The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife

by Peter Gatien

  “Here’s a dollar sixty—now beat it.” I dutifully obeyed. For years, Freddy managed to pay for forty-eight weeks a year rather than the full fifty-two, essentially shorting me almost two bucks annually. Since that was my profit margin per house, it meant I was delivering the guy’s paper for free.

  I was disgusted. Everywhere I looked when I was growing up, people seemed to be cutting corners and performing mean-spirited acts, simply because there wasn’t enough money to go around. Generosity was a luxury. I wanted to live in a better world than that.

  My father put in his daily grind of consistent, honest work. Though he was eventually promoted to supervisor, he spent a majority of his working life standing in front of wooden cubbyholes, sorting mail into one little box or another. Day after day, month after month, year after year. There was a nobility and integrity in this approach to life that, I’m embarrassed to say, was completely lost on me.

  One summer, when as a teenager I had finally outgrown my paper route, I was offered a temporary position at the post office. After just a few hours of performing the same job my father did five days a week, I felt my legs turn to concrete. I suffered through and saved up my paychecks to splurge on an outlandishly loud, twin-barreled street racer. The car had been painted black with a side decal of a cartoon mechanic and the vehicle’s name, “Tinker’s Toy.” It didn’t bother me that I wouldn’t qualify for a license until my next birthday.

  After I brought it home, a battle between me and my father ensued that, as brief as the tiff was, meaningfully shaped me. Bucking my old man was not something any of us kids did without consequences, since conflict impacted not only the culprit in question but my father’s mood, which in turn affected everyone in the whole house. It was the summer of 1967, when the world was divided into crew cuts and longhairs. I had grown my hair down to my shoulders, forcing Bernard to lay down the law: “Either you get your hair cut, or I won’t sign the papers for your driver’s license.”

  A license meant everything to me—mobility, respect, independence. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t optional. I had to get my license as soon as humanly possible, on the day of my sixteenth birthday.

  But I sure as hell wasn’t going to give in to my father and get a buzz cut. My spur-of-the-moment purchase of Tinker’s Toy brought the conflict to a head. After absenting myself from home for three days of unlicensed joyriding, I pulled up in front of the house with my outlandish new obsession.

  Papa was not happy. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said to me. “You don’t have to cut your hair, and I’ll sign so you can get your license, but you have to get rid of that friggin’ monstrosity of an automobile.”

  I came out of the experience with long hair and a driver’s license, which, to me, seemed like a win. I always questioned authority more than my brothers did, and the Tinker’s Toy episode was yet another in a series of clashes. Without my racer, I kept my freak flag flying, and instead co-opted an Austin Cooper 850 that had belonged to my older brother, taking over the car by sheer force of will, insisting that it be given to me and not sold by my parents. Then I accessorized it with a sonic-boom-level sound system.

  But the job at the post office had given me more than a path to a nice car and long hair that whipped in the wind as I drove it. I finally understood how Papa felt every night, how he had developed the varicose veins that ran up and down his legs like a mess of escaped earthworms.

  Not for me, I swore to myself. But options in Cornwall were limited, featuring crushing boredom and presenting all manner of dangers. My mother told stories about working at Courtaulds silk mill when she was fourteen. Courtaulds was a Norma Rae–style factory where a hand that accidently brushed against a fast-spinning mechanical bobbin could easily result in the loss of multiple fingers. I wasn’t keen on the prospect of losing any more body parts.

  Not for me.

  My uncle Sugar, one of my mother’s brothers, worked rotating shifts at Courtaulds, a hellish, disruptive job schedule that made it pretty much impossible to live a normal existence. Just when your body accustomed itself to the five-to-twelve swing shift, here comes the midnight-to-eight schedule, the aptly named graveyard shift. He took that job at age sixteen and didn’t retire until a half century later at age sixty-five, then died after three years of cancer. What a life!

  Not for me.

