The funniest memory I have is Jon and Fern. Fernand Robidoux was an amazing singer. He’d been a choir boy and sung for the winter Cour de Bois festival in St. Boniface. Amazing tenor. We’d sing Amen whenever we were drunk. Fern only sang after he was drinking and there was limited window when he was a truly incredible. A nightingale who became a duck when the blood alcohol overshot it’s sweet spot.
Jon Cowtan was the guitarist. We’d asked them to play the song by the Turtles, « Happy Together »
Imagine me and you, I do
I think about you day and night
It’s only right
To think about the girl you love
And hold her tight
So happy together
If I should call you up, invest a dime
And you say you belong to me
And ease my mind
Imagine how the world could be
So very fine
So happy together
I can’t see me loving nobody but you for all my life
When you’re with me, baby the skies will be blue for all my life
Me and you and you and me
No matter how they tossed the dice
It had to be
The only one for me is you
And you for me
So happy together
Jon and Fern had agreed to meet and practice the song at the Ken Matthews Dance Studio. Baiba and I proceeded there to see if they had finished and to ensure everything was locked up, Ken and Marie having been kind enough to let us use the studio after hours.
We opened the elevator doors and there our musician and singer were. Somehow they’d made it onto the elevator drunk but passed out on the way from the second floor to the first. They were piled on each other with the guitar somewhere in the heap. We had to arouse them. This was their inaugural meeting and they hit it off.
« You know Fern can’t sing if he hasn’t a drink and sounds like a duck if he’s drunk too much. »
« Yes, that’s Fern. »
« I just thought I’d accompany him and I guess we both went past the point of no return. « Jon said, days later after he’d sobered up and got over the hang over.
« So you’ll be able to do this for the wedding. »
« Oh sure. Fern has the most incredible voice. »
I don’t really remember the service except saying « I do ». Baiba of course was utterly beautiful as only the most beautiful woman in the world can look as a bride.
What I remember though was the punch. My mother doesn’t drink. Maija’s nurse friends were very naughty. There was an alcoholic punch and an non alcoholic punch. Mom loves non alcoholic punch. The nurses spiked both of the punch bowls. When I saw my mother at the after wedding party she was definitely very effusive and happy and loose.
I said, « Mom, you’re drunk. ».
« No, I’ve only had the non alcoholic punch. »
Dad with a gleam in his eye said, « Leave her Bill she’s just happy.’
I asked the nurses if they’d spiked both punches.
« Not really. »
« We injected all the strawberries with styringes of vodka. »
Mom loves strawberries.
Paul gave an extraordinarily long speech quoting all the parts of the Dragon character that applied to me, a Dragon in the Chinese Calendar. Everyone laughed because I’m a perfect dragon and it was kind of uncanny. The dancing was spectacular. I loved dancing with Baiba. Everyone applauded. It was a lovely time. What I remember.
I acquired a STD from Baiba during our courtship and shortly after we were married I was in bed with the principle dancer of the Circle de Soleil dance company. She was very insistent and drugs and alcohol were involved. I always had difficulty saying no to naked women in my bed. And saying I can’t I’m married only seemed to encourage them. Baiba was naturally not impressed. We would continue with competiting infidelities until we separated years later.
I had the second lead in the main stage Manitoba Theatre Centre production of Louis Riel. I played the Mounted Police officer. The writer was a great Hollywood fellow and I’d remember him because I’d drop LSD ,I think it was the girl from Circle de Soleil as part of my less than unwilling seduction. The consequence was I became.amazingly high. I got together with the cast and remember the writer saying. « I want whatever he’s on’. That lead to a wild search through the city for more acid. I was still teaching dancing some at Ken Mathews.
I was at the University of Winnipeg studying theatre at the time as well as Religious studies and English. The first semester studying DH Lawrence I’d turned to my college classmates and said, « Don’t you think this is lame. Us reading some old guys version of his orgy a hundred years ago. Wouldn’t it be better if we had an orgy and wrote about it. »
It was consistent with my artistic thinking of the day and my hippy friend with a Yin Yang sign painted on his wall offered up his apartment. The two girls came and we drank a lot of wine which Id’ not considered. One girl was sophisticated and artistic and into it while the other girl cried and said she couldn’t go on with it, getting drunk instead. It was a rather sordid affair and the girls didn’t talk to us much later. Orgies have great intellectual appeal but in fact are rather debauched affairs.
