Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  It was in this isolated corner of Canada where young Jack and Bernie each almost died as toddlers. One day, Jack wandered out onto the frozen lake and refused to come back no matter how loudly and frantically his mother shouted. A slip through the ice would have meant certain death, and so his parents ventured carefully onto the ice to retrieve him. Young Bernie almost went to an early grave when he drank Javex bleach by mistake. The closest doctor was seventy-five miles away—too far to be an option. Somehow, he rebounded.

  The worst of the boys’ mishaps in Red Rock came when Bernie was about four and his mother was boiling a tub of laundry water on a wood-burning stove. The wood floor collapsed and the tub spilled onto Bernie’s chest and neck. “They didn’t think I was going to live,” Bernie said. “The skin peeled away. You could see my collarbone. One of the guys my dad knew put cattails and bear grease on the scar.”

  “Mom felt horribly,” Jack recalled.

  Lucy Guindon was God-fearing and tried to pass her faith on to her boys. The name Bernie isn’t in honour of anyone in particular, but Guindon’s middle name is Dieudonne, which is French for “God given.” Both of the boys were exposed to the Roman Catholic religion at a young age. Jack was naturally good at Latin and the ways of the Church. Bernie was less taken by the mysteries of theology. “There’s somebody up there but I don’t know who the fuck He is,” Bernie reflected. “Sometimes you swear at Him and sometimes you say thank you. I’m not all that religious. I used to hate being on my knees all the time, saying prayers and losing a couple of hours on Sunday.”

  After Red Rock, the family’s next stop was in Sault Ste. Marie, where they lived with Lucy’s mother. Lucienne tried his hand again in the lumber industry and then truck driving, failing at both. Yet he and Lucy somehow scraped together enough money to outfit their boys in new suits for their First Communion. Bernie and Jack never looked tidier or more civil than on that day, posing for a photo in their matching double-breasted jackets.

  The boys’ fondest early memories include going to the movies, where they’d lose themselves in the action adventures of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Randolph Scott and Superman. They loved tales of brotherhood and power, which contrasted sharply with real life at home. “It was tough,” Jack recalled. “My dad was kind of a mean guy. We’d get lickings, that’s for sure.”

  Next, they moved to Oshawa, an industrial city less than an hour by car east of Toronto. The kids had lived there briefly before, when they were preschoolers. There had also been a brief stop in Buckingham before the second move to Oshawa. Exactly why each move was made wasn’t explained to the boys and, in time, this constant state of motion had become the norm.

  They settled for about four years at 552 Simcoe Street South, just across the street from the Simcoe Street elementary school, in an old farmhouse behind a dry cleaner’s, clothing store, variety store and beauty salon. The Guindon boys discovered a tunnel from the basement that brought them into the dry cleaner’s. They would steal bobby pins and, at home, incorporate them into the kinds of rough games young brothers play. “We used to shoot at each other with elastics around the house,” Bernie said. “I got him in the dick once.”

  They also lived in a house on Ritson Road, across from a brewery. Jack recalled an evening there when his parents had planned a night out. Before they could leave, a group of strangers dropped by for booze. There was a sudden commotion outside, and next thing Jack knew their father had knocked a man out and left him lying motionless on the road. Lucienne and Lucy got into a cab and sped off to enjoy their night. The man’s friends dragged him away. “We didn’t know if he was dead or not,” Jack said. “Thank goodness he came out of it.”

  The boys were expected to do the dishes, pile wood in the basement, refrain from swearing and never argue with their mother. Lucienne demanded that the boys respect their mother, but he still beat her mercilessly in front of them. Those beatings were a sad constant throughout their early years. The boys witnessed one particularly ugly incident when they lived at an apartment on Drew Street. “Bernie jumped on my dad one time because my mom was getting beaten up,” Jack recalled. “I jumped in there too, the two of us. Then the cops came and Bernie and I were thrown out of the house.” The police said the brothers could stay at the station overnight and the boys thought that sounded okay. The next day, they went to stay with some relatives but felt out of place. They returned to the police station. “When we got there, they put us where the lost articles were,” Jack said. “A cement floor in the basement. I’ll never forget that. Was Bernie ever pissed off!” They went home the next morning. Lucienne was sporting a black eye, courtesy of his eldest son. There would be other nights spent fleeing the violence at home, one spent in an abandoned car. “We went to a scrapyard to sleep,” Bernie recalled matter-of-factly, as if it was just a normal part of growing up.

