by Brad Fraser
I skipped the bars that night to rewrite the third act. Ultimately I copped out with another total Zoo Story rip-off in which Bernie stabs David, which everyone was far more comfortable with—possibly because of its familiarity and reinforcement of the “dead fag in literature” trope I would strive so hard to change in future work. Ultimately I would end it with David drinking Bernie’s blood and talking about eating his body, which did add a more original dimension to those hackneyed shenanigans.
For my last night in Toronto I visited the Club Baths, in a renovated Victorian mansion on Carlton Street. The club had a labyrinth of twisting hallways, hidden staircases and an outdoor pool that was already closed for the season. The possibilities were so overwhelming—the open doors, the invitations to sex, the many bodies in towels, the whispered come-ons—that I ended up retreating to my room to smoke a cigarette and jerk off into my towel as I listened to the cacophony of muted sex sounds that filled the air all around me, mixed with Peter Gabriel singing “Solsbury Hill” as I wallowed in my loneliness. It was the saddest song in history.
* * *
—
We flew to Saskatoon the next day, where I was housed in the corner turret room of the historic three-storey Senator Hotel right downtown.
Hilda arrived from Edmonton that morning, along with Jo Ann McIntyre. A local actor, Victor Sutton, would play the father. Artistic director Andy Tahn welcomed us all on behalf of 25th Street Theatre, gave us a quick tour of the minuscule facility that was housed in an old church, and we started rehearsal by reading the play.
To my ear nothing worked. Desperately I began cutting chunks of text while the actors were still reading. I excised entire scenes. Not a page remained untouched by the time the reading was complete. The cast looked at me expectantly. Layne ran his hand over his face and I could almost hear him thinking, “What the fuck am I going to do with this?” I said, “I’d like to make a few cuts” and took them through my butchering of the play over the next hour.
As cuts were made I could see some of the actors looking nervous about losing character bits, laugh lines and dramatic moments. Occasionally someone protested a cut and if they made a convincing case for why the line, scene or moment should stay I would keep it, but it took a lot to convince me. (Early in my training I’d been impressed by a piece of advice I’d read somewhere, that if something doesn’t contribute to character, action or atmosphere, it is unnecessary. Making those cuts to the script after hearing professional actors read the play made it clear to me why this was a wise thing to do and I have used it ever since.) As I listened to the second reading I realized that almost everything I’d excised was some voicing of the subtext that was already implicit in the play. None of it had been necessary.
After rehearsal Hilda and I were moved into the upstairs suite of one of those charmless post–WW 2 bungalows that dominate our prairie cities.
I was welcome in rehearsals, but after the first few days I was bored out of my mind. Theatre management was surprised when I asked about being paid for my attendance just like everyone else in the show. It seemed no one had considered that the playwright should be compensated. By the end of the day it was agreed that I should indeed be paid and a cheque was issued. This became an ongoing battle in almost every production where my presence was requested. I started to understand why so many playwrights came from backgrounds of money, privilege and education. It was fucking hard to make a living.
Our first dress rehearsal was sparsely attended and the show was a dirge. There was no lift, no spark and no humour, which drove me nuts because I knew parts of the script could be very funny. When the few people had left after some desultory applause, the company looked at me expectantly. I gave them a dark, unhappy look and walked out. I stopped at the nearest Boston Pizza and ordered a beer and a pie with pepperoni, fighting not to cry. The timer had run out. There was nothing I could change at this point.
The next day I did all of the press there was to do, including an interview with the theatre critic for the StarPhoenix and a lunchtime interview with one of the two local television stations. When a sweet television host asked me why I wrote about such fringe topics and characters, I retorted, “Because I don’t know anything about being middle-aged or middle class.” When she recovered from my bluntness she asked who my major influences were, and I replied, “Tennessee Williams and Marvel Comics.” She had never heard of either.
I liked being interviewed. I answered questions honestly and in complete sentences. I knowingly promoted an image that jarred with the academic white-bread people who usually represented the theatre. My cropped hair, black leather jacket with red lapels, tight jeans and Clark Gable moustache gave me an image that contrasted perfectly with the overwhelming beigeness of local media in those days. I wanted to be edgy and cool. I refused to say what I thought people wanted to hear, or were comfortable hearing, rather than what I actually thought. I wanted to be Elton John, I wanted to be Lou Reed, I wanted to be Patti Smith, but in theatre.
* * *
—
The opening night of Wolfboy was a delightful surprise. I sat with the audience and watched as the actors all did that thing actors do when they have an audience and finally come to inhabit their characters completely and discover the spine of the story even as they present it. People laughed, people gasped, people cried—there was a lot of applause at the end and many people hung around after to congratulate everyone involved.
I’d forgotten the old adage from theatre school: “Bad preview—good opening.”
Kate had travelled up with a fellow drama student with heavy Sally Bowles damage and a sharp sense of humour. They slept on the floor in blankets they’d brought themselves and said they loved the show. Both were deeply affected by Angelo’s truly amazing performance as David.
The next day I returned to Edmonton, hoping the show would be a huge hit, make me some money and propel me into the big-time where I deserved to be.
