But fine, I said, you stay in bed. No, I insist. I’ll go sit through the entire alphabet by myself. From under the covers, Brian replied that he’d try to show up later.
Casey Burke Marley Johnson. (Yes, that Bob Marley. No wonder he didn’t want to go to dental college.) I calculated that the Js would arrive roughly in the middle of several hours spent sitting on hard folding chairs in an unheated tent, watching polished young people, many going on to post-grad work in lucrative fields of study, cross the stage in their book-shaped caps and Oxonian robes.
I reached the campus in good time, I thought, only to discover that more diligent families had staked out their seats near the stage hours earlier. I found an empty chair toward the back and reserved it with my coat. Then I went behind the tent and followed the long serpentine line of grads until I spotted Casey, in his bachelor robe with the white fur around the hood (the “arts” fur) and a tasselled cap perched on his springy hair. Always a sucker for costumes, he was getting in the spirit of things. He was wearing his Ray-Bans, too, even though the day was overcast.
Casey had only thought to invite his girlfriend, Rebecca, and his roommates the night before so he wasn’t sure they would turn up. Wow, good sense of occasion, I thought glumly. At least our party of two wouldn’t need to make special reservations for lunch.
I went back to my chair under the Big Top. Families were milling about the lawns, getting yearbooks signed and taking photographs, as the girls’ high heels sank into the grass. Nobody in our family cares about this occasion except me, I thought morosely and . . . why did I care again? I had forgotten. And come to think of it, why hadn’t I pursued a career as a cabaret singer like Marianne Faithful?
Then I saw Brian striding across the lawn with a scarf around his neck, carrying a large tea.
“I took some Advils,” he said, sitting down beside me.
I studied the program and counted the list of arts graduates. Three hundred and sixty-five. But I had to admit that whoever announced the names of the students as each one came to the stage was giving it his all.
Thomas . . . William . . . Cullen . . . Please come forward!
There is something about an unadorned list of names that is mysteriously moving. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that long black granite wall, got it right. Every time a new name was announced and another grad crossed the stage, a pocket of cheers would rise up from their family in the crowd. Tears came to my eyes, and I didn’t know why; it was the wedding moment, of witnessing hope and promise, while knowing that life will test that hope in ways that couldn’t be imagined now.
Finally Casey was inside the tent, a few yards from the edge of the platform. He craned around in the line, spotted us in the crowd, and waved. He was still wearing his Ray-Bans and grinning. James Dean, B.A. I assumed he would pocket the sunglasses before he crossed the stage but, no, he left them on, loping across the platform and warmly shaking the chancellor’s hand with both hands, like T. Bone Burnett getting an award at the Grammies.
I thought this tiny act of subversion was harmless enough, but months later we learned that it had set a historical precedent; henceforth, the wearing of sunglasses was officially banned from McGill Convocation exercises.
Well, it wasn’t a fellowship but it did represent a contribution to the academic world.
Rebecca and several other friends had showed up just in time to watch Casey cross the stage. They whistled and whooped; heading off stage, Casey waved the paper baton of his diploma in the air—he had graduated “With Distinction,” which was news to me—and flashed his smile. I insisted on witnessing the rest of the students right down to Zwicker, and then we gathered on the lawn. Brian’s hue was slowly changing from grey to pink, now that the captive-audience part was over. Even the spring sun had made an appearance.
We took pictures of our son and his friends, then of him riding his bike around the lawn in robe, cap, and sunglasses.
“I get it now,” Casey said to us, who also likes a good wedding. “Thanks for coming.”
After the ceremony,we took the group out for lunch at a sunny, high-ceilinged bistro on Bernard Ave. There were other families there as well, celebrating, and solo diners reading newspapers on the patio. It was the sort of Montreal place where Sunday brunch goes on for hours, as if Monday will never arrive.
Love Trouble
AFTER GRADUATION, Casey stayed in Montreal, where Rebecca was still finishing her degree. The pickings were slim on the work front but eventually he found a minimum wage job with a francophone sound and light production company, in the rigging department. Being le chef des moteurs was about as far as he could get from the lecture halls of McGill, but he did hang on to one shred of school—his weekly late-night show on the college radio station and his host persona as the Rock and Roll Doctor.
My chronic motherhood didn’t extend to staying up ’til 1 a.m. to listen to the live broadcasts, but I tuned into the podcasts online, which had acquired a small but loyal following. I liked the music (unsurprising, since some of it came directly from our basement) and his retro beatnik slogans. (“The show that puts the wildness in your mildness.”) For maternal surveillance purposes, the mood of the program was also an excellent barometer of how things were going for him in his new post-grad world.
(I had been warned not to eavesdrop on his Facebook page, a familiar parental form of spying. But since he is also one of my “friends,” I do get his status updates. “Casey is a dork,” he posted one afternoon when I was logged in. “Is this genetic?” I commented. “Possibly,” he posted back.)
That long, cold winter, I noticed the playlists on his show were changing their tone. The ratio of Roy Orbison to zydeco was going up, and he wasn’t playing as much Ramones. Instead, there were more early, crackly sounding blues by Lucille Bogan and lots of Sam Cooke, especially A Change Is Gonna Come. I didn’t think he liked Amy Winehouse but he made an exception for a killer demo of her singing Love Is a Losing Game.
