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Chapter Three - The Sixties
Vicky’s Story
In early 1960, Vicky decided she wanted to move in with me. For a whole year
we were just platonic buddies and I didn’t think much about it so I agreed. We had
moved to Hamilton, Ontario because I had a job there with a painting contractor.
Now she wanted to have sex even though she knew all along that I wanted men.
Being the people pleaser that I was, I agreed and she got pregnant.
She gave birth to a boy and we called him August. Shortly after the boy was
born, Vicky became schizophrenic. She went out of control and I had no idea what to
do. A neighbor called the police. Two squad cars arrived and they tried to put Vicky
in one of the cars. She was determined not to go. I guess she got an adrenaline rush,
grabbed two cops and through them up in the air. The cops called for back up. It took
five cops to get her into the police car. They took her to the mental hospital and I was
left holding the baby. I had no idea what to do with my baby son. A blind girl from
next door picked him up and said that she would look after him. Within two hours,
the Children’s Aid Society came and took him away. They put him up for adoption.
Vicky was in the hospital for two months.
When Vicky came out of the hospital, she told me of her horrendous past,
something she had never spoken of before. I knew she was married before but that
was all I knew. She told me about her husband. He was a bank robber, an alcoholic,
and extremely abusive. (Vicky was about 15 years older than I was). She had
previously given birth to five kids, which I never knew about. Her husband used to
torture her and the kids. He would hang the kids by their feet from the rafters of a
barn and beat them with a baseball bat. Three of her kids went insane and were
permanently institutionalized. He used to beat Vicky until she was unconscious. No
one was ever allowed to see a doctor. When he went on drinking binges for a week or
two at a time he locked everyone in the house. Sometimes they ran out of food. He
was jailed several times and Vicky and the kids were often starving. Finally he ran
away and one of Vicky’s sisters had her committed to the mental hospital in Toronto.
Here she was tortured again. The “doctors” gave her electric shock treatment
several times. On one of those, she had a heart attack and almost died. Another form
of “treatment” they gave her was to put her naked in a tub half filled with cold water
and the rest ice. I guess giving birth brought back memories and she went psychotic
again. She was o.k. for almost a year and then she got pregnant again. During her
pregnancy she relapsed and went back to the mental hospital. Our second son was
born there. We named him Edgar. He was born in 1961, and the Children’s Aid took
him right out of the hospital.
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More Rejections of My Creations
That year a headline in the Hamilton Spectator said that three garbage dumps
had to be removed and it would cost the taxpayers five million dollars. I studied the
situation and figured out a more economical solution. I checked the cost of renting
railway hopper cars, engines, amount of hours it would take and concluded that I
could move all three dumps for $175,000. Not only that, but my plan included
building a recycling plant that I could actually make money on. I went to City Hall
and talked to some of the councilors. They were in favor of my proposition. Then I
talked to the mayor. He screamed at me telling me to get to hell out of his sight and
he was not interested. Well, that’s politics.
Then, between `60 and `61, I started writing poetry. This was classical poetry
with complex rhyming systems and intricate meter balancing. I wrote over 100
poems. I submitted them to every publisher that ever published poetry. Every single
one of them rejected me.
Vicky got out shortly after this and we moved back to Toronto. I was driving
back in the old Chevy and for some reason, I forgot to check the oil. I ran out of oil
half way to Toronto and the engine seized up. I managed to get the car onto the grass
median before it stopped. We left most of our stuff in the car and hitchhiked to
Toronto. I just left the car there. We rented a room with a kitchen in a large old house
near downtown. It turned out to be haunted, with what seemed to be poltergeists.
The Haunting
It was rather disturbing there because lights would go on and off any time of the
day or night. Doors would open and slam shut. A small TV would turn itself on and
off. The radio would come on with the volume full blast. Pictures I had on the walls
would be ripped off by an unseen hand. Sometimes candles would start gently
floating through the air and then smash onto the floor. We accepted them and refused
to move out. They finally became less mischievous.
By now I was a bookworm, studying everything. One evening, I was sitting in
an overstuffed chair reading and I got very tired. I put the book down and relaxed. I
was almost dozing off. Then I felt myself rising up out of my body. From just below
the ceiling, I could see my body sitting in the chair. I rose up through the roof and
stopped about 100 feet in the air. Then I floated at high speed and found myself
hovering over the Ford plant in Oakville, Ontario. I believe they call this astral
traveling. Over a period of about three months, I had quite a few of these trips. Some
were floating over Europe and some were into outer space.
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1962
In 1962, I turned to inventing. I came up with over 100 inventions A few were
more like the Rube Goldberg type, but most were good and practical. Some were
good enough to steal. I had naively made a deal with the Ontario Government’s
Department of Trade and Industry. They would publish a hint of my inventions in
their journal. If manufacturers were interested, the government would contact me and
I could sell them manufacturing rights and possibly get residuals from the sale of the
products. Well, quite a few of them came out on the market (like an adjustable
stepladder to fit on stairs) and I never saw a penny, and no one contacted me. When I
contacted the government, they told me to get lost. When I complained, they said
they have the best lawyers in the city and asked what I’ve got.
That year, I was working at the Toronto General Hospital. I worked in the
kitchen and one of my jobs was taking trays of food to the patients. I lied on my
application to get the job, and later when they found out, they fired me. The job
required no skill, but if I hadn’t lied I would have appeared over-qualified and I
wouldn’t have been offered the job. One morning, I decided not to go to work. Vicky
was with me the whole time. I went back to bed and slept until noon. When I went to
work the next morning, I got hell from everyone in the kitchen for leaving at noon
yesterday. I told them I wasn’t there yesterday. They claimed I worked all morning
but I was in kind of a daze and wouldn’t talk to anyone. Half of my work was done
and there was no one else to do it. I was actually in two places at the same time.
Godfreed and I were still meeting in restaurants for coffee and discussions. One
day he told me there was someone I just had to meet. His name was Ivan and he
would be here soon. We were sitting in a booth and Ivan arrived and sat next to me. I
was sitting against the wall. Ivan said he had to go to the washroom. He went, came
back and sat beside me again. Soon, he began to look funny and he started to stiffen
up. He asked someone to call an ambulance. While he was in the washroom, he
swallowed a whole box of rat poison. I was trapped against the wall. The ambulance
attendants had a tough job getting him out of the booth because he was so stiff. They
scraped his stomach in the process. They took him to the Toronto General Hospital
and I ended up serving him his meals. We kept in touch and hung out with Godfreed.
In the meantime, Vicky was in and out of the mental hospital. I didn’t see as
much of her anymore.
1963
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In 1963, monthly Greyhound bus passes for Canada and the US were available
for $36. I got one and traveled all around the US. This was the year I met Bill K. He
was an older gay guy and we would often have sessions together. He was about the
friendliest person I knew. I was still doing artwork although nobody ever recognized
it. I gave most of my artwork away because nobody would pay me a nickel for it. I
wrote a book on futuristic architectural designs and a book on restaurants. These all
disappeared along with my books on poetry, inventions, and a lot of my artwork.
They just seemed to vanish into thin air. I started a course in upholstery at a local
college because I had been upholstering my own furniture and it looked perfect. I
used to make my own furniture. After two months, they kicked me out because I was
five minutes late.
Through 1963, I studied the eastern philosophies, various religions, and the
paranormal. I got involved with the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, the bishop to the
King of Sweden and a Christian philosopher. What fascinated me about him was that
he claimed to live in two worlds at the same time - this physical one and the spiritual
world. He talked to angels and visited their worlds. My favorite of his books was
Heaven and Hell. I disagreed with most of what he said, but his writings were the
launching pad into what I later came to believe was my purpose in life.
1964
In January of 1964, I became a trance medium. I didn’t choose this. It just
happened to me. I started having visions of strange people who were not from this
planet. No, I wasn’t going schizophrenic; these were entities who wanted to use my
body as a medium to get a message across. I would feel a sensation of someone being
there. Usually it would happen in a restaurant while Godfreed was there. He lugged
around a big reel-to-reel tape recorder. He could tell when a “visitor” as I called them
was coming. I would become semi-conscious but still aware of the visitor. Godfreed
would turn on the recorder. A voice would come through me and it wasn’t mine. The
“voice” might identify him/herself as from the spirit world, someone who passed on,
someone from another planet, or even another part of the universe. This went on for a
year. There were well over 100 visitors and the theme running through all this was
that the universe was a macro human organism. I had thought about this idea years
ago, but I never put any validity on what the visitors said.
That year, I wrote a book on parapsychology called Dawn of the New Age. I sent
copies of the manuscript to at least a dozen publishing companies. They all sent me
rejection slips except one. That editor said that my manuscript was exactly what they
were looking for, but they lost their company a week before. Then somehow the
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book vanished into thin air just like the others did. I also took my second month-long
Greyhound bus trip that year. By now I had been in most of the states.
Early in 1965, I moved into a rooming house on Sherbourne Street. My next
door neighbor was Victor M, an old man with heart problems but a radical just like
me. We had endless hours of productive conversation.
Dancers
Ivan and I hung out a lot together often with Godfreed. Ivan loved dancing and
so did I. We often crashed parties and became popular as a dance team in free style
dance, although we could do all the popular dances of the day. We would go to dance
parties and be the stars of the night because we invented new and wild dance moves.
For some unknown reason, I joined the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. My job there
had little to do with dancing. The focus was to sell lifetime memberships to lonely
old ladies for an outrageous price. One of the members was Mrs. Craing. She was a
multi-millionair because she owned the Craing Plaza in Toronto. There were lots of
rich old ladies there, but the money never impressed me.
This ballroom dancing had endless rules and precise moves; it was quite
different from the free-style dancing I was used to. The process was that an advanced
teacher would teach me basic moves at the bronze level in waltz, tango, cha cha,
rumba, and so on. What I learned, I would teach to my students. But there were
endless hours of practice. I had to earn my bronze certificate, work then on my silver,
and also learn some gold. In a short time, I had my silver and part of my gold. I had
to wear a suit and a tie when I started. This felt very weird and strange because I was
used to dressing unisex, usually jeans and a t-shirt.
One night the Studio dancers performed at the prestigious Massey Hall. I had to
wear a black tuxedo with a red sash. I have never had any stage fright. I felt that I
could speak with ease before thousands, although I never did. In spite of my
confidence, the performance was a disaster. First, my dance partner was a young girl
who was a new student and didn’t know any moves. Secondly, the orchestra was late
and we had no rehearsal time. Then the orchestra bungled the numbers and were
playing a waltz while we were doing a cha cha. They never got any of the numbers
right.
Enter Morna
One of my first students was Morna D. She was a delightful lady of 63 years
and bouncing with energy and life. She didn’t come to learn dancing. She came to
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find a man, and for some strange reason she picked me. I told her right up front that I
was looking for the same thing she was, and she was fully accepting of that. We hung
out together for about seven years until she suddenly died of cancer. She already had
three boyfriends. We had sex a couple of times when I first knew her, and her
personality made it all right. She was very open-minded. I even brought a couple of
guys to her place and had sex with them while she watched. I once watched her
having sex with one of her boyfriends.
Morna had a 1957 Chrysler New Yorker, which she used to let me drive. It was
a monstrous and powerful car. I once drove it up Highway 400 north of Toronto at
130 miles per hour.
Enter Alvin
1965 was also the year Bill K introduced me to Alvin B. Bill didn’t think I
would like him, but told me to come over for a threesome anyway. I did. I liked
Alvin and he became the greatest sex partner I ever had. He became my main
boyfriend for 12 years and he wasn’t jealous of all the other men I went with.
Alvin was from the Austrian aristocracy. His father was one of the richest men
in Europe. He controlled the European prescription drug market. Alvin was a snob
even though he had little money compared to his family. His family rejected him
because he was gay. He worked as a hairdresser but he had some of the wealthiest
clients in Toronto. He had just bought a condo when I met him. His place was
immaculate. You could eat off the floor. He had a lot of antiques (you couldn’t sit on
most of his furniture), and good works of art on his walls. He had two nightingales
and three strawberry finches. I would visit him one night a week and that was
enough. He could not be more opinionated. If you didn’t agree with every word he
said you would be lambasted to the fullest extent. I learned to agree with everything
he said to keep the peace. I could never have lived with a man like that.
Alvin’s family hung out with all the European royalty, but when his father died,
he never left him a penny in his will. Alvin was pretty upset with that because he
wanted to be wealthy too. He had an obnoxious and stingy aunt in the city who he
would suck up to. He would always do her hair but never got anything for it. He took
me there once. She lived in a secluded stone castle on the banks of the Humber
River. Her place was filled with priceless antiques. Nothing was under 300 years old.
When she died, she didn’t leave him a penny either. His other aunt owned a huge
ancient spice plantation in Jamaica. She was eventually forced off the island. Once
while visiting her, he found ancient dungeons where slaves were kept. He smuggled
out some leg irons and torture devices, then got in trouble with the Jamaican
government.
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Whipped Cream Anyone?
During this year I worked awhile at Marina’s Coffee Shop on Yonge Street
south of Eglinton. Lunchtime was the busiest time of the day for customers and one
day I was behind the counter at noon serving someone apple pie with whipped
cream. Every seat at the counter was full and so I was rushed serving them all. I put
the pie on a plate and went to put the whipped cream on top of it. We stored the
whipped cream in a metal cylinder with a rubber nozzle in the cooler. It had to be
shaken first to build the pressure to foam the cream and squirt it out through the
nozzle. I shook it well and pressed the nozzle over the piece of pie. Nothing
happened. I shook it again and again and still there was no whipped cream coming
out of the nozzle. On my last vigorous shake the nozzle came off and the whipped
cream shot out. I didn’t know what to do with this uncontrolled gush so I was waving
it back and forth in desperation until I realized what I was doing. I was covering
everyone who was sitting at the counter with whipped cream. Then I recovered my
wits enough to toss the canister into the sink. Someone at a nearby table burst out
laughing and soon everyone at the counter was laughing. I was embarrassed but all
the customers with the free topping of whipped cream on their faces took it well and
we all cleaned up amid the knowledge that we had a tale to tell that night when we
got home from work. I think my customer ate the pie ungarnished.
Omniequilibrium
In 1965, I wrote most of a series of books called The Omniequilibrium. It
consisted of the Book of Creation, the Book of Symbols, the Book of Humanity, the
Book of Life, the Book of Death, the Book of Law, and the Book of Infinity. The
Book of Humanity was the record of the “visitors”, and was fully illustrated. The
Book of Law was never finished. The Book of Infinity was never written, and the
Book of Symbols got destroyed. For some reason, Godfreed freaked out and was
flushing all the pages down the toilet until he plugged up the toilet. Then he ripped
the rest of the pages into shreds. I caught him doing this and he had no explanation. I
sent copies of the other books to publishers all across North America. Everyone
rejected them. I still have the Book of Humanity, but all the rest have vanished.
I think Godfreed got jealous of me and started hearing his own voices. He
started writing voluminous pages of gobbledygook. Once he said some space people
were going to pick him up in Allen Gardens and they would be disguised as police
officers. They would take him to their space ship and give him a trip in space. I
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watched from a safe distance while he approached two cops in the park, then I saw
them booting him in the ass.
The “Family”
By late 1965, I was becoming increasingly frustrated about my gender. I felt I
was cursed by God. I started cross-dressing. In early 1966, I joined a group of about
ten people. They called themselves “the family”. Alex was sort of the group leader.
She had rented the second floor of a warehouse downtown. It was a big space but
there was no kitchen, no toilet or bathroom or no running water. There was a toilet
down the hall. There were about eight mattresses scattered on the floor and tie-died
sheets draped from pillars and walls. Lots of pot was smoked, but I never got into it. I
would tell them that I got high on life. The Hippie days were here. Alex, her girl
friend and some of the others were bisexual, so they had no problem with me. We
used to have lots of orgies there. Alex had welding equipment in the warehouse and
used to make metal jewelry. Half the time about half the people were running around
in the nude.
