Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  For my twentieth birthday, my mother gave me a Super 8 camera. Film, that magical, time-travelling escape hatch, had often saved me, and maybe she knew that better than I did. She’d always been capable of sporadic gestures of lukewarm support when it came to my artistic aspirations, though she undermined them with a subtle, unsettling, sibling-like competiveness. Her own early aesthetic impulses had been quashed by her father, and I sensed she both admired and envied my potential. When I showed early promise with watercolours, she framed two of my Georgian Bay landscapes, but in a strange imitation of her self-thwarting bent, never again would I pick up a brush. I would not be framed by my mother.

  But if I could paint or shoot a portrait of my own life so far, how would it look? Love Story, a box-office hit about a Harvard preppie and his dying working-class girlfriend, not only left me cold but with the conviction I could do much better myself. Short of turning the camera on my parents, I wrote and directed a political satire, The Assassination of Alderman Alderman, complete with a mock newscast voiceover, recruiting my brother and a close friend, Jay, as actors. The rebellious son of a Rosedale lawyer whose stutter had led to his early exit from UCC, Jay played a deranged populist demagogue campaigning for mayor of Toronto. Speechifying atop the Peter Pan statue at Avenue Road and St. Clair, haranguing bewildered passersby, he was gunned down by a black-hatted assassin, played by my brother, the ketchup-stained body rushed to the door of the UCC infirmary where no one received him. Jay was the kind of one-off character who spontaneously scat-sang the solemn Anglo hymn “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times” on kazoo, sending us into paroxysms of laughter. We were the assassination generation; this was how we handled it.

  In the spring of 1971, while I was away at school, my mother sprang the news that she had sold our house on Dunvegan Road. The roof, floors and walls that had contained my body for the past fourteen years simply dematerialized, as if it, or we ourselves, had never existed in the first place. I knew, but did not allow myself to know, that six months earlier, my father had made a second try at suicide by morphine, this time in my brother’s bedroom, and that our sister had saved his life, in body if not in mind. I was left to imagine my mother emptying my bedroom of its contents without my knowledge or consent, as if disposing of the evidence.

  Simultaneously, my rock star narco-gods were dying for our sins, one by one: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, all crashing the Peter Pan barrier of age twenty-seven into sweet oblivion.

  In my final year of Queen’s, my roommate Hal rocked my world when he erupted into a weeks-long jag of scattershot paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations. I was crying into the lap of a girl I knew from film class, hoping she’d take pity and deliver me from my twenty-one-year-old virginity when Hal burst purple-faced through the bedroom door waving a condom—“Do you need some protection?” With this latest in a long line of bizarre teaching moments, lust died a quick death. When I committed Hal to the psych hospital and a barrage of electric shock, I was unaware that my father was suffering a similar fate in Toronto.

  A dismal Christmas was redeemed by the fact that I’d at last formed a bond with my brother, Mike, who had followed me to Queen’s. Falling in with a pair of teenage prodigies, we stayed up all night, aping the Dadaists of Cabaret Voltaire by taking turns at a typewriter composing lines of a marathon group poem—a surrealist parlour game known as “the exquisite corpse.” As we feverishly discoursed on Dylan, Zen, Yeats, transmigration of souls, precognition and Sufi mysticism, we spun the avant-garde “music from outer space” of Sun Ra and Frank Zappa’s Weasels Ripped My Flesh. We compiled a cast of characters, live and dead, historic and fictional, to invite to a massive dinner party in heaven, seated at tables of four: Cathy and Heathcliff, meet Stanley Kubrick and Mae West. Gregor Samsa and Grace Slick, meet Timothy Leary and Mary Magdalene. And why not include the immigrant maid who made our beds every morning? If we were going to crack the Mystery, we needed help.

  It never crossed my mind to invite Sally.

  FIFTEEN

  Communing

  In the spring of 1970, George and Sandy, together with Stewart and Val, moved into 7 Inkerman Street, a two-storey semi-detached Toronto house built in 1837. The foursome was joined by three others: George’s childhood friend David, the one who had cheated death in a motorcycle accident in the summer of 1967; Glenn, a friend of Stewart’s; and the intuitive prodigy, Graham, the only person who had really listened to George when he reported his premonitory dream of Sally’s death.

