by Renee Rodin
Like Vera, Mrs. K had dreadful black numbers stamped indelibly on her arm. So it wasn’t just the awful evidence of the camps my mother respected. It was that Vera had the audacity to use her history to literally shove it in my mother’s face. What Vera was saying by flashing her tattoo at my mother was: “I went through hell. I was banished from the face of the world and returned. Your craziness will not keep me captive. I will survive you too.” Along with everything else she endured with such grace and beauty, that she dared to stand up to my mother— that she dared to trump her—means Vera is the strongest person in the world. The bravest.
Once the conflagration between Florence and Feivel’s mother was over, my mother took me home and we had a tea party, a rare treat reserved for when Sandy or I had a fever, or on other special occasions. The ritual never varied. Florence would make milky tea for us to drink out of her fancy china cups and we held our pinkies up pretending to be “ladies.” She called me “Mrs. Yakkinfloster” and we swapped stories about our respective families and would soon enter into a competition about who had the better children. This would always end with my mother insisting: “I have the best kids in the world.”
PX
I met Dick Clements in the early 1960s, when I was a teenage beatnik. We both had part-time jobs at the Potpourri, a lefty bookstore/coffee house on Stanley Street in Montreal, next door to Sir George Williams University where we were students. The place was owned by soft-spoken Morris and his tough-talking wife, Mary, with whom I snickered when she called middle-class looking girls “cha cha babes.” My eyes were heavily lined in kohl and I wore white lipstick, a black turtleneck and black tights, but I wondered if behind my back, she mocked me too.
Dick worked in the cubbyhole between the bookstore in the front and the small café in the back, where he’d put together plates of ham and cheese sandwiches on Kaiser rolls, with a plunk of potato chips on the side, which I served the customers with their coffee. He was about five-foot-eight, just this side of gaunt, and always wore pristine khaki army clothing. A lick of unruly light brown hair fell over one of his ice blue eyes and it was only his honker of a nose that saved him from conventional good looks. He had a reputation for being a “brain”—he was truly brilliant—and though he was usually quite reserved, when it came to politics and partying he was fiery and charismatic. Everyone I knew had a crush on him.
I had become an activist at the age of fifteen when my mother’s cousin (a card-carrying Communist until she was disillusioned by disclosures about Stalin) encouraged her daughter, also fifteen, and me to join in Ban the Bomb marches. It was the Cold War; and both the Americans and the Soviets were stockpiling nuclear armaments as if to guarantee there would be no tomorrow. The marches were sponsored by CUCND (Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), an organization that Dick was involved with too.
My anger towards society was as ingrained as my anger towards my parents. I saw the world only in terms of repression, hypocrisy, injustice and destruction—its only redemption was a sliver of artists and activists. Though I’d have to admit that while public protests may have been right up my alley, I was also on the lookout for guys.
Once I was at university I took the power of going to the streets more seriously and understood our struggles were more existential than political. I’d learned to practise passive resistance, to go limp at confrontation with authority, which gave the cops ample opportunity to grab at the girls’ breasts and to stomp on the boys’ hands as they hauled us off embassy steps or wherever else we were blocking traffic. We thought it was a hoot that RCMP undercover agents took pictures of us with cameras hidden in their cigarette lighters every time they lit up.
After a large demonstration at the US Embassy against the American invasion of the Bay of Pigs, a group of us crammed into Dick’s apartment on McGregor a couple of blocks away. A moment later the door was kicked in and the police were everywhere, confiscating placards and threatening to arrest anyone who didn’t leave the premises immediately. I ducked into Dick’s tiny shower stall to hide, and after everyone else was gone, stayed with him until it was time to go home to face my mother who was in the habit of waiting up for me and, whenever I came in after midnight, saying, “Only whores stay out this late.” But it was always worth it.
Dick left the next day for Cuba. Castro’s People’s Revolution was still fresh and exciting to much of the world. He was writing for a publication, maybe Our Generation, and was going to interview Fidel. He returned elated and miserable. He’d been so caught up in his conversation with the legendary figure he’d forgotten to put a tape in his recorder.
All I knew about his background was that his father had died some time before I’d met him and that he and his sister were being raised by their mother in what I assumed was a traditional Anglo environment—something I equated with a sense of knowing that you belonged—whereas I always felt my nose was pressed against the window, staring in.
I don’t remember the circumstances of his breakdown, but at a certain point his mother committed him to the Allan Memorial Institute, standing like the Gothic horror it turned out to be, high atop a hill downtown. When he came out months later his body was still slim but his face resembled a puffy papier-mâché moon.
From then on he was rarely around the Potpourri or Sir George or the Swiss Hut on Sherbrooke. The Hut, supposedly a Separatist haunt while the Quiet Revolution was getting louder, was a drinking place for idealists and intellectuals. It would soon be burned down by government-hired arsonists.
