Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  We abandoned our film half finished.

  * * *

  —

  In the fall of 1973 I started my first full-time job as a “minimum-rage” cub reporter with the Scarborough Herald, a family-run weekly newspaper lodged in a dingy suburban mall. On my first assignment, I was dispatched to photograph and interview a group of indigenous teenagers arriving in Union Station from the North. As my flash camera popped, they huddled together against the tiled wall, heads turned away in fear, and I had a flash of my own: maybe this wasn’t the life for me.

  I had no stomach for hypercompetitive, story-breaking, frontline journalism. Facing a deadline felt like marching to my execution. Unlike my peers, I thrilled not at the sight of a front-page byline. Realizing I preferred reading newspaper stories to writing them, I quit my job in the spring of 1974 and set off with Andy, a fellow reporter, to travel the world. The plan was to pick up odd jobs on the fly, imposing no limits of time or space.

  Our first stop was Halifax, where I worked for several months as an assistant manager of the Odeon Casino Theatre on Gottingen Street that served the city’s angry black underclass in the shadow of the Citadel. The casual references of my co-workers to “niggers” opened my eyes to Canadian racism; had I landed in a northern Alabama? The theatre manager, a pugnacious Cape Bretoner with a Grade 9 education, taught me how to befriend and disarm the black gang leaders; in exchange for not throwing rocks through our marquee window, we issued them free passes to the movies and all-you-can-eat popcorn.

  My days were enlivened by ejecting glue sniffers and chasing purse snatchers. Once a month, the theatre hosted dusk-to-dawn horror movie marathons and blaxploitation flicks when eight hundred stoned, Shaft-worshipping, “kill-whitey” patrons carved up the seats with switchblades as a pair of timid beat cops failed to keep the peace.

  When we’d earned enough for passage across the ocean, Andy and I pressed on to Yorkshire, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, where in the town of Huddersfield, I worked first as a milkman, then a warehouseman. When I slipped off the back of a lorry while unloading forty-pound sacks of sugar, I nearly pulverized my skull into jam on the concrete floor.

  Andy and I slept in a grotty vermin-infested boarding house, five bunks a room, mingling with coal miners who blew their pay packets every night at the pub. One night before falling snoring-drunk into bed, his brow laced with stitches like Frankenstein’s monster, my neighbour relished reporting his savage encounter with a “bottle merchant”—the generations-old practice of thrusting of a smashed pint glass into the face of the adversary. He ended with the boast, “You should see the other guy.”

  Andy and I bought a used Bedford van, dreaming of permanent mobility, but then he fell ill and returned home. I sold the van, bought a bicycle and moved into a smaller boarding house run by a tough-sweet socialist landlady and single mother named after the martyred revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. She taught me how to play mah-jong, and I was adopted. Her fifteen-year-old flirt of a daughter, Sally, pretended an interest in my swelling stack of paperbacks. One evening when her mother was out, Sally invited me into her bedroom on the pretext of needing help to locate a lost school book. As she bent over the bed, even I picked up the signal. Days later in my local pub, the barkeep inquired, “So, have ye had a go at Sally yet?” In a flash I realized that others had, and I never would.

  * * *

  —

  On a drizzling December Sunday, I threaded through the Yorkshire dales to the Brontë family parsonage in the time-stilled village of Haworth. I found the place deserted, and as I communed with the mossy headstones in the adjacent graveyard, I sank into my memories of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

  In the empty rooms, I merged with the exquisite haunted quality, redolent of my grandfather’s house. Pausing over the sofa where thirty-year-old Emily, all four feet eleven inches of her, succumbed to tuberculosis, I studied the teeth of the comb that fell from her hand with her last breath. On the nursery wallpaper, surviving from the 1820s, the four motherless genius-waifs had scribbled stories in miniscule script, birthing intense micro-worlds of fact and fantasy, Gondal and Angria, their words driving up and down the wall and into tiny books. I identified like mad with these emotionally starved children of Irish blood and felt a dark thrill as I scanned the embryonic scratchings of the masterpieces to come. How did Emily Brontë, a girl who never ventured outside of her parochial village, conceive of such a magisterial piece of art as Wuthering Heights, driven by the immortal character of Heathcliff, clawing obsessively at the grave of Cathy, the betrayer who chose class comfort over the wildness of the moors?