  A ten-minute walk south of the countercultural vortices of Yorkville Village and Rochdale College, Inkerman flowed westward a short distance into Bay Street, where it met St. Michael’s College, home of the mass media guru Marshall McLuhan. Southward loomed the despised canyon of rapacious stockbrokers; eastward stood quaint peak-roofed working-class cottages. Global villages within a global village.

  Each side of the semi—ground-floor living room, hallway, dining room and kitchen—was a mirror image of the other, joined like brain hemispheres by an open archway. Upstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom occupied each side. Before moving in the furniture, seven bodies slapped coats of paint on the walls, then crashed on the floor to finish the job the next day. The landlords had warned of the presence of a female ghost who wandered the house by night, and sure enough, when Sandy rose at 2 a.m. to visit the bathroom, she saw a young blond woman in a white nightgown glide out of Stewart and Valerie’s bedroom and pause at the doorway. Taking her for Val—a petite woman in her early twenties with shoulder-length blond hair—Sandy rejoined George without a second thought.

  Over breakfast, she was puzzled to find Val clad in dark pyjamas.

  “Why did you change out of your white nightgown?”

  Val revealed that not only did she not own one, but she had not gotten up during the night.

  In the months ahead, whenever the sound of unknown footsteps emanated from the staircase, Stewart’s two dogs hovered and snarled. David scoffed at the suggestion of apparitions, but then he too saw a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair in a white nightie in the hallway. From then on, whenever anything in the house went awry, the ghost was blamed.

  * * *

  —

  Though George considered himself lucky to have five friends and a lover, only Stewart remained intimately acquainted with his bedrock sadness. Most weekdays after class, the tribe routinely beamed itself upstairs into the tiny TV den, where the ugly psychedelic wallpaper overlaid the ugly Victorian wallpaper, to watch reruns of Captain Kirk going boldly where no one had gone before. For one two-week period, a harried Vietnam deserter and his girlfriend crashed on their floor, the young man unfurling heart-rending tales of war trauma, exile in this northern backwater and pining for home. The Canadians listened, horrified and sympathetic; for them, dodging the draft meant stepping out of the winter wind.

  To replenish his $10-an-ounce stash of cannabis, George shuffled over to nearby Rochdale College, the hippie utopia fast turning into a biker dystopia. Convinced of their ability to defy gravity, two acid heads had recently plunged from the top floor to their death, leaving George Wodehouse, the beleaguered U of T public health doctor working out of his office on nearby Huron Street, straining to grasp the social pathologies of his daughters’ generation.

  Rochdale, Yorkville, Cinecity, the El Mocambo, the Planetarium—all were within a half-mile radius of Inkerman. On a fateful Friday night in the basement of the Embassy Tavern, the gang encountered a young doctor who extended his palm bearing a cellophane packet of fifty tabs of acid, the pure, original stuff straight from the Sandoz lab in Switzerland. And so it was that at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning, bloated with draft beer, George and friends began an hallucinatory, twelve-hour, Ken Kesey-esque bus ride.

  George knew that acid favoured the prepared mind; if a magic mushroom was a nine-volt battery, acid was a tongue thrust into an electrical socket. Bad trips were born of excessive dosing and fighting the experience; a safe-as-mil
k holding environment forestalled tipping off the cliff into psychosis and never coming back. If not exactly dropping out, George was tuning in and turning on to the message: just the right dosage, set and setting, soft lighting and music and a relaxed brain—“You have to be out of your mind to use your head”—were the keys to a wild-yet-safe cortex-clearing trip through the waking dream.

  Splayed under the black ceiling of the living room, decorated with the orbs of the earth and moon cut from glossy posters, the Inkerman Seven settled into their makeshift planetarium, their wows and far-outs relaying the shared synaptic overload. George stared at random objects hour upon regressive hour, ingesting a reverberating flood of patterns and visual metaphors, the usual surfaces made unusual: beads, mirrors, drapes, fingernails, a mote of dust, a mole on Sandy’s skin, the candlewax coating the flickering wine bottle, the whorls in the crown of Stewart’s shaggy head.

