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Genesis of the Poem
I knew Phil
Tetrault as a poet in Montreal. When he was a kid he'd been a star
hockey player in the City of Montréal minor hockey leagues and I
remember seeing him briefly on TV.
Channel 12 would show minor hockey games on Sunday
afternoon. I seem to remember him literally skating through
a team single-handed and scoring.
They'd play games at the Maurice Richard or the Paul Sauvé arenas
where later as a teen I would view the Rabble (a local Montreal
band)
take over a show which was to feature the Cream except that
Jack Bruce had OD'd.
So the Rabble played for an amazing two hours
straight.
If that happened now, there would be a riot, but we all just took
it in stride.
The first time I met Phil, I was sitting alone at a table in
Montréal's famous (at the time) Rainbow Bar & Grill.
I was writing in a journal and he walked by and stared at me for a
moment then asked me if he could sit.
He mentioned something about my eyes and a soul and, in fact, I
had
written a couple of lines in my journal about that same thing and
we thought it quite a coincidence. Over that year I would bump
into
him
at the RB&G quite regularly.
They would have happy hours there where you could get two
Bradors for the price of one, when Brador was really a malt
liquor at 9 percent before they knocked it back to 6.5
and then 6.0 percent. Well, a bunch of us would get together
and order a round (2 beers for a buck fifty) and shoot the shit
about
poetry and writing.
Needless to say, by the end of happy hour which actually lasted
from 5:00 pm to 7:00pm, we were as pissed as parrots as the saying
goes.
Phil would get really tanked and some of us began to notice his
behaviour
getting more erratic. He had this way of breathing through his
nose
where
it looked like he'd curl his upper lip and almost suck up his
whole
mustache.
At that time he looked alot like Freddy Nietzche with the
moustache,
and the deep-set eyes, and that low, criminal brow. Anyways, he
seemed
to have a couple of girl friends or social workers who'd try and
keep
him on the straight and narrow, but he'd get upset with them and
take
off leaving them at the bar.
The schizophrenia we found out had started eating him alive.
Every time I'd meet him later that year, he'd be a bit further
and further out on some landscape of his mind's design.
Finally I lost touch with him both mentally and physically, and
didn't see
him until that last time in Montréal when he was playing the flute
in spring.
You could almost envision him with hooves and haunches and pointed
ears.
Recently, I was looking at a program about the media on TV and
they
showed
a video clip of a schizophrenic homeless man, and to my amazement,
it was Phil.
His brother is a documentary maker and decided that Phil should be
tracked
for posterity I guess. Well, it was nice and it was sad to see him
again.
I think the documentary may be called "My Brother's Keeper".
the damp mountain
road
covered in fallen leaves—
a hooded monk sleeps
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