'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  The landlord was in his kitchen at the rear, on the first floor, when I knocked on the door; and he himself answered, and I said I had come “to see the apartment advertised in the Star.” And he said, “Fine!” and he guided me down the back stairs, to the basement, and when I entered the screen door, which was the entrance to the apartment, I saw the pipes running in all directions along the ceiling, and I think I saw this first time, the sweating beads on the pipes, and I could not see into the farther darkness to the front of the basement apartment, but this did not deter me, so I shouted, “I’ll take it!”

  Allan, as it turned out was his name, was, as it turned out, gay. The term was not yet in full currency. The term people used, in public and in private, was “queer,” or it was “homo,” or it was “fag,” if you wanted to be crude; and it was “a philosopher,” if you were out to hide things. I had never met a man who claimed he was gay — openly. But he was, more than that, a good man. A perceptive man. He knew what I meant by accepting an apartment before I had hardly inspected it. He would know the history of my rejections and of my rare welcome, looking for an apartment or a room, to rent.

  “You haven’t even seen the place,” he said, with the cigarette dangling from the right side of his mouth.

  And then he re-climbed the stairs, back to his kitchen, bending his head, at the appropriate stages in the stairs that went around two right angles. And I made a note to remember where the stairs demanded a lowered head.

  Allan did not ask for the two months’ rent “in advance,” as was the custom, and the condition of renting in those days of 1959.

  We had a garden to look at during the summer; and we placed the two English perambulators in this garden, for Janice and Loretta, my young daughters, babies, really, to “catch the air.” And we had our own entrance, though it was at the rear, through bushes that declared flowers and a perfume during the summer, walking distance to Bloor near Yonge, to the same Loblaws grocery store I would picket, years later.

  I had got a job as a stagehand, at the CBC, in Design Staging, on 354 Jarvis Street, across the road from what was then The Four Seasons Motor Hotel, where Robert Weaver would later hold court, guiding the fortune and literary progress of the beginning of something somebody called Canadian Literature, or CanLit; and hold in his hands the future, and the failure of all Canadian writers. I was a stagehand. This closeness to the Czar of Literature probably explains how I got to know Weaver. All I needed to qualify for this stagehand job was my declared familiarity with a hammer. A hammer. Some people, including kings and fleeing dictators have asked for a horse, and in modern times, for a “flying horse,” a private jet. But all I needed was a hammer. A simple, ordinary Canadian Tire Canadian hammer, a tool, so long as it had claws. I learned afterwards, that to be a stagehand, you had to know how to use this hammer, your own hammer bought from Canadian Tire, at the corner of Yonge and Davenport, to rip apart “flats,” and to rip nails out of “flats,” and to pound nails into “flats,” leaving about a quarter of an inch, a nail head, exposed, so that the next shift of stagehands, “the strikers,” could more easily rip the nails back out.

  If the crew chief liked you, he gave you lots of overtime shifts. If he didn’t like you, you lived off your salary, only. I never liked many of my crew chiefs. They were racists, mostly. They had never seen a black stagehand before — except Martin Carrington, a painter at the start of his studies at an art college in Toronto, wearing jeans with blobs of paint on them, just like Markle, Coughtry, and Dennis Burton.

  Martin was a “Canadian Negro.” And there was another Canadian Negro, whose name slips my mind, who worked on the trucks that brought the “flats” to the television studios on Jarvis Street, to be put up, by us; and then to be pulled back down, by us; left outside the studios by him, because this is the way it was done in these days and nights of “live television.” And then the “flats” would be taken back to Sumach Street, from whence they had come, to be stored in the shop there, where they were also built.

  James Bacque, the author of Other Losses, an investigation into the mass deaths of German Prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans, after the Second World War, was a stagehand. Graham Coughtry, the distinguished painter, was in the paint shop, decorating “flats” for the scenery in plays and children’s programmes. Michael Nimchuk, known around town as the best University playwright, was a stagehand. Richard Outram, the poet, was a stagehand. Outram, as we called him, became a crew chief, soon after I joined Design Staging. He was not a racist. Outram gave me a poem once, beautifully printed in tasteful font and design, “Ophelia Illumined,” published by the Gauntlet Press. I have just read the first two stanzas, again; and I note that it is my Christmas present from Richard and his wife, Barbara, in 1965.