  Emerging clear-headed from the underworld on Sunday afternoon, George observed, “Amazing how you can sober up on LSD.”

  A genial, long-haired draft dodger from New York regularly rang the front doors of the houses on Inkerman Street and environs, an Avon Lady in combat boots, pushing his wares from pot, hashish, mushrooms and LSD to mescaline, opium and peyote—even the banana skins suggested by the Warholian art decorating the album cover The Velvet Underground. Taste tests around the kitchen table, littered with roach clips, rolling papers and bongs, kept Inkerman up to everything but speed.

  Into routine all-night parties over a hundred bodies crammed, rock ’n’ roll cranked to raise the dead. All embraced the sacred tenets of Timothy Leary, the renegade Harvard prof and politician of ecstasy, and Aldous Huxley, the English intellectual and opener of The Doors of Perception who dropped acid on his deathbed, the same day in November 1963 as JFK was murdered. After a McLuhan-themed, the medium-is-the-message party, George penned a hundred-page paper, “Media Self-Validation,” about how we defined ourselves in multiple ways through media images. Bottom line: You were only real if you existed in print, photograph, narrative or some external construction. Then he lost the paper. He was, like the house itself, semi-detached.

  George came to favour the fast, smash-in-the-face rush over the trickle-down-the-spine hash-brownie experience. His tastes were not subtle. One Saturday afternoon, as Sandy stood on the front porch enjoying a mushroom-clouded yet intelligible conversation with a black squirrel, George perched on the can waiting for the windowpane acid to kick in, when suddenly it did: an entire side of the bathroom wall bulged like a Nietzschean forehead, rocketing out with such force that he was blown clean off his porcelain throne. He was delighted. “Reality is a crutch for those who can’t face acid.”

  On a dual-track, reel-to-reel tape recorder, George assembled audio collages out of random lyrics pulled from his album collection married to snatches of the Firesign Theatre, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, National Lampoon and the Bonzo Dog Band. With a razor blade, he cut and pasted stream-of-consciousness word-association images and soundscapes, a promiscuous pastiche of puns, alliteration, onomatopoeia, neologisms, synesthesia—the found art of the unconscious, with juxtapositions pleasing and jarring. Suite Judy Blue Eyes/These Eyes/Brown-Eyed Girl. He buried a small tape recorder behind a wall in an alcove, playing an endless loop of his own voice: “Really moist brownies come from Duncan Hines!” His exasperated associates bought him a set of headphones to keep his stoned humour to himself.

  But the shared ideals of the Inkerman Seven, unchained from social convention, inevitably crashed on the hard kitchen floor of the domestic economy. As the women tired of handling the shopping, cooking, dishwashing and money management—“Where’s your share of the rent? The food?”—emotional hand grenades burst the socialist-utopian-psychedelic bubble. On the day the place was burglarized, the women insisted on amending the hippie constitution and locking the front door; in such ways the female invited the male to grow up.

  * * *

  —

  When it could no longer be denied that the house needed a dining room table, George and Stewart drove up to Rio Lumber on Merton Street, overlooking Mount Pleasant Cemetery where Sally’s ashes were buried. They loaded up their old Chevy with nails and glue and strapped two-by-fours to the roof. Undeterred by a shared ignorance of the art of woodworking, they headed down to the basement of 7 Inkerman and cobbled together a rough beast of a table.

  George knew that working with your hands failed to qualify as an Upper Canadian pursuit, but still, he borrowed his father’s hammer with one of the prongs broken off, dipped his nose into a manual and shed his ignorance one step at a time. Healing himself was not a conscious intention, but as particles of sawdust settled into the black grooves of the spinning albums, George Orr was falling in love with pine.

  Clunky pieces of furniture found their way into the homes of family and friends. Form and function rarely agreed, but they got along. The hippie cottage industry with an 1837 soul grew, scoring a contract to build shelves for a health food store on nearby Yonge Street. With each delivery, the refrains of the customers remained constant in their Canadian politeness: “That’s nice.” A name was born: the Nice Furniture Company. Stewart was in; if they’d never make it as cabinet ministers, why not cabinetmakers?