Unusual Power
One day Ivan introduced me to a very strange man. He was a very short, very
hyperactive old man that looked like Einstein. When I went to his house he said he
was possessed by the spirit of John Philip Sousa, the famous composer for military
marching bands. Shortly after I got there, he jumped up, ran to the piano and started
playing typical Sousa numbers. One wall was covered with hundreds of recording
tapes. The other walls were covered with star charts and maps. A few years earlier
there had been a massive East Coast blackout. He claimed responsibility for it. Then
he brought out a taped up shoebox and handed it to me. I could tell by the weight
there was something inside. Protruding from one end was an electrical cord. From
the other end a speaker cord emerged. On the end of it was a flat crystal. I was
instructed to put the crystal against my forehead and put my thumb on one of the
prongs of the electrical cord. Then I was told to touch the other prong with my finger.
When I did that all the lights dimmed. When I let it go, the lights were bright again.
The second time I touched them, all the power went off. As I released it the power
came back on. He said I had turned all the power off in a ten-block radius.
He told me that he had a flying saucer and that he could travel to distant stars.
Then, he brought out a small platform about an inch and a half thick. A pole rose
from the platform with short handlebars on it. He stepped on the platform, turned one
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of the handles and he rose about four and a half feet in the air. It was completely
silent. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. He wouldn’t let me try it. Ivan
also introduced me to a strange but very normal looking couple. They said they were
from another planet. The interesting thing about them was that they were completely
telepathic. They would project sentences into my mind and read every word I was
thinking. I have met a lot of strange people in my life.
In 1966, I worked for the Ramsey Wright zoological laboratories at the
University of Toronto as an animal lab technician. My job was primarily cleaning out
animal cages. There were rats, mice, guinea pigs, rabbits, lemmings, fish, and so on. I
hated it there. They were doing experiments on animals and I thought it was very
cruel. They would test cosmetics in the eyes of rabbits. They would induce cancer in
rats. They would cut off the heads of frogs just to see how long they could live
without a brain. Coming to work one day I found an injured sparrow on the street. I
took it into the lab, nursed it back to health and we became good friends. It followed
me on all my rounds and I had a good communication with it. I just couldn’t stand to
see the animals tortured like that so I had to quit.
Enter Ruth
Before I quit I went to an African dance at the university. I met a black girl by
the name of Ruth C. She wasn’t African but she was born in Panama and grew up in
Jamaica. We got along pretty good and I was fascinated with her culture. She had
just arrived in Canada and we started hanging out. She had a brother already here and
a few cousins and other Jamaican friends.
Ruth’s skin was as black as could be. Normally that would be a setback in her
culture because the lightest skin was most acceptable. But she was from the Jamaican
elite. One of her brothers was the Minister of Education in the Michael Manley
government (in power at the time). He had a luxury home in Montego Bay. Her sister
ran a government school camp in the jungle. Each year they were given a new car
and with the condition of the roads there you probably needed one.
Over Efficient
I had worked in restaurants and other places but I was always a perfectionist and
an efficiency expert. I did myself out of a lot of jobs that way. Once I worked for a
major insurance company who served a dinner to a staff of about 200. My job was to
wash the dishes after everyone ate. Normally this would take at least two hours. I
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worked out a system to do it more efficiently and I had the job down to 20 minutes.
For this I got fired. I wasn’t playing the system.
Publication Frustration
I was accumulating piles of rejection slips for my work in books, artwork,
cartoons, and other things. Then I met a Jewish guy who was the agent for an
Olympic gold figure skater. He wanted to be my agent. He got me set up at a
political-business convention at the major convention center in the city.
On the guest list was Pierre Trudeau (Prime minister at the time), Nelson
Rockefeller, Governor of New York then, publishers, business CEOs, politicians, and
other dignitaries. They had set aside a booth foe me to show my work and draw
caricatures of the dignitaries. I received a gold-embossed invitation in the mail. The
day before I was to show up, I got a call from someone telling me I better not dare to
show up, and if I try they will have security guards posted to spot me and I will go to
jail. The call was very threatening and this was something I got used to.
A well-known author of children’s books was looking for a cartoonist to
illustrate a book she had almost finished. My agent knew her and set up an interview
with her. She came to my place and asked if I could make cartoons of vegetables. I
did some rough sketches for her and she was thrilled with them. When I showed her
cartoons I had done (in color), she told me right away I was hired. She said she
would write up a contract and bring it over for me to sign tomorrow. The following
day she phoned me and she was completely insane. She yelled, screamed and cursed
at me and how dare I come into her life. That sort of thing seemed to happen a lot.
I noticed that a publishing company was looking for an illustrator for some of
the books they were publishing. I took my portfolio down and had an interview. I
was hired on the spot. It was a Friday and they told me to start Monday morning. On
Saturday, the publishing company burned to the ground. Somehow I felt it was my
fault and I caused a lot of people to loose their jobs. About a month later, another
publisher was looking for the same thing. Again I was hired to join the staff of artists.
The next day, the parent company in the States cut out the art department and farmed
it out to someone in the States.
Hippie Life
I was still hanging out with Ruth, Ivan, Godfreed, Morna, Alvin, Bill K, and the
“family”. I was still dressing as a woman most of the time and still having orgies. We
often hung out in the Yorkville district of Toronto because that was the Haight-
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Ashbury of Canada. There were lots of basement cafes with posters that shone under
black light. People were wearing tie-dyed tops and skirts, Indian and Hudson Bay
blankets (for coats). All the guys had long hair and most had beards. There were a lot
of American draft dodgers and refuges from the Viet Nam war. The hippie era was a
state of mind and a unique mind set. Even though there was lots of drugs (mostly pot
but also acid), the main mind set was antiestablishment. The young no longer
believed in authority. They questioned it. Admired authors were Buckminster Fuller
(creator of geodesic dome structures) and Marshall McLuhan (“the medium is the
message”). The greatest part of the Hippie mindset was that you were always
accepted no matter who or what you were. That never happened before or since. I
was lucky to have experienced that phase of our history.
I was also hanging out at gay and lesbian clubs. There was a lesbian club called
the Spoken Cycle where I was accepted, but the main club was the 511 Club at 511
Yonge St. This was a dance club with a stage where female impersonators would
perform, usually lip syncing to a record. They would do all the glamour queens of the
past and some current ones like Barbara Striesand. But the #1 drag queen was Craig
Russel. He used his own voice and always got rave reviews. I got to know him for a
while. We used to go for coffee and he would invite me to his room where he had the
most elaborate assortment of gowns and wigs. Craig became famous and starred as
himself in a Hollywood movie called Outrageous. I used to see him on the talk show
circuits like with Johnny Carson. Eventually Craig died of AIDS.
Another gay guy I used to hang out with in restaurants was trying to be a
fashion designer but with no luck. Then he wrote a play called Fortune in Men’s
Eyes. It was loosely based on a Shakespearean play. The play was a hit. It ended up
playing Off-Broadway in New York for eight years. Hollywood was after him for
years to do a movie of it. He kept putting them off but eventually gave in. The movie
was filmed in a prison in Quebec. It was about gay prison life, drag queens, and strip
teases. I thought it was rather violent.
I had been in plays myself with a theater group. The longest play I did was an
Erskine Caldwell play set in the American Deep South. I acted in other plays and
really enjoyed it. I was a good actress and loved doing heavy drama. The only reason
I didn’t continue was that I was doing so many other things and potential
opportunities kept arising.
Ruth Again
In 1967, I bought a black 1960 Volkswagen Beetle. It was the best car I ever
had. I was hanging out more with Ruth because I was trying to learn more about the
Jamaican culture. I would go to a lot of Jamaican parties. The main thing they would
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cook was curried goat with rice and black-eyed peas (which were really beans), They
always had Jamaican rum - the real stuff brought over from Jamaica. It was 150%
proof. Ruth wanted to marry me, primarily so she wouldn’t have to wait five years to
get Canadian citizenship, and also because she thought I would become rich and
famous. She knew I liked men and she wasn’t looking for any normal marriage. I had
a lot of marriage proposals before and since and managed to turn them all down. This
was always difficult with my disease to please and my difficulty in saying no. I’ve
had a lot of women fall in love with me and every time it happened I felt so guilty
that I let it get that far. Often it was a surprise though. Once an Italian girl picked me
out of a group of six men, called me over to talk to her, and within twenty minutes
she proposed to me. If I had been a normal man, I could have had all the females I
wanted.
Somehow, Ruth was different from all the rest, not that there was any love or
anything like that there. I saw her more as a challenge or an adventure. We were so
drastically different. Often walking down the street she would run into
discrimination. I agreed to marry her as a favor so she could get her immigration
status (the disease to please). We set a date for September 9.
That summer we joined a nudist colony (I had been a nudist for most of my
adult life). One day they held the Miss Nude World Pageant, and the (non-nudist)
public was invited. It was quite an adventure especially to see the girls in stands freak
out as I often walked by them.
Animals, Efficiency, and Danger
In the summer of 1967, I got a job with the Centennial Center for Science and
Technology, later to become the Ontario Science Center. I was in charge of the life
sciences department. It was like one huge massive warehouse with no rooms. I found
it fascinating to work there. My department had electric eels, piranha fish, fresh
water aquariums, weird bug-eyed goldfish, birds, plants and so on. Once an electric
eel escaped. I had to catch it with insulated rubber gloves, and that was a challenge
because they are so slippery. They had a tall tank of goldfish. They would slowly
increase the water temperature to near the boiling point, and as long as they did it
slow enough the fish were all right. They would also slowly bring it to near freezing
with the same results. They also had a couple of tanks of guppies and they would
change the sexes of the fish by feeding them the opposite hormones.
My job was scheduled to be an eight-hour shift. But always the efficiency
expert, I created a series of living biomes. These were self-sustaining and I reduced
my work time to ten minutes a day. They didn’t like that, but then what can you
expect from the government? Efficiency is a dirty word to them. Their motto seemed
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to be waste. There were carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and so on, but they never
talked to one another. A carpenter would be given a design for an exhibit that I was
supposed to eventually get. The electrician might or might not be able to wire it. If
not, it went in the garbage. Sometimes it got to the plumber, and usually he couldn’t
do anything with it. It went into the garbage. Sometimes it got to me and often I
couldn’t use it. Once I got an elaborate aquarium but it was hermetically sealed and I
couldn’t put any fish in it. Out in the garbage it went. I estimated the amount of
taxpayers dollars wasted at about $10,000 a day.
Since I had nothing to do most of the day, I fooled around with other people.
They had laser guns that cast a beam of red light when you pulled the trigger. It
wasn’t strong enough to burn, so we played space pirates shooting at each other and
ducking behind support beams. In the area right next to mine was a medical museum.
There were old doctor’s bags, outdated medical and dental instruments, and lots of
chemicals. Right beside that was a cobalt bomb. It was about 10 feet high, 10 feet
wide and 10 feet deep. I have always had a serious obsession with order (neat, tidy,
organized), and I set out to clean up the medical museum. Everything had been
thrown and scattered haphazardly on shelves that reached the ceiling about 20 feet
from the floor. The shelves were dusty and dirty and I had to clean everything up.
On the very top shelf, there was a big bag of white powder. I had no idea what it
was and kept tossing it to shelves below until I could find a place for it. As I got the
bag of powder down to the third shelf, a scientist saw me with it and yelled “What’s
that?” He took the bag away from me to have it tested. It turned out to be a
tremendously high explosive. He said I didn’t know how lucky I was. He took a tiny
pinch from the bag, put it on the floor and hit it with a hammer. There was a loud
explosion and a brilliant flash of light. He said that if I had dropped the bag on the
floor, it would have produced an explosion strong enough to set off the cobalt bomb.
It was a nuclear device. He said we would all have been vaporized and there would
be a crater 30 feet deep and 10 blocks wide. I would have killed hundreds of people
and injured thousands. Imagine that. I could easily have detonated a nuclear bomb.
Openings came up in design and research but they would not allow me to apply.
I had built a huge refracting telescope from a huge lens I got other lenses, a
prism, a huge long cardboard cylinder, and hardware and a tripod. We would drive a
hundred or so miles out into the country where there was the least amount of ambient
light to study the stars and planets. The telescope was almost too powerful. The
slightest vibration and the star was out of range. We did get a good look at the rings
of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. I liked viewing things like the belt of Orion, the
Pleiades, and the Horsehead Nebula.
I decided I was going to have to take the scientific approach so I could prove the
theme of the Book of Humanity. I had been doing scientific research at libraries,
universities, medical schools, etc. for about twenty years. I studied biochemistry,
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general chemistry, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, cosmology, cosmogony,
quantum and particle physics, botany, biology, molecular biology, geology,
geophysics, evolution, politics, paleontology, sociology, anatomy and physiology,
religions, spirituality, history, and so on. I feel that I mastered most of these.
Marrying Ruth
I married Ruth on September 9, 1967. It certainly was no typical marriage. She
had a Russian boyfriend, Nick B, who would frequently come to see her. I had Alvin
and she would often invite him over. I used to watch her and Nick having sex. After
about three months, Ruth wanted to have sex with me to consummate the marriage.
We did and that was the one and only time. We got along great. We went to lots of
parties and threw lots of them too. For a while we got into wife swapping. Ruth’s
mother had flown up from Jamaica to attend our wedding. She stayed with us for a
while. Ruth told me she was a diabetic and gave me strict instructions if I ever saw
her passed out. One morning I found her lying on the floor in the nude. I was able to
pick her up and place her on the bed. I poked her finger with a sterilized pin to draw
some blood. I tested it with some litmus paper to see what color it turned. Fortunately
it showed she needed sugar, otherwise I would have had to give her an insulin shot. I
poured a spoonful of sugar down her throat, and she was soon revived. This
apparently saved her life.
Enter Ted
About a month after I married Ruth, Ivan introduced me to Ted F. It was at a
hippie party. Ted was playing bongo drums and had long black hair and a full beard.
Ted became a part of my life for 30 years. Ted was well educated especially in the
sciences and theology. We got into great conversations. He was a radical and rebel
just like me (of course, that was part of the essence of the hippie movement). Ted
lived primarily off student loans and government grants. He always seemed to be
taking something at the university. And he always seemed to be broke or had little
money.
Rochdale College
Ted quickly introduced me to Rochdale College. It had taken over from the
Yorkville district as the center for the hippie lifestyle (although remained popular for
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a few more years). Rochdale was an eighteen-story building set up as a “free school”.
For a while Bob Dylan used to come there. In fact there were several famous people
showed up there because Rochdale was unique in North America. Instead of
apartments, the floors were divided up into what they called ashrams of varying
sizes. A lot of them would accommodate up to eighteen or more people. There were
lots of seminars, especially on alternative ways of thinking. Eastern philosophies
were popular. Ted had a small ashram and we set up the Utopian Research Institute
there. It was a failure.
There were coed washrooms and showers, none of which had any doors. And
this was perfectly acceptable because nobody bothered anyone. Everyone was
respected. And everyone seemed to be on their own trip whether it was music,
poetry, painting, making flowers, singing, dropping acid, making clothes, knowledge
of some particular subject, or whatever. Nudity was very common, and sex was
considered no different from eating or sleeping. It was natural. People would often be
having sex on the floor or on a mattress in front of maybe 20 people. It was no big
deal. Often there were orgies, a few of which I participated in. Unfortunately, two
years later a biker gang took it over. They were after sex more than drugs. I saw them
throw girls aver their shoulders, take them somewhere and rape them. The bikers
were violent and destructive. Rochdale closed and later, after some modification, it
was turned into a nursing home.
