When I got back to New York I was apparently in need of a haircut. I was riding the subway out to Brooklyn to visit Murray. A rather tired-looking woman in about her sixties couldn’t take her eyes off me which, as New Yorkers will tell you, on the BMT line is an invitation for violence or death. Even I had learned the famous subway gaze with which you can be packed into a subway car yet not see, or be seen by, anyone. I saw that look the first time I rode the New York subway with my uncle Sol in 1956. It startled every hair on my brush-cut head and I pray I don’t see it in Hell when I get there because, otherwise, Hell will be easy.
When I got to Murray’s stop I brushed passed the old woman on my way out. She took my hand and pressed a green U.S. one dollar bill into it and pleaded, "Get a haircut."
As the train pulled out I turned to look at the woman but saw only my own reflection in the streaming windows. I sure was a sight with that mop on top. Somehow or another it just never dawned on me, all those months in the West, that I should get myself clipped and now I saw my scrawny image mirrored in the sick light under Brooklyn streets. A disturbing vision.....but me.
I was very self-conscious walking past Murray’s mother into his Brooklyn bedroom, her eyes glued to my head. We shut the door and lit up a couple of cigarettes and I told him about the lady on the train and he agreed I looked unusual.
I was probably five or six when Larry took me on my first trip to the barbershop on the Main. Immigrant parents, I guess, saw no reason in the 1940’s to cut their kids hair, boy or girl. Pictures prove I had lovely locks back then and to this day my mother keeps curled locks of her three baby boy’s hair in a little blue box. The barbershop was huge, had about five or six chairs, all occupied by grown men, and a half dozen others sat around waiting, reading magazines or participating in the general discussions of sports, politics, etc. Framed 8x10’s hung on the walls, portraying various Hollywood leading men sporting the latest hairstyles. I suppose the idea was you’d take your pick, who you wanted to look like.
The world of Men. Bullshitting in the surgical atmosphere of crackling scizzors and flying hair. Bonding. An old half-wit with a broom mutters and drools his way around the shop under the flourescent lights and the supremely mysterious sight of men tilted backwards in their chairs with their heads wrapped in steaming towels confounds me. Another barber straps a small shiny machine to his hand, plugs it in, turns it on, and moves it around his patient's skull. What the hell are they doing? The one woman present goes chair to chair with her little bowl of sudsy liquids in which the elite baptize their fingertips. When my turn came Larry walked me to the chair upon the armrests of which the barber slapped a board for me to sit on, raising me to scizzor height. Dead boy walking.
Nobody told me hair felt no pain. Or if they did I didn’t believe them, of course. I expected blood to flow from the first slice. Well, it didn’t. But I felt the pain no less. It was a big joke to all the Men, no doubt. (Though the manicurist, I’m sure, would have saved me if she could. All my life I expected women to save me, though none ever did. I cried and screamed and still the butcher hacked away. Of course it was my yanking my poor head with every cut that caused the hair-pulling pain but I didn’t figure that out for years and by then it was too late. I’d sworn vengeance on all men. Or, at least, I’d forget to get my hair cut whenever possible.
Back in Montreal, broke again, I needed work. My brother Sam tipped me off to a job at Rideau Metal, one of his clients. Rideau’s a scrap yard and junk machinery dealer located in Point St. Charles, one of the most depressing areas in the western world. French-speaking working class catholic slum. Everything, including the people, seemed to be made from some kind of ash-coloured tin. Each day I’d pass an imposing gothic church that surely cost more to heat in one week than the entire population of Point St. Charles earned in a lifetime. I imagined myself in some third world papal slum and, matter of fact, that’s pretty well what it was. But the job looked good. I got some workclothes and a hardhat and I’d be outside, mostly, moving piles of scrap metal, cast iron, I-beams, and the like with a gang of frenchmen who ate raw weiners and drank pepsis on their coffee breaks.
I got up that first Monday morning and took a look at myself in the mirror. I needed a haircut and a shave. I hadn’t worked in a while and so had let myself go. Not by design, I have to say. It just wasn’t something I thought much about. That old lady’s dollar bill was either still in my pocket or else had gone towards the purchase of my first ten-dollar pay envelope full of marijuana from a black guy named Leo who lived on Guy Street. Dave Pinson, one of the guys I hung out with at Le Bistro on Crescent Street, also black, poet, railroad worker, took me there. Up a couple of flights into a dark apartment, jazz on the box, Leo goes off and returns with one of those little brown pay envelopes they used back then. Banks gave them out and they had forms printed on them for hourly wages, deductions, and all that and they were a handy size for ten bucks worth of marijuana. So I contemplated my mug in the mirror, with the Sweet Caporal pasted in it, and thought, "Fuck it."