  But the message the town of Cornwall was sending me and every other teenager was that yes, indeed, it’s the mill life for each of us. Who was I to believe I could avoid it? The mills, the post office—it all amounted to the same thing, an existence of unremitting drudgery. Such was my hometown’s birthright.

  Our strained economic conditions went together with a second circumstance that ruled over my childhood. As a Catholic French Canadian in a society that heavily favored the ruling-class English Protestants, I was a second-class citizen. Orangiste, we called our overlords, from the favored color of their flags and banners, and they controlled the whole country—socially, economically, and politically. English Protestants dominated the poorer underclass of Catholic French Canadians, balancing on top of us, to lift a phrase from Bob Dylan, like a mattress on a bottle of wine.

  When I signed up for a kids’ football league in town, I remember the Anglo-Canadian registrar scrunching up his face in a theatrical effort to pronounce my name. “Pee-air?” he asked, examining my filled-out application. “Gah-gah—what is that last name, sonny? Gah-tee-un?” The guy nearly swallowed his tongue making sure I understood his disdain.

  Rebelling against the working-class future that seemed to be stretching out ahead of me, and looking to shed the stigma of my French-Canadian roots, at age fourteen I decided to drop “Pierre” and go by my English name, Peter.

  Cornwall was pretty clearly divided between the east end, where the French neighborhoods were, and the west end, where the English lived. The four-street enclave around my home on Vimy Avenue was mixed but predominantly English, since the wartime housing had attracted veterans and war brides.

  “Vimy” itself commemorated WWI’s Battle of Vimy Ridge, a famous triumph of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The officers in that force, all the brass from the Field Marshal Viscount Julian Byng down to the lieutenants and sergeants, spoke English. Most of the enlisted men below them were French-Canadian francophones.

  Twenty years after Vimy Ridge, when my father served in the Royal Canadian Air Force for four years during WWII, the social dynamics remained stratified. The officers giving the orders were Orangiste, and those on the receiving end were most often French Canadians. Civilian life followed the familiar pattern. The two largest local mills were owned by British companies, and the foremen were invariably Anglo-Canadian while the laborers were French Canadian.

  Prejudice and bigotry sneak up on you when you’re a kid. I certainly wasn’t aware of my second-class status when I was a toddler. But eventually, simply by a process of social osmosis, reality filtered in. I began to hear the word frog thrown in my direction. The slur was loaded with prejudice and social discrimination, and it stung each time I encountered it.

  Driving with my father one day, we passed an imposing building, the Cornwall headquarters of the Orange Lodge, the Grand Order of British America. “What’s that, Papa?” I asked.

  “It’s like a club,” he answered dismissively.

  “A club,” I repeated, catching his tone and turning his response over in my mind. “Why aren’t we members?”

  “They don’t want people like us.”

  People like us.

  The situation improved during the Quiet Revolution in the 1970s, and especially with the rise of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s, helping to elevate the social status of French Canadians. But even in the 1950s and 1960s there were glimpses of light in the darkness. Predictably, the breakthrough in Canadian equality came via the national pastime of hockey. When I was just a kid, a high-scoring superstar forward from Montreal, Maurice “Rocket” Richard, was outspoken in his criticism of social bi
gotry.

  The same two-tier class system existed in hockey as it did in Canadian culture as a whole. The Montreal Canadiens was the team of French Canada, while the Toronto Maple Leafs were favored by the Anglos. But Richard, a fiercely physical player, challenged his coaches, other players, even opposing fans on their ingrained prejudice. He played a generation before my time, but his legend lived on. Like me, he had First Nation ancestry, and I gloried in his take-me-as-I-am attitude. He insisted his coach speak to him in French, for example. He was an icon of our proud heritage, and my father, my brothers, and I idolized him, as did every French Canadian we knew. Rocket Richard was both our Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and our Jackie Robinson, with a little of Muhammad Ali thrown in for good measure.

