by Bif Naked
Until I attended a party at the end of the summer, before the new school year, with my neighbourhood girlfriends. We were all dressed up and had essentially lied to our parents about just “going for a walk” around the neighbourhood, which was a common thing for us to do. The party was packed with kids, and there were a lot of people there we didn’t know. The boys were drinking beer. It was typical in the town that either someone’s parents let their kid invite all their friends over to drink, or you partied at someone’s house when the parents weren’t home. The latter was the case that night, and the house party was the event of the summer.
I was never very good at drinking alcohol and, being a young teenage girl, even one beer rendered me rather agreeable. So it was no surprise that I was happy to follow one of the boys into an upstairs bedroom that evening. It was also no surprise that our disappearance was hardly noticed, since the party was in full swing. What was a surprise was his friends waiting for us in the room, with the lights off.
It was what was referred to in those days as a “gang bang” and it was the loss of my virginity. My life was changed by the experience; it was an emotional milestone and a major trauma.
After the boys left the room, I quietly got dressed and left through the front door, not speaking to anyone. I looked straight ahead as I briskly walked home.
I didn’t mention it to my mother, who was sitting in the dark waiting up for me, as I had missed my curfew. I felt very bad about that too. I felt terrible about the whole disastrous night. I blamed myself, and some of the other girls, who learned of it from the boastful boys at the party, blamed me as well. Classic victim blaming, I suppose. Before classes started that September, just about everyone at the school already knew, mostly through rumour, what had happened. I was tarnished, damaged goods, a slut. Or, as I was often referred to, “a fucking slut.”
Schoolyard fist fights were events not to be missed, and I had my share of them with girls who insisted I had wronged them in some manner and challenged me to a fight (a challenge referred to as “calling on” a person). “I got called on!” I would whine to my mother, who grounded me every time I came home with a scratched face or bloody lip. “They hate me, Mom. I can’t go to school.” But, of course, I had to whether I liked it or not.
Faced with having to defend myself constantly, and desperate for the approval of the kids at school, I did what any self-respecting young lady might do. I became the class clown. I transformed into a comedian, relentlessly tripping myself, shoving things in my nose, mimicking teachers, telling jokes, and making faces, anything to endear me to the mean girls.
I was also an affectionate and complimentary friend, genuinely gushing over the smallest things that my beloved friends or acquaintances did. I did just about anything to get the girls to like me. And the boys too, and they knew it. Eventually, though, my classmates stopped mentioning the “big gang bang,” and about that I was glad.
I had few friends, but the ones I had were good and true, like George Finch. He was a few years older than me, and had the best hair of all the tenth graders. George’s mom played piano at the church and taught it as well. George had an older brother and sister, and was seemingly the perfect son. George taught me to smoke hash off a pin using a blowtorch he stashed in the back of his Dodge. He took me on my first formal date, to Dauphin’s pizza parlour. It was the first time I used a purse, and I still remember the event well.
George knew everything about music and was the singer in a band that played at the high school’s assemblies and Battles of the Bands. George gave me my first record, Judas Priest’s Unleashed in the East, which I listened to on my grandpa’s hi-fi in the basement. I lip-synced Rob Halford’s expert singing in the bathroom mirror. George introduced me to Mean Gene and all the WWF heroes, and we’d watch for hours in his parents’ basement. He loved comics like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and that made me love them too. I loved anything and everything he did. I loved George.
I never did entirely transcend my reputation, and I knew my parents would want me to forgive them, so I did. The survival skills I had begun to hone were effective and served as the foundation for needed strength in the coming years. And the year ahead was certainly unfolding in an interesting way, as my dad announced that he had accepted a position at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg. I was so happy to leave Dauphin and put my memories behind me that I lay on my bed and cried with relief. My pillowcases matched my sheets, adorned with images of horses and Kentucky bluegrass, encapsulating the glory days we had left behind, when life was simple and I was still just a little girl.
EIGHT
Pope John Paul II and Predators
JOHN PAUL II WAS LATE, AND PEOPLE WERE ANTSY. I was sure God had something to do with the Pope being late. People were mumbling around us.
“Was he really shot?” I asked my mom.
“Don’t you remember? It was the same year that Princess Diana and Prince Charles were married. We watched it on television.” My mom was lighthearted and positive despite the noise of the whining Winnipeggers. The sunshine beat down on the good people of Winnipeg awaiting the papal parade. Yes, the Pope was late, and my mom and I were standing among the hundreds of thousands of other onlookers that morning.
Pope John Paul II was on a tour and, like just about everyone else in Winnipeg, we had gone to stand in the street to try to catch a glimpse of the old man. He was in a gold cart surrounded by Plexiglas, I would later tell those classmates who had not been forced by their parents to witness the mayhem.
All the images you see of any Pope, with his outfit that looks like a big, white dress, his stance, legs shoulder-width-apart, arms in a perfect balletic second position . . . well, that’s exactly how he looked.
Seeing the Pope was a historical milestone in my life, but more for how it relates to my mother’s and my relationship than anything else.
