by Jay Onrait
Eventually the sun went down and we decided to head back, getting a little lost along the way before finally making it home. Once we bid goodbye to Karina, my sister and I walked up the steps to the front door of our little rented duplex. My parents had wanted to buy a home, but the newly opened Athabasca University—a correspondence school—meant that every available property had already been snatched up. We opened the front door and my mom’s eyes were like saucers.
“Where have you two been?” she asked frantically.
Before we could manage an answer, my dad emerged from the back bedroom area with a fire and rage in his eyes the likes of which I had never seen.
“Where the hell were you two?” His voice was not quite a yell, just a notch below; it was the best he could manage in that situation. “We have been calling around, worried sick! Did you not think we would wonder where you were?”
In this day and age before cellphones allowed parents to keep watch on their children like Big Brother, in a town where we were able to roam freely and play anywhere and everywhere we liked, we had finally pushed the boundaries too far. Apparently, my parents had come to the conclusion that their children had been kidnapped and would never be seen again. They had just moved to a new town with their family, and I can only imagine the thoughts that were running through my mother’s mind as she frantically called my dad to come home from the drugstore and help her look for the ten-year-old and the eight-year-old who had somehow gone missing and were a full hour late for dinner on a weeknight. We were grounded for the first time in our lives.
The forest was not our friend that day.
But that didn’t mean we stayed away. Instead, for the rest of the summer we went back into the forest every chance we got. It became our home away from home, our own private, secret hideout. We just made sure we kept an eye on our Swatches so we would be home in time for dinner.
So when we began observing these leather-jacket-sporting hooligans disappearing into the trees every day, we decided it was up to us to defend the forest from whatever shady deeds they were committing. We were convinced that the Leather Jacket Gang (as we began calling them) was heading into the trees to . . . wait for it:
Smoke marijuana.
It was time to get to work. Inspired by the “Just Say No” campaign, we decided to call ourselves the Dopebusters. Finally, we had a purpose for our recess and noon-hour breaks.
My friend Robin Bobocel was an only child—a rarity in a small prairie town where families usually had at least two children since so many people lived on farms and acreages, and boredom was sure to cause an isolated child to drive their parents absolutely crazy. Robin was different. Robin was an accident. I know this because he would remind us about it all the time. His parents had obviously told him at a ridiculously young age, but Robin had such an easygoing disposition that nothing ever seemed to bother him—not even his parents informing him that his entire presence on our planet was simply the result of too much red wine and too little caution with birth control. Robin was as relaxed and happy a kid as I ever met. He had clearly never wanted for anything. A visit to his “playroom” next to his bedroom at his family’s house just a few kilometres outside of town was like a visit to the nearest Toys “R” Us.
Robin had the latest of everything and was also one of the first kids I knew with satellite television. He used to come to school and regale us with exciting tales of MTV beamed in from the United States, while we were stuck with plain old MuchMusic in Canada. Years later he would be one of the only students to actually receive a new car for his sixteenth birthday, a forest green Jeep YJ that made our jaws drop as he casually pulled up to school one day cranking the beats of Sir Mix-a-Lot.
Back in fifth grade, though, Robin was a valuable member of the Dopebusters team, because in addition to the toys and the satellite dish and the trampoline in his expansive backyard, Robin was also the only one of us who had his own camera.
After several recess breaks spent performing covert surveillance on the Leather Jacket Gang, we decided we needed actual photographic evidence to bring these “perps” to justice. No way were we going to stand by and simply spy on these rule-breaking drug fiends; we needed to teach them and their kind a lesson—that drugs of any kind would not be tolerated in our school.
