ASPIRATION: 23 How I Learned to Laugh

X marks the divide between the Canadian Shield (R) and the Prairies (L)

A wonderful thing about laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.

- John Cleese

Some eight hours later, I peered earthward from my window to glimpse the vast, frozen sea of the Canadian Prairies, now emerging beyond the western edge of the great Cambrian Shield. Down there now was the snowbound expanse of Manitoba, criss-crossed by straight and level roads far apart that just faded into the distance. As my plane came down, the city of Winnipeg climbed into sight: the angled roofs of its dwellings recalling children’s models of houses, each lord of its own snowy domain, the streets, black in contrast to the white glow of the surrounding snow, where models of cars crawled along slowly, trailing tails of vapour, and then the conglomeration of earnest, modest blocks downtown.

Winnipeg, Nov 29, 2014

I was struck by a kind of wonder that such a remote and undistinguished place could still exist after my encounter with the intense diversity of Europe. The city looked exactly like it had done the day that I had left it more than a year and a half before, but it had changed greatly in my estimation. This was no more the only city that I knew. Here was space, yes, and the sense of freedom that space entails. Here was progress too, and the opportunities it offered, unfettered by ancient ways. But old Europe, old, crowded, tradition-bound, history-ridden Europe, was swarming with a human warmth and vitality – especially in the south – that made my old familiar Winnipeg seem almost infirm. How could I ever be content with it again?

McDonnell Douglas DC-8 1960s

My mother and stepfather awaited me at the airport, as I had informed them of my return.

Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, Dec 28, 2000, Temperature about -28

When I arrived at the family home, a wistful business took place that stressed how my nineteen-month absence had somehow estranged me, for I was saddened to see that our dog, Buttons, failed to respond when I called her to me. She’d forgotten all about me, it seemed, and so, over the Christmas period we had to get acquainted again.

Winnipeg, Christmas, 1960s

Later, my brother Ian arrived bearing a briefcase and wearing a sweatshirt marked with a scholarly emblem and the words ‘United College’. His hair was short in the fifties fashion, as mine had been when I left, but in the interval I had allowed mine to grow longer following the style of the Beatles. He was visibly proud to be attending university now, and told me all about his courses, while exhibiting some of his textbooks. I was not much of a reader at that time, but it was now my aim to rectify that defect, such that my attention was swiftly arrested by a couple of books on philosophy. I leafed through them during the next few weeks and also through his books on political science.

In the New Year, I found a job at Inter-Provincial Chemical Cooperatives, a firm on Marion Street in St. Boniface engaged in the making of fertilisers and other farming products. Arriving for work each morning, I had to get garbed in a boiler suit, Wellington boots, rubber gloves, hardhat, goggles and mask as a preliminary to labouring away the day packing brown gallon bottles of some chemical concoction into cardboard boxes, four to a box. It was unpleasant to have to dress like an actor in a science fiction film and then sweat with your face covered with rubber for an eight-hour shift, but the modest earnings I got from the job would help pay back the loan from my brother.

Another job I recall involved getting swaddled in the same togs and taking up an axe to break open a quantity of cardboard cylinders containing some sort of yellow rock-solid substance and chop it into chunks ready for dumping into the big vats where the agricultural witches’ brews were prepared for sale to farmers. That was hard work and hot work too, but happily you had no one harassing you to work harder.

One day, I remember being pleasingly freed from mask and goggles and invited outside to make one of a little band tramping with axes over our shoulders through a sunny field of virgin snow to a round white mound about twelve feet high at the back of the plant. Following instructions, we trudged to the top under a cold blue sky and then our boss made use of the broom he’d brought along to whisk away some snow at the summit and uncover a number of bulging hempen sacks imprisoned in milky ice. We were standing on a great heap of them.

“Right,” he said, “I want some of these inside.”

We hacked at the glassy shackles and tore the sacks from their frozen beds before bearing them downhill on our shoulders like dwarfs with a hoard of gold.

