by Jay Onrait
I looked around the car. My mom had a look of profound disappointment. My father had a look of barely suppressed anger. My sister had a look that said: You ordered porn in our room while we were all sleeping? What the fuck is wrong with you?
I had to fess up. “Yeah, it was me.”
Then I completely spilled the beans. I explained that someone in my class had told me I could watch these movies for free if I only watched for five minutes, but obviously I had watched for longer than five minutes at least three times and, wow, was I ever sorry. I would rather have been knee deep in a field full of cow shit than in that car at that moment. I was paralyzed with embarrassment.
“Next time,” said Dad, “just tell us if you want to watch something.”
Oh, sure. I can just imagine how that conversation would have gone:
“Hey, Dad, I’ve turned into an obsessively horny thirteen-year-old with no ability to control my sexual urges. I may also already be addicted to pornography. You wouldn’t mind springing for a couple adult films at the hotel that I will watch on the edge of the bed while you all slumber close by, would you? Great!”
At the time I went to university, the Internet was still not widely available. So, having long before accepted that I was a sinner and a masturbation addict, I was excited to discover I could walk into the Rogers Video on 82nd Avenue in Edmonton and rent adult films to enjoy in the comfort of my own home. This was a wonderful time for the adult film industry as Jenna Jameson was about to explode onto the scene—again, no pun intended. There was a wealth of great material to choose from, produced by classic studios like Vivid and Wicked. The only problem was that I felt even more ashamed renting the videos than I ever did when actually masturbating. That’s because the setup at Rogers Video was designed to make you feel the maximum amount of embarrassment possible.
The Rogers on 82nd Avenue was a massive video store, very standard at the time, still renting VHS tapes in 1992. After I made it past all the copies of The Goonies and Dances with Wolves, I would walk all the way to the back of the store where there was a tiny room with a curtain. I would part the curtain and there, arranged on shelves like little filthy treasures, were the adult films. There would always be one or two other guys in the room already examining the available titles, and they would briefly look up to acknowledge me and then turn their eyes back to the tapes as if to say, “You’re no better than me. We’re all in this shame spiral together.”
After I selected my tape, or more likely tapes, I would make sure to circle back through the main area of the store and pick up one or two “regular” movies to supplement my filth. I would take care to use those normal movies to sandwich the adult movies so the clerk might not be totally frightened when I put them down on the counter.
Then I would take my place in what always seemed to be a long lineup and survey the other patrons around me. I was always hoping, praying, that the lady right behind me had some sort of hearing disorder. This was because it seemed to be Rogers Video employee policy to say the name of every single movie that passed through their hands as loudly as possible. This would result in a profoundly embarrassing moment when I went to pay that sounded a little something like this:
CLERK: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom! What a classic! You’ve seen it, right?
JAY: Oh, yeah. Love it.
CLERK: Just amazing. So violent. What else do we have here? Robocop. Awesome!
JAY: So underrated.
CLERK: Totally. What else? The Scarlett Mistress? Okay . . .
JAY: I’m in a bit of a rush . . .
CLERK: One more. Busty Backdoor Nurses? Uh, will that be all?
JAY (ashamed): Yes.
CLERK: Oh, I missed one. Big Cheek Freaks. Wow.
JAY: Can we hurry this up?
CLERK: So we have Temple of Doom, Robocop, Scarlett Mistress, Busty Backdoor Nurses, and Big Cheek Freaks . . .
JAY: Like I said, I’m in a bit of a rush.
By that point, everyone in line was giving me the same look—a look that said, “So, you’re not really going to be watching Robocop or Indiana Jones are you? You horrible pervert. You filth-ridden spank jockey. Take your disgusting tapes and get out of this store.”
Then I would pack up the tapes and keep my head down as I scurried off to my car, feeling a combination of debilitating shame and joyous elation—and mostly just thankful there weren’t any children in the lineup.