A Professor of English from Montreal who insisted she was one of the women who Leonard Cohen wrote Sisters of Mercy about would crawl into my bed and try desperately to have sex with me, her also older male partner in bed with the other young actor, a female. She told me she and her girlfriend had ‘fucked Leonard’ with a lot of wine in a cheap motel room. When they heard his song they wished they’d had his experience of the otherwise sordid experience. I had to sleep under the bed to stay true to my love that night.
Going on the road with plays or shows is a difficult time for performers. If it wasn’t the others in the show it was the audience coming back stage with intent. I was easy. A male slut. Before I was married. Marriage definitely changed the dynamic. I would trying to be true and sometimes succeeding.
« What is it about women and men in uniform or on stage. ». A college math teach big on desire and low on experience asked me.
I’d not invite them to my room or to my bed mostly. In those days. They’d take off their clothes or show up under the sheets. The #me too movement was a marvellous lie that simply denied women the affirmative action they were taking in the 60’s and 70’s. Post Aids women went back to the passive resistant and downright fearfully prudishin some cases , but in the 60’s and 70’s many were definitely the aggressor despite the feminist narrative of the ‘victim’ woman. I was often so drunk I was surprised at who climbed into my bed with me and happy that they did. I considered it charity too because the leads and the good looking guys and famous guys were facing a lot more hazing.
This was when John Lennon was having a « bed in. »Hugh Hefner was at the Playboy Palace. I loved James Bond and young women on the birth control pill loved sex. My problem was that I felt I had to get married to really enjoy sex. Marriage perse was more a ‘societal stamp of approval’.
Years later I’d hear that Joan Baez had said to Bob Dylan.
« Why do you always promise that you’ll make a woman feel like a princess but instead we end up feeling like whores. »
The different experience of men and women is perception. I’d eventually go on to teach sexuality, be a sexual medicine expert, become the head of marriage and family therapy and serve the LGBT community and assist Transexuals getting medical and surgical care. In a vote at the University of Manitoba Psychiatry of dozen psychiatrists I was the only one who believed that medical and surgical treatment for transexualism was reasonable. All the rest felt it was a matter requiring psychotherapy. I almost guarantee that none of those residents and staff men remember that or would acknowledge their position then. I remember I stood alone mostly on the matter ethically and pragmatically.
I believe in both and have recommended for and against medical treatment. I ‘ve several cases in which the gender dysphoni was a psychotic phenomena and several in which it was a product of depression. I don’t believe children should be subjected to change because their parents and counselors are hot to trot on transexualism. I really believe there’s a lot of child abuse going on because of todays political agenda. At the same time I believe that Alice Dreger’s « Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex » raises many cogent arguments.
Doctors treat cases individually and ,alternatively ,as public health considerations. Finally there is the issue of funding and public health insurance. There is no argument of any validity against transexual treatment and surgery since we already accept plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery. Whether a person is ‘born’ one way or another is a separate consideration. It’s a matter of pragmatism. I’m very much a pragmatist. I further have no regrets about the adults I ‘ve assisted in their many varied approaches to sexuality. Our government is deeply disturbed on the issue and the politics of the matter are swinging like a compass in a storm. I mention this now only to say that it’s not simple, it’s not binary and the Bible is open to interpetation. Most importantly Jesus wasn’t caught up in sex like the gays, lesbians, church and political church leaders are today. Lots of dirty minds. Less dirty practices. Major disease and health situations. I served in the AIDs epidemic and watched as colleague sgo needle pricks and died. They were shunned because it was wrongly called the « gay » disease..It was a scary time. Some today are trying to turn back the clock to the 15th century while others are flying into the 22nd century without a space ship.
Today I know that alcohol was a contributor to most of the questionable behaviour of this time. If I had to had it to do over I wouldn’t have drunk so often or so much even if by the standards of the day I didn’t drink that much.
