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This work is copyrighted by my business name, The Harfolk Press. Conseqently, I must insist that you do not make any copies, except one for your own private use. If for any reason you want more than one copy, send me an E-mail with the details and I will give your request prompt and serious consideration. Bill MY SECOND LIFE Chapter Three: Coming Out Part Two In this uncongenial environment I was incapable of judging how much of my difficulties came from the job itself, which I hated, and how much came from my Parkinson's. I felt paranoid, always looking over my shoulder and anticipating the future with apprehension, afraid of what the boss was going to do. Neighbours commented that I looked defeated when I left for work in the morning, and I felt it. Coming home in the evening, I looked like the living dead, an automaton. About the only thing that kept me sane was a regimen of exercises that I had started in 1982 to lose weight - I had stopped smoking cigarettes then too. I thought that things might have been tolerable if this damned Parkinson's wasn't sapping my strength and leaving me without energy as the day wore on. I did not have the energy to fight for a job that would be suited to me. I must have presented the image of a down-trodden clerk in one of Kafka's novels. In the spring of 1984, I remembered a Scotiabank personnel policy: if an employee believes he has been unfairly dealt with by his manager, he has the right to appeal an adverse performance appraisal all the way up to the Chief Executive Officer of the Bank. I was six levels from the top. I knew that although the policy was in place, managers are reluctant to set aside or modify their subordinates' decisions. No one likes to rock the boat. I prepared my case. I based it on three points: - the Bank had not followed through on its commitment to move me over to Corporate Banking, leaving me in Credit, a role in which I was fundamentally unsuited; - the personality clash with my manager was producing a distorted picture of me in my P.A.; and - Parkinson's disease was a mitigating factor as it was causing both physical and mental changes in me. My first appeal was to the Senior Vice President in charge of the credit function and was unsuccessful, as was my second appeal to the Executive Vice President in charge of the Division, the man who hired me. (When I encountered him at a Visitor's Day at Camp Gay Venture, Emily's summer camp, he said without a crack of a smile, "I didn't think we paid you enough to send your kid here!"). I had thought that my case was a strong one and that its merits would be recognized by probably the first and certainly the second without question. I was shattered when they scoffed and turned me down. The odd thing was, the quality of my work was improving. I had done the entire credit presentations for two large and complex credits which went straight directly to the Chairman of the Bank for approval, bypassing the regular process. I was complimented on these reports. My next step up was to Peter Godsoe, the Vice-Chairman of the Bank. It was three down and three to go. I felt sure I had a strong case, but I wasn't optimistic. He had been a supporter of Esther's in her School Board election campaigns, as had many associates at the Bank. However, quite rightly, he maintain a Great Wall of China between what went on inside the Bank and after-hours socializing. After I put my case to Godsoe, he smiled and said, "Bill, you're not cut out to be one of the sea-anchors of credit, and Parkinson's is an extra burden on you. I know you have put your case unsuccessfully down the line. Those people report to me. I would have a revolution on my hands if they knew now that you won your appeal. Leave it with me. Wally Meinig will be my point man on this." I was elated. It was a reprieve. Men and women competed to work for Meinig. I had known him earlier when I was at Molson's where he was Senior Vice-President in charge of Canadian regions; now at the Bank, he was Senior Vice President in charge of Administration for Corporate Banking. Meinig, a sympathetic and realistic man, was an ideal mentor. His daughter had just finished medical school and was interning so he had ready access to expert knowledge of Parkinson's. He also had a real interest in what was happening to me. "Bill, I am shocked by the change in your personality. You have become introverted; what's become of the fun-loving raconteur and bon vivant we all liked so much?" He was right, I had become introverted. There had been a personality change in me. It was not the first one. As a boy, I had not been outgoing and gregarious. My father had seen to that. The elixir of praise and support was an unknown tonic when I was growing up; the standard medicine doled out by Father was of the awful tasting patent variety hawked by shills as cure-alls - a mixture of ridicule and put downs mixed with alcohol. I had to work at being extroverted from the