A bi-focal view: Bean Town and renewal

This bit of memoir was originally written in 2002, and edited in 2009.

 ________________

There have been many catalysts in my life, but Bob R was certainly a major influence on the paths I strode.

Pssst - the photo is me circa in the mid-70s 

In 1974, the calligraphy on my Dalhousie University parchment was probably still wet. Getting that first job is not usually easy and often a disappointment. (Nay-sayers have that part right!) Though I was a voracious reader, sorting letters on the midnight shift at the Post Office was not what I had in mind with a BA in English and Sociology. A mind-numbing black hole - I quit after five months in order to save myself from going postal - a career it was not. (And your suspicions are correct - we did read your magazines and yes, some employees, at least then, were drunk and asleep during the entire shift.) I quit and began almost a year on unemployment insurance; in those days one could quit and still live on pogey - yes, the good ol' days, indeed.

I burst out of the closet that year. My memory is that I went to bed straight, woke up, ruminated about a small party the night before and what feelings were invoked, declared myself gay, dried my eyes, and had tea and toast. There is no value in self-recrimination, and my self-esteem was never an issue. I didn't hate myself, feel sorry for myself, nor want to change.

Coming-out is is the reverse of Invasion of the body snatchers, for one night you go to sleep a husk but awake as your true self. It doesn't take long to make new friends when you're young, gregarious, fairly attractive, and have a gay friend to take you around.  I was just very relieved to start getting on with it.  I have never been overly bothered about being gay, but I was bothered about the mundane issues of day-to-day living such as money and shelter, and worried constantly.

My life took on a picaresque tinge: ribald temptation, exploration, tears and laughter, serial commitment  - everything that an evolution of becoming should be. (And can medical science explain how I lived on cigarettes, coffee, and cheese whiz and still have enough energy to go to the disco? Ah, we could party… but I was just dancin' in the dark and needed something more. Bob saw that need.

Bob was a classical musician and expatriate American, about five years older than myself. We were more sympatico than sexual. He once described me as having a crack in my psyche; some kind of hurt that I couldn't explain. Well, I didn't put too much stock in that as being a Cape Bretoner teaches one that self-pity is self-taught. No one spends as much time worrying and over-analyzing than a newly minted gay man with an undergraduate degree and no full-time job. (When I alluded to not feeling self-recriminations, I did not reject self-examination.) So, the self-analytical intellectual me was in conflict with the blue collar 'just get on with it' common sense element of my personality. I was spending too much time thinking about me, and deriding my economic situation. Regardless, I had one eye on life's absurdities and the other on life's catastrophes.

During the summer and fall of '74, Bob taught me about classical music, about itinerant musicians, about loves lost and found, about integrity, and about creativity. But the lesson he best imparted was to convince or remind me that I had talents, was squandering my energies, and that I was stifled by not being exposed to other cities and other influences.

My apartment lease had run out at year's end, predicating a move to my friend Doug's place.

Bob was concerned with my well-being, as I was spending too much time in limbo at Doug's and not enough time looking after my physical and metaphysical beings. 

Slipping into a funk, unemployed, in debt, living in a borrowed room were simply not conducive to personal growth. My first two 'serious' affairs had ended, and I had only been a 'practicing homosexual' for eight months. (Don't you love that expression 'practicing homosexual'… and there is no diploma for this apprenticeship.)

But being young, wasteful and not a little foolish, I couldn't necessarily correlate my behaviour with situational outcome. Bob, being an older and wiser man (and those five years seemed vast to an ageist young gay-about-town), had no doubt seen all of my behaviour before or behaved in a similar fashion when fresh to the scene. He couldn't rescue me from myself, but he could show me a larger picture outside myself.

Bob planned on taking a violin to Boston for repairs, and he was willing to drive thirteen hours to get there. He offered to take me to Boston, and on a side trip to New York. I had little money, so he was offering a subsidized trip. I was astonished, as he had to live thriftily on his musician's earnings. He did a good job of cajoling me, and off we went.

The car (an aging Renault, of all things) got us to Boston, with a few stops for gas and food. (I've had a soft spot for Howard Johnson's ever since.) I didn't drive at the time, so the strain on Bob must have been tremendous. I cannot recall any of our conversations during that trip - I really must have been agog to get out of town and not a little self-absorbed.