But however energetic I was expected to be at work, at home the dynamic intoxications of the past year and a half now gave way to a species of lassitude or apathy, or maybe it was just a kind of rare contentment I’d never felt before. After the day’s work I’d spend the evenings in my room reading my brother’s books or trying to play his guitar. I’d quite abandoned the habit of watching television. On weekends Ian went off to see his girlfriend and the friends he’d made since his admission to United College and once he asked me if I wished to come along and meet them. I declined.

The date of March 4^th, 1966, attained notoriety in the annals of Winnipeg meteorological history as a day when one of the heaviest snowstorms ever recorded there began. Towards the end of my shift at work, I peered through a window to see the blizzard at its height. The road outside had just vanished under a heavy white blanket and the air was whizzing with flying snow. There was no venturing out there, not for the time being anyway, and nobody would be arriving either, so the present gang of men worked another shift through the night.

The storm blew itself out before morning, and when I peered outside in the light of a new day, it was to gaze upon a changed landscape. Predominantly it was a still landscape, where nothing moved, not a single car, not a solitary human being, a soundless landscape, where the whirr of civilisation had completely ceased, and mostly it was a ghostly landscape, where things had lost their familiar shapes and everything was smothered in colossal heaps of snow.

Normally I would get a lift with a workmate to my parents’ house, which was fairly close at hand, or take a bus, but no cars or buses would be running anywhere in the city until the snowploughs had been mobilised to clear the streets. Thus I trudged into that magical landscape to tramp the two miles or more home. However, I failed to make much headway in the roadway, because the banks on either side produced by past ploughings made of it a kind of cutting that was now half-filled with crisp new snow. In the end, I found it practicable to scale one of those white dykes and wade along the light frosting on top that cloaked the hard-packed snow below.

Above: Photos of the blizzard

They say that 1400 people were trapped that evening in Eaton’s, the city’s largest department store, and had to bed down there on the floor for the night.

Sleepers at Eaton's

One morning when I arrived for my shift, the boss gathered the workers together and asked each in turn what education he'd had. After my workmates had revealed that they were all high school drop-outs to a man, it was with a touch of pride that I replied I’d completed Grade XII. I was asked then if I wanted to work in the office for a while, since the firm’s sole clerk was behind with the company’s accounts. When I agreed, I was led into a cramped annex lined with files and introduced to the company’s sole clerk, George, who was now informed he had a helper.

It took George just a couple of moments to show me how to enter transactions in a ledger, calculate totals and file invoices away. Hey! How easy this work was, compared to sweating away on the plant floor! And how wonderful it was to work unencumbered by goggles and mask and Wellington boots! I reflected now how I could have had a job like George’s any time I’d liked. But I hadn’t liked. What did I really want anyway? Maybe the murk obscuring that question would begin to shift in the dawning rays of a university education.

If I ever stood in that dawn! For although my claim to a Grade XII education was no lie, I hadn’t actually attained matriculation, because I had failed to gain a pass in English Literature, a discipline historically troublesome to me. Still, if I were refused admission at the beginning of the academic year in September, I meant to study the subject at night school and, after passing an examination in it, apply to attend United College in the following September.

Well, I must say, you needed no time and motion study to understand why George was so far behind with his work: he was lazy. In fact he became lazier still when I began to work with him, for he much preferred talk to work. Well, you couldn’t blame him really. His job was murderously monotonous.

But several days of this suspended animation infected me with a similar lethargy, for I quickly developed a taste for lounging in a seat and jawing with George instead of grinding silently away like a galley slave on the factory floor. Just one tormenting thought disfigured this idyll: when order was restored to the firm’s accounts, I would be condemned again to the hell of that factory floor and made to sweat again with the rest of the empty-headed devils there – and made to look like them too! So I worked more slowly. I think I managed to milk that accounting cow for a fortnight before condemnation again to industrial perdition.

