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| Mike With My Mother |
Mike and I were close friends for years and our list of adventures together read some like sort of weird underground action adventure. I understand why. I was a part of his past that he doesn\'t particularly remember. He is has been clean and sober for about 15 or 20 years and this is probably good as he would most likely be dead or in jail if he had kept on. I wouldn\'t say that I liked him better as a drunk but he certainly was more interesting and we had a lot more in common then than we do now. I cant believe all the shit he got me in to.
I met Michael when I was Toronto\'s leading \'bootlegger\' I owned an after hours club that was basically for musicians but I expanded it to anybody famous. I was notorious in the 60\'s for my lavish parties. After a failed marriage and over a year sailing in the Caribbean I lucked into a location and slowly built up a business. It was a lot of fun and very profitable and I knew everybody from the Rolling Stones and the New York Dolls to The Premier of New Brunswick and Nick AufDemer.\n
Mike was at the Ontario Collage of Art and had made this acclaimed 8mm film and really thought he was somebody. I was like the King of Toronto at this time and Mike got all pissed off at me because I wouldn\'t let a whole bunch of film students into my club. I did let him in for some reason and he drove me crazy. He was an asshole and always causing trouble. I had to take down the dartboard because he stuck a dart in somebody\'s leg. He was always causing some sort of incident and we clashed constantly it took a couple of years of him ingratiating himself on me to become friends. Mike spent a couple of bad years drinking himself into the ground. As often as not he would pass out in the club and I would just put a blanket over him and leave him there. I lived over the bar and one morning I wake up with this strange thumping through the floor. I go downstairs to find Mike with his face stuck to the bar. He had managed to get a hold of a pool cue and thumped it on the ceiling. I had just put in a new bar and got this guy to put a plastic top on it. He made a mistake and the bar top didn\'t set properly. Michael in his stupor crawled up on the bar and fell asleep on it and his face stuck to the bar. It was quite a job to pry him loose without doing anymore damage to his face.
Mike got his scar before I met him. He told me that he got it sitting in his girlfriend\'s house having a beer and waiting while she changed as they were going out, suddenly there was a hammering at the door and when he open it up this drunk guy attacked him screaming that he was stealing his girlfriend. in the course of the brawl the guy broke the bottle and gashed Mike face with it. In the melee Mike thought he had lost his eye and he freaked out he actually tore one of the guy\'s eye out. After the police and the ambulance and everything was sorted out the guy had the wrong house his girlfriend lived next door.
By this time I had given up my after-hours clubs and was working in the movie business as an assistant producer and then as a producer. I had a small part in Mikes career I helped him get hired in Double Negative I was assistant producer. We went to the opening of Scanners his first big role with actress Alberta Watson. I brown bagged a bottle of Mumm\'s champagne. The three of us drank it in the men\'s washroom of the theatre. While a lot of men found they suddenly didn\'t have to pee. Mike had an old car which he called something like Miriam complete with thousands of parking tickets. One time we were in the Eaton Centre coming down out of the parking lot was a circular ramp. Mike decided to see how fast he could negotiate it. I still dont believe it, he caromed off the sides for about 5 floors and we got to the bottom with dented fenders and a broken tail light but still rolling.
I went to Peterborough with Mike just after the release of \'Visiting Hours". A movie where he played a psycho killer in a hospital. His father had a had heart attack and I went with Mike to visit him. It was quite an experience a lot of people in that hospital had seen visiting hours and you should have seen the looks on their faces when Mike walked by.
Mike used on of the first Canon sureshot cameras in the movie and he stole it and gave it me for my birthday.
Mike and I caused havoc in a couple of after hours clubs. We backed down about twenty guys one night. and one other night we threatened to take Richard\'s Paper Door apart because my fur hat was missing. We really gave him a hard time and then found the hat out in the car. Mostly we would end up back at Mike\'s I don\'t know how his girlfriend Trixie put up with it for so long.
Mike and I had a few fights. Like one night Michael and Winston Rekert (Neon Rider) went to see Willie Dixon at the El Macombo. This is after both of them had made a couple of good movies and things were beginning to happen for them. We had met some interesting young ladies and wanted to party later. Well I have this very fussy friend who had gone to Poland for a month or two and had left me the key to his apartment. So I invited everyone back to his place which was just down the street from the Macambo on the condition we don\'t wreck the joint. All was fine until Michael tires of the female company and tries to phone his girlfriend when he can\'t get her on the phone. He just throws the phone through the screen window in the kitchen. I chased him down the street with him yelling "don\'t hit me in the face I\'m an actor." He got behind a light pole and ducked back and forth which was kinda funny but I did manage a shot right in the kisser.
I mean he paid for everything but what a hassle. How do you explain to friend why you had to buy him a new phone and a screen window.
Around this time Mike and Winston and I had some project going and one afternoon we went to the 22 and were sitting around with Bill Marshall. They asked Marshal if he would come in with us. All he had to do was raise 10 million from the CFDC. Are you crazy says Bill what if they ask me what I did with the 13 million they already gave me.
Michael and Winston were not good for each other. They would call me to go to dinner with them but it always seemed I was along to bail them out of trouble, I managed to talk the manager of a Queen street restaurant out of pressing charges after they cut a waitresses straps so that it exposed her breasts. I managed to get them back into courtyard Café and the club 22 twice but the third time was tough I did manage to talk Camillo into giving Mike one more chance at the Club 22 at the Windsor Arms. My friends Johnny Hart and Jack Caprio who draw the cartoon strip BC were in town and I joined them for a few drinks with Mike in tow. Michael got fairly hammered. I got up to meet another old friend Catherine O\'Hara from SCTV she had her parents with and introduced them to me as I shook hands with her mother, I gave a bit of a bow, as I did Michael came up behind me and bit me on the ass and wouldn\'t let go. It was unbelievable I jumped and hollered and leapt around the room but he wouldn\'t let go. It took Jack and Johnny and a couple of waiters to get him off of me and I don\'t know why he just thought it was funny and when it stopped hurting I laughed too. Even Camillo laughed. One Afternoon in about 1980 we drank over $400 of margaritas between us. : I remember the next morning we went for brunch at Joe Allen\'s with lady friends Mike ordered a triple Bloody Caesar with a shot of vodka on the side which was some kid of record.
One of those nights Mike and Alberta and I were at Winston's accountant Jerry 's place. Winston had just finished a movie and was well paid. We had been snorting a lot of coke and smoking a bunch of grass and started talking about food. Jerry said the best ribs he ever had were at some place in chicago. So Winston told him to order some for us. It took about 4 hours and over a thousand dollars but we had the ribs flown in from Chicago and cabbed down. They were good.
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| Mike and Alberta |
Somewhere there are nude pictures. One afternoon we decided to make a big batch of sangria at his house. We invited a couple of girls with seduction in mind. the Herb Tarlick method get them drunk. Well the Sangia was very good we made a about a gallon of it. And Mike and I (gringo assholes that we were) drink too much and pass out. So we wake up the next day hung over etc. But next week when I develop the film that was in my camera I discover that the girls had stripped our clothes off and had taken some pretty ugly pictures of us. It was pretty funny and I promised Mike that I would burn them and the negs but I didn\'t I hid them in a book and forgot which book and I have never found them since. Someday somebody is going to get a big surprise.
By the way my nickname for Mike was Boris he really hated
