MITCHEL: Desperate Journey1
Chapter Three - The Sixties
Vicky’s Story
In early 1960, Vicky decided she wanted to move in with me. For a whole year we were just platonic buddies and I didn’t think much about it so I agreed. We had moved to Hamilton, Ontario because I had a job there with a painting contractor. Now she wanted to have sex even though she knew all along that I wanted men. Being the people pleaser that I was, I agreed and she got pregnant.
She gave birth to a boy and we called him August. Shortly after the boy was born, Vicky became schizophrenic. She went out of control and I had no idea what to do. A neighbor called the police. Two squad cars arrived and they tried to put Vicky in one of the cars. She was determined not to go. I guess she got an adrenaline rush, grabbed two cops and through them up in the air. The cops called for back up. It took five cops to get her into the police car. They took her to the mental hospital and I was left holding the baby. I had no idea what to do with my baby son. A blind girl from next door picked him up and said that she would look after him. Within two hours, the Children’s Aid Society came and took him away. They put him up for adoption. Vicky was in the hospital for two months.
When Vicky came out of the hospital, she told me of her horrendous past, something she had never spoken of before. I knew she was married before but that was all I knew. She told me about her husband. He was a bank robber, an alcoholic, and extremely abusive. (Vicky was about 15 years older than I was). She had previously given birth to five kids, which I never knew about. Her husband used to torture her and the kids. He would hang the kids by their feet from the rafters of a barn and beat them with a baseball bat. Three of her kids went insane and were permanently institutionalized. He used to beat Vicky until she was unconscious. No one was ever allowed to see a doctor. When he went on drinking binges for a week or two at a time he locked everyone in the house. Sometimes they ran out of food. He was jailed several times and Vicky and the kids were often starving. Finally he ran away and one of Vicky’s sisters had her committed to the mental hospital in Toronto.
Here she was tortured again. The “doctors” gave her electric shock treatment several times. On one of those, she had a heart attack and almost died. Another form of “treatment” they gave her was to put her naked in a tub half filled with cold water and the rest ice. I guess giving birth brought back memories and she went psychotic again. She was o.k. for almost a year and then she got pregnant again. During her pregnancy she relapsed and went back to the mental hospital. Our second son was born there. We named him Edgar. He was born in 1961, and the Children’s Aid took him right out of the hospital.
More Rejections of My Creations
That year a headline in the Hamilton Spectator said that three garbage dumps had to be removed and it would cost the taxpayers five million dollars. I studied the situation and figured out a more economical solution. I checked the cost of renting railway hopper cars, engines, amount of hours it would take and concluded that I could move all three dumps for $175,000. Not only that, but my plan included building a recycling plant that I could actually make money on. I went to City Hall and talked to some of the councilors. They were in favor of my proposition. Then I talked to the mayor. He screamed at me telling me to get to hell out of his sight and he was not interested. Well, that’s politics.
Then, between `60 and `61, I started writing poetry. This was classical poetry with complex rhyming systems and intricate meter balancing. I wrote over 100 poems. I submitted them to every publisher that ever published poetry. Every single one of them rejected me.
Vicky got out shortly after this and we moved back to Toronto. I was driving back in the old Chevy and for some reason, I forgot to check the oil. I ran out of oil half way to Toronto and the engine seized up. I managed to get the car onto the grass median before it stopped. We left most of our stuff in the car and hitchhiked to Toronto. I just left the car there. We rented a room with a kitchen in a large old house near downtown. It turned out to be haunted, with what seemed to be poltergeists.
The Haunting
It was rather disturbing there because lights would go on and off any time of the day or night. Doors would open and slam shut. A small TV would turn itself on and off. The radio would come on with the volume full blast. Pictures I had on the walls would be ripped off by an unseen hand. Sometimes candles would start gently floating through the air and then smash onto the floor. We accepted them and refused to move out. They finally became less mischievous.
By now I was a bookworm, studying everything. One evening, I was sitting in an overstuffed chair reading and I got very tired. I put the book down and relaxed. I was almost dozing off. Then I felt myself rising up out of my body. From just below the ceiling, I could see my body sitting in the chair. I rose up through the roof and stopped about 100 feet in the air. Then I floated at high speed and found myself hovering over the Ford plant in Oakville, Ontario. I believe they call this astral traveling. Over a period of about three months, I had quite a few of these trips. Some were floating over Europe and some were into outer space.