Whether it was due to some new dissatisfaction with my new-old life, or to some thawing wind of spring, there came a day when I felt restless again. What opportunities for romance were open to me now? I mused. Fay Turner was available I knew. She was a girl in our old street I had been shyly sweet on when I was about thirteen. She’d grown up and married a Finn quite young, but was now divorced, according to my mother, who had recently re-established contact with her mother, who’d passed a message from Fay. Why didn’t I ring her up and take her out for a beer? I didn’t. For one thing my former fumblings with the fair sex presaged little success with a woman lately coupled in marriage, and for another I thought she’d just be looking for a another husband.

There was still Judy Taylor, that’s true, but how could you get romantic with a girl you couldn’t even put your arms around? No – pointless. Then there was Ann. I’d been in touch with my friend Larry since my return and learned that he’d broken up with her, but what she looked like exactly, I couldn’t recall. It was a long time since I’d seen her. However, I remembered her as a very pleasant girl, always smiling and tall too. I would take a chance.

In the exchange of news we pursued on the phone, she told me she was now going to university. Yes, she would be pleased to see me again, and we decided in favour of seeing a film. But my first sight of her confirmed her lack of magnetism for me. Not only was she plain, but her past pleasantness had all but evaporated. Apparently she now aspired to a ‘sophisticated’ demeanour. She was cadaverously thin now and pale and she carried a black bag which she swung carelessly in long strides, wearing a long black dress, black boots and black fishnet stockings! – And it wasn’t even Halloween. We talked little that evening and I never saw her again.

One day when Ian and I were buying a couple of things in the Bay, the other big Winnipeg department store, we met a friend of his from university that he introduced as Jim Smith. Seeking a place to sit down for a chat and a coffee, we rode the escalator to the top floor and entered the ‘Paddlewheel’, a cafeteria featuring a model paddlewheel revolving in a foot of water.

Like ourselves, Jim hailed from the North End, and as he’d learned I’d just come back from Europe, he began probing me about my time there. I was extremely pleased to convey a travellers’ tale or two, for I got small opportunity to air them generally. Most Winnipegers, I’d decided, were distinctly indifferent, for Europe was very far away and very little related to life in Manitoba. Despite its acne scars, Jim’s face looked very boyish, but the surpassing thing about him was that he still retained his boyish curiosity about things.

On the following weekend, I chose to end my social isolation by joining my brother on a visit to meet his friends. To my surprise, we arrived outside a run-down two-storey house at 555 Broadway Avenue, right downtown. Entering without knocking, we climbed a creaky staircase to a musty roost above where we ran into Jim and his dark-complexioned companion, Wayne, who was at that moment chewing a piece of fishing line with an air of affected imperturbability. Apparently, Wayne, whose eastern European features reminded you a little of the film actor Anthony Quinn, was an old friend of Jim’s from the North End. He was working as a bell hop at the Marlborough Hotel and was now co-tenanting this ..er.. residence with him.

Later, a tall, thin chap with red hair and freckles entered. There was no ceremony here. Visitors just appeared in the open doorway. This one Ian introduced as Larry Hoffman, a colleague of his from the Provost Militia Regiment he belonged to. Larry had in fact already completed a Mathematics degree at the University of Manitoba and was working in the Great West Life Assurance offices on Osborne Street just opposite the Legislative Building. A flower among weeds on account of his middle-class background, he was distinguished by his quick wit and open-handed generosity.

Soon, another figure appeared in the doorway, grinning. This was Fred Baryluk, who lived downstairs with his girlfriend Penny – a practice completely unheard of in Winnipeg at that date – and worked for the C.P.R. There were other arrivals too, though I’m no longer sure exactly who they were: Wayne’s girlfriend Marilyn, probably among them and Penny as well.

Now some money was collected and someone went out for beer (Larry likely). When we’d consumed a bottle or two, Jim and Fred got out their guitars and led a frenzied singsong. In the sixties, every young fellow aspired to play the guitar. They played mostly folksy stuff by the Kingston Trio, humorous ballads like ‘Bad Man’s Blunder’, the favourite here.