  During the 1954–55 season, a violent altercation on the ice led to local police attempting to arrest Richard after the game. NHL President Clarence Campbell, a stiff-upper-lip Brit if there ever was one, slapped a season-long suspension on Richard. On the first Montreal home game after Rocket Richard returned, thousands of demonstrators gathered and waved “Vive Richard” placards. Campbell had the gall to attend, and was punched in the face by an outraged fan. Outside the arena, French Canadians battled police, injuring a dozen cops during a looting rampage that culminated in fires, overturned cars, and almost a million dollars of damage to downtown businesses.

  I was too young to remember the riot, but I heard about it time and again growing up. Rocket was the hero of the family and of the neighborhood. Hockey was a religion just behind Catholicism. The whole country slowed to a stop every Saturday night to watch the hockey game of the week on TV. Watching Rocket play represented an act of defiance when people like us were getting the social shit beat out of them elsewhere in the culture. Tuning in to see a French Canadian wailing on Orangiste ass felt like its own type of freedom.

  But the joy of watching Rocket didn’t stretch much beyond the weekly match, and the Saturday high gave way to Sunday doldrums. My parents, devoted and observant Catholics, attended mass often and made sure their sons did, too. I served as an altar boy, trudging through the freezing cold Ontario mornings for six-thirty mass and then staying to attend seven o’clock mass, collecting fifty or sixty cents a week for my trouble.

  I also attended Catholic schools, where catechism was always the first subject of the day. After grade school, up to ninth grade, I attended a Jesuit institution, College Classique de Cornwall, where all the teachers were members of the order of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits were pious and intellectually rigorous. Math and science were taught in English, and everything else was in French.

  “Give me a child by the age of seven and I will mold him for life,” runs the maxim of the Jesuits, but I might have been the exception that proves the rule. They taught old-style fire-and-brimstone Catholicism, traditional and strict. I was once even punched in the head for laughing in class. It was as if the liberalizing influence of Vatican II had never penetrated their enclave, and I’m sure some of the conservative priests would have preferred saying mass in Latin. Satan was a very real presence, and so were the fires of hell. If you weren’t Catholic, you weren’t going to go to heaven to sit beside Jesus. The heartlessness of that arrangement never sat right with me.

  When I was ten I asked my mother, “Maman, if you aren’t Catholic, the priests say you don’t go to heaven. Doesn’t that mean that all the other people who aren’t Catholic go to hell?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “But do you know Mrs. Mallion?”

  I nodded. Winifred Mallion was a nice English Protestant war bride who lived two doors down from us. She always had a smile and kind word for me.

  “All I can tell you is that, in my opinion, Winny Mallion is going to heaven.”

  I was surprised to hear my mother break with the doctrine I was getting at school. Looking back, that might have been the first crack in the brutal logic of the faith, the first sign that questioning the teachings of the Church could be an option.

  But what really knocked the Catholicism out of me was the tribulations of the Lebruns, my uncle’s family. The whole Lebrun clan was beyond religious. There were portraits of Jesus all around their house, prayer candles burning twenty-four hours a day, and compulsory attendance at mass every morning, without fail.

  Beyond their piety, the Lebruns were known as “a good family,” without the usual problems with drinking or carousing—a little boring, but always kind, respectful, and decent. One of my Lebrun cousins became a priest, and I was sure that if anything could earn you favor with the Lord, it would be having a clerical collar in the family. But none of that seemed to matter. Trouble assaulted them at every turn. The family simply could not catch a break. When Cornwall flooded, which it did from time to time, the Lebrun house got hit the worst. If everyone else got the flu for a week and then recovered, the Lebruns came down with pneumonia and spent weeks in the hospital.

  On and on went the catalog of misery, as if the trials of Job were being rained down on them. My uncle’s wife died of a sudden illness when she was just forty-four. Then, a short time later, my uncle was roasted within an inch of his life in a steam blast during a mill accident. After an incredibly painful six months of burn treatments, he recovered and immediately got into a front-end collision with a drunk driver, a horrifying crash that killed him and paralyzed his young granddaughter for life.

  Jesus, I thought, witnessing all this from afar and brooding on how moral and observant these people were. If there is a God, I don’t want Him to know that I’m alive.