  * * *

  —

  Glenn quit the commune and was replaced by Jane, the tall, self-confident girlfriend of Ted, a talented musician who was often drawn into the basement workshop. Refugees from Establishment Toronto families, Ted and Jane slid seamlessly into the Inkerman scene.

  One day an idea, germinating for months in the collective boomer psyche, popped out of George’s mouth: “Let’s split from the city and grow things in the country! Vegetables and livestock! Back to the land, man! Weekend hippies to full-time hippies!”

  Over the summer months of 1970, George and Stewart drove the battered Chevy back and forth between Toronto and Barrie, Port Hope and Niagara Falls, checking out three thousand miles of rural Ontario to find a place where they could set up a self-sustaining organic farm and a furniture shop to which they would devote their lives.

  Nearing summer’s end, they happened on a property five miles east of Lindsay, outside the hamlet of Downeyville. The narrow hundred-acre strip of pasture land and hayfields held a pond and grove of reforested pine; a classic Ontario working barn faced a dilapidated wood-frame farmhouse. The village of Omemee, where Neil Young grew up, was a short drive distant, as was Rochdale’s own rural commune, Golden Lake Farm, on the edge of Algonquin Park. Irish Protestant pioneer farmland wrested from the natives was being reclaimed by a tribe of white brats who identified with the natives.

  Each kicking in enough to cover the down payment and the $35,000 mortgage, the group of seven baptized their sylvan utopia Never-Neverland. Patrick, the precocious UCC old boy turned Yorkville pianist and part-time studio session man, replaced Jane as the seventh tenant, and all helped heave his piano into the farmhouse. Patrick was the only permanent resident, while the others drove up from Inkerman on the weekends.

  One warm September evening, everyone clambered into George’s Chevy and zigzagged all over the moonlit fields. The entire county was abuzz over the arrival of the first outsiders in years; were these the scandalous hippie sex-and-drug fiends so demonized by the media?

  Heeding the advice of the Department of Agriculture, the novice farmers fixed on strawberries as a healthy cash crop and granted the neighbouring farmer permission to keep his forty-three head of beef cows in their barn over the winter. In the spring, the grazing livestock scuttled the plans for Strawberry Fields Forever.

  That fall, stoned out of his skull, George stumbled into the gymnasium of Upper Canada College for a five-year reunion of the Class of ’65, seeking he knew not what. Narcotics had served as a salve, but not his salvation, and in his recurring dreams he never ceased aching for a place that had never existed and a time that never was. Sally’s fingers pulling back the velvet curtains of his nocturnal amphitheatre, she emerged i
ncandescent from the fortified Rosedale sally port, moving as only she moved, speaking only as she spoke, laughing as only she laughed.

  He started to seriously believe that Sally had never died, that her parents had hidden her from him. Because he had never seen her body, there was room for reasonable doubt. It was no more far-fetched an idea than the moon landing was staged, or that Paul McCartney was replaced by an impersonator after he died in a 1966 car crash. A corpse lying cold and motionless in a coffin was the closest thing to certain truth, but inside him Sally remained warm and moving and promising and real. Rarely did a morning pass when he did not expect her to appear in the flesh at the table. Was not Orpheus, charmer of the Gods, granted a second chance?

  * * *

  —

  In the spring of 1971, after six years of undergraduate work had failed to materialize into a BA, George gave up on school.

  With his father’s pull, George was hired as the Canadian sales rep for the Ecclesiastical Insurance Office of the Church of England, insurers of nearly every church in the world, including the Vatican. He quit within a week, telling his father he refused to live in a cage.

  He landed a job as the sole sales rep for House of Anansi Press on Jarvis Street, a seedbed of Canadian cultural nationalism, founded in the Centennial Year of 1967, where the poets Dennis Lee and Margaret Atwood were emerging with seminal works. Loading his trunk with books, George covered a route of assorted bookstores, filling a steady demand; The Circle Game, a book of Atwood’s poetry, had sold five thousand copies, the mark of a Canadian bestseller. One day, assigned the task of keeping Atwood busy, George repaired with her to the Red Lion pub, where she drank him under the table.