Mahatma could see Corbett’s mouth working but heard no more sound. Corbett had been disconnected. He stopped, turned and stretched a wide mouth at the man beside him. Two men pulled Corbett away from the podium. Lawson told the crowd the demonstration would continue. But he was interrupted by megaphone-boosted soprano anger: “Down with unfairness. Down with this meeting. Down with poverty! Up with the Charter of Rights and Libidies!”
Shoving broke out behind Lawson. Corbett lost his place on the platform and found himself back in the crowd. He pushed his Blow-Joe megaphone volume button to max and let loose with another speech. Half the crowd wandered away, while others stayed to watch Corbett’s tussle. Finally, Lawson took the microphone on stage. Corbett matched him word for word. At that point, the rest of the crowd disbanded.
Ben Grafton had attended the rally out of curiosity “Who is that man?” he asked his son.
“That’s the welfare kook I’ve written about.”
“That man is no kook. I don’t care if he’s on welfare, I don’t care if he sleeps under abridge, I’m telling you he has power. Took him three minutes to send a thousand people packing. Could the premier of Manitoba do that? Answer me that!”
Mahatma borrowed his father’s idea for his lead:
A Winnipeg welfare recipient accomplished yesterday what Premier Bruce Gilford couldn’t have hoped to do: he disheartened and disbanded 1,000 anti-government protestors at the Manitoba Legislature.
Slade, in The Star, wrote:
He came, he saw and he messed up the whole works.
That was what organizers of yesterday’s rally against the Manitoba government’s French language plans were saying after a $178-a-month welfare man poleaxed the proceedings with an outburst of his own.
Jake Corbett, who lives in a greasy spoon and lugs around a megaphone to air his beefs about so-called “welfare injustice”…
In his column for Le Miroir Georges Goyette wrote:
Introducing an unwitting champion of the Franco-Manitoban cause…
None of these articles generated any media interest outside Winnipeg. However, by a circuitous route, a fourth article sparked the interest of the international press. For La Voix de Yaoundé, Yoyo wrote:
Winnipeg—A brilliant social strategist has managed to defuse a wave of anti-French bigotry and at the same time attract attention to the plight of the poor in Canada.
Jake Corbett, a middle-aged man of poverty, no education and ill health, again showed his talents as one of the fastest rising social critics in North America…
Christine Bennie, who had been reporting for The New York Times since quitting The Herald eight months ago, was covering an assignment in Cameroon when Yoyo’s article appeared.
Christine Bennie had a passion for local newspapers. Everywhere she went, she read them. In Tucson, in Tijuana, in Toledo. Bennie could read Spanish, French and German, and she made good use of it with the local press. In Yaoundé, lounging in a bar in the Forum Golf Hotel, scanning La Voix de Yaoundé, Christine locked onto a fascinating line in bold face that said, “De notre correspondant à Winnipeg, Has-sane Moustafa “Yoyo” Ali.” Christine took a long sip of her tonic and asked herself: What’s this paper doing with a correspondent in Winnipeg? She devoured the story. Some guy on welfare was turning everybody on their heads in good old Winnipeg. Christine vaguely remembered Jake Corbett. She had intended to do an article on him, but had ended up resigning from The Herald before she got around to it. The truth was that for months, Christine had been pestering her new editors to let her return to Winnipeg for a few days. “I could write you some local colour that you wouldn’t believe,” she told them. Nobody doubted that. Everybody in The New York Times newsroom remembered the wire story that had come out of Winnipeg a year or so earlier: Wild Moose Bolts into Downtown Winnipeg, Causing Panic. An even wilder wire story had come out of Winnipeg since Christine had left The Herald: Welfare Recipient Pardoned for Sucking Letters from Mailbox. After that, Times reporters began teasing her about the city. “Winnipeg? Where’s that?” someone would say. “It’s where they suck moose out of mailboxes.” First the moose, then the vacuum incident, and now the welfare recipient with more personality than Martin Luther King. Or so La Voix de Yaoundé suggested. Christine would see for herself. She’d be going to Winnipeg soon. She felt like scooping the ass off The Herald. And she had to meet this Hassane Moustafa Ali! What on earth was he doing in Winnipeg?
