My Dad's Secret Partying life in the 70s ...
Just telling it as was related to me by an old man I met randomly in a bar in the wilds of north Vancouver Island in 2003.
If you have been reading my stories you will be aware that my 70s childhood was a pretty normal lower class redneck Canadian one.
My Dad was young ( 27 ) and he was off working up on forested islands north of Vancouver, cutting down thousand year old, old-growth forests to be pulped into toilet paper and newspapers.
These were the ways of the big Canadian Logging camps. It was a boom time.
I have photos of my young and ripped father standing next to red wood tree trunks nearly 30 feet across. There was backlash against loggers back then to the degree that he would tell people he was a helicopter pilot.
The pay was massive and they would fly into the logging camps by sea plane and work for three weeks or so and then fly out to see their families for a week.
I heard him tell many intense and nostalgic stories to friends as they boozed and blazed about the kitchen table in New Zealand, when I was a young teen. Often he didn’t know I was listening in the lounge, ( calmly baked on second hand weed smoke ).
Apparently if you chose NOT to take the time off the company would fly in a hooker and coke weekend for you… a good way to incentivize productivity I guess… but I don’t think it would work these days…
He would tell stories of a guy called Animal, who never spoke and just ate with his hands…
Another time they found a guy who had wandered off to sleep in the bush on a break between falling trees and a bear came along and literally ripped his head off.
They found the badly chewed head about 20 yards from the body.
Tales of alcoholics that felled trees while chugging on bottles of whiskey and then eventually found dead in the snow. The wife leaving them and taking the kids was often a prior incident to this.
I asked once why no one said anything or got these guys help. People just being allowed to drink themselves to death in the bush without intervention, gobbled up by bears or eating with their hands and never speaking, boggled my mind.
He and his pals just laughed at me. A man’s business is his own.
It’s almost impossible for the modern mind to grasp the grit of the 70s logger.
There are still receding pockets of this grit and mindset in places Im sure… but I think one day it will be gone, until we open up space and it will be born again in the lives of rough asteroid miners or something…
Anyway…
That’s the scene set… Here’s the story…
I was 25 and I was in Canada as detailed in the story series stretching from “The Life and Times of the Cowboy Coppersmith” and the Twelve stories after it in chronological sequence.
I had been living large on my massive gangsta roll, earned by working doing roofing, in the Toronto snow. Many months had gone by and I had frittered almost all of it away.
I got a bizarre job through a friend. It was to travel with an electrician around Vancouver Island, living in hotels, eating out of restaurants and just run back and forth to the Van, getting him the tools he needed as we installed Keno Machines in almost every bar on the island.
They look like this.
It’s a bingo type game where you buy tickets and stare at a screen praying you win enough to buy a jug of beer.
So I was working in this bar, way up northern Vancouver Island and I was chatting away to the boss…as I was handing him tools so he could wire up this keno machine.
There was a big old grizzled logger looking guy at the bar drinking whiskeys…
He said “Are you from New Zealand?”
Yes I am sir.
“I once knew a guy from New Zealand… you sound just like him.”
What was his name…? New Zealand is a small place I probably know him…
GIVES NAME OF MY DAD.
OK … here we go…
“Oh wow… I want to hear all about that!”
And so here is the story within a story…
This is what this old grizzled logger told me…
Location Vancouver. 1979, Canada is booming.
This guy and my dad used to log together, working the logging camps and then on their time off fly to Vancouver to party for a straight week.
I always wondered why my dad was gone for MONTHS at a time.
A: Where I hear the tale from the grizzled old Logger in 2003
B: Where the logging camps were 1979
C: Where Me, my mum and sister were 1979
D. Where the party’s at. 1979
My three year old self and my 1 year old sister and my mother were on Gabriola island thinking that he was working for months on end, often telling us he was snowed in… or the seaplane broke down…
I realized then, he wasn’t coming to see us when he got off every three weeks.
He was partying in Vancouver.
I don’t blame him. Fly out to see his 33 year old wife and two kids for a boring week at home… or booze coke and girls in party town Vancouver 79.
This old guy told me of one incident of intense late 70s partying…
He said that my Dad was a bit younger than them and partied harder than them all.
It was a heavy snowy winter….
The crew had brought a CASE of whiskey, and big bag of good coke for the week, and they would get a head start on this during the day before hitting the bars.
My 27 year old dad was hitting is so hard than on the way to the bars he went down on the icy sidewalk, went into convulsions and spewed.
They picked him up and he came right!
So they headed to the bar.
At the bar they were playing pool and my dad was talking but no one could understand him.
What had happened is that, his upper teeth were false, as he had knocked them out in a motorbike accident in his teens. And when he had fallen down and spewed he had lost his dentures in the street.
