by Cathal Kelly
There was a wet crust around his lips that quickly hardened—“gluebeard.”
Adam was a handsome kid in the all-American sense—tall, broad, blond. After thirty seconds on the bag, he looked like he’d been run through a car wash on a bicycle. Glue huffing had a way of immediately making everyone who did it dishevelled.
I was not a drug person. This wasn’t moralism. I just could never get my head around the whole idea.
First off, drugs are done in furtive groups. Five guys roll a joint. One of them puts it in his mouth, which is a petri dish of disease and contagion. Then he gives it to another guy. Who also puts it in his mouth. And then another mouth. And another. Eventually, back to the original mouth.
The second problem with drugs is that someone is always trying to rip you off as you buy them. We didn’t have regular dealers. We had places to go where dealers tended to congregate. They were all faceless and nameless to us, since we wanted to be that same way to them.
One of those spots was in a laneway in behind Lansdowne subway station. You could get all sorts there. Most of it was overpriced and underpowered, but we enjoyed the feeling of buying drugs—all the nodding, stage-whispering and palming of bills and packages. It was the closest we were ever going to get to spycraft.
At least one time out of three, whatever we’d bought turned out not to be what had been promised.
That’s why I preferred liquor—it’s a state-run industry. It has standards.
Also, drugs—all of them—made me ill. I suspect that’s largely because I could only overcome my squeamishness when I was already blind drunk.
I was convinced to give hash one last sober try after our friend Isaac found a real and permanent drug connect—a guy he worked with on weekends at an auto-repair shop.
We smoked the hash on the football field of our high school. Since this was all for science, I went at it hard. It hit me like a sandbag coming out of the rafters. I had been very drunk and pretty high, but I had never felt anything like this. I couldn’t speak. I had no sense of space or time. I could not stand up or bear to lie down. I was hallucinating all sorts of nonsense, while being dimly aware that I was hallucinating it.
John quite literally dragged me to his house, which was just up the street. His room was in the basement. He put me down on his waterbed. The undulating did not help. He turned on music to soothe me—“Money” by Pink Floyd. The roll-in with cash registers opening and coins jingling would not stop and the song would not start. When I tried to turn off the stereo, “off” and “on” would switch places. No matter which way I turned it, I was turning it on. Clearly, I was going mad.
I staggered upstairs to announce my impending lunacy to John and was confronted instead by his mother. In my panic to escape her, I turned back and went headfirst down a flight of stairs. Apparently, the hash had given me superhuman suppleness, because I didn’t snap my neck. John’s mother was still standing at the top of the basement stairs while he tried to talk her down—“It’s totally fine. I think he’s just not feeling great.” I found my way into the furnace room, turned off the lights and passed out on the floor.
The next day, I was as sick as I’d ever been. I felt very close to paralyzed. The hangover, if that’s what you’d call it, lasted nearly a week.
Of course, hash isn’t supposed to do this to you. Isaac went back and asked his new drug-dealing pal if we’d been given an especially narcotic batch. Apparently, as a “little surprise,” he had given us some laced with opium.
So there’s the last and most important reason why I didn’t do drugs—little surprises. Nobody puts powerful psychotropics in gin. The gin does that work for you.
My abstemiousness, however, was not widely shared in my peer group. Hence the glue.
Modelling glue was reasonably priced. The problem was acquisition. You can only buy it in hobby stores and there was only one of those in our neighbourhood. You also need a certain kind of plastic baggie to do it, since shopping bags leak and sandwich bags are too small.
In an age before the ubiquity of Ziploc, the correct baggies were also sold at the hobby store. And once you’ve done some glue, you need more glue. Immediately. You can never have enough glue.
Let’s role-play this. If Adam wants glue, he goes to the hobby store to get some. Say, three tubes and ten baggies. It was a big place and fairly busy. Easy enough to blend in. The guy behind the counter sees Adam and thinks, “I wonder what he’s building?”
It may strike him as odd that Adam is buying glue but shows no interest in the model kits. But whatever. It’s a free country.
It strikes him as a little more odd when Adam comes in the next day to buy more glue and more baggies. By the third day, this guy behind the counter has it figured out. Now it’s like buying a ski mask at a gun store. Once you’re cut off at the hobby shop, that’s the end of your glue because there was no glue dealer lurking behind Lansdowne station.
Even my idiot friends could see this problem coming. No one person could buy glue repeatedly. Different people would have to buy it at different times. The baggies would have to be part of a separate purchase. I was not interested in doing glue, but I try to be helpful. So I became the guy who got the baggies.
Now you’re not just going to wheel in and buy a box of baggies on the regular. That’s also weird. You have to spend some time in there making it seem like baggies are something you remembered to get as you were leaving.
At fourteen, I had passed beyond comic books and models didn’t do it for me. What they had in the hobby store that piqued my interest was a vast collection of Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia.
