But I am not even close to her office on Jarvis Street. I am still on Church: and Church has a few run-down restaurants, dives; and the reliable hardware store, which we all buy things from; nails; and light screws, and screwdrivers — when I was a CBC stagehand, I bought my first hammer from this hardware store; and passing mansions and remembering what I was told in casual conversations at the Pilot Tavern, and elsewhere; and now, look how things have changed, for the worse, women have now taken over the streets, and Church is known as Whores Row, and we haven’t reached Jarvis Street yet! Nondescript is the word to describe Church Street, south from Bloor, just passing Isabella. I know Isabella. Bert Hilckman, the Dutch fellow, lives in a basement, not a basement, but a space he literally dug out in the basement of a rooming house, owned by a woman who does not work in the house, doing housework, and by a man who does not work, in the house or outside. He likes beer. And he drinks his beer slowly, so no one knows how many bottles of Molson’s … including his wife; no one keeps count … he has put away, “this unemploy son of a bitch sit down, down there, all day and drink!” He took me once to the tavern, on Hayden Street, along with Bert, who was a stagehand, too, the first street south of Bloor, running between Yonge and Church. And we sat in the room filled with round tables on which were small bottles of salt, and a small bottle of vinegar, and ashtrays made out of tin, and covered with white paint and the name of the donor, and with three places to rest your cigarette, Players Plain, they could cut out your guts they were so strong, and we drank draft beer, establishing our social status as “slobs” or “men on the dole”; and the waiter who smoked as he served us, served us the three remaining pickled eggs that were in a large see-through jar, like fish in a fish tank, dead to the bottom of the putrid vinegar water; dead to the world.
If there were a woman with us, if his wife were with us, we would have sat in the better section, named “Ladies and Escorts.” But the hard-boiled eggs there, were the same as in the proletarian section where we sat, and where the painter, Kenneth Seager, dressed lugubriously day after day, year after year, in a black baggy corduroy suit, red round-neck sweater, desert boots, and thick black-framed spectacles which warned you that Ken was near-sighted; and in this room, where it is said, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, he ate hamburgers all day, “well done, with chips, no mustard and heavy on the ketchup,” every day of the year — except when his sister invited him for a meal on Sundays — and where he found his inspiration for his huge paintings in oil, of imposing buildings that gave off a scent of religion. He painted the front of the chapel of St. Paul’s Anglican Church, on Bloor Street, a building made of stone that reminds you of a coach house. Perhaps, this is where the assistant acting vicar lives. Kenneth Seager likes to paint buildings that are more sturdy than his weak and delicate frame and constitution, healthier in their architecture of proud boasting stone. How can a man who lives on well-done hamburgers, for breakfast, so they say; for lunch and dinner, so they say; and at Christmas and Easter, and who paints the brown-black meat with the thick red of ketchup, live to paint the city’s architecture and leave behind for us, the generations that follow after him, the correct idea, the correct and recognizable brushstrokes of our cultural wholesomeness? And he did this, before the city got cocky and turned its attention to, and asked for the authenticity of, “real-estate developers?” The mayors of this city, from 1963 until the reign of David Crombie, did not like architects and town planners.
I walk music-less in these streets, Hayden, then Charles, Isabella, then Gloucester, then Dundonald, then Wellesley, buildings with apartments in them. But there is one off this street where Bert lives, in a hole in the ground, a hole he has transformed into a palace and that caused the landlord, between sips of Labatt Blue, to bargain: “Would you fix up our place if I charge you half the rent?”
Bert gives us hard, dark, blackish, Dutch chocolates every fortnight, when his father, who makes chocolates, sends him a parcel of chocolates, and a pouch of Dutch tobacco for me, for which we run to the Charles Street post office, to collect. The rich, wholesome smell of the chocolate struck our nostrils the moment we entered the door. The parcel had been wrapped by an employee in Bert’s father’s chocolate-making firm. He could not have known, the pungency of the power of scent, under the arms of the postal clerks in Toronto.
