I Was A Teenage Folksinger

Stefan des Lauriers in "High" School Attire

THE LONESOME DEMISE OF MY WRETCHED POETRY COAT

             When men first landed on the moon, I was working as an armed human scarecrow at a cherry farm. My alleged duty was to sit on top of a rickety tower and scare the birds with a shotgun. To look the part I would often wear my poetry coat.
              My poetry coat had humble beginnings as a navy blue overcoat in the Salvation Army. I liberated it, took it home; tie-dye bleached it and inscribed poems in the faded blotches. The poems were kept on the inside — it being a time when I still had some modesty and occasionally opened up to bare my soul.
             Sometimes I would employ the poetry coat as a phantom surrogate. Using the shotgun and water jug as props I was able to create a human scarecrow by placing my straw hat on the jug. The only difference between an actual scarecrow and a human scarecrow is the human element. By removing the human element I was able to come down to earth and do nefarious things, such as sneak up on my friend Michael in his nearby tower.
               During the evening when flocks of starlings flew high overhead some of the young charges would blast their way through high heaven. Of course we were supposed to just scare the birds and not kill them. Nothing in the job description, however, specifically stated that we shouldn't perforate our fellow workers.
             So it was with quiet abandon that I made my usual climb up Michael's tower. The towers had a tendency to sway when mounted, so it was difficult to ascend in a stealthy manner. Approaching the last few rungs I heard a volley of shots. Michael peered over the edge. "Now Stefan," he said, "I knew you were up to something when I saw that crow land on your hat."
             Upon returning to my tower I was shocked to see what had happened in my absence. My beloved poetry coat had been shot full of holes. I opened the walking anthology, and saw how a fine spray, and a few blasts had decimated my precious poetry. Looking through the holes I came to the sad realization that there were words, and some verses missing from some of my early works. And that was the first time it occurred to me that I should edit my work.   

 © 1997 Stefan des Lauriers

I Was a Teenage Folksinger

I was once a human scarecrow upon a cherry farm
On a tower with a shotgun didn't mean to do no harm
How that cow got in the air eludes me to this day
So many things I would have done but cows got in the way

I was a teenage folksinger with a wretched poetry coat
It was tie-dye bleached and contained the lousy stuff I wrote
With poems inscribed in the lining I'd often bare my soul
O is it any wonder — my early work was shot full of holes

I was once a world-class clown doing stand-up in canoes
Now my days of building castles in quicksand all are through
Being forced to play ice hockey I was quite a lousy skater
But did some ground breaking "work" as a jackhammer operator

I was a teenage folksinger with a wretched poetry coat…

I sat atop an upright grand beating chords out with my feet
My version of "Cold Turkey" could be heard way down the street
At school the glee club's sponsor — she said I sang "off key"
In numerous humorous doomsday ditties all devoid of glee

I was a teenage folksinger with a wretched poetry coat.

 Stefan des Lauriers, with "Magic Telescope" 

at the Cottage that was left uninhabitable 

by Hurricane Hazel

             "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."
             The fireworks were in Scarborough, where I lived with a nuclear family before the breadwinner of our unit had a near fatal accident at Goodyear, when a tow motor load of tires toppled upon him. I had just been written up for my own near death endeavor in the Toronto Star as the "Toddling Astronaut." The headlines: "Boy, Two, Survives Brush With Death As Goldfish Bowl Gets Stuck On Head," did little to propel Canada into the space race.

REAL CLIFFHANGER
BOY STRANDED ON CLIFF RESCUED BY FIRE LADDER

A class party at Kelso Conservation Area turned into a real "cliffhanger" Saturday night when police and fire fighters had to help a young student down from a precarious perch 40 feet up a rock cliff. Steven Deslaurier, 16, of 149 Mary St. Milton clung to the rock face for about three hours before he was rescued.

Milton OPP Said the incident was not reported to them, but a patrolling constable noticed the commotion, investigated, and called out the fire department to free the youth. According to the police, the grade 10 class of Milton District High School was having a year-end party at the abandoned quarry property on the escarpment at the south end of Kelso Park, when Steven decided to try scaling a crevice in the 80 foot high rock face. He got up about halfway, panicked, and decided against climbing any higher or returning to the ground.

Milton's fire brigade was alerted and six fire fighters drove as close to the scene as they could with a pumper. Students were recruited to assist and they carried the 40-foot ladder to where Steven hung to the cliffside. Steven helped carry the ladder back to the truck.

            With a wolf at every window, our beloved nuclear family was forced to move to Milton, and we abandoned that bungalow that radiated in my eyes with yellow bricks. So we tied the chairs, the television, the beds and what have you on top of our lemon, an amber and green 1957 Dodge and forged our way west. Just forty miles, mind you, in a westerly direction, towards that old escarpment affectionately referred to as "the mountain," in my formative years. Indeed, it was in the shadow of an Imaginary Mountain that I endured the perplexities of my youth.

 
             The first page entertained mundane atrocities. Mundane if you consider white washing the dilapidated frame house, naming our dappled cat Sputnik, and tearing down the outhouse. Mundane until we discovered too late that a full-fledged hive of bees congregated in that proverbial house out back. Standing beside the verandah I watched my French Canadian father in a fedora ascend the ladder, sporadically muttering "Sacre blue." My dad was known for painting with furious speed just as Picasso was known for painting bulls with flaming light before cameras in the dark. If you are not aware of Picasso painting with light — at least try to fathom my predilection to make light of painting.

