Coming Ashore

by Catherine Gildiner

  Crazy David’s reeked of burning incense that made me feel woozy. I spent my entire September rent budget on utterly outlandish hippie clothes — my favourite was a purple vest that had three feet of fringe on it with red beads placed at six-inch intervals. I sounded like a mariachi band when I walked. I bought underwear tops, appliquéd pants and floppy hats in every colour. I bought long Indian shirts with embroidery on the sleeves that Ravi Shankar might wear for a concert.

  Crazy David had waist-length blond hair in a ponytail and wore a T-shirt that read, Turn in, turn on, drop out. His demeanour was decidedly taciturn. (I later learned that was simply called “­Canadian.”) I said I was a childhood friend of a good friend of his. He didn’t ask who it was and simply nodded. Finally I said, “Rick James sent me here.”

  “He out of jail?” he asked with such little inflection it was ­hardly a question.

  I never saw Rick James again. However, thirty years later in 2004, I was browsing through Time’s person of the year issue, and I saw a full-page spread about him. He had become famous as a rock singer and rock promoter. His famous song, not surprisingly, was titled “Super Freak.” He died at age fifty-six. They said the cause was heart problems, but the autopsy showed at least nine drugs in his system.

  Following Rick’s advice, I rented a room in a boarding house on Huron Street in the midst of the downtown campus. It was a large, three-floor place full of graduate students. My room was a small garret on the third floor. I loved the sloping ceilings and playing the role of the intellectual recluse who had given up all human ties in order to live a life of the mind.

  There were four other rooms on the third floor of the rooming house, each occupied by a French Canadian male. I had to share a washroom and kitchen with these four gentilshommes. (If you ever think of sharing a washroom and kitchen with four males, think again.) Jean-Claude, who spoke the most English, was working on a Ph.D. He was at the Institute for Policy Analysis at the University of Toronto, retracing the routes of the seventeenth-­century French Canadian fur traders, called voyageurs. The other three seemed to have a lot of time on their hands and I had no idea what they did. They perpetually jabbered in French about political theory. (At least that is what I assumed from my rudimentary French.) Whenever we exchanged small talk in the kitchen, Jean-Claude prefaced his sentence with “I’m practising my English,” as in, “That’s the only reason I’m talking to you.” He would go on about how provincial English Canada was, how uncivil it was not to be able to get wine on Sunday, etc. I usually retorted that if he thought Quebec was so great, why didn’t he live there. Once in a while un ami of theirs, who said he was doing a thesis on the Basque separatist movement, would come over. He wore a navy blue and white striped sweater with buttons on the shoulder and a beret. He thought he looked like a revolutionary, but in reality he resembled Gordon MacRae in Carousel. The only thing I learned from him was where to buy a scrumptious Gâteau Basque. I had enough trouble understanding the Parisian French accent, but this Québécois accent was utterly indecipherable.

  Sometimes they would have heavy meetings in the kitchen with a dozen of their other French buddies, all men. If I happened to go into the kitchen to get a slice of cheese, they would abruptly stop talking until I left. Once I came in and one of them asked why I was “lingering,” so I said that I paid rent and if I wanted a break from my room to sit in the kitchen to make myself a fried egg sandwich, I would. I could also sit and eat it. I said, “By the way, I didn’t know there were so many secrets surrounding the French Canadian trade routes of the voyageurs in the 1690s. What are you hiding — a Great Lake?”

  What I really didn’t like about them was how seriously they took all their little chatter. They wrote FLQ (which stood for Front de libération du Québec) in big letters on the fridge. As far as I under­stood, this was some fanatical fringe group that put bombs in mailboxes way back in 1963.

  Less than a week later, the country was in shock when FLQ members had kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner James Cross from his Montreal home. The FLQ tried to set up a trade with the government to get some of their political prisoners ­released. I had never heard of any FLQ member being arrested. They hadn’t done anything. I asked Jean-Claude who the hell had ever been arrested. Had someone been caught selling a tourtière with FLQ written in pastry dough?