Chapter 2
The New Kid in Town
Before I moved to Athabasca at the age of ten I had never been in a fight in my life. In my first year in that town, I was in at least four. It probably didn’t help that I wasn’t exactly trying to be inconspicuous.
The previous summer my next door neighbour Daryl told me his cousin Colin thought we should both be wearing skinny leather ties. Colin was considered very cool because he was in high school. “Colin told me pink is the cool colour now,” said Daryl. Colin had just returned from Edmonton—“the City”—where he had been buying back-to-school clothes, and basically anything he said to us about how to dress was gospel. “Pink leather ties, that’s what everyone is wearing.”
So as the new school year approached, my parents took me to West Edmonton Mall for my own back-to-school shopping and I insisted on going to Zazoo, a store that would become well known two or three years later as a go-to spot for the latest Zubaz sweatpants. At Zazoo I stocked up on ties. Not just in pink but also in black, blue, and red—all skinny, all leather. It might sound very hipster now, but it was a little weird for a ten-year-old. I think the popularity of Alex P. Keaton, Michael J. Fox’s conservative character on Family Ties, led me to believe that wearing ties to school in grade five would be a wise decision. Instead, it put a giant target on my back.
A few weeks into fifth grade, I participated in an ill-advised arm wrestling contest one day after school. My long, lanky arms provided extra leverage, and miraculously I placed second. I was beaming with pride as my new friend Troy Dubie described me as “pretty tough,” especially since Troy was a real cowboy, a future bull rider. It seemed like everything was going my way until one day, when walking to my dad’s new drugstore after school, I was suddenly cornered by Rory Langevin, easily the biggest kid in my class. I had heard of him but never met him, and now he was introducing himself to me the only way he knew how.
“Hey, are you Jay?” he asked.
“Y-y-yeah?” I replied, reluctantly.
“Some guys were saying you were tougher than me today, so we’re gonna fight after school tomorrow. Right outside the gym. Then we’ll see who’s tougher.”
“What?” I literally almost shit my pants right then and there. A wave of panic swept through my body and my stomach tightened. Why had I entered the world’s stupidest fifth-grade arm wrestling contest?
“Do you want to go bike riding sometime?” asked Rory, a quick changer of subjects.
“Uh, no. I have to get back,” I replied absent-mindedly. Get back to where? I had no idea. I had to get away from this monolith that had me pinned against the wall by the post office.
“Okay. Remember tomorrow. Boom!” And with that, he walked away.
Good God. I had unwillingly been placed in a main event title fight with a major weight class discrepancy. Every other fight I’d been in had been against someone fairly close to my body size, but now I was about to take on the Goliath of the Northern Prairies, and the whole school was going to see me get destroyed. Tears began to stream down my cheeks as I stumbled—stumbled—down the remaining stretch of alley toward the back of my dad’s store. As I waited for him to finish work so I could get a ride home, I wandered around the store in a daze, flipping through comics, every inch of my body filled with unbridled terror.
I was practically inconsolable on the drive home as I explained the situation to my dad. Once we were in the house, my parents tried to calm me down.
“Why would someone say that to you? What did you do to him? Just come straight home from school.” Moms!
If only life were as easy for their children as they wanted it to be in their heads. After she walked away to finish making dinner, my dad quietly offered me words of advice for dealing with a playground combat situation.
“Remember: Quick jabs to the face.” Got it. Quick jabs to the face. I would be sure to remember that as Rory took one big swing at my chest and sent me flying back ten feet as my fellow fifth-grade students laughed uproariously.
I didn’t sleep much that night. The next day, I awoke with a feeling of dread the likes of which I had never experienced before. Dead man walking. My father dropped me off at school and wished me luck, probably wondering what my face would look like at the end of the day. I went through the motions in my morning class like a young zombie who had just been bitten and was getting used to a catatonic state. Gym class was right before noon, and Rory was going to be out there playing dodgeball either alongside or against me. Maybe I could fake a dodgeball injury and he would see it and spare me a beating.