During one particularly fruitful spying session, we hung around long enough to watch the Leather Jacket Gang leave early before the bell rang, giving us the opportunity to check for evidence left behind in the little forest clearing where they sat around, laughing at their own jokes—a little too hard for our liking. Once the jacket squad had cleared out, we carefully snuck down to the clearing, and it was there that my fellow Dopebuster, Kevin Meyer, found . . . wait for it . . . an empty container of cough syrup! The boys were drinking sizzurp years before it was cool with hip hop stars and Justin Bieber. Taking out one of the Glad sandwich bags I had stuffed in my jacket pocket that morning while my mom was preparing my lunch, I carefully scooped up the empty cough syrup container to be stored back in my cubbyhole for safe keeping, not taking into account that if our teachers or principals actually considered drinking cough syrup some sort of crime, then I was basically putting the evidence in my own possession. It was like someone finding a murder weapon and putting their fingerprints all over it. Columbo I was not. I was not even Angela Lansbury from Murder She Wrote.
But even with the cough syrup bottle, we still felt we needed photographic evidence. So the next day, Robin, Kevin, and I, plus the other idiots we’d convinced to join us in this ridiculous venture, all snuck into the trees near the school at lunch hour and resumed our stakeout. The goal was simple: Get a picture of these ne’er-do-wells smoking, drinking, or ingesting actual drugs so we could take it to our teacher, Mr. Galonka, and rid our once clean and serene school of the scourge of drugs forever. We watched the clock impatiently, thirsting for justice, knowing that nothing was going to stand in our way of putting these scumbags behind bars.
When that bell finally rang we tore up the hill as fast as our ten-year-old legs could carry us, hoping to beat the Leather Jacket Gang to their favourite spot. We set up shop near the clearing—dangerously close—and waited.
Sure enough, a few minutes later the Leather Jacket Gang showed up and sat on tree stumps in a circle like they were about to start a campfire. One of them fired up a lighter, and a billow of smoke wafted through the air.
The demon weed!
This was our moment. Illegal drug activity was taking place right before our very eyes and now was our chance to stomp it out.
Sadly, this was years before camera phones could have captured the action with the silence required for such a covert operation. Robin’s camera was not so quiet. Robin was on his elbows, clicking away, and lying on my stomach just a few feet away I thought it all sounded dangerously loud. How could the Leather Jacket Gang not hear Robin snapping away with his camera like a young Annie Leibovitz?
The Gang continued to smoke away while Robin snapped his pictures. When he was comfortably satisfied that he had captured enough photographic evidence to put these guys behind bars where they deserved to be, Robin signalled for us all to sneak away in the opposite direction so we could make our escape. Then after school we would quickly get these pictures developed at my dad’s drugstore and bring the photographic evidence to the appropriate authorities, probably the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Just as I put my hand down to slowly and quietly prop myself up and leave, I heard a voice—the most terrifying voice I had ever heard. Menacing, ominous, it came from one of the Leather Jacket Gang, the one with his back to us. He didn’t even turn around when he said:
“You guys are gonna get it.”
We had been caught, and now there was nothing to do but panic.
We all sprang up in unison and ran, screaming at the top of our lungs the entire time.
All the way down the hill we ran, pushing aside tree branches, stepping on leaves and dog shit, practically falling all over
each other in our attempt to flee the scene. It wasn’t exactly every man for himself, but if you were to have witnessed us emerging from the trees that day you would have assumed we had all been held against our will in those bushes for weeks and had just now found our escape. That was the level of unbridled terror in our eyes. Our fellow students looked at us like we were completely and totally insane.
We sprinted to the doorway of the school and ran inside toward our home classroom, where Mr. Galonka would surely appreciate our tale and keep us safe from the pursuers who were about to be exposed to the entire world for their drug use and general bad influence.
But there was no one behind us.
No one.
They hadn’t even bothered to chase after us. They just didn’t care. They were happy to put the fear of God into us and that was that. They went on drinking their sizzurp and smoking what was likely one of their father’s cigarettes. It probably wasn’t even dope.
We had never really gotten a good look at their faces, so we had no idea who they even were. There weren’t many kids wearing leather ties at that school, but there were plenty of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds wearing bad leather jackets. We never did find out who the real Leather Jacket Gang was.