  Over the spring and summer of 1975, I cycled the back roads of England, Wales and Ireland, paying homage to the literary shrines of Wordsworth, Byron, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy and Austen, the storytellers who had filled the empty spaces. One late afternoon after a strenuous day of pedalling, I drifted into Winchester Cathedral, once again astonished to find that I was alone. The sublime strains of evensong emerged from an unseen place, a choir of incarnate angels delivering a concert for one; dehydrated and exhausted, I gazed up into the vaulted ceiling and fell into a monkish swoon.

  Cycling in the rainy wilds of County Kerry in southwestern Ireland, I was unaware I was deep in FitzGerald country, for my father had never told me where we came from. One morning, I emerged from a youth hostel to chat with a vivacious Australian of my age. As we unlocked and mounted our bikes, she complimented my 1940s brown fedora—a cast-off of my father’s—and cast me a smile magnetic in its naturalness.

  “I’m heading west. Which way are you going?” she wondered.

  The other way, of course. But instead of shifting gears and spending a day by her side, I turned my bike in the opposite direction. I derived a subtle pleasure from her disappointment, but coasting down the hill I felt a puzzled regret. What was it with me?

  For eighteen months I had survived on thick beer and greasy food, shunning the medication I needed to treat my Crohn’s disease. My gut was not my friend. In a burst of loneliness under one too many Irish downpours, I realized that I could no longer sustain the vagabond life. But I also realized I would miss the milkmen, miners and forklift drivers who had accepted me into their circles as an equal, a scenario that would doubtless find no reciprocity in the dens of Rosedale and Forest Hill.

  Back in Toronto, I felt I had caved in and sold out; in the words of Pablo Neruda: “He who returns has never left.”

  In my absence, my parents had split up. Finding work at the University of Toronto, my mother was now busy fending off assorted suitors while my father had retreated to a rented one-bedroom high-rise apartment and a full-time regimen of TV and psychiatric drugs. I viewed his choice as a sit-down strike against the expectations that had killed him in everything but body; on my infrequent visits, he regarded me like just another channel on the remote control.

  I started work as a reporter for the Port Hope Evening Guide, the smallest daily newspaper in Canada, an hour east of Toronto. In a local bar, I was drawn to Claire, a kind school teacher. On New Year’s Eve 1975, amid the debris of a party in her house, she whispered into my delighted ear, “Let’s be wicked.” I was twenty-five and she was thirty-two. Generously and patiently she tolerated my immature fumblings; over the winter, I felt like a long-starving Irish immigrant gratefully docking in a port of hope.

  In time I would take solace from the historical roster of genius-virgins and near-genius near-virgins: Goethe failed to bed a woman till age forty, and Freud stayed celibate after age forty; T.S. Eliot was asexual when he married at twenty-six, and maybe thereafter; G.B. Shaw lived with his mother until forty-two, then lived an unconsummated marriage. A pioneering expert on sex, Havelock Ellis likely never had any; a passel of brainiacs from Immanuel Kant and Isaac Newton to Henry James and John Ruskin were all virgins and celibates, or so it was said. When I eventually learned that even Pierre Trudeau and John Cleese did not lose it till the age of twenty-five, I counted myself
in good company.

  One night, as Claire sat up reading in bed, she risked a moment of deeper intimacy. “I think you really do like me,” she said. I did, but I could not bring myself to say it aloud and, cut off from my own terror, I did not realize my unconscious mind was now plotting the beginning of the end. To me, liking, lusting and loving formed a confusing trio, and sadly, even two out of three was more than I could handle, even with a warm, open-hearted woman like Claire. I quit the paper.

  Back in Toronto, I drove a cab, then worked half-heartedly on a medical journal. I binge drank and committed regular acts of parapraxis: fender benders, knocking over drinks in bars, blurting cringeworthy faux pas. I pretended I was not receding into the darkness.