I wandered into the tiny gym and went to sit on the stage while the rest of my fellow students gathered. None of us were changing into gym clothes yet. We were too young for that. We were too young to really sweat anyway. We’d just run around like idiots and then return to class in the same clothes. That was the routine. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I saw Rory, a hulking presence in hand-me-down jeans, running shoes, and an oversized T-shirt. He was headed right for me. My eyes bugged out in terror as he sat down beside me on the stage. He couldn’t have had a more pleasant disposition. What the fuck is wrong with this asshole? I thought. Why was he so calm and measured about ruining my day and my reputation and my face in this new town and this new school where I was doing so well? He opened his mouth and spoke slowly:
“Hey, I heard we’re going to be on the same hockey team,” he stated proudly, like he was actually happy about this.
“Uh, we are?” I wasn’t really capable of forming coherent sentences with this bully sitting beside me, talking to me like I was his friend when just hours later he was going to use his big bear paws to dent my delicate face.
“Yeah, my mom said you’re on my team.”
His mom? How did that subject come up? Did Rory get home after interrogating me in the alley by the post office and tell his parents about the skinny new kid in town he was going to massacre the next day? Only to have his mom inform him that the skinny new kid was going to be playing defence on the second power play? This whole conversation was highly bizarre. Then Rory turned his head to one side, tilted it even, like he was actually thinking, as if there were actually thoughts going on in his oversized noggin.
“Hey, do you really want to have that fight after school?” he asked.
“N-no,” I mumbled. I was a broken young fella, so happy and relieved, but too rattled to enjoy being let off the hook.
“Me neither, see you at hockey!” And with that he leapt off the stage and into the fray of dodgeballs and squeaking sneakers.
Of all the times I had been rocked by violent diarrhea while away from the cozy confines of my toilet—and by now you have probably guessed that situation occurs frequently—nothing compared to the relief I felt that day when Rory called off the fight that afternoon. I no longer had to worry about Rory, other than the fact that he couldn’t skate and was a real detriment to the success of our hockey team.
Chapter 3
Dopebusters: The Case of the Leather Jacket Gang
The email chain was pretty innocuous. The subject line read: “President at Cameron Indoor Stadium.” The first email was from Dustyn Waite, one of our researchers on Fox Sports Live, and it was inspired by President Obama’s upcoming visit to Duke University to watch their men’s basketball team play.
“The only previous U.S. president to appear at Cameron Indoor Stadium was Ronald Reagan in 1988.”
To which Ian Martin, one of our production assistants, replied: “Next sentence: ‘Reagan, the nation’s 40th president, spoke during an anti-drug seminar.’”
This was followed by a reply from Andy Meyer, another of our researchers a little older than the rest of the staff. Okay, a lot older. Like my age. We had all dubbed him “Handsome Andy” for his matinee idol good looks and jovial nature. Andy wrote: “Just say no, Ian. Just say no . . .”
And the email chain stopped abruptly there.
He got nothing.
No further replies, no LOLs. I hadn’t been responding to the chain so I assumed the conversation had simply just died out, but later that evening when I ran into Handsome Andy in the hallway near my offacle (not quite an office, not quite a cubicle—the walls didn’t go up to the ceiling, but there were walls and it was better than fighting for a computer with the interns like I did back at TSN), I mentioned to Andy how much I enjoyed his “Just say no” comment.
“You’re the only one! No one else even gave it a mention.”
“Really? No one else understood it?” I said, perplexed.
“No one said a thing. No one replied. I feel really old! I made a really old reference and no one got it. You and I were the only ones.”
I understood exactly what he meant. Thirty years ago making a “Just Say No” reference would have been met with a laugh, or acknowledgement at the very least. Now, it was just as much a promotional campaign memory as “Where’s the Beef” or “Calgon Take Me Away” (even I was too young for that last one).
If the 1970s were cocaine’s big coming out party, then the 1980s were the depressing morning-after crash and comedown. So many musicians, actors, Hollywood executives, and general douchebags who’d experimented with the drug after the ’60s were over and thought that it could do no more harm than smoking a joint suddenly found themselves addicted and strung out and in need of serious help.
