The 225th Bastille Day, Almost
On the 25th anniversary of my father’s death
Alan Gordon Cooke died 25 years ago in a small hospice on a quiet street in Montreal. He was 56 but looked 80. It was a Tuesday—July 11th, 1989—at around 8:30 in the evening. Like me he loved dates, and history, and synchronicity, and I was surprised he didn’t make it to the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. But the cryptococcal meningitis and the cytomegalovirus that his immune system had not been coping with proved too much.
Learning that my father had AIDS, while a shock, was not a surprise given his bacchanals on the Mountain when the weather was right or in a sauna on Saint Denis when it wasn’t. The swiftness with which AIDS had reduced his strong body to blotchy skin and protruding bones, however, was.
I got the news that my father had collapsed and was in hospital the day after Thanksgiving in 1988. His brother Jim and I drove up from Boston right away. Our first stop was my father’s flat on avenue du Parc, just below the Mountain, where we were greeted by dusty tumbleweeds, dirty clothes, and dishes piled in the sink. The hospital—also just below the Mountain—was a short walk away. There we found a skeleton, its skin taut and its skull crowned by limp hair dyed an unnatural beige. This most vital and virile of men had been reduced to some inconceivable number of pounds. Clear fluid flowed from a plastic bag into his wrist, yellow-brown fluid dripped into a receptacle hooked to the side of the bed.
Over the following weeks I spent a lot of time sitting next to him in his hospital room. I would take the Vermont Transit bus up from Boston with my Hüsker Dü and Tom Waits cassettes, thankful that my boss was letting me use my sick days for this unexpected time off. On one visit I spent hours reading aloud an interminable biography of Sir Edmund Backhouse, the fraudulent English sinologist, while my father dozed in and out, oblivious to the blinking and beeping machine attached to his drip. Another visit we read a volume of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which was better.
We didn’t talk much. My father had always been the great orator and I his listener, but AIDS and looming Death had left us silent. I spent the evenings at my father’s apartment with Sarah the cat, or walking the snowy streets and reminiscing about the six months I had lived with him during the winter and spring of 1985-86.
Those six months in Montreal were a high point of my life. I was 23 and had moved back to the States from England a few months before. My parents had separated when I was a baby, and my mother and I lived in Washington DC while my father worked on his doctorate at Cambridge. When I was nine my mother took me over to see if we could all live together again, despite knowing he was bisexual (by that time the “bi” wasn’t really pertinent; my father desired male companionship far more than women). He had visited us in Washington for an afternoon a few years earlier, and I barely remembered him.
In 1971 my father was not altogether happy. He was a serious drinker, sometimes for days at a time, and blackouts, followed by depression, were common. After such an episode he would write to a correspondent: “Well, here I am again. More evidence, if more were needed, of life after death.” I was terrified of him and his powerful voice with its impeccable diction and vocabulary and its tendency to argue. He could be impatient and he had a temper. But it wasn’t all bad. He had a wonderfully dry sense of humor—he loved to tell stories and jokes and to laugh around a kitchen table with his friends (of whom he had a great many) and wine. We had no television but there was one program he liked, so we would walk over to someone else’s when Monty Python was on the BBC. But most of the time it was safer to avoid him.
He wasn’t at home often, but when he was I increasingly had to escape to my room while my mother and father yelled at each other. After two years of escalating tension he moved out and I saw him even less. We had a weekly date at The Hayloft on Lensfield Road, next door to his favorite pub, The Oak. He would talk and I would listen while eating my oily pizza and drinking Coke. He had pulled some strings to get me into a prep school and I returned the favor by becoming a poor student—a mystery to my parents, who had excelled.
In 1975 my father moved to Montreal. In Cambridge he had worked for the Scott Polar Research Institute; now he had a similar research job at McGill’s Centre for Northern Studies. After so many years in sedate Cambridge he welcomed gay-friendly Montreal with wide-open arms. He drank more often, now in wild bars and taverns—the Dominion Square and the Rainbow among his favorites. I would visit him on my summer holidays. He was becoming a little more used to what he considered my complacent attitude toward school and life, and he bullied me into learning how to touch-type so that I could always find some kind of clerical work to support myself. My greatest sin, however, was not acknowledging what he and others did for me: it seemed no matter how much gratitude I showed, it was not enough. I had to learn how to avoid angering him on those summer vacations. By 1978 things became easier: now we both liked beer and sometimes I went with him to the taverns, and I remember one dinner party when I paced him Molson for Molson, which impressed him.