time I met Esther. It wasn't fake, but a gradual discovery of my own nature. By the time I was at Molson, it was a natural part of what I had to offer at work and in every-day life. In 1978 I had been a founding member of the Alderbrandin de Sienne Society, a fine wine club that was really based on good fellowship. I was included because I was fun to be with and a good story teller. Now, six years later, I had become withdrawn. One friend told me later, "When I agreed to have lunch with you, I didn't know I'd be doing all the talking, and there still would be there were awkward gaps in the conversation." I had to tell Meinig that my introversion was part Parkinson's and part depression as a result of my unhappiness with the job. "Parkinson's is nothing to be ashamed of," he said. You didn't get it by doing or not doing anything. What was dumb was using being hungover as the reason for the tremor. Look at the mess that created. Don't worry about the job. You have enough to cope with getting used to Parkinson's." Esther had been trying since my diagnosis to persuade me to confront Parkinson's, to look it squarely in the face. Wally Meinig said the same thing. "Bill, you have to start telling people who should know that you have Parkinson's. Don't do it indiscriminately, but tell colleagues and friends." Over the next few months I took his advice. I had no choice. I had to face the reality of having Parkinson's. The Bank now seemed to me to be both Jekyll and Hyde. Meinig was trying to find the best place for me in the organization, while my manager was bound and determined to get me fired or demoted through my PA, which was very negative. So effectively had my personnel file been contaminated with innuendo, that it took several months to place me. Meinig spent countless hours getting a full appreciation of my situation, working every possibility until a place was found. At the end of the summer of 1984, I went on my annual canoe trip with Howie. As a teenager, I had spent five summers at Camp Stephens on Lake of the Woods, near Kenora, Ontario. The canoe trips were be best part, and by my last year, I was good enough to go on a two-week trip. I enjoyed being in the wilderness and loved being in a canoe, and having the feeling of being the moving force, with a paddle. In 1980, when I did my first canoe trip with Howie, it had been almost twenty years since my last trip and I was learning by doing all over again. Howie, who was then nine, had just come back from Camp Voyageur, was in a very real sense, my instructor. For the first time in my life I was conscious of aging. Over the next years we did two trips to Algonquin Park, another to Killarney Park and a fourth down the Pickerel River. These were in addition to trips we took with Stephen Booth and Tony Graham. Howie and I always went in the last week of August, because the bugs, black flies and mosquitoes were sure to be gone, and the lakes and rivers were not crowded with campers. The weather was usually fine: only once in five years did it rain. That was on the first trip. I had read a wilderness book which included some weather forecasting tips. When you see fracto-cumulus clouds, the author assured me, it will not rain. The only problem was that I wrongly identified the clouds. We woke the next morning to pouring rain. There was not far to go, and we made the best of it by discovering that our life jackets were quite effective as "wet suits" in keeping our upper bodies warm. To this day, whenever I make a weather forecast, Howie will say "fracto-cumulus clouds, Dad?" Over the winter of 1980-81, after our first trip, I had bought a 16-foot cedar strip canoe, with clear fibreglass overlaid on the cedar, from Albert Maw of Northland Canoes in Huntsville. I didn't want Esther to think that I was overspending, so I told her that I had won it at the Sportsman's Show. She didn't fall for it, particularly when Albert called to say the canoe I had ordered was ready. The canoe has aged more easily and gracefully than I have. Howie still maintains that the canoe is half his. It was on these trips that I developed my ideas about decent meals on canoe trips. Why endure freeze-dried foods or Kraft Dinner - which is equally bad - when I could make a vegetable stir-fry and grill a small steak accompanied by a split of decent Burgundy, finishing with a cup of espresso and a good cigar? The joys of cooking bannock over an open fire are highly over-rated, about equal to carrying an unbalanced canoe on a long portage. Now, as we started the 1984 trip on the Mattawa, I was preoccupied with the implications of Parkinson's and anxious about my future with the bank. I was so distracted by my manager's obsession with finishing me off that I thought it would drive me to a nervous breakdown. Images of his face appeared in my mind for the first day and a half of the trip. Not even my worst encounters with my father had that effect on me. We put in at a Provincial Park near North Bay and took the 60 miles