In 1969, I bought a ‘64 Plymouth Savoy with push-button drive. Ruth and I used
to take trips out into the country. I had kept sending excerpts from manuscripts to
publishers all over everywhere. At that time I still had my book of poetry -“Exercises in Imagination”, the Book of Death, the Book of Life, and a cartoon book
called the Spaceman’s Christmas (and other works). The rejection slips kept piling
up. I was still hanging out at Rochdale, still wearing women’s clothes, hanging with
the “family”, Ted, Morna, Ivan, Bill, Alvin, Godfreed, Ruth, and was still picking up
men.
By now, I had probably been with hundreds of men of every race and
nationality you could think of. I had been with white people, black people, Asians,
Europeans, Jews, Arabs, Hindus, Mexicans, South Americans, Africans, and so on.
Toronto was a very cosmopolitan city housing people from almost every country in
the world. I never had a prejudice bone in my body. But this was also partly due to
my need to please. These encounters were completely absent of any love or affection.
They were just sex, and the only satisfaction I got was a psychological feeling of
momentary acceptance and the closest I could act as a woman. Even with Alvin,
there was no love or affection.
When Rochdale closed, most of the hippies moved to a district known as the
“annex” just north of the college. It was about ten blocks of old rooming houses
north of Boor Street between Spadina and University Avenue. The houses were
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usually three stories with two collective kitchens. The kitchens were usually always
dirty because nobody seemed to do any cleaning. Ted had a room on Huron Street.
Some of the rooms were huge with mattresses thrown on the floor, girls and guys
lying around in the nude, and sometimes people were just having sex. Nudity, sex
and orgies still went on in the annex. Streaking was also popular then. One cute guy I
had been after for about a week was streaking and cut his foot badly on some broken
glass. I nursed him as much as I could. I finally got him too. I visited that house a lot
and had lots of sex there while others were watching. Ted loved to eat and would
often raid the fridge. There was never a clean dish so I got into the habit of cleaning
the dishes and the filthy kitchen. People were calling me things like “little miss
wifey”, or “the maid” and so on. I was already going by the name of Janis. It just
wasn’t official.
Woodstock
By the summer of 1969, everyone was talking about the upcoming Woodstock
festival in a farmer’s field in upstate New York. Everyone wanted to go and some
did. After all, Jimmy Hendricks and Janis Joplin were going to be there. They were
the true symbols of the hippie movement. The third would be Jim Morrison of the
Doors. Isn’t it strange that they all died shortly after from an alleged drug overdose?
Woodstock had a crowd of about 400,000 people, the largest gathering of its
kind in history. It lasted four days. People came in cars, trucks and Volkswagen vans
painted in psychedelic colors. People slept in tents, on the ground, under tarps (it
rained a lot), in cars or wherever they could. The festival went on 24 hours a day.
Lots of people were in the nude. Some wore only flowers in their hair. Everything
went peacefully and everyone had a great time.
Unfortunately, this festival marked the end of an era. The curtain came down.
The hippie era, flower power and everything that mindset stood for came to an end.
A lot of hippies became yuppies and got jobs and careers in the early `70s. The diehard hippies tried to hang on, but their time was up.
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Chapter Four - The Seventies
In early 1970, I bought the stock of a second-hand store and renamed it
Aladdin’s Lamp. I made some really good deals with the help of a dealer who was
good at finding bargains. The store was a success. I was making good money but I
felt guilty. I was taking advantage of welfare people. They would bring me
refrigerators and stoves in the middle of the month and I would give them five
dollars a piece, which they would usually spend on booze. At the end of the month,
when they got their welfare checks they paid $25 to get them back. I felt that was
corruption and I wanted out. Godfreed would hang around the store and was amazed
at the money I was making. I offered to sell him my stock for $200, which was what
I paid except he got a lot more stock than I did. He took over but he had no business
sense and he lost everything. Then he was mad at me.
Sociobiology
I was still collecting rejection slips and by now had enough to paper a large
house. I stubbornly persisted. I was still doing hours on end of research in the
sciences and humanities. I was determined to find the scientific proof of my concept
of the universe, God, and life on Earth. I was starting to accumulate massive amounts
of notes which would eventually be the work of a lifetime. I became the founder of a
new science - sociobiology. I founded a new state system which I called Biocracy. I
later titled my major work The Biocratic Manifesto. I ended up putting 30 years of
my life into this work. When I was researching, I would often go into a bookstore or
library and walk directly to the book I needed. I never had to hunt for it. I learned to
scan books rapidly. I would flip through a text in 10 seconds and have the whole
concept of the book. If it had something useful, I would go to that spot and read it.
When I got rid of the store, I got a job at the Granite Curling Club. It was for
millionaires only. I worked as an icemaker in the winter and maintenance person in
the summer for lawn bowling.
That year I met a real estate racketeer by the name of Walter Hooey. He didn’t
deal in houses. He bought farmland outside Toronto and subdivided it up into small
lots. He made a lot of money this way. Since he had significant connections with the
government, he would have roads taken out and put back in after he bought the land.
He also bought and sold apartment buildings and office buildings. He was a little
short guy, dressed like a gangster, and always flashed a huge roll of cash while
walking the streets. Why he was never robbed, I’ll never know.
The buddy he used to hang out with was the former press secretary of Pierre
Trudeau. Maybe this was how he made his political connections. They were both
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interested in the paranormal and were studying Buddhism with a Japanese monk. We
used to meet in restaurants for coffee and they became really interested in what I had
to say. They organized a symposium of professors and people from think tanks to
investigate my claims. They came to Toronto usually one at a time from places like
Harvard, Yale, Columbia University, Berkley, the Rand Corporation, Westinghouse,
and so on. We would spend hours daily over coffee discussing my theories and
concepts. This went on for nine months. Since I only had a Grade Nine education,
they couldn’t believe I could come up with such theories. They desperately tried to
find fault with everything but they couldn’t.
Since they couldn’t disprove anything I said, they resorted to personal attacks.
They criticized my wearing of women’s clothes. I had really thick long red hair.
They were asking why I wanted to look like a girl. I told them I am a girl. That didn’t
go over too well. After long talks with the professors and those from the think tanks,
I thought they were ignorant and stupid. With the little education I had, I was way
ahead of all of them. One of the professors was Edward O. Wilson, an entomologist
from Harvard. I had talked to him about my new science of sociobiology. I had
coined that word. Two years later, he published a textbook called Sociobiology, The
New Synthesis. He stole my term. Apparently there was a lot of controversy over his
book. I got a copy from the library and read it. First of all he got the concept wrong.
What I meant by the term sociobiology was the synthesis of society based on
biological principles. What he did was consider the social aspects of biological
organisms like ants and bees. Only the first and last chapters dealt with human
society and in a bigoted and prejudiced way.
I knew that I was a lot smarter than those people just like I knew I was smarter
than my teachers in Grade Nine. But why was this happening to me? Among the
many abilities I was “gifted” with was the abnormal ability of understanding. I
perfectly understood society and the civilization on this earth. I understood how
stupid people of the earth are. I studied Einstein, especially his unified field theory.
He tried to find an energy that unified the four universal forces. He never found it,
but I did. In fact, I found two unknown energies (which I could prove in the
appropriate lab) that prove the unified field theory (it is fully explained in my book
The Biocratic Manifesto). Later, I studied Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
I realized I knew a lot more about the universe than he did. I started wondering if I
was from another planet. I felt very lonely. The only person who would listen to me
was Ted.
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Ruth and Hawaii
I don’t remember much of 1971 or most of `72. I know that Ruth and I had
applied for American immigration status because we wanted to move to Hawaii.
After about a year and a half we were finally accepted because Ruth was a nurse. In
December of 1972, we flew to Honolulu Hawaii. We had a stop over in Los Angeles
to transfer to a Northwest Orient Airlines 747. The plane was late because it had got
stuck in snow in Minneapolis. We had about a three-hour wait at LAX. Finally we
boarded the plane with only a few passengers. The plane took off over the ocean and
when we were about twenty-five feet above the water, the two side doors right across
from us flew open. Two flight attendants struggled to get those doors closed and
finally succeeded. Luckily it happened at twenty-five feet. If it had happened at
35,000 feet, we would all have been sucked out of the plane to our deaths.
For the first few nights in Honolulu, we stayed at a cheap hotel off Waikiki
beach. All the big hotels along the beach had big shows every night. We would walk
along the beach and watch the shows from behind. One Hawaiian guy said to me
“Hey bruddah, how you get so white?” In a few days, we rented a furnished
apartment at 1040 Mounaihi Place in Makiki on the side of punchbowl crater. I had
wanted to go to Hawaii for so long. I loved Hawaiian music, especially the Hawaiian
steel guitar. I had collected Hawaiian records and was fascinated by the singers.
Quite often the males sounded like females and the females sounded manly. I loved
the Hawaiian language. I think there are only about seventeen letters in their
language. They run strings of vowels together. For instance a town in Oahu is
Kaaawa, but the As are broken up in different guttural sounds.
The aloha spirit was certainly alive and well when I was there. I could feel it
strong. Even though there were very few Hawaiian natives in Honolulu, the
Hawaiian culture was strong. Almost every street in the city had a Hawaiian name.
The Americans (and everyone else) spoke a kind of dialect that used a lot of
Hawaiian words. I learned these fast. We enjoyed visiting the Iolani Palace, Pearl
Harbor (where we saw the USS Arizona from a glass bottom boat), attending a rock
concert on the floor of Diamond Head Crater, and traveling all over the island of
Oahu. I used to go uptown around Hotel St. (the dangerous part of town) where the
native Hawaiians hung out (where part of the TV series Hawaii 5-0 was filmed). I
found a real Hawaiian restaurant where they spoke no English and the menu was all
in the native language. I would order something off the menu and never knew what I
was eating. At first we didn’t cook much and usually ate at the Like Like (leekee
leekee) Drive Inn on Keeaumoku St. which was near by. I still have the menu I stole
from them.
We were invited to a luou (pig) but never to a hukilou (fish). I tried to eat poi
but no matter what I tried to flavor it with, I couldn’t get used to the taste of it. I got a
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job with an American company called Tropical Fruit Glace, Inc. downtown on Cedar
St. They produced exotic desserts usually served in coconut shells for first class
airline passengers. They imported their coconuts from British Honduras. Ruth got a
job in a hospital as a nursing assistant. They wouldn’t recognize her Canadian papers
as a registered nurse. She was not too happy about that. Christmas was interesting.
We were used to snow, but in this tropical state it is usually between 70 and 80
degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. The palm trees (always my favorite tree) were
decorated with strands of lights. There were signs all over saying “Mele Kalika
Maka”, which means Merry Christmas and “Hauoli Maka Hiki Ho’ meaning Happy
New Year.
Ruth, having very black skin, kept running into a lot of discrimination, mainly
from the Chinese. Most of the population was Asian, with the Chinese at the top
followed by the Japanese. The Japanese virtually owned all the businesses in the city
including the hotels on Waikiki beach. Ruth wanted to get out of Hawaii because of
all the discrimination she faced. I thought we should move to New York City
because I had started a new comic strip called “Gizmo” and thought I could find an
agent or promoter. I always liked New York. I had been there a few times before and
I had climbed inside the Statue of Liberty, and to the top of the Empire State
Building. Besides, Ruth had a cousin in Brooklyn. He was kind of in the Black mafia
and, according to him, dealt mostly in diamonds.
New York
We took a flight from Honolulu to New York City and about half way through
the flight, the pilot announced a contest. Whoever could guess the closest time of
arrival in NYC would win a bottle of champagne. I saw people with calculators and
note pads working feverishly at it. I wrote down a number and won the prize. I
guessed it within two seconds. Ruth’s cousin Max picked us up at the airport and
took us to the huge tenement house he owned in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Max
was actually from Panama but grew up in New York. When we got to his building, it
was surrounded by a twenty-foot chain link fence with razor wire at the top. It was
set up with alarms and guard dogs. Crown Heights is an all black area and a pretty
rough district where there were a lot of shootings. I wouldn’t leave the house at
night. We stayed there about two weeks.
I knew the city pretty well and I took Ruth to places like the Village, Central
Park, the Bowery, Wall St., and so on. The Bowery is New York’s skid row. Drunks
and derelicts would lay silent on the street and no one knew if they were dead or not.
Their policy was to wait a certain period of time and if they didn’t move, the Black
Mariah was called to haul them away. I had instructed Ruth to always look straight
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ahead if anyone looked at us and keep a serious face. When Max found out I had
taken Ruth down the Bowery he was surprised and said we were lucky to come out
of there alive (I had panhandled these streets as a teenager). Oddly enough, that was
the diamond center of New York.
Max had a customized Lincoln limousine with a bar and TV and so on. He
drove us through Spanish Harlem and then around Black Harlem, which is a city in
itself. He seemed to be well known in the Harlem. People saluted him, waved to him
and moved out of his way. A lot of what I saw of the Harlem was pretty run down
and dirty. Max had told me he had a killer attack dog. He fed it black coffee and raw
meat. He said if it ever got to me I’d be ripped to shreds. The next morning, I slept in
and everyone in the tenement house had gone out. I was all alone and my bedroom
door was open. Just as I was waking up I heard some growling. Standing in my
doorway was this attack dog, snarling and getting ready to attack me. Somehow he
had escaped. With him was a German Shepherd. I knew I could get through to the
Shepherd a lot easier than the other one. I told the German Shepherd to tell the other
dog that I was okay. I saw him tell him. The killer stopped growling but wasn’t
totally convinced. I communicated with the killer dog and got through to him.
Eventually, the attack dog was friendly and I ended up petting him. Max was in
shock when he came home. He couldn’t believe I wasn’t dead. Then he started
doubting his ability to train a dog to kill.
I liked to wander around Brooklyn. I went to Coney Island with all its midway,
rides and scams. I went to a hotdog cafe where everything was covered in flies. I got
a fly filled hot dog and a coffee. I’m sure I ate some flies but I didn’t care because I
knew nothing could harm me. I had been used to eating garbage and I was never sick
a day in my life. Another day I was wandering around Brooklyn and one of the
tenants spotted me. He yelled at me “Hey, git yo white ass movin’ back where yo
came from. Yo headin’ fo Bedford Styvesant. Yo go in dere, yo dead”. I turned
around and went back where I came from. One day I wanted to stop for coffee and I
walked into what I thought was a normal restaurant. The staff and customers didn’t
look like the other Blacks of the area. I asked for a coffee but they couldn’t
understand me. It sounded like they were speaking French, and I saw chickens
running around in the kitchen. It turned out to be a Haitian restaurant. I left and was
later told it was a good thing because they practiced witchcraft.
Agents Be Damned
While staying with Max, I located the top cartooning agent in the US. She had
a penthouse suite on Park Ave. I already had lots of Gizmo strips made up and
thought maybe she could get me into syndication. She was a long time agent for most
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of the top syndicated cartoonists. She said she liked my cartoons and could get me
syndicated. I had to leave all my samples with her. I told her we were leaving for
Toronto and we exchanged phone numbers. We got back to Toronto in the early
spring of 1973. My New York agent kept asking for more samples of Gizmo. And
for a while I kept sending her some. I soon found out she was selling my jokes to top
comedians. I kept hearing them on the Johnny Carson show and others. She was just
ripping me off.
Back to Toronto
Shortly after returning to Toronto, I bought a house at 295 St. Helen’s Street. It
was a semi-attached house that had been converted into two one-bedroom
apartments. We could have rented half of it out but Ruth wanted the whole thing. I
had no money when I bought the house, but the dealer was good. He turned the down
payment into a second mortgage and Bill Knopp loaned me $500 for the lawyer.
With two mortgages I was only paying $100 a month. We sure had a lot of fun and
parties in that house.
