SUDDENLY, EVERYTHING WENT wrong, and all at once. I had left Paris in June, without a cent, but equipped with a gift of a hand-woven hammock from a Greek friend, Michaelis Mamalingas, and more importantly, a plan for my new frontier of conquest — Cape Bogador. Charles was a friend from a Gabonese diplomatic family, and had promised me that, upon completion of my Masters thesis, I could fly to Gabon where a helicopter would await me, and from there a position in a local university.
The thesis was more than doable. After reducing me to a crumb, Chaunu had offered some practical advice that saved me — stay away from Barthes and Foucault! The big issue at the time was loyalty of the French Canadians, in the wake of two American invasions in 1775 and 1812, and the Church was in thick with the negotiations — because they feared more than anything the Enlightenment, a creation of the French intelligentsia, and that was the ideological spark alongside Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, for the American revolution. In Quebec, democratic institutions were tentatively making their way. Voltaire and particularly Rousseau were considered as seditious writers by both the Church and the Château Clique, led by a bishop named Jacob Mountain, and a governor called Murray, whose tenure has been referred to as “the reign of terror.”
I chose the material because it fit my destiny as a future prime minister coming from Western Canada, an utter fantasy considering my own vagabonding tendencies, but one that consistently had me on the rails as far as my formal trajectory went. My paperwork was always in order, and in the end, that would save me.
Seven weeks after my return, I visited our family physician Dr. Yelland for a quick check-up prior to my departure for my African adventure. Doc Yelland was a charming man, an Edinburgh Scot. He nearly killed my mother with an allergy shot, and she ended up being a Botox pioneer, taking botulism injections to keep her eyes from closing. He used to travel to the old country to watch the annual Edinburgh Rugby Sevens. I’m a great believer in synchronicity. Doc Yelland only poisoned two of us, leaving seven members of the family intact. Unless he recommended that Chinese doc who killed Dad. That would defeat the theory, but that was probably just coincidence.
He greeted me with a conspiratorial smile: “Still on your French fixation, are ye,” in his Edinburgh brogue, and added a non-sequitur that I didn’t fully understand yet: “Chercher la femme.” Then, after a quick look-see, he said: “Sobering news for you, lad. You’re not going anywhere.” I had to check into the hospital for the removal of a cyst. It was a straightforward operation, but proved unsuccessful, and involved two further interventions, a serious inconvenience, but one further complicated by a notorious painkiller — Darvon — that has since been removed from the market, and probably the cause of my contracting atrial fibrillitis later on.
The problem of Darvon is due to the fact that the majority of the drug is converted into a metabolite that is even more toxic and has a longer half-life than its parent compound. From 1981 to 1999, 2,110 accidental propoxyphenerelated deaths were reported. In the year I was taking it, there were 221 reported deaths.
To sum it up in a phrase, it triggers heart failure. The FDA finally called upon the pharmaceutical companies to stop making propoxyphene (PPX) in 2010, based upon a clinical trial in which electrocardiograms demonstrated that the drug altered the heart’s electrical activity, potentially causing serious or life-threatening arrhythmias. In 2009, I was finally diagnosed with atrial fibrillitis, a condition I have to this day, and which I trace back to that casual prescription. Atrial fibrillitis can be described as an electrical firestorm in the atrial chambers of the heart that confuses the entire physiology of the body. I cannot dissociate what followed with this condition and its chaotic properties with the desires of a soul aching to find meaning in today’s world, and indeed, part of the curse that has governed my life since.
While I popped Darvon, and occasionally blacked out, I stopped none of my excessive activities and was unaware that I was risking becoming another case of Darvon roadkill. But I had Gabon on the mind. However, my body had a different take on events, and by February I was bedridden after a third operation, and was rapidly becoming desperate. It was during that time that a friend dropped the copy of Moravagine on my table side, and my reading of that book indebted me to Cendrars forever and allowed me to finally escape the confines of a clan I was finding oppressive, and that was personified by my father. Whether that feeling was subjective or not was irrelevant. During every waking moment, I thought only of escape, no matter the price, setting the stage for the next big mistake of my life.
If a young man from my background then does what I did after reading Moravagine — i.e. on the strength of nothing but anger and desperation leaves his sickbed, moves into a basement suite in a house owned by Sikh immigrants, and spends his days in a hellish toilet factory as a kiln loader, six on, two-off, operating within metres of that 2,400-degree furnace, it can only be for one reason — that the alternative was worse. And, so for the next year and a half, I moved from the Crane Pottery Works to the Alberta oil fields, and finally to the relatively forgiving climes of city construction work, before once again striking out, this time for Quebec, in the hope that my cherished dream of returning to Paris would finally be realized.