Enter Duane

Other than trying, and failing, to act the mad student, and running over my foot (purposely, I believe) with his Ford Fairlane at a Hallowe'en field party, Dunnery lived out his remaining years as a fabulously wealthy stock tout on CBC, where a suspicious number of my former my classmates seemed to end up. They were a horde. And they all thought exactly the same. They did discover a particularly useless set of words, ie. paradigm shift. This was the secret handshake of the washed-up faux-oxonians over there at the CBC, providing a few more years employment as arbiters of the correct and incorrect thinking of our culture, being particularly hostile to those among us who refused to see the beauty of living in right-thinking, state-supported poverty on cutesy communes with all the comforts. I had always thought that poverty was no disgrace, just really inconvenient. These folks had a vote to decide that the rules of poverty could be stretched enough to allow for the tools of convenience, so funds were allotted and a roar of joy was heard coming from the slums of The Annex.

Duane. He was different. I met him one beautiful November Friday afternoon when he offered a ride as I walked the 6-mile trek from Nassau to my palatial digs @407 Water. People kept asking me "if I was from the Source". How the hell would I know? Oshawa could never be accused of providing the world with spiritual leaders, and I sure didn't want to be one. Yet ... There was one person from O'Neill who, many years later, actually did become a spiritual advisor. To me, anyway. And to think that the declension of Latin intransitive verbs interested her not in the least! Back to Duane and the afternoon of our meeting. I accepted his offer of a drive, and first we stopped at his place in the suburban home of a Mrs. Downey to have a beer. ONE! The talk turned to his quite mad room-mate, Dawson. D. told me a little of Dawson's quirks, which were so hilariously harmless, that I peed my pants as the stories unrolled. It's a little known fact that Dawson's favourite way to relax from the stress of studying and hitting fruitlessly on young women was donning a baker's hat and apron to bake a dozen bitchin' cherry tarts. I fell down and Duane had to get smelling salts when I heard that one. Two days after this, I went over to watch the Grey Cup on their 12" black and white. That was the one where X-Ray fumbled the ball on Calgary's two yard line on second down leaving my beloved Awwwwrgos behind 11-9 for the duration. It would be another dozen plus two years for them to finally win. By that time, I had discovered responsibility, mortgages, home maintenance, and Friday evenings trying my best to forget about it all. So football meant not a whit.

Duane and I were together on and off for the next 3 years. We had Something In Common, Blues and hot knives and beer never stirred unless it was a boilermaker. Played on the same hockey team, The Shaibu Pucks. I was the shell-shocked goalie and he was the leader of a porous defence squad. We had two strategic moves, get the puck to Randy Milligan and try to get the puck to Randy Milligan. We had one more that I had forgotten. Put Randy on the ice for 60 minutes, or he lost his lunch The teams high point came in our last game before the Christmas break in 1972. We had actually played the best team, the goons from the Baptist College, to a 2-2 draw, so to celebrate we all went over to Trooper's house. I went along with Duane. We were on the hot knives, boilermakers in hand, like hungry wolves. Suitably in another state of consciousness, I looked at the clock; It was 12:43 am. I turned to Duane to say: "We've been here 8 minutes and look at us!" I repaid him for the cherry tart story. He didn't have an extra pair of pants, though.