Sept. 1: The joys of moving out of province

I have told this story before. Now, it seems, I am destined to tell it again.

 

The year was 1997. I was 24, living at home, going nowhere in life. I’d been kicked out of two different acting schools and I was starting to realize that I didn’t have the talent, skill, or drive to make it as a professional actor. I’d spent the past three years working a thankless bunch of nowhere jobs - shuttle bus driver, courier, hotel lackey. I had only one ambition, which was to write a novel.

 

I told my parents that I wanted to spend an entire year saving my money so I could move away from home, rent an apartment in a small town somewhere, and dedicate myself to the act of creation. My parents thought that was a fine idea. I think they wished that when I came back, I’d have a plan for my future. They didn’t tell me that though. They were kind enough not to hinder my creativity with pragmatism.

 

My friend, Natalie, lived in Redvers, a very very small town in southeast Saskatchewan. She had a friend there who would rent me a suite. I spent 1998 saving my money and - strangely enough - entertaining my first real girlfriend. Our entire relationship existed under the surety that in the fall, I would be moving away indefinitely. We rarely talked about it - I think we were both young enough to appreciate living in the moment - but there were times when we were unable to force ourselves to be ignorant. She never asked me to stay. She knew I had to write. She knew it was something I had to do. She let me go. She’s married now.

 

I left for Saskatchewan shortly after the Labour Day weekend of 1998. I threw a going away party at an Inglewood pub called the Hose and Hound. My brother came. So did my sister as well as her soon-to-be husband. My writer friends came. My best friend, who would die of bone cancer a little more than a decade later, also came. At one point during the party, he took me aside and told me he admired my courage. I had no idea what he was talking about. He said: “You’re uprooting yourself from your home so you can follow your dream. That takes courage. Your home will never be the same again.”

 

And he was right. Today, whenever I’m in Calgary, I feel like a stranger.

 

I felt like a stranger at my going away party. I knew I was abandoning the Saturday night writers night at Words Books, where I would read my fledgling stories for an adoring chain-smoking crowd. I knew that Words would never be the same.

 

I was right about that. I spent about seven months writing in Saskatchewan and then I returned to Calgary and went back to Words and it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t the star anymore. It had morphed into an open-mic night. I had grown to love being in the company of writers, hearing poetry and short stories and novel excerpts and essays and streams of consciousness on a cornucopia of subjects. Now there were stand-up comedians and beret-wearing goateed musicians singing John Lennon songs. My stories used to reap peals of laughter and standing ovations. Now they garnered only polite applause. The familiar faces at Words were gone. The people there were strangers. I had not won them over and I was young and arrogant enough to think I didn’t have to. That I was entitled to their awe because I was awesome.

 

One of the new people at Words was a girl named Athena, who had seen videos of my performances and was intrigued by me. I met her and liked her and asked her for a date and she said yes and then she called me a couple days later to cancel. She didn’t give me a reason. 

 

I didn’t call my former girlfriend. She had another man. I didn’t want to intrude. 

 

***

 

One afternoon when I was leaving the grocery store in Redvers, I ran into Jeff Turton, who was the stage manager for Goldberg Street, a series of short David Mamet plays I had acted in at Mount Royal College in 1992. Jeff recognized me and told me Redvers was his hometown. He said he’d moved back shortly after college because he realized big city life wasn’t for him. “I got married,” he said, and flaunted his wedding ring at me like a little kid showing off his Christmas presents. I told him I was in Redvers to write a book and Jeff asked what the book was about and I said it was about the end of the world.

 

Jeff’s response was this: “Oh.”

 

I said we should have dinner one night and get caught up and he said that would be a swell idea but, of course, we never did. Our curbside conversation had been for one purpose only, to see if someone remembered us.

 

The suite I rented did not have a kitchen. I had to use Natalie’s or the kitchen of the person who owned the house. The house was owned by a middle-aged single mother of two teenagers, a boy and a girl. One weekend, the mother went away and the teenagers threw a massive party. Lots of people got drunk and some of the boys took to taunting me from outside my closed door. I’d never met any of them yet somehow, they felt it necessary to assault me with pejoratives that questioned my sanity, sexuality, gender, and my status as a human being. It was not a fun night and I complained about it to the mother when she got back but, of course, there was nothing she could do.

 

***

 

In Redvers (circa 1998), it was understood that drinking and driving was a tolerated necessity. The old farmers at the tavern would get drunk on beer and then they would leave and their friends would call at them not to drive into the ditch. I didn’t like it and so I wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper and then the editor told me that she liked my writing and maybe I’d like to write for her.