As soon as he rode past, we bum-rushed the Portage Avenue Burger King ahead of hundreds of other sloppy, sweat-soaked red-faced idiots (at least, that’s how I saw myself). The place was crowded, everyone eating burgers lemming-like. But really it was about me with my mom and my mom with me, a theme that started that day and would continue on through our lives—special times, just the two of us together. Although I’m going to guess she remembers that time in the Burger King more vividly than I do, as I was hungover from the small amount of beer it would have taken my teenage body to get tipsy on the night before.
I always got drunk on just one drink. This would be perfectly fine except for my penchant for being a clown. People like me when I’m drunk—I’m funny. To the great amusement of others, I rarely stopped at one drink; in fact, as soon as one hits my system, I am sufficiently judgment-impaired to have, say, ten or seventeen more. It is of little surprise that my mother, desperate to save me from myself, intervened, marching me right to the front doors of the Alcoholism Foundation of Manitoba (as the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba was then known).
The counsellors there embraced my family and assisted my parents in designing a program for me: Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Narcotics Anonymous meetings (despite my trying to convince everyone I didn’t do drugs), and one-on-one counselling. I was a teenage girl in a program with recovering adult alcoholics and drug addicts, with dozens of others in treatment for various combinations of substance abuses, the majority being men. It became my dating pool. I was getting a lot of attention and liking it. I dated in-patients and guys from the meetings; proximity was the key component at work here. Naive.
And I assure you, everyone at the foundation was kind to me, took me under their proverbial wing, educated me in the ways of the Big Book, but in reality, I was ripe for the plucking and I was plucked. I did develop friendships with some very kind people—artists, parolees, even Claude, a man in his sixties who was a notorious pimp in the city.
Claude was extremely helpful to me one of the times I ran away from home during that period. My poor mother could say very little to me without m
y taking it extremely personally, becoming distraught and stomping out the door to go stay the night at a girlfriend’s. But this time, I realized I had no place to go, and Claude gave me a place to stay. I immediately came down with the flu, and he took care of me. For about four of the six days I was gone from home I was deathly ill, unable even to get out of bed by myself. Claude helped me get up to use the bathroom. He fed me and made sure I was getting the care and attention I needed. I felt so grateful to him for treating me with such kindness that I wanted to show him my appreciation. So one night after I had recovered from the flu, I climbed into his bed completely naked, climbed on top of him, and gave him the only gift I thought I had to give. You might think having sex with an old pimp would be a difficult thing for a teenaged girl. But to the contrary, it was the first time I had an orgasm during sex.
When I returned home, I was immediately delivered to the Salvation Army’s “home for wayward women.” I had to sweep the floors and bunk with two homeless women who had scabies on their legs. I don’t think my parents had a clue of what they were working with here.
The Salvation Army Home was not for me. The staff there didn’t approve of my language, and I was uninterested in the mandatory church attendance, And I was completely unhappy with the early nights and the policy of lights-out in the dorm at 8 p.m.
That bright day as my mother and I watched the Pope wave at the applauding onlookers, all hastily crossing themselves while shoving their hot dogs and doughnuts into their mouths, I felt happy to be there and even happier about not feeling like I had to ask the Pope’s forgiveness for anything. Little did I realize at the time that on that same city block where we were standing stood the Salvation Army building. My whole life was still ahead of me. But the clock was ticking, tick tick tick, just like a time bomb.
NINE
The “Blush” Pill and the Photographer
I DREAMED OF BEING AN ACTRESS, A STARLET, JUST like every other girl in my high school drama class. Well, any girl in drama class who knew who Shannon Tweed was, that is. “She’s Canadian,” I’d say to anyone who’d listen. “Just like me.” And I’d beam. I was the only Canadian in my family. Winnipeg was a big city compared with Dauphin, and I knew that somehow this was where I would make it.
My ever-supportive parents, happily paying for acting classes and theatre workshops, musical theatre, and continued dance training, saw nothing wrong with my going for head shots for my acting, or even on shoots with my ballet class. They never asked about it, and I never asked them for a ride to the venue.
When I met a photographer at the mall who told me I should be in Penthouse magazine, well, I really sat up and listened. “Wow! Me?” It was music to my ears. “Yes,” he said, “I could do your test shots.” I was so happy I hugged him. “You could be on the cover,” he said.
To my teenage brain, I had been discovered.
I readied for my big shoot and met him at a street corner near my house but out of my parents’ sight. They both happened to be home that day but unaware of what I was up to. I was meeting a photographer who shot for Penthouse! I had arrived! He pulled up in his sedan and we drove to a motel room for the shoot. “I do this type of thing all the time,” he said. “The pros always shoot in motels.” I believed every word he said.
The motel room had a bed, its bedspread with a brown-and-turquoise geese motif; a matching painting on the wall; plastic plants in plastic pots; and a bathroom with a toilet, a sink, and a bathtub.
“Do you want to have a bath?” he asked.
“Yes?” I said hesitantly, and he grabbed a towel from the metal towel rack over the toilet and handed it to me.
“Wash it good,” he said, smiling. I was nervous but did not want to appear unsophisticated in any way.
