I got a room at the Y on Burrard. If you've never spent time in a Y let me confirm your worst, or best, suspicions. They're full of homos. I've been propositioned in Y's coast to coast. Before I caught on to the action I kept wondering why guys in the showers were always bumping into me. I don't know if it's still true but used to be you swam naked in Y pools. And I'm sure I musta had a cute wienie in my youth. Was it in the Regina Y where I spotted "turn around for a blow-job" scrawled above the urinal? Sure enough, after zipping up I turned to see a naked guy sitting in the stall right behind where I'd just relieved myself, the door wide open. But the Y's were a good deal. Economical, clean, the staff generally pretty helpful (Christian, I guess), and blow-jobs were cheap and plentiful. I persuaded the manager at the Vancouver Y to let me a have a room on the cuff, as I was completely broke.
Any value this memoir might have would be in the recounting of how I managed to do whatever I did with no money. It would be knowledge worth having now. Half the time I was broke. I spent many days or nights sleeping in parks and movie theatres or crashing on the various floors of both friends and strangers. A fifty-cent bed or two-dollar room in a cheap hotel was a luxury. Meals were elusive. But as far as I know I never starved to death and I can't say why. I almost never worked. Once in a while I'd get dayjobs through Manpower, which had offices in all the big cities. (Manpower was a private, day-labour outfit, an Office Overload for guys - not the Canadian government agency that came along to pretend to find jobs for the unemployed.) I'd show up at 7:30 in the morning. In itself a towering achievement for me, but that's when you had to be there. I'd sit, trying to wake up, in a hall with rows of hard wooden chairs with a bunch of my colleagues and every once in a while the guy in charge would yell out something like, "Okay, we need two guys to count ingots at the Munchhausen Ingot Works. You and you," pointing out the chosen people. No order, no seniority, just the whim of the boss. You had to get to the job on your own and, usually, within a half hour, no matter where the place was. They'd advance you the busfare if you needed it. Around nine or nine-thirty you'd give up and either go get a ten cent glass of beer with a couple of the guys, if you had a dime, or go home and catch up on some sleep. Once, in Toronto, the boss let me sit there till about 9:30. Everybody in the hall got work and I waited and waited till I was the last one there. Finally I got up to go and the boss calls me over. "I ain't sending you on no jobs till you get a fuckin haircut." What an asshole. He could have told me that right off the bat and saved me a sore ass. I could have gone home to sleep and thus had more energy for the inevitable partying later that night. But that was Toronto.
In San Francisco about a dozen of us got a three day job cleaning up one of the big downtown hotels after a major convention. They took us there in a van. A guy named Eddie sat beside me, bullshitting with me all the way to the hotel. When we got there he said, "Stick with me, kid." Eddie knew the ropes, for sure. He made me his partner and taught me more than a decade full of official, government approved professors could dream of. (Not grammar, though.) First thing, they took us to a basement room for instructions and handed us all green jackets so we wouldn't look like crooks wandering the hallways of the hotel. It took Eddie's brain a nanosecond to grasp the potential of those little green jackets.
They gave us a list of rooms. We had to go to each one and get the garbage into big wheeled cans. Conventioners are a messy bunch, believe me. I had a job one time where the bosses, all middle-aged Jewish family men, respectable, neat, captains of industry, bragged constantly about how much they drank and got fucked at various conventions of scrap-metal dealers. "Check the liquor bottles," Eddie explained. "There's gonna be a lot a booze left over." Every room had several bottles lying around and every bottle had at least enough to make a sloshing sound when shook. We're talking good stuff, here. Kentucky Bourbon, single-malt Scotch, Canadian Club. We shared all of it. By lunch-time I could barely find my nose. "If you see anyone standing around ask if they called a bellhop," he said. "You can carry their bags to the cab and get a tip." It was our green jackets that set up this particular trick. Bellhops wore some other colour but who knew? Certainly no hungover ingot salesman from Death, Idaho with a dose of clap he was taking home, a gift for the little lady. Lunchtime Eddie says, "We got a find the employee cafeteria," and we go find some chambermaids to follow. "We can't eat here, can we?" I muse. "Just follow me and do what I do." We get in the cafeteria lineup, barely able to stand and stinking of twelve different kinds of hootch. Eddie loads up his plate with everything in sight. I do the same. Near the end of the counter he picks up a pad, scrawls something on it, tears the page off and puts it in a small tray. My turn, I look at his chit and can make no sense of it, so I doodle some Pollockian lines and leave my chit on top of his. By the end of lunch we've crammed roast beef and potatoes and peas and carrots, unknown amounts of alcohol and collected a few bucks in illicit tips. We keep this up for three days while Eddie talks about cities and dames and riding the rods and time in various jails coast to coast.
