Hockey was a blast, the break in the daily routine as gentle as the routine was gave us many benefits. After a few weeks of playing our darker sides showed up. The guards took along several spectators fellow inmates as there were no work crews when we played hockey. One of the spectators a chap named Jim with a complexion like the actor Richard Burton saw that the liquor store was located across the street from the rink in the little town of Mansfield. The next week all the millionaires sent Jim to the store to buy us liquor in the form of mickeys that Jim kept wrapped individually in the brown liquor store bags. Then he put the bottles carefully into the hockey duffle bags in the dressing room while the guards watched us butcher each other.
The liquor was to be be brought into the camp building later from the storage facility garage by the head of the storeroom, this was myself as I had inherited the job from Jim Bugsy when he was released in January. Jim Bugsy looked a lot like Alf Ventriss on the British sitcom Heartbeat, he was an accountant that had gone south with the companies funds. It was a real honour to get the position of storeroom clerk, it was the best gig for an inmate. In the mornings and the evenings I went out alone with no supervision and raised and lowered the Canadian flag. I spent my days in the storeroom, sorting laundry that had been shipped in from the O.R., stacking shirts and toiletries which were given out to inmates on Wednesdays after dinner. Incoming supplies, dry goods including canteen items would come through my office, I was an integral part of the institution.
There was a little radio in the store room, a desk and a chair. To while the days away I carved rings out of the bowls of tobacco pipes which card players would purchase for me as part payment of their gambling debts. Sandpaper was available at the tool shed along with round files and a hacksaw which I used to cut the exotic wooden pipes into pieces. Tobacco pipe wood is of differing materials some interesting pieces were created and either sold or given to friends who treasured these crude but unique pieces of wooden folk jewelry. One ring survives to this day, a crude outline of a serpents head hand carved into the exotic wood.
Wednesday nights were Happy Day nights and we would drink our liquor mixed with cans of coke while we watched the show. I drank whiskey then, still do at times, others chose vodka, or rum whatever. Jim got paid in tobacco for getting the booze, we used to purchase between five and ten mickeys a week. The plan seemed foolproof, we repeated this scam for about six weeks, no one was the wiser, not even the guards who just thought we were being goofy because we were watching Happy Days.
It all came crashing down when they found a couple of empty mickey bottles in the kitchen garbage pail. Actually the chef found them and reported them to the guards who had a thorough investigation and the two inmates who worked in the kitchen Bob Rainey a speedy kind of guy from Regent Park with ambitions to strike for one of the clubs was one of them and his friend Gilles another weight lifting guy from Toronto’s east end. They both got sent back to Guelph immediately. Problem is the guards were now on the warpath and they left no stone unturned in their searches. Eventually they came across a stash of empty bottles in the removable ceiling panels above my bunk, that was it. Although technically they didn’t bust me, they knew my position of trust and my position as a ‘millionaire’, all fingers pointed towards me. Besides myself a few others from the dorm were returned to Guelph where we would face the wrath of the Warden, we had let him down.
By now a year of the eighteen month sentence had been served. Sentences were automatically reduced by a third if you had good behaviour. A new term was thrown around, ‘short timer’, and this was a pleasant term that also had a dark side which was the anxiety of the future. What would one do on the outside? Although I generally am grateful for my short time served I like to point out, that in this regard, this preparation for release, the system was lacking in that very little pre-release planning had been done prior to my departing the institution. Due to the shortness of the sentence there hadn’t been a long enough time period for me to require any extra counsel. In retrospect the system could not have known that this period of incarceration was in fact the termination of a half dozen years or so of misbehaviour.
The Warden called the half dozen or so returnees from the camp together the next morning after ‘jug up’. We were outside in the courtyard, we were kept waiting for an hour while he took care of some other duties. He then personally took us up to the attic of the dorms, where we were assigned the task of moving several hundred old steel bed frames from the attic a dark and dusty poorly lit space down three flights of stairs to the garbage and scrap area a hundred yards away from the buildings for the scrap dealers to take away. The work was boring and repetitive and of course it was meant to be a form of punishment. Not unlike the days on the S.W.P. building hills then dismantling them
Had this been the 1950s we would have been beaten across the buttocks until we bled, if an earlier period we would have been flogged! I must admit I was getting a little testy with the job and after a few days complained to the guard who was in charge of the detail, to no avail, the sentence lasted a few weeks. The only solace of the situation was the fact I had been returned to my old quarters, 2B where most of the inmates were still present and accounted for. The same guys still wanted to challenge me at cards and lose their canteen dollars, I took it, but had even lost interest in cards except as a means of buying smokes and chips. I wrote most of the debts off.