  Refusing to wait for the government to act or even respond, they kidnapped another man, Pierre Laporte, who was found dead in the trunk of his car soon after. Pierre Trudeau, the handsome, randy prime minister, implemented the War Measures Act, which gave the police extra power in this state of emergency. Televisions broadcast footage of armed guards rushing up Parliament Hill. Hundreds of people were arrested and detained without charge. Later this became known as the October Crisis, and it made international news. Jean-Claude and his buddies cheered at every new move of the FLQ. The University of Toronto’s academic commu­nity was outraged at the loss of liberty under the War Measures Act. As far as I could see, these FLQ fanatics were like the whiners in a marriage who threaten divorce but never leave. They were all dressed up with nowhere to go. If they wanted to speak French, let them get their own party and secede from Canada — bon ­voyage.

  The English Canadians on the second floor of our rooming house made a gesture of solidarity by putting stickers that said My Canada Includes Quebec on their doors and cars. The English ­Canadians got mad at me when I said the separatists were a bunch of delusional terrorists who should break away from Canada or shut up. They said I didn’t understand Canada is a bilingual nation. The French on the third floor, where I was marooned, couldn’t stand anyone who was English. Needless to say, I was not the most popular person in my rooming house.

  I had left the U.S. because I had gotten too involved in politics and was relieved that I was not galvanized by the FLQ. Then on a cold morning in late October 1970, three plain-clothes officers came storming into my room in the middle of the night, trailed by my terrified, pyjama-clad landlord. They shook me awake and said they wanted to speak to me. I was sure they had been searching for me over the Laurie episode, the Black Power connection and the murder trial of Laurie’s cousin Splits. I had left the United States for England when I thought I might have to be involved in the trial. I assumed that even though I was still outside of the States they had found me, just like they’d found Rick James, and I would be extradited. For some reason, I was more terrified now than I had been when the whole episode was going on. Maybe it was because they had awakened me from a sound sleep and were invading my bedroom. As I was marched down the hall sandwiched between polyester detectives, I glanced into the other bedrooms and saw no sign that anyone except me lived on the floor. Jean-Claude and the others’ beds were stripped and the mattresses were rolled up. The rooms were empty. The FLQ sticker was ripped off the fridge and the walls had been stripped of the voyageur and coureur de bois posters. When did that happen?

  The detectives started questioning me about how well I knew Jean-Claude. To my credit, I said I couldn’t say anything after waking up from a sound sleep. I said I was getting dressed and having a coffee and toast before I said a word. (I have no idea why I demanded food instead of a lawyer. I guess I knew I had some rights but I wasn’t sure what they were.) I had no food in the house so, believe it or not, I was interrogated at Fran’s family restaurant. (I figured the worst they could do there was make me eat the Salisbury steak.) I explained that I had rented my room on Huron Street two months ago based on a sign placed in the first-floor window. I said I didn’t know anyone who was living there beforehand, nor did I even understand about ninety percent of what they said.

  It was one of those good cop–bad cop set-ups, except it was Canada so it was good cop and slightly less good cop. The good cop opened a small spiral notebook and unfolded a note that I had left on a napkin under a fridge magnet. He read aloud:

  Like you guys are so important that you can’t shop? I realize that
you are too busy gearing up for the revolution, however, when you steal my food from the fridge, please leave all English ­Canadian products. Don’t touch my Canada Dry or my ­Canadian cheddar, especially the individually wrapped slices, to say nothing of my Canadian back bacon. If you want separation so much why not buy or steal Camembert —

  P.S. By the way, poseurs, clean your long black hairs out of the bathtub.

  “What exactly does that mean? We know a code when we see one. What did you mean by individual slices?”

  I started laughing, and the less good cop said, “Listen, Miss McClure, this isn’t Get Smart. We are talking about sedition, insurrection and murder.”

  The other cop said, “If you didn’t understand them, how did you know that they were, as you said in the note, ‘gearing up for the revolution’?”