By the time Dick was home from the hospital I was solidly involved with someone else so I stayed clear of him. Not long after that, he was in the vanguard of a mass migration of Montrealers to the West Coast. I’d spent the summer of ’66 there, when Vancouver seemed a sprawling, stifling combination of the American Wild West and the most repressive aspects of British society. When I returned in l968 with my husband and five-month-old daughter, almost everyone we knew from Montreal had moved there. Ad hoc communities were springing up everywhere; they seemed as hopeful to me as the sight of crocuses in February. Vancouver was the promising new world. Dick was now married as well, had a baby son, and was making sandals at the Leather Box on 4th Avenue, the main drag of Kitsilano—the Haight-Ashbury of Canada. Tourists drove up and down the street on weekends to catch sight of hippies smoking weed during that halcyon and horrible era. The war in Vietnam was spiralling out of control, the Berlin Wall was built, and we reeled from one assassination to another: within five years, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were murdered.
Dick had taken the nom de plume “PX Belinski.” PX may have been a reference to a soldier in the field. Belinksi was a famous nineteenth-century Russian intellectual, an impassioned socialist and atheist who was later glorified by the Revolutionists of 1917. Dick was writing mainly for the alternative newspaper, the Georgia Straight, doing arts reviews and political articles. Many of these were about the CIA, which was orchestrating the downfall of Chile, Nicaragua and other left-leaning governments in Latin America so that socialism would not spread and cut into North American corporate profits. Air Six, a chapbook of Dick’s lyrical poetry, was published by Bertrand Lachance’s Air Press. It was good.
Years passed and I was on my own again. At that point in my life, I couldn’t afford both tickets and babysitters, so I missed Writing in Our Time, a series of readings by Canadian and American poets, organized by therapist/teacher Ellen Tallman and teacher/writer Warren Tallman. It was held at the Italian Cultural Centre over several evenings. The talk of the town was that Dick had drunkenly heckled at one of these readings and created such havoc he had to be bodily ejected.
Robert Duncan, on a panel during Writing in Our Time discussing the concept of “mission,” commented on Dick’s heckling. He said, “That’s what a mission does, it says ‘we’re not going to have any of this’ and it advances something. At first you say, ‘Why do you look so negative, what the hell are you advanc
ing?’ But if it’s a mission, it comes forward with what it’s got to do.” Duncan had understood there was an urgency to Dick’s behaviour but not its cause. No one did.
One afternoon that summer I went to a free speech rally at UBC to protest a censorship issue and saw for myself. As soon as bill bissett began to read, Dick, who was his friend, began to shout insults at him, and in an instant four behemoths picked him up and threw him out of the building. I followed and sat with him on a patch of grass. This was the closest I’d been to Dick in years. He was bedraggled and bad-tempered from a bender. Despite this I could still see the old immaculate intellectual, everyone’s counter-culture hero, who now wanted to be called “Richard.”
He’d long ago separated from his first wife and had had children with another woman, but this marriage had also fallen apart. Like Richard, I too was lonely and floundering. After we got involved he officially moved out of his house to squat in a two-storey building in Kitsilano with a fabulous view of the harbour. He’d hooked up a wood stove for heat and cooking, and I’d leave his place smelling of ashes. It was our best time together.
With winter approaching, Richard moved into the suite above mine with his large dog and three young kids from his latest marriage, whose custody he shared. I lived downstairs with my three kids. Our resources were limited to say the least. My relatives had chipped in on the down payment for a house when I needed a secure place in which to raise my family, but I was responsible for maintaining it.
When he was sober, Richard was gentle and sensitive, a person I wanted my children to emulate. However, when he was drunk, he was impossible to be around. Though his children always seemed unperturbed by him. Often I’d bring them downstairs to be with mine, and they were always very polite and perfectly behaved. For a short while social workers hovered about our households. But I’d been a social worker myself in that system, a few years earlier, and they soon supported the arrangement Richard and I had established.
During those years Richard looked like a cross between a hippy and a biker. He had shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, and always wore a green or red plaid flannel work shirt with jeans. He remained thin as a rake—once he pinched one-eighth of an inch of flesh on his stomach and called it his “middle-age spread.”
To augment his small income Richard occasionally scavenged from abandoned buildings, stripping them of whatever valuable items they contained. He was an alchemist—whatever he found he turned into gold. But he turned all that gold into alcohol. He would recover from his hangovers by reading Arendt, Hegel, Derrida, Foucault and Wittgenstein. One of his favourite writers was Gershom Scholem, a Jewish scholar. Though no follower of religion, Scholem explored redemption and salvation—he was a magician of the mind.
Richard continued to concentrate his writing on the activities of the CIA in Latin America. He also tried to join a class action suit against them—soon after we got together, he told me he had learned that during his stay at the Allen Memorial Institute in the early 1960s he had been part of a CIA mind-control experiment.
It had been rumoured for years that during the Korean War, the Koreans had used brainwashing techniques on American soldiers to turn them into enemies of the state, and the US government wanted to be able to use similar techniques against its “enemies” during the Cold War. Dr. Ewen Cameron was hired by the CIA to conduct experiments on psychiatric patients in treatment at the hospital. This had all been done with the full permission and partial sponsorship of the Canadian government.
