Meanwhile, 50 years ago this week…

 Becoming Clint Eastwood

So there we were, wondering what to do with our day off. Not as if we had any housework: the six of us sharing a small rented bungalow on a downscale back street were in our early 20s, so it wasn’t as if ‘housework’ was high on our list of priorities, or high on any list, for that matter. We were miners, and miners didn’t ‘tidy up’ on their days off. It just wasn’t done.

Which left us – after we got up at the crack of 10 – wondering how to entertain ourselves. Then somebody said: “Hey, Clint Eastwood’s playing downtown. Like, all four movies.” He meant all four ‘spaghetti westerns’, although if you look it up, they weren’t all shot in the same place by the same director. If you look it up.

Still, a holster-full of Clint Eastwood movies was just the thing to entertain a bunch of young miners on their day off. The quadruple-bill was playing at the Empire on Elgin, right next to the Plaza, which was showing a girl movie, so there might be, you know, girls around, not that local girls had any interest in young miners on their day off.

Of course, we had to prepare for the movie marathon, which also meant we had to decide how to smooth things out (whatever it was that had to be smoothed out). It was a toss-up between mescaline and acid, but we reasoned, quite logically we thought, mescaline would be the better choice because it was made from cactus or whatnot, and cactus actually grew in the old west. So it was settled: Douglas and I would smooth things out with a bit of mescaline, while Ricky Dick would shepherd us, if we needed shepherding.

As we approached the movie house, the marquee boasted all-day Eastwood, which was just fine with us, because we had all day. Smelly old theater, but then again, that’s why it was playing four spaghetti westerns in a row. There were a few others in the theater, mostly young guys like us who obviously had decided that this was the best way to spend their day off.

As we settled in, so did the mescaline, which meant we were hooked from the very first frame. Pastel mesas and empty desert opened up before our eyes, then a lonesome cowboy drifted into view. It was Clint, and we were right there with him as he slowly rode into town, flinty eyes scanning as the townfolk drew their curtains and layabouts stared suspiciously.

And gradually, as the afternoon progressed and we worked our way through bar confrontations and uncannily accurate gunplay, Doug and I became Clint Eastwood.

We noticed it first during a bathroom break (those long spaghetti western credits were great). Standing at the urinal, we weren’t young, stupid miners in a dreary northern Ontario mining town, we were – collectively, I guess – Clint Eastwood, getting ready to walk into yet another saloon to confront yet another greasy-eyed cowboy who couldn’t draw as quickly as we could. We swaggered, we eyed the guys getting popcorn to see if they were plannin’ to draw. But no takers.

Back in our seats, the colours of the old west were so amazing! Rich hues of red and ochre (whatever that was), a sky so blue that it almost made you cry-

Rick leaned in and said, “Hey, a bit too loud.”

“What?”

Then Doug, from the other side: “You’re talking way too loud.”

And here I didn’t even know I was talking at all.

Volume control lowered, we slipped back into another frontier town along with Clint, all in the name of grabbing a rightly-deserved fistful of dollars, or even a few dollars more.

And that’s how the afternoon played out, until Clint rode into his final sunset and we pried ourselves out of our seats. As we made our way out of the Empire, it was with the weary gait of cowboys headin’ for the chow wagon after a long day on the range. The girls coming out of the Plaza didn't seem to notice that we had changed, that we lived the life of lonesome drifters now, headin’ west.

The thing is, we were still Clint Eastwood three hours later. We felt a certain restlessness, the wide-open prairie calling us to roam from town to town, following the sun with a serape draped over our shoulders, until we faded into history. It was a great feeling, important for some reason, and we knew we had to prolong the mood.

Because serapes were hard to find in Sudbury in 1971, we had to make do with colourful blankets (of course, everything was colourful, thanks to Mr. Mescaline, which also might have had something to do with our restlessness). A serape/blanket just felt right, especially when we realized that if we tied them just so, we could flip them back over our shoulders, ready for a gunfight, if necessary.

There was a small, rocky hillock near where we lived, sort of like a mesa in the old west. It was dark by now, but we figured there was enough light from a nearby parking lot that we could avoid the coyotes and rattlesnakes. So we made our way up the hill while a couple of friends watched (and a couple of passers-by frowned in confusion). We stood on top of the mesa, framed by the sun setting in the west (even though it was dark, but still). In our minds, the theme music played out, as did the jingle jangle of our spurs .

“Doodle loodle loo!” we said in unison, our approximation of the signature music effect in the movies. We flipped the blankets/serapes over our shoulders, knowing that anyone who even dared look our way would be frightened off by our trademark gunfighter stance, not to mention the soundtrack.

“Doodle loodle loo!”

We waited, but no one accepted our challenge.  

Clint Eastwood/Tom New, maybe when he was 20