I had a friend named Walter Lacosta. Walter was a truly strange dude. He arrived in Canada sometime in the early sixties from some eastern bloc country and set about becoming himself. He told me once that he had been someone else before his current self and that his current self kept changing and evolving. So much so that he felt he needed anchors to hold the core of his being in place while the evolution was going on. That way he wouldn’t wake up one morning not knowing who the fuck he was. He therefore invested a lot of energy in discovering what sort of anchors he needed and which were the most effective. Friendships were high on the list because they help define who we are and that’s true for all of us. Unfortunately Walter wasn’t good at friendships. People thought he was batshit crazy and he dressed in black martial arts outfits and shaved his head. He was a two hundred pound walking menace, Walter, and that suited him just fine, because he was a very paranoid person. Martial arts was another anchor for his soul and he did work at it but he kept getting thrown out of the dojo because he didn’t like hitting people. Well not exactly, he thought that he’d like to hit people and had a long list of people he’d like to hit in his head…but the ones in the dojo just weren’t on the list. He thought if hurt them they wouldn’t like him. Are you getting a little of the flavour of Walter? Believe me there was much more.
Quite aside from everything else he was an extremely bright fellow. Well read, finely attuned (as all paranoids are) to the world around him and filled with aspirations. He was at one time, part of the story editor program at the CBC . This was a program designed to develop young people interested in media and the arts and to lead along the path to becoming producers or more likely into careers in broadcasting . I don’t know if he was any good. I didn’t know him then but I know others who were in the program and they did very well.
Walter ended up driving a cab in Toronto. He loved and hated it. He told me that it would be a great gig if he didn’t have to pick anybody up…or if he could pick them up and just take them where ever he wanted. Walter did acid while driving his cab. His eyes looked like pinwheels and he looked like a B-movie assassin . I wouldn’t get in a fucking cab with him and I liked him. He was a feature in the fringe art culture of Toronto. Surreal people who lived in the shadow world of Queen Street bars and music halls. He got a job as muscle for male strippers which opened a whole world of sexual insanity for him. He self published a diary of his days and nights with the cock ring gang. It’s four volumes of hand written observations. I have one around here somewhere.
I usually worked on my drawings late at night…I liked the quiet. It wasn’t the quiet of noise that I liked because I loved Italian Rock Music at the time but it was the quiet of movement. Cities have a lot of noise and light pollution for sure but cities are places of constant movement. Cars, people, activity, that’s “movement pollution” and it diminishes at night. Walter would show up randomly at that time and we’d talk. He was never quite at peace but he was calm enough when we talked. His search for himself was exhausting, led him up dark alleys and blind streets. He couldn’t really understand the world and he was very bright and he had a better view of it than most people. He thought that understanding the world would help him place himself in it. Personally I didn’t give that much of a shit. I’d found lots of places in the world that I didn’t quite fit and I was content with that. He had the feeing that the world didn’t like him..well paranoia, I suppose. On the other hand he thought it was all hilarious, like there were cosmic jokes everywhere that most people never saw…
One night we were ripped to the tits, talking gibberish and thinking it made sense. He said ” I don’t know what’s going on but I’m ready for it. I don’t know what it is but I know what I like.” . Later on we came to conclusion that we didn’t know much about Rastafarianism but we liked the dreadlocks and reverence for weed.
I kept moving, coast to coast, and it was a while before I got word of what happened to Walter. He checked out at Cherry Beach. It was a place where he liked to go at night…look out at the water. The police constantly harassed him there. He was too weird. I don’t know if he ever found himself or became himself. I think he was always the self he was going to be . He just couldn’t reconcile the many pieces but I like to think they were all there . I didn’t judge him then and I don’t judge him now. The time we spent together was crazy and delightful. Misfits, stoned and laughing at the night…not knowing what it is…but knowing what we like. See ya later Walter.
And maybe that’s enough.
Blues: 26 09 24
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