Before I went I wanted to take one last crack at water polo. I had heard Canada was putting a team together to go to the World University Games in Japan. That sounded like fun so I thought I’d give it a go. Over four years of listening to self-righteous philosophy profs and self important yet mediocre philosophy students I had formulated a world view which I thought warranted writing down. My parents have a cottage outside of Ottawa so in the middle of the Canadian winter I moved up there with my friend’s dog and started a regimen of philosophy and exercise. I had to get in shape before try-outs if I was to stand a chance.  I’d write all morning, run on the country roads and ski on the frozen lake in the afternoon, write into the night, listen to the CBC then call every friend I had across the country because I was going stir crazy in this cabin in the woods where my only company was a wooden stove and a dog.

I wrote a philosophy based on a punk rock upbringing. I had a mindset that had to be adhered to going into every situation. I’m sure it sounded deep at the time but now I think it boils down to figuring out which normal, average, boring and uncreative person put the existing institutions in place and having the self-confidence to disagree with them if I felt I was right. I am actually a sucker for traditions, rights, rituals and norms but only if they serve the people. If they are put in place by a business entity I despise them.

After a month of training I was ready to move back to the city and hit the pool full time. I moved to Toronto for the try-outs. Water polo was a very political sport and I got cut after the second round to make room for people who the coaches knew better and felt more comfortable relying on. I stuck around the pool for training and a couple weeks later got put back on the team after they got to know me and saw my skills.

So I was on my way to Japan as part of the Canadian team.  We trained in Toronto for the rest of the summer. I got to know a lot of guys pretty well but didn’t care for most of them. There were a core group of rougher guys from Hamilton who really seemed like my kind of guys. Hamilton seemed very much like the prairies. It was rough and tough but also a college town. It’s a steel town which houses one of Canada’s best Universities. That sort of place seems to breed a certain type of person I really gravitate towards. It’s the type of person who can hold a conversation given any social setting, follow an argument, have a political opinion but is also the product of a depressed economy and can hang with street urchins without coming off as arrogant.

I shared a house with my friend Todd who I had met when I was on the Canadian Junior Team in Hawaii as a teenager. He was a lovely prairie boy and introduced me to these guys from Hamilton. My favorite was this guy named Pumpkin. He was named Pumpkin because he had this massive head. Pumpkin, as in Pumpkin Head. When I asked someone what his real name was they said it was Eddie. So I called him Eddie for a long time until I heard a grown up call him Pat. I asked him what his real name was, turns out it’s Pat. I asked why everyone called him Eddie and he told me it was a nickname the water polo guys gave him for resembling Eddie Munster. You know, the little kid with the big cranium. Three Name Pat must have had a good sense of humor to deal with all these nicknames so I knew we’d get along.

Pat really cracked me up when he told me he had the last known case of scurvy in Canadian medical history. Like many Canadian kids, he went to Whistler, British Columbia to live in the mountains and ski for a season. It’s a common thing among Canadian teenagers. Anyways, I guess he didn’t like to come down the mountain so he lived up there surviving off beer and potato chips for months on end. He landed a bad jump and caught the lip of a canyon one day and broke both his heels. At the hospital they told him they were shocked to find, as he put it, a “slight case of scurvy”. I’ve never heard of a slight case of scurvy before. He cracked me up. That and the fact that the entire time I knew him he wore the same pair of red shorts, no shirt, Birkenstocks, and drove a purple Volkswagon bus. I didn’t usually associate with hippies but I really liked Pumpkin Eddie Pat.

So these three guys from Hamilton and me trained all summer made the Canadian team and were off to Japan to represent our country. This was pretty funny because on one hand we knew we had the goods but on the other Canada should have been pretty scared sending this crew out into the world. The rest of the team was pretty much a bunch of jock types that I didn’t really relate to but the Hamilton boys and me had a lot of fun.

There were two coaches on the 1995 Canadian team. One was an uptight guy who probably ended up pushing paper somewhere really exciting like Coopers & Lybrand. The other was a tough guy from Hamilton who had the tact and physical appearance of a gorilla. This was our guy. He was offensive, socially unacceptable and a little too unstable to be put in charge of a bunch of kids in dire need of discipline.

We boarded the plane to Japan and within a half hour all the Hamilton guys including the coach got drunk and passed out. When we set down in Fukuoka we walked off the plane to see a hundred Japanese people carrying Canadian flags. Mothers, kids, fathers, all there to welcome us and cheer us on in what we knew was a lost cause to begin with. The humidity was like walking into a sauna, I’ll never forget pain of walking into a wall of 90% humidity. I couldn’t figure out how we were supposed to compete in this weather. We’d be better off putting the Polo aside and having some fun.

A short bus ride later we arrived at the athletes village, which is basically where the city puts up new apartment buildings using budgets from the games. They later turn into low-income housing or posh new apartments. Japan had an Olympic bid in at the time and was trying to show that they could really do it right with the University Games. Personally I think they overdid it.

I wasn’t complaining though, the athlete’s village was a cesspool of hormones for horny young athletes with toned bodies, limited time, and a promise never see each other again. Basically it was a recipe for disaster.

We were ushered into our sleeping quarters to drop our bags and then hauled of and paraded through a stadium with our flags and outfits. The lights in the stadium were so bright and there was so much dry ice that I’m not sure there was actually anyone in the crowd, it could well have been piped in crown noise. Over the next three weeks we had our picture taken with local school children, met dignitaries, had translators assigned to us, visited Buddhist temples, banged on gongs, posed for photos. Meanwhile we were sizing up each and every situation to see what trouble we could get in.

The boys and I discovered Shochu very quickly upon our arrival at the athletes’ village. We did a beer run and stumbled upon this clear alcohol in an extremely large bottle for next to no money. We asked around and it turns out Shochu is the Japanese version of Vodka. It’s a potato-based alcohol largely associated with the underclass. It’s a working-man’s drink. We knew this was for us, none of those foofy drinks with top shelf booze and umbrellas, we wanted rot gut.

Word traveled that the Canadian Water Polo team were the party animals. We ended up doing Shochu runs daily. The Russians heard about us and came around with their smuggled vodka. We met them on the beach that night and traded drinks. The Russian vodka is much stronger than expected and went down a lot easier than the Shochu. In fact the Russians refused to drink the stuff, they turned their noses to it completely.

Girls started to come around, because where there’s a good time, people come. We made some quick friends. We started hanging out with these Australian girls who were quickly reprimanded for associating with us well into the night after visitors were supposed to have left. I cringe now at the fact that I made out with one girl all night on a mattress I dragged into the kitchen to get away from my 15 roommates.

The Hamilton boys and me would go on late night commando missions. Which usually meant streaking through the athletes’ village looking for a good time. The armed Japanese security guards didn’t take kindly to this and chase us naked down the beach with their automatic weapons drawn. We climbed a fence and wandered through a local neighborhood naked until we came across a few young teenagers who were scared shitless of us. We kept asking them if they knew where the yakuza was. They didn’t get it so I started showing then my hand with my pinky tucked in. This was meant to symbolize a Japanese Mafioso who’d offended his master and cut off his pinky to appease him but I think I just ended up looking silly. These kids looked at us a little funny. We eventually made it back to the village, scaled a wall very carefully and made it back to our bunks.