Ten days after Yoyo’s article appeared in La Voix de Yaoundé, Christine Bennie arrived in Winnipeg. She had contacted La Voix before leaving Cameroon to obtain Hassane Moustafa Ali’s address and telephone number. She flew from Dakar to New York, spent five days at home and then flew to Winnipeg. Mr. Ali was extraordinarily hospitable. A true Cameroonian! She had phoned from her office in New York and he had offered to meet her at the airport. She accepted with pleasure. She would write two stories from Winnipeg: an offbeat piece on a Cameroonian correspondent in Canada, and a piece about Jake Corbett, the welfare hero.
Yoyo met her at the revolving baggage counter. “It is my honour and privilege to welcome you to Winny-peg, even if it is not my city,” Yoyo said. The smiling woman had a firm handshake and big, firm hips, like a good Cameroonian woman. She was gregarious. She loved to talk. He liked her immediately.
They chatted all the way into the city, in the back seat of a cab. “You came out here on a bus to meet me? I don’t believe it. I simply don’t believe it!”
“You went all the way to visit my country and read our humble newspaper in Yaoundé?” Yoyo countered. “I don’t believe that! I simply don’t believe that!”
Yoyo directed her to Frank’s Accidental Dog and Grill. She wouldn’t go in at first. “Just a minute. Just give me a minute. I just have to get this down.” She appeared to be noting the name of the café, the address, the name of Joe’s Barber next door, the look of the men in the street.
They stepped inside. She shook the hand of the man behind the counter. “Hello,” she said warmly, “I’m Christine Bennie from The New York Times.”
“Hello,” he replied evenly, “I’m Frank, from an accidental pregnancy.”
“Good one. I’ll remember that. Is Jake around?”
“Hey. Would you do me a favour? If you’re doing a write-up, would you kindly not call this here establishment a greasy spoon?”
She smiled. “Sure. I think I can do that.”
“Good. Jake’s upstairs. Your friend knows the way,” Frank said, indicating Yoyo. “He’s been here before.”
Christine found Jake Corbett in fine form. He was arranging his files and clippings about welfare when she came in. There was no place for her to sit. The bed and chairs were covered with documents. She noted the documents in his hand, the clothes he wore, the sagging bed, the paint-peeling window held open by a brick.
“Don’t tell Frank about the brick,” Corbett warned her, “he says I’m burning up his energy. Says he’s gonna boot me out he hears that brick’s in the window.” Christine steered Corbett through his welfare woes, keeping him on track for the story she was framing. Then she went with Yoyo to see Mahatma Grafton. He provided photocopies of his earlier stories on Corbett and explained who Christine should talk to for more details. She phoned a welfare officer who hung up when Christine identified herself. She phoned the deputy minister of Community Services. She phoned Corbett’s lawyer. She phoned a professor of social work at the University of Manitoba. She found out about how a judge had ordered Corbett’s arrest, how Corbett had gotten beaten up in Polonia Park, how he had turned an anti-government protest into a dud, how he had gotten on the front page of The Herald four times in as many months.
Christine wrote the story of Jake Corbett’s public life, highlighting the key moments over the last year. She didn’t do any more than anyone else had ever done, but she summed it all up in one article. It ran as a colour piece on page one of The New York Times. Reporters began calling Corbett from all over the United States and Europe. The
American and European interest came at a time when the Manitoba media were ignoring Corbett. The Herald noted that The New York Times had written about Corbett; it also noted when Corbett was interviewed on U.S. television. But, on the whole, it ignored Corbett. It was too busy following the French language crisis.
The League Against the French Takeover of Manitoba regrouped after the abortive demonstration. It sent delegations to meet six Cabinet ministers. It protested to the federal government. It won the support of ten provincial government backbenchers. It sent a delegation to Mayor Novak, who dismissed them after stating that he believed in minority language rights. Undaunted, the league urged city councillors to hold a civic referendum on the question. It pushed other Manitoba municipalities to do the same. It scraped together 20,000 names for a petition, taking a ten-dollar donation from each petitioner to pay for newspaper ads.