  “Once in a while they would start screaming, vive this and that. They mentioned Quebec separating once or twice. They had silly secret meetings. They clapped over Basque separatism — that sort of adolescent rebellion bullshit.”

  Then the good cop, who was not as good as he was five minutes earlier, said, “Your past doesn’t squeak.” A black pool of ­silence spread over the Arborite table. I was terrified that they had looked into my past and there would be an international incident. “You want a job here, or in any Commonwealth country, you’d better cooperate.

  “Your boyfriend, Jean-Claude, is gone. He and his friends will not be returning to Huron Street or the University of Toronto. I would do some serious thinking about telling us everything you know about them. By the way, he is two-timing you with a woman named Renée.”

  At this point, I lost my fear. Being romantically linked with dreary Jean-Claude was totally off my radar. I was also insulted to be lumped into the all-girls-talk-if-they-are-two-timed subgroup of jealous idiots. I told them I didn’t know a thing other than they were happy when they heard the news on the radio about the kidnapping, but they acted as surprised as I was about the killings. They had meetings with other men in the kitchen, but I had no idea what they said.

  The almost-bad cop said, “We will get back to you shortly, and I will want to know everything that you have forgotten today. If you hear from anyone who was at those meetings, please let me know at this number.” He handed me a card and added, “You will have to come to headquarters within forty-eight hours to identify some faces from mug shots we have on file of possible FLQ members. I want to identify this so-called Basque separatist.”

  I never heard from them again.

  >> <<

  When I got back to my rooming house, everything I owned was on the porch, neatly placed in liquor store boxes. It was 3:30 in the morning and I didn’t know anyone in Toronto. Clearly the Hungarian landlord wanted anyone who brought the police to his doorstep out of his home. North Americans may find police annoying, but Eastern Europeans are terrified of them. I could have called my mother; however, she’d had to put up with my shenanigans since I was four years old, and I decided she’d had enough.

  Where can you go in the middle of the night? I sat at the bottom of the steps of my rooming house porch, smoking cigarettes as time ticked by. A German shepherd wandered up and sat at my feet. He looked like some junkyard dog that could take my head off in a second. Fortunately he seemed tired and slightly ­disoriented, like he’d forgotten how to get home, so ripping me to shreds wasn’t his top priority. He just sat there, looking as lost as I felt.

  At about 4:30, just as the birds began to stretch, a man walked down Huron Street, then stopped when he saw the dog and yelled, “Mikvah, where the hell you been? Mitzi waited in the lobby, like you’re supposed to do when the elevator is out of order. Okay, buddy, next time your sister gets the bone first, you useless, piece-of-shit watchdog.” He raised his hand in anger but didn’t hit the dog. Then he turned his wrath to me. “Did you lead him over from the park?”

  “No. He seemed confused and meandered over here. Then he just sat down.”

  “Well, this is pretty fucked-up,” he said. The man who owned the dog was large with black curly hair. He had eyes with red rims like a white rabbit and arms with tattoos of cherries with the stems still on them. He wore a black tank top with a picture from the Led Zeppelin album and looked like the kind of guy you would train a watchdog to keep out of your house. Both dog and master looked fierce and dangerous but were slightly off their game.

  It struck me as funny that he expected the dog to take an ele­vator on his own. I said laughing, “Does he take an elevator to work?”

  “Yeah, he’s in securities,” he said. Then he laughed and said his name was Ginger.

  “Usually people who are named Ginger have red hair.”

  “I used to snap at people when I was little, so my parents called me Ginger Snap. The snap got lost over the years.” He stretched his pallid arms that were as thick as Popeye’s and said, “I haven’t been out in a while. Nice to get some fresh air.”

  He sat down on the step next to me. While patting Mikvah, he asked, “You trippin’, blondie?”

  “No, I just got kicked out of my rooming house. The police thought I had something to do with the FLQ.”

  “Those assholes?”

  “The FLQ or the police?” I asked.