I’m going to suppose that you know the fundamentals. It’s the most basic sort of narrative—a man goes on a journey. Except it’s not necessarily a man. It’s a dwarf or an elf or a half-elf Druid or a part-dwarf sorcerer or some other bizarre mélange of imaginary ethnicity. You are that dwarf. You build him from the ground up. You’re supposed to do this with the randomness of rolled dice to avoid making him the smartest, most muscular dwarf in all of dwarfdom. Then you and a few friends begin a merry adventure through the Land of Fallen Men or whatever, killing things and finding treasure as you go.
In order to understand the limitations and possibilities of your dwarf doppelganger, you require Dungeons & Dragons manuals. A lot of them. Dungeons & Dragons created the wiki model before such a thing existed on the internet. The information was voluminous and crowd-sourced. It was always expanding further into the minutiae of armour, weapons or spell casting. You were always behind the latest developments and needed another book to catch up.
And these books were not cheap. What could have been shoehorned into a mass market paperback would instead be bound in glossy hardcover volumes that were twenty, thirty bucks a pop. I made $3.15 an hour sweating over a deep fryer at Harvey’s. I’d work a whole shift to buy one book.
But the vastness of it, the detail, the way the information had been broken into lists and catalogues and instructionals, was irresistible to me. This was a unique system of thought so capacious you knew you could never fully grasp it.
* * *
—
I WAS HAPPY TO GET THE BAGGIES for my friends, but I wasn’t going to do it for free. We had a round-up understanding. You gave me a bill and I gave you no change. I used the first few turns at this to seed my Dungeons & Dragons project.
My friends—Adam, Tony, Geoff—were quickly turning into full-on degenerates. Glue is awfully hard on the body. It sticks to your lungs and accumulates. It kills millions of brain cells per inhalation. Brain cells do not regenerate.
I had lunch with Adam one day at a restaurant off school grounds. He wasn’t looking too good, nubby and worn down. Like a human pencil eraser. I wondered how often he did glue now. Every day? Several times every day? My friends knew I found the whole thing sordid and began to hide it from me. They’d stopped expecting me to buy the baggies. I didn’t ask where they were getting them now.
During lu
nch, Adam began hacking. It was loud and consistent enough that people turned to see if he was all right. After a few minutes at it, he coughed something up. It was a piece of hardened glue a little bit smaller than a marble.
I was reckless in the same way most of my friends were, but I wasn’t willfully self-destructive. I wasn’t going to ruin myself just for the sake of doing so. The people I admired lived hard, but they got up the next morning. They went to school and had jobs afterward. They fulfilled their responsibilities. As stupid as I was, I recognized where that line fell and was not going to cross it. Coughing up glue in a greasy spoon on Dundas Avenue West at noon on a Tuesday. This wasn’t rock ’n’ roll.
Something in my lizard brain was telling me, “This won’t end well. Flee.” Unlike my actual brain, my lizard brain has rarely let me down. The glue period and the people involved faded from my life. When you are a teenager you think your friends will be intertwined in your daily drama forever. Those connections have an electric urgency. You need to constantly know what those people are doing and why and be part of it. But at a certain point, they begin to drop off. For all sorts of reasons, you stop caring. New people appear, that same connection is achieved, the urgency repeats (though it is less intense each time) and then it too passes.
Another marker of the arrival of adulthood is the realization that the only person who remains entirely consistent in your life is yourself, or some version of yourself. If you cannot find a way to be comfortable with that, you will struggle. Dungeons & Dragons became a way further into that fresh realization.
I had by now a critical mass of books. All the information was at hand. I would spend hours alone in my room, headphones on, making up characters and worlds. I filled hundreds of foolscap pages with notes and illustrations. I didn’t think I was “playing” correctly. It was hard to say, since I didn’t know how anyone else did it and I didn’t care to ask. I didn’t use dice or strictly adhere to the rules. I used the books as a leaping-off point. What I came up with was a step further than the established order of the books. It was my own.
I don’t remember any of those characters because there were so many. Once I’d finished one to my liking (the point at which anyone else would have begun “playing”), I started another. They all had elaborate back stories. It was the act of creation that enthralled me.
I didn’t write as a child. There is no corpus of handwritten short stories or angsty poems buried in my mother’s basement. I stuck to writing whatever was assigned in school.
Instead, I taught myself to write by reading. The best way to uncover your own literary voice is to read widely enough that you find five or fifty authors whose style you deeply admire. Then copy them. Nothing I’ve ever written is half as good as the stuff I’m trying to emulate. But I do get paid. I get up every morning and do the work. It’s something.
That’s what I did with Dungeons & Dragons. I was copying what was in the books but reflecting it askance, in my own way. I did it rigorously. It cost me no effort (the best indicator that you’re meant to do whatever you’re doing). I could disappear into it for entire days.
My mother saw me at it often. Obviously, she thought the whole thing sad and bizarre. But she knew it was better than whatever the Adams and Tonys of the world were doing in their downtime. She never commented on my interest in goblins.
Eventually, I realized I was going to have to play the game, if only to wrap my arms around the entirety of it.
I tried to interest some other friends—my newer, better friends—to do it with me. I hadn’t yet finished handing out all the materials on a Friday evening in John’s basement when someone said, “What the fuck is an orc?” and the whole thing collapsed into jeers.