The editors of small radio and TV stations noticed that Edward Slade was raising hell over French. “Why aren’t our reporters doing that too?” they wondered. They noticed that Slade was writing the dickens out of the French issue and that The Star readers seemed to love it. So they put their police reporters on the French beat too.
His behaviour in the French language dispute did not endear Edward Slade to his police beat competitors. Three days into their dual roles as police reporters in the morning and language-crisis reporters in the afternoon, Bob Stone of CFRL Radio and Susan Starr of CBRT Radio were told by their editors to match a Star story carrying the headline French Activist Has AIDS!!!
The killer AIDS disease has struck a French rights activist who works with St. Boniface school children, The Star has learned…
Bob Stone balled the tabloid in his fist. “I don’t have to imitate that runt! He makes his living poking into things that are none of his business.”
“That’s what reporters do,” Bob’s editor said. “You should too.”
Over the next weeks, Edward Slade produced a few mild morsels (one of LAFTOM’s leading activists was charged with wife-battering; police caught a married Franco-Manitoban leader in a brothel). But he felt dissatisfied. Mahatma Grafton was outwriting him. Every day, Grafton was covering complicated political angles. Slade knew Grafton’s work was more serious, but he also knew that almost nobody read it.
Slade opted for the low road. Everywhere he went, he dug for dirt. This approach was based on his belief that behind every news story of any consequence, somebody was running a scam. The harder you looked, the greater your chance of unearthing it. Scams were hard to snag. You missed them nine times out of ten. But Slade lived for the exception.
Judge Melvyn Hill reached two painful conclusions. He would never make the Supreme Court of Canada, or any federal court at all. And he would not be allowed to work past the age of sixty-five. Perhaps he was a man ahead of his time. While many of his race still toiled on the trains, Melvyn had risen in the ranks, become a contributing member of society. But nobody cared. Nobody appreciated him. Years ago, train porters had ridiculed him for wanting something better. And now, he still got no respect. Not from his peers, not from reporters, not even from bums on the street. Melvyn wanted to be seen in his robes by every railway porter in Canada, by every passenger whose shoes he had shined, by every Air Force officer and law partner who had slighted him. But he knew he would never rise above the Provincial Court, and in that court, he would never get out of the Institute of Public Protection, whose endless coterie of cons, ex-cons, to-be cons and their sniffling families made it the worst of all postings.
Nevertheless, he wanted to work past his sixty-fifth birthday. Retirement terrified him. What would he do? His wives had left him. He had no kids. He had always been certain that children would hate him. He was a good person, didn’t cheat people and had never betrayed his wives. But he sensed that children would turn against him. So he never had them. All he had was his job. In the past year, he had written three times to the chief provincial judge, and twice to the attorney general’s office, reminding them of his situation and asking for a renewed contract. But Melvyn had received no response.
Melvyn had attended the LAFTOM rally at which Jake Corbett raised a ruckus. That man brought disaster everywhere he went. Corbett’s interruption had irritated Melvyn, who believed the government was carrying this French business too far. Why give French people higher status than the rest? The next thing you knew, they would start requiring Provincial Court judges to be bilingual. Just today, Ben Grafton’s son had written that the province now intended to provide bilingual services in its courts. Sources predicted that francophones would fill the next several openings on the Provincial Court. Melvyn knew that judges rarely got ‘promoted’ from a provincial to a federal bench. But he was sure that some new French-speaking judge would be bounced up a notch or two after serving briefly on Provincial Court. This angered Melvyn. He wanted to enter the debate over bilingualism. But as a judge, he couldn’t take a public stand. If he got embroiled in another controversy, his chances of working past sixty-five would be shot.