After that embarrassing conclusion to the investigation, we wisely closed up our detective agency and the Dopebusters became nothing but a memory from those few weeks in grade five when we suddenly became the least cool school kids in North America.
Chapter 4
The Sweat and the Fury
Growing up, my father didn’t make me do many chores around the house, but my one regular responsibility was mowing our one-acre back lawn about once a week during the summer months in Alberta. (For those not from Alberta, the “summer months” are May to August, and maybe September if you’re lucky. Truthfully, they may just be June to August. Okay, just August.) I actually enjoyed mowing the lawn because I would throw on the foam-covered headphones, slap a tape into the Walkman, and groove out to some of the hottest hip hop sounds of the day. This being the late ’80s and early ’90s, that would include such seminal releases as Big Daddy Kane’s It’s a Big Daddy Thing; Digital Underground’s Humpty Dance; Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet; A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory; N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton and Efil4zaggin; and Beastie Boys rivals 3rd Bass’s The Cactus Album. I was into hip hop at an early enough age to have regularly listened to MC Hammer before “You Can’t Touch This” (the Let’s Get It Started album) and Sir Mix-a-Lot before “Baby Got Back” (the Swass album).
When it comes to hip hop’s all-time greatest MCs, I’m often disheartened to see Big Daddy Kane fail to get mentioned with regularity. Maybe it’s because he simply faded out of the spotlight. I was somewhat disappointed in Kane’s It’s a Big Daddy Thing follow-up, Taste of Chocolate, but there was one hilarious song on the new album called “Big Daddy vs. Dolemite” where Kane traded increasingly profane barbs with the ’70s era Blaxploitation comedian. The song was so foul that it shocked even me—and I was listening regularly to Andrew Dice Clay at the time. I once made the mistake of forgetting to eject the tape out of the deck in my father’s 1990 Chevy Silverado, which we used to deliver prescriptions to the local nursing homes in town. When he drove home that night he got into the truck, turned the key, and at full volume heard Dolemite say something about wanting to take out his shiny dick and tear up some lady’s old grey ass. I can just imagine how shocked and borderline frightened he was after a day of counting pills and dispensing advice about enemas. My father never really paid attention to the music I was listening to. He didn’t seem to listen to music at all except for perhaps the soundtrack to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. So I was seriously taken aback when Dad stormed into the house that evening shouting, “What the heck is that music you were listening to in the truck? Pretty foul!” He was not amused. I didn’t even know what he was referring to until the word “Dolemite” was uttered. The situation could have been a lot worse—I mean, I could have left a 2 Live Crew album in the truck.
2 Live Crew was a four-person group started by Miami impresario Luther Campbell that made waves with their pornographic rhymes as opposed to the gangster rap world created and cultivated by the likes of N.W.A. Their entire debut album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, was like an audiobook for an African-American pornographic film set to programmed drum beats. Their huge debut single, “Me So Horny,” was an exercise in nuance and subtlety. Naturally, I was a big fan. So much so that when my friends and I got word that 2 Live Crew was opening for Tone Loc at the Dinwoodie Bar at the University of Alberta, I begged my father to drive us all in to see it. Amazingly, he agreed.
The Dinwoodie was not a regular concert venue for the likes of my friends. We had pretty much been shackled to Northlands Coliseum where the Edmonton Oilers played. That’s where Edmonton hosted stars of the day like Poison, Bon Jovi, Skid Row, and yes, Janet Jackson, who busted out some serious moves in a Martin Gelinas Edmonton Oilers jersey on her Control tour.
The Dinwoodie was an altogether different venue. It was for all intents and purposes a bar with a performance stage that often hosted improv comedy shows. The bar did host a few concerts from up-and-coming indie rock bands and Canadian acts, but it was a somewhat strange choice for the performers of such blockbuster hits as “Wild Thing” and “Funky Cold Medina.”
