Morningside: Memories, second thoughts, and why we shouldn’t have heroes

 

So what happens when your hero turns out to have feet of clay?

Well – is there any  other kind? Isn’t this realization a kind of punishment for the sin of having a hero in the first place?

This all goes back a long way, so bear with me, please. It was back in the 1980s, and I was living in Hinton, a small town in Alberta in the foothills of the Rockies. Like a lot of people, I was a huge fan and rabid listener to Morningside, that folksy, down-home, ultra-Canadian radio program which ran for three hours every weekday (with a cornball ten-minute drama tacked on at the end, which now seems utterly cringeworthy, but there you go. This was CULTURE,  and the drama  even provided that all-important “Canadian content”.)

Of course, at the helm of Morningside was one Peter Gzowski, always presented as an avuncular nice-guy, friendly, down-to-earth, and only stirred to ire if anyone dared question his rabid Canadianism. He seemed to champion local stories, pride in your small-town community, tales of everyday heroism, people heroically struggling with serious health conditions, and predictably dull interviews with Literary Figures, the usual round of third-string Canadian novelists who were making a wee splash with their latest book.

Now it seems painfully parochial, awfully small-time, but  then, at least where I lived, it was a very big deal. I even began to send in some of my short pieces, and did backflips of  delight when some of them were actually being read on the air. It never occurred to me I was giving stuff away when I should have been asking for the dignity of some sort of recompense. This was MORNINGSIDE, the champion of the small-scale Canadian author! How crass were you to even think of - ? But the utter glory of hearing Gzowski cough and wheeze his way through the piece was supposed to be enough. Certainly, my small-town neighbors in Hinton were thrilled I was getting so  much national exposure.  At that point, I had a weekly column in my local paper, but back then, newspaper columns were read today, and used to wrap  fish tomorrow.

After a  while, a friend of mine began to get HER pieces read on the air, so we sort of banded together, keeping an eye on each other, of course, but mostly cheering each other on. Then there was The Morningside Papers,  a series of books made up of all those donated bits of folksy stories, thrill-packed adventures in tiny towns, and even a few moderately-more-serious topics. My first piece in the Papers was a  thrill, as was the second and third. My friend Amber also had quite a few of her own writings in the Papers, and at one point we had a champagne celebration that was covered in the  Hinton Parklander. Fame at last!

But the BIG one for me was being asked to  appear on the  show to respond  to a man who had written a rather lame folk song about the Great Hinton Train Crash.

It wasn’t that big a deal when it happened, but it was prime Gzowksi  material, small-towny, folksy, of the earth, of  the Common  (of course, Canadian) Man. So I got on there and talked  to the guy, who hummed and hawed  and  said  that, actually, no, he knew nothing at all about Hinton and only read about  the crash in the newspapers. I was especially incensed when he  referred to our  glorious community as “a sleepy little pulp-mill town”. I had  a few word s to say about THAT.

It made for good radio, or OK radio, though of course there was no recompense except the shining glory of being ON Morningside! My small-town friends were ecstatic, and I actually got a few gigs on Edmonton radio as a result (and by the holy, they PAID me, though not very much. At least they didn’t shame me for asking.).

At one point, a new producer came on-board, and I recognized him as Glen Allen, a man who wrote a truly hair-raising series for Morningside on getting sober. This was his Detox Diary, first-person, present-tense journal entries (Day One, Day Two, etc.), written in what now sounds like rather purplish prose, It was “You Are There” stuff, recounting his physical breakdown as a result of floods of booze, cigarettes and pills. “My liver is as big as a house” was one  memorable phrase, as was his insistence “I loved  booze  more than some people love each other. What a time it has been! The rye and  ginger years, the rum years, and then the discovery of Russian vodka, the Ultimate Weapon, the sweet sting of the steppes rising from the bottles with the strange-sounding names. Taken neat, it was strong enough to run a tractor.” If any of this seems creepily detached from the reality of vomiting blood in a detox ward, then you’re right, it IS creepy and actually irresponsibly dramatic. By the end of it, on Day 12 or whatever, he’s citing  a psychiatric nurse who described him as “superficial, infantile, and lost in life.”

