RASKIN’S ACCOUNTANT WILLIAM BELL CAME ONE DAY TO their house in the late sixties to let Carmel and Albert know about their husband and father. It was the first time he had seen Albert in years, and saw a pale fat young man, his blond hair falling limp over the front of his face, with a face half-covered in acne.
He had taken courses, was a socialist of some kind, and seemed now to hate everything to do with his uncle’s business.
He spoke about the business like a boy trying to secure things for his mother, without knowing a thing about the business he spoke of.
Bell told him politely that all things were being taken care of.
“Yes, but as I say,” he said, glancing at his mother as if in private conference, and then back at Bell, “I want assurances that I— Well, that my mother will not be left out in the cold. I am not worried about myself—but about my mother.” He swiped at his hair to move it away from his blue eyes, and he had a ring on one of his short fingers, and he seemed self-conscious of how he looked.
Bell did not know the boy would fail. However, that is what he had heard from Oscar Peterson who read the tarot cards and said he had read one night to this boy.
“Oh yes, I saw it when he was young but I did not tell him. I am not like that. But if he doesn’t do something to change his ways, things will get tough for him—and others. I am afraid what others just might be involved.”
Bell was not prone to superstition, but now suddenly he thought of what half-mad Oscar had said.
Bell tried his level best to be polite. He realized that they both thought they were being conspired against and sat together fending off such conspiracies that never were. And he realized the boy had no real ability to fend much off.
“We are sure to lose the house,” Carmel said. “They will put me out on the street.”
“Nothing of the sort will happen,” he assured them.
But the boy said his mother had faced enough hardship not to trust anyone. And that he was compelled to take his mother’s side. Then he told his mother not to say any more.
Bell shuddered for some reason as he thought of all of this later, at this youngster determined to make an impression. Where would it all lead?
“He won’t tell you this but he is dying.” Bell told them about Byron Raskin.
Neither of them seemed to know for a moment how to respond. This was unimaginable to them, and they felt with him gone—they might be cut off completely.
“Oh I’m sure he will be fine,” Carmel said.
“My mother has suffered a long time, and she loved her husband,” Albert said, and produced papers for him to take back to the uncles. “So please give these to my uncles. I feel they are tired of us.”
“Not in the least—not even a little bit.”
Byron drank in the bars, and was in and out of the hospital. Two times, then three, then four.
When they put him in he would sign himself out. Once he was seen in his pyjamas in the lineup at the liquor store. One night in a johnny shirt down at the bar, after having been taken to the hospital in an ambulance two hours before.
Then he decided to rent a room above the bar so he could come and go in peace.
He often wandered back to the room with a bottle of gin. It is hard to imagine what life he had wanted for her and the child and what life became. It is harder to imagine how many times more he loved them than any of those who accused him of not loving. In fact he loved the boy deeply, but the boy felt he wasn’t loved.
I suppose grand writers can take care of that discrepancy, though I do not know of many so brave.
Albert struggled in school, and to prove to himself and others, wrote a long essay on the struggles of those working for Greenpeace, and Penelope—a girl he liked who had been committed to an institution, and who he visited he said, with simple affection and chocolates, even though she didn’t speak to him, and wouldn’t see him.
He also ended this essay, which wasn’t unusual for the time, by saying how innocent the drug culture was. It was published in October Review, a little underground paper at the university.
Many were envious of him too because he had his choice not of one, but of three cars and had a new Fender guitar that he hardly played. For a time he had his own half-hour program on the radio where he would invite people living on the street to come in and express themselves. He was a counsellor and a crusader—a person who was concerned about young people, and their mental health—especially those who wished to flee the oppressive dictates of family life. He certainly understood that and spoke often about people’s mental health during these times. Young women’s mental health especially. He seemed to be a young role model—a real voice for us, as certain young people said.
He became influential and worked for a while at the drug crisis centre housed in a little building on a side street in town. People began to know him, and he began to have meetings held late at night.
There were debates in the drug crisis centre where he wore an old army jacket and like others spoke to people about a variety of hash and acid and how one should take acid so their trip wouldn’t be bad.
The drug centre was a small room, with a few chairs, two cots, a coffee machine and pamphlets on a variety of drugs and what they did to the psyche.
It took on the aura of grave professionalism that it wasn’t and pretended needed knowledge that only rebellious experience could share. That is there was a constant concern over things one didn’t have to be concerned about five years previous but now seemed to be the main emblem of the day. The idea of Aleister Crowley’s maxim that one should so do what one wilt had suddenly come to life within him. For he had read Crowley and insisted he was a prophet. And he felt very special in being on the cutting edge of the new and impious world, of being a mental health advocate and a counsellor of sorts.
They also, because they were free, made light of all people who were not exactly like themselves and didn’t smoke hash. They spoke about Frosh Week, and how young girls would be arriving from all over the country. “The best thing to do is relieve them—release them from their parents.”
And then one night a person arrived in the dark rain and stood just inside the door of the drug crisis centre saying he had some mescaline. This man was Shane Stroud, and the person who got up to invite him in was Albert Raskin, dressed in a new jacket, with a new wristband. Shane Stroud looked at all of them with rather mischievous black eyes, and took out a chunk of hash. Albert was suddenly drawn to him; almost like a magnet both of them came together. It was as if suddenly they were the best of friends.
