My trying to climb into the mother and father’s window one night probably had something to with it. Her room was on the other side of the house. It was dark her room was on the left looking out not looking in.
My mother didn’t like the hickies. I started wearing big navy blue army navy wool sweater. That’s when dickies became fashionable so we got those to hide the hickies.
I’m still playing on the Volleyball team. We’re still winning all our games. I’m doing well in school. I’ m loving English. I’m loving writing poetry. I’m actually enjoying Shakespeare. I’m at the YMCA learning and competing on the Gymnastics Team.
I was voted president of my church group. Doug has become my friend from church. Our wild gifted friend is still alive. He’d die in a freak motor vehicle accident a year or two later when he got his driving license. There was a bridge being built but someone took down the detour sign. He hit the construction at 90 km an hour.
Kirk and I are still friends. We’ve got a group of guys we hang out with, not a gang but friends we can joke with. Overlapfrom school neighbor Y and volleyball. We’d throw ball around, play pick up basketball at the court, ride bike, hike down by the river, just hanging out.
Ron was doing great in church and school and playing soccer. Dad’s a success in business. Mom’s writing for the Lance and enjoying her garden. She is forever winning awards for gladiolus. I’m still fishing and camping with the family but we’re catching more fish. We’re hunting ducks and prairie chicken in the fall. Ron’s now hunting deer in the fall.
We’ve visitting Toronto taking the train to be with my Mom’s family. Dinner is a solemn affair with my serious grandfather and the US family who are visitting. My aunt is darling. She’s taken us to Easton’s and we’ve gone to her huge Baptist Church on Yonge street. Her other sister is married to a dentist. Her family are stuffy but Ron and I like our gentle beautiful cousin Ruthanne.
I’m on the student council. It’s weeks of arguing. I’ve spear headed a motion to have a noon hour sock hop and and it’s gone through. The next thing is to get a school dance.
At the sock hop no one is dancing. We’re all standing around in our socks, girls on one side, guys on the other. Nothing is happening. The music is playing. The lights are up. It’s the gymnasium. It feels like the gymnasium.
So I do it. I cross the greatest chasm.
‘Would you like to dance?” I ask this random girl who I thought was a friend.
“No,” she answered then giggled. I was mortified. Shot down in front of the whole school, it’s just a dance.
All the girls giggled.The guys laughed. I can walk back across the chasm or ask another girl along the line this side
I moved to the next girl over.
“Would you like to dance?” I asked politely.
“No, not till other people are dancing, “ she said.
I walked further along to increasing laughter and giggles.
“Would you like to dance?”
“No’.
At that point a pretty girl came over and said, “I”d like to dance with you”. We began to dance.’slowly everyone joined in. Lotsof the girls danced lesbian style but none of the guys went gay.
It wasn’t a slow dance thing. The music was all rock and roll. One of the guys with a huge record collection which others added to with loans ran the turntable music through the PA system, it was tinny but music. The dance was one of those monkey type jerk things where you stand across from your partner shuffling and moving your hands up and down like you’re milking a huge cow.
“I didn’t dance with you because I like you, Billy Hay. I don’’t dislike you but I hate those girls. They’re so ignorant and stupid. . They all said they wanted a dance but they only want to dance with their special boys. They’re such rubbish.”
At the end of the song everyone was dancing. We were all having fun.
“There,” she said. “We got the dance going. Now you can go dance with someone else. I’m sorry those girls were such cows. You’re a nice guy but you’re not my type. I don’t like jocks but you’re a nice guy. Ask another girl now and she’ll dance with you.”
Frankly I don’t know where Kathy was that day. But I asked another girl to dance and another girl and another girl and they all danced with me. We had a lot of fun. I really liked to dance. Especially those line dances.
Danny Donahue’s band was on stage. They had their own amps and all that mysterious professional electrical gear. We all stopped the music fo listen to him. We crowded around the stage and he played. Drums, bass guitar and Danny. . There might have been another guitarist. They were just great. Danny was the best. His voice was special. All the girls swooned. Everyone cheered. It was pretty magical. Hearing this incredible group that was from our own school and them being so great. After they played we went back to dancing. It was only an hour over lunch. It went well.
