106 toronto life December 2018jewels. The Toronto Sun heard about the exhibit and sent in a
reporter who, in the middle of dinner, badgered my diners
with pushy questions like, “What do you think of this, the way
this guy is disrespecting royalty?” I threw him out. And he
said, “Why are we upsetting you so much?” I said, “Look, as
a gay person—” and he said, “Oh, you’re gay?” So the next day
in the paper on page 2, there’s a headline, “Gay Restaurateur
Disrespects Queen.” It became a scandal, and we had to take
the exhibit down.
I became the chief minister of party—drink, drugs, food, fun
on a never-ending loop. The problem was life became
51-per-cent party, 49-per-cent work. My first experience with
coke was when a friend who used to send us hash from India
brought over a silver box full of it. In those days, you could get
really clean cocaine that didn’t have seven per cent ground glass
and fentanyl and God-knows-what bathtub drugs people put in
it now. I was trying to put the moves on a guy, but we just talked,
staying up all night doing lines and solving the world’s problems.
It was delicious and euphoric.
I discovered the great marriage between coke and alcohol. If
I did too much coke, a drink would balance me out. If I drank
too much, a quick line would set me right. I worked seven days
a week, round the clock, and my drug and alcohol intake increased.
I was running a restaurant, and modelling for Gerald Franklin.
I was in two bands, the Time Twins and the Parachute Club,
playing percussion, and I was deejaying at Pan Am, spinning
music like King Sunny Adé, Grace Jones and Grandmaster Flash.
The moment I knew I was in too far was when I had a gun
pulled on me. I was high when it happened. I had been passing
along some coke as a favour for my dealer, who was a friend.
But the buyer accused me of cutting it, put a pistol in my face
and demanded his money back. My guts dropped into my shoes.
Fortunately, his girlfriend talked him down. I decided I wouldn’t
do favours for anyone—it was too dangerous.
My partner, Andrew, was lots of fun but much tamer than I
was, so we parted ways, amicably. We sold The Parrot for $80,000,
and I went to Tahiti to get clean. It was like my own self-styled
five-star rehab. I did a ton of cocaine before I got on the plane, and
by the time we landed, I was doing what I call the hibbity-jibbity
fish-out-of-water withdrawal dance: anxiety, edginess, sleepless-
ness. I went to the hospital in Papeete, the capital, and told the
doctor I was coming down off a lot of coke. He gave me Valium,
and I started feeling good on it. Then I discovered my friend
Mr. Ballantine, of the scotch family, and mixed the two. It was
wonderfully calming. What a lovely way to come down off of coke, I
thought. I’d have red wine and pepper steaks delivered to this
palace I’d rented by the water. Polynesian women were putting
tropical flowers in my room. I’d swim with the fish in my little
leopard-skin Speedo. But it was all just an hysterical delusion.I spent a month there, then moved to New York. The city had
a dark and ominous feel at the time. The gay bars were like
something from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. We’d heard
about “killer syphilis” —some mysterious virus stalking the gay
community, but we knew nothing about it. Then my roommate,
who was my best friend, started having fevers at night. I watched
his body get covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma. He had AIDS, but we
didn’t call it that yet.
I moved back to Toronto and got a job at Emilio’s, on Queen
East, near the first CityTV building. We were all heavy drink-
ers there. By three in the morning, the entire staff would be
passed out on the bar. The critics applauded my return. I told
everyone I didn’t care about celebrity, but the truth is, I loved
the attention. I remember when Joanne Kates reviewed Emilio’s
and I didn’t have the right change to buy the Globe, so I just
kicked in the newspaper box and grabbed a copy. I thought I
was hot shit. But I was terrified, too. As a self-taught chef, I
found it hard to believe the hype. As each review got more over
the top, saying things like I was the most important thing to
happen to the Toronto restaurant scene in 20 years, I thought
that somebody would call me out as a fraud. Booze helped kill
the anxiety. And as more friends kept dropping from AIDS,
booze helped kill the pain of that, too.
Eventually, I entered the land of toxic alcohol poisoning, and
I couldn’t work any more. I’d blown my body out from the inside.
Alcohol is such a nasty drug. I had a room at a friend’s house and
was on unemployment insurance, but most of the time I was out
on the street, a fifth of Listerine in my back pocket. One night, I
was so out of it from drinking that I collapsed in a bus shelter at
Queen and Bathurst. My sister, who lived around there, knew I
was a mess, saw me and took me to the Addiction Research
Foundation on College Street. They hooked me up to a bunch of
tubes. I stayed for about a month before checking out. I knew
drinking would kill me, but that wasn’t enough to make me stop.
For the next three years, ’86 to ’89, my friends and lovers kept
dying, and I thought that if everyone was dying, there was a
good chance I was on my way out too. I decided to break out the
booze and have a ball. But then I didn’t die.
In the late ’80s, I worked at Stelle, on Queen near Niagara,
just as TIFF had reached a certain level of glitz and glam and
Toronto was becoming Hollywood North. My partners at Stelle
were in the film industry, and we did tons of cast parties. We
hosted Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, Michael Keaton, Susan
Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Rod Steiger. They would come straight
from the airport, and if we didn’t have a table ready, we’d prepare
a silver tray with champagne and some gorgeous appetizer and
deliver it to the limo. Curb service, we called it. I once closed the
restaurant and De Niro and his girlfriend, Toukie Smith, came
in with her bulldog and we all got smashed on Montrachet.“My former lovers were dying of AIDS.
I figured I was next, so why not
have a ball? But then I didn’t die”
GREG_COUILLARD_SEND.indd 106 2018-10-30 10:56 AM