We saw a lump on the floor which turned out to be the youngest member of our team. He had indulged a little too much and was passed out covered in vomit and poop.  We made a group decision to clean him up. Over the course of 15 minutes we formulated a plan that included showering him in the communal bathroom three floors down. Three-name Pat drew the short straw and was assigned bum cleaning. The buddy system was employed and two of us were sent off to find transportation. We found a bellhop’s trolley that would do nicely and somehow got it into the elevator. We lifted the young, flaccid corpse onto trolley and wheeled him down the halls looking for the shower room. We decided that the body should have a blanket over it in case someone saw us. That would ensure this was an anonymous mission and names and faces of the “innocent” would be spared. A security guard rounded the corner and did a double take. We simply put our fingers up to our mouths and shushed him as we kept on down the hall. I can only image what this young Japanese man was thinking. Here he was pulling the overnight shift among athletes from around the world, all there for some very serious competition and he stumbles upon four drunk guys trying to dispose of a body.

Our illustrious Canadian Team very quickly lost every game we played at the World University Games. I did score my first goal in International play so that was remotely exciting. We did some touristy stuff like visit a Buddhist Temple. We turned up early in the morning still reeking of booze and a nice monk took us in and did a tea ceremony with us. The bad-ass coach from Hamilton was still drunk but trying to hide it by kneeling in the middle of the temple, putting his hands together and meditating for all of 45 seconds. He then rose, curtsied and say “hi” very loudly. Like I said, he was socially unacceptable. The monk was clearly humoring us as some sort of act of kindness. His sanctity had been invaded by a bunch of miscreants, some of whom couldn’t get it together enough to put their shirts on and whose the leader was making a mockery of ancient traditions. I think our coach actually uttered the words “my little yellow friend” at one point. The monk played stupid and showed us a tea ceremony, which I quite liked. Anything including hot liquid and friends usually ok in my books. We whisked the green powder into hot water, sipped, wiped, turned and passed. The whole thing took about 10 minutes and I really enjoyed myself. We poked around the town and went back to our village.

Another of our adventures included our wonderful translator. She was a middle-aged woman who became our den mother within two days of meeting us. She was so nice and so patient with us. We absolutely came to depend on her for our everyday outings. For some reason the mayor of Fukuoka took a liking to us. He brought us to his favorite sushi restaurant and then to a street fair where we watched some Japanese kids play some perfectly executed Jazz somehow completely devoid of any swing. The next day we were to meet him for a special outing.

We were extremely excited about it as this guy seemed to have a wild streak in him. He took us to a private whiskey bar where we all sang karaoke and drank from his private reserve. We were all a little on edge because we expected our translator to be joining us but the mayor cursed her out and belittled her in the street for assuming she was invited. She ran off crying and we all got very upset about it. It was the first side I’d seen of the misogynist Japanese culture. We didn’t know what to do so we insisted she come. It was a bit of a fight but in the end the mayor relented. He saw we were quite dependent on her.

The whiskey bar was a very subdued place when we showed up with well to do couples doing their best renditions of western classics and traditional Japanese songs. When our turn came we butchered a few lame rock songs, made a mess of the bar, and were quickly ushered off into the night. I think the mayor realized that he had to come back here in the future and didn’t want to write off his reputation completely.

We were taken to a part of town where men were handing out flyers to every businessman walking. We asked for flyers but were ignored. Our translator, acting weird the whole night because she felt she was imposing, told us that it was because the locals were advertising night clubs that catered to the rich and they didn’t think we had any real money to spend. I picked up a flyer off the ground later that night and I think our translator was embarrassed because they were really advertising sex clubs. We called it a night and went home.

All the athletes were invited to see Stevie Wonder perform at a local stadium. Tickets were $75 but free for athletes so we packed into a bus and went over. I was still firmly entrenched in punk rock at the time and hadn’t discovered Stevie’s vast and rich catalog. I knew “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and “Higher Ground” because The Red Hot Chili Peppers had covered it. The Chili Peppers had completely lost me by that point but they were one of my favorites on Freaky Styley. So me and about ten of the guys kept belting out “I just called to say I love you” in between each song. In between songs the Japanese crowd was extremely subdued and you could hear a pin drop. Eventually Stevie asked “Is there anyone out there?”  It was really interesting to see a different culture taking a concert so seriously, as if it were high art whereas back home everybody would be in the aisles dancing and cheering. I really enjoyed that night.

After closing ceremonies, trading track suits with a beautiful French girl, and saying our goodbyes we left for Osaka. We took the high-speed train. My friend Jesse in New York would call it a “super sonic electric train”. I have distant relatives in Osaka so I was greeted by a rather large group of people I had never seen or heard of before. My grandmother’s side of the family is Japanese so she arranged the meeting. It was really quite nice. The family had rented a large room in a hotel and pulled the kids out of school for the day. I met cousins, their wives, children, and close friends. Food started appearing and I really had no idea what I was eating. It was the first time I’d seen furry fruit. We spent the day exchanging pleasantries and walking around Osaka Castle.

One man, whose relation I can’t recall, brought me to the top of Osaka castle and showed me what he called the dichotomy of present day Japan. We looked one way and saw sloping roofs, traditional architecture, and the old world. We looked the other way and saw steel and glass high rises, modernity. He said he was having a hard time getting his kids to care about traditions. They didn’t like traditional Japanese food, They only wanted curry and hamburgers. They didn’t care about traditional texts they only wanted Playstation. I told him I thought the same thing was happening on the other side of the world.

I left a day later and stopped by Vancouver to visit some friends. I got off the plane so dehydrated from the drink that I thought I was going to die. So we spent the next week or so tearing up Vancouver like never before. I went to see Lucky Dube at the club with tires under the dance floor, I made out with a high school friend, I walked the city during the day, I hung out with my good, good friend Joel and talked about what I was going to do next. Joel had become a professional photographer for Skateboard and Snowboard magazines. I knew I needed to get back into music if I was going to be happy.

I enrolled in music industry school in Toronto immediately upon my return

Stu was fast swimmer, a fast talker, and he was smooth with girls. He always had a good-looking girlfriend but they never lasted. Stu had intimacy issues and would inevitably end up cheating on whatever girl he was with. Regardless of the endless drama streak, he quickly became part of our click. We liked him and didn’t have too much trouble differentiating the bullshit from the truth so we just put up with it. He could tell a mean story and we liked having him around. At heart he was a good guy, he liked music, and he was one of us.

Once I was leaving on a national water polo trip and I asked Stu to return some movies to the video rental place. This was before Netflix, it would require him physically going to the rental shop. I asked him very clearly to tell me if he was unable to do it but he promised it would be no problem. I was gone about a week and upon my returning I started getting calls from the video place. They claimed the videos had not been returned they wanted $100. In college in the early 90’s that was a lot of money to me. I told them I would look into it. I asked Stu point blank if he returned the movies and looked in his eyes. He said that he had and I should ask Nick The Greek if I didn’t believe him because they were together when he returned them. I took his word for it and told the video people they must be mistaken. I raised my voice enough to sound convincing and they let it go.

A few months later when Stu had cheated on his girlfriend and they were on the outs she tore up his room in a fit. She came out and threw the movies on the ground asking if they were the ones he was supposed to return all that time ago. We confronted Stu about it and he broke down crying saying he had a major problem.  I had never lived with a liar before so this was a real headfuck for me.  Most of my friends had always been pretty honest and upfront. It took some getting used to being around someone you knew wasn’t totally honest.

