happened to the Gallant clan.

 

Take This Job and…8

Suddenly, we were interrupted by another employee. Without hesitation George yelled.

“How’s she going lad?” The young man waved in acknowledgment then left the room. We wouldn’t have been able to hear him anyway, with all the racket coming from the cheezie making machine.

“Who’s dat?” I asked, expecting the outcome, shortly

Dat’s John.” George offered

“Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. Dat’s John “the giant” Gallant?” For he was a big man.

“No” George said. “Dat’s John Hillside”

“Ah yes” I added “Gallant…from up on the hillside?” I beamed

“No, just John Hillside!” He looked at me, quizzically, suspiciously, as if I was from another planet.

Okay! I give up. But enjoyable really, Maritime logic of a down homer and the personal philosophy of my co-worker George.

George was known to his mates as George “the cheese head” Gallant because back home his family made a cheddar cheese as a side operation on their potato farm.  Perhaps that is why George was attracted to this job. Fate!

The next day I was on my own. No more George. It was an easy job I must say and by noon I had it down cold. I did miss the conversation with George as those cheezies came down the tunnel to the barrels.  Standing there, sampling and chomping away to my hearts content, watching the world of cheezies go by. Every now and then one of the guys from shipping would come over and grab a handful of cheezies out of the barrel to take back to the loading dock. This became a regular occurrence.

I also had my fair share of cheezies. The only downside to all of this is one had a wicked orange stain around the lips, on the hands, fingers and down one’s shirt and pants. The stain was very difficult to get out, much the same as dried egg whites and yokes. And that machine. A work of mechanical art I can tell you. Yet after a while the novelty of this operation began to wear off and my restless nature was beginning to take hold again. I was beginning to see myself as Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times.” I could envision being caught up in the gears of the contraption and turning into some monstrous cheezie. I am sure they could make a horror movie out of this meme.