Kitsilano (1963-69)

For Judy Williams Fraser 1963-69 I lived on the corner of Yew & York on the 2nd floor above  a corner store with my sister Leni  & boyfriend soon to be husband Neap  Hoover her friend Jo-Ann Huffman & her boyfriend Mike Sawyer then  Elsa Young  (just left Robert who was with Maxine) who met her lover Jack Wise next door then my sister Mary and my boyfriend  soon to be (later to unbe) husband Cliff Andstein below us bill bissett & martina & oolya  then painter-jogger  Gordon Payne & Merrilyn  (who becomes my friend later)  then bill again then Gordon again next to us Bing Thom, Jay Bancroft & often Marian Penner, Rick Clarke across the landing John and Susan Newlove & children fathered by gerry gilbert later the Ridgeways and next to them directly opposite us: Gerry Geisler (New Design Gallery) and Helen Sturdy & children our kitchen faced theirs apple pies in my oven & stew or toast in theirs we cd smell everything like the time we fell asleep as pork hocks simmered in my big red pot charred and burned almost caught on fire would have if Gerry hadnt woken us up and that building a total tinderbox always worried bill wd start one my bedroom / study faced the Molson’s sign and Burrard Street Bridge and I could watch the west end and highrises and planetarium grow and white sheets on a clothesline across the street dry as I’d sit at my bay window and write and mark on a smooth board cut to fit exactly the sill I’d glance up and see people like  you  &  Jamie  &  Carol  &  Joan  &  Marcia  & the Trumans and the Gadds  and the Lathams  and Lanny Beckman walking up and down Yew Street open the window & shout drop by on your way back dropping by everybody did it days filled with coffee, tea, poetry, cigarette smoke crises, trips, talkedy talk talk painting hard edged  strong coloured also  intricate silver point mandalas and collages a gallon of Calogna Red one summery Saturday night became a party of 100 or even more dancing in my bedroom to one music on a tape recorder dancing in the other to another drumming in the kitchen talking in the room with the blue-tile fireplace so many bodies I couldnt hear the music from  inside the  hallway just saw the taller heads moving together to different beats in almost darkness that crazy night at the Wahs’ place if that wasnt a party of this kind everybody landing on that bed everybody kissing everybody we had to go outside to pee because the lineup for the can so long somehow to do with that small space that it was so tight that everybody had to rub every body simply to go anywhere It was gorgeous after the Vancouver Poetry Conference (1963) Roy Kiyooka started dropping by   when he left his studio there’d always be a light on somewhere in our building and he could visit  any of us separately or clustered one time he told me he had a painting he wanted to give me but it was big and heavy he borrowed a truck and someone helped him up the dusty always dirty long stairs with Hoarfrost which we hung on a wall in a room just big enough to hold my round oak table (used to be Bowerings’ they bought a whole household of furniture for $80 and when they moved they gave it to Joan and then when she moved she stored it with me) a wall that later Elsa and I tore apart with a screwdriver and hammer shouting angry hexes at Robert all the way after and during that conference-- Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Avison, Whalen, Ginsberg-- Roy and I became friends and there were readings in my room every second Sunday red cast iron pot full of bean soup, corn chowder, spicey meatball vegetable stew simmering and then cheese scones in the oven people would come and read their new work one week and the next week there’d be a Tish meeting with Daphne Marlatt, Dan MacLeod, Pete Auxier, David Cull & David Dawson rent $60 a month didnt change and some years it was cold the wind so cold on side facing the North Shore that Hydro was $60 per month and that wall frozen behind my pillows the police were something else they felt they had a right to question anybody so Cliff would be up at the laundromat on 4th or at Jackson’s to get some hamburger and be walking back with an economics book in one hand and meat wrapped in brown paper in the other and they’d stop him and ask him what he was doing and my friend Ray Wargo would get stopped almost every second time he’d drop in to visit where are you going and why and how long will you be someone was always getting busted someone was always tripping out someone was always visiting from   or going to  Europe or Japan here is a journal entry on June 9: evening of the first ever national leaders debate on TV “I am looking forward to seeing Trudeau--hope he gets pushed into/onto answering more directly than he has in the past. I, like many others including every gay man I know, do have a crush on him: he has much more style than any Canadian politician so far. I mean style in the true sense of the word, it is him, not affected… Cliff, of course, doesn’t trust him at all and thinks he’s a sell- out. I don’t go that far, yet. But I do think that compromising is the only way a politician can work this country and I do not like all the PR, razzmatazz, fundraising, and allegiances that go into just getting elected: our system seems to be based on gullibility…” coming home at night up Yew Street whether from downtown or the beach or Paul the butcher’s or Elsie the baker’s I loved looking up at my North-facing windows goldy  gold  mesh curtains light filtering through so warm  and so inviting