3: The First Page of My Life

The Teenage Folksinger photographed 
behind an unknown girl

  
        "Firecrackers and kids are out of control, it is dusk, Victoria Day 1957; and the artist as a young boy seeks refuge in a rusty Nash behind the yellow brick bungalow." So begins my life story, which I began documenting on June 15, 1975: "Ten minutes ago; struck with the sudden urge to write an epic novel, I dashed with typewriter into the sunny backyard of my youth, only to stare at this blank paper radiating with white gold."

        
            My father was born in a French Canadian village called Field, a sawmill town not far away from Calendar, where the Dionne Quintuplets were on display. My real grandfather died when my dad was four, of a kidney failure, and my grandmother, following an Old Testament custom married her brother in law. She was still cooking on a wood stove when I last saw her in the summer of 1979. I mentioned her in a song for my father called, The Ballad of Fern Deslauriers.

The Ballad of Fern Deslauriers

My father was born in a town called field
And that's about the size of it
Way up in the French Canadian Shield
You should hear all the lies of it

He had a job taking a cow to pasture
And carrying water up a hill
One day the cow met a cow-catcher
It just stood there stupid and still

He used to dive off the bridge through the logs
Once there were no holes anywhere
He had to swim three miles (just like a frog)
Before he could come up for air

He jumped off the roof with an umbrella
It inverted and down he slid
Waited for a rainy day (the clever fella)
Said, "Hey ma, look what the wind did!"

O the cruel winter wind like a knife did slice
The snowdrifts piled o'er your head
The water in a glass had frozen to ice
The morning they found poor grandpa dead

O they couldn't dig a hole anywhere
So they stored him in a little brick shack
Grandma said "At least he'll be warmer there
Then he was in that house out back"


              Every summer my dad would pack the family into a dark green 1953 Pontiac and drive the 262 miles north to Field. There were blueberries growing at the base of the cross that overlooked the village and Kim and I would be there, banging rocks and screaming to hear our echoes across the valley. When we got back, past the swamp with the rusted tow trucks and my grandmother would be waiting for us. “The Priest called me about you kids.” When my step-grandfather died, it was wintertime and they had to store him in a little brick shack until the spring thaw. Grandma said, “At least he'll be warmer there then he was in that house out back.”
             My Father’s first job was to carry buckets of water from the well, and to take a cow across the tracks to pasture. He was fifteen at the time and made enough to buy his first suit. Once while taking a cow across the tracks the cow met a cowcatcher. My dad used to jump off the roof three stories up with an umbrella parachute, but it turned inside out. He waited for a stormy day to bring it to his mother's attention. Another time he allegedly dove off the bridge and swam beneath the logs that were perpetually jammed up, almost drowning having difficulty finding a hole through the logs.
             I recall seeing a snake that had been run over by a car in front of my grandmother's house. The tires had sliced the snake in half, so that a frog that had just been eaten could hop out.
             On the weekends my father used to get inebriated and would sit on the veranda in the warm weather telling tall tales about how he and his buddies had rigged up a huge slingshot between two trees with rubber inner tubes. They would shoot 2 x 4's across the river and he would say there was a man building a house across the river who would thank God for delivering his lumber.
             Perhaps the inspiration for that story came from my father's work at Goodyear, where he was a tireless worker. He commuted to the plant in New Toronto in a light green 1956 Buick, which he personally repaired by bolting sheet metal over the rust spots, finishing it up with green house paint. It was tough working at Goodyear, so tough that if an employee lost a quarter in a soda machine the machine would get welded to the rafters. Apparently one soda machine had fallen from the rafters, and my father tried to catch it with his bare hands. Luckily he missed it.

