“Really?” How had I missed all of this?
“Yeah, it’s shaking stuff up in Chicago and it is huge in Boston and New York. It’s going to spread. I’m thinking of joining a consciousness-raising group.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s about realizing that women have been brainwashed into believing that they need to have a certain role in society. It’s heavy stuff. You have to rethink how you act all the time.”
“Jeepers.”
“Truthfully, for once you are in the vanguard, and you don’t even know it. You might just have had feminist genes or something. You don’t have a lot of work to do. No wonder you haven’t paid attention to it. I have always liked to make everyone happy. I thought it was my job, just like it was my mother’s. You never bought into that.”
“I have always liked to cause human misery,” I said proudly.
>> <<
Years later, I found out what transpired between Carl and Michael after they’d left Rochdale on the night I met them. As they walked home, Carl said, “Well, she was nuts.”
“Completely gone,” Michael agreed.
“I can’t believe she talked through the whole movie — and didn’t even get the hint when we said we couldn’t hear a thing.”
“It went right over her head,” Michael agreed.
“Christ. Is she going to join us for the whole series?” Carl asked.
“Oh, she’ll join us for sure. It’s not like we can get lost in the crowds.”
>> <<
The night after I’d met Michael and Carl, I was sitting on my bed reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. (I always read all the works by one author before I go on to another.) Someone yelled from down the hall, “Cathy, gentleman caller.”
A man? To see me? That was a Canadian first. Carl appeared holding a crumpled yellow film schedule and simply said, “Hi.”
He said he’d brought a copy of the OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) film series. We were discussing which movies were worth seeing when the motorcycle gang called on the phone from downstairs and said, “Cathy, some other tall dude is here for you. Doesn’t look like a killer. Should I send him up?”
The door opened and it was Michael. He had a copy of The Female Eunuch with him. Carl and Michael looked a bit sheepishly at one another. Neither had told the other where they were going. I guess there was something about me that wasn’t as nuts as they’d let on to each another.
CHAPTER 19
a surprise party
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship … You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
— Ray Bradbury
Michael, Carl and I went to all kinds of movies, including an amazing four-month Japanese film festival. It was before the era when movies could be rented, so we had to travel all over the city to see retrospectives. We also went to the Friday midnight screening at Cinecity, which showed avant-garde movies, reverentially called “films.” I remember the night we saw Blow-Up by Antonioni. We were enthralled by the scene where the actors played a tennis match with no ball.
We emptied out of the theatre on Yonge Street at 2:00 a.m., and since there were no restaurants open, we went instead to Queen’s Park, flopped on a bench, covered ourselves with our coats and chattered like magpies until dawn about what that tennis match meant: that we all make up our own reality — we don’t really need the tennis ball, it is the same game; that reality has to comprise individual perception, social consensus and art; that ultimate reality is something unknowable; that if some creature landed from Mars, it would watch the mimed tennis game not knowing there was a ball “missing”; etc.
Although it was December in Canada, and below freezing, none of us noticed the cold. Every intellectual idea was new and had to be explored. Nothing was more wonderful than these talks with people of like mind who had read what I read, or who had read far more than me and from other perspectives. We pooled our ideas: Michael from physics and math, Carl from philosophy, and me from literature. I remember being so excited that I climbed the park’s enormous cast iron horse, riding double with King Edward VII, and recited Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: “Time let me hail and climb, / Golden in the heydays of his eyes …”
As our twenties wore on, the three of us felt the inexorable pace of time shadowing us and we all opted for more hands-on professions: Michael chose medicine, Carl law and I studied psychology. For sure we opted for practical careers where there were jobs at the end of the voyage, but we had a marvellous time on the journey, docking at every port that interested us.
The worst thing about the best time of your life is that when you are living it, you have no idea how precious it is. I was unaware that later, when the responsibilities of life had swallowed me whole, I would look back with pure joy on the night I sat with my friends in the cold until dawn. These were the days when you’d left your parents, made it through the university slog and now there was that small window of time when you could try to understand the world before you actually had to become a cog within it. When you are part of what makes the world go round, you can never really see it with any perspective. The precious years between freedom from home and “settling down” are so short in the fullness of time, yet so vivid in memory.