The book Papillon was making the rounds and I got on the short list of persons to read it early on. The story was supposedly the true adventures of Henri Charriere as he made numerous escapes from Hells Island where the French authorities had sent him for his crimes. The books many layers of adventure helped to retard the boring days I was experiencing. Earlier in life I felt much the same while reading titles by Harold Robbins. Vicarious living was at this point about all I could do, when engrossed in a novel either fiction or truth I could lose myself in another time which was much more satisfying than the day to day experiences for the most part.
Up on the third floor some nasty speeders had gotten a hold of some Angel Dust one night and they tore the place apart. About six thugs from the Shuter and Queen Street area of Toronto had overdone the ‘bad’ drugs and started beating on some meek inmates. A gang of about thirty riot equipped guards marched up the stairs with batons and teargas to subdue the altercation which they did quickly. The thugs with blood shot eyes were handcuffed, some were literally dragged down the stairways to the solitary area and were never returned to the general population. It was usual in these circumstances for inmates to be shipped out to maximum security Millbrook where the regime was much tougher and where other ‘difficult’ prisoners were locked up.
A side effect of the Angel Dust evening was a lack of some privileges for the entire prison population and a general search of every ones locker boxes. I had no contraband, hardly any extra tobacco as my ‘extras’ had been confiscated at Camp Dufferin. The guards claimed I had been gambling. These searches were fairly common, and lots of guys lost their most prized possessions at these times, their pornography pictures. The odd blade and pill and piece of hash and pot were also confiscated and if you were found with any contraband chances were you’d be sent to the hole, some extra time would be added to your sentence, perhaps even court charges would be laid and then you may be sent to another institution possibly Millbrook.
Dwight Bonkers a burly man from Neathrose Ontario was doing a sentence for apparently torturing someone by lashing them to a tree with steel chains and driving into them with a vehicle. He was a mean looking son of a bitch who had been transferred from the third floor to our calm ward after the commotion. Dwight could lift double his own weight which I would safely say was well over two hundred pounds. There existed in that prison and I’m told at many others a group of individuals who’s sole purpose was to lift weights in their spare time thereby creating a climate of fear around them. For the most part, the word ‘toughs’ could be applied to these folk. For outsiders and newcomers there wasn’t much of a chance to use the weight lifting equipment unless one wished to embark on friendships with these individuals.
When I heard through a gym ‘employee’ that Bonkers was interested in ‘killing’ me my sense of paranoia grew considerably. Bonkers’s bunk was only about six beds up the wall from where I slept near the TV. A friend from the gym had moved into the ward and he kept an eye on Bonkers for me as we played cards together in the evenings. I made sure that I didn’t go anywhere without someone with me. Turns out that Bonkers was jealous of my popularity, and I could understand this. Night after night he would lie on his bunk watching us play cards and kibbitz around while he had no social life to speak of. I spoke with him on a few occasions, being friendly, trying to get a feel for his anger, from where it stemmed. That as we all know is a difficult task, understanding the unknown and I think by way of my friendly advances and sharing of myself that Bonkers negative attitude towards me subsided, in any case when he got transferred I was relieved.
Spring shone wonderfully that year. As it always does when one is able to work in the outdoors. Eventually the warden saw fit to transfer me to the outdoor gardening crew where life became more tolerable. Since I was on short time I was allowed on this crew with other short timers, the likes of Jake Babine from Hamilton a real street tough individual and another character from north of my Mt Dinky neighbourhood, Porky Morrow of the famed Morrow family who’s brothers Greg and Damien I got to know quite well when they frequented the Beverly Hills Hotel in future years. Greg and Damien were in involved in an unfortunate incident in 1980 that saw a Toronto policeman, officer Sugar murdered after a botched robbery attempt at a Queen Street bar called Bourbon Street. Greg is still in jail, no thanks to super cop Jewel Fanta. Poor Porky he died sometime in the 80s by jumping off an overpass of the 401 near Oshawa escaping a pinch. He jumped onto the highway with cars going 120 KMH, that’s what them bad drugs can do to you. Drugs like crack cocaine and meth, stay away from them.