It soon became evident to me from the musical offerings on Rock and Roll Radio that all was not well in the romance department.
Rebecca was younger than Casey, just 21. A beautiful girl from a big, warm family. We had met her a few times and liked her. Wow, good for him, I thought. The two of them fell for each other, and then six months later things began to unravel. I’m not sure what the problem was, apart from the basic, insoluble problem of being in love in the first place, and Casey was too discreet to go into details. But his efforts to sound okay on the phone were not always successful. He was having doubts, and she didn’t want him to have any doubts. All I knew was that they seemed to be working awfully hard to be happy.
I tried to remember that all I had to do was answer the phone, put things in perspective for him, and not be pulled off balance myself.
At which I failed.
Well, I’m not getting very far with this part. I don’t know how to write about my son’s love troubles, and shouldn’t even go there. But not to write about them in some way would eliminate the thing that probably affected me the most about this particular stage of growing up. There’s nothing sadder than the sound of ruined love in your child’s voice. For a parent, this is new terrain. We can proofread their essays and buy them duvets but we can’t put love back together for them.
Love trouble is the signal that the most gratifying stage of motherhood, when you could actually protect your child from being hurt, is over. He’s out in bad weather on his own now. It’s your job to listen, to sound optimistic, and to feel helpless. Also, when you hear yourself saying,“Are you getting to the gym?”make a note: better hit the gym yourself.
It was February or March. Another call from Montreal. They had broken up, again, and he was determined to make it stick this time. I was attempting to be brisk and normal. He said he hadn’t been outside yet but that he planned to. He was going to fix his bike.
“Just keep moving,” I said. “Today won’t be good. But it will get better, I promise you.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
We hung up. A wave of sadness descended. I have not quite lied, although I could have elaborated: it does get better, but it is never the same again, not really, and even a mother with several decades between her and the first or last departing love can feel the sting again.
Drugs, Music,
and Sex in 1968
1968. It was only a year since I had finally shed the last of my tattered virginity, the same spring and summer I smoked marijuana for the first time, listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and rose up the staircase of that last, long crescendo that ends “A Day in the Life.” The Beatles had gone from singing bouncy little ditties like “Love Me Do” to performing neuroscience on my brain.
In my last year of university, drugs and the new music had just made their way to Toronto from San Francisco and London. From the Canadian prairies too:Neil Young and Joni Mitchell played at The Riverboat. The Jefferson Airplane came to town; Bob Dylan was at his most beautiful, long before the pencil moustache. He had just put out John Wesley Harding. My boyfriend’s apartment balcony overlooked Yorkville Avenue, where there was a bad-trip trailer parked down the street.
He and his pals liked to drop acid on the weekends, sometimes in the course of sleepover parties in one parental home or another (minus the parents). When they got stoned they would often conduct a shock-and-awe tour of the furniture. One item that sent them onto the floor in paroxysms of glee was a transparent hassock with a bed of artificial flowers inside. It did cry out for ridicule.
But on the whole, dope wasn’t my cup of tea. It took me another 10 years before I got up the nerve to try acid (and found it less gestalt-shifting than mescaline). My Burlington brain preferred alcohol. So I drank scotch and water and puffed on the occasional joint while everyone else, including the more intrepid girlfriends, took tabs of Windowpane or Purple Microdot. They marvelled at the hassock, too, or sat with glistening eyes while the boys fell about laughing. I could enter into the spirit of things but I wasn’t actually seeing the molecules of the shower curtains writhe and dance. Seventeen magazine hadn’t prepared me for this sort of dating situation.
While my boyfriend took acid and toured the universe, I rode along in the sidecar, adept at contact highs but still intact, suburban, afraid. It was going to be love that cracked me open, not a chemical.
As a result, I sometimes found these weekends a little . . . taxing. A night at the movies and then home to bed would have been just as mind-expanding. But I didn’t complain. It was understood that the collective experience was more important, more fun, than most of the things that couples did on their own: dates, for instance. Dates were old-fashioned. We wanted to experience the new consciousness as a group, to bounce around on it together like a trampoline.
But underneath the giddiness there was also a more momentous sense of being on a genuine frontier. This was new. Nobody thought about where the experience might take us or what we could make of it; that was what “the system” did, boxing up the future. We want the world and we want it now. Our job was to be in the moment.
Unfortunately, smoking marijuana tended to pluck me out of the moment, not into it. (“Wow, my heart is beating fast. Maybe my aortic valve is leaking. . . .”) But sometimes getting stoned did feel like a revelation—an irrefutable, visceral sense of what could be. Since then, decades of avid horticulture have bred stronger strains, but there were times when the gentle dope of the day made me think: yes, this is how I ought to feel all the time, this plush connection to the low hum of life in everything.