Maitland, Alexander … turn left here, and walk beside the elementary school, and turn a short left, and I am beside Studio 7 where the big live shows are done. Eugene Onegin, all the Chevrolet Sunday Night dramas, Wayne and Shuster Comedy Hour, and the small nook of a studio, beside it, where Barbara Hamilton and the Howdy Doody crew read their lines from cue cards. We called them “idiot cards.” And where Percy Saltzman, every night, except Saturday and Sunday, changes a plain black board that is green, into a work of art, with the hieroglyphics of modern, abstract art, making an art of giving us bad-weather stories, and tossing his chalk into the air as the punctuation mark to mark the end of his spellbinding presentation of foul weather that is digested by all of Canada every night during the week, as if to tell us, “You ain’t seen bad weather, yet! Wait till I talk about Quee-bec!”
I am travelling all this time and in this place, from Asquith Avenue to Alexander, and it would be easier if it was not the winter. In Toronto in these days, winter was winter: snow piled high to the knee, climbing over snowbanks and falling into them, and receiving a smile of understanding from the woman who waited for you to fall before she tried her dexterity; and cold wind blowing straight from the Arctic into your bones, ripping off your underwear you’re wearing, your pantyhose and your long johns, and exposing you to the curse and the vow, that “this is my last year in Toronto, in this winter!” But winter in Toronto in days gone by, were days of adventure, of romance, of dressing up and going to parties where food was cooked and served, and where men and women danced after dinner, no matter how small the house was. We danced to all music, even though we did not know the steps. After all, we were having a “love-in” with ourselves. Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O.” Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.” Miles Davis’s “’Round Midnight.” Even the Beatles. And Bob Dylan. And “Both Sides Now.” And this walk, this morning at ten in the deepness of winter, I left the house on Asquith Avenue, with a song in my mind. It was an ordinary song. Not a song I would listen to, intentionally. Not a sound I would buy from Harry’s Records and Used Books. Not from Sam the Record Man. Not a song I would turn the volume up on if it came over CFRB, or CHUM.
I do not listen to CFRB, because of Lister Sinclair and Betty Kennedy. I do not listen to CHUM because it plays the Beatles and Elvis Presley. There is a tune moving about in my head. It came there when I stepped down the single step of the front door of 46 Asquith Avenue. And when I turned the corner, at Park Road and Asquith, and cast a glance at the Oscar Peterson School of Jazz, at the corner of Church and Davenport, I remembered to put the tune out of my head, and think that in all the years I have lived on Asquith, so close to Oscar Peterson slamming black and white keys on a Steinway, with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen, and teaching young “musicianers” to play in similar beat and time, I had never cast my two eyes on Oscar Peterson. Never saw him “live.”
Across the street on Asquith, from my house, was the First Floor Club. Sonny Rawlins played there. Art Blakey played there, and broke three drum sticks. I caught one and put it in my study like an object to worship, for years; to give me the inspiration to play that driving, heavy bebop beat. Philly Jo Jones, Elvin Jones, and Max Roach. I wanted to be a jazz drummer, when I caught that stick, that night in the First Floor Jazz Club. But I was too shy to approach Mr. Peterson’s house that schooled young “musicianers” in the swing of the times. Before that, I wanted to be a trumpeter. Miles Davis got into my blood, under my skin, and I even bought at the Goodwill (now showing more goodwill than when the same store was called “The Crippled Civilians”) … I even bought a chair made of cane, and with an iron frame reinforcing the cane. Miles Davis sits in a chair like
this, on the cover of his album, ’Round About Midnight, wearing a shirt made of a material that looks like the blue-jeans cloth, so cool, the shirt open almost down to the middle of his chest. I tried to be cool like this. But I had only the chair. It was easier being cool, than going to the Oscar Peterson School of Jazz, and listening to the hollers and the shrieks and the mornings of first experience on the trumpet. I forego the trumpet, and think of the trombone. So large, so clean, so sliding like okras on the tongue, so simple, you blow into it, you slide the shaft out, you slide the shaft in, and you are in the holy presence of J.J. Johnson … Rob McConnell was still jamming on Monday nights at the First Floor Club, learning his instrument. And so was the Japanese musician Nobby … the trombone became less attractive. You could not get women playing the trombone. It was the tenor sax … Coltrane … then, the alto sax … Charlie “Bird” Parker, Jackie McLean, and Phil Woods; and P.J. Perry, “in from out West … blowing his ass off, and the asses of older musicianers, this cat … ain’t he still a teenager?