1962
In 1962, I turned to inventing. I came up with over 100 inventions A few were more like the Rube Goldberg type, but most were good and practical. Some were good enough to steal. I had naively made a deal with the Ontario Government’s Department of Trade and Industry. They would publish a hint of my inventions in their journal. If manufacturers were interested, the government would contact me and I could sell them manufacturing rights and possibly get residuals from the sale of the products. Well, quite a few of them came out on the market (like an adjustable stepladder to fit on stairs) and I never saw a penny, and no one contacted me. When I contacted the government, they told me to get lost. When I complained, they said they have the best lawyers in the city and asked what I’ve got.
That year, I was working at the Toronto General Hospital. I worked in the kitchen and one of my jobs was taking trays of food to the patients. I lied on my application to get the job, and later when they found out, they fired me. The job required no skill, but if I hadn’t lied I would have appeared over-qualified and I wouldn’t have been offered the job. One morning, I decided not to go to work. Vicky was with me the whole time. I went back to bed and slept until noon. When I went to work the next morning, I got hell from everyone in the kitchen for leaving at noon yesterday. I told them I wasn’t there yesterday. They claimed I worked all morning but I was in kind of a daze and wouldn’t talk to anyone. Half of my work was done and there was no one else to do it. I was actually in two places at the same time.
Godfreed and I were still meeting in restaurants for coffee and discussions. One day he told me there was someone I just had to meet. His name was Ivan and he would be here soon. We were sitting in a booth and Ivan arrived and sat next to me. I was sitting against the wall. Ivan said he had to go to the washroom. He went, came back and sat beside me again. Soon, he began to look funny and he started to stiffen up. He asked someone to call an ambulance. While he was in the washroom, he swallowed a whole box of rat poison. I was trapped against the wall. The ambulance attendants had a tough job getting him out of the booth because he was so stiff. They scraped his stomach in the process. They took him to the Toronto General Hospital and I ended up serving him his meals. We kept in touch and hung out with Godfreed.
In the meantime, Vicky was in and out of the mental hospital. I didn’t see as much of her anymore.
1963
In 1963, monthly Greyhound bus passes for Canada and the US were available for $36. I got one and traveled all around the US. This was the year I met Bill K. He was an older gay guy and we would often have sessions together. He was about the friendliest person I knew. I was still doing artwork although nobody ever recognized it. I gave most of my artwork away because nobody would pay me a nickel for it. I wrote a book on futuristic architectural designs and a book on restaurants. These all disappeared along with my books on poetry, inventions, and a lot of my artwork. They just seemed to vanish into thin air. I started a course in upholstery at a local college because I had been upholstering my own furniture and it looked perfect. I used to make my own furniture. After two months, they kicked me out because I was five minutes late.
Through 1963, I studied the eastern philosophies, various religions, and the paranormal. I got involved with the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, the bishop to the King of Sweden and a Christian philosopher. What fascinated me about him was that he claimed to live in two worlds at the same time - this physical one and the spiritual world. He talked to angels and visited their worlds. My favorite of his books was Heaven and Hell. I disagreed with most of what he said, but his writings were the launching pad into what I later came to believe was my purpose in life.
1964
In January of 1964, I became a trance medium. I didn’t choose this. It just happened to me. I started having visions of strange people who were not from this planet. No, I wasn’t going schizophrenic; these were entities who wanted to use my body as a medium to get a message across. I would feel a sensation of someone being there. Usually it would happen in a restaurant while Godfreed was there. He lugged around a big reel-to-reel tape recorder. He could tell when a “visitor” as I called them was coming. I would become semi-conscious but still aware of the visitor. Godfreed would turn on the recorder. A voice would come through me and it wasn’t mine. The “voice” might identify him/herself as from the spirit world, someone who passed on, someone from another planet, or even another part of the universe. This went on for a year. There were well over 100 visitors and the theme running through all this was that the universe was a macro human organism. I had thought about this idea years ago, but I never put any validity on what the visitors said.
That year, I wrote a book on parapsychology called Dawn of the New Age. I sent copies of the manuscript to at least a dozen publishing companies. They all sent me rejection slips except one. That editor said that my manuscript was exactly what they were looking for, but they lost their company a week before. Then somehow the book vanished into thin air just like the others did. I also took my second month-long Greyhound bus trip that year. By now I had been in most of the states.