The principal at the next council meeting agreed we could have a dance. Extra curricular activities other than sports were a big deal. He worried about his insurance. They’d been problems at other schools. Teachers didn’t want to monitor. A dance was more unpredictable. Sports was regimented. This was years ahead of fans using the sports event to wage wars against other countries. Back then sports was just sports and the spectators were all well behaved. The problem with dances was booze. Kids sneaked booze into dances and all hell broke loose.
We had permission for the dance. That was the big deal. I had enjoyed arguing for the dance and having the support of the council. Poitier was there I believe. Grant too. I was in the high school student council too and it overlaps with the student councils I was on in junior high. Wes Hazlitt played a big part. He was wise before his time and could convince management of things. He had this knack for making a deal and getting everyone on board. I came up with ideas and just assumed everyone would be on board. Wes had finesse.
Nobody messed with him either. He was the strongest guy anyone knew. He had polio so needed to use crutches a lot. This made his arms and shoulders strong, like brick shithouse. No one could last a second against him in an arm wrestle. I even saw him hold handstand for a minute on his crutches. A really crazy funny guy.
The dance was great. Now the lights were turned low. The girls were dressed to the nines. The skirt hems we’re going up and the necklines were dropping. Mini skirts were on tv. Danny Donahue and his band played. They were the big draw.
I felt like I was on TV in one of the dance sets that were popular at the time. American Bandstand.We could have been in Los Angeles, London or New York. The music and this dance were just so ‘with it’. Living in Winnipeg we always felt like we were anything but ‘withit’. We were outsiders on the world of modern culture. Later when I’d live in London England or San Francisco I’d reflect that our mainstream scene was 10 years out but our fringe was contemporary or ahead of the “scene”.
Here we were having sock hops and a dance with Danny was playing the latest Beatles music. There wasn’t sheet music or songbooks in those days. Musicians had to buy a 45 or LP of a group and learn the song by listening to it over and over. Otherwise they had to wait for it to come around on the radio and try and get the song listening for it to come on over a few days or a week. There was recording devices except studio equipment. Danny and his band were playing songs we were all listening to on the radio and they were writing their own songs and music. Danny was a musical genius. It was cutting edge. There were Eve coloured lights. The guys were acting like gentleman and the girls were gorgeous. We were even doing the twist kind of genteel like the way it started. I was worried the whole time we’d not pull it off. We’d had so much resistance from the administration. This was the doorway to more dances and more contemporary activities. Everything could go wrong or nothing could go wrong. When you’re an organizer you don’t really have much time to enjoy the event itself because you’re worrying about everything.
But when ithe band was ending and the dance was going on,the stupid kids, three of them, guys whose brains were slower to develop than others, began to cause trouble . They began cutting the seats out of the bottom of the chairs and throwing them like frisbees. I saw them first. I also smelt the booze. While I was trying to get a dance going they were working their own gig being ‘bad boys’. Their ambition was to be a gang and they were this weird mix of kids who had a couple who were flunked Because they were slow in school they had their drivers license. They had 100 cc Honda’s and others with bicycles. The guys with motorcycles had flunked a grade. One guy flunked repeatedly. They were bigger too and smoked. Smoking was being tough.you couldn’t drink till you were 21.
Without a thought except for the principal having his excuse not to have another dance, dances and sock hops weren’t part of what the administration was paid to have, I just walked right over and stopped the three guys.
“Don’t throw that.’ I said. “They’ll shut down the dance and we’ll never have another. Can’t you just have fun. Look how much the girls are liking it. If we destroy property the principal won’t let us have anymore dances.”
“Who cares,” the weasel leader said, knife in one hand, chair in the other, holding them like weapons. Here I was appealing to something that had t developed in the guys brain and might never. Selfish and self centered.