  “Both pigs — different troughs” was his summary.

  I offered him a cigarette, which he accepted, lit and then took the longest drag I had ever seen anyone inhale. He was like a ­human bellows. “Those boxes yours?” he asked, pointing to all my earthly possessions.

  “Yeah, mostly books.”

  He pulled a walkie-talkie out of his pocket and said into it, “Ginger here. Get some guys down to the house across from the park next to the church on Huron. We got some product to move.”

  What was this guy doing? “Move where? I’m a student. I have to be near the library.”

  “It’s only four doors up the street — the high-rise at the corner of Huron and Bloor. You can see the university from the window. You can have your own room in my ashram or maybe we will put you in a Zeus.”

  A Zeus? “What’s the rent?”

  “Don’t worry, blondie, you can afford it.”

  “What’s the name of it?”

  “Rochdale.”

  I had to go somewhere and this Ginger Snap had movers at 4:30 in the morning. I decided to count my blessings. Whatever a Zeus was, I was on my way.

  Ginger finished his cigarette and said he had to rush “back to work.” The movers, three scrawny space cadets, showed up a few minutes later. They piled my boxes on three red dollies and trudged up the street. When they reached the eighteen-floor high-rise, they brought everything into the lobby, unloading under a sign that read Security. At the security desk sat two guards with long, greasy hair and leather jackets with Vagabonds Motorcycle Club written on the back in fuzzy yellow letters. One didn’t have any shirt on under his jacket and the other wore a short T-shirt that read Rehab Is for Quitters. The ripped T-shirt did an inadequate job of covering his protruding hairy white gut. Both of these security guards were bedecked in chains of all sizes and shapes. Behind their desk was a floor-to-ceiling wall mural illustrating smoking motorcycle gangs travelling in packs on huge Harleys with their oily hair flying in the wind. One guard asked why I was there, and I said I wanted to rent an apartment. He carefully went through a box of my books and pulled out Tudor Songs and Sonnets. He showed it to his cohort, who snorted and said, “I don’t think even narcs read that shit — go ahead. The rental office is on the second floor.” He got on a walkie-talkie and said, “Spence, got one of the Bobbsey Twins down here — wants to rent an apartment.” He said this as though it were a strange request, as though we weren’t standing in a large apartment building that had rooms for rent. “She seems clean. I think she actually wants to rent an apartment. No need to get out any other wares.”

  The rental office was a complete mess
and had papers piled two feet high over every surface. The floor had booklets piled to the ceiling and narrow alleyways had been left to get to the desk.

  By this time, I was confused. Spencer, the man who seemed to run the whole rental office, was handsome and quite debonair. He was tall, thin with fine blond hair flowing past his shoulders. He had one of those Roman noses you find in private school pictures. After we shook hands, I felt on more secure ground. “I am a student looking for housing. What is the exact mandate of this building? I mean, what goes on here? Why are those thugs at the door?” He didn’t flinch at all. He said it was a free college where you could set up your own curriculum. He explained that a B.A. required a $25 donation to the college and the candidate had to answer a simple skill-testing question. An M.A. was $50, and the applicant could pick the question. A Ph.D. did not require any skill-testing question and went for $100. (Thirty years later, I was at a philosophy of mind conference in Tucson, Arizona, and I read a résumé of one of the German speakers. In his C.V., he had listed a Ph.D. from Rochdale College, University of Toronto, Canada.) Spencer showed me the degrees and said I could sign up. He also said that they ran an open college with resource people — some from the university and some “scholars of the street.” He handed me a sheet with lectures for the following week. They ran the gamut from “How to stay hydrated on speed” to “Hermann Hesse on religion.”

  He said he had an opening in a Zeus, which gave me my own bedroom, but I had to share a bathroom with six other people and a kitchen and a living room with eight.

  “When Ginger sent me here, he said something about an ashram.”

  “Ginger sent you here?” he asked as though the Father, Son and Holy Ghost had sent me.