          
It was during the Second World War that my parents met each other, on Easter Sunday 1943. My father was stationed near London loading bombs on planes. My mother's father worked for a moving company and did a Soft Shoe vaudeville routine under the name Eddie Kent.
             At first my mother hated living in Canada. She was a monarchist and mostly a teetotaler who kept a daily log of her activities: March 27, 1976: “Thirty-one years ago today I left dear England to come to Canada. What a trying time we have had. Seven children, a hurricane fire, problems with Bob, Kim and Danny, and also a murder trial for the fire death of Michael, (my mother's sister) Molly's baby who perished in a fire in their home in Long Branch in 1952, the fire being set by their landlord, for insurance money, but he was acquitted for lack of evidence.”
             In 1966 ma started working as a lady matron at the Brown Street jail, which was conveniently located two blocks away. I used to make a sad face and say, “My mother's in jail,” then I'd smile and say, “Ya, she works there.” My father was the breadwinner and there was always food on the table; he wasn't enthused about ma's job. Ma was on her way to higher echelons in the jailhouse when she had to retire in 1974 due to a stroke. 
             Every time I visited Milton ma would show me her latest acquisition from the T. Eaton Company. Her 'purchases' came from a catalog. The latest item was an imitation paper Mache fireplace, which she set up in front of the stairs. I can still smell the imaginary smoke from that imitation fireplace as it seeped up through the staircase. On February 26, 1993 my mother wrote in her journal, “Went to Kmart and Simpson’s at Shoppers World; ordered my French Provincial Set, Bedroom Suite: bed $56.00 nine drawer dresser $160.00; mirror $42.00; two night tables $52.00 each, desk $104.00 corner desk $60.00, chair $28.00. A really foggy night.”  Perhaps the reason ma became such a prominent consumer was probably from being poor, due to having so many unruly children. The T. Eaton Company asked no questions when they replaced the glass dome clock that I had inadvertently destroyed when Kim suddenly ducked out of the path of one of my errant projectiles.

             There were a half dozen or so of us kids, if you counted Rick, who would either claim to be 'adopted' or 'British made, Canadian born.' The war was just winding down when ma boarded the Britannia with six hundred war brides and sailed to Halifax. She was pregnant with Rick, and had Bob with her too.
             It must have been a real shock for her to arrive in that backwards village with the outhouses and all after being reared in London. The way she described the wild lumberjacks who came to meet the locomotive with their plaid flannel jackets and axes carried jauntily over their shoulders — the black sedan that pulled up, the way she had thought the Deslauriers were rich to own such a car, but it actually turned out to be a taxi — sticks in my mind like an axe in a stump. Whenever I mention my background I often allude to my father's ancestors as probably being aristocrats who escaped the guillotine to ultimately set up a chain of mystical lumberjack communes in Canada. When I moved to Toronto and drifted away from my family, I created a theatrical name for myself by putting a space between the “s” and “L” making it “des Lauriers.” I always thought our family name needed some breathing room. 

             Discharged from the Canadian Forces my dad joined ma, that's what I call her, sometime later; and they moved to Timmins, a remote mining town in Northern Ontario. There my father is said to have toiled in the underground. After a few years and a couple more offspring — the so-called twins, Terry and Susan — we moved to Toronto where dad found work. It is my understanding, however, that when Terry and Sue were in the custody of caretakers that a wood stove inadvertently blew up in Terry's face, leaving scars in the form of parentheses on his cheeks. (The baby-sitter's usage of lighter fluid to get the fire going apparently caused the explosion.)
             My father ultimately found work in New Toronto, at Goodyear, the esteemed rubber company after bugging them persistently for a job. And so it was in 1957 that my father broke his back in an industrial accident and had to sell our bungalow in Scarborough and move to Milton, a town 40 miles west of Toronto. I was four when we moved to our very own dilapidated two story frame with the veranda on the side and front; and the apparition of yellow peeling paint that left a bad taste in my mouth. It didn't take long for dad to tear down the barn and paint the house white with pink shutters. A year later Danny was born.
           
             When we first moved to Milton the Soviets had just put a satellite in orbit so we named our cat Sputnik. My father bought a white and gold 1957 Dodge with swept wing tail fins, and it turned out to be a lemon. As men were venturing into space our house was still being heated in a primitive way. We had two coal and wood burning stoves. My dad would shuttle red-hot coals between the stoves, and if a hot coal dropped on the floor it would be the cause of much excitement.

The creek beside my boyhood home was half a foot deep with water spiders sending the faintest ripples through calm reflections. A path ran alongside the creek through the empty lot between Mary and Main Street. One strand of buttercups grew just before the rickety white tennis court clubhouse that straddled the creek. The floors of the clubhouse had rotted through and afforded a pleasant view of the creek.
             I explored the clubhouse with Laurence Whitney, the trapper’s son. Laurence was in my first grade class and we would pretend the clubhouse was an ice-fishing hut where we could fish through the floor. I seldom went inside Laurence's house, after witnessing his father entertain a toddler with a bear trap. He would set it before Laurence's younger brother and activate it with a long red plastic racing car. Mr. Whitney had many German shepherds about the yard and kept an ice-fishing hut in the garage. In grade three Laurence and I would follow the creek with hockey stick spears in search of muskrats. When the ice froze we would slide through the tunnels under the road on our backs. Following the creek we would cut through the fairgrounds.

