Heroes in My Head

by Judy Rebick

  * * *

  There was no way that Roger and I could continue living in that tiny apartment so we decided to find a bigger place with Alan and Diane. We found a wonderful old Victorian house on Hutchison Street, a couple of blocks from my apartment.

  We moved in on May 1, 1967. I paid our portion of the rent because Roger didn’t have a job; he just did the odd contract here and there. I have never understood why Alan and Diane agreed to live with us, given Roger’s drinking and mercurial ways. But like most of my friends, they found Roger fascinating and we were all very close friends. I guess for the three of us, moving in together was another step into the sixties lifestyle. Living together without marriage was radical enough in 1967, but sharing a house with another couple was almost like living in a San Francisco commune.

  Roger started drinking more once we moved to Hutchison Street. His womanizing, which hadn’t bothered me until then, got much worse. When he was drunk, he lost all impulse control and would come on to women right in front of me. He would also crash dinner parties and disrupt the proceedings. The worst was when he would pick up people on the street or in a bar and bring them home. These parties would inevitably erupt into loud, boisterous, and sometimes threatening scenes.

  One night when I was visiting my parents in Toronto, Alan and Diane hosted a reception for friends who had just gotten married. Roger crashed the party with some of his “friends.” That was the incident that put Alan over the edge. They got into a physical confrontation and Alan knocked a dead-drunk Roger to the ground. Like many drunks, Roger never remembered or took responsibility for his behaviour. The next day he felt that Alan had done him an injustice and tried to have him criminally charged for assault. That was it for Alan. He and Diane decided to leave. They asked me to come with them but I wasn’t ready to give up on the relationship yet.

  “We couldn’t understand it,” Alan told me many years later. “Things were really coming unglued for you, too. It was the only time in my life I was completely paralyzed. Roger was getting incredible — intolerant, mean, crazy. You were just like a zombie, more or less. You totally zoned out. Roger being extremely crazy, you being zoned out, and we being unable to cope — we couldn’t survive. We thought you should come with us but you wouldn’t come.”

  I blocked out the whole experience. It wasn’t until I tracked down Alan in preparing this memoir that he told me the story. I had confirmation of my dissociation in the past from someone else. While he was talking I had a flashback in black and white of me standing in the hallway of the Hutchison house looking into the living room, seeing and feeling nothing. Before that moment, it had always been a mystery to me why Alan and Diane moved out. I just knew that they did and I never saw them after that. I often wonder why I never tried to find out why Alan and Diane left. Perhaps part of my conscious mind was telling me to leave well enough alone.

  * * *

  Alan and Diane’s departure made Roger dry out for a while. For one thing we couldn’t really afford the house ourselves so he had to find work. He also probably realized that his behaviour would eventually drive me out as well.

  Still, he was always inviting people to crash at our place. Usually I was the one who objected to total strangers staying with us, but in early August our roles were suddenly reversed. The doorbell rang at 11 a.m. and standing there was a hippie. Roger and his friends didn’t think much of hippies. They brought too much attention to the LSD that had been flooding into Montreal, restricting their freedom to partake whenever the spirit moved them. But this guy was all business.

  “Hi, my name is Larry. I’m the road manager for Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead,” he said. “Paul Krassner told us about Roger and he sounded cool. We’d like to crash at your place for a couple of days while we’re here for Expo.”

  Jefferson Airplane was just about the biggest rock band around, but I had never heard of the Grateful Dead.

  “How many people?” I asked.

  “About twenty with our old ladies and groupies,” he said. “But we don’t all need beds. It’s cool to crash on couches and the floor.”

  I went upstairs to try to rouse Roger but he was dead to the world. So I said yes because Roger always welcomed guests. A couple of hours later when the bus pulled up, Roger was out the back door. He didn’t want to deal with the chaos and he didn’t care a whit about celebrities. One time when Rudolf Nureyev, the famed Russian dancer, was in Montreal, a friend came to our table at the famous Spanish Club saying breathlessly, “Nureyev is here; he’s right there.”

  “Is he dancing?” Roger asked dryly. If not, he wasn’t interested.

  But I was excited that Haight-Ashbury had come to my house in Montreal. It is almost impossible to understand today the ethic that made a hugely successful rock ’n’ roll band crash on the floor of someone’s house, but that was the 1960s. Only Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick stayed at a hotel.

  “She always does,” one of the band members said contemptuously.

  All of them except Pigpen of the Grateful Dead, who was a drinker, seemed stoned all the time, not just on pot but on acid. Even though I didn’t know anything about the Dead, I found them the most interesting. Jerry Garcia always had a guitar slung around his neck. He never stopped practising. His “old lady,” in the parlance of the day, was Mountain Girl, and they had a baby named Sunrise. Garcia was the philosopher of the group, and he and Pigpen would often have long discussions. I remember sitting around the kitchen table, Garcia and Mountain Girl doing most of the talking. Mountain Girl, who I later found out was one of the Merry Pranksters, was probably the most stoned-out person I had ever met.

  “I’d love to go to China,” she said in the kitchen apropos of nothing I could see. “Imagine, everyone’s Chinese.”