Their girlfriends were standing by scowling. They’d not liked what the guys were doing either but they didn’t like me a do good one bit.
It had just seemed like a good idea for them. Destroy comes a whole lot easier than create. Maybe my talking to them made them they see the administration bearing down on them and then police and jail and a swat team or two. Everyone had their dreams. They just hadn’t planned on “goody goody two shoes” Billy Hay hassling them. They backed down.
I went back to the dance. Mostly I was enjoying listening to Danny and his band. I never knew he was so good. We’d grown up together. Where did this guy get that voice and how did these guys learn how to play their instruments so well together. I was a 5 chord guitar wonder and couldn’t play with any one because I couldn’t tune my guitar and had no idea of harmony with instruments. I could sing a bit but these guys had their instruments all tuned together and were synchronized and had the beat. Everyone was impressed. We really had talent at our school.
“You’ve got to get out of here,” a couple of my friends said, when they approached me. “The gang is waiting outside to beat you up.They say you disrespected one of their girlfriends.”
“I never disrespected one of their girlfriends.”
“She’s saying you didn’t ask her to dance.”
“She was with her boyfriend. I didnt ask a lot of girls to dance. This is bullshit.”
“I know. It’s just an excuse. But the girls are stirring the guys up. They didn’t like you telling the guys to stop ripping up the seats with their knives. “
“Of course that’s it. Now girls want to see you knifed after the dance. They really don’t like the girls on the student council. Everyone’s saying how great Danny, the band, the council is so they want to ‘send a message ‘’send a message’, where do they get this stiff.’ I asked, thoroughly dumb founded. Gangster talk in Fort Garry. What losers.
‘They won’t pick on Wes because he’s too strong. Danny has too many friends. I guess they figure you’re the easiest target. They didn’t like you stopping them destroying stuff.’
“Maybe you should have let the principal handle it.”
“I couldn’t, he would have used it to close down the dance and any further dances.’
“Well, he’s going to do that anyway when they knife you after the dance.”
“Whose going to do it.”
“Robby Baker”.
“I don’t know Robby Baker”.
“His girlfriend is that real skank bitch. She was there when you stopped the other guys destroying the chairs.”
“Was Robby there.”
“No”
“Someone went to get him. The other guys are afraid of you but Robby said he could beat you.”
‘This is bullshit.!’ Years later I’d learn the line ‘you stand up and you make yourself a target. Then I just had to deal with the knuckle draggers. They’d not contributed to this really good thing so they were going to ride their shitshow on the tails of the dance and Danny.
I remember realizing back then that their were people who brought the light and the party with them and others who couldn’t do that so didn’t like the light and they called their dark thing the party. I learn to call it evil but then I was just a scared kid figuring things out as I went. I instinctively knew that war was all about place and time. I wasn’t worried about fighting except I didn’t want to fight knives and gangs. It was what the principal predicted and I didn’t want him to be right. He didn’t think kids had maturity.
So I just left the best dance of my life. I went out the back door and sneaked home. It was half way through the dance. It was my big night. I was so happy and then I was sad. .
They never fought one on one. They started that way but the pack jumped in if the victim was winning or if he went down. It was a no win situation.
My mom was there when I got home.
“Why are you home so early? “
“No reason.”
She pestered. The mom questions. I was upset. It had been such a big deal. I told her the whole story. I insisted she do nothing and that I’d take care of it in the morning. She promised she’d wouldn’t do anything.
Before dawn I slipped out of my house and rode my bicycle over to where Robbie lived. I don’t know how I knew his house in Wildwood. I guess it was his mother outside taking out the garbage.
I asked , “Is Robbie home?”
“He’s a sleep downstairs.. Who are you.?’
‘ His friend”.
I walked past her into the house, downstairs into the basement, right into Robbie’s room. He was asleep. . I sat on the bed. I waited. He woke with really wide eyes. Trying to raise himself on his elbows, me looking down at him, hands on my lap.