downriver in three days. Howie did a lot of planning for the trip and was the navigator, and on portages he had to carry the canoe as well. I was starting to stumble a bit, and could no longer manage them safely. In addition, the tremor which was in both sides of my body was a real irritant. There was no point denying or hiding the effect Parkinson's was having on me and for the first time I talked to Howie about it. Howie was amazingly mature for all his youth. His attitude was very different than on past trips when I was in charge. His takeover was subtle but definite. I think I realized for the first time, that my future, at least the future I had planned for myself, was behind me. We chatted for hours about the change Parkinson's was making in thee family, particularly in my expectations. The fun and pleasure of the trip was not dampened even when we finished in pouring rain, chilled to the bone and soaking wet. We abandoned our plan to stay in a campsite and checked into a motel where we made inappropriate jokes about refugee families from the third world as we hung our soggy gear about the room to dry, started our gas stove, and cooked a late lunch. The trip was a success for both of us and Howie had developed a real love for canoe-tripping, so much so that his later high school summers were spent as the lead tripper at a girls' camp. But I realised that this was probably going to be my last canoe trip. My stamina was fading, walking was getting more difficult and I did not have the will. About the same time, I sold my 15-foot Albacore sailing dinghy to Tony Graham, our good friend and cottage neighbour at Blue Sea Lake, for exactly what I had paid for it thirteen summers before. I had never been a successful competitive sailor, but I used to go out sailing every day at Blue Sea with Tony, initially with me skippering. I also used to sail the Albacore single-handed. I was no Joshua Slocum or Francis Chichester, and sailing alone called for a dexterity and agility that I no longer had. The realization that I wasn't up to demanding physical exercise where decisions I made affected someone else was a let-down. But it was reality, hard reality. The sailing involved a trade-off: if I could not skipper the boat, I could at least have the enjoyment of being the crew. Almost unconsciously, I was beginning to accept the reality of Parkinson's. I was never as good at the tiller as Tony anyhow! (It's amazing how easily that rationalization came.) Selling the sailboat was depressing, but I still sail most days at Blue Sea with Tony at the tiller. Early in 1985 my father died. We had not grown any closer over the years and I had little affection for him. He was a crude, bigoted man who was always impressed with his own opinions. He was constantly putting down other people for their views, even if his were patently wrong. As he saw himself passed over for promotion time after time, his bitterness grew exponentially, particularly against the men "who were out to get him". It was extreme enough to be called paranoia and had a terrible effect on the family. He drank too much for a long period of time. No, I will not permit the last vestige of filial piety in me let him off that easily. He was an alcoholic and was subject to intense vitriolic rages that left Mother and me shaking with impotent fear. An incident in 1956 when I was thirteen illustrates his penchant for violence. Father had bought a new set of golf clubs. The old set was on his basement workbench, waiting to be discarded, or so I thought. "How difficult would it be to bend the shaft and break it?", I wondered. It turned out not to be hard at all, once I had put one end in a vise and tightened it. In no time, it snapped in two. Just then, Father appeared at the top of the basement stairs. "What in Christ's name do you think you are doing?" When I told him, he turned into another person, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He flew into a rage, the intensity of which I had not seen before or since. He picked up one of the pieces of the now-broken golf club and chased me around the basement brandishing it like a club. Screams of invective were pouring out of his mouth - he must have been close to foaming. He stopped only after he had drawn blood with the rough metal end of his weapon: a deep four inch gash on the back of my right hand, whose scar remains to this day. Mother had been watching this spectacle with helpless tears cascading down her face, screaming "Stop ... stop, both of you!" "Jimmy, look at what you have done. You have mutilated my son. We'll have to take him to a hospital to get it stitched" "As usual, Betty, you don't think before you open your mouth. The doctors would ask how it happened." I still have a prominent scar to remind myself of the event. Father had always liked big, powerful motorboats. When he was 78 in 1981 he bought a twenty-foot boat with a two-hundred horsepower engine. I told him that someone his age had no business with a boat