So somehow, blind faith, native wit, lessons learned along the road, and probably a shitload of sheer stupidity got me by. And July 1963 found me in a room in the Vancouver YMCA, registered for the summer poetry seminar at UBC, and looking for a better place to live. I heard UBC had a housing office. Rooms to rent were posted out there so I went out and looked at a large bulletin board filled with index cards advertising rooms, apartments, and the like. No addresses made sense to me and I had no idea where to go. I chose a card, pretty much at random, and called the number. The room was still free so I got directions, got a bus, and got the room in the house on 37th Avenue near Arbutus.
Ellen Oliver was, and may still be, a sweet, gentle woman, widowed, who shared her home with her sixteen-year-old daughter Carol. Carol was young, gorgeous, blonde, amply breasted, and life on earth was a dream marred only by waking hours. Oh, well. I lay in my room listening to birdsongs I'd never heard before and thought, these must be westcoast birds. Ellen worked all day and, as school was out for the summer, when I got up, maybe 11 or 12, Carol would be home. We'd hang around the house. She had, among the usual teenage records, a single Ray Charles album, Yes, Indeed!, that we listened to again and again. I'd look at the paper and was amazed to see the Vancouver Sun had a regular jazz column. I'd never seen such a thing in Montreal. I was in the promised land! Carol'd make me something to eat and I'd go.
One of the places I went to most often was Jamie Reid's place on Pender Street where many of the poets hung out. The night of the day I rented the Oliver's room I met Peter for the first time. He was also signed up for the poetry conference. I told him about my room in that lovely house and the tree-lined street with the strange and lovely birdsongs and the nymphet daughter. He asked, "Is that the Oliver house?"
"Yeah."
"That's my mother and sister." Peter Oliver! This magic continued all summer and well into most of the remaining decade. Always the right place at the right time. Even when I was at the wrong place it was the right time. It also turned out that Warren and Ellen Tallman lived across the street from the Olivers. Carol babysat their kids. Warren had written a terrific essay on Kerouac and jazz that I'd read probably just a few months earlier. He taught poetry at UBC and was the one who had organized the poetry conference. So I got to hang out at Warren's, too, all that month. A house full of all the best minds of whoever's generation that was. Ginsberg, Creeley, Duncan, Olson, Whalen, et al.
Within a day or two of arriving in Vancouver I met Gil Pomeroy, probably at Jamie's. Gil was from Goleta, California and maybe a year or two older than me. We clicked instantly and spent a lot of that month hanging out together. One day at Joy Long's house in Kitsilano we'd had a few glasses of Joy's miraculous homemade wine and I got very drunk, but in some way that I'd never known. What the hell was in that wine? I went out in the yard, in the deep sunlit day and saw the grass and trees and sky and everything with a crystalline intensity so powerful I was dumbfounded.
Till then my marijuana dabblings had pretty tame results. Once, at Jamie's, a half-dozen or so of us sat on his living room floor passing joints around. At one point I said, "I dunno. I been trying this shit a while, now, but I don't really seem to get high."
Jamie looked at me for a minute. "Shit, man, you've been sitting there for half an hour with bugged-out eyes and a beatific grin on your face and you're tellin' us you're not high?"