We arrived in Boston on St. Patrick's Day 1975 - just how wonderful is that? The way the high towers loomed up over the interchanges just left me speechless, as I had never been in a city with so many towers. Bob navigated the labyrinthine Boston traffic familiar to him from his past, and got us to his friend's rent-controlled, fifth-floor walk-up in a run-down part of the city. But it was heaven to me to be away and in such an interesting place that juxtaposed the academic with the blue collar. In that way, it is like a very big Halifax.

We stayed in Boston a week, and Bob showed me many of his favourite places, including the Harvard Co-op, Filene's bargain basement, the Prudential tower, the Public Library, and numerous other attractions. I even saw Last Tango in Paris (still banned in Nova Scotia at that time - but oddly not banned in Boston), on a double bill with Streetcar Named Desire. It was jarring to see Brando age twenty-five years between reels. I felt terribly grown-up seeing that naughty movie that my friends back home didn't have access to.

Bob also took me to the other Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the cruise bar called Sporters. Seems I was a hit in most of Boston's bars, but then again, a 23-year old gay ego can see interest where interest may not be. Bob looked after me and Mother needn't have worried that I would be murdered or spirited away against my will.

Bob also paid for Amtrak tickets to New York, wherein we spent a weekend at his friend Merrill's place. Merrill was honest to God in show business, being a producer/director at CBS. Merrill graciously put us up in his apartment. New York was a dream given form, as being in New York was a goal from the first time I saw all those high towers on TV.  Among many attractions, I got to the Empire State Building, Radio City Music Hall, Greenwich Village, but sadly, no time for the Statue of Liberty. Even now, whenever I travel, I want to see the iconic attractions. When in Australia, it was the Sydney Opera House; when in Kyoto, it was the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. I don't spend my type hiking, skiing, nor back-packing - I spend my vacation eating, drinking and ruminating.

Staying with Merrill in Manhattan had distinct advantages, as he was a bona fide television hyphenate, a director-and-producer. A week earlier I had been eating muffins in a Halifax coffee shop, and here I was, one of many of Merrill's guests having dinner with Pierre Boulez in the CBS dining room. This was very heady stuff for an unemployed guy from Halifax. From the sublime to the mundane - Merrill also had the first VCR and Mr. Coffee that I ever saw - I've been addicted to those gadgets ever since.

Shortly after the return to Boston by Amtrak, we drove back to Halifax. After getting us through New England, the Renault had to be abandoned in Moncton, as it expended its life force on catching fire rather than reaching Halifax. We arrived home by train the next day, (also my first train trip), tired but satiated. What else could one want from a trip? 

Education, entertainment and excitement, with a dash of glamour tossed into the mix.

Aside from those elements, the fallout was far more riveting than that. Not to get all Robert Frostian here, but there are junctures in one's life. I had reached a nexus upon which the rest of my life touched. The core element of the trip was that Bob could see that I needed a kick-start to the rest of my life. Previously, I lived my life shaken but not stirred, and now I could be stirred and not shaken.

Well, things did start to change, or should I say that I changed things. I was renewed and now seemed to have a willingness to try new things. Within six weeks of returning from the trip, I sold most of what I owned, and headed for Toronto with Doug. (Leaving the Maritimes for Toronto is almost a rite of passage in the Maritimes and is known as goin' down the road.) While we bounced from friends' apartments in Toronto to friends' apartments in Ottawa (not such a big change after all), and I only stayed away for good for barely a month, there was an epiphanic change in me that transcended the return to Halifax.

Back in Halifax, I detoured as a disc jockey in a pseudo-gay lounge (in those days, there was still a degree of duplicity in clubs), then the miraculous happened - I got a full-time job in Classic's Bookshop. (Working in a bookstore was a kind of goal of mine, and this became  the real start to the rest of my life.) Now, while the money was border-line poverty level, it was the right job at the right time for me. Here I am, 34 years later, back in Halifax semi-retired from a successful (award-winning, but that's another story) college bookstore management and senior administration career, and now a hyphenate in my own right: writer-manager-night school instructor. I lived a very good life in Vancouver for close to 30 years. Ted and I have been together for over 25 years; I've earned an MBA and teaching diploma, and am long-retired from both smoking and disco-dancing.

While Bob and I have lost personal touch, I've heard that he lives in Toronto and still looks terrific. I wonder if he thinks about that long-ago trip to Boston and New York. But as Bob is a giver rather than a taker, it is likely just one in a long stream of kindnesses, and he would have no idea how truly inspirational and life-altering that excursion actually was.

...Michael de Breton... revised September 2009