Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Two continued: Part Three

     Chapter Two continued


    At night time wherever my family stays, my mother and father squabble and sometimes scream at each other. The reason? The usual one namely shortage of money. I'm now in high school at Northmount High, a new school built for the surging young of pre-Baby Boomers and Baby Boomers.
     At first, I love high school. It gives me a refuge from my family's apartment, with its bare living room, no t.v. and a tiny fold-up cot where I sleep. Later we get some living room furniture thanks to Sylvia who quits school for a time to get a job.
     Then wisely she slips away from Montreal and goes to Los Angeles in 1960. My mother's pitifully low wages as a file clerk that keeps starvation away from the door. My father now sells aluminum sidings to people often as poor as he is.
    "You are nomads," one of my father's partners in their belt factory tells me with a mocking smile. But that was way back in 1956. By 1962 I was in university at McGill, barely scraping by mark wise in philosophy and english studies. I had become a snobby abusive self-proclaimed intellectual.
      Wealthy and not-so wealthy WASPs and Jews rub shoulders in the halls and classrooms of shis downtown university. But these two groups rarely date each other or even like each other. "Why do your Jewish women dress up so much?" a blonde Protestant lady asks me in one of my classes. "We don't."
    To-day I would say that Jews assert themselves by dressing up. WASPS didn't have to do that, because back then in the early 1960's, they were still the top dogs in Montreal. Hanford was a tall curly-haired honours student. He was a WASP. "We were told to hate Jews," he told a friend of mine.
 "Later I found out that Jews were interesting people. To-day I like Jews."
     Hanford's father was a professor at McGill University. I often wondered whether he told his son to dislike us. But I never asked him or his son.
     Of course, not all my poverty-stricken teen age years were terrible. In my early teens I loved to play pool although I was a bust on the baseball diamond and the football field. As an athlete I stunk and was usually the last person to be chosen in pick-up games. Still, with friends of mine like the husky Mike Lowsky, the outspoken Micky Katansky and the dark-haired Stephen White, I went to pool halls where we often played for hours. And I often won at the pool table.
    Later on, I pal around with Peter Cohen, a son of a rich dress store owner. He joins me up in a club at the Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. on Cote Sainte Catherine. I love playing basketball. and dancing at  'Y' in its ballroom on Sunday afternoons. Later still I make friends with Stan Berger who introduces me to classical music. He has a big collection of classical music in his bedroom and he lives with his mother only two blocks away from my parents' place on Bourret Avenue.
     I look up with awe at Jack, a dark-haired graduate of Northmount High whose intellect overwhelms me. Later I see this man as a cold abusive intellectual. Other McGill students like Ronald Blumer and Adam Szymanski who become film makers, turn me on to international flicks from Germany, France and Italy. Morrie Alioff, a tall clever film critic also opens the world of film to me.
     Yet I want to leave Montreal. I loathe its ferocious freezing winters, and broiling humid summers. I sense the threatening rise of the new French-Canadian nationalism. I tire of my parents' endless arguments. And at McGill, I stumble on a way out of this dead end.