  With my brother and Jay, I rented Elmbank, a stone farmhouse on a semi-rural branch of the Humber River built by my pioneering maternal Scots ancestors in 1834 that survived as one of the oldest houses in Toronto. The family had sold the property in the 1890s during an economic depression, and my grandmother—the one who paid for the Odyssey—had recently bought it back. We threw dance parties so energetic that the planks of the original hardwood floors, the fireplaces and sash windows vibrated under our feet, even as the voice of Eric Clapton courted the Victorian and contemporary ghosts:

  Lay down, Sally, no need to leave so soon.

  I’ve been trying all night long just to talk to you.

  We threw a one-day, $10-a-head, jazz and blues festival on the grounds, complete with bleachers, tents, kegs of beer and pots of hot dogs. Scouting out talent at Grossman’s Tavern on Spadina Avenue, we hired bands with names like the Original Sloth Band and Kid Bastien’s Happy Pals to perform. Jammed into the pie-shaped acre-and-a-half property, three hundred people danced and drank and toked and shagged in the woods in a mini-Woodstock we captured on our Super 8 cameras. Because her father was born in the house in 1882, our mother felt entitled to crash our parties. One minute she longed to join the revelry, trolling for a hit of a passing joint; the next minute she turned gorgon, quoting Old Testament scripture—“Honour thy mother and father.”

  The dance floor of my young life was more crowded than I knew.

  George and Sandy, 7 Inkerman Street, Toronto, 1971

  Stewart, 7 Inkerman Street, 1971

  George, 7 Inkerman Street, 1971

  SEVENTEEN

  The Long Goodbye

  After parking his green Chevy truck beside a gas station phone booth in Calgary, Alberta, George dialled the number Ronda had given him. Through the Plexiglas, he scanned the cloud-capped teeth of the Rocky Mountains, eighty miles distant, as on the other end of the line Ronda told him how glad she was that he had come.

  Moving on to Vancouver together, they merged with the shaggy influx: the refugees and refuseniks, the dreamers and the disgruntled, the gentle and the bold, the deadbeats and the live wires, the draft dodgers and the ban the bombers, the charismatic and crazy, naïfs and desperados, nudists and Buddhists, vegans and dopers, tree huggers and whale watchers, each in his or her own way splitting from bad families, bad scenes, bad vibes, bad winters, bad news. The population of the city had recently topped a million, a growth spurt driven by the sixties boom. In their restless, homeless drivenness, they were not so much running away, they told themselves, but running toward.

  British Columbia. Before Christ. Before the Crash.

  Dropping her plans for Australia, Ronda shacked up with George at 1274 Barclay Street, an old lumber-baron mansion that had been broken up into apartments, and together they started to assemble something half-resembling an adult life. Staring into the mirror one morning, George found streaks of silver in his brown hair; within days, his entire twenty-eight-year-old head and beard turned grey as a winter sky. George was unfazed, even pleased, by the sudden skipping of an entire developmental stage.

  Sally had remained a fitful, murky presence in his dreams. Then one night she burst before him spectacularly alive, real, radiant. He gazed into her eyes, and as she opened her mouth to speak, instead of words a rainbow of erotic, psychedelic colours gushed out, the arc seeming to connect heaven and earth. Waking, he wondered, If this is a sign, what does it mean?

  Ronda enrolled in the pottery program in the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and George found a job at the new CBC-TV building on Hamilton Street, employed not as a journalist but a carpenter by the institution he had worshipped as a kid. In workshops three floors below ground level, George steeped himself in the art of scenic carpentry for various shows and specials featuring Juliette or Blood, Sweat and Tears.

  On the set of Canada’s first late-night TV talk show, 90 Minutes Live, temporarily imported from Toronto, George built the desk for the host, Peter Gzowski, a radio star whose transition to the tube failed to divert Canadians from their habitually early bedtimes. Still, as George lingered backstage, he thought, I could do that. But he wasn’t ready yet.

  * * *

  —

  George and Ronda began to buy, renovate and flip a series of houses as a path to early retirement. Scrounging money from various sources, they acquired a fixer-upper in Kitsilano, living in the gutted shell while they worked. One day George noticed an ad for a six-hundred-square-foot cabin with a wood stove in the wilds of West Vancouver, two blocks from the ocean and twenty minutes from downtown. Racing out to 5410 Keith Road, he snared the place on the spot for $45,000 without consulting his partner. Fortunately, Ronda loved it as much as he did.

