How I Spent My Summer Vacation, 1989

Ain't got no picture postcards, ain't got no souvenirs,

My baby, she don't know me when I'm thinking 'bout those years.

-- Tragically Hip, New Orleans is Sinking

After second year chemical engineering at UBC, I couldn't find an industry-related job.  Times were tough for engineers in 1990; doubly tough when recent grads a little older than us were boasting of when companies used to vie for their affections with promises of new cars and ten thousand dollar signing bonuses.  Also, I was and continue to be absolutely abysmal in job interviews.  Seriously, it's like I'm hovering over top of myself, slapping my forehead and thinking "Did you really just say that, you moron?"

What's more I was not completely convinced I'd passed. In first semester I'd gotten 23% and 25% in my calculus courses, although it was aces all the way in Drinking 101. I'd completed the test for the esteemed 40-Beer patch in an astounding 6 hours and 23 minutes.   Joining a frat didn’t help academic matters any.  You needed a 55 average to stay in the game.

So, jobless, I headed back to Winnipeg, where I'd lived and bartended until the year before.  My buddy Jamie had a pad on Manitoba and Salter in the North End (or as the media refer to it, "Winnipeg's troubled North End").  Jamie was a big feller and he bounced at a couple of the more questionable joints in town.  The house where he lived was pretty much a tear-down and you never really knew all the faces who were crashing there.

It was 1989. Nirvana was trying to make it in the Seattle bar scene, and the internet was still just text-driven bulletin boards populated by nerds. The 90s were out there,  just waiting to happen.

I went down to the Unemployment Office and perused the little indexed cards looking for something I was remotely qualified to do.  There was nothing for engineering, but there was a job requiring a guitar player and another looking for a bartender.  Bingo!

My prospective employer, David M, ran a pawn shop on Main Street in Winnipeg, a street comprised primarily of lo-rent hotels, bars, pawn shops and discount stores.  Like any pawnshop, guitars are a good chunk of the business (what does this tell you about guitar players?), along with jewelry, small appliances and stereo equipment.  David needed someone to keep the axes tuned and demonstrate them to prospective buyers.  It was close to where I lived, and I could handle keeping a bunch of guitars tuned.  And the job interview was a lot less stressful than Proctor and Gamble's.  I took the job.

This ain't it, but it looked a lot like this.

David and Karen were your stereotypical old Jewish couple who would argue back and forth in Yiddish all day, regardless of who was in the store.  I liked them a lot.  And they liked me.  I was honest and showed up to work sober (if occasionally hung over).  The clientele was primarily natives, who, along with Eastern European immigrants, comprised the dominant ethnicity of the North End.

One time, some guy pulled up in a Caddy looking for a radio for his garage  "Just something cheap" he kept saying.  Whatever David put in front of him he'd balk at the price, and said if he wanted to pay that he'd go to "regular" store.  Well David didn’t like that and he took the radio and smashed it on the counter and said "There!  That's what I'd do rather than sell it to you.  Now get out of my store." 

Nights and weekends, I worked the Manor Hotel just down the street.  This may have the dubious distinction of being the biggest dive in the North End.  It was mostly haunted by old-man Ukrainians and Poles who lived upstairs drawing welfare.  The beer was literally so bad that I couldn't even give it away to my friends, who were not exactly folks with the most discriminating of tastes when it came to alcohol.  Not a word of a lie, I had to manually remove cockroach legs from the beer before serving sometimes.  I've no idea how they got into the beer lines.

Every morning at 11:00, four rubbies were lined up at the front door waiting for opening.  They'd file in to the same dark table at the back and order a glass of beer between them.  Their clothes were stuck to their bodies, they'd been wearing them so long, and their breath was the sickly-sweet of decay.  Every one would savour one "virgin" sip from the glass before pulling out the bottle of rubbing alcohol and topping 'er up.  When the liquid in the glass was clear--pure propyl alcohol--it was my cue to kick them out.  They'd spend the rest of the day under the railway bridge.

"Killer" had some kind of degenerative muscular or nerve condition.  He was a young fellow, a couple of years older than me, though shriveled and bent by his condition. He'd piss himself and not even know it, so he didn't always smell the best.  Plus he was a homeless alcoholic.  He'd come in a shoot pool a while when his check came in, and boast about how he could kick anyone's ass on the table.  Friendly guy.  I came out at closing time one time and he was lying the street.  I guess a bunch of thugs had come by and kicked the shit out of him and caved in his face pretty good.  I called the ambulance and saw him off, but never knew what became of him after that.  That's the North End for you right there, though.  I grew up there so I never realized at the time how crazy it was compared to just about anywhere else. 

My evenings were spent with drinking with various bouncers, bikers, gangsters and ne'er-do-wells.  There as Adolph--half German and half Apache. He didn't like to drink because it got in the way of his fighting.  And Steve was tougher than a sack full of frozen hammers, but had a heart of gold.  He got into the heroin though.  And my buddy Jamie was the biggest of them all, though that meant taking on all comers.  He even got a busted beer bottle in the throat that summer, but pulled out of it OK.  I have this surreal memory of us all doing acid one night and heading down to what passed for a carnival in the North End--a few rides and hucksters set up in the Loblaws parking lot--and then partying with the carnies until the wee hours.

It wasn't exactly a sustainable lifestyle, or even a safe one. I was 24 and the choice was stark:  was I going to be an engineer, or run with the bad boys? It all depended on that letter from UBC--pass or fail--and until I got it I lived in a mélange of two worlds and nothing seemed real. I think maybe that's why I went so crazy that summer, why I marched jaw-first into the harshest situations I could uncover--to make it real, to banish the fog of my future by experiencing the now in all its exquisite insanity. Maybe, here in Kabul, I'm still doing that.

I got the letter from UBC late in the summer and was incredibly relieved to find I'd managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat and manage a 57% average, and was soon cloistered once again in the hallowed halls of UBC.  I never went back to Winnipeg after that.  But images from that summer are still seared into my cortex 20-plus years later.