At that time, when Xerox machine and snail mail ruled, it took time for information to be exchanged. Having someone read you a review over the phone from a different city was about as immediate as it got. The best review quote from the few that came out described me as the “Wayne Gretzky of Canadian letters.”
My sojourns in Toronto and Saskatoon had cost me more money than I’d made and I was working every shift possible at Boots ’n Saddle to pay my rent while trying to figure out what my next move should be.
When I finally caught up with Cam, who was moving up quickly in the world of Edmonton hairdressing, and regaled him with my travel tales, he barely acknowledged them before launching into his own “but this is what I’ve been doing” monologue. I could sense his jealousy. I have to admit I took some secret satisfaction in it. We had a few beers and then I fucked him. Later, as he was lying on my chest, I could feel the envy melt away from him along with my own sick sense of superiority.
We slept in that position for the rest of the night. Cam was one of the few people I ever slept with peacefully.
The show closed without making me any money beyond the minimal guarantee. Hilda returned home a few days later and slipped into another two-week depression. I partied enthusiastically with the guys from the bar, staved off the hands of elderly men in their forties while serving beer, and drew comic pages or experimented with my airbrush on my off-time. I still dreamed of being a comic-book artist and devoted as much time to it as I could, although I was not very good at all. Fellow PA students from two years before would drop by to smoke joints, I’d go to movies with friends, pine for someone to love me, and sometimes come home late at night to stare at my typewriter balefully.
I had nothing to give it.
Mutants and Wolfboy had been written in less than two years, with only desperate, last-minute revisions. Stylistically and in subject matter, they were connected but discrete. Both had been attempts to understand and process my complex love f
or men, and my strange relationship with the entire world around me, while presenting an experience that would excite audiences emotionally, intellectually and visually.
I felt like a failure.
And then Paul Thompson called again.
PART FIVE
RUDE NOISES (FOR A BLANK GENERATION)
PAUL WAS WORKING ON A NEW collective at Theatre Passe Muraille about street kids in Toronto, and he wanted me to be the writer. It all sounded a bit airy-fairy, but no one else was clamouring to employ me so I was more than happy to say yes and fly to Toronto for a second time.
Thompson met me at the theatre and we took the long streetcar ride through old-time Toronto in the east end, where he lived with his family. I crashed in their guest room, after going to a house party where I was introduced to many Toronto theatre people, including one of my idols, playwright Carol Bolt, who’d written the effective thriller One Night Stand.
The next morning I was introduced to the TPM office staff and was given a list of accommodations they could afford, which I could check out after rehearsal. I’d managed to put a couple of hundred away my last few weeks working at Boots, so I could make it to Thursday, when we were paid. The office was connected to the building that housed the theatre, but there were no rehearsal facilities. For those we had to walk a few blocks south to Bathurst and King, where the original Theatre Centre was housed in a thirties brick bank building. A number of different companies shared the space, including the brand-new Buddies in Bad Times, Canada’s first gay theatre.
The rehearsal room was in a dank concrete basement with a few old couches and mismatched chairs scattered here and there. The place was crawling with spiders, roaches and centipedes, which we all studiously ignored. There was a cast of six, four men and two women. All but two of them were recent graduates of the York University acting program. They did not strike me as a group that knew much about life on the streets of Toronto.
After introductions and Paul Thompson talking about the concept behind the show—something about the courage of kids on the street and their stories that needed to be told—the cast started to improvise. Paul would watch and occasionally make a suggestion and I’d watch, take some notes, watch some more—and wait for something magical to happen. I fought the urge to get up and take part in their improv. I was there to be the writer, not another performer.
After rehearsal I consulted the list of possible accommodations, jogged back to the theatre, retrieved my bag and flagged a taxi to the Hotel Isabella, the best-sounding place on the list. I paid for a room. The elevator was broken. I had to haul my hockey bag up three flights of stairs. It had been a long day and the jet lag was catching up with me. I unlocked the door and stepped in.
The light was murky, the curtains ragged and the lower pane of a three-part window was broken, replaced with a board. Scabs of paint hung from the ceiling. On the wall above the head of the bed the words “Fuck Iran” were scrawled in red felt pen. The lumpy mattress looked exactly how a spider’s nest lined with bedbug eggs would look if covered with a threadbare blanket. No stranger to squalor, I slept in my clothes, quite soundly.
I woke up feeling pretty good, showered gingerly in the squalid bathroom, checked out, caught another cab to the old YMCA on College just west of Yonge and checked in. The room was small and dingy, but if the Isabella was the best on TPM’s list I knew this would be better than any of the others.
After the first couple of weeks I began to get very impatient with the scenes and ideas the actors were presenting. There was a terrible whiteness to it all, a sort of “middle-class kids exploring the streets with no real risk” thing that got on my nerves. They presented endless, meandering scenes about hookers talking to johns, strippers who couldn’t dance and guys wanting to meet chicks. On breaks the actors would nervously point out that I wasn’t watching them when I had my head in my hands, as I often did when they improvised. I’d smile and assure them it was because I was “listening,” but I suspect they knew that they were boring me.