For my poetry-writing boyfriend, I think drugs were exactly what they were meant to be: an X-ray that exposed hidden truths. A do-si-do of the weltanschauung. Getting stoned wasn’t just about lying around listening to Dark Side of the Moon and falling madly in love with the patterns in the rug. Marijuana still had an aura of sacrament about it. We were initiates into another avenue of higher education.
It’s hard to imagine now,but drug use was not part of the mainstream, and “rehab”was something you had to do if you broke a leg. Before the 1960s, only Thelonius Monk and beatniks smoked weed. Until grass,mushrooms, and acid came along, our culture of intoxication didn’t go far beyond a case of Molson’s Blue on the dock. Alcohol wasn’t as much of a fixture on the scene as it is now. Binge-drinking was still Skid Row behaviour, not a prom-night ritual.
Long before weed, however, there was speed, a dangerous but curiously tolerated drug. When my mother went to her GP in the 1950s complaining about weight gain and a lack of “pep,” the doctor routinely prescribed amphetamines.
“You should have seen me run around with the vacuum,” she recalled with a certain relish. Speed was around the way antihistamines are now. Some writers thrived on it: Jean-Paul Sartre wrote voluminously on speed; Jack Kerouac famously tried typing on one long scroll of paper so he wouldn’t have to stop to roll in a new page.
But speed didn’t deconstruct your world view; it just kicked it up a notch. It gave people energy they didn’t actually have. Acid and marijuana, on the other hand, rearranged the whole grammar of things and melted down the words.
To point out the obvious, dope and acid fed a lot of the new music as well—not just the lyrics, but the perceptions that woke up language. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is one long pipe dream, the album that revolutionized pop music. (A year later came the song “Ob-La-Di,” a tune John Lennon referred to as “Paul’s granny shit,” but never mind.)
Drugs fought cliché until they began to generate their own. Getting stoned can become a case of chasing the dragon, trying to recapture that initial visionary rush. But for a brief time—in the late ’60s and early ’70s—I think we had it: that first, fresh uncorrupted glimpse.
Not that we were so original or groundbreaking; it was mostly a matter of being the right age at the right time. There was an assumption that smoking dope or taking acid was not just a lark but a new technology, a way to draw aside the curtains of the ordinary world. It didn’t feel like escapism; it felt more like tuning in, Timothy’s Leary imperative. Turn on, tune in, drop out.
Leary was not, in the end, the best advertisement for the long-term effects of taking acid, having turned into a sort of Joan Rivers of enlightenment toward the end of his life. Aldous Huxley exited more gracefully. His last words, to his wife, were “LSD. 100 Micrograms I. M.,” to which she responded by injecting him with the requested amount.
In 1968 taking drugs wasn’t considered seedy; getting stoned was almost an act of civic hygiene, like volunteering at a food bank. It was about seeing, and seeing through, the rules, hypocrisies, and convention our generation had all grown up with—values that had helped our parents raise protected, secure, well-fed, well-educated children,who then grew up to become questing, idealistic, naïve, self-involved, and somewhat careless young adults, unconcerned about careers or making pots of money. My friends joined CUSO or signed up for Katimavik. They drove Volkswagen vans overland to India, and slept in hammocks on the beach in Mexico. Marriage, houses, and having children were postponed until the last possible moment.
We didn’t worry about the future; indeed, it rarely crossed our minds. It was taken for granted that we could invent our own futures in a world that was environmentally and economically well-disposed toward us. The young were golden. Nothing stood in our way—jobs grew on trees, travel was dirt cheap, the war in Vietnam was troublesome and probably immoral, but self-contained. The world was still intact, and so were we.
All the more reason to take it apart, along with our consciousness.
This enterprise,however, had some grave consequences. A girl I knew in university took acid and began to experience one orgasm after another, like a set of rapids, and it wouldn’t stop. She had a breakdown and disappeared. Acid probably contributed to the suicide of two other friends. The term “mind-blowing” wasn’t accidental.
In our son’s growing-up, I think Casey preferred Jamaican over-proof to smoking dope. We never
had to go through chats with the principal or the drug busts and showdowns that are a rite of passage for many parents. No, the irony in our family is that drugs were probably more important in our lives than they have been in our son’s.
But music was an even more defining force. This was before pop culture became the great hairy beast it is today. Even in 1968, when rock ’n’ roll was 12 years old, the new music was still relatively self-contained, an upstart genre in a world of classical music, bland ballads, and Masterpiece Theatre.
I remember the night that rock ’n’ roll first breached TV, in 1956, when Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. As my mother and I sat in the den watching Elvis sing “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog,”I felt a blush of embarrassment;we were watching something sexual together, on the television, which had never happened before.
And well before the civil rights movement, even though the face of rock ’n’ roll was mostly white, it was rooted in black culture— in gospel, R&B, and the southern blues that the Rolling Stones emulated and made popular. Unlike the rest of society, the early televised dance concerts, like The T.A.M.I. Show, were racially integrated.
Open-air rock shows like Woodstock and the Stones’ Hyde Park show in London were new. Many of us had grown up in nuclear, secular families in the suburbs and had never experienced a sense of community on that scale. Drugs,music, political activism, and the sheer demographics of the postwar baby boom created a culture that we felt we was ours, and ours alone.
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