It was glorious working outside! We’d get shovels and rakes off of a tractor pulled wagon and plant trees, tend garden beds, rake up leaves and debris paying particular attention to the front of the grounds where the administration building was and where visitors to the institution would get their first impression of things. This was a great gig with lots of joking around where once again the bonding between individuals made for great times.
A flooding situation in the town of Cambridge required a crew from the O.R. to go to the flooded town and help with the cleanup of the flooded basements in the downtown core. Several of us traveled in a corrections van to the area every day for a week. The interesting aspect was the sudden taste of freedom, for the very first time in over a year. Fortunately everyone toed the line and reported to the van at lunch time. We were sent into commercial stores and helped in the general cleanup, the throwing out of merchandise. One such shop a nickel and dime store either a S.S.Kressges or a Woolworths were throwing out hundreds and hundreds of those cheap Timex watches that you saw all your life in those twirling display cases in your local drug store window. Insurance companies wouldn’t pay for anything if it wasn’t all sent to the dump. Truckload after truckload filled with excellent merchandise pulled out of the lane ways where the shops had thrown out the stock.
After a few days the water level in the basements of the main street shops had subsided and our crew was no longer required. Our guard told us that the town of Cambridge had officially thanked the prisoners who helped with the cleanup. All these years later I recall the wonderful feeling of being free for those brief moments, the freedom of driving to Cambridge in the institution van, to observe the common everyday occurrences out in the other world, a young girls colourful skirt, a smile on a strangers face, nobody counting you every couple of hours. I felt human.
Back at the institution I counted the last remaining days of incarceration. My plan was to move back with mom and whomever was with her for a while until I got settled in to another routine. Life in the dorm seldom varied, down the hall in 2C a friend from the Rock was in doing a couple of years less a day the maximum reformatory sentence, anything more and you were sent to a Federal institution. Brian Kurns was his name, he was a bit chunky, maybe half native dude from the old days at Rochdale. He had operated a substantial take out pot and hash business a few years earlier, dealt mostly to people from the east end, had a wife and kid now, he used to have some excellent gange. He got a big kick out of having me smoke a reefer of incredible quality. All that crap you here the police saying about how weak pot was back then, that’s bullshit! Lots of guys were like that, wanting to take you over the top, show off their goods.
Kurns he was a mystery in there, at the Rock he had his pad which was where he dealt from on the eleventh floor windows facing Bloor we would visit at least once or twice a week, he’d lavish the drugs on us. One time he took some of us to this ‘other’ pad in the building where it was furnished to the hilt, best stereo system, velour couches, carpets real deluxe not at all like his crash pad, maybe it was some bodies stash place that he was watching cause it just wasn’t his style to have a fancy place like this.
As it was, by this time in life I’d actually lost the taste for drugs like pot and hashish, I guess because there was so much time between ‘drops’. Using became an old habit, one I didn’t really need anymore. Kurns, he kept to himself, if I didn’t know better I might of thought he was afraid of something, he said he was just scared of the situation and appreciated my friendship. He got lucky, was assigned onto a work gang that went to the abattoir on the property and cut meat for which he received a good pay cheque that went to support his wife Barb and their young child.
There was a small scandal that took place at the prison during my tenure. A guard who was in charge of the laundry and its large work force was charged with buggering several inmates. This was common knowledge to the prisoners, this sex ring that was thriving in the laundry area. For having sex with the guard the inmate was given favours, nicer clothes, smokes, candy, not much different than the Maple Leaf Garden scandal years later. The prison guard was relieved of his duties. Had this occurred in the earlier years of the prisons existence, had an inmate been charged with these crimes the courts would have given long sentences and included the paddling of the individual on the buttocks as he stood pants down tied to a large wooden stand, tied at the arms and the legs, up to twenty strokes might be administered depending on the severity of the crime. After a half a dozen or so whacks the inmate bled. The guard was relieved of his duties, lost some seniority, some pension, what shame could he have after the thousands of assaults he had performed over the years while prison officials turned a blind eye to his house of horrors.