More Animals
Ruth got her job back at the hospital and I got a job at the Eglinton Veterinary
Hospital. I though I would love this job because I liked animals. I soon found out
how the animals were tortured there so I didn’t stay very long. Sometimes I would
assist in surgeries because I liked to compare the animal’s organs with our own. It
was yery interesting communicating with the animals. They were mostly cats and
dogs. I’ve always had a fondness for dogs. A lot of dogs were brought in to be put to
sleep (executed by lethal injection) and those dogs all knew when they were about to
die. I could feel the sorrow and anger in those dogs and felt so sorry for them. Some
of the friendliest dogs would turn vicious when it was their time, and some would
accept the inevitable with peaceful resignation. Part of my job was grooming
longhaired cats. Most did not like to be groomed because they had matted patches in
their hair and combing them out was a painful process for them. They would
instinctively fight back using their claws. One of the idiot workers there attempted to
show me how to do it. He grabbed a cat by the scruff of the neck and kept smashing
its head on the table until he knocked it unconscious. After that, I refused to have
anything further to do with the cats.
I often had to bring dogs from their cages to the veterinarians. I always knew
what kind of mood the dogs were in. Some were friendly and some were hostile (just
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like people). The hostile ones had to be removed by a solid looped pole. Some dogs
were terrified although no one else there could see that. These were the most
dangerous dogs and I saw a few people get bitten by them. I could always tell just
from their body language as well as by reading their emotions. One day a dog came
in to be ‘put to sleep’ and he was definitely not friendly or resigned. I could see the
fear and anger in him and nobody could touch him. I talked to him every day and
befriended him. I developed a good communication with him and he realized I was a
softie for animals. He started pleading with me to take him home. Dogs are a lot
smarter than people give them credit for. I ended up taking him home to the surprise
of the staff.
Once a mad Doberman Pincher came in frothing at the mouth and extremely
vicious. He was extremely difficult to handle. He was brought in for execution.
Death row dogs were always given a week before their demise. I talked to that dog
every day in its own language and within four days I had it calmed down to the point
where I could touch it. Soon I got it so tame it was like a little puppy and one of the
receptionists took it home with her.
Mexico
In the summer of 1973, I planned a trip to South America by myself. I had
intended to go to a point in Peru where I could catch a steamship to travel 4,000
miles down the Amazon River to its mouth. I would have to provide my own food by
buying trinkets and trading them with Amazon native tribes for food. I never quite
made it that far. I got all my papers from the Mexican embassy in Toronto but there
were no other Central American embassies to go to. I was told I could get all the
others in Mexico City. I took a Greyhound bus to Laredo Texas. I had stopped in San
Antonio and visited the Alamo. I had to wait in Laredo for six hours to catch the
Mexican bus at 2am. Laredo seemed to be about ninety percent Mexican. I could
hardly find an American to talk to.
When the bus finally arrived, it left a lot to be desired. It must have been built in
the 1940s, it was full of garbage and cockroaches, the windows were cracked and
broken, and it stunk. I got the second seat on the passenger side. I had a two-day trip
ahead of me. Before we left, an American got on and sat beside me. We crossed into
Nuevo Laredo and headed south. After crossing the border, we had to go through five
military checkpoints. The soldiers came aboard the bus yelling something in Spanish.
I don’t know a single word in Spanish so I just handed them my papers. They looked
at them and handed them back. At the third check point the American was taken off
the bus and I was the only person left that spoke English.
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After all the checkpoints were passed, a girl from the back of the bus came up
and sat on the driver’s lap. The spare bus driver pulled up a wooden box and sat
beside the driver. Then a girl came and sat on his lap. They started pulling out bottles
of tequila and just kept drinking. They set up a ghetto blaster and started blaring
lively Mexican music. Soon they all drank. They were weaving all over the highway
and by now we were in mountainous country. There were no guardrails along the
curves, not even a raised ridge. Some curves had a drop of several hundred feet
straight down. I actually saw the wreckage of several busses below some of those
curves. From where I was sitting, I could see that half the width of the front
passenger tire went over the edge on three occasions. I thought for sure we were all
going to die.
Soon we found ourselves in a scorching desert, and then our bus broke down.
There was nothing but sand in every direction, and the temperature was about 120
degrees, at least. It took two hours for a rescue bus to pick us up. In the meantime we
had to get out of the blazing sun. The only shade was the side of the bus where we all
sat down, some under the bus. There was no water or anything to drink. Finally some
young Spanish girl came up to me and gave me a sip from a juice box. It tasted awful
but it was wet. The bus that picked us up was in no better condition than the first one,
and none of these have air conditioning. Farther along the scorching desert we drove
by a native village. The people were all naked and lived inside four walls (with doors
and windows cut out) made of cactus and sand. There was no roof. At the front of the
huts was a fence made of prickly pear cactus, and within the fence were tiny skinny
goats. This was a great mystery to me. How could they or their goats live in such
harsh conditions? Outside the village there was nothing but sand in all directions as
far as the eye could see, not even cactus. What did they and the goats eat? Where did
they get the cactus? What did they drink?
We finally arrived in Mexico City by way of San Luis Potosi in one piece. I
went to the Pink Zone where Americans stay. They have all the fast food restaurants
and a better quality of living. Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world and
covers the huge floor of a volcanic crater which some believe is dormant. They often
have earthquakes in that region. I had already converted most of my American
money to pesos. I got a cheap room in the Hotel Uxmal for five pesos a night. At that
time a peso was worth eight cents American, so it was very cheap to live there. I had
heard about the famous Market and decided to go there. The city has the widest
variety of transportation I’ve seen. There are rubber-tired subways, busses, trolleys,
jitneys, taxies, and private cabs. I wandered to where I thought I could catch a bus to
the Market. A friendly policeman asked me where I wanted to go. I kind of stood out
like a sore thumb because my skin was so white. I told him, the Market. He said the
city was very dangerous for someone as white as me, and he conveniently had a
young guy beside him to be my guide.
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I didn’t trust this guy but accepted him anyway. He told me in broken English
that we had to take the Number 42 bus. The bus was in terrible condition with most
of the windows broken, some missing altogether, and full of garbage and
cockroaches and food waste. Even some doors were broken or missing. Whenever I
traveled to potentially dangerous parts of the world, I always wore men’s clothes and
acted like a man. I knew it would be a lot safer for me. We arrived at the Market and
I was surprised at how huge it was. Their main item was silver because it was so
cheap. Americans were gobbling it up for investments. Everything you could
imagine was there. Then there was this long row of prostitution tents. They would
grab anyone who looked like a man and try to drag them into their tents. A few
grabbed me but I got away. My guide stuck to me like a shadow but I had a feeling in
my gut not to trust him. On the way back, I jumped off the bus when he wasn’t
looking about five blocks from my hotel. He never found me.
I set out looking for Central American embassies to get visas. The few that I
could find could not or would not speak English and I speak no Spanish. On the way,
I had to cross Avenue Insuentes. It must be the widest street in the world, with at
least eighteen lanes, and there are no dividing lines between the lanes. I don’t think
there was any speed limit either. Speed was only limited by the amount of traffic. It
resembled a racetrack. I got half way across which in itself was taking my life in my
hands. While standing in the center boulevard, a drunken Mexican came at me
yelling, “Hey, gringo Americano, I keel you”. He pulled out a knife and I knew I had
to run. Since Mexico City is about 10,000 feet above sea level, there is much less
oxygen than I am used to and the slightest effort exhausted me. He attacked me and I
got two slashes on my face. I had to think of something fast or I would have been
dead. I ran out into the traffic (which also could have killed me) believing that if he
followed me he would be run over by traffic and he would die. I dodged the speeding
traffic and got to the other side. I looked for him, but couldn’t see him. I don’t know
if he was killed or not.
I found myself in a rather undesirable part of the city. It was very dirty. There
were Mexicans wrapped in colorful blankets with huge sombreros sitting in the dirt
and seemed to be dozing off to sleep. I noticed they had handguns stuffed in their
belts. One of them had two crisscrossing shoulder belts full of bullets just like in the
movies. I thought I better get out of here fast. That same evening, I was ganged up on
by five teenagers. They demanded my money. They said they would kill me if I
didn’t hand it over. I gave it to them. They took $200 in American money. I knew
now I wouldn’t have enough money to go to South America.
One day, I decided to go to the Shrine of Guadalupe. I took a rickety old bus
and got to the front gates. I had heard it was a very famous place. In front of the
church was a huge cement courtyard. I watched in astonishment as I saw people enter
the courtyard and go down on their hands and knees and start licking the sidewalk
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toward the church. Less than half way there, their tongues were bleeding. Then there
were about ten concrete steps to the door of the church. They licked all the steps to
the door. There were long trails of blood and their tongues were raw and bleeding
badly. I went inside the church and there was a beautiful painting over the altar. It
was claimed that it was painted by an angel and that is why this was a shrine. Mexico
is a very Roman Catholic country and some take it to extremes.
The next day, I took a bus to visit the pyramids of Teotehuacan. I was told to
pack a lunch because nothing was for sale there. I did. There were two main
pyramids, the pyramid of the sun with 365 steps and the pyramid of the moon. I
foolishly tried climbing the pyramid of the sun, not realizing I was higher than
10,000 feet above sea level. Besides, the steps were very narrow and very high
making it more difficult to climb. I didn’t make it more than a quarter of the way up.
I explored some underground rooms carved out of rock. The walls, floor and ceiling
were as smooth as a modern apartment. It was an amazing feat of engineering and
there were beautiful ancient paintings on the walls. There was a main street called the
Street of the Dead. A stone wall about five feet high and perfectly flat on top ran
beside the road for one mile. I checked it out and realized it was one hundred percent
straight, in spite of being in earthquake country.
The day after that I took the subway to the Museum of Anthropology. It was
well worth seeing. It is a huge building with a cantilever roof. Hundreds of ancient
treasures from the Aztec and Mayan empires were on display. There were some
incredible stone carvings including one of the human brain accurate in every detail.
Another day I befriended a Mexican kid with an old man on a donkey outside the
city. They both spoke broken English. They were beside a cactus plant that provides
tequila. The old guy cut one of the branches off that had a sharp strong needle at the
end. He delicately cut around the needle and pulled it off. It had 3 strands of thread
going the whole length of the branch. He told me this is how nature provides for
them. Then he sliced the outer skin off the branch. Under that was a layer of material
stronger than any fabric known. They used to make clothes from this and it came
with a needle and thread. I found this fascinating. Another day I was exploring some
ancient Mayan ruins outside the city. I got there just at the right time. There was a
kind of a stage and a performance was going on. These were descendants of the
Mayan nation enacting their traditional dances and songs, and in their traditional
costumes. It was a great learning experience.
I had now been in Mexico for almost two weeks and I decided it was time to get
out of there. I wanted to go to Panama City, but nobody would tell me what bus line
to catch. It turned out to be the Cristobal-Cologne bus line. I already had a contact in
Panama. Ruth had a cousin there and we contacted him to say I was coming. I
thought the best way to get there was to fly (hah!). I found out that I couldn’t get a
flight into Panama unless I had a flight out. I was running low on money from being
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
55
robbed. So I had to pick the cheapest flights in and out of Panama. I bought a ticket
from Panama City to Miami, Florida. I boarded a small, rickety plane through its tail
at the Mexico City airport. There were few people on board. Our plane was allegedly
forced down in Chichicastenanga, Guatemala where it was confiscated by the
military. For some reason, I was the only one left of the plane while it was filled with
young soldiers in full battle gear and heavily armed.
Central America
Shortly after take off our plane was hit by lightning. No one was hurt but there
was a brilliant flash of light that lit up the whole plane. As we flew over Honduras, a
volcano was erupting and spewing lava high in the air. It seemed like the pilot
wanted a closer look and got a little too close. We came very close to getting hit with
lava. There was a war going on in El Salvador between the Contras and the military
government. And the Americans were involved. Our plane landed in the middle of a
war zone about 9pm. It was dark and there were no runway lights (not even an
airstrip) and all the soldiers got off the plane to fight. I could see mortar fire in the
distance moving closer to us. There were lots of shells flying past the plane, and I
thought for sure we were going to get hit. By some miracle, we didn’t. But our plane
was out of fuel and it seemed too dangerous for a fuel truck to fill us up. I was
trapped in this war zone for two hours. Finally, we got to hell out of there.
Our next stop was in Managua, Nicaragua. The city was devastated because
they just had a massive earthquake a few months earlier. The downtown was hit the
hardest and there were huge wide gaps in the streets with boards across them for
people to walk. A few people got on the plane including an American who later may
have saved my life. We stopped in San Jose, Costa Rica where everyone got off but
the American. I thought it was a beautiful place. We finally arrived at the Panama
City airport but it was two in the morning. The airport was closed. There was no
telephone. The airport was twenty-five miles from Panama City, and I was in the
middle of a dense jungle. The American had called a friend in the city from San Jose
who agreed to meet him at the airport. Luckily, I got a ride into the city (he charged
me five dollars US). If it wasn’t for that American, I would have had to try and
survive the night in the jungle. My guardian angel was still looking after me.
It was now too late to call my contact so I looked for a hotel. The city has
military police and they weren’t to be messed with. I got a cheap room in a hotel that
was named CIA. While I was paying for my room, there was a decorated military
general showing off a handgun with a mother of pearl handle to one of his officers. I
didn’t sleep much that night and was up early to look around the city. The population
seemed to be predominantly Black but the language was Spanish. I wandered to the
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edge of downtown. It looked like a ghetto. Right across the street was a huge barbed
wire fence. Behind that were the immaculately landscaped gardens of Balboa Heights
in the Canal Zone. The difference was like night and day. At that time, the
Americans owned the Canal Zone and I soon saw there was a lot of hostility against
the Americans from the Panamanians. I thought they might think I was an American
and got out of there quick. I called my contact and he was over in a few minutes to
pick me up. He actually worked for the American government in the Canal Zone, so
he had a pass and could go in there anytime. I stayed with that family for about a
week. The meals they served me were delicious, but I had no idea what I was eating,
nor would they tell me.
The cousin took me on a tour of the canal and I was fascinated to watch the
huge ships going through the locks. There is a much greater height difference
between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans than I realized.
The next day he took me to Panama Veho (the old city). It was mostly the
stone walls of buildings in various states of disintegration. Some walls had big round
holes in them which I was told was from cannon fire by the pirate Captain Henry
Morgan. The waters just off there contained dozens of sunken Spanish galleons and
pirate ships overloaded with gold. And the gold was still there. I got the feeling that
Panamanians didn’t place much value on gold.
Another day, I wandered into the Roman Catholic Church of San Jose built
around 1671 and near downtown. The entire alter from floor to ceiling was covered
in gold. The chalices and candleholders were solid gold. There was only one security
guard by the entrance and he was sound asleep in his chair. I walked right by him on
my way up to the altar and he never woke up. I wasn’t even tempted to take any gold.
Wandering around the edge of the city, I came across a group of San Blas
Indians (from the San Blas Islands). These natives were just covered in gold. They
were completely stone-faced, devoid of all expression. I tried hard to communicate
with them but to no avail. I heard a rumor that the Americans were planning to bomb
the San Blas Islands. Why?
I wanted to see how far south I could get toward Columbia. I hiked along the
two sand lanes of the Pan American Highway. I got a ride with a couple of
Americans in a jeep into the Darien Gap. This was like a rain forest or more like a
massive swamp. After about two hours, we came to a native village. They were the
Choco Indians and most wore no clothes. They lived on raised platforms with a
thatched roof but no walls. They were friendly and invited us to eat with them. We
did, but the food did not taste that good. I found out later it was alligator meat.