I should have listened.

Because he was so honest and courageous (confessing he left little glasses of vodka all over the house, so that “passing from  room to room, travelling by the Stations of the Cross, I would never be far from good cheer”), he was deemed a hero. He was confessing all this on public radio - reading his pieces himself, of course, not in Gzowki’s wheezy baritone. Back then, before social media and reality TV exposed the public’s blatant schadenfreude, the myth was that the more you “shared” this harrowing stuff, the better for the public good. And, of course, it couldn’t help but help YOU in your “journey”. So  everyone thought.

So Glen landed the gig. He was “in” with Gzowski, and thus with Morningside, though, as was typical with him, he lasted less than a year.

I  was actually kind of riveted by his Detox Diaries, and when they appeared in the Morningside Papers, I  wanted to get in touch with him. Oh yes, and I also wanted to run some things by him for  the show, which worked after a  fashion. They used maybe ten per cent of what I sent in, and Glen let me in on the fact Gzowski thought I was  a nuisance and wished I would go away. But what I was to learn about Glen Allen should have turned some lights on.

He was the  son of Ralph Allen, whom I had  never heard of, but who was fabled as some sort of  founding father of Canadian journalism. And Gzowski  idolized him to the point of sainthood, if not godhood. The fact Allen died in his 50s from smoking  and drinking just added to his mythology. So here was his son Glen, fresh off those astonishingly self-revealing and unnecessarily graphic  pieces about booze (not a confessional, but "a last letter to a lost love", he called them) that he read on the  air – and Gzowksi began to rhapsodize about him, calling  him a “shy and courtly writer” and “one of the finest journalists in Canada”. He was a fine writer when he was able to  sit up and tap at a typewriter, but a lot of the time he was, by his own admission, face-down.

 It was a strange sort of bromance, with Gzowski constantly trying to pump Glen for stories – any stories, anything at all – about his hero. He didn’t want to play, making it clear his father was horribly cruel to him and they never got along. Gzowski  even claimed that trying to squeeze Ralph Allen stories out of his son was like “a tongue probing the exposed nerve of a tooth.”  He also described “the smile that ignites his face”, though he was disappointed that this odd facial blaze reminded Gzowski  of his mother rather than his hero Ralph.

As a producer, Glen Allen lasted barely one season, but by this  time he  was truly encouraging my writing  and even urging me to try to sell some of it. I eventually did get gigs with  the Edmonton Journal, and eventually wrote for papers all over the country, including the Montreal Gazette and the Globe  and  Mail. Would I have gone ahead with it without  Glen’s promptings? Yes, I would, but it was still kind of nice. In the fullness of time, I wrote five novels (well, five and a half)  and published three - with publishers, folks, real ones, not the other kind. If my timing had been different, who knows, I might have sat there inhaling all that toxic second-hand smoke.

Starting with me, of course, Glen and I began to write to each other, and this correspondence (pen to paper, with envelopes and stamps  - this was the old days) went on, on and off at least, for nearly ten years. We shared a lot about certain mutual struggles – I gave up drinking and joined AA when I was 36, realizing it was doing terrible  damage to my loved ones and my life. And like Glen, I had fallen down the mental illness rabbit hole when I was only in my teens.

You have to understand how people idolized Glen’s  writing. It was, as I was to realize later, writing that calls attention to itself, inciting “ooooohs” and “ahhhhhhs” from the audience, like watching a fireworks display. But it would have helped if he had stuck to facts and not resorted to so much embellishment and  florid storytelling, which I now see as unnecessarily manipulative. “Respect your readers” should be the first law of journalism.

I was to find out later that Gzowksi  had pulled a lot of the same shit, doing just about anything (including staging  disaster scenes  to boost his reputation as a reporter) to get famous. I  was also to find out later that he privately groused about me because I was only sending my pieces in  to  get exposure on the radio. Horrors! A writer wants people to hear them? And to even think about being paid was even more reprehensible.