that big or powerful. "If I had wanted your opinion, I would have asked for it. You are just like your mother, opening your mouth and talking without thinking if anyone is going to listen." In 1982, he had a serious stroke. My reaction to the news verged on indifference. He never fully recovered, perhaps because he was "too busy" to take speech and physiotherapy. The next summer, as he and Mother were leaving the Safeway dock at Kenora, the boat rammed a retaining wall, throwing them both into the water. Mother broke both ankles and wrists, while Father was physically unharmed. Like a small child caught stealing candy in a store, he said to the Ontario Provincial Police officer who investigated the accident: "I opened her right up." When I went out to Winnipeg to visit them in November, mother's breaks were completely healed and she was caring for Father. She said, "Someone has to look after your father, Bill, he can't look after himself." Shortly after the accident he began the move to another world of which he was the only inhabitant. His last two years were spent there. In some ways, I feel he had it coming to him, after ruining my youth. Yet, even he did not deserve the silent agony that was his destiny. Father died on January 30, 1985 a day before his eighty-second birthday, in the middle of the night. Mother phoned at six in the morning with a short message: "Bill, your Father is dead." I told her I would get the first plane out to Winnipeg. When I arrived later that morning, all evidence of Father having lived in the house on Cordova Street for thirty-one years was gone. "Clothes, papers,... What use are they, Bill?" It was tragic that Mother could dispense with the man she had been married to for almost forty two years with a few garbage bags. She said, "I've got the memories I want. Please don't ask or talk about the kind of father or husband he was." The funeral, against my wishes, was held in a funeral home. I read a lesson and the congregation sang "Abide with me". Mother had a reception at home after the service. A lot of people came, but the talk was not of him. He was already forgotten. His death did not have much of an effect on me. It was like closing a book that had gone on too long and finally reached its end. I had no pleasant memories of him, only bitter ones. Finally, in January, 1985, the bank was able to place me in a new department. I was moved to Precious Metals Marketing. My new manager, David Turner, had a broad understanding of neurological conditions because he is an epileptic. He and his boss Larry Mason, a Senior Vice President in the Investment Banking Division, made a real effort to accommodate me. My position was a make-work one in the sense that they weren't expecting much from me, and I did not disappoint them in that regard, even though I tried to make a contribution. But I still had to cope with depression. It is one thing to say that I understood that the cause of my depression was at least partly due to a chemical imbalance in my brain. It is quite another to accept that. There were external factors influencing my depression: the sheer shock of learning that I was imperfect and my former rotten job attitude being the most important. They were not cleared up in the short while after I became aware of them. Once in my new job, I was left alone for five months to recuperate and regain my mind. I was given permission to do some political work. That was a very unusual step, perhaps implicit recognition on the Bank's part that I had been ill used. At this time there was impending election for the provincial government. The long-time Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario, Bill Davis, had just stepped down as leader. I was Treasurer of the Progressive Conservative Association for our local riding, St. David, and was deeply involved in the planning of the nomination convention to select a new candidate for the riding. Esther and I had got to know Julian Porter through Esther's municipal election campaigns, and she urged him to run for the nomination and offered her support. I became Julian's eyes and ears on the St. David Executive until the end of March when he won the nomination handily. From then until the end of June my time was spent as the Chief Financial Officer of Julian's campaign as the Conservative candidate in St. David in the 1985 provincial election. I began to recharge. Julian Porter, who combined implausible good looks with a famous ability as a story teller and speaker, was is one of Toronto's leading civil litigation lawyers and had long been one of the Progressive Conservative Party's most promising personalities. Politics ran in the family; his father Dana had been Attorney-General in the government of Leslie Frost. We gave two coffee parties for Julian during the nomination campaign, and Howie got involved as well. Just fourteen at the time, he had so much fun that he skipped school on the basis that the campaign was educational. Esther went out canvassing with