  In the summertime, Bernie and Jack were dispatched to rural Gatineau Mills, Quebec, where they stayed with their aunt and uncle, who had sixteen children, two of whom died young. Bernie remembers his father saying, “Learn your French,” as he sent them off to help out on their aunt and uncle’s farm. “They never spoke English. I’d have to really listen well in order to know what they were saying.” There were just a few beds for so many kids, and they slept head to toe so they could pack in as many as possible. Bernie and Jack were dressed well when they arrived at the farm so that the family appeared wealthier than they really were. “We’d get there in suits,” Bernie said. “The old man showed us off…They got all hand-me-downs and they were lucky to get fed. They’d stare at us.”

  The Guindon boys had adventures of their own during their visits to Quebec. Once, one of their older cousins sent Bernie off in a field to chase after some horses, not warning him that those horses didn’t like people. “The horse kicked me in the leg,” Bernie said, but it didn’t get a good shot at him. A kick from another horse gave Bernie his first broken nose of many.

  Summers in Quebec proved rougher for Jack. The first time he broke his left leg was at their grandmother’s. When the boys wanted to play baseball, she said no, but the boys went off anyway. “I ran to first base,” Jack recalled. “My cousin was on first base. I collided with him…it snapped the leg in both places. It was just hanging there. I’ll never forget that. It was painful.” Jack broke that leg another six times as a boy. Doctors tried implanting a steel rod, steel plates and lamb’s bone, all with limited success. “His leg didn’t grow,” Bernie said. “He always walked with his heel up.” Perhaps that explained Jack’s woeful record against Bernie in their living room brawls.

  A youth as rough as the Guindon boys’ was bound to leave Bernie with medical issues of his own. He had a punctured eardrum, most likely a result of too many shots to the head from his father and kids in the schoolyard, and needed an operation at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He continued to have hearing problems for the rest of his life. (In later years, he liked to keep his bad ear turned toward any particularly chatty company.)

  Christmases for the Guindon boys weren’t spectacular, but they definitely were better than what was experienced by their Quebec cousins. “They were lucky to get fed at Christmas,” Bernie said. “Sometimes we’d only get one present, but you got a present. I got my double cap guns one year with holsters. Jack got them too. That was pretty exciting. The old man must have sold quite a bit of beer.”

  No matter where they were living in Oshawa, Bernie always knew where to find his father when he wasn’t at home. He’d be up the street at the Cadillac Hotel, and he would likely be slumped at a table, his senses dulled by beer. The Cadillac was a bucket of blood hotel with loud, live country music on the weekends, and Lucienne was one of the men who contributed to its rough reputation. “My old man used to be in there all of the time,” Bernie recalled. “My old man used to bounce there. After the bar, they’d all go to my dad’s house. He’d have them there until five or six in the morning.”

  Lucienne did try, in his own way, to steer h
is boys in the right direction. Once, he took the boys to see Kingston Penitentiary. Since 1835, it had housed generations of the country’s most desperate, violent criminals behind its thick limestone walls. Lucienne pointed to its heavy front gates and told his sons, “This is where you’re going to go when you’re bad.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Local Celebrity

  My parents didn’t give me shit about homework. My mother couldn’t read or write. My dad was busy with bootlegging.

  BERNIE GUINDON on his early education

  The Guindon family home on Simcoe Street South was in the centre of Oshawa’s old southern immigrant neighbourhood. It was much poorer than the northern, suburban area that later attracted Toronto’s commuting class. Directly across the street from the Guindons’ rented house was the Simcoe Street elementary school, and students there quickly made it clear they didn’t want Catholics—who they called “Cat-lickers”—on their playground. “I used to go across the street and fight all of the Protestants,” Bernie Guindon said. “I was a ‘cat-licker.’ I fought a lot of the big guys. I did good. I held my own. That’s how I got into boxing.”

