City Success Story was the heading above the continuation of the story on page three. There was a photo there too: It was of Billy standing in front of the Charles Street West property in 1967 with “an unidentified woman.” The unidentified woman was me.
Except for a strip of joke pictures of Billy and me mugging in the instant photo booth at Union Station, this was the only photo of the two of us together. I realized with a pang that it had been taken by our landlord, Vladimir Maksimovich Chapayev, known to us as Vova, and murdered by Billy on a soft September evening in 1967. It wasn’t hard to figure out how the picture had made its way into the paper. When it came to his triumphs, Billy was as sentimental as a schoolgirl. He would have cherished this photo of himself on the cusp of his brilliant career. The fact that he had killed the man who took the photo and threatened to kill the woman who stood beaming beside him would have been of no more consequence to Billy than the clippings his manicurist snipped from his fingernails.
“Nuts to you.”
— Motto of Toronto’s Uptown Nuthouse
(now defunct)
If you’re going to travel fast, you have to travel light. That’s what Billy always said. But it was possible Billy had underestimated the power of things he left behind. I had resources. The $64,000 question was whether I still had the nerve to use them. For forty years, I had wrapped myself in respectability, believing that each act of quiet duty separated me from the girl who believed the sun rose and set on Billy Merchant and who stood at the top of the cellar steps, heart pounding with fear and love as Billy knelt over Vladimir Maksimovich Chapayev and pinched the nostrils of his thick, maddeningly persistent snorting peasant nose until the old Russian stopped breathing forever.
As I propped Billy’s photo against my cappuccino cup, my hands were shaking. Maybe, after all, the last laugh would be Billy’s. Maybe in that instant when he silenced Vova, he had silenced me. It was possible that all the years of cautious living in my pleasant house off the Danforth had smothered the raw nerve I would need to bring Billy to his knees. I looked at Billy’s picture again. And against logic and good sense, I drew strength from it.
In my quiet, sunny kitchen, I could almost hear Billy’s voice, silky as one of the ties he was fond of fingering at Holt Renfrew: “Bring it on, babe. You’re tough, but I’m tougher. I can take you.”
“You take a chance the day you’re born. Why stop now?”
— Billy Merchant’s motto,
appropriated from the movie Golden Boy
I moved into the Charles Street West house on June 21, 1967: the first day of what the world would remember as the summer of love. There were no flowers in my hair, but there should have been. I was a virgin ripe for experience, ready for plucking. When I saw Billy, shirtless, his thin chest glistening with sweat as he mowed the postage-stamp lawn in front of the house, my loins twitched. He gave me one of his bullet-stopping grins, asked if he could carry in my luggage, and I was a goner.
That night Billy took me to see Golden Boy at a cheap theater that showed old movies. When Barbara Stanwyck told William Holden to follow his dream, Billy’s hand squeezed mine as if someone had shot 300 kilovolts of electricity through his body. Afterwards, Billy stood under a streetlight, arms extended like an actor. “Sooner or later, everybody works for the man,” he said. “And babe, you are looking at the man that, sooner or later, everybody is going to work for.” That was my 300 kilovolt moment.
From the day we met, Billy and I seized every possible second together. Vova lived on the first floor of the rooming house. A gentle accountant who spent his evenings and weekends making scrapbooks of the Royal Family lived on the third floor. Billy and I shared the kitchen and bathroom on the second floor. His bedroom was at the front and mine was at the back, but even the long summer evenings weren’t long enough for us, and by Canada Day, Billy and I knew the squeaks and hollows of one another’s mattresses as intimately as we knew the contours of one another’s bodies.
We might have been short on money, but we were long on dreams. I earned nine dollars a day selling costume jewelry at the Robert Simpson Company on the corner of Queen and Yonge. My dream was to go to Shaw’s Business College and become a private secretary. Billy earned nine dollars a day (and tips) at Winston’s on Adelaide Street West. Winston’s was the restaurant where the Bay Street elite ate prime rib and talked money. Billy, who dreamed of becoming a millionaire before he was twenty-five, said that every day at Winston’s was worth a year of college education.
That summer, he and I explored the city, not just our neighborhood — all the neighborhoods. On payday, we bought ten dollars’ worth of subway tokens, and after work, we’d hop on the subway and take turns choosing which stop we’d get off at and which bus or streetcar we’d board. Every night was an adventure. As we traveled through the muggy evenings, Billy would sit with his forehead pressed against the window looking out at the unfamiliar streets with the hunger he had in his eyes when he looked at my body.
“Toronto is the engine that drives Canada.”
— Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto
When he talked about Toronto, Billy was like a lover: His voice grew soft; his hands trembled; his eyes glittered with lust. He needed, physically, to touch every part of the city, so he could penetrate her secrets. He had a shoebox filled with the spiral notebooks in which he recorded what the men who lunched at Winston’s were saying about his city, and the information he had was pure gold. The men who drank icy martinis at Winston’s had insider information about which crumbling town houses and firetrap warehouses were going to be torn down and where new freeways might be built; they knew where the subway might be expanded, and which cheap rural land would be developed as suburbs for the people flocking to live the dream. The men with icy martinis knew what nobody else knew: They knew where Toronto was going.
“Nobody knows where the hell downtown Toronto is. But
everybody’s going to know where downtown North York is.”
— Mel Lastman, Mayor of Toronto
Even though Billy didn’t understand what they were talking about, he wrote it down. Later, when we rode the public transit out to the edges of the city, Billy put the pieces together, and he floated his extravagant dreams. He was a man obsessed. Many years after that, I was reminded of Billy when I read my child the story of Icarus who dreamed of touching the sun and stuck feathers to his shoulders with wax so he could fly. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell into the sea, but Billy was smart enough to calculate the odds. Nothing could bring him down.
“I’m lost, but I’m making record time.”
— Allan A. Lamport, Mayor of Toronto
During the summer of love, Toronto was filled with kids who’d hitchhiked to Toronto to get stoned in Yorkville and enjoy a little loving wherever they found it. One steamy Sunday, Billy and I were walking through Queen’s Park. As always, someone in the crowd was playing a guitar badly and the sweet smell of pot was heavy in the air. The lawns were littered with sleeping bags where girls with sunbursts painted on their cheeks and dreamy unfocused eyes were pressing their bodies against jean-clad barefoot boys with straggly beards. Billy stepped over them as if they were excrement.