Apparently, that is their main food. From there the road was washed out and we went
back to Panama City. I had a chance to go by ship to Cartagena in Colombia, but I
was almost broke and couldn’t afford the trip even though it was quite cheap. I was
certainly learning a lot in the School of Life and the School of Hard Knocks.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
57
I went back to Ruth’s cousin’s family and told him I had to get back to the
United States. He drove me way out to the airport and I caught another rickety, little
plane for Miami. Shortly after we took off, we ran into a hurricane. I was sure our
plane was going to crash. The wings were flapping like a bird and the turbulence was
severe. The pilot thought he should make an emergency landing in Cuba. I was all in
favor of that. For some reason, he decided to fly through the hurricane. I thought he
was nuts. The turbulence seemed to last forever and then all of a sudden there was
dead silence. We were in the eye of the hurricane. It was unbelievably peaceful and
calm. But I knew we had to fly out the other side and go through this all over again,
if we could. I was amazed we made it through without crashing of the plane falling
apart. We finally landed at the Miami Airport.
Miami
After I paid the bus fare downtown, I had six and a half dollars in my pocket. I
saw a YMCA across the street and although it was late at night, I got a room for five
dollars. I had a dollar and a half left. In the morning I had breakfast which cost all I
had. Now I was flat broke. I didn’t wander very far until I found I was in a very
rough and dangerous neighborhood. They had just had massive riots in the Black and
Cuban districts nearby. I found a private employment agency and sort of demanded a
job. They gave me a job at the Diamond Motel at 14155 Biscayne Boulevard in
North Miami Beach, right on the edge of the Biscayne Swamp. I had to beg the guy
for a transit ticket to get there. The Miami area is very hot and humid (muggy) and
all the busses and coffee shops are highly air-conditioned. If you dress for the Miami
weather, you freeze on busses and in the shops.
When I arrived at the Diamond Motel, I was hired as a “handyman”. The job
entailed cutting lawns, painting cabins, and taking waste including fallen coconuts to
the dump just inside the swamp. I was given my own cottage, one of the worst ones.
None of them were that great. Anyway, it had a kitchen with utensils and pots and
pans. I told the manager that I didn’t have a cent to my name and I needed food. He
advanced me a hundred dollars, a week’s wages, and I stocked up on food. My first
job was to cover the swimming pool and put away the chairs because a hurricane was
coming. I said “I know, I just flew through it”. The hurricane changed course and
never hit us. The next day he asked me to chop down a tree near the swimming pool.
I chopped it down, cut it up and took it to the dump. He then asked me how I felt and
I said, fine. He said that it was good because I just cut down a poisonous holly tree
that nobody else would touch. I had noticed before that potentially harmful things
had no affect on me. I found out that there are a lot of poisonous plants, insects and
animals in the Miami area.
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58
Once when I was examining a strange tree I’d never seen before, I handled what
looked like seeds or pods. Suddenly, someone yelled at me that it was highly
poisonous. It never affected me. The motel area had many coconut palm trees. I was
supposed to pick up all the coconuts that fell and take them to the dump. Whenever I
picked up a coconut I would shake it. If there was liquid in it, I knew it was the best
thirst quencher in the world. Nobody else seemed to know that because they were
spending a fortune at the pop machine. A coconut has three ‘eyes’ and one of them is
soft while the other two are impenetrable. I started carrying a nail with me and would
push the nail easily into the soft eye. I drank the coconut water from it as often as I
found it, because it was so refreshing. On the edge of the swamp where I dumped the
waste, there were brightly colored red and blue striped coral snakes. I knew by their
color that they were very poisonous and so I kept a safe distance from them.
I used to see a lot of alligators come out of the swamp looking for food at the
dumpsite. They fascinated me and I would study them. Sometimes I would feed
them. Although I had encountered a wide variety of dangerous animals, I never knew
the meaning of fear. Right beside my cottage door was a wasp’s nest but they never
bothered me. One wall of my cottage was separated from the floor allowing space for
things to crawl in. One night I felt something crawling in my hair. I brushed it off
and found it was a scorpion.
I had Saturday and Sunday off, so I would often go to Hollywood, Boca Ratone,
or Fort Lauderdale where I would watch the Seminole Indians wrestle alligators.
Sometimes I would go to “downtown” North Miami Beach. The first time I went was
in the evening. I was looking for a restaurant. I was looking around a little mall and
everything seemed closed. Just then a police car raced toward me. The officer swung
open the door and pointed a gun at me yelling, “Get your hands up”. I complied. He
frisked me for weapons and drugs. Finding nothing, he put his gun away and became
very friendly. He told me where I could find a restaurant and even where I could pick
up a hooker. I lied to him and told him I had a girlfriend waiting at home.
The so-called downtown was only about nine blocks away from the motel. One
day I walked down there, went into a Denny’s Restaurant and there was Ted sitting at
the counter. I casually walked up and said “move over Ted”. He was astonished to
see me. I hadn’t seen him for over a year and had no idea where he was. He had been
pumping gas at a nearby gas station and had just got fired. This was no surprise
because he could never do manual labor. Besides, he had just got thrown out of his
apartment for not paying the rent. I invited him to stay at my cottage where I became
his temporary ‘wife’. I cooked for him, washed his clothes and so on, but no sex. I
couldn’t have had sex with Ted even if I wanted to because he had about the biggest
penis I have ever seen (and I’ve seen lots). I got him a job at the motel but he was a
terrible worker. One day the manager had us pulling weeds in front of the motel.
Two immigration officers stopped us because we were so pale that they could tell we
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were Canadians. I was okay because I had my green card, but Ted didn’t and he was
given twenty-four hours to get out of the country. They bought him a bus ticket to
Buffalo, New York. He left and I stayed at the motel.
One day I took a bus through the Everglades on a road they called Alligator
Alley. We were followed by airboats. I was fascinated by the airboats. They had an
airplane engine in the back for drive because they were flat-bottomed with no keel or
rudder. The driver sat on a high tower. They were ideal for the swamp. At the other
end was a forest of very twisted trees that were drenched in moss. It looked like a
scene from the Twilight Zone or some strange planet.
I had been in Florida for over a month and had saved up four hundred dollars
US. I thought it was time to head back to Toronto and to Ruth.
In December of 1973, I arrived back home. I immediately returned to wearing
women’s clothes. I was back into the gay club scenes even though I never drank. For
some reason, I never picked up any guys at any of the clubs. I guess I didn’t turn
them on.
Toronto and Betsy
In the beginning of April 1974, Ivan called me up and told me to come on over.
He had a girl that he wanted me to meet. I really wanted to meet a man, but I went
over anyway and he introduced me to a girl named Betsy T. She was 21 and I was
37. She ended up playing a major role in my life for sixteen years. She had told Ivan
that she dreamed of meeting someone special with red hair. Ivan thought I fit the
description of the kind of person she was looking for. There were several others there
since Ivan was having a little party. He introduced me to Betsy but I paid no attention
to her throughout the whole night until we were about ready to leave. Then I just
flopped in her lap as though I’d always known her. She insisted I come home with
her. She had a room on Asquith Avenue just north of Bloor and east of Yonge. Even
though I was wearing women’s clothes, she wanted to have sex with me. I had
already told her that I liked men, but Ivan had told her that I also went with women.
By now I was very addicted to people pleasing. I had ‘the disease to please’ and
was a doormat for anyone to wipe their feet on. I was also very addicted to sex and
that meant even going with a woman for the temporary acceptance I got. I did have
sex with her that night. There was something special about her. We really had
nothing in common that I was aware of then. She was not an intellect and she was
overweight. But I got something from her that I never got from anyone else in my
life, and that was affection. She was a very affectionate person and that was
something I was starved for all my life. I told her about my steady boyfriend, Alvin,
and about my wife, Ruth. She had no objections and it turned out she was a radical or
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rebel just like me. We did have that in common. I told Ruth about her and she invited
her over for dinner. Ruth was still seeing Nick B. I kept seeing Betsy off and on. She
used to like cooking me steak dinners even though she only had a hotplate in her
room.
Another Job
I got a job right across the street at Arthur Jones lithographing plant. I worked
there as a woman even though everyone knew I was not, partly because I still had a
man’s name and all my identification listed my gender as male. Most people there
seemed to accept me, or at least tolerate me. But some didn’t and some wanted to
beat me up, but there were girls that defended me. I had a problem with the
washroom. The men didn’t want me using the men’s room, and the women didn’t
want me using the ladies room. There were two main guillotines for cutting paper
and three smaller ones. The waste paper would go in big bins and one of my jobs was
to wheel the full bins out to the loading dock and bring empty ones in, and also
sweep the floor.
I actually had lots of spare time on my hands and was never one to sit around
and do nothing. I had noticed there was tons of paper that had been sitting in shelves
for years. No one had ever cleaned the place up. It was a mess. I have never been one
to tolerate a mess and have always been obsessed with order (neatness, tidiness,
everything in its proper place). Paper was piled on pallets fifteen feet high to the
ceiling. I would grab a forklift truck and pull stacks of paper from the shelves, then
dump them in the loading dock. I worked there for a year and it took me that long to
clean it up. People would say that I would make a good housewife. And I would
have. While I worked there, I fixed up the house we were living in. I replaced the
entire outside back wall with interlocking pine boards and I replaced the tiny window
with a huge big window. I finished the bottom with cement on chicken wire.
An Alien Mind?
I again was sending excerpts from manuscripts and the Gizmo comic strip to
publishers and syndicates. All I ever got was rejection slips. I was working on the
first draft of The Biocratic Manifesto but it was an enormous amount of work. There
was a Mensa meeting in Toronto, and for some strange reason I got invited. To be a
member of Mensa requires one to be in the top two percent of the highest IQs in the
world (intelligence quotient). I managed to talk to several of the members and I was
not impressed. I asked everyone to define intelligence. None of them gave me a
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satisfactory answer. Their idea was the ability to solve problems. When I asked what
kind of problems, they said solving puzzles, doing complex math rapidly and things
of that nature. I define intelligence as being synonymous with wisdom, and solving
the problems of life, life skills to be able to handle any adversity that may arise. No
one came anywhere near this definition.
I was beginning to wonder if I was some kind of alien, and there had already
been lots of people that though so. Why did I have this phenomenal ability of
understanding? I know I was born with a lot of very advanced abilities that people
would refer to as super powers. Some of these remain my secret and will go with me
to my deathbed. I would never tell a living person. And I have my reasons for this. I
sometimes thought of myself as from some other world looking down at these
strange humans and remained baffled at why they do the things they do. I couldn’t
figure out a lot of their behaviour. Why did people kiss? Even though I was a
professional dancer, I wondered: Why did people dance? Why did people wear
clothes to bed (or at all for that matter)? I was always a nudist whenever I could get
away with it and could never wear pajamas or anything else to bed. Why did people
hold hands? Why are the people of Earth so stupid? That’s what I wondered about.
My curiosity extended to all the major religions. I read the Bible, for instance. I
found it full of contradictions and inconsistencies, just as with all the other holy
books. I understood what they were trying to get at, but I could see how their pursuit
of power and world dominance got in their way. I knew there was a universal
spirituality which had nothing to do with religions or churches, and I set out to prove
this and to prove what God is. I did just that in my Biocratic Manifesto.
In December of 1974, we sold our house on St. Helen’s Street. I made $10,000
profit in one year. In January of 1975, I bought a custom built house on Hampton
Crescent in Port Credit (now Mississauga). They were asking $65,000 but I haggled
and got it for $45,000. It was a modern three-bedroom bungalow with an attached
garage. The lot was 50 feet wide by 400 feet deep. At the end of the lot was a river
that ran into Lake Ontario and I was half a block from a sandy beach. The house had
three separate heating systems. There was an electric-powered heating system which
we never used. There was an air-circulating fireplace, which we used sometimes, and
there was a system of hot water pipes under the floors of every room. This is what we
used because it was very efficient. An oil furnace heated a big water tank and pipes
ran everywhere from the tank. One wall in the basement had a bank of valves to
control the water into each room.
I liked to hang out at a nearby donut shop in “drag”, but it was a truck stop and
a lot of regulars started hassling me. Some were threatening to beat me up. The
waitress was very nice to me and understanding. She always stood up for me and
when anyone gave me trouble, she yelled at them to leave me alone and said good
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things about me. The trouble stopped but some drivers had looks that I thought could
kill.
Jamaica
In March of 1975, Ruth was getting homesick for Jamaica. We decided to take a
trip there. On March 27, we took a flight to Kingston, Jamaica. Her brother Junior
met us at the airport, and took us to his mansion in Montego Bay. That was a long
drive through mountains and jungles. Junior was the Minister of Education in the
Manley government. Michael Manley was white and was a frequent Prime Minister,
along with Bustamante, and a Spanish guy. Ruth and the Clarke family were among
the elite of Jamaica. Ruth’s sister ran a government school camp in the jungle. Every
year the Clarke’s got a brand new car, but that was almost a necessity because the
inland roads were carved out of rock and very hard on a car. Ruth wanted to stay
with her sister at the school camp so Junior took us there more than half way across
the island. The scenery was breath-taking. The camp was atop a mountain ridge near
Mount Diablo, yet it was still dense jungle; it was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
The location of the school was Blackstonedge which is even on the map, but the only
thing there was the school and her sister’s house.
The sister’s house was modern by Jamaican standards. The house had one large
bedroom with ten beds in it. There was plumbing with a flush toilet. There was no
door to the bathroom but the Jamaican culture is far different from here in North
America. Nudity is as common as wearing clothes. In the jungle, clothes are optional.
There was no hot water tank but if hot water was needed, there was a small gas tank
mounted on the wall and connected to a water pipe. You just lit the tank for hot
water.
Most dinners consisted of curried goat, rice and black-eyed peas (which were
really beans). I had learned to love this in Toronto because Ruth used to cook it a lot.
There was no bacon for breakfast because there were no pigs. Instead there were
strips of fried plantain or fried green bananas. Sometimes there were eggs and often
they were wild bird eggs. In the back yard of the house were wild banana trees,
papayas, mangos, and oranges, as well as jungle growth. We always had fresh fruit.
Behind the house there was a big cement silo (cement was natural to Jamaica
and it was once in abundance and cheap) where they tried to keep it full of water.
There was a mountain water pipe line that ran above ground beside the road we were
on. The house had a spur line connected to the house and the silo. Often there was no
water in the main line but when there was they made sure the silo was full. There was
also a backflow to the house. The silo had a shower attachment and everyone took a
shower there. Not far from the house the jungle plant-life was plentiful. Almost
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everything grew wild. There were coffee trees, cacao (chocolate) trees, goobers or
ground nuts (peanuts), oranges, mangos, papayas, bananas, spices, and fruits I
couldn’t identify. There were even vegetables that grew on trees, and so on. It was
just so lush.
One day a young boy with a machete came by and started talking to us.
Jamaicans talk in a dialect called Patwa (except for the more elite circles) which is a
combination of British English, some Swahili, and Arawak Indian. The kid was
fascinated with me because of my white skin. The kid asked me if I knew I was
standing beside a chocolate tree. The tree beside me was tall and from its branches
were hanging green pods that looked like short cucumbers. I would never have
guessed it was chocolate. The kid climbed the tree with the agility of a monkey and
cut off a green pod. With the machete, he peeled off the green skin and there was a
brown pod beneath. He asked me to taste it and it tasted bitter just like baker’s
chocolate. The machete is the universal tool in Jamaica. Everyone, especially in the
bush (as they call it) carries one.
The school itself was about twenty-five feet to the side of the house. There were
two buildings connected by a roof. I don’t know what the buildings were for but
there were bench seats below the roof, which I never saw being used. The kids sat on
the grass in a small clearing in front of the buildings. The kids would wander in from
the jungle at roughly the same time. There didn’t seem to be any rules. I know they
did some reading, writing and math, but mostly they studied nature. I thought this
was neat, certainly not like any North American school. The people of the jungle
communicated with drums made from hollow logs, conch shells and smoke signals.
These worked well since we were in an area with a lot of mountain ridges. Jamaica is
a very mountainous country. One day Ruth’s sister heard some drum beating. She
understood it and told us to hurry fast to get some fresh meat. We piled in the car and
drove about a mile along a very rough road. Then we had to walk a distance into the
bush slashing our way with machetes. Someone had found a cow and had hacked it
to pieces with his machete. Several people were ahead of us and more were coming.
