Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 31, Part One.

   The Saviour and His Disciple by Dave Jaffe. Part One.


      This is a story of two men. One helped the other survive. Yet in the end their politcs ended their friendship.
    It was September 1975 and Gerry Coser was in a hell of a mess. In fact, Gerry was the mess. The balding blonde short 33 year old was a graduate of the University of Toronto. Yet he had already walked out of been forced to leave two careers and his savings were quickly running down. To add to his troubles he had big physical problems too.
      "How shall I live?" this former teacher and one time government clerk asked himself as he looked
around his grim two room suite in a rooming house on Vancouver's Kitsilano district. "And what am I going to do with my life?"
    As the leaves on the trees outside his rooming house flared into red, orange and yellow, pain wracked his lower back. Coser's doctor was a cheerful transplant from Northern Ireland."You've got arthritis in your lower vertabrate,"the doctor told Coser. "It could get worse and if it does you'll probably have trouble walking." Doctor McCullin sent Gerry Coser to a back specialist who told him just to rest. Yet this man, a massive former athletic coach, told Coser that right now he had no cure for the pain in Coser's back except pain killers.
      Coser's physical pains weren't the only problem that plagued him. His mind was a mess too. His temper was out of control. Massive waves of anger would sometimes sweep across his brain. He would often yell and scream at people. At other times sadness would wrack his mind and he felt like crying. He still felt the pain of his mother and sister's deaths of a few years back. Still , he couldn't break into tears.
    "Men don't cry," was the rule he live by. So he resisted crying and ended up feeling even worse.
Gerry's girlfriend Vivian, a 20 something bureaucrat, had walked out on him, unable to take his abusive ways. "I don't ever want to see you again," she told him and then  stalked out of the rooming house where Gerry lived. He took one last painful glance at her as she walked out into the street. She did have nice shapely legs and a nice big behind that were now encased in blue jeans, he had to admit to himself. He never saw her again.
   After she left, he scanned the local papers, went to the local library to look at books on the shelves. Where were the answers to his problems, he wondered. Were they in books or what?  And then just as things were looking even worse, a saviour came into view. Henry Afflick was a tall gangly American draft resister. Gerry had met him in a political meeting. Afflick came from northern California and one day he and Gerry ran into each other again at a greasy spoon restaurant on Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano. Gerry poured out his problems to Afflick.
    Henry smiled as he sipped his coffee. "I've got the answers for you Gerry," Henry said as he pushed his long thick brown hair backwards from his forehead. "Have you ever read Arthur Janov's 'The Primal Scream'? It can help really help you." Then Afflick gave Gerry a copy of Janov's book.