… kicking ass!” and kicking it, still; and once I really listened to Louis Armstrong and I wanted to play the trumpet like him, feeling that if I listened to him, and liked him, and imitated his antics on stage, I would be like him. And then one night, during my years teaching at Yale, I returned to Toronto on a weekend, and stopped off at the Embassy, famous for its steaks, at the corner of Bloor and Bellair, where exactly the tailor shop is, Harry Rosen’s, where Louis Armstrong was playing. It was a sad day for Louis Armstrong; a sad day indeed. The lounge where jazz was played was empty. There must have been at most, eleven of us. I was ashamed for my city and the insult it had given, symbolically through the absence of audience, to this great musician. I thought I would go up to him, and tell him how happy I was to see him playing in Toronto. The Embassy was not like the Colonial, or the Towne Tavern. It was hidden away on Bloor Street where nothing happened. Not even Yorkville Village was exciting in those days. The artists, famous for having no money, and prone to spend four hours over one cup of espresso coffee and a Danish, playing chess, were recently chased off the streets of Yorkville by Toronto policemen on horses. But nobody seemed to notice. Not the mayor. Not the counsellors. Not the people who spent their time writing letters to editors of the city’s four daily newspapers, complaining about everything they disliked about Toronto. I think that the only person of stature who raised a voice, except those ineffectual pleadings of the artists themselves, was Pierre Berton. So, Louis Armstrong the great trumpeter was more or less relegated to a second-rate place to play his music. The deeper tragedy that visited him that night, apart from the small audience — but it was an audience of jazz enthusiasts! — Louis Armstrong’s sister had died that same day.
I was listening to “Mack the Knife” and “Saint James Infirmary,” and feeling in Louis’s playing the pain and the sadness at the death of his sister. He did not announce it to the audience. He was proper. He was elegant. In a black suit. Very expensive. And well-tailored. He was private. With a silk shirt, buttoned all the way to the neck. And in his breast pocket, his talisman. The white handkerchief. Like an orchid. Growing out of his pocket, in four furls, or leaves. I can still hear small rock-stones and the gravel in his voice, bereft, of sorrow for his sister, back in the States, Georgia, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Harlem, and Louis Armstrong, up here in Toronto cold as a tundra, warming our hearts with his trumpet.
He confessed his sadness to me as I stood beside him, reaching to the level of my eyebrows, to have a photograph taken with him. He is grinning his famous, and infamous, historical grin. All his teeth that are possible to see, are “skinning,” as my mother used to say, about laughter that was so expressive. She didn’t like me laughing too much. “skinning your blasted teeth, boy! Every skin-teeth isn’t a laugh, boy! Remember that, long’s you live!” I am dressed in a three-piece black suit, with a fairly, fiercely long Afro, wearing the tie of Berkeley College, Yale, where I took dinners, and not smiling, except with my eyes. Beside me is Louis Armstrong, skinning his teeth, disclosing both top and bottom teeth, and Betty Clarke, skinning her teeth, but displaying only her top teeth.
Three streets are left still to cross, before I turn left and walk along Carlton — why does one street have two names, College and Carlton, when it reaches Yonge? College is West, Carlton is East. The east of this city, has always been looked down upon, like a resident in Rosedale looks down, along with school teachers and principals, upon students who live in rent-controlled apartment buildings in Regent Park, put up by the city — after passing Wood Street, and Granby Street, and McGill Street…. Who would have thought in that passing McGill Street on this morning in 1965, I would, twenty-five years later, without warning, without planning, call McGill Street my residence? I say this is fate. Destiny. Voodoo. Something invisible and unknown that is guiding my footsteps. I keep coming back to the spot, to the point of view, to the belief, to the landmark, geography, and argument, from which I started. Not in a straight line. Journey is not so calculated, so drawn with slide rule and computer. My journey is a circular one. Circuitous. As if I am a lion walking around my prey, measuring and hypnotizing him, before I sink my teeth and my ambition deep into its soft flesh, to see the blood of its life spurt from its claimed body.