>> <<
Michael had all kinds of politically “heavy” friends visit from Cornell. The college had been a hotbed of discontent in the late ’60s. Cornell even made the cover of Time, with an angry black radical wearing crossed bandoliers upon his chest, shooting daggers at all who viewed him. Next to the activities at Columbia and Berkeley, Cornell was roiling. The worst thing you could be labelled in those days was “bourgeois.” I’d rather have been a labelled a bank robber.
Michael’s old housemates, six men and four women, came to visit from Ithaca, and we all went together to a film festival. We saw Jules et Jim by Truffaut and then went out for dinner to a Tibetan restaurant where they served a “hot pot.” This culinary mishap was a dinner where each patron was served their own raw food, which you, the customer, then threw into a large black Macbeth-type boiling cauldron in the centre of the table and watched it cook. Then you lifted it out with your own little individual strainer, popped it in your mouth and scalded your tongue. Finally, at the end of this boiled meal, you drank the soup, which was basically your own garbage. Everyone talked about how this was such a “real” dining experience. I kept quiet and didn’t want to embarrass Michael in front of his friends, but it seemed stupid to pay a restaurant to give you a pot to cook your own food and then for dessert you could drink the dregs. I had spent lots of time in restaurants in my life, and I never had to sweat making my own meal over a boiling pot — and then pay for the experience. I think there are better ways to feel virtuous.
As we all stirred the pot, the group began to wax eloquent about Jules et Jim. Everyone loved the Truffaut film, saying it was a masterpiece, a breakthrough. They admired the characters, saying they were brave for having a ménage à trois. As my spices slipped through my strainer and I wilted along with my Chinese broccoli, I realized I’d had enough toadying up to this group of Marxists. I said, “I loathed those characters. That woman couldn’t give up her youth and being adored.” I took a deep breath and continued, “Ménage à trois was one thing, but the fact is the woman was a liar and a cheat. She wasn’t worth the heartbreak the two chronically depressed men put themselves through. I think those men wanted to be miserable, and they found the perfect woman to blame their despair on.”
There was a silence among the group. The pot hissed and smoked. Finally one guy who had done a thesis on Marx said, “Don’t you think monogamy is part of a capitalist plot?”
A woman with a thick New York accent said, “Cathy, I felt that way too once. You will feel differently when you
read more Marx and some of what the new feminists are saying about marriage.”
“Wasn’t Truffaut trying to say that there are other options?” another ventured.
I realized I was not as hip or as left as these avant-garde Ivy League intellectuals. However, call me the dreaded “bourgeois,” but I didn’t think Marx was the answer to anything. If Michael didn’t like me as a liberal capitalist, then so be it. Let him move to a collective farm in Ithaca. Forging ahead, I said, “I am not saying there are not other options, but watching a narcissistic airhead bounce around the screen while two malcontents moon over her is not my idea of a political statement. In fact, their threesome was so bad, it almost made monogamy look good. It was hours of boring pathology that the French love to call ‘the drama of relationship.’”
The table was silent. We all watched the skim rise to the surface in the cauldron. Finally, Michael said, “I feel the same way as Cathy about the film.”
Everyone looked at him as though he had just jumped into the pot. We would forever after be shrunken heads to this group. After drinking the dregs of our hard-earned meal, we walked home somewhat subdued on a cold winter night. Forever after I felt a chill from the Cornell cadré.
>> <<
A few months later, more left-wing pilgrims made the journey from Cornell to Toronto for a jazz festival. It was freezing in March as we trudged to various bars around Toronto. This time it was three women and a man. One woman named Polly had long blond braids and wore “working-class chic” clothes: bib denim overalls (the kind that had a loop for a hammer), a blue denim shirt and Kodiak steel-toed work boots. For a winter jacket, she wore long underwear topped by layers of corduroy shirts, a checked wool lumber jacket and a quilted black vest. She didn’t own makeup.