And that’s how my career in journalism began.

 

Natalie took her kids to Regina in the fall of 1998 and I went with her because I didn’t want to live in Redvers without any friends. I lived in her basement and both of us worked for a while at the Regina Free Press and then that paper went under and shortly after that, I moved back to Calgary. The novel wasn’t finished but that didn’t matter to me. What was important was that it had been reborn. I couldn’t finish it yet. I wasn’t old enough. I was too innocent. I had more mistakes to make.

 

***

 

It was the spring of 1999 and I was 26. My sister was making a living as a teacher. My brother was in Vancouver, working in radio. I was back home with my parents and I was trying to convince myself that nothing had changed when, in fact, everything had changed. I called my best friend and he told me that he saw my former girlfriend at a pub with her new boyfriend. I asked him if she looked happy and he said that he didn’t know.

 

***

 

Before I moved to Saskatchewan, I took the insurance off my car and parked in the alley behind my parents’ house. Later, my dad and brother moved it into the garage, maneuvering it so it was snug against the far end of the garage, parked parallel to the wall. 

 

One of the first things I did upon my return was get my car re-insured. I was wearing a T-shirt and it was a cold day, much too cold to be wearing a T-shirt anyway, but I didn’t care. I knew I’d be working up a sweat in the garage and I was right. My car wouldn’t start. I got it boosted and when I drove it through the alley, it sounded like a death rattle. Later, a friendly mechanic at the local Petro-Canada looked at my car and said that, in his professional opinion, it was not safe to drive. There was an addendum: If I gave him a whole lot of money, he would do things to it that would make it safe to drive.

 

Such is life.

 

***

 

Listen: In Regina, I got a part-time job working in the bulk foods department at the Real Canadian Superstore. I was optimistic when they hired me, thinking I would work three times a week and the rest of the time would be devoted to writing. That’s not how things worked out.

 

I was told I would work 25 hours a week for five hours a day; I’d have Mondays and Thursdays off. I wasn’t happy. I suspected that the energy I spent on the job would take away from my writing. It was one of the few times in my life when I was right.

 

Confession: I was so lonely in Regina that I joined a telephone dating service. I didn’t sleep with anyone I met off there, although I had a few invitations. The least subtle invitation came from a forty-something woman who had a son just one year younger than me. She lived in one of Regina’s low-income housing projects along with her son, two daughters, brother, uncle, and their seven cats. I went on exactly one “date” with her. The date involved me buying Kentucky Fried Chicken for her entire family. Outside it had started blizzarding and the lady said she wasn’t going to drive me home so I should spend the night at her house. She took me into her bedroom and asked if I wanted to have sex and I said no and she asked if I was gay and I said no and she asked me why I didn’t want to have sex so I lied and told her that I had a venereal disease and she said “Oh.” 

 

So I slept on a dirty mattress next to her bed and the older lady fell asleep and then she started snoring and then she started farting and then one of her cats took a shit in the litter box that was in the corner of the bedroom. I stumbled out of bed at six the next morning and the lady’s son was sitting on the couch and he asked me if I’d had sex with his mom and I said no and he said: “Good.”

 

***

 

I’m still friends with one of the people I met off of that service. We spent New Year’s Eve of 1998/99 together. We went to a dance club and we did this cool dance where she turned around so her back was toward me and then she reached up and kind of stroked my neck with her hand. I really wanted the first song they played in 1999 to be Prince’s song 1999. Instead it was Auld Lang Syne. The second song was something by the Backstreet Boys. 1999 was the third song. 

 

The girl was from Hungary. She made a living cooking Hungarian food. She looked like Maria Fredriksen from Roxette.

 

***

 

I hated working at the Superstore but it was necessary to earn some money. I knew my car would need a lot of work when I got back and, like I said, I was right about that. But as it turned out, fixing the car was necessary.

 

Shortly after I moved back to Calgary, I started emailing all the weekly newspapers in Alberta and Saskatchewan. I told them I was a reporter looking for work. I sent them all copies of the stories I’d written for the Regina Free Press. There was a story about a professional arm wrestler and one about a ringette tournament and one about a horseshoe pitcher who was being inducted into the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame. Lorne Cooper, now deceased, gave me my first full-time job, which was as sports editor for the North Battleford News-Optimist. Ever since then, I have worked steadily in newspapers. I have a career.

 

***

 

The moral of this long and rambling note-a-day is that you should never be afraid of following your dreams. Even if the dreams don’t come true, sometimes they will still enable you to build a life.