Julian several times. Julian, and one or two of the other Porter people, knew that I had Parkinson's, and they were concerned that I not push myself too hard or too long. Each day, I would walk from the Bank at King and Bay to Julian's campaign office at Parliament and Winchester, about three miles. I would pick up bills to be paid and contributions received, go back to the Bank's offices and do the necessary paperwork. It was fun. As soon as Porter learned that I had Parkinson's, his first thought was for my future: Was the Bank treating me fairly? Had we made adequate provision for the future? How could he help? In that respect, Julian epitomizes what Esther's father meant when he said that we should greet the disadvantaged of the world "not with handouts, but with hands outstretched". Our association with Julian continued. He was a constant supporter of Esther's in her role as a School Trustee and raised money, being very generous himself, to finance her three re-election campaigns. Julian's campaign had the air of Prince Hal and the famous speech from Shakespeare's Henry V, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...." In the end Julian lost to his Liberal opponent in an election that saw the Tories go down to a resounding defeat. Early in the campaign, when the money was not coming in as quickly as we would have liked, Julian said to me after a Sunday evening campaign committee meeting, "Bill, do you know the difference between "joint liability" and "joint and several liability?" "Of course I do, that is basic to the investment business." "Just so I am sure you understand, explain it to me!" "In several liability if you and I together owe $100 and you go bankrupt, I owe $50. with joint and several liability, I would owe the full $100." "I'm glad you grasp the concept so clearly, Bill. Under the Election Finance Act, the candidate and the Chief Financial Officer are jointly and severally liable for the campaign debts. My wife [his wife is the well-known publisher, Anna Porter] takes a dim view of having to pony up any money at all to cover campaign expenses. I'm sure Esther would be just as upset." "Upset. Christ, she would be furious." "Then get out there and get the money in!" We did get the money in, and after the election was over and lost, Julian and I held a lunch at the Albany Club for the fund-raisers. Altogether, they had raised over $135,000; we thought a thank-you was in order. It was a convivial group that included Hal Jackman, the godfather of Toryism in Ontario, and Conrad Black, already by 1985 outgrowing his entrepreneurial training wheels. He was now favouring Julian and the other lunchers with his pontifications on sundry subjects including the propriety of full funding for Separate Schools, an initiative taken in the last days of the Davis government which had contributed to the Tory defeat. During the drinks before lunch, I was chatting with Douglas Lissaman, now a judge, who said, referring to my tremor, "that must be one hell of a hangover, Bill." Scarcely believing what I heard myself say, I replied, "That's no hangover Douglas - I have Parkinson's Disease." Poor Doug's jaw dropped and for the first time I had known him, he was at a loss for words. If he felt badly, I felt worse. Yet, it was the first time I had admitted to anyone who didn't know me well that I had Parkinson's. There was truly a watershed aspect to my comment. I had come out. "Coming out" was a complex process that I did not fully understand at the time. By the time of the Porter campaign, Parkinson's was readily apparent to anyone who cared to look. The evidence included a tremor in both hands, limping with both feet, the beginnings of the Parkinsonian mask and worsening of my handwriting. But I did not consciously decide to "come out", and there wasn't any external social pressure that there is with certain elements of the gay community. My decision was not explicit, nor were there any implicit factors present. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. I think that Esther's constant urging was probably the key factor. Looking back on the years 1984-85, I see they were for me a time of rebirth and regeneration, much like a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly. Not that I changed into a thing of beauty; quite the contrary. My Parkinsonian mask became more expressionless, my walking became more irregular and my tremor worsened. It was more of an intellectual and spiritual metamorphosis. I didn't judge people quite so quickly and began to seek out compromise and accommodation. The change came about for two reasons. With the death of my father I began to realize the extent of his negative influence on me - particularly his tendency to be judgemental and bigoted in belittling other people. And I had seen both Peter Godsoe and Wally Meinig deal me and my Parkinson's generously and imaginatively, taking risks and in placing less weight on the conventional wisdom about me. I tried to learn from them.