I have a memory of Baiba and I on a train track screaming at each other. I’ve never hit a woman though I’ve been hit by them. Baiba wasn’t one of those who were physically violent. She had as sharp a tongue as I and the two of us had those « Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf » moments where she played a drunk Elizabeth Taylor to my drunk Richard Burton. On this occasion the voluminous verbal war ended with us throwing our rings at each other across the space. This followed with both of us on our hands and knees looking for the rings in the gravel. That followed with make up sex. Everyone who has had make up sex knows it too contributes to more marital arguments. Nonetheless it is great sex.
I have thought that if I hadn’t loved red wine then perhaps we’d have stayed married. Or if Baiba hadn’t also liked wine we might have found a happy place. But this is playing God. While we can change the future the past is simply as it was meant to be. The past is fate. The future remains to be seen as fate or free will.
I loved Baiba with all my heart and soul and all I knew at the time. I believe she loved me. We really were so young.
I dropped out of the play, dropped out of University and decided we needed to leave Winnipeg and get a fresh start. We decided to go to Toronto to make money and then bicycle across Europe. Why not? Frankly I can’t remember how that followed. At the time it made perfect sense.
I had been teaching dancing part timeat Ken Matthews. Baiba was working waitressing in downside cafe and teaching dancing a bit. I’d visit her in that cafe and write a poem ‘down side cafe’ about her working there. It was a sad place and Baiba, so young and beautiful and fresh was the only light in the awful little place.
I’d drop acid. We’d almost split. We’d make up. We’d go to Toronto to make the money to go to Europe. Baiba’s friend ,another dancer, was the girlfriend of the chemist in Rochelle. We’d suddenly be in the inner circle of the Rochdale Student Union experience, part of Canada’s most famous underground history. I had a friend then whose job was the admissions attendant at a porn theatre. Another friend was off to be a missionary in Africa.
Sometime I made love with a missionary on her way to Africa 12 times the day in the day and night before she boarded the bus east. She’d wanted to be completely sated before she became pious. I was glad to serve. This was before Or after Baiba. It’s like a loose bit of poignant memory in the jig saw puzzle of my mind.
Baiba and I were again staying with my long suffering glorious Aunt Sally who was completely flabbergasted by us. Baiba wouldn’t come home when she was angry with me and we’d drop acid and disappear together. My Baptist aunt became the greatest prayer warrior with the challenges God gave her with us two kids. I believe I’m alive today because of her prayers as well as my mothers. Maija’s greatest prayer efforts would come when we were overseas. The wild times began in Toronto. LSD.
I’d work for a Jewish deli in the heart of downtown taking lunch breaks across from city hall. Serving gefilta fish and matas ball and lox and bagel I’d meet the famous comedians Wayne and Shuster. Aunt Sally would take us for dinner at the revolving tower where we’d have a great view of the harbour and city.
We decided to do LSD in a completely dark room. This is before William Hurts movie but coming from the same source. Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment was the best of the day. Baiba was reading Neitze. I read Castenadas and all the spiritual books of the day. We’d talk crystals and tarot on the street and in coffee shops. We were in Yorkville when it was Hippy before it went Yuppy.
I experienced Jung’s collective unconscious have the experience again of the one mind. Later a yogi would talk of many ways into the palace but not being without a pilot. Eventually a street addict would tell me the drugs made him fly but they took away the sky.
The next day I’d talk to a bus driver and ask him about his family, naming them and asking if his son had passed his exam at school he was worried about. He’d acknowledge it was all true and thank me for my concern but ask how I knew. I did. I’d know a lot of secrets and reassure people in the neighborhood that day. In the Here and Now I’d experienced the transcendent. Clairvoyance telepathy manic psychosis for a day, we knew this. The « trip » had been good. We’d take our friends acid with us when we left.
We hitch hiked back to Winnipeg. Kirk was going to the Strawberry Mountain Peace and Love Festival. This was an international holistic non electric gathering of conscious people for world peace. We thought « groovy ». The plan wa to eventual meet up with Maija and Paul and the rest of the family at the International Latvian Song festival in Vancouver. Thousands of Latvians were gathering to sing harmony. Groovy.