It wasn’t until I lived with my father in that winter of 1985 that I began to feel actually comfortable around him. School was no longer in the picture, and I had four years of employment behind me. To help matters, he had decided that he was hypoglycemic and had quit alcohol, sugar, and white flour, replacing them with vitamins and minerals and Quebecois grass (sometimes he called it marijuana—never weed or pot). “Thank God for grass” was his mantra; also “A day without grass is like a day without sunshine.” We shared a ritual joint before a dinner of fish and potato stew or hamburgers, followed by my washing up and a game of Scrabble. Sometimes he went out for an evening liaison but more often he went to bed early, rising at 4:30 or 5 to eat his breakfast of raw oats, chopped figs and apple, almonds and kefir while I listened to the clinking from my sleeping bag in an alcove next to the kitchen. Then the door would close and he would march down the street to the Metro station to catch the first train west to Atwater, home of the Hochelaga Research Institute—a big room above a public library that was filled with his books and papers. He had recently founded Hochelaga to replace the Centre for Northern Studies library that McGill had decided to break up and redistribute around their campus. Hochelaga was across the street from the Forum where the Canadiens skated and Rush played; it’s where I worked for my father for six months and it’s where I fell in love with his younger colleague, Jennifer. It was a magical time for me.
My father became interested in northern Canada soon after entering Dartmouth College in 1951, his freshman passion for geology giving way to its northern history and the impact of industry (first the fur trade, then natural resource mining and other “development”) on its native peoples. In the summer of 1953 he worked amidst swarms of mosquitoes and black flies on a survey expedition in the iron fields of Ungava, a thousand miles north of his home in Sunapee, New Hampshire. Being white, he was nominally put in charge of twenty Montagnais Indians, many of them twice his age. When the camp cook fell ill halfway through the summer, my father took over his job, getting up at 4 a.m. to cook breakfast for everyone. Afterward he would knead enough dough for the next day’s twelve loaves of bread, then make cakes and pies in time for a supper of steaks or roasts flown in from town or rainbow trout fresh from the lake next to the camp.
The next summer, with a rolled up sleeping bag, a pack, and twenty dollars, he hitchhiked and worked his way from Sunapee to Moosonee on the southern end of Hudson Bay, then traveled along the new Trans Canada Highway through Winnipeg to Calgary. There he got a ride on a truck heading north to Hay River, where he found a job as a deckhand on a tugboat that pushed barges up the Mackenzie River to Aklavik, 120 miles above the Arctic Circle. After investigating Inuit villages along the coast, he managed to get a ride on a two-seater flying into Alaska, where the westward portion of his journey ended in Fairbanks. He had to scramble to get back home in time for his senior year at Dartmouth, where he had been named a Fellow.
At Dartmouth he met Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Canadian explorer and the first white man to live for extended periods of time among the Inuit. He had donated his Arctic library to the college and was now working in it with his wife, Evelyn. Stef was my father’s mentor and, following a year at a seminary in Boston and another year teaching Indian children in a one-room school in Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories, he returned to the Stefansson Collection to work for him. My parents were married on Stef’s farm in Vermont and I was named after him.
Stefansson enthusiastically encouraged my father’s interest in the North, and soon he was back on the Mackenzie, canoeing its 2,500 miles down to Aklavik with a classmate. In 1960, a few days after my parents were married, they drove from Vermont to Seattle, then flew to Noatak, an Inuktitut village on the North Slope of Alaska.