She’d had trouble getting across the border because there was a warrant out for her arrest. She’d stolen an American mail truck. (What was she going to do — commandeer the mail? To where?) Apparently after hijacking the truck, she just drove it around Cornell and dropped off leaflets about a demonstration. She became a local celebrity and the event had made it into all the papers with a picture of her behind the giant wheel of the mail truck. She returned the truck to the post-office parking lot the same day, hoping to have been undetected. Oddly enough, she had been spotted driving up and down the hills of Ithaca, beeping her horn in a red and white truck that had U.S. Mail blazoned on it, and she was arrested that evening.
This Cornell faction plus Michael, Carl, our other Toronto friend Stanley and I went out to hear jazz at George’s Spaghetti House. We sat down near the stage, and Stanley lit a joint. Everyone seemed cool with this gesture; however, I suggested that it was a really bad idea to toke up in a public restaurant, albeit a jazz bar. Stanley, a man who eventually helped start a hostel in British Columbia called Cool Aid, said in all seriousness that if anyone questioned him, he would just point out the long-standing tradition of black musicians using marijuana.
I said, “Are you nuts? I think jails are full of men for whom that ‘long-standing tradition’ may have been missed by the police and courts. I mean Ray Charles’s lawyer must have forgotten that defence.” I said if he wanted to smoke dope, he should go elsewhere, as I had no intention of being arrested. Stanley was always completely agreeable and went backstage with the others to visit with Honeyboy Edwards, the performer. (I guess Stanley was going to enlighten good ol’ Honeyboy, the aged blues guitarist, about this “long-standing tradition.”)
Only Polly remained at the table with me. To me, Polly was an intimidating leftist. She had established her credentials by being a union organizer. When she’d told us of her organizing work in factories throughout New York State, Stanley held up his glass and said, “To Polly, a comrade who walks the walk.” I had heard that she had been involved in some clandestine way with the SDS Weathermen bombing in Greenwich Village. She knew one of the guys who was killed and said that the CIA had set the bombs. No one could ever have called this poster girl for the ’60s bourgeois. She was, as Michael said in an admiring tone, “hard core.”
As we sat alone at the table, she silently removed a blue bag of pouch tobacco and a small metal device from her black quilted vest pocket and rolled her own cigarette. After she licked the end of her cigarette paper, sealing her creation shut, she leaned over the table, looked into my eyes and said, “I know no one owns anyone. I just wondered if you knew that Michael and I were ‘doing a thing’ at Cornell.” She held up her fingers to make air quotes when she said “doing a thing.” “Look, ‘things’” — again the hand quotations — “can happen anywhere and I’m not trying to express possession. I just thought you should know the history and you should know why I came to Toronto.” I wondered why she was telling me this, so I just looked at her blankly. She continued, “I mean we have jazz in Ithaca and in Manhattan, where I’m from. I didn’t have to come to Toronto. I’m just putting my cards on the table.”
I said, “Well, I can tell you one thing. I am not in any way involved with Michael. Carl, Stanley, Michael and I are friends. Three or four of us go to movies together.”
“It doesn’t look that way to me. You make every effort to sit next to him when we go out. Women are attuned to the sexual politic. I’m honestly not trying to do a monogamous possession thing here. I am just being no bullshit. I want you to know the facts. You can do with them what you will.” As she lit her tightly rolled cigarette, she gave her summary statement: “Michael and I have a history that is probably ongoing.”
I just nodded as the guys came back to the table and the set began. I sat next to Stanley and only half listened as he told me that Walter Cronkite was a plant for the FBI and that the fake news was fed through him. I could not get it out of my mind that Polly thought Michael and I were “doing a thing.” I had a strange feeling about the whole conversation. For some reason, I was embarrassed that everyone knew Michael and Polly were together and I was in the dark. I tried to rein in my emotions. Michael had been a friend for five months and I had never even touched his hand, so I had no right to go head to head with Polly. When everyone went back to Michael’s place after the concert, I said I was tired and went home.