The pairing of Tone Loc and 2 Live Crew was very strange in and of itself. 2 Live Crew was the biggest purveyor of filth in the day, the target of Tipper Gore’s censorship campaign, “Parental Advisory” stickers plastered all over their tapes and CDs. Tone Loc was about as vanilla as they came. No one was fooled by his “Wild Thing” video and the subject matter of the hit song. This was a fat, lovable, mostly agreeable fellow who wasn’t out to offend anybody. In other words, he was absolutely not cool. He was a Top 40 rapper—even this hip hop loving prairie boy knew that. I didn’t own his album, and I had no real desire to see him in concert. But as soon as I heard that 2 Live Crew was opening for him, the tickets were purchased over the phone and plans were made to drive into “the City” to see these crazy Floridians for ourselves.
We were actually not that used to general admission concerts. The venue was one big room with a stage at the side. All my friends were fairly tall, and we quickly realized what an advantage height would be for us at general admission concerts in the future and how much of a disadvantage that would be for those who stood behind us. We shimmied and squirmed our way through the mass of white, pimple-faced Edmonton hip hop fans toward the stage until we were standing directly in front, blissfully unaware that our eardrums were about to get their first real test of limitless programmed drum beats and profane hip hop shouting. We were young and full of stamina, and we knew the words to every ridiculously foul number on the group’s hit album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be.
Then we waited . . .
And waited . . .
And waited . . .
At first, we kind of appreciated that they were a little bit late; it gave the crowd an excuse to come together in encouragement—everyone started cheering and chanting, “2 Live Crew! 2 Live Crew!” But by the time a full hour went by, the crowd was starting to get restless, and by the time the second hour went past, that restless crowd was genuinely starting to get pissed off.
But even more than anger, that crowd was dying of thirst.
I had never been part of a group that was packed that tightly into a venue before. I hadn’t paid attention as I was blissfully making my way to the front of the crowd, but as minute after minute went by with no sign of the group anywhere, I started to take notice of my surroundings. I was packed in way too tightly next to my friends, and everyone was starting to sweat. No air conditioning, lights blaring on the stage as two massive African-American security guards stood next to each other, arms folded, staring at the crowd. I wasn’t craving anything to drink when I arrived at the Dinwoodie, but after that second
hour went by every bit of hydration had finally left my pores and I desperately needed something—anything—to quench my thirst.
As two hours became two and a half, we began to wonder if the group was going to make it out onto the stage at all. At that point I would have literally traded my friends next to me for a sip of water—warm, dirty, it wouldn’t have mattered. My lips and throat were so dry I stopped trying to make small talk with anyone around me. I stood helpless as the larger of the two security guards walked out from behind the curtain carrying a big bottle of aqua, which he proceeded to drink like he was an extra in the movie Flashdance, pouring the water over his head, as we watched, desperately wishing he would take pity and spray the crowd with his own cold spit. Five minutes later he came out with two more bottles of water, which we thought was some kind of ridiculous practical joke, and then proceeded to spray the crowd as we cheered in relief.
Word began to circulate through the crowd that the plane carrying 2 Live Crew, Tone Loc, and their respective posses had taken off late but had since arrived. Those of us new to the concert scene imagined all of them sprinting off their private jet on the tarmac of the Edmonton International Airport into a waiting stretch limousine.
“Step on it! We’ve been keeping hundreds of Northern Alberta hip hop fans waiting!” Tone Loc would shout to the driver, who would weave in and out of traffic at high speeds like a real-life game of Spy Hunter. Alas, like so many of my concert dreams that night, the concept of the artists rushing to a venue when they were late was also a pipe dream that was about to be shattered.
Moments later the water-soaked security guard once again came to the front of the stage to initial cheers that soon turned into jeers when he announced that “2 Live Crew are now eating their dinner and will be taking the stage shortly.” Eating their dinner? Couldn’t they have grabbed a few tacos from Taco Time on the way in? Patience was wearing thin. No one was under the illusion that Edmonton was a spot on the map where hip hop artists were going to perform with regularity, but still, those would-be gangsters were really trying our patience.