In my head, from the time I have stepped out of 46 Asquith Avenue, as I started to tell you, there has been a song in my head, a silly song, an extraordinary song considering the songs I like. “It’s a Man’s World.” “April in Paris.” “No Woman No Cry.” I want this one to be sung at my funeral, in the St. James’ Cathedral Church, whilst the congregation — not the mourners! — with their lips to the bottle of Jamaica White Rum, passed from lip to lip, touching the flesh, as at Communion; and followed by ice cubes in coconut water, flown fresh that afternoon, from Barbados. What could beat this sending off? The heavy breathing of the organ in the Cathedral, the plaintive strings of Bob Marley’s voice and its imprecation and the soothing stimulant of a white Wray & Nephew! To complete this farewell, all that is needed is a bowl of Barbadian cou-cou, turned mellow-mellow-mellow, with green okras like sentries and an okra-slosh to help the meal-corn slide comfortably down the throat…. But I was carrying a tune in my head when I left Asquith Avenue, a tune of no personal significance, except that if I am thinking about it, and not being able to call to mind either its tune or its lyrics, or why it is that this piece of music that has entered my head. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Why this? There are other more profoundly significant songs which bring back heartache and the sorrow of love: “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston; or “Evening Shadows Make Me Blue,” sung by Ella Fitzgerald, even before I saw a photo of her on her album, sung in the dusk and tricky double light of Barbados, after six-thirty on an evening; and, as with matters of the heart, it is always on a Friday when these tormenting pangs and reminders take over the heart, and sadness like the sadness that visits a man condemned to die by hanging, until he is dead, dead, dead, enters his body like his thinned blood; and in spite of the benediction of the chief justice who dons his black cloth hat, as he intones, in deeper lugubriousness, “… and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul,” I am pretty sure that this does not subtract from the heaviness upon that man’s heart, nor change his blood back to thickness. Life not yet lived, not even imagined, suddenly visits the poor present with gripping cancelling of the future, which suddenly becomes like a mirror, like a memory, of the present. Present and future become one. That is the feeling I suffered in the hour just after the sun had changed the green waves from golden yellow with red stripes in the shape of a semi-circle, into the darkness, the gloom, the smells of boiled chocolate and the leaves of nutmeg, oily and made substantial with the addition of “flour-drops,” soft dumplings, and Ella, like an artist far away in America, adding to my small personal torment of lost love — but was it ever there? It was all hope and fantasy and longing — as her voice anointed the song with greater sadness; and loneliness. “Evening Shadows Make Me Blue.” The shadows that
fall over Barbados, at dusk, with the certainly of a shroud the undertaker puts over a body, snow-stiff with death and disappointment, are blacker than the shadows in Toronto. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” This is Sarah Vaughan, isn’t it?
But now, continuing this small journey, from Asquith Avenue to the red brick building of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, at 354 Jarvis Street, where now stands the National Ballet of Canada, without the antenna on the small news studio, which makes your head spin when you look up, into the snow, into the mist, into the clouds, into the sun.
I have no Walkman to make my walk easier to take, especially in the winter. So, I memorize the song I want to hear. “Flamenco Sketches” from the album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, I have memorized, especially the solo by John Coltrane, every note; and I would skat along with Trane, in “So What” and in “All Blues.” It was this ability to remember all the notes that Coltrane plays, and the solos of the other musicians, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, Bill Evans, and Wynton Kelly played, that caused me to think that I could become a bass player, or a saxophonist, or a trombonist, or a drummer, without attending one lesson at the Oscar Peterson School of Jazz. I was sure I could learn the keys and the notes by heart. And when I realized that this was wishful thinking, I decided to become a sculptor.
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