At that moment I knew I really was stoned but you can see it was pretty subtle. In Joy's yard I reached a state of highness wholly new and miraculous to me, every sense hightened so that colours vibrated and edges were sharper than I'd experienced since I‘d lost my glasses in the eighth grade. Gil, I knew, was into all kinds drugs. I'd been reading De Ropp's Drugs and the Mind and discussing every chapter with him. He found me out in Joy's backyard counting the leaves on the trees, the blades of grass, but not with numbers then known to mathematicians. "Gil," I said, "man this is great, this is great. But, man, listen. I wanna get really high."
"Right!"
A couple of days later we went over to bill bissett's studio on York Street. Gil had a bagful of peyote buttons and another bagful of empty, large-size gelatine capsules he'd picked up at the drugstore. He mashed up the peyote, filled the caps with the brown mess, and divided them up among himself, myself, Bill, Bill's partner, Martina, and Neri Gadd. "Peyote tastes awful," he explained. "This is easier to take." I got fourteen caps but after swallowing the eleventh I thought to myself, maybe eleven's enough, I don't know what's gonna happen. I put three in my pocket. Then we all walked down to Kitsilano Beach to look at the sunset and wait. For what, I didn't know.
There was, and still is, a giant tree stump down on the beach there that must be twelve feet in diameter and maybe fifteen feet long, lying on its side. It's got to be about as old as the Hebrew children. I climbed up and sat looking out across the water as the sun went down. I thought the kind of thoughts I thought I should be thinking, waiting for the cactus to perform its magic. After a while we sauntered back to bill's. I felt disappointingly normal.
Bill's place consisted of two very large, long rooms. Paintings, books, and manuscripts were everywhere. The far room had a crib in which bill and Martina's newborn girl, Oolya , slept. I went in there and sat down, looked around, poked through some books and magazines while the others talked in the the other room. Someone went in the bathroom to throw up. I started to feel a little sick, myself. Soon I was feeling very sick. Soon after that I felt so sick I knew I was dying. And soon after that I died.
I was dead quite a while. But not so dead that I couldn't feel the cold. I was cold. My blood and bones and heart were cold. My mind and soul were sick and shivering. Martina came from somewhere and found me huddled in a shuddering, foetal heap. She placed a blanket over my shoulders and as it descended over me so, too, did a soft, rosy warmth. As though the inside of the blanket itself were composed of the radiant love of god. It glowed like a quilt made of an infinte number of infinitely small suns. I pulled it over my head, enclosing myself completely as I drew my knees tight against my chest. Wrapped in that blanket with my eyes shut, still I bathed in that reddish light. Soon I began to hear sounds that became voices, incomprehensible, like a strange music. I heard them but didn't listen. Then I listened and was drawn to the voices. Finally I got up, still cloaked in that angelic mantle, and moved towards the voices in the other room and sat down again. I listened for a long time but understood nothing. I poked my head out and drew it back. A while later I took another peek but was still not ready. The voices jabbered on and I stayed blissfully within my refuge. The third time I looked out I was beginning to understand that I had to come out. I let the blanket drop to my shoulders, exposing my head to the cooler air, and sat, still puzzled by the talk in the room.
It's hard to know what's duller. Other people's dreams or their drug experiences. Probably a tie. I'd rather watch oats cook than listen to either. But this trip is fresh in my mind after thirty-three years. And any birth reminiscence is worth a little reflection, I think.
Why did I let the blanket fall altogether? Did I have a choice? I sat awhile, chilled again, but longing for the company of these incomprehensible people, my family. Later we were in the other room, all but me yakking away about who knows what and by now I was understanding the conversation but had yet to master speech. Words and ideas were flying about yet I couldn't make myself utter a single syllable. Then I got an idea. I rolled a cigarette, knowing I'd need a match and would be forced to ask for one. But I wound up sitting there with my unlit fag, dumbstruck still. Bill noticed the cigarette in my hand and tossed a matchbook at me. "SHIT!" I blurted. Everyone stopped and stared at me as my face lit up with a big smile. I repeated "shit" a couple more times. "What's the matter?"