But back to Glen, and the fact that his commitment to sobriety was shaky at best. I was also to  learn he had bipolar disorder and had crashed completely at the time of his detox diaries. To hear him talk  about it, his life at that time was a smoking ruin, he had no job, his family was hanging by a thread, and he was close to actual death, but here was Gzowski, idolizing his dead Dad and willing to do anything  to squeeze information out of him. 

So he was hired.

 A few years later, when Gzowski  retired from Morningside, Glen wrote a long newspaper piece about his ten-month stint on the show (which actually was about average for him sticking  at anything). The piece was called “In the Spirit of Eros” – “eros” as in “erotic”. I will try not to read too much into that, but added to the tongue probing at an aching tooth, you’ve  got to wonder.

Some of his letters were beautiful  in that  powerful storytelling  way he had, but there was always  a smokescreen, a sense he wasn’t  being very truthful and that it was all from some sort of strange arm’s length. He did land in detox again because he was swallowing  benzodiazepines like candy, and I never had the sense he really became a part of AA, just went to meetings, sat at the back, then bolted out the  door. He never had a home group and was "terrified" to get a sponsor, presumably because he wasn't putting too many sober days back-to-back.

In those ten years, he  worked at five different jobs in three provinces. Newspapers, magazines, radio. He even did a short stint at Macleans magazine, which his legendary father had founded. (Glen was totally obsessed with this man who had treated him so shabbily, and referred to him in almost all his letters.)  I could  not keep  track, and he never provided a  home address. I didn’t  pry, because he was supposedly intensely private in spite of his detox True Confessions. He had a  “companion”, but never gave a name. I did wonder sometimes if it was a man or a woman, though ultimately I don’t think it mattered, because nothing ever lasted with him.

Then the trail went cold. He stopped answering  me, perhaps taking off on another adventure somewhere – he constantly talked about “hitting the road again”, and “hiding out”. In the fullness of time I realized he had dragged his wife  and small children all over the world, each gig lasting  a year or two. Many of these countries, such as Chile and China, were not  even English-speaking, which makes me wonder if he really did care about his children and their wellbeing. It seemed utterly selfish to me that a man who was supposedly so lavishly gifted had to keep hopping  around as if his feet never touched the ground. 

Then it  stopped, the trail went cold, Morningside ended - but not after a final piece of  mine appeared in the last Morningside Papers. But there was something wrong at the end of it.  Something awful.

The name of my town was listed as KINRON, Alberta. Kinron. There IS no Kinron, such a place does not exist, and to make matters worse, I  had already been ON the show doing an interview from Hinton.  No one seemed to think this small gaffe meant anything. No, not to folksy, small-towny, parochial Morningside! Why should I be so  upset, when they were generous enough to select my writings for the show?

KINRON.

Ultimately, I heard Gzowski  had died of emphysema, after writing an astonishing detox diary of his own – claiming he was in rehab for smoking. I have never heard of such a thing, but to his last gasp  he never admitted to his alcoholism. He was as destructive a drinker as Glen, but much less honest about it. It was only later that I found out about his “secret son”, a child  he had fathered with an anonymous woman, only to keep paying him off to  keep his mouth shut.

Funny,  because the same thing happened with Glen. He told a harrowing story (to  me, anyway – to  him it was just reporting) about moving in with a woman he barely knew, fathering a child with her, then leaving when the baby was only six months old. He put all his things in a garbage bag and sneaked out, likely in the middle of the night, never to return.

Yes, he was an afflicted soul, but as he was to claim years later in another harrowing You Are There piece (about getting  shock treatments in a psych ward), this was one of those long stretches when he insisted he was perfectly well and totally functional. He claimed to only experience a bout of mental illness every ten years or so, with “eight or nine trouble-free years” in between, before "the demons came calling" again. When they finally did, the shock treatments he wrote about made him euphoric, and the newspaper piece he published made him seem positively giddy, enraptured by the sudden bright colors, the murmuring of friendly voices (psych nurses) and the pleasant ticking of a clock. To  someone who is bipolar, this is NOT good news.

