Erotica Artist Ch. 01: Inferior Initiation

The house my family rented was the last in a single row of homes way out in Martin Valley, a mile or so from the twenty-four-hour-a-day throb of the paper mill. From my bedroom window I gazed into bush that stretched two hundred and fifty miles north to Prince Rupert. I longed on schooldays just to amble off into that wilderness never to return. I dreamed of setting up a hermit existence in some remote cabin with just my transistor radio and books for company. Of course someone more unsuited for the outdoor life would be hard to imagine, I had the sense to realize. I had no aptitude for fishing and hunting and absolutely no desire to learn.

No, when my freedom came next, when the time was at hand to get utterly lost, it would not be in the wilds but in the big city. And that was years away yet. In the meantime, I had to get by somehow, friendless and alone.

* * *

My chief solace was still music. But yet another depressing bit of deprivation in Beaver Falls was the fact that no radio waves penetrated the deep inlets of the BC coast during daylight hours. The lack of television bothered me not at all, but to have no radio till the sun went down was just as bad as living in the UK. And so my lifelong love of night-fall and the late, late hours of the day began in earnest.

For then, after dark, the outside world opened up through those precious radio waves. And I could hear not only popular music from Vancouver, Seattle and Portland, but news and talk radio from as far away as San Francisco, Salt Lake, and Oklahoma City.

And one magical Saturday night/Sunday morning I hear Wolfman Jack broadcasting over XERF, from Acuna, Coahuila, south of the Rio Grande, blasting John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed up the continent with two hundred and fifty thousand watts of international clear channel. No FCC or CRTC regulated fifty thousand watts for the Wolfman. Boom that stuff all the way to Alaska, baby, and sell a few record packages of the old masters while you're at it. Just send those checks and money orders on down to Del Rio, Texas. And I did so. It was my own tiny piece of heaven.

For now my father has been working some months in the paper mill for three times the salary he was paid in the old country, and my mother has found work with Aunt Dolly on the janitorial staff of the local high school. For the first time ever my family has a decent income. Lots of money coming in and very little to spend it on. And now there is a record player in the house, and I can send away for blues and R&B albums in addition to taping what I can pick up off the radio.

On the magazine rack in the Hudson Bay Company drugstore I find Billboard magazine and check the ups and downs of my favorite songs. If the United States, that behemoth south of the forty ninth parallel held no other fascination at this time in my life, the existence of this magazine alone would have been enough to sustain a lifelong love affair. What other country could produce such a periodical (not to mention Variety and Cashbox), not once a month but every couple of weeks?

In that same drugstore I find paperback books that strike my fancy. Having no knowledge of Ernest Hemingway I read 'A Moveable Feast.' And one day I stumble upon that master of alienation J.D. Salinger. I read 'The Catcher In The Rye' several times in a row and suddenly don't feel quite so alone.

I read and stay up as late as I can listening to music. Two, sometimes three times a week, whenever the bill is changed, I visit the town's single movie house. I see 'Dr. Strangelove' and 'Lolita' and 'The Apartment' and 'Some Like It Hot,' and my very first foreign film, 'Divorce Italian Style.' I have no friends. I loathe school but get excellent grades because I do nothing with my early evening hours but study. But my real life is an interior one, stimulated by music, books, and movies.

And I can more than afford to indulge myself in these areas after my first year of incarceration in Beaver Falls because grade eleven and twelve students are taken on as weekend and summer relief in the mill at the same rate of pay as regular employees. Only boys. No girls. This is still the early nineteen sixties.

Two eight hour shifts on the weekend and I have more money than I can spend. The night shifts are not easy after being in school all week, especially in the sawmill, which is cold and wet, grimy and noisy beyond endurance. But afternoon shifts in the Finishing Room beside the warm, roaring paper machines are over almost as soon as they've begun. And I get to go home to bed and listen to XERF half the night. Life did have some compensations for loneliness and desolation.

Summer work wasn't as pleasant. It sometimes meant sweeping the streets of the townsite on dayshift, often in torrential rain. More physical discomfort. More deprivation.

And of course there was something else missing. These were precious, irretrievable teenage years and I was spending them in virtual solitary confinement in a community rare in its isolation. My love of music and books and movies and my deep inner resources kept me from going mad. But only just.

Given my profound shyness and sense of inferiority, and my feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, I wondered if my life would really have been much different had my family settled in a larger, more populated and accessible area. It may not have. But I was pretty sure that the remoteness of Beaver Falls did make things much harder to bear.

I found myself, as year followed year toward graduation, not only less and less willing to speak, but less and less able to act. It was as if I were steadily freezing into complete passivity.

My salvation of course would have been a girlfriend, or at least a friend, male or female. But I had isolated myself to such an extent that no one bothered with me anymore. The one exception, a year before graduation, was a pretty, petite brunette named Martina, whom I bumped into several times in school doorways before realizing that she was clearly interested in me.