He tried to make it up for his lies by taking us with his Dad and uncle to see the Rangers/Celtics football match early one New Years Day at the local pub. We went to breakfast first at the local greasy spoon and his Dad spiked all our coffees with whiskey. Police Chief Dad had enlisted one of his young officers to drive us there because he didn’t want to be chance a DUI. I can just imagine this young office saying goodbye to his wife early in the morning New Years Day and having to explain that he’s driving his chief around on an all day bender.

We got to the bar by the crack of 11 AM. They poured us pitchers of beer and we tried to pick up on who was who. It became clear that Stu’s uncle Hugh was the lone Catholic in the room and supported Celtic. This meant he took constant abuse from just about everyone in the bar. After a few hours and a nonstop barrage of Pope jokes he started to get testy. We tried to take his mind off it playing pool but after a while I didn’t really feel like carrying him so I whipped his ass. After every shot he missed he’d break the cue over his knee and throw it in the corner. Me, skinhead Rob and Stu were stealing food off other patrons’ plates, scaring girls, and making a general nuisance of ourselves. We were stealing posters off the walls. The entire day had turned to shit. At one point I got in Police Chief Dad’s face because he was such a hard ass to his kid. I told him I doubted he would care if any of us turned up dead. He confirmed that he couldn’t give a shit, I called him an asshole and left the bar. Rob coaxed me back in after twenty minutes of us reeling around the street making a scene.

We sat around a table, the match ended and we thought we’d call it a day. Police Chief called his daughter to come pick us up. As soon as she turned up her uncle Hugh, the lone Catholic who’d been abused all day and had a chip on his shoulder said “Gillian come over here and give old Hugh a kiss, ya look lovely lass”. He gave her a great big hug and held on a little long. I looked at him a little weird as he said “Give me another kiss girl you look lovely.” Something felt wrong with this situation and I was feeling pretty brave at that point so I said “Hugh man, that’s your niece what are you doing?”

They sell beer in pint bottles in Ottawa. Hugh took his pint bottle and knocked out my front teeth. I spat my teeth into my hand, put them in my pocket, took a glass, smashed it over his head and lunged for the thick glass ashtray with which I surely would have killed the man. A bouncer grabbed me by my hair and threw me out of the bar. We ended the fight up in the street.

Stu’s father broke it up, told Hugh he was an animal and told him to walk home and never to come around again. I went home and passed out with my teeth in my pocket. I was sure the dentist could reattach them. Before I passed out I called Natalie, who I had a crush on, and told her the story. She came over to see if I was alright. We started to kiss but I had to go to the bathroom really badly and then I passed out. She ended up dating Stu a few weeks later. It only lasted a couple months because he lied to her about another girl, and the cycle continued.

I had to call my grandfather the next morning to take me to the dentist. I didn’t want to rely on him but my Mum was busy and he was the only person with a car. He showed up and said he couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. How could a friend knock out my teeth? He didn’t say it in a comforting or concerned manner, just judgmental. He treated it kind of like when I became vegetarian. His only remark was that I wouldn’t keep getting invited to dinner if I made it difficult for people to serve me. A lecherous drunk had just knocked out my teeth and Grandad seemed put out. My grandfather was a very judgmental character. He was disapproving of most things. He could talk forever about wine and food but never about anything of substance. It used to drive my father nuts.
My grandfather wasn’t always a very nice man. He chased me around our cottage once threatening to “knock me into the next week” if I didn’t take off my hat for a family photograph. I’ve been a hat guy since I was about 13, I go through phases of what kind of hat but there’s always a hat.  My father finally stepped in and said “You will not touch my kid”. I loved my dad for that.

My father always backs me up. I remember when I was about 15 he took us out for dinner at a country club. I wore a beret because I thought it made me look like the guy from Suburbia, totally punk rock. The waitress came up to our table saying that there had been a number of complaints over my beret and that if I didn’t take it off I would be asked to leave. I put my fork down, stood up and walked out of the place. My dad came outside, brought me some food and said not to worry about it. I laugh my ass off about that now but at the time it showed he cared.

Another time in 5^th grade some friends and me were throwing toilet paper at cars  and some long-haired tough guy caught us and was about to start throttling us when my dad came up and got in his face. My dad always backs me up.

We stayed there for about 6 months and then moved into a house with Skinhead Rob. We rented it from a schoolteacher who was divorced and needed the money. It was a block away from the Experimental Farm where young scientists would cross-pollinate corn and broccoli or whatever. We had finally hit our stride. We had a house full of prairie boys who were all misfits with lefty politics and absolutely no jockish tendencies.  Our house was an oasis of normalcy in a weird, weird little city. We started to get a regular crew of droppers by who liked that the house had no power struggles, no testosterone problem, and very little drama.

A few months into our stay we noticed an odd, balding, fat, orangey fellow in the basement. We contacted the landlord who told us his friend would be staying there a while but he promised to keep to himself. It took us another couple months to realize that he only came to life a night and he came and went quickly. He finally showed his face when he heard us having a party upstairs and couldn’t resist coming up to socialize. Other than this we’d only ever heard him when he got really drunk and decided to mow the lawn at 4 AM. Turns out he was on the lam. He was wanted for several armed robberies and was hiding out in our basement. He came and went to the casinos at night feeding his gambling addiction but other than that all we noticed was the constant drone of the television emanating from the basement. After a few months of ignoring the television we noticed it wasn’t on anymore. The landlord came by again saying his friend was going to be “going away for a while”. He got caught knocking over a 7-11 and confessed to all his crimes.

My old coach from Saskatchewan was living in Ottawa and put the idea in my head about joining the team. I was pretty much done with the sport at that time but got back into it because I needed some sort of social interaction. He told the team about me and I was immediately invited to join when I came to town.

Skinhead Rob and I got initiated onto the team within a few weeks of being there. On the prairies you’d get initiated by going to the bar, having a drink, talking about some obscure punk band, and having a good time. This was different. This was prime time thuggish jock nonsense. My initiation to the Carleton Ravens water polo team is probably one of the worst nights of my life.

It started off at some guy called Stretch’s house where they filled us up with beer and forced us to play drinking games. I remember some of it but not all. It was really lame, homoerotic stuff. They’d split us into teams of two, one guy doing push ups with his dick in a glass of beer and the other guy screaming with encouragement. This was some mutated twist on team building. Each team member had to rely on his partner because if the other team did more pushups, you were drinking the glass of beer.

Once they felt we were lubricated enough the party shifted to a bar downtown where they Duct taped us to chairs naked, covered us in liquid hair remover and hired strippers to dance around us. They all cheered and watched eagerly to see if anyone got aroused. I never did understand what that was all about.

So, there I am naked on a chair in Ottawa, surrounded by closeted homosexuals, taped to a chair with a stripper rubbing my leg, and I look over at my new friend Skinhead Rob and say “fuck this man, I’m not going down without a fight”.

Next they blindfold us and make us drink something called “Blood of the Raven” which, I find out later is tequila, red wine, and liver. They make us repeat some bullshit pledge of allegiance to the brotherhood of Ottawa Waterpolo?? Fuck this shit.