Edward Teller and the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to test the idea of using atomic bombs for large-scale construction projects, and had arrived at the notion of blowing up a chunk of Cape Thompson to make a deepwater harbor. They called this scheme Project Chariot. My father had been hired to study the environmental impact on the local economy—hunting for caribou, seal, and whale, and fishing for salmon. My parents lived with the Inuit villagers for several months, participating fully in their daily activities and taking notes and photographs. Not surprisingly their report concluded that detonating atomic bombs would not be good for the local economy. The federal government was keen to go ahead—until my parents returned to Vermont and helped organize a grassroots campaign to save the region from nuclear fallout. Soon the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society got involved, and the plan was dropped. (Leonardo DiCaprio has purchased the film rights to Dan O’Neill’s book about Project Chariot (“The Firecracker Boys,” St. Martin’s Press, 1995), and I recently read that a movie of the same name had been given the green light.)
At 26 I was half my current age when my father died. Today I would be a better friend to him than when he was alive. Despite our different modus operandi we have much in common. My father cherished his freedom and independence—having a lot of money was not important and he rarely earned enough to have to file a tax return. As long as he had enough for food, rent, secondhand books, Quebecois, and sometimes taking a Hochelaga visitor to lunch at Thursday’s on Crescent Street, he was quite happy. That said, earning enough to pay for those things as a freelance editor was a constant struggle. (I’m the same; I love my independence and many years ago happily traded a regular paycheck for working at home as a freelance web designer.)
My father spent a lot of time trying to get me to see how diligent and responsible I would have to be if I wanted to survive in a world indifferent to my wants and needs. He was right there. After I left Montreal in 1986 and moved to Boston, I was thrown into uncharted territory. I had to figure out how to survive, and I couldn’t sleep on Uncle Jim’s couch forever.
My self-reliance and determination kicked in. I got a good job and I met Resa, who in 1995 would become my wife, and we slowly but steadily built a life and home together that we are both very happy with. I wish I could tell my father about how I put myself through evening classes, earning a Bachelor’s degree with honors—from Harvard, no less. He would be astonished that I’ve become a family historian, that I’ve traced my roots back to Salem before the Witch Trials—I, who never showed any interest in my family. He would be fascinated with the book I’m working on about his half-sister-in-law, Barbara Newhall Follett. He knew Barbara’s tragic story from a short book written about her in the 1960s, but I would be able to tell him a lot more. He’d be delighted with my role in the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, whose website I manage. In 1987 we flew to Cambridge together for a visit, and he had decided that drinking a pint or two of bitter would do him no harm, and he was right. We had a great time in familiar pubs with his old friends. Now I’m a home brewer, and I would love to be able to share some of my beer with him. I think he would be surprised at how good it is.
In his last years my father worried about aging and the lessening attention he was receiving at the baths. That’s why he dyed his hair that unnatural beige color—he would have been better off having it done by a professional, but he was frugal. Making love with men had been the driving force of his life for at least 25 years. He considered the act literally divine; when he and his partner or partners were on the Mountain or on a bed, their lovemaking gave them exalted status, like gods in Athens or Rome. He preferred younger men, and they should be slender and handsome. He did his daily pushups and he was very strong before he got sick, but he couldn’t reverse the clock.
He spent a lot of time alone, reading in the sun on his balcony or typing his journal on Christophe, the computer on the makeshift desk in his kitchen—so named because he had arrived on Columbus Day. The computer had a floppy drive that whirred and clicked—“Tais-toi, Christophe,” my father would say in return.
Like me, my father had no visual imagination. When he closed his eyes he saw nothing but black, but his dreams were in technicolor. He longed to be able to communicate with his subconscious mind, this mysterious phenomenon that produced these wonderful dreams—that’s why he spent so much time typing journal entries on Christophe, often while stoned. A disciple of Carl Jung, he believed in the collective unconscious, in the Wise Old Man. Sometimes he took mescaline or acid to try to open Huxley’s doors of perception, but he never quite succeeded. He tried meditation and hypnosis, hoping to get images or voices or spirit guides to appear before him—he wanted to learn all he could from them. But his impatience and frustration got the better of him.
I’ve been on a similar quest for the past few years (minus the acid). I meditate daily and can quite easily reach an altered state where my body vibrates and my disconnected mind floats somewhere in outer space, ticking along at 4 or 5 Hz. It’s a state of profound bliss and I wish I could share my experiences with my father. But who knows? Maybe that’s where he ended up on that sunset evening of July 11, 1989, three days shy of the two hundredth Bastille Day. I hope so.
For The Recollectors by Stefan Cooke, 11 July 2014.
