Ray Robertson - Moody Food

OKAY, JUST A LITTLE background music: Toronto, 1965 in particular.

For anyone starting to let his hair grow long and wanting to hear some good music and maybe even check out some of that free-love action youd read about going down in places like California, that would basically mean Yorkville, just north of Bloor Street. No more than three blocks in all, Yorkville was our very own city within a city, every street, alley, and low-rent hippie-converted building bursting with the sounds of loud music and the sweet smell of incense and overflowing with like-minded friendly, freaky faces. There was the Inn on the Parking Lot, the Riverboat, the Mynah Bird, the Penny Farthingcoffee shops and folk clubs, basicallywhere you could listen to Joni Mitchell and Ian and Sylvia and a million others no one has ever heard of since. Everyone drank lots of coffee and smoked plenty of cigarettes and you could play chess outside if the weather was nice and there was pot if you wanted it and all the girls, it seemed, were eighteen years old and tall and thin with the kindest eyes and long dark hair and none of them wore bras even if there really wasnt all that much love going on, free or otherwise.

But maybe that was just me. As a University of Toronto second-year dropout of no fixed major working part-time at a second-hand bookstore with no guitar-strumming ability of my own, I wasnt on anybodys love-to-love-you-baby list. At least not until Christine showed up one day at Making Waves.

The Making Waves Bookstore wasnt much more than the entire first floor of a paint-peeling Victorian house near the corner of Brunswick and Harbord crammed to the walls with the owner, Kelorn Simpsons, own book collection, most of it accumulated over twenty years of academic gypsydom. Kelorn was a fiftysomething psychedelicized Ph.D. in English literature witha framed degree from Oxford and dual portraits of Virginia Woolf and Timothy Leary hanging over the front counter to prove it. She was also near-messianic in her need to educate, physically and otherwise, the young female undergraduates who would drift into the bookstore from the university just a few blocks away, as well as reluctant as hell to sell any of her books. Which is how I started working for her in the first place.

After she saw how disappointed I was when she barely even looked at the cardboard box I brought by full of an entire semesters worth of practically new books, and then how pissed off I became when she wouldnt sell me her City Lights Pocket Book copy of Howl (a cute girl in black leotards with jet-black hair and no makeup in my Modern American Poetry class told me to read it when Id asked her out to a Varsity Blues hockey game; she also declined my invitation to the hockey game), Kelorn made me take off my coat and gloves, poured me a cup of mint tea, asked why I needed money so badly that I wanted to sell all my books, and why I wanted to read Allen Ginsberg.

After I told her about the cute girl with the jet-black hair and how Id dropped out of U of T a few months before and how the bank was calling in my loan and how Id have to move back in with my parents in Etobicoke soon if I didnt get a job, Kelorn asked me if I wanted to work at the bookstore.