  “Cool,” everyone responded.

  They were great guests. They brought in all kinds of good food and they cleaned the house from top to bottom when they left. I guess it was part of the communal lifestyle to which they were so committed, but I don’t think I’ve ever had better houseguests.

  The next day they were leaving for Timothy Leary’s farm and invited me to join them. I was ready to get into the car when I realized that they were all tripping on acid. “Honk when you get to the border.” One of them laughed. That’s when I decided to stay home. Visiting Timothy Leary’s farm in 1967 with the Grateful Dead would probably have been one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life, but maybe that was the trouble. It was fun sharing their world for a couple of days, but I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to jump down the rabbit hole. My life was crazy enough; I wasn’t sure I could take more, and I was probably right.

  Roger’s wild lifestyle was slowly but surely consuming my life. I couldn’t trust leaving him alone. One weekend when I went to Toronto to visit my parents, Roger called England without telling me. When I got the phone bill it was $347. That was more than a month’s rent in 1967. Neither one of us could pay it, and we lost our phone service.

  He was also getting more violent. One night, in a drunken rage, he had gone to his ex-wife’s apartment, and when she refused to let him in he tried to break down the door. He was arrested and thrown in jail. I bailed him out but for once I didn’t believe his bullshit about what had happened. I couldn’t understand why he was still obsessed with his ex-wife and it made me very worried; the violence was terrifying.

  Then his rage exploded at home. I’m not sure I knew what it was about at the time and I certainly don’t remember now, but I do remember him tramping down the stairs yelling about something, stopping long enough to pull a phone cord out of the wall, pounding his fist through the wall, and breaking a couple of chairs.

  The next day one of his friends came over with a bottle of Irish whisky, Roger’s favourite. I knew if I didn’t do something, they would drink the whole bottle and I would have to deal with his rage again. If I poured it down the kitchen sink, they would be furiou
s. So I started drinking. I don’t know how much I drank but I drank it down fast. When I finished the bottle, they went off to a local bar called the Swiss Hut.

  Once the nausea passed and the drunken stupor set in, I decided I would show Roger what it was like to deal with me when I was a drunk and out of control. I got up and started the two-block trip down Hutchison Street to the Swiss Hut. It was as if everything — the street, the sidewalk, and the houses — was in a thick fog. I had never been so drunk. I had to concentrate to put one foot in front of the other. When I got there, they were sitting at a table with a bunch of pretty young McGill students. I sat down and said to the waitress in a loud voice: “Call the cops, I’m drunk.” Everyone but Roger thought it was hilarious.

  Roger decided to get me out of there just in time for me to puke my guts out on the sidewalk. Then he walked me home, took me upstairs to the bedroom, and left. I had to vomit again and managed to get to the bathroom. When I woke up at dawn, I was lying on the hallway floor and his dog Pele was licking my face with concern. Roger was still not home. I was sick in bed for three days from alcohol poisoning.

  That’s when I decided to leave. I couldn’t admit that I was leaving to save myself from Roger but I think he knew. My excuse was that I was graduating soon and couldn’t find a job as a journalist in Montreal. I had been writing for Midnight magazine, a supermarket tabloid. While the job paid well, I hated it and Roger was horrified that I would stoop so low to make a living. When I graduated from McGill, I applied for a full-time job at a private radio station writing news, where many of my male Daily friends were working.

  “We don’t hire girls in the newsroom,” the producer told me. “The men swear in the newsroom and wouldn’t be comfortable with a girl.”

  “I don’t give a shit if they swear,” I responded. And then I was doubly damned not only for being a woman but a foul-mouthed woman at that. Quebec’s human rights charter was not passed until 1975; at the time, discrimination against women was still legal.

  Roger didn’t want me to leave but he had promised to support me in whatever I wanted to do in my life, and he did. I think he knew then that I wasn’t coming back.

  * * *

  I moved to Toronto in early October 1967, and stayed with my parents and younger brother, Alvin, in their apartment on Bathurst Street in Forest Hill. Alvin and I shared a bedroom, which was a bit of a drag, but dealing with my father was something else altogether. I was twenty-two years old and had been living a bohemian lifestyle. There was no way I was going to listen to Jack’s rants about how long I was staying out or what I was doing, and there was no way he was going to put up with me living an independent life under his roof. I also now had the particular arrogance of a sixties radical. Whatever my parents knew, I knew better.

  “Just because you’re older doesn’t make you wiser,” I would say.

  Our arguments were driving everyone crazy, even Jack. After a particularly vicious fight, he gave me a month’s rent so I could get my own place. He had recovered quickly from the bankruptcy in Quebec. Once back in Toronto, he had gotten a job selling windows. Using a combination of humour and intimidation, he was an outstanding salesman. I was furious that he was throwing me out, even though I was relieved to be going.