As usual, the job taught me a lot about how things really go in the social setup. On the one hand there were the men I worked with. These guys still had a ways to go before getting their PhD’s, that’s for sure, but they were all straight shooters, as far as I could see. They worked hard, as did I, and we got along fine. I drank beer with more than one of them more than once. The bosses, on the other hand, (there were three) all venerated pillars of the Jewish community, sat around the office bragging about whores they porked at various scrap metal conventions. They’d be first in line waving the "family values" flag, no doubt, and demanding the lockup of drug users but regularly got shit-faced in Chicoutimi, Trois Rivieres, and even Toronto with various shiksas while the wife and kids watched Perry Como in the suburban abyss. Of course my colleauges in the yard could have a good time, too, but at least they looked down their noses at no one.
By spring my hair must have been hanging over my shirt collar and my scraggly beard finally began to look like I hadn’t merely forgotten to shave for a few months. A little historical perspective might be useful here. Forget about hair for a minute. Today you’ll find beards on bankers, priests, cashiers, bus drivers, nazis, landlords, milkmen, you name it......... A mere 30 years ago a beard could get you fired from your job, mugged, stoned (in the traditional sense), shot, ridiculed,.... You might almost escape persecution if you were a college professor but that was about it. Even Fidel Castro was vilified more for his whiskers than for carousing with Nikita Khrushchev. Around 1955 my cousin, Jerry, grew a beard and, though I knew next to nothing about his life, beliefs, hobbies, or whatever, this alone was enough to make him my idol for the next twenty years. Of course he was in show business, (radio announcer), so he could almost get away with it. As for long hair on a male head, this was enough to produce fits of blasphemy and violence. Even Zeydeh , when he saw me, could only mutter, "Rasputin". Other than Rasputin, the only other man I knew of who looked like this was the famed French-Canadian sculptor, Armand Vaillancourt. The one who built that fabulous fountain at the San Francisco Hyatt around 1975 and then spray painted seperatist slogans on it. The hotel sued but I never heard the outcome. I'd run into him once in a while at LeBistro and we'd sort of stare dumbly at each other. I was mistaken for him more than once, maybe even by him.
I was a voluntary monster. I practically demanded persecution. I was refused service in restaurants. Cops automatically stopped me on the street. Soon as I saw a cruiser I'd get my wallet ready, to show them I.D. I may also have been one of the first guys to carry a shoulder bag, an old army surplus canvas thing I picked up in an American army-navy store and used for notebooks, pens, whatever I was reading at the time, etc. This drove the cops crazy and they needed to see inside it, though I never showed them. Without the beard I’d a most likely looked like just an ugly girl but as it was I seemed to drive everyone mad. Children stoned me. My hair was set fire to on an Ottawa bus. Passing motorists yelled at me in several languages. I also attracted the attention of a certain kind of female (e.g., Booby) so there were rewards. Also, certain people assumed I was an artist, probably a genius. And they were right but, still, why did I do this?
If I was smart I could probably write a book on this subject, with many footnotes and references to deep thinkers. But all I’ve got is a failry simple idea. I not only felt alienated from straight society, I kinda despised it. And the feeling appeared to be mutual. By adopting this deviant appearance I pretty well guaranteed that there’d be no slip-ups on either side and that, besides expressing my wild spirit, I’d have no choice but to live my life beyond the depraved domain of Good Housekeeping approved culture. More or less.
I rented my first pad, a funky old flat at 55 Guilbault Street, from an old Greek couple that lived around the corner on Pine. Forty dollars a month. When I left the landlord’s flat after signing the lease and all I passed his son coming up the stairs. I heard him yelling at the poor old guy when he got inside. "What??? You rented to a beatnik???" At least he didn’t call me an existentialist.