"Shit." My first word.
I can't say that I learned much about poetry at the Vancouver Poetry Conference. Most discussions were over my head, though I enjoyed the readings, over my head or not. I met a lot of great people and went to a lot of great parties. Isn't that what poetry's about, anyway? By crossing the street to hang out at the Tallmans I got to hobnob with several modern poetry geniuses, including Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and others I've forgotten by now. Of course the main attraction for me was Ginsberg who'd already been one of my heroes for some time. Now I was discussing running shoes with the bard, drinking beer with him at the Alcazar Hotel where we discussed Cuba (He asked me what they thought of him there and I said they thought his poetry was more or less irrelevant. How the fuck did I know that?) and he poked me with all his fingers, quoting Corso, You must feel. It's so beautiful to feel, and reading aloud from my secret notebook in the Tallman living-room where I was mortified, saying, "No, no, not aloud," and he said I must stand naked before all and, after reading my jottings, including "itch in asshole is most painful of pleasures," which he deemed Blakean and added, "Read more Blake." Which I did. I went so far as to steal two books from the Vancouver Public Library. Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics and the Modern Library Selected Poetry and Prose of Blake. (Back in Montreal, months later, lousy with guilt, I mailed the price of the two books to the library.) Gil and I read each other stories from the Zen book and I got to know some of the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The rest was beyond me.
The Readings. I knew exactly one Creeley poem. One I'd read in the Evergreen Review a year or two earlier. But for some unfathomable reason he asked me to select all the poems for his reading. No doubt the fact that I'd given the impression that I was a huge fan of his helped. What would I do? I knew fuck all about his poetry. Pick a bunch at random? Go home and read his book and see if I liked and/or understood any of them, and choose those? It was lucky, though I still felt like a fraud, that some key fans of his, including the Tallmans, Duncan, et al, got wind of this scheme and slipped me lists for days up till his reading. I compiled the titles, added the single poem I knew, and gave Creeley my list. The night of his reading the lights blew in the lecture hall. A candle was found and the magic of Robert Creeley reading poetry by candlelight before a couple of hundred devotees proceeded. He read every poem on the list but the single one I'd contributed. It probably was not a very good poem. And even when I read it now I have no idea what it means.
The Ginsberg reading was something else. A long, hot jazz solo. He read Kaddish which brought me close to tears. He read long sexy passages from his India journals, including many cocksucking scenes with Peter. This was where the two nuns in the audience politely, and apologetically, retreated to the night. People called for Howl but he was hesitant, then began, then stopped and said, "I can't read this, again. Fuck you." Who can blame him? He musta read it a million times. I saw him out in the hall when it was over I planted a big kiss right on his huge ginsbergian lips.
When I first saw Olson, on night one of the conference, I took him for a mountain man just down from northern wilderness to study modern poetry. I had no idea who he was but soon learned he was kind of a father figure to some of these guys. A giant in red plaid mountain shirt. To me he was the most impenetrable of all but a beauty of a man. That night I once again dragged out the battered New American Poetry and tried to fathom The Kingfishers, berating myself, "c'mon you ignorant punk, how hard can it be, it's in English, isn't it?" Well, mostly in English. I remember the night he started a class by writing "Polis is eyes" on the blackboard. By the end of the night I knew what it, and many other things, meant. It was heaven just to hear him speak. Every word was a poem. He introduced Margaret Avison's reading only by standing at the microphone and saying, "It's just such a pleasure to present you Miss Avison." There may be no reason to repeat those words here other than that after 33 years I still remember them perfectly. At the famous party I sat down beside Olson, sitting there with a beer in his hand surveying all with his powerful eyes. I started to tell him the truth, that I was in over my head, I knew nothing and would he explain to me, could he give me the key to unlock the mystery, of The Kingfishers and everything and everyone, and would he... he beamed at me so generously and fatherly. I knew that at any moment I'd be admitted to the wonderful understanding of all that was happening around me. He started to speak, I could feel the kindness in his soul like heat radiating from his skin, and at that very moment John Keys, the New York poet, butted his drunk way between us and said, "Charles Olson, I love you," and kissed him on his olsonian lips, a kiss that went on and on and on. I waited so patiently for what should be a normal conclusion to any kiss. I sipped my beer and puffed on my cigarette. I got up from my seat on the north side of Olson and sat down again on the south side of him and then got up again and circled the kissers a while, lighting another fag and sipping beer out of the long-necked brown bottle. To this day I neither know nor care whether these men, either of them, are or were homosexual. It never occurred to me. I think we should all kiss poets, every chance we get. I'd kissed Ginsberg, hadn't I? But this was turning into an eternal smooch and, besides, was the rudest of interruptions of what was surely to be the most important conversation I was ever to have in the world of poetry. Keys had lost himself, it seemed, in an osculatory coma but Olson sat cool and stoical and, finally, I just walked away, cursing Keys for snatching the rose from my green fingers.