Known as MK-ULTRA the experiments began in the early 1950s and went on until the late 1960s when they were supposedly stopped—though a decade later, former CIA agents testified that the project had never really been abandoned. Information gleaned from it has remained highly classified. The goal of these “psychic driving” experiments was to manipulate the subjects’ mental states and alter their brain functions.
Without their knowledge, patients were drugged with LSD. Tape recordings were placed under their pillows to condition them to behave in controlled ways. They were systematically degraded, their toilet training was reversed, and after they were regressed, they were re-formed. They were sleep-deprived and given multiple electric shock treatments. All lost vast amounts of memory. Some women did not even remember that they had given birth. Most victims became helpless drug addicts or alcoholics when released. Most ended up in and out of jails, hospitals and other institutions for the rest of their lives. Many killed themselves.
The story broke in l977 because Member of Parliament David Orlikow’s wife, Velma, had been experimented on in the late 1950s. She, along with eight other former patients, sued the CIA for mistreatment and won, which spurred other ex-patients to become active in seeking justice. For years Richard fought with authorities to release his records so he too could become part of a subsequent class action lawsuit. There had been hundreds of victims. But authorities were making it hard for him to establish that he had been at the Allan; the records were allegedly spotty and difficult to access.
It was after the disclosure about the experiments that Richard had begun to disrupt poetry events. In the five or so years we were together, Richard didn’t attend any more readings and when I broached the subject of his previous heckling, he said he couldn’t remember because he’d had black-outs. Now, years later, I think Richard went to those events because they were filled with people whom he thought of as kindred spirits. He had wanted to tell his community what the CIA had done to him but his rage took over.
Once, after seeing my kids onto a plane at the Richmond airport to visit a relative during spring break, I parked my car on the mainland so that Richard and I could explore a pretty little island in the Fraser River. Before we knew it the tide had come up and we were marooned. We spent the night huddled together to ward off the cold and ate the crabapples we picked off the trees. Boats passed us, we waved and shouted, but people just waved back not realizing we needed help. We didn’t know the proper SOS signals. My shouts for help, though to no avail, were far louder than Richard’s, which was peculiar because when he was drunk he was phenomenally loud—it was as if he’d swallowed a public address system.
My neighbour used to cut her grass obsessively, and once, after she’d used her electric lawn mower one time too many, Richard climbed onto the roof to rail against her. After he calmed (and climbed) down, Boris, who lived three blocks away, came knocking on my door. He told me he used to live in another part of town where he’d shared a house with Richard. One day, when Richard was yet again in their back yard ranting, Boris lost his temper and threw a heavy flowerpot at his head. Richard collapsed, and Boris, thinking he’d killed him, quickly left the area. Hearing Richard screaming from our rooftop, Boris was very relieved to learn he was still alive—but just as furious that he was once again within earshot of him.
It seemed as if Richard and I had been stuck on different parts of the same loop forever and at long last I had to give up the fantasy that if only I could get him to stop drinking, he would be my ideal partner—none of it was ever going to happen. When I told him I’d started to see someone else, he shredded his writing and began tossing it off the top balcony. For hours it fluttered past my window like snowflakes in a blizzard. It was the beginning of a series of storms. Ours was an extremely acrimonious parting.
Richard’s kids moved back to live permanently with their mother. Billy Little, a poet, and I became partners in a bookstore where I began to organize a series of readings. Richard appeared at the first event and within minutes, pandemonium reigned. After that he never returned to the store. Still, it took years before he assumed human proportions for me again. I’d duck around a corner if I saw him coming because I couldn’t trust my reactions to him.
My vision was skewed. Where once I had focused on his great qualities, now I demonized him. Finally I found the courage to face him when we happened to bump into each other. He was very friendly, as if nothing bad had ever occurred between us, even invited me to go for
a beer. It was as if he didn’t remember our long, tumultuous relationship. Or that he didn’t care.
Carefully constructed letters/articles by him continued to appear periodically in the Vancouver Sun and the Georgia Straight, all the result of painstaking research. Richard was meticulous at garnering facts, exposing the chinks in the armour of American foreign policy. As always, I was impressed by his intelligence and his commitment. Though he had tried for years, he was never able to claim compensation from either the CIA or the Canadian government for having been a victim of their brainwashing experiments. In order to qualify, he had to have had at least seventy-nine shock treatments, and he’d had “only” seventy-five.
A year after he quit smoking and drinking, Richard died on Father’s Day. His kids found his body in his apartment. They said the last time they’d seen him was a few days earlier. They had all gone on a peace march together. On his desk were copious notes for a new political article. It was just before the beginning of the second American attack on Iraq, when millions around the world were on the streets to protest the coming indescriminate slaughter of innocent people for the sake of oil. According to the subsequent coroner’s report, he had overdosed on prescription pain medication, possibly deliberately.
A friend of his family held a memorial for him at her house. I was apprehensive about how Richard’s ex-wife would receive me, wondering if she were still mad at me for becoming involved with Richard at the end of their marriage. But she hugged me. I saw the woman who’d had a brief affair with Richard while he was with me, and I hugged her.