“I understand you wanted to fight me. I’m here to do it. Just you and me. We can go outside. No crowds. One on one. I’d like that. What about you?’ I spoke really quietly.
“Hey man’ he cried, obviously terrified.
‘I don’t want t o fight you. It was the girls. We’re cool man. I’m sorry. No way. I’m really sorry man. It was the girls. I was drinking. I don’t know what was going on but really we’re cool.”
‘Okay’.
I got up and left.
The dance was on Friday night.
On Monday on the way home from school, Robby Baker approached me with some of his friends.
“I just got expelled from school.. assshole. ‘ unlike his lowbrow friends and skank, Robbie was a smart gUy. School meant a lot to him. ‘ your mother phoned the principal and said I threatened her baby. They phoned my mom and now I’m expelled from school because of you.”
He was really enraged.
I was shocked.
My mother hadn’t told me. She’d promised she wouldn’t do anything. I’d never have told her.
Robbie Baker punched me three times in the face. ‘Fight back you prick”. I couldn’t. My mother had betrayed me and Robbie was right, I was a rat and I deserved a beating. I just stood there as he punched me over and over again getting out the rage he rightfully felt. We’d been cool. Now I was the lowest snitch.
“I’m not fighting you. I’m sorry. I was wrong to tell my mother. You had enough. ‘ I finally said.
“Yea’ He said and walked away, His knuckles were bleeding, my face was hamburgher.
I walked away thoroughly dejected. The hangers on were slapping Robby on the back.
A few months before a guy had come up and punched me three times in the face. I’d said don’t do that three times but he kept punching me. It was over a girl. He wanted her attention. She wanted me. I had a girl friend so it was a whole drama that played out in his mind, most frustrating because the girls in general ignored him because he was a creep.
I hit him. My one punch dislocated his jaw and facial bones. He was taken by ambulance to hospital where he stayed a few days coming back to school his face all bruised. The police had interviewed me and they interviewed the girl. That’s all that happened. He attacked me. I defended myself. The girl said she was just talking to me when he attacked for no reason. I had a reputation. Now I had another reputation.
It wasn’t me. It was the creep’s face. I’d learn years later he had this ‘fragile face syndrome’. Guys like him could never Box.I had the opposite kind of jaw. I could take a punch. My eye swelled up blue and closed though. I was really bruised too.
My mom asked what happened. I explained it to her slowly. Very slowly. I was 15 years old and suddenly a whole lot older. I didn’t tell her who had done it, denied Robbie did it, but said ‘I had it coming because I was the lowest of the low.’
I wouldn’t trust her or talk to her about anything important for years. We were both from the same blood. Irish/Scot. We could hold a resentment. Loose lips sink ships.
A couple of the younger little guys from the gang now that Robby had hit me came up and hit me in the next weeks. No reason. Just to show they were tough. I wouldn’t fight them. They were glad I didn’t fight back. They called me a sissy, maybe I was.
They surrounded me once. Robby wasn’t there. He’d actually turn out to be an okay guy just caught up in circumstance with a skank girlfriend and lousy friends and alcohol. These sleaze ball guys with their motorcycles and the others guys on bikes, kids who hung out at the billiards were really losers.. The leader, some slime ball with too much brylcream had a big knife. He didn’t go to school. He’d tried to kick me but I’d just blocked every kick. Thank God for martial arts training. I’ve blocked a lot of kicks in my life. Just scissoring the arms. He got out this this big 8 inch blade from the pannier on his bike, a baby Harley look alike. He entertained his gang by stroke across the blade’ The he came after me. He had it overhand so it was easy to block and then he went under hand . He kept trying to stab me and trying to kick me. I just kept blocking, hoping to tire him out, hoping the other guys didn’t join int. He finally stuck me, grazing my ribs. He quit then. Maybe he felt it. Maybe he hadn’t meant to take it that far. Maybe he thought he hit my jeans. I had a lose jacket on. I walked away. Back straight. The blood dripped into my pants. My jacket covered it.