Everyone was scrambling to get what might be the best chunks of meat. Somehow,
he had an old commercial scale and sold the meat by weight. The chunks were then
wrapped in banana leaves. The sister bought several chunks. We had to rush home
and cook the meat up right away. There was no refrigeration there at all.
There was a river nearby that we used to go to occasionally. People would walk
many miles through the jungle to get here. It was a place for bathing and washing
clothes, but mostly for gossiping. When I was there everyone was in the nude - men,
women and children of all ages. Some were bathing and some were washing clothes.
I could tell from their bodies they were a lot healthier than most North Americans.
They would use sand from beside the river for soap to get dirt out, rinse them well
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and hang them on rocks or bushes to dry. They would dry fast because the weather
was very hot. There must have been 35 to 40 people there.
The road beside our house going south (down the mountain) was called the
Devil’s Racecourse because it was so dangerous. Heading for Linstead and Bog
Walk, it was carved out of rock with treacherous turns beside steep cliffs, and we
saw lots of remains of vehicles that hadn’t made it. We saw one car sticking out of
the roof of a shack below. Going north, we would come to Ocho Rios on the coast.
Here I actually got in the water. This was the first tropical ocean spot where I could
get wet. I never learned to swim and I’ve never been able to tolerate cold or even
cool water. It has to be at least body temperature. Not far from Ocho Rios is a tourist
spot (there are few tourist spots in Jamaica) called Duns River Falls. You can
actually climb quite a distance up the falls, which I did.
Not far along the road was a Rastifarian camp selling homemade stuff to
tourists, like sandals made from car tires. They never wear out. The Rastas are a
quasi-religious group who used to worship Heile Salasi who ruled Ethiopia for
decades. They were more like the hippies of the `60s than anything else. Their hair
was always matted, usually from goat dung and they called it natty dread locks. They
were a sight to see. They religiously smoked grass, which they called Ganga. They
started a new type of music called Reggae, which caught on worldwide. Bob Marley
was the Rasta man who made reggae famous. Eventually, he was murdered by Obea
(witchcraft). They have some very powerful witch doctors in Jamaica and I’ve seen
some of their handy work. They spoke the deepest Patwa on the island. They were
the hardest of all to understand.
One day Junior drove us to Green Island (which isn’t an island) on the tip of the
West Coast. There was a party going on. I was surprised to see Chinese people as
black as the Jamaicans and speaking perfect Patwa. There were also Rastas there. It
was the home of a Member of Parliament and a few dignitaries were there. The
booze and the food were plentiful. Some of the food was unrecognizable. The
favorite alcohol was Jamaican white rum. It was 150 proof. Ginger beer was always
popular and there was a very strong pop made from some purple peppery plant. I
watched some Rastas playing dominos. That seemed to be the favorite game but they
would always slam the pieces on the table. Then I watched 5 Rastas smoking ganga
from a huka pipe. It was a huge pipe with a tower and water in the glass bottom. Five
leads came from the pipe so everyone could smoke at once. They would sit around it
in a circle. They had some technique where they would all suck together at the same
time and then blow. Then a huge ball of fire would shoot out of the top of the pipe.
Always the adventurous type (maybe too much so), I left the house and started
wandering along the beach. White people never go anywhere alone in that country. I
found a cove where some strange people were doing strange things on the beach. I
hid in the bush to watch them. They were all stoned on something. They had just
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sacrificed a chicken and seemed to be performing some witchcraft ceremony. In
Jamaica, it’s called Obea. They were pounding hollow logs with sticks and chanting
in what was a foreign language to me. They were also in the nude. I watched them
for about half an hour and then I went back to the house. When I told Junior what I
saw, I got a severe scolding. He told me they were a hostile tribe from the bush
nearby and if they had seen me, they would have killed me. They told me never to go
anywhere by myself. They talked about northern tribes that escaped the English
when they came and were very primitive people. Not even the regular Jamaicans
would come near them for fear of their life. Some live around the Cockpit Country
which I was told looks like the surface of the moon. They have their own languages
evolved from African languages. The Maroons were a semi-friendly tribe but no one
could understand them.
Once while we were driving to Spanish Town, we came to a place where a river
flowed across the road. We could drive through it, like a ford. On the other side was
a fruit stand and we stopped so Ruth could shop. I wandered around looking at the
plants and birds. Suddenly, four Jamaicans started threatening be because I was
white. Ruth ran over and started talking to them in Patwa and soon they left. Ruth
spoke perfect English because of her elite upbringing, but she could talk the local
talk if it was needed. She probably saved my skin.
From the window of the house we could see the traffic on the Devil’s
Racecourse. There were lots of trucks loaded with sugar cane and some logging
trucks. I saw a country bus that had a full-length roof-rack loaded with bananas, live
chickens, luggage, fruit baskets, sugar cane, boxes, and so on. I told Ruth’s sister that
I wanted to ride on it. She got really angry at me. She said that no white person ever
rode that bus. I could be killed, if I did.
A lot of Jamaicans hate White people because of what the English did to them.
When the English came to Jamaica, there were only Arawak Indians there but they
would not be slaves to the Whites, so the English killed them all off and shipped in
slaves from Africa. Jamaica was a land rich in resources such as spices, cement, and
bauxite. The English company owners needed workers (slaves) to harvest these
resources for shipment back to markets in England. Some refused to be slaves and
ran off into the deep jungle and became relatively hostile tribes.
Junior and his sister decided to take Ruth and me into Kingston for a tour. We
came in from the west via Spanish Town. Along the southern coast going into
Kingston, the ground and rocks everywhere were red. This was bauxite from the
mines all along there. Jamaica has one of the largest bauxite deposits in the world.
This is where aluminum comes from and it is the country’s main export. At the edge
of the city were what they call ‘shantytowns’. Hundreds of people were living in
cardboard boxes, corrugated aluminum lean-tos, and lean-tos of palm and banana
leaves. There were goats everywhere, even in the city. Most of the houses in the city
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were made of cement with aluminum roofs. We were taken to the small elite area of
the city and to the Pegasus Hotel. It was a tourist hotel that was primarily for Blacks
from other countries in the Caribbean.
Kingston is located on the south coast and is surrounded to the north by a
mountain range. This makes the temperature extremely hot in the city. It must have
been at least 120 degrees with no breeze. Those mountains though, produced the best
coffee in the world. They also house a lot of bandits that live in caves. At night they
put grease on their naked bodies and come into the city to pillage and plunder. If
anyone catches them they are too slippery to hold. Junior drove us by the penitentiary
in the heart of the city. Everything is painted red and the huge yard has a high chainlink fence with barbed wire on top. The inmates have to spend the day in the
scorching sun in the nude. Whenever there is an election, it is taken very seriously.
They vote more with bullets than ballots. The police are the military, and gun battles
break out with voters at election time.
Just down the road from the house we were staying in was a little town called
Guys Hill. It was like stepping into the 1800s. All the buildings were gray boards.
The stores had some canned goods from other countries but most of what they sold
was in bulk. There were lots of fruits and vegetables. They sold brooms made of
bamboo poles with coconut husks at one end. Once we went to Negril, the
westernmost town on the island. We came through a spectacular bamboo forest.
Somewhere on the north coast we drove through the Fern Grotto where there were
giant ferns 30 feet high with enormously thick stems.
Ruth’s grandfather had been a wealthy merchant mariner. He was the captain of
his own ship and traded among the Caribbean Islands. At one time he owned the
entire island of St. Lucia. This was where Ruth’s mother was from. He also owned
about half of Jamaica. He lost most of his land when the British came. But Ruth’s
father still owned large pockets of land in Jamaica. He gave parcels of land to all his
two boys and two girls. Ruth had been given some land but she had never seen it.
Her sister decided to drive us out there. It was up in the northern jungle and when we
got there, it was occupied by a primitive tribe. We started to walk around but when
they saw me some were really scared. Some thought I was a ghost. They had never
seen a white person before. They stared at me in disbelief. They all lived nude in
crude huts and they all carried machetes. Ruth made no attempt to communicate with
them and decided they may as well have the land. It wasn’t good for anything
anyway.
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Toronto Again
After being in Jamaica for over a month, we decided to go back to Toronto. We
brought back three bottles of White Lightning (Jamaican rum) and a bottle of
pumpkin ketchup. The customs agent at the Toronto airport was suspicious of us, I
guess because she was so black and I was so white. They went through our luggage
and were puzzled by the pumpkin ketchup. They never saw that before and one guy
had to open it, stick his finger in it and taste it.
Back in Toronto in May of 1976, it felt good to be wearing female clothes
again. I went back to visiting the gay clubs, going to the steam baths (I kept some
men’s clothes for this purpose), and hanging out with Betsy, Ted, Morna, Bill
Knopp, Alvin, Ivan, and a few others. I knew a lot of cross-dressers but virtually
everyone of them was straight. Some of them were married men. For them it was a
fetish. Drag queens on the other hand, were gay and were a grotesque cartoon of
women. I was never a cross dresser (although I was often considered that) nor a drag
queen. I was a woman wearing women’s clothes. I just didn’t have all the female
parts. I still sent manuscript excerpts and cartoons to publishers and syndicates. All I
ever got was more and more rejection slips. By this year I had sent cartoons to every
syndicate in North America. Everyone rejected me. People who knew me and read
my cartoons kept telling me they were the best they had ever read.
Off to the Arctic
In July of 1976, Betsy decided we should take a trip to Baffin Island. She saw
an ad for a twenty-four-hour excursion to Frobisher Bay which included crossing the
arctic circle and getting a certificate for that. Well, we booked the flight and this was
most definitely a trip into the Twilight Zone. Betsy and I distinctly remember getting
on a small blue plane with white lettering on the side. As we got near Frobisher Bay,
the pilot said that we have to land right away because we were running out of fuel.
But instead of landing, we began circling overhead. Then the pilot said we can’t land
because there is a 747 on the runway and we have to wait for it to take off. He told us
we were going to cross the Arctic Circle just for the experience of it. When we
finally landed I could see it was impossible for a 747 to have been there. The runway
was far too short. It could only accommodate small planes. The strangest thing was
that we got off a brown plane. Somehow it had changed colors in flight. I know that I
was drugged on the plane but Betsy wasn’t. She didn’t drink the same thing I did.
Yet she saw a brown plane.
We went in the airport terminal and the only person in there was a Black man. I
wondered what he was doing here. He said there was a school bus waiting to take us
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on a tour. There had been about eight of us on the plane. As we got on the bus the
driver, an adult Inuit introduced himself and I remembered his name because it
sounded odd to me. The strange thing about him was that he had a huge deep gash on
the side of his head that was well healed over. He took us to the hotel to check in. We
had arrived there in the afternoon and wouldn’t be leaving until next afternoon. Then
we toured the town. There were no houses there because this was tundra. Walking on
it was like walking on a thick deep pile carpet. All the housing units were trailers
sitting on stilts. The driver said they couldn’t set them on the ground because the heat
from the houses would melt the tundra and they would sink into the ground and
disappear. Since no trailers were allowed to have stoves for heating, the town had a
central heating system. A large pipe suspended on stilts about five feet above ground
went past every trailer. The trailers had spur lines from the main line to obtain their
heat.
There was also a rope about three feet above ground connecting every trailer
and building in the town. It was the law in winter (which is most of the year) to keep
your hand on the rope while outside. A blinding snowstorm could arise at anytime
and there would be instant white-outs. If you took your hand off the rope during a
white-out, you could see nothing, get disoriented and lost, and freeze to death very
quickly.
Another strange thing was that there was not a single adult in the town, nor a
dog the whole time we were there (except the bus driver). I asked the driver where
the adults were and he said that they must be out hunting. The whole town? The
women too? We saw a lot of abandoned snowmobiles. They looked like they hadn’t
been used for a long time. There was still snow on the ground in places and yet there
were pretty, small flowers popping up here and there. Out in the bay there were
massive icebergs. We saw a huge metal tower in the distance with a flashing red light
on top. I asked the driver about it and he said the Americans had an underground
base there. That did not make any sense. There was no life there either. The driver
then dumped us off downtown. We never saw him again. Every store was open
twenty-four hours a day, but all the stores were run by children, the oldest being in
the teens.
I was amazed at how black their skin was. They were just as black as the
Jamaicans, but unlike Negroes the palms of their hands was just as black as their
body, and they had straight black hair. I wondered how they could get so black living
in the high Arctic. The convenience stores were modern. We were able to get
hamburgers, French fries, and pop but the food was very expensive. Everything has
to be flown in. The window of our hotel room faced north and at 11pm at night, the
sun was blaring through our window. We had to close the blinds to get some sleep.
Betsy’s mother was on this trip with us, but we never saw her in the town. I have no
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idea how we got back to the airport but somehow we did. And I don’t remember
seeing the plane before we got on.
Back to Toronto
The next day we left for Toronto. Shortly after leaving the airport we made a
huge circle in the sky. I don’t know what the reason for that was. Betsy tried to talk
to her mother about the strangeness of the trip, but her mother refused to talk about it.
When we got to Toronto I went straight home to Ruth. Nick B was there and I was
telling them about the trip. Nick had worked for the government all across the Arctic
including Frobisher Bay. I told him about the bus driver and mentioned his name. He
said, “Oh yeah, I remember him. He died back in the `50s. He was accidentally shot
in the head by a harpoon.” By now, I was wondering if we really went to Baffin
Island or to some other dimension.
I started a full color comic book of Gizmo that year and finished the first story. I
wasn’t spending much time with Ruth anymore and we agreed to a mutual
separation. She was a social climber and Nick was rich while I was poor. I gave her
the house I had bought and asked for nothing. She sold it for a hefty profit and
bought a much more expensive one in Mississauga. I moved into the rooming house
where Betsy was staying at 90 Asquith Avenue. My room was so tiny but there was a
communal kitchen in the basement. Betsy had a much bigger room and sometimes I
would sleep with her just to get the affection I was starved for.
The Gays
I started hanging out at the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) which was
only a few blocks away. That church had an inner city drop-in centre for mainly gays
and lesbians. Most of them were street people and some had very serious emotional
problems. I was unofficially doing volunteer work for the centre. One day as I was
walking down Yonge Street, a girl from the centre saw me and told me I had to help
her friend. They were both young lesbians and her friend was going to kill herself. I
sat beside her on the sidewalk while she contemplated slitting her wrists with a razor
blade. I talked to her for about half an hour and then she put the blade away and gave
me a hug.
There was young gay guy there who went by the name of Lee. He was halfChinese and half-French. He was a martial arts master and claimed he used to teach
the police. He was very intelligent but he had problems. His boyfriend was very tall
and strong but a real wimp. He was always trying to teach him Kung Fu but he didn’t
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want to learn. He liked to talk about the lives of `50s rock and roll artists. I had a
good knowledge of this and we would spend hours talking. One of his buddies was
an older guy who was schizophrenic. He claimed to be a Viet Nam veteran. But he
didn’t officially fight for the Americans or the Canadians. He was a mercenary. He
said that the Americans would pay him to kill officers of the Viet Cong. The higher
the rank, the more money he made. He said that he loved to kill people, and that was
his mission in life. He carried a contraption on his hip that he said was a laser side
arm. I never saw him use it, but he said he only used it to melt phone boxes to get the
coins from them.
Betsy had good intuition and so did I. Sometimes her intuition saved me and
sometimes mine saved her. One evening, Lee, his boyfriend and the mercenary came
looking for me. They knew what house I was living in but were never inside. Betsy’s
room faced the street and they threw stones at her window to get her attention. They
asked for me. Betsy had a bad feeling about this and told them I wasn’t home even
though I was right there. The next morning Betsy ran into Lee. He told her that the
mercenary was going to take me under a nearby viaduct, rape me and kill me last
night. A few months later, this same mercenary was charged with one of the most
heinous crimes in Toronto. It made international news. He had kidnapped a Spanish
shoeshine boy, raped him, murdered him, and stuffed his body in a garbage can. Lee
was with him when he did it and testified against him in court.