I never got involved in the drugs scene in the joint, Cinnors was just handy and we hit it off. Other dealers worked in the gym, it was a cushy go and if you didn’t have drag you didn’t work there. Zorky, a big TO player from Mississauga was there as was his friend Bob, Bob got real bad in the drugs game, smuggling tractor trailer loads of marijuana into California from Mexico, he shot and killed some people, anything for a buck, rumour has it he’s still at it and to be avoided. John Naatch from Oshawa he worked in the gym, smiling Johnny I’d call him, he worked for that big moving company in Oshawa, he was a great guy. That last month I got friendly with the gym guys and I’d get to play golf a lot on the little three hole course they had built while I was in Dufferin. My friend from Keele and Eel Tony Flaim and the Dukes were coming to the joint that summer for a gig and can you believe it, I felt bad that I wouldn’t be there to see the show.
When the last day finally came, sometime in early June of 1974 I hugged a lot of guys the night before, gave all my stuff away, cards, sunglasses, smokes, books, whatever I had. I got up around 5AM on release day, hardly slept it was that same kind of sleep a kid gets when he is excited about something, say like going to the Ex the next day.
A guard came over to my bed and gave me a shake to stir me, he put his hand to his mouth to be quiet so as not to disturb the thirty one other people sleeping. I dressed quickly and quietly then followed another guard to the reception area where all my things were given back to me. The clothes I had worn from Windsor. The mid blue coloured three quarter length jacket with lots of pockets and the white striping fit very well I wondered if it was still fashionable. It was nice to see the white gold ring that they had cut off my finger, I slipped it on. Other things like my wallet and the keys for Don and Carols car were given to me in a plain yellow manila envelope along with about six hundred and fifty dollars. A couple of hundred which was from my canteen savings as every dollar you earn is split up equally in your canteen and take home fund. Somehow I had managed to do my income tax from the previous year and that cheque had been put into my account as well.
That sum was a pile of dough back then, almost as much as I had saved while working for McPhar a few years earlier. In the big cafeteria I was the only person eating and the ritual is that you get to order whatever breakfast you want within reason. I recall those good tasting bacon and eggs that day. A guard walked me out a quiet side door, through a tall wire fenced area into a waiting van where another guard drove me to the Guelph bus station and handed me a one way ticket to Toronto, the bus left in three hours. The guards job was to get me to the bus station. My cockiness was just a mask, I was full of anxieties, life was about to begin anew.
Waiting for the bus was irritating me, we were near the commercial strip, I think, any ways there was a car rental place nearby and I hoofed it over to the place and rented a shiny new car to use for the weekend, nothing fancy a mid size sedan. Before I left I called Robbie Cinnors who was attending U of Guelph on a TAP program and made arrangements to hook up with him sometime soon in Toronto as he had some hashish he wanted to show me. At a service station I quickly unhooked the odometer under the hood to save on mileage charges.
It’s a short drive from Guelph to Toronto, about an hour. I drove to my moms apartment building on Clearview Heights in the Trethewey Drive and Keele area. The government subsidized four bedroom apartment on Humber Boulevard was lost when the Toronto Housing Authority found a lot of damages caused by Alex. The new place was pretty grim, they didn’t have much of anything. There were pieces of ratty old furniture, those few wooden pieces left over from when dad was alive and providing. They’d gone downhill a lot which is hard to imagine as the apartment on Humber was always fairly threadbare. That entire fourteen months I’d been away, I think I wrote home on a bi-weekly basis, Gisele, my mom never once mentioned the turmoil she was going through. It was difficult to appreciate from jail, in retrospect my life in prison was better than that of my families in Toronto. I felt like crying as the sight of this degree of poverty was overwhelming. That poor woman, those poor younger siblings who were with her still, Shane, Barbara and Suzanne. I was the lucky one, the one who left home and went to jail.