  Besides the arguments with Jack, the main thing I remember about moving back home was my relationship with Alvin. He was almost nineteen and in grade thirteen. We used to laugh a lot. “My sister thinks her clothes hang from the floor up,” he would tell his friends. Alvin was already smoking dope so we did that together, too. One weekend when my parents were away, we threw a party at the apartment with his friends and my friends, most of whom were expat Montrealers. The adult closeness Alvin and I developed then has lasted for a lifetime. To this day, he remains my best friend.

  Leonard and his first wife, Maureen, had a place on Markham Street in Toronto’s Annex, which was pretty rundown in those days. When Leonard and Maureen broke up later that year, he and I moved to a much bigger one-­bedroom apartment on St. George Street near the University of Toronto. Every month we’d trade places — one would sleep on the bed and one on the couch.

  I think part of the reason I had such a close relationship with my brothers was because we had formed a bond in our childhood in trying to defend ourselves against Jack. I would not have survived these later years without them.

  Seven

  No Way Home

  Within a year I decided to move to New York City. I found Toronto really boring and became disillusioned with journalism rather quickly.

  Both the anti-war and the student movements were growing in leaps and bounds, and the assassination of Martin Luther King sparked uprisings in Black communities across the country, strengthening the Black Power movement. The youth revolution in France in May and June of 1968 had a major impact on the New Left, transforming what started as a movement for democracy and against war into a more general revolutionary movement that raised questions about capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. New York was one of the centres of radical change in politics, lifestyle, music, and the arts. I was still an American citizen so there was no legal barrier to the move and my aunts were glad to put me up. Even though I didn’t get directly involved in activism, my experiences in New York shaped many of my political views in the years to come.

  I arrived in Brooklyn in the fall of 1968. My first job was at Christina Gorby, the coolest dress store in the East Village. Greenwich Village had been the centre of the Beat movement and the jazz revival, and now it was the centre of the folk scene. But it was the East Village that was hip in 1968. It had an otherworldly feeling. The air seemed heavier and darker. Even during the day, it seemed like night. In the beautiful memoir of her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, singer and poet Patti Smith talks about “the yellow filtered light of the East Village.” Living there in the broken-down tenements filled with drug dealers, artists, and hippies was out of the question for a middle-class girl like me, but hanging out in the delis on 2nd Avenue and the bars on 8th Street, and going to concerts at the Fillmore East, was the centre of my social life.

  Christina Gorby was a great introduction to the East Village. The store sold designer clothes at fairly low prices so everyone who was anyone bought their clothes there. Among the patrons were Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, both of whom were East Village denizens. The other girls were wonderful gossips. They loved Hendrix and hated Joplin with equal passion, both opinions based on how friendly the rock stars were to the sales girls.

  One day after work one of my friends invited me to join her for dinner at a 2nd Avenue deli. Just after we turned the corner from 8th Street, she saw some guys she knew. It was two of the Yippies, a counter-culture political group that was famous for its antics during protests at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The protests turned violent. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin would be charged as part of the Chicago Seven in one of the most famous trials in U.S. history. They were already legendary. They were also hyper and full of themselves, and it was hard to understand what they were talking about. But I did understand their attitude toward me, which was that I was not much more interesting to them than a piece of meat. Sexism was pretty pervasive in those days, but they were particularly obnoxious.

  New York provided a great place for sexual exploration. In the last few months I was in Toronto, I wondered, if men could feel free to sleep with whomever they wanted, why couldn’t women? In Toronto, men looked askance at “easy” women but New York was an entirely different story. Greenwich Village was one big pickup scene. It seemed that every café and every bar was populated with men and women on the make. Without much effort, I could have had sex with a different man every night. I didn’t go quite that far but I certainly made up for lost time.

  One evening, I went to a coffee house and a very handsome and charming young Black man sat with me. His name was Wheat. He walked me home and kissed m
e good night.

  Wheat was a lovely man in so many ways: intelligent, talented, kind, funny, and loving. He came to New York from the South. He didn’t have much of an education and had a hard time finding a job that interested him. He was an artist, too. He sold his drawings on the street in the Village and they were good.

  I remember he had the most extraordinary touch, light and gentle.

  “Where did you learn to touch like that?” I asked.

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Yes, I will.” The truth was I believed pretty well everything people told me. It’s not that I was naive; it’s just that I always assumed the best about anyone I liked and I’m still like that.

  “My dad was a pickpocket. He taught me how to do it. You had to be so light-fingered that the mark wouldn’t notice a thing until he needed some money. My dad worked the subway platform during rush hour. He’d be long gone by the time his mark realized the wallet was gone.”

  “So you’re a pickpocket?”

  “Nah, I hate crowds. Can’t be a pickpocket if you hate crowds. Kind of like being a swimmer if you hate water.”

  His only other option was to work in a factory, which he didn’t want to do. Somehow he had money, but I knew better than to get into the details.

  It was through my relationship with Wheat that I started to understand racism. Walking along the streets of the Village, people would ask me for directions, even though I was the woman. When I would refer the question to him, they would walk away. It was bizarre. When I would get mad, Wheat would put his arm around my shoulder and say gently with a look of love in his eyes, “That’s the way it is, Judy. It’s only because you’re from Canada that you even notice it. I don’t let it bug me.” It bugged me a lot.