Origins (Clinton Street, Toronto, 1987)

“You can hear the sound of the underground trains
You know it feels like distant thunder” ~Eurythmics, This City Never Sleeps

Down in the dumps

As recounted in my introductory post to these Toronto stories, my first refuge in the city was on Clinton Street, just off Bloor near Christie Pits. I should have been grateful — my dear friend and former Vancouver roommate Brian Hay graciously shared his small room with me — but the place really was the pits.

My arrival brought the carousel of university students and itinerants to around nine (sometimes it was hard to know who was actually living there and who was simply visiting). There was always a sink full of foul dishes in the ancient kitchen sink, much to the delight of Toronto’s abundant cockroach population. Brian snuck me upstairs to show me the room of one of the students, a young woman from North Vancouver. A nice big room with a futon on the floor. The bed was unmade. Among the tangle of sheets were half-eaten pizza slices (great all-night pizzeria down on Bloor) and mouldy Chinese take-out.

Summer rolled around. Unable to find a position in a photo studio, I’d taken on a job working for polling firm Angus Reid. “Would you be interested in receiving information on our sponsor’s fertilizer discounts?” Laying on a lumpy camp cot, bathed in sweat from Toronto’s famous Calcutta-like heat and humidity, I could hear and feel the rumble of subway trains heading through Christie Station. Never had a popular song seemed more about my life than the Eurythmics’ This City Never Sleeps. My nights were disturbed by dreams of wrathful gods determined to kill me with raging windstorms.

“You know there’s so many people
Living in this house
And I don’t even know their names”

Subterranean homesick blues

Surprise! I was not a happy camper on Clinton Street. As an introduction to the city’s attractions, I borrowed Brian’s ex-girlfriend’s bicycle (mine was in storage back in Vancouver) to ride down to a music festival featuring Vancouver group Spirit of the West. Returning to the bleachers where I’d locked it, I found only the severed chain. A very long and dispirited walk back to the pit followed. Of course, I now owed DeeDee a bike.

A former inhabitant of the doss house arrived back on the scene and, coveting my lumpy cot, cooked up a plot to have me ejected.

Climbing buddies like Tom Hocking (himself trapped in Alberta by financial necessity, AKA the British Columbia real estate meltdown of ‘82) wrote to me asking: “So Tronta, eh? Well I guess that’s fine for the cultural side of you but what about the adventure side (yin & yang?) I mean, like, where are the mountains?”

My daughter, 12, sent me ornately-penned letters signed with pink ❤s, proudly reporting her scholastic and athletic accomplishments. She had a crush on a local boy. They went to the movies. “It was a double feature! It was reallllly fun!”

Den of thieves

One benighted night Bryan and I came home to find our Mamiya medium format cameras and lenses had disappeared from a shared cupboard. This disaster nearly sent me back to Vancouver, had I been flush enough to buy a ticket home.

Around this time, I got my foot in the door at TDF Artists, where Brian worked. They needed a janitor. Though some of the established photographers respected and clandestinely used me as an assistant, management rebuffed my attempts to trade toilet brush for Deardorff.

Sweet dreams are made of this

Finding better accommodations in a city with 1% vacancy rate was next to impossible, but as the torrid summer waned we snagged a large house in “The New Bohemia” neighbourhood of Queen Street West, on Palmerston Street. Brian and I couldn’t afford the rent alone. Hurriedly, we ran a newspaper ad and found three roommates: two modern dancers (one, a graduate of Ballets Jazz Montréal and licenced massage therapist) and an art student studying at the Ontario School of Art (now OCAD U). Much of the decor — curtains, furniture, even paint — were discarded props rescued from the dumpsters at TDF.

One day I was called to the phone at the studio. Strange, who phones me at work? Parking my mop, I took the call. It was Peter Kundert, one of my mentors at TDF, who himself had recently run afoul of management there. He tipped me off to an opening at Pringle & Booth, another megastudio out in the ‘burbs. My portfolio was well-received. I handed in my notice at TDF.

The big city was exciting. I loved walking the busy, somewhat dirty, streets exploring the mix of shops, cafes, and ethnic delis on Dundas Street, in Little Italy and Kensington Market. The house on Palmerston was smack dab in the middle of a Portuguese neighbourhood. We were greeted that autumn by the sweet smell of fermenting wine. Did I mention book stores? And the galleries? Best ever.

Dancing fools

The nightclub scene put Vancouver’s if not to shame then in perspective by the sheer number of venues and roster of talent. Right across the street from the pit, Clinton’s showcased some of the best jazz musicians I’d ever seen and heard. Further east on Bloor, in the Annex neighbourhood,  another friend worked at Lee’s Palace. There was the famous El Mocambo, Bamboo, RPM, Twilight Zone,The Horseshoe Tavern and the nearby Rivoli, then the hangout for Canadian artists like Mike Meyers and Gord Downie.

A club at Bathurst and Queen offered 3 floors of hedonism, If you didn’t like the music at street level, there was something different upstairs. Feel like a crazy house party? Climb another staircase to enter a shoulder-to-shoulder festival of weirdness, where amateur minstrels strummed guitars in armchairs, wrapped in tobacco smoke. It didn’t bear thinking about what might happen should a fire break out. Not that we did after a few drinks. The Boom Boom Room opened soon after we took up residence, right on the corner of Palmerston and Queen. It was essentially a concrete box that gave one the experience of dancing inside a bass drum.

Then there were the unlicensed after-hours clubs, where electronic house music ruled. Who had time for sleep?

I regret not having recorded these historic social events on film. Nights were for shaking off the stress of slaving over a hot Hasselblad in the pressure-cooker world of the commercial studio.

Some mornings called for strong coffee and extra concentration on the focussing screen.