I went to the bathroom and shut the door, drew a bath, took off my clothes, and got in the tub. I had been fasting for several days, so I was very satisfied with my stomach and staring at it when he thrust open the door.
“I forgot to give you something,” he said. “I’m so sorry! It’s so unprofessional of me!” He showed me a pill. A “blush” pill, he said. “All the top models take this on shoots. It’s for your skin—it gives you a healthy glow.”
“I can’t actually swallow pills,” I said, feeling a little sick, though I wasn’t sure why. I scrambled for something to say. “I’m just too young, I guess,” I told him, chuckling.
“Don’t worry, happens all the time. I usually just crush it in water.” And so that’s what he did.
He handed me a glass with the pill crudely crushed and floating on the water, like Styrofoam on the ocean. I choked it down while he sat on the edge of the tub rubbing my back. The pill kicked in quickly and I started to feel hot and flushed. I felt like I was drowning, even though the bathwater level was low. I fell into semi-unconsciousness, only to awaken on the bed, the photographer on top of me.
After he pulled his pants up, he said, “What an amazing shoot. You’re a pro. You’re gonna be in the magazine.”
But he had relieved me of my dreams of stardom. Even though I was disappointed in him and even more in myself, still foggy from the pill, I wanted to act professional—or how I thought would be professional. I thanked him as I collected my things—my costume earrings, my mother’s shoes—and stuffed them into my knapsack, then politely thanked him again. “I appreciate your time, sir,” I almost whispered.
He smiled. “C’mon kid. I’ll give you a ride home.”
And that’s what he did, just in time for supper.
TEN
Norman the Cabbie
I CAN’T HONESTLY SAY THERE WAS A CATALYST. THERE was no gunfire or earth-shattering exchange between my mother and me. She was trying to rein in a wildly defiant, highly sexualized, and self-harming seventeen-year-old daughter. I didn’t have a bad existence, really. I held a summer job at the video store on Academy Road, with all the Eddie Murphy videos and a big coffee can full of cigarette butts outside the back door. I had also developed the bad habit of driving my mom’s station wagon on the weekends while inebriated. My friend Connie and I frequented the clubs, dancing all night to the new hip-hop club tracks, like Rob Base, even though we were not legally old enough to be in these places.
My mother knew I was always getting myself into dangerous predicaments, and she tried everything to keep me out of trouble. But I was absolutely determined to counter every suggestion and railed against any parental guidance. She didn’t stand a chance. I was relentless in my self-destruction.
On a cloudy Monday in autumn, I decided to run away. It was morning and everyone in the house was getting ready for school. I packed a small duffel bag with some belongings and off to school I went, armed with fresh defiance. I skipped the first class so that I could badger Connie into joining me. She was delighted to, as a best friend would be. This reinforced my belief that solidarity was mandatory for absolute best friends. And so the wheels were in motion, or rather, our feet were.
I knew that my little sister, Heather, was in class (she was now at the same school as me)—and that my plan would only be worthwhile, only effectively attention-getting, if people knew what I was up to. So I wrote a note and passed it along to her. Connie and I did not stick around to watch Heather read it. Instead, we immediately headed downtown on a city bus. Connie had money on her, but I had only a few dollars, which were not going to last long. I had decided we should go to Toronto, where the “acting schools” were. Where actresses go. That was in part my motivation: to become an actress of enough acclaim to get on Saturday Night Live, like Eddie Murphy. I just needed to get started, and that meant we needed Greyhound bus tickets. Of course, I hadn’t discussed my acting ambition with my parents, as I was convinced they wouldn’t take me seriously.
As it happened, my first boyfriend, George from Dauphin, had moved to Winnipeg and into a band-house right beside the bus depot. George was in the band, and he was usually home sleeping during the day because the band partied at night. I called him from th
e pay phone around the corner and asked if we could come over: I had to say goodbye, as Connie and I were running away, I told him.
“Sure, come on over,” he said.
“George said yes,” I told Connie. “I’m going to ask him for the bus fare.”
I was quite pleased with this plan of mine. We marched up the walkway to the door of a house falling apart and surrounded by weeds. It looked like every other house in the rough north Winnipeg neighbourhood. We spent most of the day with George and his roommate, Gary. Being an enterprising young miss, I suggested that Connie and Gary get to know each other while I went with George to his bedroom. George and I had the kind of friendship where we were like childhood sweethearts or forever lovers, despite my having broken his heart three years before when I unceremoniously broke up with him and began dating a classmate of his a day or so later.
Later, as Connie and I gathered our backpacks and coats, preparing to depart, I asked George for money. He was not happy with my decision to jump on a Greyhound but gave me fifty bucks anyway. Little did George know that his actions that day would lead to so many songs being written just for him. Little did I know either.
The Greyhound depot in Winnipeg is a terribly dirty place, with soot from the exhaust everywhere. It covers the countertops and the inside of your mouth like pollen.
We discovered that fifty bucks only buys a ticket to Thunder Bay, Ontario, which was just ten hours’ driving distance of the about thirty-six hours it would take to get to Toronto. Undaunted, we purchased our tickets. It was already dark. I knew in my gut that my mother would be in a sad state by now. My stomach hurt.