Tag: wet coast

The Two Stooges

Hey Moe, hey Larry, nyuk,nyuk,nyuk.

I first met Timmy in Grade Six. I didn’t really hang out with him but just knew of him. And the fact that he was an alter boy, so I used to see him carrying on up there on the alter during some of the Sunday services I went to. Sitting there on a side bar of pews by the main alter joking, giggling, snickering with the other alter boys making fun of the priests and members of the congregation. He was a bit of a jester in that regard.

We sort of became good friends, not close though, in Grade Eight, just as the Beatles made their debut in North America, February 1964. We both loved their music but also the other bands of the so called British Invasion: Rolling Stones, Animals, the Kinks, The Who, Dave Clark Five, Moody Blues, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Herman’s Hermits, well not really Herman’s Hermits. Of course there were other American Bands that were also making an impact around that time such as the perennial favourite Beach Boys, Sam and Dave, Vanilla Fudge, Sam Cooke, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, Three Dog Night. Supremes. Temptations, Ugly Ducklings. Unfortunately Elvis was caught up in all of those crappy musicals at the time and wouldn’t really make a statement until his triumphant come back concert of 1968. And as the 60s progressed the music became even more awesomely progressive with the likes of David Bowie, Pink Floyd, the Doors, Procol Harem, The Moody Blues, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye and CCR. Musically, it was a great time to be alive.

Timmy and I had a great deal in common in that regard. We both liked the same stuff, were big fans of the Three Stooges and along with O’Grunts and Jimmy-mum carried on like Curly, Larry, Moe and Shemp. It was pure immaturity, sprinkled with a bit of idiocy that kept us sane in those days of great transformative culture in music, fashion, film and morality. From the romantic, wholesome and family fantasy world of Pat Boone, Perry Como, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Andy Williams, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Laurence Welk, World of Disney to the likes of Alice Cooper, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joe Cocker, The Faces, Cream, Led Zeppelin and on and on it went. Movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, Easy Rider, The Great Escape, Pit and the Pendulum, The Dirty Dozen, Cat Ballou, Bonny and Clyde, Wild Bunch, Lolita, and The Graduate were radically challenging censorship and violence while pushing the boundaries of the established mores of the day. TV may have been minimalist in its content and selection in those days but it was incredibly entertaining expanding the limits of creativity and freedom of expression.

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….