Not to worry, there were other lessons waiting in the wings.
A dozen of us crammed ourselves in the stairwell landing where Ginsberg was teaching the spiritual powers of chanting and, in particular the Hare Krishna chant, as yet unknown in the West and I suppose Ginsberg, just returned from India, was to first to import what was to become part of the soundtrack of so many downtowns and airports. But then it was a brand new idea to us and I was seduced by it on the spot, as were the rest of us jammed in the stairway chanting like spiritual lunatics. Hare krishna hare krishna, krishna krishna, etc.
A few minutes of this chanting and through the door at the bottom of the stairway came a handful of RCMP cops. Turned out their station house was directly beneath the apartment, amazingly. The chanting must have summoned some kind of magic because despite the din, the drugs, the jam-packed wild apartment, the cops backed out within minutes.
Back in Montreal that fall I taught it to my friends, like a Bodhisattva from o'er the Mountains, and when, a few years later, the Hare Krishna cult developed and opened one of the first North American temples on Park Avenue, I was a regular at their nightly feasts. I should add that I was there for the food. Every time I've been attracted to religious pursuits it's been for the food and my spirituality never extended to the main belief systems, especially when such things as a supreme being, a leader too holy to wear regular clothes, sitting around musty rooms listening to taped sermons, or any kind of rules were involved. In the final analysis, Jewish food's good enough for me and I'm happy to put on a yarmulke now and then to eat some.
Duncan I felt nothing for or, maybe, just a little antipathy. Although he did say, "At twenty the poet is twenty. At forty the poet is a poet." Probably a famous quote. Anyway, I'd never heard it before but it stayed with me and when I got to be forty I thought of it and decided I was a poet after all. Fifty, though, is something else, again.
Philip Whalen and I spent an afternoon walking about the UBC grounds, particularly the Nitobe Japanese garden, talking about Buddhism, Gary Snyder off in Japan, Kerouac, and a poem of his, Martyrdom of Two Pagans, that I read aloud with Gil on that peyote night. That poem shook me with great beauty and truth and the next day, when I looked at it again I'd lost my sympathetic insight. I was sure he must have written it while on peyote, himself, but he denied it.
These are a few of the famous , the celebrated ones who's lives and works have touched many people and maybe there's some interest, small as it probably would be, in my brief contacts with them. Some I met again, and others, too. But they're not the important ones for me, then or now. The main cats were the ones I hung out with, partied and got high with, talked talked talked with. Like Gil Pomeroy, who, a couple of years later I was desperate to find again, even walking up and down the beach of Goleta, California asking bikini beach bimbos and surfing hunks, California blonde every one, if they knew the name. Gil had given me a Goleta address when I last saw him. Well, no dice. I haven't seen him since, but you never know. And there was Easteregg. He might have had another name. I might even have heard it. But he was Easteregg then and we'd go to the UBC cafeterias and eat leftovers off the plates, we had no money or food. More than once the Chinese cooks and busboys, to whom we musta seemed truly pitiful, gave us bags of untouched buns and even chickens and pies and whatnot. Gil and Easteregg and others long since forgotten were either the last beats or first hippies or both or neither but they were the real ones for me. Hanging out in pure joy and the excitement of new times and poetry and art and high.