             Sulkies ran around the track in good weather and sometimes walked the back streets to the Smithies shop. In the summer when we went to the Rotary Park to swim I would stand in the open doorway of the Smithies and watch old man Waldie at the anvil. Up the street from our house, facing Victoria park where we played baseball and war on the old cannon there was a dun yellow house where Mr. Campbell lived. A big pear tree grew in his backyard, and the old man once gave me a pear as I scooted by in my wagon, one knee in and one leg pushing. In front of Mr. Campbell's house was a metal ring in the sidewalk where horses used to be tied up.
               

          There is one memory that Kim and I both share, just after Danny was born. We were standing on the sidewalk beneath one of the two tall elm trees in our front yard eating Saltine crackers. Something happened at the end of the block that we will probably remember for as long as we live. You never forget the taste of Saltine crackers.

Mother planted peonies and carnations around the house. A trellis for roses clung to the side of the veranda, ants crawled on the peonies, and huge bumblebees cut the scenes of summer into puzzle-dust with their tiny traces of pollen.
            I was named after “Stefan” a Polish pianist in a movie called Dangerous Moonlight, I’d sit in front of the hi-fi and she'd play classical pieces for me. My favorite was the Waltz of the Flowers. As time want on I'd 'conduct' various pieces, before an imaginary orchestra. For a finale I'd conduct the piece with my feet. Mother had high hopes for me. Unfortunately with my talent for burping incessantly, and my lack of discretion, I was kicked out of Sunday school.

                     

Around grade one I started playing hockey in the arena, two blocks away from our house. My older brother Rick worked there as a 'rink-rat,' scraping the ice with a shovel between hockey games, and was able to find some shoulder pads for me. The rink—rats' nicknames were written on the bright red plastic with white paint, including the name I'd given Rick; "Ricky-Dicky-Bird." While changing in the locker room I'd get funny looks. It wasn't as bad as the catalog my dad used to use far shin pads when he was a kid. (In winter, Dad made a little rink for us in the backyard, flooding it with the garden hose.) My whole family would come out to watch when I played at the Arena with Rick in the stands mouthing off... "Hey Ref, You're missing a good game!" Kim played goalie, and would watch "Hockey Night In Canada" with Dad all the time. Sometimes dad would watch the game from the kitchen using a mirror set up to reflect the TV in the living room at a 90-degree angle.
            Kim and I would spend a lot of time in the arena, since it was just up the street beside the jail. We used to collect hockey cards, and play games tossing them in the back halls. The manager of the arena once lifted me up by the scruff of the neck to throw me out. My only claim to fame as far as hockey was concerned was to have my picture in the Canadian Champion; dressed in my Crest Hardware uniform. I only played hockey for a dew years; I was never that enthused about it, for I was terrible on the ice. My skates wobbled; I was too nearsighted to see the puck. When I scored two goals in one game once, I was so happy I came home to tell everyone, but no one was home. The only one to share my victory was Rusty the dog, who jumped all over me.

 Bulldozers dug near the path and we would give the workers drinks of water in tin tumblers. They could taste the remnants of Cool Aid in them. We left them with a pitcher of water. I used to stand with my hands on my hips, watching them, as if I were the boss.

We had a circular above ground pool in the backyard, with an inflatable dinosaur floating-device advertising Sinclair petroleum. Once little Heather from two doors down was swimming, and she asked what’s the bump in your bathing suit. One time I threw a grab apple high in the air to startle her and it hit her on the head. Dad made a drain pipe to empty the water in the creek, and eventually planted tomatoes in the circle when we outgrew the pool.

In September 1963 when the tops of a row of cedars were cut on the lot adjacent to our house, Kim and I used them to build a lean-to fort on the checkerboard sign. I sat on top of the sign with a rubber football, as Kim was below with a long stick poking fun at me. I threw the football at him, lost my balance fell and broke my left arm. After seeing the shape of my arm I ran into the house screaming. The pain was mostly from looking at the twisted bones. My arm was put into a newspaper sling and I was taken to the hospital. When I returned home with a cast on my arm, everyone was hamming it up for a home movie, but I wasn’t in the mood to be filmed. I found the football under the bed; it was deflated after being chewed up by Rusty, the dog.

The first time I fought with Kim was with my mother to register for kindergarten. Both of us were wearing our cowboy cardigans, which were knitted by our grandmother, fighting over a cap gun. For many number of years we would be fighting and playing together. On July 11, 1964 our rowdy behavior caused us to be banished from Bob and Bonnie’s wedding reception, when we were left in the care someone on a farm just outside of town.

