Lee G. Hill, my friend

Lee and me in London, December 2025

I met Lee G. Hill in the first week I was at St. Bonaventure Junior High School in Calgary. That was 50 years ago.

We became friends right away - along with Dan Nearing and Pierre Schenk and Pat O'Heran and Bill Corcoran and others - because we liked a lot of the same things. Beatles, movies, counterculture stuff. We were misfits, I guess.

We started something called the Non-Conformist News Agency, which we used as vehicle to satirize everything. When we ran a make-believe candidate in the student elections under the NCNA banner - Herbie Schwartz, who won in a landslide - the unamused Vice-Principal made us serve on it.

While there, Lee and I put together our own fanzines. His was Alpha to Omega, so I decided mine should be called The Space Between, which was taken from a George Harrison song. We wrote about the Beatles, movies and counterculture. And the occasional short story, too, which we would laugh about, when we got older.

Some of us styled ourselves after our heroes of the moment; Lee didn't pretend to be anything other than himself. I can't recall him ever wearing anything other than a collared shirt and a tweed jacket, bag full of books slung over his shoulder. I thought he was the real writer in our little gang. He looked like a writer, you know? He talked like one.

We both went to Bishop Carroll High School after that, and we hung out with other misfits. We would gather in room 531, so we became The 531 Gang. We wrote for the school paper and we were into Bowie and Iggy Pop and Nicholas Roeg and Beethoven's Seventh and, circa 1976, punk rock. Some of us started to dress like we were in the Ramones or the Clash. Lee just kept looking like Lee.

After graduation, Lee decided to go to Carleton University for journalism. That sounded like a good idea to me, too, so I went to Carleton and eventually got into the journalism program. He got in first.

We were roommates in residence at that point, in Russell House, on the second floor. We were pretty different guys, by then - I was fully a punk, ripped jeans and a biker jacket, and he was an intellectual who seemed to know everything there was to know. But he was always my friend from home, too. He'd come to punk gigs with me, wearing the collared shirt and the tweed jacket. He'd seen Joy Division and I hadn't, and I always told him how jealous I was about that.

When Lee quit the journalism program to get a degree in English, I was a bit pissed off. I thought we were going to be journalists together. Lee had other plans. He was going to write books, and he did.

We'd stay in touch over the years. He'd send me funny postcards, and later emails, full of obscure literary and musical references. He moved to London, where his Dad had been from, and he wrote the definitive book about Terry Southern. He wrote the definitive book about the movie Easy Rider - he was probably the leading expert in the world on Easy Rider. He was at work on another book when I last saw him.

That was in December in London, when we got together again for a pint and to catch up. That's us in front of my hotel in Earl's Court. I don't know if he knew he was dying then - he didn't say. But tonight, I found out my friend of more than 50 years has died. Cancer.

We were misfits, and we had different lives, but we both got to be writers. There's that.

Right now, however, I'm remembering one night in Ottawa, in 1982 or so. There was a knock on our front door, and there was Lee, looking lost. His Dad had died suddenly, he said. I told him to stay with me - my roomate Harold gave up his bed so Lee could stay until he could get a flight home - and he did.

It was the first time one of our Calgary gang of misfits had lost a parent, and I didn't know what to say. So I said what I felt: "I love you, Lee."

And I did, and do. Alpha to Omega.