>> <<
As the snow fell and slush from Bloor Street splashed and then froze in layers on the huge statue called The Unknown Student in front of my building, I realized I had to get out of Rochdale. Once Ginger had gone to the rehab hospital, there was no one to watch my back. We’d had a strange kind of bond, but it served as occasional companionship. Now I rattled around in that huge place alone with strange scary men coming to the door every now and then looking for Ginger. Plus I needed a rest from weirdness and edge. I needed to move where dogs didn’t take the elevator alone, where no one lived in the washing machines and where you were expected to wear clothes to the movies. I was even willing to pay rent for the privilege of normalcy. I went to the office and told Spencer that I would be moving and wanted to give him notice. He said, “Okay, I noticed,” and then went back to talking to some runaway teenage girl.
I’d decided to rent in an unhip house in the west end with three men who’d placed an advertisement in Guerilla that said Room in house available, must be reliable with rent.
As I was carrying a load of belongings down the stairs at Rochdale, I heard CRUD snap on. “Hey, CRUD heads or, as they say in France, crudités, listen up. You better be at Cathy McClure’s surprise going away party on Saturday. Ginger is springing for the dope and chips. Bring your own beer. The Ginger Snap is hoping to make it his first outing in his wheelchair. It is at Bob Miller’s penthouse, so wear clothes. Signing off.”
I froze in the stairwell, holding a heavy box of books. Were they having a going-away party for me at Bob Miller’s? Bob was an interesting older intellectual and one of the founders of Rochdale. He’d hung on too long and the place had fallen from intellectual experiment to drug warren, which saddened him. However, he still
had his great bookstore, the SCM Book Room, on the first floor of the building and maintained his apartment in the penthouse. I liked Bob but had no idea he’d thought highly enough of me to host my party. He was one of those older English gentlemen (probably only thirty-five), who knew every intellectual in the city because he ordered the books they needed. He seemed to know everything about everything, like so many of the Brits I’d met in England. In its heyday, England had been overrun with Renaissance men.
It was typical of Rochdale to host a party for me and forget to invite me. Details like that fall through the cracks when you neglect to delegate. I assumed it had been Ginger’s job since he’d arranged it all, but clearly he’d forgotten. He was on enough pain medication to quiet a nation. I was shocked and touched that anyone thought to have a party for me. I could count on my right hand the number of interactions I’d had with others in Rochdale. When I expressed shock to one of Ginger’s flunkies as I was carrying out boxes, he said, “Yeah, well, you never made enemies and you weren’t a freeloading stoner.” If only the rest of the world had such basic rules to define social success, I could have been Miss America.
I woke up on the morning of my Rochdale departure at 5:00 a.m. and heard CRUD jabbering. If they were playing Tommy again, I’d kill them. However, when I listened closely, I heard the words of James Joyce. About a year earlier, I had told Ginger that someday I’d love to wake up to Molly’s soliloquy in Joyce’s Ulysses. Ginger, a surprising character in lots of ways, had arranged it for my last day in Rochdale.
Suddenly, I felt nostalgic for Rochdale, which was a bit silly for a number of reasons. The first and most important was I hadn’t left yet, and the second was all I’d ever done while living there was complain about it.
Living in a commune was a lesson for me in human nature. Some of the ideologues remained and tried to talk Russian political theory to the parasitic, psychopathic and power hungry. They weren’t listening. Parasites only look lazy. Have you ever tried to pull them off the guest host? They are tenacious little buggers who can put tremendous energy into clamping onto a free lunch. Everyone should have to live in a “Marxist” or “egalitarian” commune sometime, and then they would see that a democratic society may have its faults, but even if you get a total lunatic running the asylum, it will only be for four years.
Coming Ashore Page 25