Process

The First Time I Got Paid For It

I remember wanting to be a writer back in my early 20’s. Wanting to be a writer. I didn’t say I wanted to write. I mean, I kind of did. It’s like wanting to have a poop but you are constipated. You know there will be release and satisfaction, you’re just not sure when. Back then, late 70’s I hung out with a dear friend of mine and did un-suburban kinds of things, had tea in small cafés in the farmers’ market downtown, talked for hours about everything from skirting sexuality (mine) to what we really thought about other people. We met for breakfast when we could, at nice hotels or dingy diners. We mentioned the word ‘write’ a handful of times. I wanted to write and I wanted to write something about us, because I felt we were unique.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have confidence in my writing. I had written the odd letter, one to keep my skating coach from being fired for some poor conduct at a competition. I knew my letter nailed it and I didn’t need anyone to tell me so. The writing in my letter seemed to go where my spoken word and confidence couldn’t.

Earlier in a creative writing portion of a class I took in high school, we were to write something, god-knows-what but I wrote a sort of stream-of-consciousness about observing an airport departure lounge. I was burning to stand up and read it to the class, which I did. I remember the teacher simply breaking the post reading silence and saying “no.” I sat down.

I’ve never been good with no, and even so it would have helped to get an encouraging word from anywhere. None came. It didn’t matter. I started keeping journals and simple day-timers about my life. Nothing earth shattering I can assure you. I wasn’t having much, if any sex, still confused about my sexuality. So the diaries were limited to a swirl of activity, rehearsals, classes at university, some pretty shallow stuff.

Cut to years later when I had been working as an actor. I returned from a one-man-tour of a play for which I had supplied the narrative, although I had given the whole mess to an honest-to-God playwright to sort out. Anyway that’s another story, but what happened after arriving home from the cross-Canada tour there was silence. No auditions to prepare for, not much on the career front as an actor and my relationship had been sucking since the word go.

I’d had this fantasy on tour when I was out in Saskatchewan in Outlook the whistle stop town my mom was born and raised in of all places. There was a public outdoor swimming pool which my grandfather had had built as a war memorial, rather than just having a monument stuck at an intersection. (I think among other things he may have done a stint as mayor. He’d multi-tasked—been a preacher, and decided he wasn’t qualified to spread the word, a teacher, and then a lawyer.)

Anyway I had an erotic fantasy about the pool and wrote down as much as I could one night I think at lights out wherever I was staying (a hot little room at the Patricia Hotel in Saskatoon). When I got back to Toronto I took out my draft and fixed it up––I must have had a typewriter. Then I did a bit of research into porn mags at the local grocery and sent off my story to a place in the US.

A few months later I got a check in the mail for a hundred US dollars and signed something to send back, and that was it. The first time I got paid for it and boy did that feel incredible. They sent me a copy of the magazine ‘Blueboy’ which I still have. I think they may have changed one word and used ‘tumescent’ instead, to which a friend commented that he’d have to have one hand on his dick and the other on a dictionary to enjoy the story.