  At the Holy Cross Catholic Elementary School just up the street, Guindon was constantly in trouble for fighting, talking and not doing his homework. Jack was better behaved, but he fell behind too. Jack had lost about two years of schooling because of his leg operations, and neither parent was pushing the boys to catch up. “My parents didn’t give me shit about homework,” Guindon said. “My mother couldn’t read or write. My dad was busy with bootlegging.”

  Guindon’s lack of academic production led him frequently to the principal’s office, where a nun he nicknamed “Dirty Gertie” cut an imposing figure with a leather strap in hand. “That strap looked pretty goddamned big. I used to have welts on my hands all of the time.”

  In class Bernie listened to a priest say God knew everything past, present and future. That didn’t settle much in Guindon’s mind. He raised his hand and asked, “If God knows all of this, then he already knows if I’m going to heaven or hell, and if I’m going to hell, why would he want anything to do with me?”

  The bright spot in Guindon’s days came after school, when he boxed at the Simcoe Hall Boys’ Club on Simcoe Street South. He often tried to drag Jack along and sometimes he succeeded. Their parents weren’t home after school, and young Bernie had plenty of aggression to vent. “At that time, I never thought about boxing,” Jack said. “I went to the Y and took up bodybuilding, which I should have stuck to. Bernie wanted me to get into the boxing. I was his sparring partner. Oh boy.”

  Experienced boxers taught Guindon a lesson his father began years before: if you’re in a fight, it’s vastly preferable to give out the punches than receive them. “When you’re young, you’re not that vicious. When I first started, I used to do a lot of playing around. As you got a little older, you knew the guys are out there to hurt you. It’s no longer a fun game.”

  His father enjoyed watching Bernie fight, although he didn’t praise him. “He thought I was pretty lucky, pretty good.” His mother cheered him on. “Whenever she had the opportunity, she’d come watch, if it was around town. She didn’t mind me boxing. She knew it kept me out of shit.”

  Shit still came at home, where the fighting was never fun and no one cheered. But by the age of fifteen, Bernie could fight back. “I slapped him for beating my mother once. I gave him a shot in the head. He left shortly after that.”

  The same year that his father moved out, Bernie was expelled for truancy, which gave him more time to train. He was now in his third year of boxing and starting to make a name for himself, headlining boxing cards at places like the Avalon dance hall on King Street West. He ran up an amateur record of twelve wins and no losses and was clearly a kid to watch. For all of its brutality, boxing offers a basic fairness that appealed to him. It doesn’t matter, once you step into the ring, whether you’re rich and snooty or poor white trash from the wrong side of the tracks. All that matters is what you do with your fists. “The thing in boxing is the better man wins.”

  His mother found a boyfriend who liked motorcycles. He took Guindon for a ride. “It was unbelievable. He asked me if I wanted to drive. I said yes, so he sidesaddles the bike and makes me change positions without even stopping.” Guindon was hooked and soon bought a 1948 Matchless G80.

  He began hanging around the newly formed Golden Hawks Motorcycle Club. Clubs were a new and exhilarating thing in the 1950s, especially after Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin appeared as bikers in the movie The Wild One. The Hawks were the largest bike club in the province east of Toronto, with several Korean War and World War II veterans in their ranks. When they admitted seventeen-year-old Guindon as a full member, his initiation consisted of chugging a bottle of red wine, something he found particularly unpleasant. The parade of drunks through his family’s living room had already killed any notion that drinking was glamorous, and he soon quit drinking altogether.

  Guindon was quickly promoted to Hawks road captain, which put him in charge of mapping out runs and making sure no one got lost or in trouble on the way to events. When they rode together smoothly as a group, the Hawks were impossible to ignore. Individually, members of the club might be forgettable, but everything changed when they rode down the highway together in a tight, loud formation, like a fighter squadron. They felt free and dangerous and it was intoxicating. “It gave you a sense of power, when you were in a pack. You could hear the rumble. You could hear it for a long ways. They knew you were coming.”