They then put a Bart Simpson mask over our heads and, one at a time, make us stand on a chair naked and describe to them our first sexual experience in as great detail as we can remember. After each detail they slap and punch you but you can’t see it coming because you have a Bart Simpson mask on. That was my breaking point. I started throwing punches blind, I connected a few times, I tore back the mask and took them all on. There I am, naked in the basement of a bar with a Bart Simpson mask on my head fighting a bunch of jocks, covered in hair remover, blind drunk and pissed off. This isn’t punk rock this is stupid.

One senior player, who moonlighted as a bouncer at this very bar, put his meaty arms around me and dragged me into the bathroom. It turned out he’s an old punk rocker from the prairies and wasn’t really a fan oft his whole charade either but was going along with it because it happens every year.  He took mercy on me and talked me down from a full on brawl with the team. It was almost as if he was coming out of the closet to me. He told me all about the hardcore shows he went to as a kid, the bands he played in, his beliefs and his worldviews. He had kept all this to himself over the years in order to adapt and survive in this climate but now he knew there were some people like him on the team.  He told me he knows it’s different out here but I should just get through the night and everything will be all right.

By the time the leader of this whole night came into the bathroom to ask me what my fucking problem is I was calm enough to talk instead of fight. I tell him that this isn’t the way water polo works on the prairies, that we’re all misfits, a rag tag army who band together to play a romantically dying sport. We’re not collegiate tough guys looking to fuck and fight. I tell him he doesn’t understand anything about the beauty of the sport, I tell him he doesn’t know what it’s like to grow up where I did, that he doesn’t know what it’s like to loose friends for silly reasons and find solace in a beautiful sport. He looks me in the eye and tells me he understands, his parents were killed in a plane crash and that everything will be ok as long as I go along with tonight.  I found respect for this meathead through his suffering, I realized he was human after all. I found out weeks later that he was lying. His parents were fine and he simply didn’t want me to ruin his jock night out.  I shat hatred for him for the rest of my time on the same team.

Sufficiently assuaged I return to the party, sit down, let them shave my head and tie a marker to my dick. Until that point they’d kept us separate from the women’s team all night. We were in the basement and the girls were one floor up ready to pounce on the drunken rookies. My next mission is to get all the girls on the women’s team to sign my back even though the string is too short to reach. I could tell in the girls’ eyes that they didn’t really like this stuff either but for some reason we were all going along with it.

We hit another bar, I got kicked out, kissed a girl and went home to pass out. I lived with Brian, my coach and former prairie boy. We rented rooms from a guy we called the Muffin Man. He was a sorry, divorced, middle-aged guy who had to take in boarders to make his mortgage payments. We called him Muffin Man because he was constantly baking muffins. He’d make dozens every week and was always trying to pawn them off on us because there simply wasn’t enough room in the house. They were in the fridge, the freezer, in cupboards, in baskets on the counter. The damned things were everywhere. He’d pack us muffins when we went away on water polo trips. Brian refused to take anything from Muffin Man because he thought it would be a sign of friendship and he didn’t want to have to deal with him on any type of regular basis. He’d just walk right past him as he offered him muffins, very uncomfortable.

One day there was an odd little girl in our house with a flute in her hand. It was Muffin Man’s offspring. That was the deal breaker for Brian. He hated having to share a house with such a sorry man and the fact that a young girl would be showing up every couple weeks for his allotted visitation was enough to put Brian over the edge. We started looking for apartments immediately.

Ian and I met in 9^th grade when I was skateboarding out front of my house trying to grind a pipe I’d found in the back alley. Jarred, a popular boy I’d grown up with brought him around one afternoon. I didn’t give much thought to Jarred, he wasn’t my kind of guy, arrogant, normal, your run of the mill high school hero. He confided in me the next day that he thought Ian was a little weird. I had the exact opposite impression. Here was a kid who could draw skulls, liked The Cramps, and used big words to make his friends laugh and intimidate insecure pubescent kids. He had a wild streak in him and knew then and there we were going to be friends. If there is one thing I hate its normal people and this guy was far from normal.

That summer there were three of us. Ian, Chad and me. Chad was a guy who hid his obvious criminal psychosis under a preppy haircut and sharp dress. He dated a beautiful girl named Leanne who always talked about filling gel caps with Cayenne pepper to clean out her system.  There was something not right about her. She and Chad were the Bonnie and Clyde of our high school lives. People always made allusion to some criminal charges stemming from a large heist of computers but no one ever gave me the true story. We heard years later that she became addicted to heroin and killed herself rather than face a life-long battle with schizophrenia but not before doing some graduate work in Physics. Chad turned us onto The Pogues, shared a love for The Jesus and Mary Chain and everything in the world seemed right.

One afternoon we tore up the greens of a local family owned par-three golf course because they denied us entry. We didn’t call ahead for a tee time so they turned us away. Who calls for a tee time for a public Par 3 course? So we ran to the putting green and hacked it to bits with our nine irons before being chased from the grounds. The staff had the whole neighborhood chasing us. Guys with mullets and no shirts were coming out from behind their muscle cars chasing us down because the family was part of their community and we were punks they’d never seen. It was my first public chase scene as we tore down back alleys trying to escape knowing full well that the family recognized us. We went to school with their son and he fingered each one of us. We ended up repairing all the damage both to avoid criminal charges all the while trying to talk his mother into giving us some cinnamon buns she sold in the canteen. The cinnamon buns were as much a draw as the course among those in the know.  I still dream about those cinnamon buns. This memory always makes me laugh, what kind of punk rocker plays golf? Any moreover, what kind of punk rocker snubs his nose at playing a public Par 3 course? It’s this dichotomy that sums up my childhood.
Ian was never scared to act out in public. One night he told us he had seen a porno movie featuring a guy named Hershel Savage and he reenacted an entire sex scene on the counter at the local donut shop clubhouse. We left before the cops got there and headed to a house party where we stole checks from some kid’s mother.  This kid was trying to buy drugs form the local pusher using his mother’s checkbook so we thought we’d teach him a lesson by pocketing a few. The next day we filled them out in our own names, cashed them and went record shopping. About two weeks later we got some angry phone calls from the mother. I think we ended up doing some sort of penance for that as well in order to avoid another call to the cops.

We knew this kid Discount Dale, a Korean kleptomaniac who “liberated” much of the Ralph Lauren line from the mall in the first two years of his high school career. He could usually be found selling multi colored polo shirts out of the back of his green Volkswagon for next to nothing. From what we could tell he didn’t need the money but did it t for the thrill. Dale was a talented artist but couldn’t sleep without three of his father’s beers in his system.

Me and Dale once took a road trip once to Saskatoon to see a girl I used to date named Christen. I woke up about 3 a.m. with him sitting over me asking if I’d kissed her. Dale had developed feelings for Christen and knew that we were coming to an end so he wanted to discuss it with me.  It was really creepy and I didn’t ever hang out with him again. I never could figure out what 18 year old could afford a Jaguar with a Corvette engine yet never held down a job and didn’t ask his parents for money. I didn’t ask too many questions though because he’d let me ride his motorcycle in the back alleys and didn’t mind that I’d crash it every time. I never got that stupid thing out of first gear.

Dale blew the best smoke rings of anyone I’d ever met and I guess I miss that. Actually come to think of it, he was a decent guy. I remember my brother Mark and I both started to carry switchblades in the 10^th grade. Having better judgment than us, Dale“borrowed” them from us one night at a party in some field and we never saw them again. He always told us he lost them but I knew he threw them away. I never bothered to let him pay me back for losing my knife. I owe him a thank you for that as I had no business carrying a knife in high school and I probably would have gotten in serious trouble if I’d kept on.