  SIR, she is couched

  Under the willows,

  Watching the water;

  You shall not find her

  Where she attends

  The slightest of motions:

  And Don Owen, who went on to make movies and films and to make a name for himself at the National Film Board, down in Montreal, speaking broken French, at the NFB.

  And then, there appeared a man named W.H. Linklater. He was supervisor of the stage crew (Studio Operations). Other men, most of whom were recent immigrants, from England, Ireland, and Scotland … perhaps also from Australia…trained by the BBC, they let you know, these gentlemen … there were no women then … boasted a superiority of experience and talent because of their origins outside of Canada. In this hierarchy, were Leonard Crainford, director of design, and A.E. Bentley, studio co-ordinator.

  In these 1959 days, I was looking after Janice and Loretta during the day, spending more time bathing babies; powdering them; burping them, cleaning them, changing them, feeding them … singing to them; singing them to sleep, so I could sneak … “on tip-toes now, boy, yuh don’t want to wake-up the children from sleeping …”

  “Rockabye baby on the tree top

  “when the wind blow, the cradle going rock …”

  From Monday to Friday; from seven o’clock in the morning, until five when Betty got home from the Toronto General Hospital, head-nursing adults, and trying to make sense of the madness of my decision to be a writer. I was nurse and nursemaid during the day, and, at night, in the basement with the sweating pipes overhead, following me like fifth columnists, stalking my movements from one room to the next babysitting and baby-screaming room, hitting keys on the Noiseless Remington Rand that made the same sharp noise as my stagehand hammer striking partially exposed heads of nails on “flats” in CBC television studios; trying to write plays in verse, in imitation of Christopher Fry, and not knowing another living writer with whom I could exchange a word to help solve my literary confusion. But I was reading. The Lady Is Not for Burning. And listening to Miles, and Coltrane, and Bird, and Art Blakey, and Beethoven. Yeah! I was cool down in that basement, remembering to duck my head from banging it, from not getting my head cracked against the sweating pipes that lined the low ceiling, that caused me to walk with a stooped back, like an old man, like the homeless men who looked into the galvanized, shiny garbage cans, left out like bombs waiting to blow up the houses in front of which they lined the peaceful peaceable houses they were left outside to guard. The homeless men were regular, on garbage days, as policemen who strolled, every day, all day, through these Rosedale streets, silent and smiling, and touching the peaks of their caps. “Morning, sir! Have a good day, sir.” And I far from home, far now from Barbados, am here. “Where you was such a blasted fool to choose, choosing Canada over England, by yourself, to live in that damn cold place, Canada as if you is a real Foolbert.” My mother said that in a letter in a red-white-and-blue air mail envelope from Barbados. “And by the way, I send you a little parcel, with the thing you ask for in the parcel. I hope the bottle don’t break. Or somebody in the post office up there don’t pinch it. And you up, in Canada, where it so cold. Your very loving Mother. Mother.”

&nb
sp; In those days of uncertainty, I was tormented by personal demons (to use the threadbare term in a context of fear) with no one, no other writer, with whom I could share these misapprehensions of writing that hugged me like a wet, cold shirt.

  Babysitting in the daytime, squeezing an hour here and an hour there, to put a word on paper the days that seemed shorter every day, to slam my frustration out on to the noisy keys of the Noiseless Remington Rand; and working as a stagehand, hammering nails into “flats” on the night shift.

  CBC’s Studio Nine was on Yonge Street, just up from the Summerhill Liquor Store, across the street from a fancy meat store that sold steaks for more money than I spent on furniture and corduroy trousers, at the Goodwill Store — still called The Crippled Civilians — and facing the entrances to Rosedale’s intractable streets which could take you walking in never-ending circles and in mazes and roundabouts, for hours and hours. It is also near — or used to be — to the art gallery that Ted, a Hungarian immigrant, a painter, owned; and who before that was the impresario, and owner of the jazz club, The Cellar, a basement on Avenue near Davenport Road, where Canadian and American musicians played in the key of John Coltrane and Charles Lloyd and Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette; and imitated Thelonious Monk and the Bird; and where I read poems that no one would publish. But who gave a damn? This was a time for poetry readings and love-ins, and paint-ins, and one night stands in the low-ceilinged Cellar Jazz Club, where Michael Nimchuk read a scene from a play in progress, and did not call it a poem. But which jazz club owner would pay a starving poet to read his poems? This was free publicity, man. The audience, sometimes no bigger than the size of the group playing Miles Davis tunes, were themselves poets!