  At the start of a run, Guindon loved to growl, “Come on, you criminals.” It was his responsibility to make sure the bikes assumed a proper formation, neither too close nor too far apart, as they raced along at over sixty miles an hour. Colliding at a high speed wouldn’t be just embarrassing, someone could die. “I’d run a few off the road. They’re not just fucking things up for themselves. There’s going to be a major accident and I don’t want to be one of them.” Guindon was promoted again, to sergeant-at-arms, which put him in charge of discipline. He kept order at meetings and made sure everyone paid their dues.

  He wore a helmet back then, even though they didn’t become mandatory in Ontario until 1969. It wasn’t for the safety. He used helmets as a government-approved punch enhancer. At first he wore a small one, called a “half casket,” which didn’t go down over the ears and doubled as a nice, light boxing glove during a rumble with a rival club. He then shifted to a full helmet when he realized he could punch even harder with more helmet. “They’re even better. You’ve got more plastic to hit them with.”

  Guindon still lived in Oshawa with his mother, but he worked at the BIA gas station at the corner of Simcoe and Gibb Streets, which was owned by former motorcycle racer Monty Cranfield. As Guindon dashed back and forth, filling cars, he caught the eye of a new girl in the neighbourhood. Suzanne Blais, who went by the nickname “Nicky,” and her mother had moved from Toronto in August 1958, settling into an apartment building looking over the gas station.

  Suzanne was three years younger and liked something about how Guindon looked as he handled the pumps. She was smitten by his slim build, kind smile and “gorgeous eyes.”

  “Who’s that cute guy pumping gas?” she asked her mother.

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

  The next day, on her way to school, Suzanne walked up to the stranger.

  “I don’t need gas, but I would love to know your name.”

  “I’m Bernie, and you are…?”

  “Suzanne.”

  He asked where she lived and she pointed to the apartment building.

  “Up there.”

  He said he hadn’t seen her before. The conversation shifted to school and she said she went to Holy Cross. That was his old school, he told her. He could tell by her accent that she was French and said he was French too. They had so many things in common, Suzanne noted, as her interest increased. It didn’t escape her notice that several other girls
enjoyed stopping by the pumps to speak with Bernie, as well.

  That night, Suzanne told her mother his name and that he was French. Her mother wanted to get in touch with his parents because she only knew a few French-speaking people in the area.

  This is a guy I would really like to know forever, Suzanne thought that night.

  She arrived in Guindon’s life with a tangled back story that rivalled his own. Suzanne’s parents had grown up two farms away from each other in Quebec, but after Suzanne was conceived, her father left his wife for a woman named Alma. Her mother vowed she would never let him see their baby girl. In time, Suzanne’s estranged father married Alma but still pined for time with his daughter.

  Suzanne later heard stories of how her father would park at the end of her grandparents’ laneway at their farm in Saint-Eugène, Quebec, in hopes of catching a glimpse of Suzanne. Her grandfather kept a rifle close at hand and made it clear that there would be no safe drive up his laneway. “He said, ‘You cannot see Suzanne because my daughter made that rule,’ ” Suzanne recalled. “ ‘You went with Alma. You’re out of the picture.’ ”

  Her father died in 1954, never resolving the anger that split his family. “I never met him,” Suzanne said.

  In time, Suzanne’s mother decided her girl should learn English, the language she associated with business and success. Hearing she could find a job at the General Motors plant in Oshawa, she and Suzanne packed up and left for English-speaking Ontario.

  Around this time, Bernie’s mother loaned him five hundred dollars to buy a dark blue 1949 MG convertible with a white cloth top. He would pay her back, bit by bit, and it didn’t escape him that her loan was a grand gesture of love. “She had to work on her knees. Scraping floors and washing floors.” Suzanne loved the convertible too and was thrilled when he took her to the movies and bowling. “I’ll always be your protector,” he told her. “You can call on me any time.”