Albert was driven to do something dramatic, to release himself from the opinion of others. And he liked how they were amazed by the deferential way Shane, who terrified others, whose reputation as a cutthroat was known, treated him.
“I even heard you on the radio,” Shane said. “Talking—you were even on the radio!!” He seemed amazed. Albert Raskin seemed amazed as well.
One evening a few nights later, with the lights in the tavern ebbed low, the small pinball machine reflecting those lights in its shining glass, the outside bathed in spots of comfort, the windows yellowish in the coming dark, a small round man dressed in very new clothes brought a number of files for his father to look at. His father was sitting on the chair in his room at the hotel, with the window opened to the street and the sound of cars humming along the square. One must realize that these hotels are situated over taverns and are available for short-term or long-term rent, and are seen in every town and city in Canada. This one was now Byron’s home. The small round young man was doing this for his mentor, Professor Dykes. Dykes believed a community of concerned activists should take over Raskin Enterprises. Albert was sent to his father.
Albert had plotted all day what he would say and how he would say it. His stepfather sat forward pouring one glass of gin and then another.
He listened. He realized it was his stepson’s attempt to show Raskin Enterprises how things could be done for the new generation. Of course Byron had already heard of these demands because his uncles had told him about them. They had themselves received them from Mr. Bell.
“Can’t imagine demands like that,” Dexter said.
“They are awful demanding—awful demanding demands,” Chester said.
“Never saw such demands,” Dexter added.
So Byron knew of them some time before. Demands to immediately close everything down, and have a new oversight committee set up directed by university students. But it didn’t come really from Albert. It came, this ultimatum, from Dykes himself. Dykes whom Byron detested.
His father focused his blue eyes upon him—almost china blue in their blueness. “No, that cannot be done, son—without putting two hundred men out of work and cutting off the oil supply to almost four hundred families.
“I know it is not much, but scholarships are set up for the Indian girls and boys. I know much more could be done. Still, others talk much more and do far less. One is that imposter Dykes.”
When he finished speaking he picked up the gin glass and cupped it in his hand. He smiled consciously, conscious of having hurt his son’s feelings. At this moment he felt he had done a grave disservice to all mankind. He saw his stepson withdraw from what he said, his white hands, which had never done a day’s manual labour, shaking. His face dabbed with alcohol because of acne, and worried about having to report back to Dykes and upset about his mother.
“Your great-uncles are old. They have done what they have done. I do not know what to say anymore on their behalf except, beyond all of it, they are decent human beings. Conquer yourself. Do not bother the dying business of two elderly men.”
A year or so more passed. Young Raskin went to Europe for a month, and then to Los Angeles and San Francisco for a while. He toured the north, and travelled part way on an ice-breaker. There was a picture of him with his beard frozen. He wrote articles in the paper about his trip—about how well he understood the Inuit, and how he had taken pictures of a polar bear. He was published not because these articles were so phenomenal but because he was Albert Raskin.
Young man says we should all live off the land and do no digging underneath it.
Things went on. There were trips to the cottage, and young Raskin breaking off with a young woman who liked him. Then he tried to get her back, and Carmel realized it was she who had broken off with her son.
Her note which Carmel found in his jean pocket said:
“I can’t pretend you have not disappointed me—and maybe you have disappointed yourself. No—I am not square. I understand things in life too. I am however not sure of how much you understand. Realize you will never find another woman who cares for you, and not your money—and I was the one.
“When Professor Dykes insulted me for being nothing but a middle-class white woman, you sat there and did not open your mouth—nothing proved to me more what I wanted to know less. Goodbye young Raskin—my sad little Albert—I don’t know where you are going—but I fear you have already lost your way. You were given so much, so soon, for so little it will be a great struggle in the end.”
He sat much alone when in town, and what he did near Arron Brook Mrs. Raskin did not know. His stutter lessened with time, and his philosophy became more bold. Small, heavy, his face pitted because of acne, he wanted to make some impression.
And then an article was written about him because he was noticed at the first protest against some effluents into the river by Raskin Enterprises. It was a cold day, the brooks very frozen, the river sluggish, and he walked about giving out hot chocolate. A young teenaged boy watched them from the edge of his property—his name was Torrent Peterson.
“He is very reflective,” one of Mrs. Raskin’s friends said to her.
“My son is for revolution,” Carmel said. “He has a universal mind. You should hear him speak such startling, broadminded things.”
“The Raskins were mostly insane—best to ignore them,” some modern priest was known to have told Carmel.
Even though she did not believe in Christ anymore, she believed in gossip, and in the new priesthood, which seemed to transplant Christ as well.
Or, one might say, she believed in Christ as long as Christ believed in her.
Then:
“You will see what kind of party I will have,” Raskin told his mother one night. “I know how those poets and others look at me when they come here. My party—well, let me tell you, I have been in touch with people—real honest-to-God people that would make all those guys turn pale! You and I will show them who they’re dealing with.”
She had no idea what he was speaking about.
She would.