My Dinner with Albert Moritz

            On Thursday morning my butt muscles bothered me a bit more than the day before. The discomfort went away during yoga but came back later when I’d been sitting and writing for a while.

I got caught up on my journal.

I did some exercises for my gluteus muscles and then headed over to the Mezz to have a beer with Albert Moritz. I got there twelve minutes early and sat at the small table with the stool seating by the window. I hadn’t been there for three years but had heard that the place was under new management and that the big salt-water fish tank that had given it so much character was gone. I ordered a pint of Creemore and asked what happened to the fish tank. The bartender told me that the previous owner had taken it with him. I read a little bit of “The Old Acrobat” by Charles Baudelaire. There were some metal sculptures on the wall and I got up to take a closer look. It turned out that they were mechanical sculptures with cranks attached to bicycle chains for making them move. One was a face and the eyes would move from side to side. Another was a bird whose wings would flap. A larger one was a man but this time with an air pressure lever that made his head nod.

Albert was about as late as I’d been early. He didn’t want to sit on the stools and so we went further back.

He got a beer for himself and we chatted. He noticed on the big screen that there was a lot of pre-game Raptors programming. He said that in his capacity as poet laureate he’d been asked to write a poem about the Raptors but he’d declined because he didn’t think it was appropriate. He suggested that there are rappers whose writing would be a better fit. He said he has handlers that make suggestions but he isn’t required to write on any topics. He’d written a poem to commemorate victims of the Toronto vehicle attack and read it at the memorial. A few months ago he’d had a request from the Redpath Sugar Company for him to write a poem to mark their 60^th anniversary on Toronto’s waterfront. They got more than they’d bargained for when he submitted a long poem “The Current of the Sugar” about the company and sugar’s contribution to colonialism and slavery and so they rejected it. Albert said, “Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!” If Redpath had just accepted him coming to read the poem maybe only fifty people would have heard it, but their rejection made the news and caused the poem to be read by half a million people.

He asked what I’d been doing poetically and I told him about my bedbug diary and my poem in which I have the city speaking about its own alleys. He thought those were interesting ideas. He said that he’s always thought that a collection of poems about a trip from end to end along one of the long east-west streets like College or Gerrard would be interesting.

He wanted to know how long I’d lived in Toronto and I told him that I’d first come here in 1971 when I ran away from home. I said the summer of that year was the end of the hippy era at least in the east. Hippies and freaks from all over the world converged on Quebec City when I spent a few weeks there on my way back to New Brunswick.

Albert told me to my surprise that he’s 72. He said that he thought the period from 1967 to 1969 produced one of the great communities of history. I asked if he’d been a hippy and he said he’d merely been a fellow traveller. We talked about our times on the street. He said he had been a street person for a while but never out of necessity because he always had a place to go.

He said that drugs killed the hippy movement but I suggested that it had been money as is evidenced by Yorkville.

We discussed how Toronto has changed over different periods and how it’s now Condo Toronto. But he remembers all the hangouts where many now successful or later successful and now dead poets like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondatje, Milton Acorn and Gwen MacEwin would read.

Albert had brought back both my manuscripts and had made notes on them. He said he thinks my poems need a bit of work but that they could and should be published in Toronto. He told me we could get together again after I’ve tweaked them a little. He suggested that I change the order of the poems and open with some of the poems about Parkdale, followed by Instructions for Electroshock Therapy and then some of the romantic laments. It was also his opinion that the Parkdale poems in my course manuscript should be included in Paranoiac Utopia, including “Fuck Off” which although it’s not Parkdale poem, feels like one.

Albert had a meatball sandwich and I had the chilli fries. I had invited him and offered to buy him a beer but he seemed intent on paying and he does make a lot more money then me and so I didn’t put up a fight.

I walked Albert to the Lansdowne bus and waited with him until it came. I rode home but when I got there I saw that it was early enough to go to the supermarket. I went to Freshco where I bought grapes, strawberries, raspberries and a loaf of Bavarian sandwich bread.

Since I’d already had dinner with Albert I just made coffee and had some yogourt with honey and raspberries while watching one episode of Stories of the century.

This story was about Nate Champion. It begins with him being run out of Texas for rustling. The only reason the Cattlemen’s Association buy him a ticket to Wyoming instead of lynching him is because he can’t prove he’d been rustling. On the stage he meets a wealthy British gentleman named Benton on his way to set up a cattle ranch in Wyoming. With Benton is a young woman named Joan who is his ward. Champion says his name is Joe Baker and that he is a cattle buyer and so Benton hires him. But Champion gathers a gang of crooked cowboys around him and they rustle cattle from a nearby ranch. Champion tells Benton he’s bought them and just keeps the money. Detectives come looking for receipts for the cattle. Benton puts them off but he knows Champion has been rustling. He’s about to go to confront Champion and threaten to turn him in when Joan shoots him and goes to tell Champion that she’s his new partner. They become lovers but when the law closes in he pushes her away. The posse closes in and there is a shootout. The house where Champion is holding up catches fire and Champion dies.

Joan was played by Lisa Daniels, who was Miss Birmingham, England when she was 13. She did the voice of Perdita in 101 Dalmations.

The real Nate Champion started out as a cowboy in Texas, working his way up to Wyoming for ranchers until he could build his own spread. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association was an organization of large ranchers that tried to monopolize public land that homesteading smaller ranchers were trying to also use. The big ranchers often accused the homesteaders of rustling as a way to eliminate them because rustlers were often unceremoniously hanged on the spot. Nate Champion was one of the leaders of the small ranchers trying to organize a competing roundup. The WSGA attacked Champion’s KC Ranch first and killed some of his men. Champion’s house was surrounded. He held the vigilantes off for several hours, killing four of them. He kept a diary during that time. His place was set on fire and when he emerged he was riddled with bullets. The big ranchers had expensive lawyers and never saw a jail cell.