Chairs in the Time Machine: A Montreal Memoir to the memory of Marquita Crevier & Roy Kiyooka I GOT TO MONTREAL I got to Montreal from Calgary in the summer of 1965 by various flukes and some conscious intent. I remember watching a CBC interview show in the early 60's, and seeing Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen being interviewed. Layton, as the bookjacket adjectives describe him, was irreverent, cocky, pugnacious - the short stocky poet ranting about the sexless mediocre middle class, the power of poetry and passion, and the evil in the world. Cohen was quieter but as powerful as Layton because of his timing, syntax, and gift for the epigrammatic punch line. He had a kind of smart-alecky spontaneous intelligence and wisdom about life that made him charming and likeable. Layton was brash, smart and tough; Cohen intense, smart, and vulnerable - the first two poets I'd ever seen in action, so to speak. I was attracted to their hubris, humor, and sense of mission as serious poets in the world. In the course of the interview, Layton said that he taught poetry at Sir George Williams University. That night I "decided" that I would go to Montreal and study with Irving Layton - one of those large but painless leaps a young man can instantly make because he has a sense of unlimited future and a life ahead, and can ignore any sense of whatever obstacles might be in the way. My parents, I'm sure, wanted to change the channel. AS IT TURNED OUT, MOUNT ROYAL As it turned out, Mount Royal, the two year college I was attending in Calgary, had a transfer arrangement with two universities: the university of Montana in Missoula, and SGWU in Montreal. Now that I think back, Mount Royal College, was perfect for me; it gave me my chance. I flunked most of high school and took 4 years and 2 summer schools to get a general diploma. My friends had gone on the university and matriculated while I struggled with Math 30, Physics 30, Chemistry 30 - abandoned in my basement room half-heartedly studying formulas and theorems that drove me to some other place in my imagination - a better place of spontaneous language and image. I was becoming, to my mind, a serious writer, composing quick poems between chemical formulas, theorems, and the physical laws of force - as a way to ease my mind. But without grade 12 matriculation, universities wouldn't accept me, so that MRC, a private college with high tuition, and cynically called "sure pass" by students of other academies, and attended by lots of football players on scholarships, was my only option, in Calgary, for higher learning. I got on the Dean's honour roll the first semester, resurrected from failure to legitimacy. Then in the second semester I quickly slid the curve grades tht were average, but high enough to make the transfer to Montreal: that fecund city of Cohen & Layton, art, French Canadian culture and politics - & my way out of Calgary. The odd physics of chance, fate and will worked in my favour. It was time to leave the wasteland for Montreal. SID MARTY Sid Marty, also to make the journey, had become my good friend at MRC. I first saw him at a cafeteria table one afternoon between classes. He was big, slouched forward with a morose, fierce expression, fists clenched. He was sullen and dangerous