And home where I got up late and Carol floated gorgeous through the days, so young, even for me then, and sweet but untouchable. Coffee in the kitchen, wander in the yard, or lie on my bed alone with some book or letter and listen to crazy Vancouver birds chirping out in the yard, in strange new trees. I sat in the livingroom, sun streaming through the blinds and drapes, listening to the one Ray Charles album, Yes, Indeed, with her and talk about our lives which, then, were worlds apart in age and place, time and space, but, decades later are not far apart at all. I've had girlfriends much younger than her. She was about three years younger than me. That's it. Three years, and she catwalked through the summer while I looked on mouthwatering and virginal. One morning in 1965 I woke from a Lolita dream of her in which we lived together and I wrote about us in a book which began, "Car-uhl, light in my darkness, bulb in my socket." Honest to god.
Some of the poet guys had eyes for Lisa, whom no one knew. She came to the conference of the bards alone, every class and reading, spoke to no one, and left alone. Tall, lissome blonde, in her late twenties, astonishingly lovely and mysterious. Even the famous, the handsome, the heterogenius, followed her sexy moves with hot eyes, hopelessly. At the famous party two guys sat beside me, interupting a fiery and sophisticated discussion I was having with Jamie Reid about what I saw as an infinite network of events that linked every thought and deed in the universe, which I thought was a bright idea at the time but is, of course, old hat by now. Regardless, I got the idea from a Theodore Sturgeon novel and it's ramifications were obsessing me at the time. I needed some deep thoughts and this seemed like a good one. But these two guys, Bill Klein and his pal, accosted me and said I looked Jewish. I couldn't see how this fit in with my theorem, but I played along. Basically, I don't think I look very Jewish but a couple of times in my journeys I've been spotted by lonesome jews in goyishe cities, desperate for brethren. Yeah, okay, I'm Jewish. We chatted about two minutes when they said, "We're having a barbeque on Sunday. Why don't you come?" I was here, in Vancouver, hanging out with authors and bohemians, to expand my social milieu. I was not especially keen on Jewish barbeques, at the time, though these fellows seemed nice enough. At that moment Lisa walked by, alone, with a beer in her gorgeous hand.
"Yes, I'll come if I can bring my girlfriend."
"Yeah, sure. Who?"
"Her."
She stopped. She just stood there smiling while I got the address and then I told her we were going to a barbeque on Sunday. "What time," she asked me.
Sunday afternoon I picked her up at the house where she roomed. A green house with lace curtains and the smell of furniture polish and old landladies. Tea, incense, bath oils. We followed Bill's bus instructions to a house in Kerrisdale where Bill and his friend were partially drunk and a couple of others sat glumly in the yard waiting for the burgers to cook. I was with the most beautiful woman in Western Canada as far as I was concerned. I knew that on this night my virginity would expire and, at the same time, I knew it would not. Lisa was happy to chat with the dopes and eat burgers and drink beer. I was anxious to leave right after eating. This was the first place I'd been since my arrival in Vancouver where no one had marijuana, so I got a little drunk and, as the sky turned a deeper blue than I'd ever seen, we left, Lisa and I.
It could be the romantic imagination fired by new places that makes things appear so differently than they did before. For example, the colour of fire, I'm sure, is different in the east and I supposed that it was something in the local atmosphere that caused this. It wouldn't be hard to find out if this is true but why not just humour myself? It'd be even easier to figure out if summer days are longer in Vancouver than in Montreal or New York. Latitudes and all. But to me the days of that summer were amazingly long. The birdsongs could have belonged to Martian birds for all I knew. And strangest, loveliest of all, I'm walking in the evening down maple-lined Western streets with a woman so angelic and elegant that some of the best poets lusted vainly for her.