  It was the 1960s, and the entire world seemed to be questioning authority. As a Catholic boy in the process of lapsing, I had a good jump start on what was happening in the wider culture. I left the Jesuits behind to enroll in Saint Lawrence High School, which, despite the “saint” in the name, was a public institution. My high school was more secular than any educational institution I had ever experienced. It was also fully coed—no separating out the boys from the girls on the schoolyard. I felt as though my world was splitting wide open.

  Because of my eye injury (oh, that’s bad) my parents had received a substantial monetary settlement (oh, that’s good). Saint Jean Bosco School paid up to the tune of around thirteen thousand dollars, the equivalent of almost a hundred grand today. My mother banked the money, spending only a little on my clothes and on tuition to College Classique while I attended there. She saved the rest for me once I became an adult.

  Things were looking rosy for me. The day I turned eighteen, I would legally be able to access the settlement fund. The promise of that cash—the type of money my parents had never seen in their lifetime of work—was, as they say, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In My Little Pond

  Growing up in a small town, I had severely limited horizons. The prevailing wisdom was that if we didn’t finish high school, we’d “wind up digging ditches,” a particularly apt warning for a mill town that thrived on manual labor. In Cornwall, even those of us who managed to get a high-school diploma were still most likely to wind up toiling at the mills.

  When my older brothers started talking about college, my father dismissed the idea. “We’re French Canadians—we don’t go to college.”

  My mother responded gently, “Oh, Bernie, come on.”

  “That’s our lot!” Papa insisted.

  Options? We don’t have no stinking options! My dad had followed a narrowing career path, but we all knew that it had led him to an unhappy adulthood, working a mind-numbing job at the post office, putting in extra hours just to keep his family afloat. All my brothers rejected his model. Encouraged by our mother, we aimed a little higher. Our hope was that going to college would broaden our opportunities. With diplomas, we might become “professionals,” which in our minds meant being either a lawyer, a teacher, or a doctor.

  So the choice was to join the mills or take up a profession. But that was as far as our imaginations took us. By
the time I reached high school, I knew it wasn’t in the cards for me to follow my older brothers into a profession. The idea held absolutely no appeal. Moe aimed for law school, and Ray would be a doctor, but their futures appeared too regimented, too safe, too square. More than that, there was too much discipline and sacrifice required, and I knew myself well enough to know I wasn’t going to put in the work.

  I dreamed about a wider world, where people had multiple options. They could become almost anything—scientists, broadcasters, financiers, authors, cellists, or movie stars. It seemed to me that there was a whole universe of lives and lifestyles outside Cornwall, but careers such as those simply did not occur to anyone around me. Even if I made it as a professional, that life struck me as just another version of the hamster on the wheel. Timothy Leary characterized middle-class life as “the assembly line of school, college, career, insurance, funeral, goodbye.”

  Coming out of my Jesuit school and heading into public high school, I knew I wanted to break out of the trap that was so carefully set for young French Canadians of limited means. The settlement money gave me a leg up, but I knew a kid who received a similar windfall after a car accident and who immediately pissed the whole thing away on massage-parlor masseuses. That’s a hell of a lot of happy endings, but I swore that I would put my little grubstake to better use. And yet, the first thing I did with my newfound wealth was buy a used muscle car.

  I had owned other cars, but the muscle car that I bought with my settlement money, a canary-yellow 1967 Camaro SS 396 convertible, was the first vehicle that really felt all the way mine, when I was old enough to enjoy it. I was eighteen and wanted to drive fucking fast. The twisty roads along the river seemed to have been laid down just for me, having called out their invitation since my tricycle days. The Camaro, I reasoned, would also smooth my way with the opposite sex. I was too shy to be much of a ladies’ man, but I desperately wanted to find a girlfriend, especially one who might elevate my social status. I had dated around a little, and had one longer relationship with a nice girl, the daughter of a local judge, but I wasn’t the most confident guy. The car, I reasoned, would set me apart from the pack.