English if you did first, and would reply in French, likewise, if you spoke French. The French Canadians were bilingual; they had to be. But you could feel the French Canadian sense of under-class. The wealthy English minority, with corporate control, and colonial loftiness, made the French feel weak and inferior in their own time and place and spawned, at the extreme, the FLQ. Past St Laurent, however, French was predominant and English speaker might be forced to attempt the language without sympathy or assistance. Though we never saw bombings or violence, these tensions were manifest in people's manner, tone and attitude. Tension was in the air - a large part of the soul of Montreal. Juan was the only French writer I got to know in Montreal, but his intensity and paranoia were too much to handle; our relationship was brief because of this. One day in the apartment Joy gave him a cup of tea, but he switched it for hers; he literally expected that we might poison him. Two years later, the poet Dwight Gardiner and I took on the task of translating Juan's Alchemie du Corps . With French/English dictionaries and our poor Calgary French we managed to muddle word by single word thru the text, hoping to translate a semblance of the energy and power of Juan's surrealism. Our version was never published, but the book did eventually appear in English. Juan seemed to inhabit a terrible darkness, but his verse was a brave attempt to articulate his condition and vision, and create a kind inspired energy, of rhythm and light. I suspect he either went completely mad, or gave up poetry, or .... God knows whatever became of him. IN A MORE COMPLETE REMINISCENCE In a more complete reminiscence I would have to tell about Stan Shaffer, a literary intellect, who arrived to SGWU from UCLA and became an instant friend; I remember that, within days of knowing him, he loaned me $5.00 for food; Barry Thompson from Calgary also studying English Literature and regular apartment guest for talk, beer and TV; Milly Ristvedt, painter and model who used to walk around our apartment naked on those many nights she stayed with us after the clubs closed; Bob Brookes, from New York - my friend and partner in a psychology experiment and one-time alto sax student of Eric Dolphy and who like Walker became a college student and put his horn away; Ron Proby, Vancouver jazz trumpeter who I followed around from club to club and who occasionally visited the apartment for a needed meal; Nancy Geller, student and artist and friend; Dwight Gardiner, the blazing young poet from Calgary sporting a Smith Brother's cough drop beard, fellow beer drinker, and expert on New American poetry and poetics; Derek Bennett, student and post modern prose writer before the term was invented, and my co-editor of the SGWU literary journal Prism; Peter Leitch [link to two tracks from his latest CD in Realaudio format], jazz guitarist, now a premier player in New York City, who I got to know during a jam session at his mother's house; Roy Kiyooka, teacher, poet artist who turned me on to Ezra Pound, and lent me his copy of For Love. Many other friends came to visit briefly: Brian Coulter, Judy Johnson, Karen Kunelias, Doug Harding, Jane Carter, Brad Robinson, and Bill Reuter who hand printed my first book - these are the people I remember as germane to our life there. AFTER TWO YEARS After two years Joy and I left Montreal, overwhelmed by our sense of the complexity of our experience there. That spring, we headed west. On the outskirts of the city, with Barry Thompson at the wheel, we stopped the car to take our last look: beautiful Mount Royal, the slope of the city to the river and old Montreal, the island, the St. Lawrence leading east to rural Quebec, the hills of America to the south. Did we weep in our short homage and goodbye to Montreal? Then we were young in the time machine, but knew in that moment of leaving--this blurred scape had entered our hearts forever. A note on the title: While having a pleasurable talk and reminiscence with artie Gold in Montreal this May, he as a curious question that stuck with me: Why in science fiction do the time machines have chairs? This presumes that time-travellers have to ironically sit and wait in the present before transporting to more desirable destinations in the future or past. We didn't wrestle long with the question, but his line, "chairs in the time machine" stayed with me as the right title for the memoir about Montreal that I wanted to write.