Two of the guys ( “cityfolk” the guy said ) in the bar were mocking him, one, because he wasn’t making any sense when he talked and two, because he actually only had two fingers on his right hand.
Now my old man was an absolute beast of a fighter. Even in his later years. He would brook no insults from anyone ever.
He was also polite and would never give any insults. He would just act.
Growing up in rural New Zealand with only two fingers on one hand was a serious “Boy Named Sue Situation” ( look that up if you don’t know what that means).
The old man grew wistful as he told me of this fight… looking down the years to that happy time…
It was like something out of a movie, he got real quiet and went around closer to these guys and pretended to be looking for a shot to take at the table… but I know he was just lining them up.
He flipped the pool cue round and spun, smashing it directly into the face of one the guys and then as that guy dropped, he kicked the other guy square in the nuts. Following up with a massive battering of punches with his big strong hand, using his little two fingered hand to hold the guy in place by his jacket.
As soon as that guy was out, he spun on the other guy and similarly beat him to the ground. We grabbed him and pulled him out of there after he had stomped on each of that guys hands breaking his fingers.
-
I can imagine them fleeing laughing from the bar. Just rolling down the road to another to keep the party going.
They picked up some girls who I’m sure were of similar awesome quality to this crew and headed back to the hotel.
On the way back my dad found his false teeth frozen in a spew pile in the snow on the sidewalk where he had collapsed from partying too hard earlier that evening.
He picked up the frozen spew disk and took it back to the hotel.
The Party continued in the Hotel room and my dad got a pot of water on the stove and put the frozen spew disk in the pot to melt. Then he comaed out on the sofa.
The party continued until the most foul reek emanated from the kitchen.
The spew water mixture had boiled over and gone into the elements, roasting up and sending plumes of rancid burning barf gas through the hotel room.
The smell was so horrendous it drove the girls off and killed the party.
One of the guys turned the stove top off and they called it a night.
And that was the tale.
I thanked him… and we rolled out… job done… Keno machine up on the wall…
I was reeling from this new information about my dad.
I thought over my life and despite what I thought were our tremendous differences I realized I was indeed my father’s son.
I had also fallen down and spewed in the streets from partying too hard.
I had bashed people’s heads in, with nunchucks ( See story - Saving Lives and then Burying bodies) and kicked assailants in the nuts.
I had recently worked for weeks on end in the snows of Northern Ontario, followed by a week of staying in a cheap hostel, working through a bottle of Finlandia Vodka a day and hard raving in Toronto’s Gothic nightclubs.
Me and Random Argentinian Metal Head at the hostel.
No one besides me went to the Goth Clubs in corpse paint.
Also White silky pirate shirt and Thor’s hammer necklace, band pants and copper wallet chain.
Plus digital watch, for easy time checks.
Canadians are nice though and let me be a freak to my hearts content. Some even spoke to me.
Pulled from Reddit : Savage Garden once sat tucked away behind a little stairwell on 550 Queen St W, Toronto, it's long since closed down. I spent too much of my time in back in the late 90s early 2000s. I figured that someone out there may get some nostalgia of one of Toronto's greatest goth clubs in a now long vanished subculture in a ever gentrified Toronto strip. The décor of the club was very much cyber goth themed with a very HR Giger vibe. Skulls with wires and computer parts adorned the walls, demonic robots observed from perches all over the club as music blasted.
Goth Gals In Savage Garden.
Getting down in the Savage Garden.
I did this cycle for about 5 months. Spending about 1500$ everytime I had a week off from four weeks on. Instead of spending it on whiskey, coke and fun time gals, I spent it on expensive restaurants, CDs, movies, and entry to clubs.
I was engaged… to a my future wife who was in the USA… and I didn’t have two kids and a wife living on an island that I was avoiding… so I guess the similarity only goes so far…
Even more nuts, was that I did this alone.
But to some degree I might have been channeling my Dad.
The snowy cold and the booze activating cellular memories…
OK Im losing track here…
What I wanted to say was that of all the things in my life, it was that conversation with that grizzled old logger in that bar, that enabled me to understand and love my dad more than anything up to that point.
I had left home at 16 and we were more or less estranged, mostly due to the fact that I was off doing my own thing as you have read....
But right there in that stinking dive bar. Right at the part of the world, which was my young dads stomping grounds… he reached through the ether and gave me a firm handshake.
Partying wastrel to partying wastrel.
Me and my dad, substantially calmed down at my sisters wedding decades later ( Still got hammered but remained upright.)
RIP Dad. Thank You for teaching me how to be a tough bastard.
The best lessons are the hard ones.
The content I'm here for.
Here’s to wild men and strong women.