I fell for her instantly. For one thing, she seemed to be something of a loner herself. I never saw her in a clutch of chattering girls and she didn't appear to have that one soulmate girlfriend whom she shared secret talk with. And what really set her apart: she didn't try to accentuate her looks with make-up.

I had moved from a peer group of schoolgirls in the UK who were required to dress like children: they wore navy blue skirts and blazers, knee socks and straw boaters. Then, virtually overnight, I was surrounded by teenagers in stylish clothes and nylon stockings, with permed hair and enough lipstick and eye shadow to make them look ten, twenty years older than they really were. In fact some of them looked like middle-aged women already, almost as old as my mother. It was as if they'd suddenly skipped a generation. Not only was their crisp Canadian accent intimidating, but their entire appearance was hair-raising. I found the mock sophistication totally unappealing.

Martina, on the other hand, was fresh-faced and seemed to have little interest in fashion. And I thought her the loveliest creature I'd ever encountered. I wanted desperately to know her but had no idea how to approach her or what to say to her. I simply stared at her and remained mute. She seemed just as eager to know me, but made no move beyond crossing my path several times a day, doubtless in the vain hope that I would rouse from my catatonia.

I never did. As with Susan Tomlinson and all my dealings with girls I found attractive, I did nothing. It went beyond shyness. It was a total lack of confidence in my ability to say or do anything that could interest a girl. The sense of inferiority and uselessness was paralyzing. And so I did nothing.

From what I had observed, other young men didn't have anything remotely interesting to say to a girl either, but that didn't stop them charging in and saying it.

Maybe pride had a lot to do with it. I had such an aversion to making a fool of myself or being laughed at, a trait acquired partly from my uptight parents and my tight-assed English heritage, that I preferred to say and do nothing.

And so the weeks passed. And my yearning for Martina continued. And my sense of frustration and helplessness and despair deepened with each new day.

If I'd had a single friend I could bounce my frustrations off I would have learned that what I was experiencing was not at all unusual but common to many teenagers with any sensitivity at all. But I had no one and so thought of myself as some kind of irredeemable oddball.

Some of my actions around this time were a little strange. One Sunday morning after an eight pm to five am shift in the sawmill, for instance, I detoured on my walk home via Martina's house. To accomplish what? To see where she lived? To feel close to her while she slept? I was unable to say hello to her in the light of day but at five in the morning I could cruise the deserted lane behind her house and gaze up at the windows to wonder which one was hers.

Just what was I afraid of? Rejection? Betrayal? Abandonment? An overactive imagination was a large part of it, I suppose. The tendency to over-think everything, to exaggerate fear to the point of utter paralysis. Did this fear really go back to the time my mother, to teach me a lesson after I'd thrown a childish tantrum in a supermarket, locked me in my bedroom and said she was leaving me alone in the house?

I didn't think along these lines for long. My fear was much simpler and more immediate: how to approach the person you have a crush on when their very presence has you trembling in your boots? What to say? How to act? How not to come across as a complete dolt?

It was all unknown, dangerous territory, and it was much, much easier not to attempt anything than be rejected or, worse, be made a fool of. What if she didn't respond to an overture? What if she snubbed me out of hand? What if - worst case of all - she laughed at me? Way too many questions. Too much imagination. Not enough action.

Endless self-doubt and total passivity. Then endless self-recrimination for the lack of action. Little wonder I was close to cracking up during that last awful year of high school. All that got me through was my exhausting weekend work and the music, movies and books.

Yes, it would have been wonderful to connect with the exquisite Martina, but I simply did not have the experience, the confidence, the guts to make that happen.

And if Martina herself was not perhaps destined for early motherhood in an isolated backwater town, she was sadly fated for something much worse. I never again detoured by her house at five in the morning as I had once done, but five years later I did cruise, very late at night, along a lonely section of River Road in suburban Richmond, where, I'd read in that day's newspaper, she had been killed instantly a few evenings previously, along with her current boyfriend, in a grisly car accident.

Music, books, and movies helped sustain me through my three years in Beaver Falls and for many a year after that, but I couldn't help but wonder, once in a while, if I'd had the wherewithal, if I'd had the courage to talk to Martina, to date her, would not my life have been so much richer and would Martina, had we stayed together for a while, have perhaps not met so cruel an end? My imagination at work yet again, overactive as ever.

High school over, a summer's worth of paychecks in the bank, I finally escaped Beaver Falls in September of 1965. My grades were sound enough for a place at UBC. I was eighteen, solvent, virginal, and free at last of the numbing isolation of a small mill town.

But I was withdrawn to a point of serious social retardation, and if I escaped my solitary confinement on the twelve-seater seaplane in a single day, I would take months, years, to break free of this other imprisonment, largely of my own making.