For a brief period at school, a group of my friends were being bullied. I remember Dale deciding to put an end to it. There was a Native kid named Trevor who transferred to our school and took advantage of people being scared of him by beating everyone up. This guy beat up so many kids at school that Dale finally stood up to him. The kid was carrying a pipe and beat Dale senseless but at least he tried.

A simple fistfight was not a big deal though. If I hadn’t grown up on the Prairies I would have been a seriously troubled individual. Moving us there kept a couple rambunctious boys out of big cities where real trouble lies. It’s kind of like going to jail in Monopoly when things are really hairy and just sitting there while everyone else in the game goes toe to toe.  It’s not such a bad thing.

A perfect example is my cousin Jeremy. He grew up in Montreal around the corner from where I lived as a little kid. Montreal has a couple million people in it and has some serious big city life if you seek it out. When Jeremy started getting into trouble it was blown up cars, expulsion from reform schools, broken legs, police at the house regularly. When I got in trouble it was staying out late, a fistfight, and smoking cigarettes.  I’m glad I was stuck in Saskatchewan for my formative years. What I experienced seem relatively innocent to what kids in big cities are exposed to. I feel like I prolonged my childhood by living in Regina.

There were these two brothers from the north end of Regina named the McCalls. I used to play hockey against them in the Pee-Wee leagues. They were big burly boys who formed the toughest defensive wall a kid ever tried to cross. I started seeing them a few years around the pool when water polo became an obsession of mine. We then started talking and I discovered they had a love of punk rock and we made quick friends. They even had first names, Neil and Warren.

I started a band with Neil and his brother Warren became a close friend when I went to University. We’d talk philosophy for hours. Warren is now a politician and Neil died of skin cancer he got from working in the fields without a shirt. Of all my friends the McCalls were the most decent and always provided me with a good rationale for doing the right thing. The McCalls were the best people I’d ever come across. Their parents instilled in them the strongest moral sense of anyone I’ve ever known. Warren and I now trade emails and see each other when I go home. It’s funny that I call Regina home. I wasn’t born there, I left when I was 18 and none of my family lives there. But somehow it seems right to call it home. Last time I was there Warren and I drove half and hour to Moose Jaw to get Vietnamese food.  I wrote a song about Neil on my first solo record.
I remember one night at the Student Union a band from America called The Dwarves were opening for a bunch of drugged out losers from the desert called Kyus. Members of Kyus went on to for Queens Of The Stone Age. It was just another show, just another weekend in our high school experience until the Dwarves took the stage and started telling us we were hicks, how Canada sucked, they were doing us a favor by even showing up. After the show I walked right up to them and told them they were the worst band I’d ever seen and that they didn’t amount to shit outside their tour van. The band chased me out of the building and tried to beat me up. I was in pretty good shape back then so I made a quick getaway. It was Warren McCall who talked me out of slashing their tires with my switchblade.

The McCalls and I spent the rest of that summer training with the Canadian Junior team for a water polo tournament in Hawaii. We would spend four hours a day in the pool and then go to punk rock shows at night or work a bingo to raise money for our Hawaii trip. Regina has these massive bingo halls. They were the precursor to the modern day big casinos and they were everywhere. The formula was the same as you find in casinos; sell dreams to poor people who shouldn’t be spending their money gambling. We’d go to these massive bingo halls filled with black lunged smokers hacking away as they played up to a dozen games of bingo at a time, dabbing their neon colored dabbers with such intensity and fervor that it almost resembled a competitive sport. The water polo league had a deal with the bingo halls and we’d each get a $25 credit for working a bingo. You can imagine how many credits it takes to work off a trip to Hawaii. I did it a few times out of commitment to the team knowing full well that my parents would pay for my trip. The McCalls did it out of necessity as they wouldn’t be making the trip without these bingo credits. You’d come away from these bingo nights with eyes watering from smoke, reeking to high heaven. It would take at least two washes to get he stench out of your clothes. I always chuckled that a sports team would subjects its athletes to such an unhealthy environment but I didn’t mind.

We went to Hawaii, played water polo, met girls from California and saw Jimmy Cliff in concert. At the Jimmy Cliff concert two locals came up to us and asked us why we were both wearing red handkerchiefs on our heads. They said we should take them off if we didn’t want trouble. I immediately took mine off but Warren looked them right in the eye and explained we were tourists, it didn’t mean anything to us, and we just wore them because it kept the hair out of our eyes. I knew then that there was something different between us. Warren wasn’t scared to look some Crips in the eye and tell them he wasn’t taking off his colors. He is now a successful politician.

The McCalls had a pool table in their basement. I loved pool so I would come over and play with them every chance I got. We’d listen to Southern Death Cult on vinyl and shoot pool. I never thought twenty years later I’d be making a record with The Cult but that’s another story. I spent most of my teenage years in a pool hall, earning extra money hustling little kids. I learned a lot in that pool hall, I learned how to hustle pool, I learned how to read people, I learned how to cheat, I learned how to sell drugs but never bothered as it wasn’t my thing. I got to know the old guy Lloyd who ran the place. He showed me a few things. When no one else was around and he didn’t have to play hardass he’d open up the pay table and we’d shoot real pool.

There was one kid who was always at the pool hall. It didn’t matter what time you went, Ashley would be there. He usually had a spark plug on a piece of string hanging out of his back pocket. The porcelain on the outside of the spark plug acted a silencer when smashed against glass. There is some weird property about porcelain I didn’t know about because I avoided science classes like the plague. Ashley figured out if you swing a spark plug on a string at a car window it would shatter silently.

Ashley was the guy you went to see if you needed a car stereo. He was stealing car stereos while the rest of us were trying to learn algebra. He worked for this guy who rented pirated porno tapes out of the garage behind his house. It was right across the street from the high school.  They got busted before we graduated and we lost touch. I think he now repairs and resells cars with his father.

Another kid from the pool hall was Bart. He was a crazy skinhead who moved away but came back, because everyone ALWAYS comes back to Saskatchewan. He made a living stealing bikes and therefore always carried a can of Freon. He would freeze bicycle locks and hit them with a hammer until they shattered. Bart grew up around the corner from me, he was a weird kid but when he hit his teenage years he got downright dangerous. Years later in Ontario my college roommate Skinhead Rob told me he knew him during Bart’s time away from Saskatchewan and recalled the time a hooker came up to their car, stuck her head in the window and said “Yaba Daba Doo”. Needless to say Bart bore a strong resemblance to Fred Flintstone. We cracked up about that for years.

One night some drunken idiots were bothering my brother in the coffee shop so I followed them out into the parking lot and put my cigarette out on the kid’s neck. I was about to get my ass kicked and Bart pulled up looking for a fight. He asked me what was wrong and I told him these guys were picking on my brother. He reached into his car, threw me a tire iron, threw my brother a bat, grabbed his can of Freon and put in his mouth guard. He said something to the kid which none of us could understand because of the mouth guard. Never having seen anything like this before the dumb kid looked at him blank faced as he got Freon sprayed all over his balls. The lack of reaction pissed Bart off so he sprayed his face and beat the kid until he passed out.