I made good on my promise of two years ago and contacted Paul Reynolds, who was delighted to hear from me. He took me to dinner and then back to his place for sex. He listened patiently as I moaned about the experience at TPM. He wasn’t a great admirer of collective creation. Both Pauls, Thompson and Reynolds, held radically different views of the theatre. Paul Reynolds was from a large festival that was devoted to the contemporaries of George Bernard Shaw, while Paul Thompson worked at the theatre that wanted to defy everything the Shaw Festival represented. That I knew both of them so well greatly enhanced my understanding of the many things theatre can be.
After each rehearsal I’d head back to the Y, fire up my electric typewriter on the cheap, cigarette-scarred desk facing the blank wall (the window faced an air shaft) and write scenes based on that day’s work. I wasn’t creating a transcript of the rehearsal so much as playing with the ideas and images that stood out for me and filtering them through my own sensibility. Then I’d eat, often at the greasy short-order diner at the Y because it was cheap, and head out to the bars for the rest of the night.
My favourite was Charly’s, upstairs at the St. Charles Tavern at Yonge and Alexander, one of Canada’s oldest gay bars. Charly’s was the first man dance bar I’d ever been to. It had a sexual energy that was connected to the music in a way even the Barn didn’t have. There were no lesbians there, no drag queens, no straight people and no nervous closet cases—everyone in this bar was a fag and there to dance hard. It was a writhing mass of male flesh with only two things on its collective mind.
The DJ was playing a deadly mix of Rita Marley’s “I Want to Get High” and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” that shook the entire building. As usual I found a corner where it was possible to observe the action from the best vantage point without being on full display. The writer side of me loved to hang back unobserved as I made mental notes about the experience and the people I watched. This bar was redolent with the sweet-and-sauerkraut rancidness of sweaty bodies, cigarette smoke, poppers and dirty drugs.
One night I met an older couple, a chunky muscular man in his forties and his “younger” (probably thirties) partner, who was lean and stylish. One was an international businessman, the other a decorator. They travelled the world and did business in all the major centres. They took me home for drinks and pot. Our first night together was a pigfest, although it quickly became clear the muscular one was most interested in fucking me while the younger one liked to watch. It was a great time, and I staggered the few blocks back to the Y with a smile on my face.
Later in the night I woke up with a piercing headache, feeling delirious and thirsty. I staggered down the hall to the bathroom to drink from the tap and then went back to bed, where I shivered despite the high fever I was running. Eventually I passed out again, only to wake a short time later feeling sick to my stomach. I puked into the wastebasket next to the desk a couple of times before passing out again. When my alarm went off a few hours later I pulled on my clothes and stumbled to the pay phone at the end of the hall. I called the theatre and asked them to let Paul Thompson and the cast know I was under the weather and wouldn’t be at rehearsal. That was the only rehearsal I’ve missed in my life. When I woke nearly twelve hours later, whatever it was had passed. I didn’t give it much thought.
Around this time more news bits began to appear reporting on the minor growth of that strange cluster of a rare cancer among gay men in New York. They were always small articles and didn’t give much information. A lot of these people with the rare cancer were dying very quickly, and the doctors had no idea why. I’d shake my head and think of other things.
November turned to December and Toronto became even greyer and more Dickensian as rain fell and dirty drifts of snow turned into puddles of mud on the streets and sidewalks. This was not the bracingly cold but sunny and clear Alberta winter I grew up in. My feet were always wet. The heat in bu
ildings was always cranked to the max, causing everyone to sweat beneath their winter coats. The streetcars smelled like goat pens.
* * *
—
In mid-December the collective broke for the holidays and I flew back to Edmonton. My pay from the theatre barely covered my expenses in Toronto, let alone the rent I was still paying in Edmonton. I immediately picked up waiter shifts at Boots ’n Saddle and was glad for the tip money. I used the rest of my time to work on a draft of something that could be used in the street kids collective.
The material I took back to Toronto was met with relief, and we started using these scenes as jumping-off points for more focused improvisation. After a few days it became clear to me that the actors were not going to bring in any revelatory or provocative material of their own.
At lunch one day I spoke to Paul about my frustrations. The actors were all likeable people, but the material they were bringing in wasn’t matching the material I was generating. I spent my nights not just at gay clubs but at strip clubs, in alleys, at the illegal late-night boozecans that thrived all over the city because of Toronto’s draconian liquor laws, interacting with junkies, hustlers, hookers and the people who orbited/loved them. I drank with them, did drugs with them, fucked with them, and not as research.
I told Paul I’d had enough. I couldn’t make it work. I wanted to quit and go home.
He said, “You can’t go. You’re the most interesting thing in this process.”
I shrugged. “This collective thing isn’t working for me. I don’t want to write something for some people who wouldn’t really get it anyway.”
“What do you want to do?”
I said, “I want to write and direct it myself with a different cast.”
Paul considered my words. I could almost hear his brain clicking, weighing options, considering possibilities. Then he said, “Okay. I’ll give you two weeks to write it and three weeks to direct it.”