            Terry and Sue used to take Kim, Danny and I up to the escarpment every day, during our summer vacation, with Terry telling us tall tales all the way. Terry was popular in town, and won a cup in 1966, called the Terry des Lauriers Citizenship Cup. When he was presented with this cup, the principle had my parents sit in the front row. One of the teachers compared Terry to Saint Francis of Assisi, and that that there was a saying at school; "Terry will do it." (The real saying was “Let Terry do it.”) Terry was active in the athletic department, and was on nearly every organization at school. He was also head of "Toc Alpha," a student organization concerned about alcoholic parents. He was an active Sunday school teacher, a co-coordinator with the recreation department, as well as a clerk at the stationary store, where he repaired typewriters. Terry could always be heard coming home whistling. In the winter, he would jog for miles through the countryside, and students on the school bus all waved.

            Kim and I would finish our paper routes in the winter and would play hockey in the streets. We'd set up lumps of Ice for the goal post, and would play by the light of a street lamp. We'd use a tennis ball, and broken hockey sticks that we had prepared, as a good stick would be ruined quickly. It would be dark and cold, but we loved playing hockey so much. We played so much street hockey, that Terry bought Kim and I hockey nets for Christmas. I got in trouble, because-from the veranda, I could see into the window where Terry had the Eaton's catalog opened to hockey equipment so I knew what it might be, and suggested as much to Terry.
            With my paper route money I would buy model cars and spend hours putting them together, not stopping until I had finished them. It would sometimes be late in the morning when I finished them. One Christmas I received a '58 Chevy from Rick, and assembled it as Sue played her Roy Orbisons's Greatest Hits album incessantly.

Christmas was always a big event at our house, even though we weren't so religious. Our whole family would get together. One earlier Christmas I went to bed with mom and Bob putting out cookies and Coca Cola for Santa Clause, and awoke to see that Santa had refreshed himself, and left a tin castle for me, with knights and all set up. When we first moved to Milton dad would take us out Christmas caroling, I would go with Rick, who would know instinctively the houses that would give big donations, and would skip all the rest. Even though I knew none of the words I would sing along anyhow. After we'd drive around and look at the Christmas lights sometimes stopping at Eaton's department store to look at the animated windows. Nearly every house would have strings of colored lights around it, some would have nativity scenes in the snows. At home there would be Christmas cards strung up, -and many presents beneath the tree. I thought how incredibly long the time was between Christmases, and would feel the day was very special. This I usually pondered as I ate some special candy. It would move me to think that countries at war could stop fighting at Christmas, if only for one day, and longed for eternal peace in the world.


One Christmas Eve, I think it was 1966; I was so upset with my family, that I wanted to run away. When Rick returned from California, I no longer shared a room with him, we used to have a room with a picture of a silver Corvette Stingray on the wall, cut out from a magazine. Rick returned from California in a '58 Chevy that he sold to Terry. Rick had said that he didn't want to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. Dad used to fight with Rick, then Rick moved out and dad fought with Terry. Terry moved out, and then dad fought with me One of my very first memories is that of my mother packing her suitcase to move out. The only reason I didn’t run away on Christmas Eve was because I'd miss out on the presents.
            Kim would try often to get me to fight with Terry, so that Terry would lose his temper, and would hit Kim. Kim would go crying to his dad, then dad would hit Terry, and Kim would laugh. Whenever dad was drunk, it would be easy for him to lose his temper and beat us. Especially when Kim and I tormented him. My mother hated that he drank so much, usually a case of 24 per weekend.
            At dinner when dad yelled at me I would refuse to eat, and my dad would say, "Then I'll eat your food."
            Mom would say, "Here, eat mine too," Dad got angry with that and threw his plate at her, breaking tier tooth. He said he was sorry for this, on one of the very rare occasions when he apologized; Mom always sided with me, and dad always sided with Kim. Kim would always manipulate dad, taking advantage of him because dad was so fond of him. Kim impressed dad with his mechanical abilities, I had the opposite effect for my interest in models cars rather than real cars.

