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heterosexual pride
was intact. Damage: split ear lobe, ripped and bloodied
shirt, ruined corduroy jacket, chipped tooth, and a broken
little finger, the one needed to complete a guitar chord.
Over the next month he kept saying, I'm gonna get that son
of a bitch and kill him, I'm going to get that son of a
bitch and kill him - a kind of mantra he'd chant, usually
when he was impossibly trying to practice guitar or
type.
I came into the room one day to find Sid hacking and sawing
at the plaster cast with a kitchen knife - plaster flying
into the butter dish, onto the floor, chunks of white
careening off the walls. I'm gonna kill that son of a bitch
... (another stab at plaster) I'm gonna kill that son of a
bitch....(another stab at plaster) "Sid, you're supposed to
leave it on for another 3 weeks," I reminded him. I'm gonna
kill that son of a bitch. (Another rip at the last hunk of
plaster) Now he could play the folk clubs, type those
mountain songs, be a casteless poet, free at last in
Montreal.
THAT
FALL
OF 65
That fall of 65, I enrolled in two of Layton's courses
("Introduction to Modern Poetry " and "Creative Writing")
with great expectations that I would learn secrets from a
master and replace my own diffidence by his acknowledgement
and reassurance that being a poet was the only real purpose
ahead. But the experience was to be much more complicated. I
hated the course, developed a writers block, and slid from
fecundity to anxiety in a short time. It wasn't all because
of Layton. Joy, my girlfriend, who agreed to stay behind in
Calgary, hitch-hiked into town with my high school buddy
Brian Coulter, and moved in earlier than we planned. She was
glad to see the burlap wall. All of us slid from the autumn
romance of Montreal to the realities at hand: money was
scarce, we got crowded with friends from the West who needed
to crash; we became grumpy, competitive, and territorial,
and our general health and eating habits were poor. I, in
particular, was missing a few major food groups. Just before
our first Christmas in Montreal, I developed strange
blisters on my hands and feet and went to emergency. I was
diagnosed as malnourished, told to eat better and given a
bottle of purple pills to dissolve in water. I'd daily soak
my hands and feet in this solution, which stained the
communal sink, which got Sid pissed off, and stained me with
purple hands and feet for a few embarrassing weeks. Sid was
much healthier. He boiled and simmered a clam chowder and
vegetable soup, that, along with porridge, became his steady
diet for that year, and created an irritating galaxy of
splashed colour up the kitchen wall behind his pot. The
smell made me gag. It was the reason I couldn't eat. I
cooked only eggs and hamburger in a frying pan next to the
chowder pot. Joy eventually got a job at the Royal Victoria
Hospital as a medical records clerk, moved to an upstairs
apartment, bought groceries and nursed me to better
health.
MCKINNON,
WHAT'S
THE
ANSWER
"McKinnon, what's the answer to number 3?" "I don't know
sir." "Marty, what's the answer to number 3?" Sid, when
asked, boomed his answers with confidence: "the central
metaphor in this poem emerges from the struggle between good
and evil " . Layton would listen, head a bit cocked maybe
listening for a slip-up, and then with his own booming voice
would say "very good".
I felt dumb and defeated in this class and hated the text,
Laurence Perrine's An Introduction to Modern Poetry.
Layton gave the occasional full lecture, two brilliant ones
I remember: one on Communism and one on the symbology of
Roman Polanski's film Repulsion. But in retrospect,
and now knowing more about his personal life, marital
difficulties and work-load during this period, I figure that
he probably chose a text to make his job easier. Each class,
35 of us in rows of desks, was structured on the students'
answers to Perrine's questions. I didn't have a vocabulary
for academic literary analysis, nor an interest in studying
poetry in this way. It was highschool. I wanted to hear
Layton speak and give us the goods. Instead the semester
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