The scoop Edward Slade had been hoping for finally landed in his lap. Slade found the story by scanning letters to the editor that The Star had judged unworthy of publication. Perusing them for story ideas, Slade noticed several by the same author that attacked the provincial government for promising to make Manitoba’s court system bilingual. The author only left his initials—M.H.—but he often added a postscript: “I am a highly placed legal professional, and I am eminently qualified to examine this issue. It behooves me, however, to safeguard my anonymity, and therefore I only sign with my initials.”
“Give me a break,” Slade muttered, throwing the letter and others with the same signature in the waste-basket. But suddenly he retrieved them. Slade recognized the initials. He phoned Melvyn Hill.
“Hello, this is The Winnipeg Star. We need to clarify a detail concerning the letters about bilingualism that you sent to The Star.”
“I’ll clarify any detail you’d like, but I don’t want my name appearing under those letters. I did write them, but…”
Edward Slade had his scoop. His story ran under a photo of the judge.
Provincial Judge Joins Anti-French Movement
Provincial Court Judge Melvyn Hill gives the NDP government and its pro-French policies a licking every day.
For the past week, the controversial judge has been penning livid letters against provincial bilingualism proposals and sending them to the editorial office of The Winnipeg Star.…
Golden here, burnt there—perfect! Frank slid the hash-browns onto a plate, crowned them in ketchup and sat down to eat. At the same time, he studied, for the twentieth time, a paragraph in The New York Times of March 2. A paragraph having to do with his business:…a cholesterol factory…
“The fuck’s that?” Frank mumbled, beaming with pride at being written up in the cream of the cream, The New York Times…equipped to send the hardiest street bum into diabetic shock…“The hell’s that Christine Bennie talking about?” Now came his favourite line: Frank’s Accidental Dog and Grill is a world-class greasy spoon, an Orwellian pillar of down-and-outdome…“Let her have it right in the kisser, I will. Calling my place a greasy spoon!”
“Excuse me, Frank,” Jake Corbett said, for the fourth time. “Somebody’s gonna be calling for me. Can you say I’m at the Flapjack Café?”
“I’m no answering service. That doesn’t come with the room. Speaking of which, keep that brick outa your window. My heating bill…”
“Can’t you tell ’em I’m at Harry’s?”
“No! That simple enough? I’m not helping the competition.”
“Just tell ’em I’m at Harry’s, okay?” Jake Corbett limped toward the door. Reaching for the knob, he moaned.
“What’s the matter?” Frank said.
“My legs.”
“It’s your imagination.”
Leaning on the back of a chair, Jake waited for the pain to subside. Then he went out. It was friendlier at Harry’s. The f
ood was cheaper. Harry treated him nice. Never talked to him like Frank talked. Harry’s nose looked like it had been flattened by a two-by-four. Thick lips loose and swinging, three chins, silver hair screwed tight on a black head, brown eyes as tired as old shoes, eyes that looked straight through you. Harry was a nice man. Jake felt free to eat there every day.
Yoyo met her at the airport again. The big hug embarrassed him. The smack on his lips embarrassed him even more. North American women were like that. Helen had been that way, now Christine Bennie. Women would kiss you right on the lips, in public! Thoroughly uncivilized!
“Darling,” she whispered. She told him she was dying to ball his buns off. Idiomatic speech still caused Yoyo problems. But he still understood, somehow, what she wanted.
“Shall I take your valise?” he said, reaching down.
“Suitcase,” she said. “Valise makes you sound like a butler.”
“Thank you for the correction.”
“You’re so formal.”
She slapped his bum. Also in public. He did his best to ignore it.
“Let’s grab a cab. Is that how you say?”
She screamed with laughter. “Yes, honey, perfect. Grab a cab!”
All that talk in the airport had aroused him. The instant they arrived in her hotel room, he unbuckled his belt. “Not right now, honey. If I get all relaxed and warm and tingly, I won’t be able to get going again today. So let’s save it for tonight, hummm? We have to track down Jake Corbett.”
“Okay.” He started to fasten his pants.
“No, wait! Let me see it. Just let me see that darling thing. Oh, it’s so cute! It’s so, oh oh! Yoyo!…”
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