It turned out to be one of the great pads of the century. A one bedroom layout with sloping floors, walls which consisted of about 100 layers of paint over 100 layers of wallpaper, and a gas-burning hot-water tank in the kitchen. I rarely bathed in those days because the bathroom scared me. Though I never saw the rats they ate any food left out and left little calling cards here and there. Roaches, dust, and mystery were my roommates. It worried me at first with it’s blazing yellow walls and secret passageway from the bedroom to a separate little structure out back that was a kind of storage area where I’d hide out and smoke dope occasionally. There was an old mattress left behind, all the furniture I had at first, that I assumed someone had died on and so for a year I slept with a ghost. But it got to be known that I was available to have a good time night or day so visitors abounded, wine, drugs, and even once the amazingly lovely Lebanese femme fatale, Yvette, who literally drove men mad, danced naked to Ray Charles (Genius + Soul = Jazz). One night Harvey came by and asked if he could sleep the night there. I’d been in the bedroom (which was my study, actually. I slept in the living room) at my typewriter. It might have been one or two in the morning. He went to sleep on the extra mattress in the livingroom. I kept writing. About an hour later Christian Beaugrandechampagne Sivrell, the French-Canadian beatnik, dropped by and we went out for something to eat. We got back around four. All the lights were blazing and we could hear jazz pounding the windows from halfway down the street. Inside a half-dozen or so revellers were partying with jugs of wine, dancing to the music on the mono hifi while bleary-eyed Harvey sat draped in his blaket on the mattress scowling in utter defeat.
Meanwhile I went to work at the scrapyard. I don’t remembering missing a single day and if I was ever late it was by minutes only. I liked the job. I was busy and the time went by quickly. Everyday after work when I walked to the busstop (this was before I got my bike) I passed the massive, expensive church and I saw the dark woman in the black trenchcoat.
All day long truckloads of scrap metals came in and went out. We loaded and unloaded the trucks, sorted the metal into growing and shrinking piles of steel, iron, brass, copper, aluminum, lead, etc. The work was dirty and hard and in the summer the sun beat down and we could see the metal dust we breathed. I felt like I was handling the raw materials of creation. I wore a hardhat and heavy gloves inside which my hands sweated. Somehow, the bosses decided I had more on the ball in the brain department so had me doing all kinds of extra work, figuring things out. I helped out in the office with bookwork and answered the phone. Half the time the callers spoke french so I had to say "attends minute" and call Rusty, the bilingual office manager. Guys pulling kid’s wagons loaded with various metal junk they found in the streets and alleys would come in and I’d have to weigh the shit up and pay them a few dollars.
They also had another business going there which was buying and selling used machines. The gym-sized warehouse was a jungle of old motors, air compressors, puddles of black oil, and the like. Suspended from mid-ceiling a long steel I-beam on a pivot swung to reach the whole area and hanging from that a long pulley was used to lift and move these heavy objects, using the principle of mechanical advantage which seemed to be the only thing I learned in high school that made any kind of sense in the long run. Guys’d come in and say, "I need a two-and-a-half horsepower so-and-so motor" or "a such-and-such compressor" and I’d go find it. I had a pretty good idea where things were. But to make things easier I concocted a system, using an old ledger I found in the office, of recording what was where. Pretty soon the bosses relied on me to instantly let them know what we had and where it was. This old fart, Rene, who lived next door to the yard with his family, had worked there for years and was, technically, the foreman but, for all intents and purposes I was pretty well running things after a few months.
Payday Rusty would hand me one of those little pay envelopes. The same kind that I would also get marijuana in from Leo on Guy Street. This particular Friday the main boss, Irving Burnbeam, had my pay envelope in his office.
"Brian, come in the office I gotta talk to you a minute"
"Sure, what’s up?"
"Brian, what’s with the hair?"
By now I was looking a lot like Mexican pinups of Jesus himself.
"Nothing’s with the hair. I just don’t cut it, that’s all."
"Well, you got to cut it, Brian. We don’t mind the beard so much. Just trim it up a little, that’s okay but, Jesus, that hair."
"Mr Burnbeam, I work in a junk yard. What’s it matter what I look like?"
"Uh...well, we got clients come in here. They don’t like it. They make comments."
"I know they make comments. They bug me about it all the time. Call me Jesus and shit but I don’t mind. We joke about it. What?... they’re not gonna buy your junk cause my hair’s too long? The guys in the yard rib me, too, but I get along with them fine and I do a good job here so what’s the problem?"
"Lissen, Brian. You got more brains than any a these guys here. You practically run the place. We wanna give you promotions, make you a salesman, send you on the road. We can’t do that the way you look."
"Salesman? I don’t wanna be a salesman. I like my job in the yard. It’s all I want."
Did I tell him I already had a life and all I needed was a job? I don’t remember. I remember the long pause, though. He was stunned. I suppose this went against everything he was raised to believe in. Progress, success, money, who knows?
"Brian...." He hands over my pay. "Don’t show up Monday without a haircut."
So I didn’t.