Early in 1965, I moved into a rooming house on Sherbourne Street. My next door neighbor was Victor M, an old man with heart problems but a radical just like me. We had endless hours of productive conversation.
Dancers
Ivan and I hung out a lot together often with Godfreed. Ivan loved dancing and so did I. We often crashed parties and became popular as a dance team in free style dance, although we could do all the popular dances of the day. We would go to dance parties and be the stars of the night because we invented new and wild dance moves. For some unknown reason, I joined the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. My job there had little to do with dancing. The focus was to sell lifetime memberships to lonely old ladies for an outrageous price. One of the members was Mrs. Craing. She was a multi-millionair because she owned the Craing Plaza in Toronto. There were lots of rich old ladies there, but the money never impressed me.
This ballroom dancing had endless rules and precise moves; it was quite different from the free-style dancing I was used to. The process was that an advanced teacher would teach me basic moves at the bronze level in waltz, tango, cha cha, rumba, and so on. What I learned, I would teach to my students. But there were endless hours of practice. I had to earn my bronze certificate, work then on my silver, and also learn some gold. In a short time, I had my silver and part of my gold. I had to wear a suit and a tie when I started. This felt very weird and strange because I was used to dressing unisex, usually jeans and a t-shirt.
One night the Studio dancers performed at the prestigious Massey Hall. I had to wear a black tuxedo with a red sash. I have never had any stage fright. I felt that I could speak with ease before thousands, although I never did. In spite of my confidence, the performance was a disaster. First, my dance partner was a young girl who was a new student and didn’t know any moves. Secondly, the orchestra was late and we had no rehearsal time. Then the orchestra bungled the numbers and were playing a waltz while we were doing a cha cha. They never got any of the numbers right.
Enter Morna
One of my first students was Morna D. She was a delightful lady of 63 years and bouncing with energy and life. She didn’t come to learn dancing. She came to find a man, and for some strange reason she picked me. I told her right up front that I was looking for the same thing she was, and she was fully accepting of that. We hung out together for about seven years until she suddenly died of cancer. She already had three boyfriends. We had sex a couple of times when I first knew her, and her personality made it all right. She was very open-minded. I even brought a couple of guys to her place and had sex with them while she watched. I once watched her having sex with one of her boyfriends.
Morna had a 1957 Chrysler New Yorker, which she used to let me drive. It was a monstrous and powerful car. I once drove it up Highway 400 north of Toronto at 130 miles per hour.
Enter Alvin
1965 was also the year Bill K introduced me to Alvin B. Bill didn’t think I would like him, but told me to come over for a threesome anyway. I did. I liked Alvin and he became the greatest sex partner I ever had. He became my main boyfriend for 12 years and he wasn’t jealous of all the other men I went with.
Alvin was from the Austrian aristocracy. His father was one of the richest men in Europe. He controlled the European prescription drug market. Alvin was a snob even though he had little money compared to his family. His family rejected him because he was gay. He worked as a hairdresser but he had some of the wealthiest clients in Toronto. He had just bought a condo when I met him. His place was immaculate. You could eat off the floor. He had a lot of antiques (you couldn’t sit on most of his furniture), and good works of art on his walls. He had two nightingales and three strawberry finches. I would visit him one night a week and that was enough. He could not be more opinionated. If you didn’t agree with every word he said you would be lambasted to the fullest extent. I learned to agree with everything he said to keep the peace. I could never have lived with a man like that.
Alvin’s family hung out with all the European royalty, but when his father died, he never left him a penny in his will. Alvin was pretty upset with that because he wanted to be wealthy too. He had an obnoxious and stingy aunt in the city who he would suck up to. He would always do her hair but never got anything for it. He took me there once. She lived in a secluded stone castle on the banks of the Humber River. Her place was filled with priceless antiques. Nothing was under 300 years old. When she died, she didn’t leave him a penny either. His other aunt owned a huge ancient spice plantation in Jamaica. She was eventually forced off the island. Once while visiting her, he found ancient dungeons where slaves were kept. He smuggled out some leg irons and torture devices, then got in trouble with the Jamaican government.