The Punch Line was then only two thirds intact: in the absence of Hector "Toe" Blake, who retired in 1948, Maurice "The Rocket" Richard and Elmer Lach were skating on a line with Floyd In 1950, nos glorieux could already deploy a formidable defense corps, That was the last year Bill Durnan, five times winner of the Vezina trophy, best goalie in the National Hockey League, would mind the nets for my beloved Montreal Canadiens. I came of age envying their expatriateĪdventures and, as a consequence, made a serious decision in 1950.Īh, 1950. In my bedroom, where the radiator sizzled and knocked through the night, I eventually stumbled on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Gertie and Alice, as well as our own Morley Callaghan. Sheets frozen rock-hard on backyardĬlotheslines. I remember snowbanks five feet high, winding outside staircases that had to be shoveled in the subzero cold, and, in days long before snow tires, the rattle of passing cars and trucks, their wheels encased in chains. A neighborhood that had elected the only Communist (Fred Rose) ever to serve as a member of Parliament, produced a couple of decent club fighters (Louis Alter, Maxie Berger), the obligatory number of doctors and dentists,Ī celebrated gambler-cum-casino-owner, more cutthroat lawyers than needed, sundry schoolteachers and shmata millionaires, a few rabbis, and at least one suspected murderer. Moto" novel, selling for twenty-five cents at the time in Jack and Moe's Barbershop, corner of Park Avenue and Laurier in the heart of Montreal's old working-class Jewish quarter, where
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Setting my Mickey Mouse wristwatch on our kitchen table with the checkered linoleum cloth, I would zip through the piece in question in, say, four minutes and three seconds, and consider myself an intellectual.
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or Conrad's The Secret Agent, but the old Liberty magazine, which prefaced each of its articles with a headnote saying how long it would take to read it: say, five minutes and thirty-five seconds. At bottom, I am obliged to acknowledge, with a nod to Clara, the baseness of my soul. I was a voracious reader, but you would be mistaken if you took that as evidence of my quality. Cyr, or some other exotic dancer, who would bring her act to a drum-throbbing climax with a thrillingįlash of bare tit, in days long before lap-dancers had become the norm in Montreal. Man, tipping my straw boater to the good folks in the balcony as I fluttered offstage in my taps, yielding to Peaches, Ann Corio, Lili St. Had no artistic pretensions whatsoever, unless you count my fantasy of becoming a music hall song-and-dance The Mount Royal Billiards Academy than in classes, playing snooker with Duddy Kravitz. I had barely squeezed through high school, having invested more time at the tables of I hadn't won awards at McGill, like Terry, or been to Harvard or Columbia, like some of the others. Clara, who now enjoys posthumous fame as a feminist icon, beaten on the anvil of male chauvinist insentience.
But fame did find several of my bunch: the driven Leo Bishinsky Cedric Richardson, albeit under another Wrigley's big giver never caught up with me. The shill, according to report, would surprise you on the street to reward you with a crisp newĭollar bill, provided you had a Wrigley's chewing-gum wrapper in your pocket. Was possible-fame, adoring bimbos, and fortune lying in wait around the corner, just like that legendary Wrigley's shill of my boyhood. Poor Terry was no more than tolerated by my bunch, a pride of impecunious, horny young writers awash in rejection slips, yet ostensibly confident that everything Terry McIver and I, both Montrealers born and bred, were in Paris together in the early fifties. Terry's sound of two hands clapping, Of Time and Fevers, will shortly be launched by The Group (sorry, the group), a government-subsidized small press, rooted in Toronto, that also publishes a monthly journal, the good earth, printed
Barney Panofsky's troika, the nature of my friendship with Boogie, and, of course, the scandal I will carry to my grave like a humpback. To come clean, I'm starting on this shambles that is the true story of my wasted life (violating a solemn pledge, scribbling a first book at my advanced age), as a riposte to the scurrilousĬharges Terry McIver has made in his forthcoming autobiography: about me, my three wives, a.k.a.