Kirk had this $100 1950’s wreck of a car which attracted major attention at the border. Kirk looked Kirk but I looked like Hoffman from Easy Rider and Baiba looked like Carly Simon. Kirk and I had cried at Easy Rider. I’m sure seeing us me a long hair » with Baiba upset them. The guards were jealous and irritable. My mother had given me a bag of vitamins because she was worried we weren’t eating. I had an English dictionary because as a writer I was looking up every word I didn’t know in my voracious reading of those days. I was journaling when I was devouring everything I could read. Lord Byron, Keats, Shelly. The guards had us strip the car. We told them that if we were drug dealers we’d be driving one of the Mercedes they let through all the while they hassled us. Finally looking at the vitamins and English dictionary they said « what are those?
My first lesson in border crossing. followed my answering,
« Alright you caught me. I told you those are vitamins from my mom and I have the English dictionary because I’m a writer but the truth is that’s a bag of LSD and I’m a Russsian Spy so am carrying an English Dictionary.’
That’s when I was billy clubbed to my knees, wrists hand cuffed together, dragged on my back down the hall where the hand cuffed were locked to a ring and I waited. Kirk and Baiba waited too not knowing what was happening to me.The RCMP were called. My record as a Youth Representative to Parliament was known, my church involvement, my being a good university student who had dropped out was known and various sundry other details were given to me. I was told after this unsettling synopsis of myself and character were given that I was considered not a threat to the US and the Canadian government actually liked me. I’d meet Pierre Trudeau a couple of months later and shake his hand without knowing he hated having his hand shook. Pierre Would point me to the washroom on the hill when I asked him. I thought it was a good thing that a Prime Minister knew where the public toilet was. The body guard who let me slip threw the defensive proabably saw his next assignment in Nunavut.
US border patrol gave us a 10 day pass for the US. We were not to tarry longer.
Kirk’s car broke down before Strawberry Mountain Colorado. He called on his dad who was a great guy like mine to help him with the problem .We parted there and hitched a ride with a crazy guy in a truck. He hadn’t intended to go to the festival but decide on doing so after we shared his mighty fine weed. A half day before Strawberry Mountain we got caught up in the amazing gathering of people. I’d later have this same experience when I drove my Harley into Sturges. All these people going to the same place, converging in the thousands, like birds flocking.
There was no electricity at the Music Festival. Everyone had to climb the mountain with what was on their back. We had our packs which we’d bought for Europe and our tent and were well prepared. Not like others. It wasn’t that hard a climb and it ended on the most magnificent basin plateau. Tents as far as the eye could see. Lots of campfires and communing. Tie dye and macrame.
I remember looking for Peyote but not finding any. We had LSD from our friend in Rochdale. We did hits of white lighting. We were at the centre of the centre. Far out man. People were playing acoustic guitar and singing.
I’d actually dropped my first acid at the Lead Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly Concert in Winnipeg that summer before I met Baiba. A girl gave it to me , another dancer. She and her black friend brought me with them when Jimmy Page called us all to join him on stage as his dancers. It was a wild night. I think I’ve written about it elsewhere. I ended up in the Winnipeg Free Press. Mud sliding. At the point the picture was taken and I had maximal propulsion and elevation I remember I thought I was Snoopy Chasing the Red Baron before I crash landed.
My favourite memory of Strawberry Mountain was getting this idea to make love to the most beautiful girl ever in this high grass at the side of the mountain. A complete unique and original idea. This high grass grew all along there so we would be hidden. I thought I was really smart to think of making love to Baiba there. Only when I looked to the side in the middle of love making I saw hundreds of bums bouncing up and down. It turned out everyone of us hippies thought making love in high grass on the side of a mountain looking out at snow capped mountains would be super cool. The entertainment continued after we’d finished and it was bouncing buttocks in a kind of volley fire with new groups starting up while others petered out. I still have that wonderful image enshrined in my mind.
There was also a fat sheriff who’d ridden a palomino pony up another trail. He was sitting on his horse there with an instamatic camera taking pictures as evidence of all the licentious love making going on. I’m convinced my buttocks remain in some American police file to this day.
This was around the time Arlo Guthrie wrote Alice’s Restaurant. He was in jail for littering. People forget how uptight the adults were. Really. They’d been in WWII , had race riots and Nuclear stand offs,, Communists spies had invaded and stolen the nuclear secrets, moles were everywhere, the Vietnam War was raging. Adults were wound up real tight and drinking way too much jack Daniels. Not that our carrying on helped but it’s often forgotten that the adults of the day were bat shit crazy which they thought we were and we were but we kind of knew we were and they didn’t. One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest would come out a few years later and catch some of the flavour of the day.