By the time I read that piece, he was dead by his own hand. Hospitalized again, the fifth or sixth  time in three provinces in two years, he took  an overdose washed down with beer, wandered away from the psych ward into a freezing Toronto  winter, and froze to death by the railroad tracks. There was even a police report about  a “missing man”, showing someone who did not look like Glen at all, skeletal, with glazed eyes and a front  tooth knocked out.

I know how I am supposed to feel about all this. In fact, it seems horribly cruel to feel any other way. Compassion, even pity, and huge admiration for his courage in describing how the doctor glued electrodes to his skull and flipped the switch, sending a jolt of electricity through “the addled spheres of my brain”.

But the piece was written with a lot  of mythologizing  and glib phrasing that somehow held it all away  at a safe distance, while pulling the reader in, forcibly, with that inevitable first-person, present-tense style he loved to use.

I know it was an awful death, and I can kind of see why he needed to write about the shock treatments, but this idea that spilling your guts is always  a good thing has aged like milk. I am sure most people reading his psych ward diary were taken aback  - even I was, and I knew the man well enough to know this wasn’t the first time. Nor did he need to recount every single one of his bizarre manic episodes, in which he heard jabbering foreign voices in his head, hired a film crew for a non-story on corrupt bankers in Montreal, hallucinated seeing his dead father in elevators, went on  several wild hitchhiking trips in Northern Alberta, and believed the Mafia was after him.

This seemed a lot more like paranoid schizophrenia to me than bipolar, but maybe he was both. The weird dissociative thing pushed it all outside himself. When he wrote about an accident after a bad drunk, he said “an arm was paralyzed, and stayed that way for  a month.” AN arm, not HIS arm. Another time, he cut “an arm” with a broken bottle. And the poetic ramblings in between were what we writers call “making story”, We don’t ever let mere facts get in the way.

I don’t know why all this has come back to  me now, except I think I do. I am not at all sure the health problems I am struggling with now are going to be survivable. It’s not looking good. So is this bizarre death from 20 years ago  haunting  me because my  own death is imminent? And what will that be like? Can it be any worse than what happened to Glen?

Gzowski  wheezed out his last in a cardiac ward in 2002, and Glen lay down and died like a homeless man three years later, having literally run away from a psychiatric ward. I see him now as running and running, even during those long stretches of “trouble-free years” he claimed to have. He fathered a child during one of those stretches, then abandoned his daughter and a single mother with no means of support.

So  do I forgive all this because he was “mentally ill”? He was, but so am I, technically, living with bipolar  disorder which has come close to finishing me many times. When I tried to share some of my mental health struggles on Morningside, the pieces were treated like dead rats. You had to be the son of a hero to get away with that.

So I’ve done a lot of things to try to shake this off. Morningside now seems embarrassing to  me, not just small-time but totally hypocritical, willing to mangle the name of one of those quaint small towns we all were supposed to celebrate, even after featuring many of my writings and even an interview from  my home  town which was on the air.

KINRON.

Yes, Kinron, which is “nowhere”, and in a way Glen was Nowhere Man, but it seemed like self-exile to  me, and during those supposed (self-reported) long, long stretches of sobriety and stability, what was his  excuse for yanking his small children all over the globe, never letting them settle anywhere, and abandoning an infant daughter? The suicide attempts he so willingly recounted were all very public – he  jumped in front of a bus in Montreal, he took pills in New Brunswick and waited for the  tide to carry him out (resulting in a coma), then ended up in Toronto as the “missing man”, frozen to death beside the railroad tracks. These attempts all had something in common. They were extremely public, and were all geared towards finding his dead body in  a very public place. Being a newspaperman, he knew all about getting the story, and he knew in each case it would invariably  get into the papers (he was a public figure, after all), and his family would be approached for comment. As if they hadn’t gone through enough hell already.