Fred and Jim throttled the necks of their guitars and slashed at the strings while half a dozen voices or more shattered the air with:

"Well, early one evenin' I was roamin’ around, got to feelin’ kinda mean an’ shot a depedy down!"

I sat mum watching this exhibition, a little shamefaced at being the sole spectator at this extravaganza. When they’d exhausted their stock of songs someone put a record on and the bunch erupted into dancing wildly and shrieking the lyrics of a pop song.

That struck me as a bit silly. Half were not even matched with a female, but all were bouncing about to the musical beat and wailing insanely. Nobody ever behaved like that in staid old

England

. Dancing there seemed merely a means of meeting members of the opposite sex, or spending time with them. Nobody ever expected to enjoy it – at least not the males! I mean, people might enjoy the setting, the atmosphere, the music, the company of others maybe, but the dancing itself, the mere movement of the body? No. Far less did they – could they! – ever forget themselves to that extent.

And neither could I.

Plainly, Jim was the guiding spirit driving this exhibition. He flung himself into the binge with a primeval zeal, showing small trace of shame or self-consciousness. The others held a little of themselves back, I thought, but here was I, a mute witness, in frozen immobility and isolation.

“Why don’t you get up and dance, Colin?” Jim urged.

“No, I’m okay here,” I replied, smiling, tightly clutching my beer glass.

Why wouldn’t I get up? I asked myself. This was just harmless fun, surely. No – I couldn’t. What? Just get up and start capering about the place like a zany? Never! I’d feel silly and everyone would be watching me!

The romping went on and on, while I sat rigidly sipping my drink. Why was I feeling ashamed? I asked myself. I was not the one frisking about like an idiot! Now and again there was the same urge from Jim. C’mon, Colin, why don’t you get up and join the fun?

The drink was now beginning to surge in my head, breaking down my restraint. Why didn’t I get up? I asked myself yet again. The whole tribe of them was hopping about like Cossacks watching a horse race. Why did I have to be such a prig? The posture of abstaining saint bearing mute witness to a game of leapfrog was beginning to seem scarcely more tolerable than embracing all this friskiness outright.

Should I or shouldn’t I…? No! The shame of it! …But was it any better to sit here like a bronze idol four-square in the centre of this spree? At last the tide of collective feeling came streaming in and I went under. My face flushed, I thrust myself to my feet and set my frame a-jerking. But that failed to erase my shame. I now felt like a donkey that had strayed in from the street and trotted up the stairs to join the fun. Surely the whole party was sniggering at my asinine kick-ups – if not my long ears!

Not so. Sly looks I took at my new comrades showed not much more than concentration on their own fun, or at most a slight relief now that this small obstacle in the way of it was gone. In a strange way a barrier in my own path had been knocked down too. For from that time onward I felt a kind of kinship with these people. Not only did I never again feel any shame before them, but also I avidly learned the words to all the songs they sang and abandoned myself to their revels with a frenzy only a very repressed young man could be capable of.

More than that, I’d found a spiritual home. For all my wanderings in the world so far, I’d never met anyone aspiring to any independence of spirit, anyone that questioned in any way the norms of human conduct. But here all conventional values were under attack: any kind of pretence, for instance, or piety, any dullness or artificiality, any solemnity or sentimentality or excessive refinement of expression, any conformity with accepted ideas or received opinion, any practice of self-repression, empty forms of etiquette, etcetera.

The chosen weapons were sarcasm, ridicule and a relentless pursuit of logic. Why? Why? was always the battle cry. The most mortal venom was reserved for flatterers, or ‘brown-nosers’ as they were contemptuously labelled in this little sect. Fred was the bellwether here. After all, hadn’t he flouted the sacred bond of marriage by openly living with his girlfriend?

The qualities to be lauded, on the contrary, were frankness, naturalness, wit, humour, spontaneity, honesty and calling a spade a spade even to the point of voicing one’s views in the crudest of terms. All this was honoured, but what was treasured above all was the pure, sparkling, laughing water of life, drawn from the deepest wells of our humanity. Admittedly an awful lot of beer had to be consumed to get the buckets moving, but in this little anti-society of ours the notion that a greater harvest was to be reaped from life by permitting the instincts a measure of expression than by merely subjecting them to a grievous taming – this eminently sensible idea had gained a little footing here.