It was 1967, the year the illustrious town fathers of Milton commissioned the beautification of the Mill Pond as a Centennial project. Dynamite was being used to clear a channel beside the 16 Mile Creek and one particular blast woke me from my reverie as a grade eight student at the nearby Marten Street Senior Public School. As I oft times recall the blast ominously shook the can of muddy brown paint that I was dipping into. We were in the midst of painting a backdrop mural, a prop for a Centennial skit. It was about driving the last spike in the railroad that was to connect our fair nation. The highlight of the skit was to hold up the section where the northern rail of the westbound track runs into the southern rail of the eastbound track.
              It was just a year prior to this that my brother Rick returned from California in a two-tone silver and white 1958 Chevrolet Impala. He had been working as an encyclopedia salesman as the Vietnam War escalated and had returned home rather suddenly with giant sombreros for the kids and two black velvet matador paintings for ma. I think he was concerned about being drafted.
             For almost a year I had been studying electric guitar, but had given it up after my grade seven teacher, Mr. Bosman, had railroaded me into playing Greensleeves, at the Christmas assembly. I was a poor student and hadn't learned a single song. My father advised me not to attend school on the day of the festival. It was a rare occasion when I took his advice.            

It was in the spring of 1967 that Kim made an incursion into my room and smashed all my models. I had not only model cars on the windowsill, but had a Fokker Tri-plane hanging from the ceiling. When I brought this to my father's attention, he brushed it all aside saying, “You must have done something to provoke him.” When I insisted I had done nothing of the sort he said: “Then you should have kept them out of his reach.”
            “But they were hanging from the ceiling…” This made me really mad.


A week or so later my mother went to the city to help Rick's fiancee select a wedding dress. I was watching a documentary about a tunnel the East Germans had built under the Berlin Wall and got in an argument with my dad. When I was beaten my dad he would close the curtains, and started whipping me with his belt. He was drunk and started kicking me in the butt, so I turned around to kick at him. Usually I would laugh till I cried, but this time I was indignant at the injustice, and turned to kick my father, in retaliation. He considered it ‘unconscionable,’ that was the word he used, for a kid to kick his parents. He gave me a good swift kick and left me almost unconscious sprawled on the floor. When I came to I got up and ran away, walking ten miles to Georgetown along some busy train tracks in tears.

To complicate matters things weren't going so well in my grade eight class. Our teacher asked us to bring in baby pictures to display on a bulletin board. I brought in a picture of me on a high chair in a sailor suit with a telescope partially obscuring my face. One of the girls said, “You were so cute as a baby, what happened to you?” I was so hurt, not realizing she was just kidding. I thought I was ugly.  I had a hideous birthmark on the side of my neck, in the shape of the Maritime Provinces.
             May 13, 1967 was a sunny Saturday. My dad helped me to fix a flat on the back tire of my bike. I left saying that I would try it out. Instead of riding around the block, I actually rode my bicycle to Niagara Falls, a distance of about eighty miles. All I had was a sweater on and ten dollars in my pants pocket. I slept under the stars on a cold spring night and made it to the Falls. I had a pancake breakfast at a restaurant, which was a rare treat for me, inquired about a helicopter ride, and then headed for Rainbow Bridge.
             Halfway across the bridge I looked down to the rapids and thought about taking my life. Staring into raging rapids, I thought it might be better to ride to New York City, to go on top of the Empire State Building and threaten to throw myself off unless someone paid for me to have plastic surgery, so that I wouldn't have to go around being ugly any more.
              Actually I asked one of the girls in my class to go roller-skating with me and she turned me down. And then a couple years later I had a crush on another girl, Betty, the pinball machine man's daughter, who lived in the country. My friend Paul Foster used to drive me past her house once a week in his Volkswagen Bug and he'd always sound his horn. I'd be hiding in the back seat in embarrassment. I used to call her every two weeks and ask her out. I had a song about her in flamenco style called Scrambled Eggs and Pretty Legs. I called and played Bob Dylan's Love Minus Zero/No Limit over the phone. I sent her a dozen roses and invited her to the musical Hair but she still refused me.
            I was there at Niagara Falls and Rick came with my mother in his white 1964 Pontiac convertible with the red leather interior. The top was down. Rick said, “It seems you are going further and further each time.”
            I'll never forget how I felt when the Customs Official said, “Don't you know it's Mother's Day.” My mother's eyes were red as roses; all the way there, she must have been in tears.

            After ten years I could finally relate to my dad. For seven or eight years we argued constantly. I'd ask him “Where are the pliers,” and he'd say…
            “In the shed,” and I'd say…
            “Whereabouts?” and he'd say
            “In the shed,” so I'd walk into the shed and straight out and say…
            “I couldn't find them.” He'd say…
             “Where did you look” and I'd say…
            “In the shed.”