In the summer of 1976, I met Suzette. She had a little, one-woman publishing
firm called Now Publications. She was looking for Canadian cartoonists to do a book
on the Montreal Olympics. She told me I had to draw jokes with no captions so they
could be understood in any language. She liked mine the best but didn’t use the cover
I designed for her. Maybe she was sleeping with the guy who got the cover. It was
just a small booklet and for payment she gave me about a dozen books and told me to
peddle them on the corner of Yonge and Bloor for five dollars a piece. I never sold
one book even when I dropped the price to a dollar. I ended up giving them all away
except one that I kept for myself.
I remember Halloween night in Toronto. That’s when the gays paraded in full
drag on their way to a private fancy-dress ball. It was a huge event. Guys would be
dressed in the most gorgeous gowns and be in wigs and makeup. They would often
arrive riding or standing in open-top limousines. Unfortunately, there were lots of
intolerant straight guys lining the sides of Yonge Street with bushels of tomatoes and
baskets of eggs. They would throw eggs and tomatoes at the drag queens and often
the gays would end up covered in one soggy mess, with their gowns and hairdos
ruined. The police just stood by and watched and laughed at the gays.
Betsy and I would hang out around Yonge and Bloor. It was now the trendiest
area in the city. We would see movie stars and other celebrities there. One day we
ran into Dustin Hoffman shopping for shoes. Another day we passed Peter Ustinoff
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on Yonge Street. The most exciting event for Betsy was seeing Peter O’Toole. She
was infatuated with him and grabbed his hand as he was passing. He said a few
words, was polite and walked away.
My Studies Continued
In between all my trips and adventures, I continued to study at university
libraries and other places and I was focusing on genetics and molecular biology. I
knew there was a biological pattern that would explain all the secrets of the universe.
It took me three years but I finally had that pattern. I called it the Biological Systems
Model. It was seven systems double dichotomized. I made major scientific
discoveries in the field of genetics. For example, I found a master DNA located in
the amygdala of the brain that controls all of the other 100 trillion cells of our bodies.
This can easily be proved in a lab or through an autopsy (or by examining a zygote
cell). I offered this to a lot of doctors and medical researchers but not one person
showed any interest. Eventually I was able to scientifically prove the existence of
God through physics and genetics. Nobody would touch that with a 10-foot pole.
People claim to seek the truth and some people claim to have the truth. But
civilization is based on power competition and always has been. The truth would be
the most detrimental thing to any society. Nobody wants to hear the truth (because
it’s painful) and it often makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing on this planet.
There’s an expression, ‘know the truth and the truth shall set you free’. That’s
bullshit. If you discover a new truth, and you declare it, you will be persecuted.
Check history.
Adventures with Betsy
In August of 1976, Betsy and I decided to take a trip to James Bay. We took the
Polar Bear Express train to Moosonee, Ontario. About half way there, the train
stopped at some town and we were provided with a steak dinner. The steak was the
thickest I’ve ever seen and was so big, it hung over the plate. We arrived in
Moosonee and started wandering around. Betsy was just as adventurous as I was. We
met some natives outside of Moosonee who were very friendly. They offered to take
us on a canoe trip. They paddled us up the Moose River into James Bay. Then, they
invited us to their village for dinner. I have no idea what we ate but it tasted good.
Then we headed back to Toronto.
Betsy was a makeup artist and she would always do my makeup when I was
going out for a night on the town. My favorite dress was a short, green, floral dress
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and I wore that a lot. I also had a white mini-skirt that I often wore to the clubs. I had
had that a long time now. Mini-skirts were very popular with hippie chicks. I began
sleeping with Betsy almost every night, because I so loved the affection I had always
been starved for. Of course this often led to Betsy wanting sex. I would often give in
mainly to please her (and I was very good at that), but also, that was the only way I
ever got any physical satisfaction. Other than masturbating, this was the only way I
could have an orgasm. With the hundreds of men I was with, I always satisfied them
but I never had an orgasm.
Unknowingly, Betsy had become pregnant and had a miscarriage. I heard her
making strange sounds in the bathroom. She was bleeding and I think the fetus got
flushed down the toilet. I told her to get in the bathtub because now she was bleeding
profusely. I turned the shower on to help wash away the blood. Then I got a lot of big
towels and cleaned up the toilet and the floor around the toilet. When she seemed to
stop bleeding, I put a thick clean towel between her legs. I put a plastic sheet on the
bed and lay her down. Soon that towel was red with blood and I got another clean
one for her. I must have had a dozen bloody towels and I washed them all by hand.
Later she seemed to be okay. I had never been to a doctor in my life and neither had
Betsy. Neither one of us believed in doctors and I never took her to one and she was
all right anyway.
Betsy was conned by someone into buying a racehorse. It turned out to be more
of a lame duck. She wanted me to see it and we went to a stable just outside the city
where it was in a small, enclosed pasture. The stable owner pointed it out to us and
we climbed over the fence to get a closer look. I could tell right away it was not a
racehorse but there were two other horses there that definitely were. They were
aggressive and ran up to us to chase us out of there. Betsy ran and jumped over the
fence. I just stood there telling the horses I wasn’t afraid of them and they weren’t
going to chase me away. I had never known the meaning of fear. I started
communicating with the horses and was fascinated with their intelligent personality.
In the stables, were some of the top racers around, and it was fascinating relating to
them. There was no comparison between them and the farm or wild horses. These
horses were very proud of themselves and were almost human. I watched one stud in
a stall while a mare was walked in front of him. He started yelling at her in horse
language. He had a large erection and was trying to jump out of the stall to get at that
female. I’m often amazed by so many people who don’t believe animals are smart
and intelligent, even smarter than a lot of people. Betsy auctioned off the horse and
didn’t even get enough to pay the horse’s keep.
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Trouble at GBC
I had been used to designing and making my own furniture and by now I was
making my own clothes. In December of `76, I started taking a dressmaking course at
George Brown College on Spadina. By this time, Betsy realized she was two months
pregnant. She would later decide what she was going to do about it. I always went to
class wearing women’s clothes and makeup, sometimes heavy at times. There were
all kinds of other classes in the college and some other classes took a dim view of
me, especially when I often dressed outrageously. Always the fast learner, I soon
became a fashion designer. Some of my designs would fit into the 70’s couturier
style, but I preferred to design a haute couturier that was far-out like from outer
space. These were accompanied with designs of a wide variety of masks and weird
jewelry. My classmates tolerated me but no one could accept my designs. I made a
fancy denim outfit where there was not a single stitch visible inside or out. I made
several of my designs and wore some of them to class. I started getting a lot of
harassment from other students but I never backed down from anyone. I always stood
my ground. I often got in yelling matches with other groups.
One morning, I went to class wearing a pair of thick light colored purple
corduroy pants that I had modified. I had very thick big cuffs at the knees. I wore
knee-high police motorcycle boots full of zippers and pockets. I had a purple velvet
top and lots of makeup. I had thick mascara, purple eye shadow, purple lipstick, and
black nail polish. At lunchtime, a group of about seven or eight Blacks began to
torment me. They started to threaten me. I walked up to them and challenged them. I
swore at them and told them to come on. I said, “I’ll take every fucking one of you
guys on. Come on. Just try something”. I guess I surprised them and they backed
down. Then another group that was taking a butchering class started threatening me.
I said to them, “Go fuck yourselves”. I noticed one of the guys was holding an iron
bar about four inches long and about an inch and a half thick. I was on my way
upstairs to my classroom and he snuck up behind me. He tapped me on the shoulder
as I got to the top of the stairs and when I turned around, he punched me in the eye
with all the strength he could muster (with the bar in his fist).
My first thought was this is not like in the movies at all. I never fell down. I just
stood there telling him he was going to pay for this. He stood there for a while with a
grin on his face watching my eye swell up and turn purple. I noticed I was bleeding
from some cuts on my face. I think I was in a state of shock because I never saw it
coming. Then I lay down on the stair landing for a while. Everyone walked by me
and over me totally ignoring me. I went into my classroom and a few people were in
there. One girl saw my face and started crying. There was a big tough guy in there
who had never spoken to me before but never condemned me either. He asked me
who did this to me and if I could point him out. I told him I could. I took him
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downstairs and the guy who did it was sitting with his buddies. When he saw us, he
passed the iron bar to someone else. I walked up to him and I pointed my finger
about one inch from his face saying that he’s the one. My classmate said “Why don’t
you pick on someone your own size?”, then he punched him in the face and he went
flying to the ground.
The big guy took my arm and helped me to my classroom. A redhead classmate
I often had lunch with came in and said “Oh my God! What happened to you?” (She
was very accepting of me.) I explained it all to her and she said we have to get you to
a hospital. The teacher came in and she agreed I should go to the hospital. Then she
remarked that my eye at least matched my eye shadow. This happened on April 14,
1977. The redhead told the teacher we may be away for the afternoon class. She
drove me to a nearby hospital and the emergency room was full of people. But a
doctor came out and took me in before anyone else. He said “Come on in ma’am”. I
guess he soon realized I wasn’t a complete woman, especially since I was still
officially using a man’s name which I had to give him. He said “Somehow, we have
to get that eye open”. He tried with his fingers but no luck. Then he applied some
solution on it and finally got it open. When it was open I was seeing double. There
were two of everything. My eye was knocked out of alignment, and an X-ray showed
I had a blowout fracture. My entire eye socket was fractured inward. He called in a
photographer to take a picture of my eye, which would be published in a medical
journal because it was the worst case of this type the doctor had ever seen. He said
my eye would realign itself soon. I had to wear a patch over my eye for two weeks.
The redhead girl drove me home and stayed with me for a while.
The next day I went to the classroom but told the teacher I’m not taking any
classes today. I said I was going to get even with the guy who did this to me. She
warned me not to do anything rash. I assured her everything would be okay. I took
my eye patch off to show the massive bruising and swelling around my eye and went
directly to the butchering class. I walked in while the teacher was instructing and I
saw the guy sitting there. I said to the teacher “I want the name of this guy right
here” as I pointed right in his face. The teacher gave me his name, which I wrote on a
piece of paper. The teacher asked me if he did this to me and I said yes. He
immediately called him up from his seat and kicked him out of the class for good.
Then I went to the police station and filed an assault charge against him. A trial date
was set. Then I went home. That evening, most of the girls from my class came to
visit me. Some brought gifts. Some brought food, and some brought booze. I got a
big hug from everyone and we had a big party.
I took a few days off and then thought I’d go back to class. I lasted about three
weeks. The harassment was getting worse. Now a lot of other classes joined in to
torment me. People were yelling names at me, Hey fag! Hey queer! Hey girly man.
Some were saying that my kind of people should be shot. I thought of getting a gun
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and bringing it with me to college and start shooting up the place next time they
attacked me. Then I thought there must be a better way. I started carrying a knife
with me and I walked around like I owned the college. If anyone threatened me I was
prepared to use the knife. I sort of got my message across and no one said anything to
me directly. But they were saying lots about me. On March 7, I quit. I just couldn’t
take it any more. Besides, Betsy was concerned about my safety and tried to get me
to quit earlier. I guess I can be stubborn at times.
Going West
Betsy decided she was going to keep the baby and raise it. She didn’t like the
idea of raising a child in Toronto and asked me what would be the best city in
Canada to raise it. Without hesitation I said, “Victoria, B.C.” and we made
preparations to go there. About this time, Morna told me she had been diagnosed
with cancer and that the doctors had given her three months to live. She gave me her
latest boyfriend. He was a tall, slim Scotsman who loved to drink although it never
seemed to affect him. I went with him for a couple of weeks, but all he wanted was
anal sex and I never cared for that.
On April 30, we boarded a train for Regina but I wanted to stop in Wapella. I
wanted to investigate my past. I had to inform the conductor that I wanted to stop
there. He said, “Why on earth would you ever want to stop there?” He had to signal
the engineer to make the stop. The train stopped in Wapella on May 2 at 2am in the
morning. There was no sign of life anywhere. We walked over to the Commercial
Hotel, which was still there. The manager’s room and office was right inside the
lobby door. We rang the bell several times but no answer. We pounded on the walls.
No answer. There was a pay phone on the wall and the town phone book. I looked up
the number of the hotel and tried to dial it. A voice came on and said I had to go
through the switchboard in Regina (150 miles away). I finally got through and a lady
came out in a bathrobe. She asked what we wanted with a puzzled look on her face.
We asked for a room. She said it would cost us two dollars. We gave her the money
and she took us upstairs. There was no other room rented. Our room was quite big.
There was an old iron bed with a thick straw mattress and a down comforter. There
was a small ancient dresser with a large porcelain pitcher and a big porcelain bowl
for hand washing. It was like going back in the 1800s. The washroom was across the
hall. It too was huge with an old iron bathtub with clawed feet. The bottom part of
the window was detached and just leaning against the windowsill. That night, it
started raining and there was water all over the floor.
We stayed five days in Wapella. As we started wandering around Main St. I
ran into some kids I went to school with. They seemed to remember me but also
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seemed terrified of me. When one kid (they weren’t kids anymore) saw me, his face
turned white and he ran like he was seeing a ghost. I think a rumor was spread that I
was dead. I’m sure some people didn’t think I’d be still alive at 41. The kids I grew
up with all had kids of their own now, most in the teens or pre-teens. It seemed like
most of them never left town. I decided I was going to talk to all the elders of the
town, especially those who knew Jack’s family and Christy McP, to fill in the blanks
of my life there. Wapella was the type of town (as I’m sure a lot of others were)
where everyone knew exactly what everyone else did and would gossip freely
amongst themselves, but would never admit anything to an outsider. When I was
there family violence, sexual abuse, wife beating, and murder were common and they
always got away with these.
I knew I couldn’t take Betsy with me when I visited the old folks so I went
alone. I went to one lady who had attended the ceremony and participated as Christy
put a curse on me. This is when I got all the details of the curse. Another lady told
me that Christy murdered my father, Jack C. She said she poisoned him with
strychnine and he died a painful and agonizing death. I was told that Jack had left me
something valuable but I never found out anything about it. Then Christy put
Gramma in a nursing home even though she was in perfect health and she died
shortly after. I was never told the cause. Christy took the house and never paid
Gramma a penny for it. She took everything out of the house, kept anything
considered valuable, and threw the rest in the town dump then sold the house to the
dairy farm across the way. I asked some other elders about my two buddies in school,
Grant McD and Arnold T. I was told that Grant had died mysteriously and Arnold
had disappeared and was never heard from again. No one would tell me anything
about the three years of my life that were missing.
I asked an elderly woman who knew my mother if she knew where my brother
Albert and my sister Agnus were buried. I was told the location but she said they
were in unmarked graves. I went there anyway but couldn’t pick up on anything. I
decided to visit Christy McP but I wasn’t going to ask her any questions so I thought
Betsy should come too and meet her since I told her a lot about her. Betsy was a little
scared but came anyway. When we went to her house, she was in the garden digging
potatoes. She had not aged. She admitted to being 93 (I think she was older) but she
didn’t look a day over 40. The first thing she said to me was “Are you still alive?”
but she wasn’t surprised to see me. She invited us in for tea and scones. Christy
handed Betsy a kettle and told her to get some water from the kitchen. She came out
confused saying there was no taps in the kitchen. I took the kettle and we went in the
kitchen and there was a hand pump beside the sink. Betsy had never seen one before.
I lit a fire in the stove to boil the water and we had our tea and scones. The house had
no plumbing or electricity. I wanted to see the old house I grew up in. We went to the
dairy farm and the guy remembered me and asked me if I was still drawing cartoons.