 So I have a lot of anger mixed in with the pity and bafflement, and I now see his “diaries” as sensationalistic and far too graphic to be of any real help to  anyone. In the final analysis, I don't even think it helped him. We don’t need to hear about the technician “plunging a needle into a ready vein”, knocking him out, gluing electrodes to his skull, flipping the switch like something out of a Frankenstein movie. He even phrased it, “And out I am in this fourth of eight shock treatments at New Brunswick General Hospital.” Out I am? This takes his usual, attention-grabbing (if not lapel-grabbing) “you are there” to a  whole new, ghastly level. How can you SAY you’re “out” if you are indeed unconscious?

Someone should have blocked the publication of this piece, particularly when it was reprinted after he  died. At very least, he should have waited to write it after the course of treatment was finished he was only at the halfway mark) and he came back down to earth. Someone should have taken him aside, but no one did, because the writing was so impressive. He worked at that. He did die rather horribly, and I grieved, and kept all his letters for a long time, until I couldn’t  any more and decided I needed to dump  the whole subject, but since writing is my way of making SOME  sort of sense of my life, I’ve  needed to do this now. Morningside, with its faux-folksy host  (with the secret son) and Son of the Legend (with the secret daughter) now make me feel a little queasy. That was then, of course, and this is now, the only now I have.  There’s a Cole Porter song which keeps coming into my head: aptly, it’s called Every Time we Say Goodbye, and one of its more memorable lines is, “But how strange the change/From major  to minor.”

Yes, when the fog lifts and the lights come on and the Frankenstein scenario is finally over, things definitely slide into  a minor  key. If anyone actually reads this, and I am a fool to  think anyone will bother, no doubt I’ll get blasted for NOT having warm, fuzzy, folksy memories of Morningside and Peter Gzowski,  everyone’s jovial favourite uncle. But  Kinron. And all those pieces, when I did not  yet realize it was OK  for a  writer to actually try to  make  a living with their skills. For even thinking about being paid, I was roundly shamed  and branded an opportunist.

I  won’t do my usual thing and break this up with photos or  images or whatever, because I’m too tired right now, I’m exhausted from treatments of my own (though no  electrodes are glued to my skull). A lot of  time has passed, more than half my life, and an awful  lot of this stuff has aged very poorly. For  the most part, though there are likely a few diehards, Gzowski is no  longer seen as the folksy hero, his endless wheezy chain-smoking and equally-endless drinking starting to make him look kind of shabby. No doubt Ralph Allen was a nasty piece of work (smoking and drinking himself to death as well), a narcissist who made everyone think it was a privilege to  work for him. Glen - poor lost Glen - was doing himself in steadily through most of  his 65 years. Yes, he kept a record, but  though his writing was praised for its “oooooohh”, “ahhhhhhhh” factor, I see through all of those tricks now.

There’s a not very nice name for these attention-seekers in this  age of internet fame and infamy. Yes, those were different times, but not THAT different. Don’t pretend to be this shy, private person  who only spills his guts (FOR PAY, by the way – he was paid for everything he did on Morningside – son  of the Legend, after all!)  for the public good. What he wrote did not reduce the stigma or “raise awareness”. It had shock value, and as  a seasoned writer, he knew it did and chose it deliberately. But gut-lurching shock is not a public service. It’s a deliberate demand for attention, sympathy and even pity, and though he no doubt was treated like a hero for it, there was always something in it for him. If nothing else, it got him another job when he had crashed in flames once again.

So  don’t have heroes. They have feet of clay, as we  all do. I hope the public is at least a little more sophisticated now, a little more skeptical. I suppose when I heard my pieces read on the air, it did give  me a momentary thrill, and made me a teeny-tiny celebrity  in my sleepy  little  pulp mill town.

HINTON, folks. Not Kinron. Kinron does not exist.