With one year left in my high school stay, my father accepted a job right back where we started, in Ottawa. Knowing that kids in Ontario had to endure one more year of high school than the rest of the country, my mother was a Saint and stayed the extra year in Saskatchewan so I could get my degree. She had it planned for us both to move back east afterwards. Everything was going according to plan when I threw the curve ball that I wouldn’t be joining her when she left. My mother had spent an entire year thinking I’d go to Ottawa with her when I graduated but I was young, in love with my girlfriend Jennifer and unable to walk away from my friends.

My brother left that year for Queens University in Ontario, my father was in Ottawa, my mother was really looking forward to moving back to civilization where she could join a choral society and visit museums. Everything was going according to plan until one night I told her I wasn’t coming along. It didn’t go over well, she cried. My mother is tougher than tough and I don’t think I’d ever seen her cry before. She grew up in a tough household and learned very early on that the tough ones survive. I think I broke her heart that day. She asked me what she’d done wrong as a mother. Yikes, that hurt. Here she was giving up a year of her life so I could finish school and get out and I’m telling her I’m staying in Regina where people live dead end lives, do nothing but get stoned and write songs never to be played for anyone.

That summer I moved in with Ian and my good, good friend Elton Roscoe. We rented a bungalow in a bad neighborhood, rehearsed our bands, and tried to figure out what to do with our lives now that high school was done. I was working cleaning toilets in the local live music venue during the day and humping as a bar back at night. I was taking philosophy courses and getting heat from my parents to follow them back East.

I started to work in a bar called Channel One. The guitar player in my band introduced me to the two brothers who owned the place and I got the glamorous job of cleaning the toilets. It was a foot in the door so I took it. Channel One was great place because all touring bands had to stop in Regina to make gas money to get to their real gigs in big cities. It was like a pit stop along the highway, a necessary evil. The next gig East was a six-hour drive to Winnipeg. The next good gig West was a nine-hour drive to Calgary. Our little town of 175,000 people suddenly looked pretty inviting and we had major national touring acts coming through every week. I met Jonathan Richman, Desmond Dekker, and a slew of other heroes working in that bar.

Eventually I moved up the ladder to working the door, being a bar back, cooking pizzas, running the coat check, doing whatever needed doing and soaking everything up like a sponge. The two brothers who ran the place were dysfunctional at best. They’d go down the street to drink at their friend’s bar before working a full night at their own place. They’d tell us to open up and practice pouring drinks to the regulars in hopes of snagging a couple bar tending shifts but it was just a ruse for them to sit at the bar down the street until their place got busy and the tips were good. Then they’d show up steal our tips and crush our dreams about getting some bartending shifts. It happened over and over again. I remember one guy commenting as I tried to layer a complicated drink “oh, just what I was looking for, a drink poured over a dirty finger nail.”

The headrests the two brothers had installed over the urinals best sum up that bar. They symbolized everything the bar stood for to me.  They pretty much summed up everything Regina symbolized to me. These two guys own a bar where world-class musicians come every week and all they do is get wasted and come up with ideas on how to rest their heads while they pee. Regina is an absolute oasis of creativity and all people do is get fucked up.

One of the brothers was a schoolteacher by day and the other eventually became an electrician. These two guys were known the country over for getting so fucked out of their heads that even the bands couldn’t keep up. Pretty much every band I’ve ever told about my stint at Channel One has asked if the two brothers were still alive. I never really got over the idea of this guy staying out all night, drinking and drugging like rock stars and then going into a high school to teach kids about current events.

I worked there for three years. I learned how to pay bands, how to short bands for fictional expenses, how to cheat the count at the door, how to give my friends free drinks even though the bottles were weighed once a week. It was like going to school. I’d go to University classes during the day, reading Plato and Aristotle and I’d go to the bar at night and learn how the real world works.

The whole time I’d go home to Jennifer.

Jennifer was my first love. We had dated several times over a six-year period. Basically there was an instant attraction from the first day we met. I still remember the day we met, the day we broke up, the day we got back together and the three years that followed. I loved that girl. I remember meeting her in the elementary school yard at a night sitting on a concrete cylinder with my friend Roman, wasting time and trying to look tough. I remember visting her school. She was a year younger than me so I would leave high school and go visit her at the elementary school. I remember being embarrassed being seen there but not caring because I liked her so much. It made her look cool to her friends having these punk rockers showing up asking for her. I remember breaking up outside the mall and her saying “so that’s it?” and looking at me like I was such a let down.  I remember asking her out for coffee two years later in the halls of our high school. I remember the blue military dress she wore when we snuck back to my parent’s house at lunch hour to make out. I also remember when I finally succumbed to the pressure to leave the prairies and her flying across the country after me to ask if I really wanted to break her heart.

When I moved into the house with Ian and Elton everything started falling apart. A girl I went to school with threw herself at me one night and I broke Jen’s heart by falling for it. I called her at 6 AM and told her. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. She forgave me for some reason. Within a few months I moved east to join my family.

We tried the long distance thing but we were just too young. I knew I had to get my life together and I couldn’t do it with ties to the prairies. I called her randomly for years after that telling her I was still in love with her. After a while she didn’t want to hear it. It makes sense. She must have thought I was nuts.

This girl put up with so much crap from me. In my senior year of high school all my friends were going to our graduation without dates so I thought I’d do the same. I’d been going out with her for 2 years at that point and I didn’t even invite her. It was because I wanted to be with my boys, I wanted to spend the night with the guys I went to school with. It didn’t even dawn on me that I hurt her feelings.

Someone’s father fell dead on the dance floor that night and we left to go to see a band called Red Fisher at the Student Union. We spent the rest of the night talking about it when I should have been with Jen. Another stupid mistake. I ran into her a few years ago on a trip back to Regina. She’s now a biker. I still have her phone number memorized but I don’t ever call it. I’m happily married and I assume she is too.

Although my high school experience may have been a little more dramatic than average, the loss of innocence during those four years was no more than any kid experiences. I was not traumatized, abused, or deprived of anything. I was popular, had fun and did what I wanted to do. My memories of high school and beyond are fond and most likely romanticized. Whatever mark those experiences left on me was positive. I learned to question authority, despise the status quo, and have confidence in myself. I was now ready to rejoin the living in the big cities of the east.

Being in a position of relative power, the local politicians would come to my father for favors. My father being a straight-forward-no-bullshit kind of guy refused with little hesitation when something didn’t jive with his moral fabric.
Apparently some of local decision makers had asked something of my father he was unwilling to oblige. As a result there were death threats to my family, forged love letters from my father to other women placed in our mailbox, phone calls at odd hours, and men sitting in cars outside our house. I’m still not sure what it was all about, I remember all the little things now but at the time I was fairly obliviously living out my high school existence.
One night, private investigators followed my father home. Pulling out of the parking lot he realized he had some papers that couldn’t legally leave the office. It was routine stuff he planned on finishing at home that night and returning to the office the next morning. Realizing he was in a compromising situation he drove around the city for about half an hour tailed by two guys, went straight back to the office, replaced the paperwork upstairs, and came home for dinner as if nothing had ever happened.

This sort of stuff went on for half a year but quieted down when my father left the telephone company for a new start up.

We started high school a couple years later and had walkie-talkies between our bedrooms like good neighbor buddies do. All that Hawaiian Shirt bullshit was behind us and he started showing his father’s flair for politics. He had the right haircut for it, a massive wave of thick Greek hair coifed to perfection. Politicians need a good haircut to succeed.