One of the most infamous stories comes from the ultimate cocaine-obsessive band of the late ’70s, the Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham lineup of Fleetwood Mac, who were apparently given rations of the devil’s dandruff before they went on stage: one Heineken bottlecapful each. That led to the best story about Nicks in which her cocaine addiction became so bad she burned a hole in her nasal passageway (true), leading to her demanding that her assistant administer the drug suppository-style into her behind with a straw (denied by her, of course).
If you were like me, a child born in the 1970s who really came of age in the 1980s, you were subjected to an incredibly effective advertising campaign meant to make you think that drugs were no longer cool.
In his book and subsequent documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, former Paramount Pictures chief Robert Evans discusses his descent into cocaine addiction and subsequent arrest that led to, as part of his sentence, an all-star version of an anti-drug video featuring some of the biggest movie and television stars of the day singing a “We Are the World”–style anti-drug song. The video also featured a confused looking Bob Hope. I can only imagine how strange it must have been to be a part of that shoot, explaining to an aged Hope why the anti-drug message was so important. Such videos were pretty much commonplace at the time. Big-name Hollywood players like Evans, who had their wrists slapped, suddenly became contrite anti-drug crusaders. Then there were the child stars of the day like Soleil Moon Frye (Punky Brewster) and Ricky Schroder (Rick Stratton from Silver Spoons). They were part of the generation that was recruited for the “Just Say No” campaign, which was championed by then first lady Nancy Reagan.
Seeing these child stars, all my age, so vehemently anti-drug really worked. It had a profound effect on me and my peers. In our minds cocaine was truly evil, and trying it once was a one-way ticket to the gutter. But it didn’t stop there. Even pot, in my tender elementary school mind, was an addictive and evil substance that would surely lead me to ruin. Once again it was the prevalence of anti-marijuana commercials that drew me to this conclusion. Teenagers shown throwing away lives full of massive potential because they couldn’t resist taking another toke. All those campaigns were terrifying and, it should be said, extremely effectiv
e.
By the time I reached fifth grade, I had never so much as seen a recreational drug of any kind in my life and I didn’t want to. That’s how deeply the “Just Say No” campaign had affected me. The aftermath of unbridled excess from the late 1970s had turned everyone into preaching teetotalers in the 1980s—at least the ones who were on NBC’s prime-time lineup. It was simply not cool to do drugs in our little ten-year-old minds, and it was up to us to keep our school, the only elementary school in town, drug free and safe from the influence of leather-clad hooligans who might try to push their illegal demon weed on fellow students with weaker, less informed minds on the subject.
When I was in grade five, we had a group of grade seven students crammed into our school while they waited for classrooms at the high school to be renovated.
Since we had an extra 120 students squeezed into our tiny school, and since those extra 120 students were now too old to be hanging around on the playground or playing soccer in the nearby field, many of them simply loafed around like a bunch of ne’er-do-wells. Between discussions about the hot new television show of the moment, Miami Vice, one group caught our attention: a bunch of dudes sporting leather jackets and dirty jeans who walked around like they were semi-comatose. Each and every noon hour they would make their way into the forest that surrounded our school. That’s right; I said “forest that surrounded our school.” The school was situated right on the edge of town, so there was plenty of opportunity to wander into the trees and get into trouble.
One day just after we moved to town, my sister and our new neighbour Karina Gregory wandered into the forest after school and discovered a nearby creek that flowed from the mighty Athabasca River. The creek was absolutely spectacular: fresh, clean water that was so delicious looking we all scooped it up and took a drink. “Why not just live here forever?” we wondered as we planned our new utopian society where we would forage fresh berries for food and wipe our bums with the leaves of the poplar trees that grew so plentifully around us. It all seemed so idyllic. We could leave behind school, we could leave behind leather ties, and we could all start again right there in the forest next to town—possibly in the nude.