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I saw the old house and it had been used for grain storage. It was empty now and I
took a ladder to look in the attic but there was nothing there.
We decided to leave for Regina but we had to take a bus in the opposite
direction to Moosemin to catch the train. They don’t stop in Wapella anymore and
the train station was gone. We arrived in Regina on May 8 and stayed until May 21. I
can’t remember what we did there. Betsy wanted to go to Yellowknife so we took the
train to Edmonton. We arrived May 22 and stayed at the Lincoln Hotel. We took a
bus to Peace River and stayed at the Peace Valley Lodge. Then we got to Hay River
in the N.W.T. From there we caught a small school bus to Yellowknife. The bus had
six seats in the front (and we were the only passengers) and the back half was full of
packages, parcels and mail. The Mackenzie Highway was a gravel road and very
rough. Betsy was over eight months pregnant and I was concerned about her. The
driver said if we have to go to the washroom he would stop the bus and we would go
on the side of the road.
At Fort Providence, we had to catch a barge to cross the Mackenzie River,
which was full of fast moving ice floes and small icebergs coming from Great Slave
Lake. The driver had to operate the barge, which ran on cables. We had to smash
through ice sheets and it took three attempts to get across the river. In one attempt,
we were hit hard by a large ice floe and I thought the cables would break and we
would end up floating up the river (which ran north) but we made it. We stopped at
the native towns of Edzo and Rae to deliver mail. I noticed unusual terrain there. We
were north of the tree line and the ground was Precambrian rock. I saw what looked
like big craters in the rock and they were full of crystal clear water. There were fish
in the water. The Natives had teepees set up and were drying fish on a line between
the teepees.
We arrived at midnight in Yellowknife and stayed at the Gold Range Hotel.
We ate at the Explorer Hotel because it was cheaper. The population of Yellowknife
was mostly Natives and gold mine workers. The mine workers were mostly
Americans and French Canadians. We were there on a Saturday night and it was
quite rough. Everyone was drinking and fighting. Some were slashed by broken beer
bottles. I was sitting at a barstool when a guy sat down beside me and started a
conversation. He was a bush pilot and offered me a job starting tomorrow. I thought
about it but decided against it. The next day his plane crashed and he was killed. We
visited the Old Town, which was an Inuit community. We ate Inuit food but I have
no idea what it was. We saw houses perched precariously on steep, overhanging,
rock cliffs.
Betsy didn’t think she could take that rough bus ride back to Hay River so we
boarded a Pacific Western Airlines flight to Calgary on May 30. Along the way, we
stopped in Hay River, Fort Smith and Edmonton. It was after midnight when we
arrived in Calgary. We stayed at the Regis Hotel. The next day we visited the
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Calgary zoo and Dinosaur Park. On June 2, we left Calgary by train heading to
Victoria. We stayed overnight in Kelowna at the Willow Park Motel. Next day we
tried to find Ogopogo, but we didn’t see it. We left Kelowna the same day and
arrived in Vancouver. We stayed at the Sandman Inn. On June 5, we caught the
Queen of Esquimalt Ferry to Victoria. We were on a Greyhound Bus. We rented a
room at the Crystal Court Motel about a block from the terminal. I had noticed that
the Victoria General Hospital was just across the street. That very same night, Betsy
went into labor (that was cutting it close). We walked over to the hospital at 2am in
the morning and Betsy gave birth to a beautiful baby girl at 7:10am. She weighed 7
pounds. This was June 6, 1977.
We named her Michelle Victoria. I stayed with Betsy the whole time in the
delivery room and tried to help her in any way I could. The delivery doctor never
showed up so an intern did the delivery. Michelle had a big head and the intern took
a pair of scissors and cut Beck’y vagina to make a bigger opening. After the birth, it
took the intern over an hour to sew her back up. I was glad I had the opportunity to
witness the birth of a child and the pain Betsy went through delivering her. I was
pretty tired because I had no sleep so I went back to the motel and crashed. I brought
Betsy and the baby home the next day. Michelle’s first bed was a dresser drawer with
towels for her to lie on. Betsy breast-fed Michelle for two years, often in public.
I had to go out and look for an apartment and I found one at 567 Head St. in
Esquimalt. It was the upper floor of a house. By now we were kind of broke. Betsy
had started out with about $2,000 and now all her money was gone. I had about
$200. The apartment was unfurnished so the owner gave us a mattress and a blanket.
I went to Social Services and they gave us a bed, a crib, sheets and blankets, a table
and chairs, some pots and pans, and some food. Shortly after we got a welfare check.
I had not planned to stay with Betsy. I thought my job was done. I had gotten her to
Victoria and got her all set up so she wasn’t in need. There was no love there, at least
not in the traditional sense. But there may have been love in a spiritual sense. We
believed in empowering each other without any sense of control or ownership.
Whatever made her happy was fine with me. I must admit that she empowered me
more than I empowered her. I was always busy. I was working on the fifth and final
draft of The Biocratic Manifesto. Sometimes I would work eighteen hours a day.
Across America
Finally, I decided to go back to Toronto even though I had very little money. I
missed Alvin and I remembered how upset he was when I said I was going to
Victoria. I bought a Trailways Bus ticket to Buffalo, NY. I first stopped in Seattle
where I stayed in a hostel. I took the train to the Space Needle to experience it. I
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stopped in Portland Oregon and knew I would never live there because the streets are
so steep. The city is built on the side of the canyon of the Colorado River. I went
through Idaho to Salt Lake City. I stayed over and visited the remarkable Mormon
Tabernacle with its incredible acoustics. From there I went through Denver,
Cheyenne, Omaha, Des Moines, Chicago, Cleveland, and on to Buffalo. I arrived in
Buffalo at about 3am and I was broke. I was going to hit up the traveler’s aid office
but it didn’t open until 8am. I had less than two dollars on me and the restaurant was
closed. A detective approached me, maybe because I was the only one in the
terminal. He searched my bag thoroughly. He asked me for some identification. I had
all my I.D. in a plastic case. In there he found a picture of me wearing a beautiful
dress, high heels, make up and jewelry. He asked who it was and I said it was my
sister. He kept looking at the picture and then back at me and I’m sure he knew it
was me but I wasn’t going to admit it. I’m well aware of the enormous prejudice
against people like me. He detained me for almost two hours asking endless
questions to find any contradictions in what I said. But he found none and eventually
let me go.
I went out on the streets of Buffalo and started panhandling even though there
were few people on the streets, and those that were looked mostly undesirable. I did
manage to get enough for breakfast and then I walked across the bridge to Fort Erie,
Ontario. I started hitch hiking to Toronto. I got caught in the heaviest downpour of
rain ever. I was thoroughly soaked. I got a few rides and bummed some money off
the drivers. I went to Ruth’s place. I found out that Morna had just died of cancer. I
was there in time to attend her funeral and burial. The Scott was there and I met her
two daughters for the first time. The Scott took me to a bar after and he showed no
emotion while I was crying. I had lost a wonderful person.
On a whim, I decided to go back to Betsy and Michelle. I have no idea where I
got the money from. On August 24, 1977, I left via the US for Victoria. I was
stopped at the border in Buffalo where they took away my green card. I had been
keeping it up by registering every January in the States with American Immigration
(giving them a phony American address) but the last January I wasn’t able to get
there for some reason. I lost my immigration status. Even though I missed Alvin, I
was kind of glad to be back with Betsy and Michelle.
Back to Victoria
In January of 1978, I arranged a meeting with the director of sociology at the
University of Victoria to discuss my Biocratic Manifesto. After all, it was a
sociological work and it did contain the new science of Sociobiology and the new
state system of Biocracy. He showed no interest in it and completely rejected it.
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We had a lot of earthquakes in the area, most centered in Washington State but
we felt them. We could see Mount Baker in northern Washington with smoke rising
from its summit. Newscasters said it could erupt into a volcano and if it did, lava
could flow through geothermal tunnels into the city of Victoria. It never erupted.
I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. The idea of being a father didn’t appeal
to me. I thought how could I be a father when I’m a woman. Besides I had never had
anything to do with babies or children and had no interest in them. I told Betsy that I
had to go back to Toronto and make a final decision. If I was coming back, I would
have to bring my stuff from Ruth’s.
On April 4, I took a bus through Canada to Toronto. I rented a room for a
week. I couldn’t find Ted, Ivan, or Godfreed. I saw Bill K and Alvin but neither one
of them were as friendly as they used to be. I gave the situation a lot of thought and I
started feeling responsible for Michelle. I kind of felt a duty to her since I helped to
bring her into the world. And I was getting some physical satisfaction from Betsy,
mostly affection that I never got from anyone else. Besides, I thought it would be an
adventure and a normal experience that I otherwise would never have.
However, I was in a predicament. I was broke. I had no money for bus fare back
and no money to ship my stuff to Victoria. Just then I found $100 in a money clip on
the street (my guardian angel was looking out for me). I had my fare back to Victoria
but no money to ship my stuff. I phoned Betsy and told her of my decision but
couldn’t bring my stuff back. She had thought that I wasn’t coming back and so she
had sold everything so she could move to Tahiti with Michelle. She seemed happy
that I was coming back and sent me $200 to ship my stuff. Ruth had thrown most of
my stuff out including a lot of my artwork because she thought she’d never see me
again. I shipped out whatever I had left. Then on April 20, I boarded the CN
Supercontinental to Vancouver. From there I took a bus and ferry to Victoria.
Trash to Treasure in Victoria
Victoria had started an annual spring clean-up where people threw out stuff that
the normal garbage pickup wouldn’t take. It lasted two weeks. We got a map of the
areas and dates of pickup. We went there the night before. The first thing we found
was a perfectly good baby stroller. That was easier than carrying Michelle in a
snugly. Every night we went out and we were carrying bags of stuff on the stroller
and even pieces of furniture on the bus. A lot of the stuff were collectors items.
When we went to Oak Bay, the old money district of the city (behind the tweed
curtain), we couldn’t believe the treasures we found. We found haut couture gowns
from the 1800s, sterling silver and things made out of pure gold. There were Persian
rugs and other treasures that we just couldn’t carry home on the bus.
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A lot of the stuff we kept but we sold enough stuff to buy a car. I bought a 1965
Mercury Park Lane for $500. It was in perfect condition and was a very powerful car.
Since there was no work in Victoria, we decided to become professional treasure
hunters. We would go to rummage sales, garage sales, swap meets and flea markets.
We got in just at the right time because the sellers didn’t know the value of things.
We knew that there were lots of collectors willing to pay top dollar for items like
costume jewelry, depression glass, milk glass, jet glass, 1950s rock and roll records,
old toys from the `40s and `50s especially Dinky toys, anything that was Art Deco
from the `20s and `30s, artwork in general, and so on. Rummage sales were usually
the best source of these gems and Betsy had a knack of getting in the night before to
clean out all the treasures. Sometimes it worked. Our challenge was that there was a
lot of competition from other dealers. We had to line up at least half an hour before a
rummage sale started to be close to the front of the line. When the doors opened, it
was a mad stampede of dealers rushing for the goodies and sometimes fighting over
stuff.
At one rummage sale we went to we were about the fourth in and we were
rushing toward a table with jewelry on it. Betsy was in front of me. There was a fruit
basket full of jewelry all for ten cents each. I spotted a diamond from half way down
the table and whispered to Betsy “grab that diamond”. She saw it right away and
grabbed it along with a handful of other stuff. We had it appraised at $1500, and sold
it for $750. We would average about two thousand percent profit. Betsy was the
expert in costume jewelry and vintage clothes, and I became the expert in `50s
records, toys, china, and art works. We made a good team.
The Rudds were one of the most prominent families in Victoria. One of them
owned Ann Hathaway’s cottage in Esquimalt. It was a replica of the one in England
and a favorite tourist attraction. This guy had a house beside it in the bush. It was
more like a little stone castle. He had a “garage sale” there one day that was actually
an estate sale. We wanted to see what it was like inside. We had already had tea in
the cottage. He certainly had nothing we could afford. He had things like original
paintings of clowns by Red Skelton. Another family member owned the largest
collection of vintage and antique clothes. She had a sale. Betsy talked me into buying
a Victorian outfit from the 1800s. It was a top hat and tails with original socks and
shoes with spats. I had a walking stick with a round gold handle. I got a glass
boutonniere that fitted in the lapel of the coat. I put a yellow rose in it. It fit me
perfectly and was very inexpensive. One reason I bought it was I knew I could make
money on it, which I later did.
I wore this outfit downtown once and someone asked me to be in the Victoria
Day Parade. When I got to the set-up area, someone in a convertible car asked me to
ride with him. I sat on top of the back seat with a beautiful princess on each side of
me. I waved to everyone along the parade route. Afterwards, I won first prize for the
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best authentic costume. Within a day or so, I went to a garage sale where I got up in
the attic of an old store in Chinatown. I found a really fancy wicker baby carriage
from the 1840s. It had been sitting in the attic for 50 years. The wicker was black
from dust and dirt and the solid tires were flat where it touched the shelf it was sitting
on. I got it for fifteen dollars. I spent hours cleaning the delicate wicker swirls and
twists, mainly with a toothbrush. I had it like new again and sometimes I would put
on my top hat and tails and push Michelle around in carriage. I sure got lots of stares
and comments. People would ask, “Where did you ever get all that?”
We ended up turning our place into a private museum. One wall of the dining
room was vintage china from floor to ceiling. We even had Royal Dalton figurines.
We had Art Deco pieces. We had a stuffed caribou head and a deer head mounted on
the wall. We had two dress forms. On one form we had a raw silk Parisian gown
from the 1800s and on the other we had a spun silk red striped gown from the teens
(none of those gowns would fit me).
Once when we went to a garage sale in an abandoned theater, we discovered
that we had gotten there late and there wasn’t much left. Looking around I noticed
the massive green velvet stage curtains. They ran from the floor to the ceiling, which
must have been at least fifteen feet high. There was a valence the width of the stage
of scalloped green velvet with solid gold fringes. There were tiebacks with solid gold
tassels. I asked somebody, “What do you want for those drapes?” The guy said, “Oh,
they’re really old, at least 100 years anyway. Give me five dollars and take them
away”. I never pulled out five dollars as fast as I did then. The drapes filled the entire
back seat of the car and I had to squish them in. The valence and tiebacks had to go
into the trunk.
I had recently bought an original chaise lounge at a garage sale that badly
needed recovering. It had been stuffed with horsehair and I had to rearrange some of
the hair. I recovered the lounge with the green velvet and put gold satin piping along
the edges. We had a large window and I made drapes for it with a valence and used
the gold tiebacks. I made drapes for a second window and I made a bedspread with
gold fringes. I also covered a vintage stuffed chair, and I still had yards and yards of
green velvet left over. I sold the rest to a dealer for a really good price.
All through 1978, we felt a lot of earthquakes. On June 6, we celebrated
Michelle’s first birthday. Ruth sent me a release form for the sale of the house. I
signed it and returned it to her. She sold it for a great deal more than I had paid for it.
In 1979, I got a phone call from Ted. He expected it to be a significant year
and asked me if I had finished The Biocratic Manifesto. I had finished the first five
chapters (out of seven) and it was suitable for publication at this point. I had set up a
routine for my life (I’ve always loved routine). We only worked weekends. Saturday,
we would go to garage sales from 8am to 8pm. Sunday we would set-up and sell
stuff at the swap meets. Monday was my day off and I would spend the day
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downtown hanging out at places I got accustomed to. Wednesday, I always took a
load of stuff to Lund’s Auction, and every week I got a check from them, usually
between two and three hundred dollars. The rest of the time I spent on revising The
Biocratic Manifesto, often working up to eighteen hours a day. I know this was not
fair to Betsy and Michelle because I was sort of neglecting them. It was just that I got
so absorbed in my work.
On September 4, I received divorce papers from Ruth because she wanted to
marry Nick B. I signed them and sent them back.