Many of my friends were involved in politics. I had different sets of friends in my life. My schooling was in French so I had my French friends, many of who were better off, better educated and more socially involved that the English kids. I had my English friends, most of who were punk rockers and skateboarders. I spent my days with the French kids and my nights with the English kids because it was much more fun that way,

The lawyer’s convinced all my friends to become card-carrying members of the Young Liberals Party just to traipse us down to his meetings and have us vote on whatever issue needed pushing that day. He’d bribe us with beer and pizza on a regular basis to ensure he could rely on us when important votes needed winning. I remember one day sitting in the basement conference room of a Holiday Inn, surrounded and ignored by young little Liberal sharks and him saying “Now Dave”. So I raised my hand, got my vote counted and walked out and skated home. I made no excuses for my vote being quite obviously paid for. My friends and I would do this from time to time for a laugh and to piss off the Young Liberals.

Eventually this novice involvement in the crooked ways of power holders was enough to spark debate among our friends and led to boycotted pizza parties and Young Liberal meetings. Oddly enough Saskatchewan is a hot bed of politics, however local and small time they may be.  This wasn’t our last exposure to the ways of politics but it did separate the squares from the players. I also went to school with the Premiere’s kid but never discussed that his father was involved in a backroom land sale scandal. We’d see it in the papers at the breakfast table and then see the kids at school but nothing was ever said. It was just what his parents did. There was always some sort of headline around the political parties. I was a sideline observer in politricks, always interested but never wanting to be involved.

That being said, I grew up in a Socialist utopia. The lefties were always in power. There was a long and strong workers’ rights tradition stemming back to the Union Pools, which in their day, were the biggest in the world. The farmers learned early on that if they banded together they could command fair prices and stood a better chance of survival. Subsequently there grew a tradition and culture of standing together. The prairie landscape is dotted with grain elevators, all of which have “Union Pool” painted on the side. Growing up you see it on trucker hats, work shirts, mugs and get to recognize it as a brand name more than anything of actual meaning. The prairies are leftist through and through. The welfare is strong, the socialist party always shows strongly in elections, and the artistic community is supported. All my friends were musicians, painters, stained glass makers, sculptors, tattoo artists, writers etc.  There is something about a small town that’s cold 8 months of the year which breeds creativity.

The funny thing is that creativity is rarely if ever acted upon. All my friends would start bands, rehearse 6 nights a week for months on end, then play one show and break up. The idea of taking your show out on the road was far too daunting. At least here in our bubble where the welfare is good and people applaud your efforts you don’t have to face rejection. My friend Xen recently put together a list of all the bands he could remember from Regina and for a city of 175,000 people there were nearly as many bands.

I remember the day Xen actually tried to get out of Regina. He came to my house and stocked up on canned food and set off for Ontario to see our friend Mary at University. He had enough for a bus ticket to get him a little more than halfway there so the rest would have to be hitchhiking. He made it as far as the Ontario border before some yahoo picked him up and took him to a back road and tried to rape him. He came back like everyone does. Seeing him come home and hearing him tell us of what happens outside of our bubble firmly cemented in my friends’ heads the notion that maybe they were better off staying in Regina. It was a concrete example of what always happens, you set out to conquer the world and you inevitably end up back in Reggie.

So we made the best of it. We started bands, we played shows, we talked about music, we went to see every band that came through town. Music filled whatever void there was in our lives. My interest in music started in about 5^th grade and quickly became an obsession that has ruled my life ever since. It started, as for most young men, through my friends’ older brothers. Greg Scheibel’s older brother had a copy of the Hanoi Rocks album, I never dreamed that 20 years later I’d be living in New York working on a record with Hanoi’s bass player but that’s another story. All I knew at this point was that these guys looked really cool, sounded really cool, and if you talked about them the cool kids would join the conversation. For us 5^th grade was all heavy metal. My friend Mark Curran had an older neighbor who drove a Camaro, had ridiculous long curly hair and moustache and loved to set fires. He used to show up at the door and ask if we “wanted to blow things up”. We’d make our own gunpowder, blow stuff up and then he’d let us come in and listen to Aerosmith. At the time I thought it was pretty cool.

By the time I was in 7^th grade I was a full on little punk rocker, sneaking out of the house, throwing molotov cocktails, spray painting local buildings, mouthing off to everyone, and spending as much time as possible hanging out with the gang of kids my mother told me looked like “little rats”. I came to school one day and they had spray painted the walls the night before with slogans like “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” and “No Future”.  It was the biggest scandal our school had seen and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. From then on I was a punk rock kid, or a reasonable facsimile.

The leader of the rat kids was Tom and I’ll never forget the time my longtime buddy Damian and I stole a stop sign to bring over to his barn-loft hangout.  His father was a judge and let him fix up the garage out back for him and his friends. He clearly had no clue what went on up there.  Tom was one of those privileged punk rockers who would end up just like his father by the time he was 25. I always kind of liked these guys more that the average street kid because they were afforded the luxury of sitting around trying to justify why they were rebelling instead of just being drunken meatheads. You could always tell who had time to sit around and think because their politics were always more elaborate and thought out. The street kids just had a hodge podge of simple slogans with no real thought behind them. I guess it’s why I ended up with a Philosophy degree a few years later rather than a face tattoo and a criminal record.

Damian and I got caught stealing the stop sign but made a hasty getaway on our bikes so it really felt like we paid our dues. We thought for sure that this would make us solid members in his punk rock gang. As we climbed the ladder to his loft we noticed there were a couple other people up there. We wanted to make a big gesture of adding a new sign to Tom’s collection but immediately lost our bravado as we saw a girl from class lying down beside him. It was my first ever experience seeing two people who had obviously just had sex. Tom passed me a pipe and said they’d just been smoking hash and I could still smell it if I gave it a good whiff. Drugs never appealed to me so I told Damian we should split.
As we turned to leave I noticed in the corner this mutated little rat kid with short limbs named Jed. Jed was the local burn out. Tom was a bright kid who taught me about music but dumbed himself down to hang out with the local punks. Jed on the other hand was a little more authentic. I always heard his hardcore band rehearsing and I knew from the start that he was a dead ender. I liked the idea of this kid but when we met we instantly hated each other. We would come to blows almost every time we saw each other. I knew I didn’t like this guy so I spat on him and climbed down the ladder.

He and this other kid Morgan followed us into the alley and threw some punches at us. The fight was over in a minute but it held a certain significance to me because I knew then and there I wasn’t going to be part of their click. Not joining that click turned out to be a good thing. I hear they are all doing the exact same thing these days as they were back then. I remember hearing things about this kid Morgan as a teenager. He had this beautiful girlfriend we were all enamored with but he couldn’t get off with her unless she stuck her fingers up his ass. We used to laugh about that behind his back all the time.

Damian was an interesting kid. I’d known him from the time I moved to the prairies. Both being the sons of English immigrants, we had a lot in common and hit it off right away. We were inseparable for my first few years on the prairies. I knew his sisters, his brother and his parents. I was at his house or he was at mine.  I still have his older sister Jane’s vinyl copy of “Stand and Deliver” by Adam Ant. She was pretty cool and turned us onto a lot of good music.