             For two years I endured a Bohemian subsistence in Toronto, thrusting myself, as it were, upon the music scene. I lived in putrid rooming houses, communes with theater people, and allegedly toiled as an itinerant petunia planter at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. As you may have heard it sung in Tour de Farce, "that summer job was a breeze." At the time of my premature but eloquent musings I'd been reading a lot, and often played Frisbee with my brother Danny. Sometimes Danny — born in the summer of '58 — jammed with me on the dulcimer, a vastly misunderstood instrument. As a matter of fact, just the other day we went to the city, to busk on the street. A passerby dropped a twenty in the case, and in snatching it up I said, "Let's quit while we're ahead." The man probably intended to give us a dollar, and may have come back for his nineteen dollars change.

CARDBOARD SPACESHIPS

Back in 1957, when I was four years old, I felt bad that Canada was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the space race and wanted to do my part. So I named our cat Sputnik and went on adventures orbiting our bungalow in my Radio Flier. I knew I needed a space helmet so I “improvised” by emptying the goldfish bowl. I had not been around "Mother Earth" for one revolution with that goldfish bowl on my head when I noticed my Oxygen supply was rapidly depleting. If it hadn't been for Sputnik running into the house and alerting my mother I might have perished. I can still see the back fins of the goldfish hanging out of the cat's mouth. (My mother, who was very strict with manners, forgot to admonish the cat with her usual “Don’t yell with your mouth full!”)

Anyhow the Fire trucks came with the firemen carrying their big sledge hammers and pick axes and I thought for sure my head would be pulverized like a grape in a vice if they used them on me. (You can imagine how scary that looked with the goldfish bowl distorting my perspective.) They managed to extract the goldfish bowl manually just in time.

Later on my father, who was a tireless worker at Goodyear, lectured me on the dangers of “home made” spacesuits. My mother took me to the Five and Dime the next day and bought me a turtle that came with a round clear plastic dish with a ramp and a green plastic palm tree. She probably thought I wouldn't get that "terrarium" stuck on my head.

My quest to propel Canada into the space race did not end there. My brother and I collected discarded cardboard refrigerator boxes and would use them as "stages" of rockets. We used to drag them behind our tricycles across the train tracks, which were a block away from our house. An earthen mound elevated the railroad so we set up our launch pad on the far side hoping no one would steal them.

At the height of our mission we had a total of 17 boxes lined up, enough to propel us to the moon and back four times! My brother and I would get into arguments over the orientation of our spaceship. I wanted it to be vertical but Kim (that's my brother's name) said the wind would blow it over, and moreover — if we did get all the boxes stacked up — it would be seen from the town and someone would steal it and commandeer it to other planets it was not designed to go to. Deep inside I knew that a square spaceship would never get off the ground so I let him have his way not wanting to burst his bubble.

My desire to propel Canada did not end until I reached "High" school. The culmination of our “homegrown” space race was when we surreptitiously assembled a life-size mock up of a 747 with a shuttlecraft on top on a runway at the Royal Canadian Airport in downtown Toronto. It never occurred to my brother that a spaceship riding piggyback on a 747 would only transport the shuttle to another airport and not the moon. But again, I didn't want to burst his bubble.

TODDLING ASTRONAUT

My radio flyer — it is bright red

It's orbiting my bungalow

The big dogs can't lick my face

Cause I wear a goldfish bow

I'm a toddling astronaut in space

And I sure miss the human race

My diapers on number two

Think I need a change of pace

II wonder what real spacemen do

If they have to go in space

Through asteroid rocks again

Take this helmet off my head

Think I need some Oxygen

Hope the fish aren't getting dead

Somebody call my flight engineer

This goldfish bowl is really stuck

Oh good my mommy's here

With the sirens and a fire truck

I've learned my lesson well

Don't put plastic on your face

And concerning those homemade spacesuits

Well just don't trust them in outer space

            THE MAGIC TELESCOPE

            It happened in the mid-Sixties when “Esso” was having a “Put a Tiger in your Tank” campaign and would stuff a tiger tail in your gas-cap with every fill-up. It was also a time when I referred to my brother Kim as the “budding kleptomaniac.” He would swipe Tiger Tails from parked cars and surreptitiously insert them into the gas caps of Police cruisers.

            I was in grade seven at the Bruce Street School and was witness to one of the most unusual spectacles in the history of Milton Ontario. Mystical Drifters had stopped in front the old limestone schoolhouse with a wagon drawn by a white horse and were enticing innocent children to gaze into their “Magic Telescope.”

            “Magic Telescope, Magic Telescope, see the star that gives everyone hope,” the Mystical Drifter said, “Only one dime.” I thought it would be something to see a star in a bright blue sky, so I lined up to take a look. I should have known better because everyone who had looked at it was frowning in disgust.

            When I peered into the telescope I was in for a shock. It was just a cheap cardboard telescope with the outline of a star drawn on the far lens. “You cheated me,” I protested, “This is just a star drawn on the lens!”

             “You are looking through a star,” the Mystical Drifter woman replied. “Did you ever dream that you would be able to see through a star?”

            I was just about to demand a refund when a police car pulled up with a tiger tail in its gas cap. The Mystical Drifters jumped into the wagon and raced off the school property.

            I don’t know if was the police car itself or the fact that there was a “Tiger in the Tank” that terrified the Mystical Drifters into bolting away. I stood watching as the police car escorted the wagon to the outskirts of town, with the telescope still in my hands. To this day I let people look into the “Magic Telescope” for free and it has never failed to put a smile on their faces.

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Attempts At My Life Story 

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