Shane was home, Kevin was doing a bit somewhere. Shane and I headed out to Boomer and Herbies house on Spadina Ave west of Eglinton where Boomer had relocated when Rochdale closed. Herbie was his new roommate, TJ, had move elsewhere. It was a tiny house in a nice quiet area of mostly bigger homes. I was a wreck, Tommy’s dog Boogie a giant German Shepherd didn’t like me and scared the shit out of me whenever our eyes would lock, and he would growl which made me more nervous. The other dog Abby was more relaxed.
My anxiety made everything feel twice its normal size. A woman from the neighbourhood was hired to entertain me, I can see her face still today though her name escapes me. I got so drunk and stoned, I was satisfied to eat clams, she liked that, all the guys got a free show watching through the front window. Then I passed out on Herbies new bed, pissing all over his $400 dollar mattress, I never heard the end of that.
I Snuck out early in the morning with Shane in tow, we had a brief stopover at moms then Shane and I headed to Niagara Falls. Somewhere between the Falls and St Catherine we got royally pissed on a large jug of good whiskey and slept the night in the rental car. Passed out is more like it, behind a dusty diner like in a scene from a bad movie. I had missed Shane while I was away, Kevin also.
Monday morning I had to reassemble the odometer on the rental car before I took it back to the rental agency. It was difficult, I was fretting that I would have to go back to jail because I got caught fucking around with a rental car, a form of theft.
I hooked up with Robbie who passed me a nice chunk of black hash at a very good price for kilos which I passed on to my T.O. people who felt I was to fresh from the ‘joint’ too much of a ‘cowboy to do business with. Who knows where that might have taken me, I may have been the big man on the street but more than likely I would have gotten a big head and screwed up. Rochdale ceased to exist all the dealers moving into regular housing with stash houses elsewhere. It was a different world now.
Down on Brunswick Ave the buildings were so huge, I was suffering from some type of ‘release syndrome’, I don’t know what they call it. At High Park there was a big concert around that time and my friend Tony Flaim was on this massive stage, the sun was shining thousands of people were in attendance, Tony was smiling like only Tony could smile a regular smiling pumpkin, full of life and as the set began he saw me and shouted over the microphone, “well folks we’ve got Charlie Tuna in the crowd today, this one’s for him and he kicked into a bad ass blues tune!!!” That made me feel like a million dollars, the ice had been broken, whatever was making me feel weird melted away with those words. Thanks Tony.
After that weekend Boomer took me up to a cottage he and others were using for the summer, a place called Kakabika, a little two bedroom cottage on Stoney Lake a half hours drive from Peterborough. Pete could see I needed some R&R, some down time, some period of adjustment. He hung in for a day or so then left me there in the splendour of nature where I could eat when I wanted, drink when I wanted, walk when and where I wanted to walk. There was a small rowboat that came with the summer cottage rental and I would go rowing on the quiet bay in the evenings trying my luck at fishing but really just bathing in all of these natural elements. I kept busy sprouting some marijuana seeds and planting them in the woods nearby, they didn’t do very well. Like a smokers coach Boomer kept passing fat hash joints to me, the interest to smoke dubes had passed me by, I was no longer comfortable getting stoned three and four times a day, everything was Heaven for me just the way it was. I was home.
After a reasonable rest period, having lost most of my cash in a poker card game at the cottage to my buddy Snorks, I headed back to Toronto, stayed at moms for a few weeks, got work as a slave, operating a jackhammer, tearing up a concrete floor at a plant on Adelaide Street, that lasted two weeks…then I got work at the local bar, the Queensbury Arms, a referral from Big Al. That’s where I met my sweetie Julia and well, going on fourty years later, we are still together….For some reason, of all the stories I have written and tried to write, this is the one I like the best. Thanks for taking the time to read it, and thanks to those folk who stuck by me over the years, you must have been able to see some good in me..
If you are wondering what The Firehydrant is, it is a business card I created while living at Rochdale at Boomer and TJs place…the bearer of that card was allowed entry into the building to party and pick up party supplies.