As open house was uninterruptedly held at 555 Broadway, many were those who found their way up its creaking stairs to this shrine of life. Some, shocked at what they saw and heard, disappeared quickly and never came back. Others, powerless to light any fire within themselves, came again and again to be warmed in the blaze so readily enkindled there at the cost of a couple of bucks’ worth of beer. Others still were constitutionally unable to stand the pace.

One such I nicknamed ‘the hero’. A goose that had waddled away from its pond, he tried to create a place for himself amongst this troop of monkeys, cockily calling Jim ‘Jimbo’, for instance, and boasting openly about the volume of beer he could drink. I don’t know what kind of devil it was that tempted me to bag this swaggering duck, but I kept him fed with plenty of beer and feigned amazement at his capacity for alcohol.

“What a hero!” I exclaimed again and again, taking sly looks at the others. “Just look at how much he can drink!”

The more his vanity was puffed up, the more he drank, so that in the end he vomited on himself and passed out. He never came again.

555 Broadway is long gone, but this is where it used to be

But while my social life was in the ascendant, my family life was in decline. Despite the fact that I was now a fully-grown man who’d travelled widely and worked at various jobs, my mother persisted in treating me as though I were still a child. Still a child herself really for all her years, she knew nothing at all about those little arts of persuasion so necessary in adult life. If you did something she didn’t like – like leaving your shoes in an inconvenient place, for instance – calm discussion of the matter was out of the question. She started carping at once. If that didn’t have the desired effect – complete capitulation, that is – she’d get my stepfather to essay a little male intimidation. But as he was somewhat shorter than me in height and significantly shorter in vocabulary, the required result was still not forthcoming. Then she’d stew in silence and resentment for several days.

One day – I think it may have been a Tuesday in April – she said to me – or rather he bawled at me, while she worked the strings: “If you don’t like the way things are run around here, you’d better get out!”

“Right, I will!” I threw back.

All this was just another storm in a teacup, I decided, for it had all happened before. My stepfather promptly forgot the matter, as was his wont, and my mother withdrew into broodiness. It would all be forgotten in a few days and things would get back to normal. However, I took a precaution. As it happened, one of my workmates was living alone at the time in an old house downtown on Hargrave Street and I knew he was looking for someone to share the rent with. I told him that I might be forced to leave home soon. If so, could I come and join him? He said I could.

On the Friday night my mother began scratching at the sore again. At the height of the argument she taunted:

“Anyway, I thought you were leaving?”

“Right,” I hissed, “I will – tomorrow.”

This time I meant it. Next day I gathered my things together and moved out down to 35 Hargrave Street just off Broadway Boulevard.

The full significance of this episode occurred to me only when I came to write of it. The question I asked myself now was: didn’t my mother’s present conduct make plain the meaning of her warning of three years ago when she’d found that packet of condoms in my bedroom? I’d better not have been using them ‘on’ Suzanne, she’d said at the time. Wasn’t the implicit threat that if I were somehow found to be using them I would be thrown out of the house, just as I was thrown out of my grandmother’s house when she’d found them in my suitcase?

One Friday in April I emerged from the sorcerer’s workshop I’d been toiling in all winter to find that the sun was shining warmly in a clear blue sky and the snow was melting all around. The sap of life was rising everywhere again and it seemed madness to remain captive in a windowless, striplit prison of a place amongst vats of acids, deaf to the spirit of the earth’s resurrection, when the door to this cage simply hung open. By now I had not only paid back the loan from my brother but also put by a sum of money that would see me through several weeks. I had then, strictly speaking, no current need for work. But I had not been nurtured in the Protestant work ethic for nothing. Thus I sensed a stab of guilt when I quit my job at IPCC and surrendered myself to the wonders of the awakening spring.