  Built in 1918 on a dead-end survey road by a free-spirited young war widow named Lillian, the cabin sat on a triangle-shaped half-acre lot near Lighthouse Park; with its stands of one-hundred-and-fifty-foot cedars and Douglas fir and a set of rolling terraces shaded by an eight-hundred-foot cliff, the place was a lost-in-the-woods oasis where they caught glimpses of deer and bear. In the garage, George built a gas-fired pottery kiln for Ronda, where she made and sold her wares. The property was overgrown with blackberry bushes, and they would spend the next two years hacking it all back, like a bad childhood, gradually revealing Lillian’s 1920s English garden of roses and lilies.

  At Christmas, the two flew to Toronto for the holidays. George’s worldly possessions—books, records, handmade furniture—were still stored in his parents’ garage, so he built a ten-foot shipping crate to pack them all in. On the January morning in 1976 when the crate landed like a giant coffin on his B.C. driveway, he knew he was never moving back east.

  After two years in a permanent part-time position, George approached his boss, Gilbert Mitchell, an Alberta cowboy who could pass for a Hollywood character actor, and asked to work full-time. Gilbert responded with a blunt challenge that George would later acknowledge as pivotal: “Don’t settle for this life, George. Use your brains.”

  Feeling like a child standing outside his parents’ bedroom door, George teetered on the threshold of the newsroom: dare he set foot in there? Two days later, he was allowed to edit Canadian Press wire copy and type it into the teleprompter for the on-air newsreader. For two months, he juggled two jobs, moving up from the windowless production studios underground into the sunlit main floor newsroom; descending and ascending, he hammered sets by day, copy by night. Then the news editor gave George a second push: “You’ve got talent. Go to journalism school.”

  On June 2, 1977, his thirtieth birthday, parked on a barstool in the Sandman Inn across the street from the CBC, George drank beer and wondered, Do I coast or climb? Pass and surpass my father? Become more than an engaging nobody? Can I be somebody and still be myself? When at sixteen he’d told his parents that he wanted to break the fourth-generational chain of Upper Canadian Georges, quit school after Grade 12 and study journalism, their response—“You are disgrace to the family!”—stopped him like a bullet to the head.

  Slamming his fist on bar, he resolved to catch up to his younger, wiser self. Changing his life, his death. Sigmund Freud believed true happiness sprang from the adult fulfillment of a forgotten or deferred childhood wish; that’s why money did not ensure t
rue happiness, for children did not wish for money. When they jumped, it was for joy.

  * * *

  —

  Enrolling in a two-year broadcast journalism program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, George discovered he was easily the oldest student. Grizzled, bottle-in-the-desk-drawer veterans of radio and TV were not born teachers, but they drilled him usefully, if tediously, in the technological pragmatics of deadline-driven newsgathering.

  Graduating in 1979, he lucked into a job as a stringer with CKNW Radio; the station had never hired anybody out of school, but George’s grey-haired gravitas created a precedent. The largest station in western Canada, it ran a dynamic, imaginative news operation, a rotation of thirty editors and reporters churning out newscasts every half hour, twenty-four hours a day. At first, George fell back into his cell of self-doubt. Then the news director, Warren Barker, delivered the advice he would never forget: “Don’t ever confess your rookie incapacities to anyone. Keep your cards close to the vest; you’re bright and you’ll figure it out.”

  Jumping into a white Ford sedan equipped with a two-way radio and the bold block letters NEWS painted on the doors, George cruised the streets of the city. Fake it until you make it. Traffic accidents, forest fires, shipwrecks, typhoons, strikes, toxic spills, holdups, rapes, homicides, suicides, parricides, political scandal, human interest—he sweated out twelve-hour days, six days a week, often not returning home till breakfast. Typically putting in several hours to create a single, forty-second, hundred-word spot on-air, he pared his sentences to the bone, choosing nouns as pictures, verbs as actions, presenting the facts as visual poetry, speaking directly to the gut of his listeners.