One of my earliest memories with Damian is of him showing me the Michael Jackson video for “Beat It”. His father was a journalism professor at the local University so he had the first VCR I’d ever seen. We watched that video so many times that we knew all the moves. A local television show called Spinback was holding a Michael Jackson look-alike contest so Damian and I decided that we’d dress up and enter. The next few nights were spent in his attic in front of the VCR trying to imitate the choreography. The day of the contest came and we got all dressed up and headed over to the television studio. When we got there Damian chickened out and convinced me that we didn’t stand a chance so we should just go home. I laugh about it now, there are 10 kids looking like Michael Jackson in a room, two of whom stand in the corner, don’t talk to anyone then just walk away.  I noticed there was something different between us that day. I would have stood in front of that camera and danced my ass off. I probably owe Damian a debt of gratitude for not subjecting me to it but I would have done it.

Damian and I had the same Mohawks in 6^th grade, we wore the same camouflage pants, we snuck out at night together, we rode skateboards together, we formed our first band together, but Damian was different. He started taking drugs at an early age and in 10^th grade he was my first friend to go to rehab. Damian drifted so far I heard that he was last seen with a band of Bedouins in the North African desert, so fucked out of his mind on heroin that we guessed we’d never see him again. His little sister and adoptive mother of my 9^th grade pet rat Stephanie recently found me on Myspace. She told me that he is in fact alive, well and married. I think he’s a chef somewhere in western Canada.

Moving west out of Ontario and Quebec at a young age was almost like being put in a deep freeze for my most dangerous and formative years. Not because of the weather but because of the sparse population. I often think if I had grown up in the big cities of the east I would either have become massively successful or massively criminal at a young age. My fascination with music would still have existed, I still would have joined bands and dorked out over records but I also might have discovered the darker side of music circles to which young people often fall victim. Growing up in Saskatchewan was like growning up in a test tube. I was blissfully unaware and unaffected by the real world.

We got to Regina and I clearly remember spending a day shopping for schools with my brother and mum. We saw several before settling on St. Pius X, a good school within walking distance from my house.  My schooling thus far had been in French so when we relocated to Regina we wanted to keep that going but other than certain pockets, there isn’t much French on the prairies. The only French immersion schools were Catholic so I ended up going to Catholic school.  Like most English, my father was a good Anglican boy and I’d been baptized into his faith. We’re not a religious family and the fact that all the French schools were Catholic didn’t weigh heavily in our decision. I was to young to know the difference between one school and the next so I didn’t really care where I went.  I remember telling my mum that we should choose St. Pius School because there was a wall out front and somehow they’d built the bricks into a big, perfectly circular hole. She agreed that we should go to the circle wall school and we started immediately. To this day I get confused about the differences between Anglican and Catholic.

I used to get into a lot of trouble at St. Pius.  I had a lot of energy and was mischievous. In 5th grade I had a teacher named Monsieur Lize. He was an old prison guard who switched professions to teaching. He was a little harder than most teachers but I wanted him to like me. He held one-on-one meetings with kids in the hallway every year where he’d go over your performance and give you some feedback. It was really very adult for 5^th grade. I remember clearly when he pulled me out into the hallway. I stood next folding shoe racks, filled with winter boots and dripping sludge onto the vinyl tiles as he told me I was “rude, crude and socially unacceptable” and sent me right back into the classroom. That’s all he had to say to me. I think this was meant as a call for me to shape up and stop screwing around. I was fairly bright, I got good enough grades he just didn’t like my demeanor.

Monsieur Lize was the macho type teacher that the eighties produced. He had a sign on his desk which said “You toucha my desk, I breaka you face” and he kind of thought it was funny yet he kind of meant it. Lize was that terrible combination of short and tough. They eighties were a different time, when parents did not sue schools for smacking their kids. This was before “time outs”. He once threw a piece of chalk across the room and hit me directly in the head when I wasn’t paying attention. It stung like crazy but I listened from there on.

One day Lize caught me running in the hallway with my hockey stick, eager to get to the playground for a pick up game. He grabbed me and took away my stick. I reached around him to try to grab it and he said “No running in the hallway.” I was a brat so I reached around him to try to get it anyways and he pinned me to the wall by my neck and said “Are you trying to get on my fucking goat?”  To this day I don’t know what that means but I think it’s bad. Lize wouldn’t make it in today’s world but back then he was probably seen as a bad ass. I bet if I saw him today he’d seem like a little man, we were practically the same height in 5^th grade but he seemed invincible.

The next school year I got an award for Most Improved Student. They paraded me in front of the entire school during mass at church and showed me off as the black sheep who’d found his way. It wasn’t because Monsieur Lize set me straight, I just wanted to show the teachers I was smart enough to do better than everyone else, I just couldn’t be bothered until it became a challenge.

We lived in Saskatchewan, the prairies of Canada, the middle of nowhere. Our teachers took much pride reminding us it was the “Breadbasket of the World”.  Great, we thought, people fill up on us for free before they get to the good stuff.

There is a huge Ukrainian community on the prairies so most of our friends’ names ended in “chuk”. Tkatchuk, Szeschuk., Kowalchuk, Upchuk… It wasn’t until I moved back east that I realized perogies and cabbage rolls weren’t standard fare for most people. Apart from the Ukrainians about half the population of our town was Cree. I learned about the Native plight early on as my town was a hotbed of racial discrimination and tension. Years later when I moved to New York I would cringe every time I hear the word “niche” come up in marketing meetings. The way the Americans mispronounce it sounds exactly like the most offensive term you can call someone in Saskatchewan. It’s the prairie version of the “N Word”.

No one ever plans on staying in Saskatchewan. The first line in everyone’s plan was “when I leave”. My story is all about moving east. Move east, move east, move east until you hit an ocean and can’t go any farther. I don’t know why but this has always been the escape route for my family. Most of my friends headed west after high school, to British Columbia where the weather is temperate, the welfare is good, drug laws are relaxed, and the lifestyle is manageably slow while still offering a major urban center. The Vancouver move was actually the defining moment for most of my friends’ passage into adulthood. They’d graduate from high school and aim for Vancouver. A few made it but most got stuck in Calgary, a mountain city which differed from Regina only in that it was bigger, right winged and close minded.

Everyone leaves Saskatchewan but only a few of us moved east and that made us very different from our friends. The east of Canada is viewed as stuck up, big city, and arrogant.  No one on the prairies could ever understand why Ontario and Quebec were called “Central Canada”. All you have to do is look at a map to see they are clearly Eastern Canada while the prairies ought to hold the title of Central. No self respecting prairie dweller could own up to the fact that most of the population is centered in Ontario and Quebec, the economy has traditionally been there, the government is centered there, the history and the big cities are in the east. To prairie folks it just always seemed like another example of east coasters thinking the world revolved around them. I was born in Ontario and my first 8 years were in Ottawa and Montreal so I never really agreed.

Whether headed east or west, the underlying theme is that everyone was getting off the prairies. If you went west you were cool and if you went east you were a snob. I went east. Those who moved east were mostly French speaking kids finding their roots or academically driven kids headed to the big Universities and a brighter future. When I was eight my family moved from Ottawa, the nation’s capital in the east, to Regina I and my father always promised we’d only be there two years so it never seemed like a permanent thing to us. That two years stretched to ten but I think it’s what has allowed me to romanticize the experience. My father always told me it was great place to raise your kids but you don’t want to get stuck there. I guess I always kind of knew I’d be going back east in the end.