  In Studio Nine, the well-liked, well-known, well-designed musical programme, Country Hoedown, was produced live, with the help of cue cards; and with a crew of six stagehands, “chiefed” by an Irishman, whose name I think was Carey. We were assigned to put up the scenery. Carey, if this was his name, would rip the designer’s drawing into half, and give each half to three stagehands, with a leader he had appointed on the spot. After a while, we learned how to set up Country Hoedown in thirty minutes. We were not taught how to do things; there was no welcome to make you feel at home, no indoctrination. You watched the man beside you hammering nails into “flats” and you hoped by God, that his hammer didn’t slip, and land you in the land of seeing stars and reverberating pains. “Crew chief? Crew chief, come over here! A fellow …”

  One night, we set up Country Hoedown in twenty minutes.

  How did we spend the time left over? I suspect that amongst the older stagehands, those who had worked together for a long time, those who were neighbours, coming over on the same ship from England, there would be secrets and confidences and cliques. I learned afterward that they went to their favourite late-night restaurant, Mars, on College Street, near Bathurst. Amazingly, the last time I journeyed in that area, Mars was still alive and kicking, and sputtering out those damn delicious hamburgers. But those of us who did not want to be driven to Mars, went home, or went elsewhere, with the understanding that we would be back in time to clock out. And nobody — not the supervisor of Stage Crew, not the director of design, and not the studio co-ordinator were seen during this hiatus. They all had their own schemes, hiding in secret places of retreat — probably in the basement of the Celebrity Club across from the CBC building, on Jarvis Street.

  From my own basement apartment with the sweating pipes, to Studio Nine on Yonge Street, you would walk out to Sherbourne Street, turn right, walk along Bloor Street, turn left, and pass the Ranch House Restaurant, which sold the best chili con carne, where, years later when I used to play poker in the Oakwood-Whitmore-Park Hill neighbourhood, we would find ourselves: weary and beaten by the cards and by the interminable hours over Five Card Stud, Kings and Little Ones, Follow the Queen, and Low in the Hole, and order bowls of chili con carne to regain strength, to have enough strength to face wife or woman, or “deputy”; the strength needed to try to explain our long absence from home. So, you pass this restaurant now, and continue past the small bridge leading to Bayview Avenue and the Branksome Hall private school for girls. You have already passed the lawns of Crown Life Insurance and Manufacturers Life, mowed to such perfection that they looked unreal, like the fields where football is played, artificial; and when Christmas comes, you travel to see their Christmas lights shine and twinkle like stars, decorations that presage hope of a better year, next year. With a job. A better apartment. “Man, all the best for the New Year, man!”

  And I make my landmark by the corner of Roxborough Street East. This is where I would emerge from the circuitous route, had I been fearful the children would be wakened from their long-winded winter sleep. But the writing got the better of me, in the sense that everything else, the crying of babies, the rage of the wife at the crying of the babies, the crying of the babies, which babies do especially at nights, tampering with my concentration in the small time I had in the basement from the cold and the snow, and the anger of the crew chief, not to mention the supervisors, all hanging over my head, inspecting the words I was hammering onto the store-bought typing paper from Grand & Toy, and the un-bought typing paper which friends and wife and allies smuggled out from their various jobs in their briefcases, handbags, and under their winter coats, keeping out more than the chilling wind at the corner of Bloor and Yonge … rambling in my thoughts, I completely lost sight of the time, and forgot I had to punch out; and in my rush to be punctual, and avert the stern warning written on another Remington Rand Noiseless, by Miss “odh,” the typist, and from the anger and the pen of Mr. W.H. Linklater, I left the unfinished page in the typewriter, got up from the chair in the low-ceilinged basement front-house, where there was only one pipe which did not sweat, walked on tip-toed softness through the long corridor to the rear-door entrance, not even realizing how stupid this behaviour was, as I had ignored my noise disturbing the three sleeping souls in the two-bedroomed catacomb. I trounced out, wearing my faun-coloured British Navy duffel coat, green corduroy suit, dark brown Clark suede desert boots, and a scarf; and instead finding my way in the anonymous streets white-painted in snow, streets that did not lead to any destination once you had begun to trample on their crunching cover of ice, like echoes of muffled shouts from a child; and turning right instead of left; and finding too late that I am going in another direction along Sherbourne, which I know; and knowing this, I know from short memory, that this street turns left and then becomes another street, and that this new street, which I had seen, fleetingly from a bus, or from a car … never from a taxi … for what would I be doing in Rosedale? Which person, writer, which person, writer or no writer, would I be visiting in this white no-man’s land, like a lake of power, glittering in parts where a star, or a lamplight from the room of an insomniac, or from the study of a man counting his treasures in one-dollar bills, I walk like a man trapping bears, or wolves, animals that eat men, and that men eat, and find none; but I am hearing the beating of my heart. And my bravery fades.

