Inside Vancouver
Born in the USA
By Daniel Wood published Sep 1, 2007
It was the year Elvis died. Maybe you weren’t around. Or maybe you were the one who told me you’d heard it that August day, and we’d agreed: He was, yeh, too young to die. Or maybe that wasn’t you. It’s hard remembering that far back. The drugs, the love affairs, the helter-skelter. Vancouver then? It was a sleepy—almost comatose—place where, at night, downtown was emptier than Jimmy Hoffa’s casket, and signs above pub entrances read MEN over one set of doors, LADIES AND ESCORTS over the other. Yaletown was a rat-filled train marshalling yard. Granville Island an industrial place that few without union cards would visit. If you used the word “gay” around the West End then, people would think of Christmas apparel. The Chinese, they lived in Chinatown. You’d go to the Orange Door in a Pender Street back alley if you were poor and liked chop suey; and, if you felt flush, to the more upmarket On On—in hopes of seeing Pierre Trudeau and his gorgeous young wife. (Trudeau made his famous pirouette behind the Queen’s back at Buckingham Palace that year.) The Italians owned Commercial Drive. The WASPs ran the rest of town, including City Council, the mining and forestry corporations, the universities and the media. If there wasn’t a mutton-chopped Anglican or Presbyterian in the family album, you’d better learn to kiss ass. Only the beleaguered Greeks of Kitsilano had to contend with intruders, with the Hippies, with, well…people like me.
Like 100,000 other Americans of that era, I’d come to Canada at the end of a pointy stick. I’d argued with the U.S. Army that—in the vernacular of those times—killing people wasn’t my thing. The Army had argued it was theirs. The FBI adjudicated. Faced with the choice of a couple of years in Vietnam or a couple of years in the slammer, I chose Vancouver. I was lured here by the seductive words of a Canadian woman I’d met earlier who’d assured me Vancouver was practically tropical. Palm trees, she said, grew in her Nanaimo hometown.