I joined a Dungeons & Dragons club. This cost me some pride. I was not a joiner and did not care to be told what to do. But it was the only logical step.
I lasted one day. The people in the club were adults but were clearly stunted in some way. Socially awkward, bad clothes, odd bodied, uniformly male, speaking in a weird D&D code.
Less than an hour in, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. I kept doing things wrong, or jumping ahead, or interrupting. They kept telling me where I’d misinterpreted the texts or misunderstood them. This was church for dorks.
And the game itself was boring. Super boring. Outrageously boring. All you did was roll dice and listen to someone—the Dungeon Master—explain what had happened as a result. He wasn’t very good at it. Not a natural storyteller. There was a lot of arguing. Even with all these rules, no one could agree on how exactly they were to be put into action.
My character was killed off early in the outing. And that was it.
I said I was going to the bathroom and walked out.
Just like that, the fixation dissipated. I stopped rereading the Dungeons & Dragons guidebooks. After a time, they were buried on a shelf in my room under other, better books. In the end, that was the point.
MUSIC
AT THE OUTSET of the grade four school year, we performed an experiment in taste. Each of us was given a questionnaire and asked to list the things we liked. Favourite food, favourite colour and so on.
“Favourite song” stopped me dead.
I didn’t have a favourite song. Worse than that, I could not recall any song in particular. Now that my father was gone, there was no music in our house.
We no longer owned a stereo. We didn’t listen to Top 40 radio. Nobody played an instrument. You hear stories about musical families. We were the amusical type. All our workaday suffering was done the way it should be—in silence.
Nonetheless, I had to come up with something here. What sort of loser doesn’t know a single song? After a great deal of mental effort, I fetched one out of my memory: “The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton. (It’s at this point that I encourage the reader to dial this tune up on YouTube. Put it on loud. Do it at work. Your colleagues will admire your iconoclasm.)
As songs go, this is a poor, verging on psychopathic, choice for a nine-year-old boy.
“The Battle of New Orleans” is the sort of song they’d play at a Civil War re-enactment or a Klan rally. It’s the theme song of someone who is radically out of touch with modern life. This was not lost on me.
As an added humiliation, the teacher randomly selected students to explain some of their choices and sing their songs. Imagine that going as badly as it could possibly go—me, standing there, thinking about wetting my pants, while trying an early experiment in freestyle rap that went something like “We fired our guns and the British kept a comin’, down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.”
Nobody laughed. There is something worse than being laughed at. There is pity. And there is no worse pity than that of children. Since casual cruelty is one of their defining features, hitting the pity bar of a room of nine-year-olds is like reaching the stratosphere unaided by rocket boosters. Once you’re there, you die from lack of oxygen.
After that humiliation, music became a mission. I was going to be musical. I was going to listen to music that other people enjoyed and learn to enjoy it myself. Being musical was a state of mind, and I would achieve that.
I began fiddling with the dial on the small radio in our kitchen. Until that point, it was set permanently to the local CBC station, where there was no music.
Now it was time to reach out into a wider world that did not include traffic accidents and policy updates and find art. Whatever that was. The first song that struck and stuck with me was Joan Jett’s remake of “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.” That sounded propulsive and heavy.
I needed to find a picture of this Joan Jett to see if she looked right. A reconnoitre down at Mike’s Smokes turned up a magazine with Jett on the cover. Young, complicated hair, make-up trowelled on, sneering, leathers. This was promising. I bought the magazine.
To this day, Joan Jett remains my ur-image of what a rock star should be. That do-not-give-one-simple-fuck look that defined her approach. A person who was above it
all. I spent a lot of time staring at her picture. This was how I wanted to be.
At the time, I cared a lot about what other people thought of me. That was all I cared about.
I found most conversations excruciating because I felt I was going over poorly in all of them. Not smart enough or cool enough or simply with it enough. Not witty or informed. Other kids seemed to have the ability to bend people toward them. If they moved, someone would follow. I didn’t have this. I had a few friends, but I moved alone.
Being alone is dangerous as a kid. If that reputation attaches itself to you, your next step is to become a victim.
There is something feral about the way children organize themselves. Everyone instinctively understands their status, but the pack is mutable. In some situations, with certain arrangements of people, you are accepted. Switch out a few of those and replace them with others, and people you thought were your friends no longer are. They’ve recognized someone of higher status and yours has diminished accordingly.
Lacking confidence and wearing that lack far too obviously, I wasn’t able to figure out where I belonged. I drifted toward kids who didn’t like me very much, and to groups in which I was only barely tolerated.
Joan Jett would not have put up with this sort of shit. You could tell that by looking at her. If you gave Joan Jett the gears, she would stab you.
I asked for a tape player for Christmas that year and for two cassettes—Joan Jett’s and Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret by the British synth band Soft Cell. The title caused my mother to shoot me a look, but she left it.
Without understanding what I’d done, I had already arrived at the two polarities of musical fandom. There are the artists you want to be, and the ones you want to listen to. They often aren’t the same.