  I am not fleeing before the footprints of paws that will haul me back, like a contrary wind, and fit me easily, appetizingly into the jaws of doom.

  Doom rises in my breast. Doom rises in my limbs. My crew chief. The arthritis of the snow-biting wind. The wind accompanies me around turns in the uncharted streets. The trees and the telephone poles are now the same colour of white. The leaves are like decorations, and the glittering snow like flakes thrown onto the green growing tree; and the lights on houses are white. They are not like the riot of lights and carnival flashing and bursting from houses in the poorer district … red, green, white, red, blue, and yellow, glittering; and some like dead eyeballs; lifeless, and staring at you. They are not like Scarborough’s multicultural explosion of passion and love. In these days, people of respectability, people like the people who live in Rosedale and in Forest Hill, and people who think themselves civilized, who get into their cars late on Christmas nights, �
�to help digest all this turkey”; and drive, and drive down University Avenue, going south as they went every other day, into the vaults of Bay Street, “to see the lights” on the trees and statues and monuments and on hospitals, in their brave, crude colours of green and red and yellow, on places and on things where “you’d never expect to see such wildness” in colour, where coloured immigrants dared to run lines of coloured lights in trees, bringing the trees back to life in the deepness of winter, and around houses, on roofs, in front garden beds, as if they were rebuilding the houses built in repeated monotony, in their own individual choice of architecture…. Had I marked a house during the infrequent daytime ramblings through Rosedale, I would have remembered the shape of the boughs, the way the leaves hung, related the house at the corner to the name of the street, and found some bearing. But the streets were anonymous. Not visible. Just as you feel the sudden panic, sitting in a bus, in November with its disappearing light, and its windows covered in vapour and mist and breath and the accumulation of the stain of snow. And the breathings of people in a new panic of early nighttime, their breath fogging up the windows, “fucking up your vision,” you do not, all of a sudden know where you are. I sometimes wonder how explorers explored streets that had no names before they began stumbling in the white darkness of being lost.

  I am passing the cemetery on the other side from the one I would take if I were walking along Yonge Street. My feet remain almost buried in the snow. My feet disappear for a few seconds, with each step in the story-telling snow of men buried in avalanches and the wilderness of snowbanks, of women found days after they first went lost, frozen stiff in an act of attempted escape, or animals stiffer than the roasted pig we ate on Christmas afternoon, back in Barbados. And I think of the Three Wise Men. Nowadays in the dawning of a new black consciousness, we are insisting that we should have, and have acknowledgement of the “fact” that at least, one o’ these three men was black.” Give us a black Wise Man, to let the world, which is white as this convicting snow, know there is a “wise man” who is black; and that every black man, or coloured man, or Negro man out of three wise men, is therefore, a wise man. Wise Men do not get lost. They use the stars as their compass, just like the one in the car that my Trinidadian friend helped to drive to get us lost, on our way to Niagara Falls and the American border. That compass sways and moves and turns corners and stops and goes, imitating the movements of the car; still remaining still and fixed, correct, steady, and reliable. I look up into the heavens for stars and see more than I am able to count and pin down, and declare. And then I give up. It is the courage of the timid. Throw yourself upon the mercy of the cold, believe you will freeze to death and no one would know, or care.