I’d later meet the brightest psychiatrists and an occasional psychotic one. One had done experiments on kids giving them LSD and observing them with a clip board in the locked quiet room believing that his refusal to ‘interact’ with them controlled the experiment. « They all went psychotic and paranoid. » The asshole didn’t have a clue that he caused them all to have ‘bad trips’ . He was probably the freakiest psychiatrist I’d meet. Though I met some pretty odd ones over the years, very much in the minority. Psychiatrists in my experience except the greedy ones were a pretty good lot. Some became my best friends.
Kirk joined up with us on Strawberry Mountain. He was not at all into drugs but got into the Hurly Gurly dancing with the then ‘boy guru’ crowd and be hooked. That’s when hhis discipleship began. My friend the holy man. We left him ‘stoned’ on love, in his case, ‘agape’ , while I was definitely stoned on Baiba. She was love incarnate. Venus. Aphrodite. Joy, Beauty, Wisdom enshrined..
We hitchiked on to San Francisco getting these ‘ticket’s’ from the police telling us not to hitch hike. But that was just Colorado. One one state outlawed hitch hiking and pretty soon we escaped, by hitchiking, to the next state that allowed hitchhiking . It was late at night. We put up our pup tent in the ditch. Baiba and I worke to lights and guns pointed in our face. Our tent had ocasioned a polic investigation, We showed them our passports where I’d been keeping all the no hitch hiking citations. They flutter to the ground and showed the officer we were definitely anti socials. They said we had to take down the tent and move along. So we hiked out of there at night tired as can be only to catch a ride west in the wee hours.
Kris Kristoffenson had released Me and Bobby McGee made famous by Janis Joplin. . I had a mouth harp and Baiba made Jane Fonda look butch. We sang Bobby McGee as we waited for rides on the side of the road. I was also singing a song Jon had taught me a lot. « It’s a long and dusty road with a hot and heavy load and the people that I meet ain’t always kind, some are bad and some are good and some have done the best they could and some have tried to ease my weary mind’.
We walked and talked and got rides.
In San Francisco the hippies closed down the city. There were tens of thousands of us. We’d come from Straw berry Mountain. Some other festival had emptied. Most had just come for the Summer of Love. It had happened and then just kept happening. We were walking through the streets a thousand strong. We were dancing. »dancing in the streets ». I had « Love « and « Peace » painted on my face and Baiba had the same on hers. IT was awesome. Old now I’d hate the traffic jams and the crowds. Not then. We were young and self centered and all felt at the middle of a huge wind change.
The year before the song « If in you’re going to San Francisco be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.’had moved us all. Now we were Herat singing that song all together. We’d all come to San Francisco from all over the US and Canada. All over the world. We met people from Japan and Europe and Africa. We all were just ‘dancing in the streets’. Really. It’s hard to imagine. I’m old but we were there. Grateful Dead and Gracie Slick and Baba Ram Dass days. Music everywhere. No traffic moving because the streets were wall to wall with hippies, smoking dope, drinking wine and dancing in the streets.
I don’t know how we left San Francisco. Probably the limit of our time was coming up and we were afraid to be arrested. The song fest was starting in Vancouver and Baiba said it was the Latvian Love In thing. I wanted to be with her and singing with thousands of people sounded ‘groovy’ « Groovy’ was a word we actually used back then. Kirk and I would walk around singing ‘feeling groovy’ . I’d tell Baiba she was really ‘groovy’. She’d smile. It was groovy to be called groovy.
The song festival in Vancouver was a phenomena. Thousands of Latvians singing. Beautiful harmony. I didnt know the words but the patriotism and uplifting spiritual revival songs with costumes and all these beautiful Latvian men and women and young people and old was fantastic.
Maija’s friend lived in Burnaby and we stayed with them. The green of Burnaby was unbelievable and I’d return here again and again attracted by the lush emerald beauty of the rain forest city.
After that we flew to London. So in love. So crazy.
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