I was thinking about a friend of mine, I used to see him on Facebook, I wondered if he had unfriended me. It turned out he had. I kind of don’t blame him. Then I remembered that for a time we were roommates. And in attempting to trace when and where that was, I started trying to reconstruct the timeline of all the places I lived with roommates. It turned out to be harder than I thought.
I lived at home when I went to university. I had tried to get my father to pay for me to go out of town. He said he’d only do that if I didn’t get into a university in Toronto. but his offer was somewhat insincere since we both knew I would.
I could have still moved out . But I was too lazy or spoiled. I was 21 when I graduated and then basically the next two years I was traveling. So it wasn’t until the ripe old age of 23 that I moved out into a house at 312 Avenue Road where my friend Marty had lived for a short time. The house was at the bottom of the Avenue Road hill. I made at least one really good friend out of that house and met a woman who would become my girlfriend for the following Fall, winter and Spring too.
She was my first girlfriend. I was a late starter in more ways than one.
Since this was my first apartment I needed a bed. And this being 1975 and given that my friend had a store on Yonge Street called “Chairs n things”, I decided to buy a waterbed. That summer I went on a little trip to Boulder Colorado with my friend Joel, where I audited a class taught by Allen Ginsberg, tried to learn to meditate, and heard Anne Waldman and Ed Sanders read poetry. When I left Boulder to try and find my friend Leesa in Denton Texas, I was arrested while hitchhiking and spent a night in a small town Texas jail for taking a piss on the side of the highway.
While I was gone, my friend Ralph who would later appear in two films of mine, was happy to occupy my room and sleep with his girlfriend on my waterbed. I can’t say the bed made sex any better but there was something fun about it.
I’m not sure where I moved when that house broke up in the Fall but I can picture the room I was living in the following February because of a clear memory of the morning of my birthday. My girlfriend had been out the night before but she snuck into my room in the morning to make up for her absence. I remember that my mattress was on the floor, and that the room had a kind of a swinging door, with no doorknob or lock.
It was the dining room, and not the last dining room I would ever sleep in. And though I can’t recall anything about who else lived there, I know it was on Markham Street, south of Ulster and across the street from a synagogue I had been hearing about my entire childhood
In an earlier incarnation it had been the Russian synagogue and my grandmother had mentioned it frequently. She called it - I will try to write this phonetically - The Rish ish i Sheel. One word.
In the voice of my grandmother the place seemed so exotic and otherworldly that when I found it sitting there on Markham Street, I couldn’t believe it actually existed let alone in the neighborhood I was living in. But that was stupid because that neighborhood was exactly where the Jews of my parents’ generation lived. My father’s high school, Harbord Collegiate was just around the corner.
At that time, I think that place was called the Markham Street Shul and today it’s called The Shaarei Tzedec.
That Spring I drove my girlfriend to her sister’s apartment where I guess she was going to spend the night. And as we sat in the car saying good night, she told me we were done. I can picture it clearly, a building on the corner, somewhere north of Wilson off of Bathurst. If I tried maybe I could find the building where we broke up, but I have no idea where I actually lived at the time or where I drove back to that night and began the fairly long period of mourning that followed the breakup, which I took very very hard.
I don’t think it was the next house I’m remembering but somewhere in that period I lived in a house on Montgomery near Yonge and Eglinton, which was the furthest east in Toronto I had ever lived up to that point and holds that distinction to this day.
There was a guy named Bart who was a guitar player and might have been in a punk band. He lived there with his best friend who, at least on the surface was not as cool as he was. I slept in the vestibule. Bart was impressed that I had a Velvet Underground record but after a few months they kicked me out. I think they said something about my interfering with their tight friendship but I always thought that was their way of avoiding the truth, that they just didn’t like me.
Logic would suggest that by the time my girlfriend broke up with me I was living on Ellsworth at St. Clair and Christie. I talked about this neighborhood in my piece entitled “Is this a stickup?”, and about the Mr. Donut that opened up at Vaughn and St Clair around the time I shot my second film The Boys.
Ralph, the guy who slept on my waterbed was in that film. Rosalie Abella who went on to be a well-known judge in Toronto, was my landlady. I moved into that house with my friend Paul and his girlfriend Debby. They broke up and the next couple, my friend Saul and his new girlfriend Cindy, moved in until they broke up. After that I guess I couldn’t find another couple to break up so I had to move on.
I have a few memories of that house. I remember a mouse that died in a jar of honey. I will always remember the living room where I shot my film. I remember a neighborhood girl whose parents kept her virtually a prisoner in the house. And I remember a party we had. I had a friend Hank. He was a significant presence in my life at that time and a bit of an amateur musician and he loved showing up with his guitar and taking part in a “jam”. More often than not he would try to lead them.
I was kind of surrounded by musicians at that point, and I went to see them play quite often but at a party, I never liked it when the guitars come out and the singing started. When the jam started, was when I would go out for a smoke . On this particular night though, I stuck around.
At that time Hank had become very enamored of this band called The Good Brothers who were a very popular sort of bluegrass rock band that played all over Ontario. One of the Good Brothers is the father of the late Dallas Good and his brother Travis, of the band The Sadies.
So of course, Hank brings his guitar to my party, and eventually whips it out and starts singing Good Brothers songs. And my roommate Saul, a very good musician, plugs in his bass and immediately elevates the jam. But Hank doesn’t think Saul is playing the songs correctly and keeps pointing out to him what he’s doing wrong.
And in one of the classiest moves I’ve ever seen, Saul just nods and tries to make Hank happy. And he kind of winks at me, knowing from my expression that I am silently pleading with him to tell Hank that he is actually the Good Brothers’ bass player. But I guess it was more fun not to tell him, and I can sort of get that.
I think everyone’s favorite Good Brothers song was “Fox on the run”. I liked the song too but I guess I never really thought very carefully to the lyrics. A woman “took all the love that a poor boy could give her and left me to die like a fox on the run”. A fox on the run dies when he’s caught and ripped apart by a pack of dogs. Even I, with all my tales of woe, don’t think it’s quite that bad, but i also know it’s just a song, a metaphor. It reminds me of a saying i coined and which I often think about, “what doesn’t kill you, unfortunately doesn’t kill you”.
One of your best Alan! I like to picture you on a waterbed in a vestibule. Btw, I was kicked out of a three-way friendship once in a similar way. In my case the reason given was that my eyebrows were too long.