“If you’re not going to fight, well fuck off.” He called at my back.
The kid was the lousiest fighter I’ve ever come up against. Left himself wide open and even with a knife he was useless. But I couldn’t fight back because if I did the gang would jump me. One of the kids in the school was permanently brain damaged by these guys. They all got him down and everyone kicked him in the head and left him in the ditch. I’d meet him after he got out of jail years later. His life changed 180 degrees by these ass wads. A good kid. He never came back to school. I knew Jujitsu. I knew blocks. I ‘m defensive at the best of times. I don’t how how he got the hit in on the ribs. They didn’t know. I walked away like nothing happened. It’s was all about ‘cool’.
It sure hurt though. I went down the next back lane and looked. Blood all over my side. I had to clean that up and get it bandaged. I couldn’t let my parents see. For the next week I was my own doctor. I was left with a weird scar but it eventually healed. After that nobody bugged me. I don’t know why. I was just deemed as a kid who didn’t fight. Nobody wanted to look like a fool trying to get me either. They might even have been afraid if I did fight back because I certainly could defend myself.
it took me a while to get over that. I became really depressed. I couldn’t wait till school ended. There was no where safe. I wondered when another kid would jump me. I wondered when the gang would come after me. I wondered when my mother would do something stupid again. I couldn’t talk to my Dad because he was away a lot with work then. My brother wouldn’t understand. He was all involved with the church and thought I shouldn’t get involved in all that ‘worldly’ stuff. He was more and more into gospel and Billy Graham. He was playing soccer and popular with the academic set. He still played badminton. He liked Elvis. The minister said John Lennon was the devil. Mick Jagger was Satan spawn. The minister railed against pop culture from the pedestal.
At night I was lying in bed with iodine and bandages on my side. I was skipping gym because I couldn’t change. I said I’d pulled a muscle. It was probably the best neighbourhood and the best school. There certainly were a lot worse. Parents and teachers didn’t know anything. In years a head I’d help dozens of kids who were being bullied. Their parents and the school administration would deny it. Once with the help of the Winnipeg Police and their agreement to post surveillance on a school they caught an extortionat gang who were bullying kids and taking their lunch money. I was seeing a genius and he was getting routinely shook down. No body had done anything. They couldn’t believe it happened in that school where judges sent their kids. The bullies were the sons of rich people. The Winnipeg Police the boy and me. It was a righteous day. The kid thanked me. The parents thanked me. I thanked the Winnipeg Police. . I ended up seeing a whole bunch of geniuses in the years to come, gifted kids, and they all were bullied. Giftedness is a hidden disability.Probably contributed to the high IQ’s too. In many ways for many kids Canada could be the worst place to be smart and creative. Mediocrity ruled. Some countries and some places even in Canada protected their genius. All this affected me many years ahead, what I did in life. Lying in bed in pain with Kleenex bandages leaves a different kind of scar. Even Freud said, “maybe the paranoids were right’.
I just got really depressed. One really cold night I walked down to the river bank and lay down in the snow and waited to die. It was 40 below. I hoped that I’d just go to sleep and freeze to death. It didn’t happen. I watched the stars. I saw satellites. I wondered about space travel. I froze. I was cold but I didn’t die. My teeth chattered. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t move a muscle for hours just laying there. I’d not taken off my clothes. I was embarrassed about being found naked so I was in pants and a jacket. I should have froze. I didn’t even get frostbite. I just lay there motionless. It seemed like days. I’d not said anything when I walked out but I must have been gone long enough because my parents phoned the police. There was a search out for me just beginning when I walked home and went to bed.
“Where did you go Billy. Are you okay.” I didn’t answer. I wasn’t answering adults sometimes back then because their questions were just too stupid.
My mom and dad were worried about me. I saw that they cared. I didn’t think they did but it was obvious they did. I just went to bed and everything went back to normal the next day. I went to volley ball practice, went to school, got A’s went to church. I said my prayers.
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