It’s Saturday night in the “big-ish” City.
Our activities are varied, but they all have one thing in common – a complete lack of foresight and planning. On this particular Saturday night, we would all channel the happy bygone days of childhood. Yes, hot-damn, tonight we were going tobogganing.
At 3:20 PM in the afternoon, we had yet to craft a plan, except for our choice of poison. TJ had managed to pilfer a 66 oz bottle of Russian 100 Proof Vodka. It was no secret we didn’t really have Champaign tastes when it came to booze (the horrible experiment in home-brew beer can be offered up as proof to that point) but even we knew this oversized bottle was very special.
We were camped out in my parents basement, as they were away for a week or two visiting family. The basement wasn’t finished, but it provided everything we needed. There were big area rugs on the bare concrete floor, a bunch of odd couches rescued from various aunts and uncles, and naturally a stereo system with turntable and a whole whack of some of the best damn music ever recorded. My sister, brother and I had adorned the place with our own artwork, which really made the expanse seem like our very own studio. I have to admit, my parents were way-cool in letting us paint on the doors, walls and floors.
The handiest features though, were the cold-storage room which housed a beer fridge, and just off from the furnace room, a bathroom with a sink and shower. Add to these amenities a walk-out to the backyard (so we could come and go as you please) and you have the makings of the perfect hang-out.
My parents preferred having us nearby, so they generally put up with our crap, and the loud music.
On this Saturday night, it would be a small group, but this same group formed the nucleus of many previously boisterous nights. TJ, my brother and I were relaxing on the mismatched sofas, sipping marvelously smooth screwdrivers out of clear plastic cups.
My brother, Edge (a nickname having nothing to do with the band U2) had contributed 10 cans of frozen concentrated orange juice, and not the cheap-ass no-name crap either, but the premium Florida-grown stuff. Two pitchers of the concoction sat next to a big bowl of ice, just beside the 2 foot stack of LP’s on the floor. TJ initially objected to the pulp, but after the 6th cocktail, his complaints dried up.
It was mid-winter 1984, and we had our music pics for the night lined up. Edge was waiting patiently through side B of Bruce Springsteen’s just released Born in the USA, which TJ was allowed to play first, but only because he brought the booze. Normally a music selection of that caliber would be relegated to the end of the evening, or when Edge fell asleep, but we were all feeling particularly gracious. Edge had a pristine copy of Johnny Cash’s 1968 Folsom Prison sitting next to the speaker, and he looked positively antsy to drop the needle. I hadn’t decided if I would request REM’s latest, Reckoning, or Van Helen’s 1984. I was figuring however, that after having to endure almost 47 minutes of The Boss, Edge would never put up with what he had categorized as “Van Halen’s shittiest album, in a catalog that didn’t even have any shitty albums”. Edge really didn’t take to the synthesizers at all.
In the end though I didn’t care much what was played, because even though I supplied the brand new B&O turntable, I honestly preferred to have other people pick the tunes.
There was a special feeling descending upon us all, as the Russian poison worked its magic. The warmth went all the way to our toes, and as was customary of this merry band, our casual conversation always took to spirited debate…
“Nothing beats the Crazy Carpet for overall best ride” TJ announced out of the blue.
“No fucking control” I said, dismissing the evening’s topic outright.
“Why would you deliberately choose to spend 50% of your ride facing the wrong direction?? It’s not like you have any choice as to your orientation on that cheap crappy piece of plastic.” Edge snorted.
“Have you seen the way TJ drives? The Crazy Carpet would seem like a monorail, compared to how he usually fares on the highway” I snickered.
The only real tobogganing experience is with the standard, old fashioned 6 foot wooden kind, with the curved up front end” Edge replied with an air of confidence.
“But the Crazy Carpet has two textures, one side smoother for speed, and the other rougher for grip, its so simple…so pure.” TJ said, lowering his eyes, aware his argument was losing steam.
Then suddenly Edge jumped bolt upright, and ran across the basement into the cold-storage room. After some crashes and what sounded like breaking glass, he emerged, triumphant, holding one of the old toboggans from our childhood high over his head.
“Let’s go sleddin’! He yelled with a level of enthusiam that was very un-Edge like.
I actually had no idea we still had those tobboggans. My parent’s basement was like that. You could poke around and always find something new. It seemed like my dad was sneaking into the house in the middle of the night, and adding crap to the place, while we slept. Weird.
And there it was, in all its dusty cobwebbed splendor..an original, probably circa 1969 Bent Wooden, complete with the cushion-pad still attached. The only thing missing was the crappy vinyl rope which made it easier to drag back up the hill. You could still make out the brand-name “Torpedo” in faded red lettering across the top of the bent section.
“Uh, reality check morons, its -40 outside.” I said with a dismissive tone.
It was getting cozy in the basement, and the Boss was singing a spirited tune called Glory Days, about what life used to be, giving examples of people watching their existences slipping away, dreams passing them by. Leave it to Bruce to find a way to twist the most moroseful of concepts into a cute pop ditty. I remember thinking I’d have to give this album another listen, soon.
The vodka was about half an hour away from making it impossible for the group to have any lofty ambitions for the night. I was fighting Edge’s sudden challenge to my plan of staying in the basement. After all, what was wrong with heading out later to have a few drinks at a local bar with a fireplace? Hadn’t they heard the statistics around tobogganing deaths?
Just last week some kid took his toboggan up on the roof of his parents bungalow, and after piling the snow from the yard up near the eaves (we have some insane snowfall in the Ottawa Valley), proceeded to sled off the roof, down onto his driveway. Problem was, he got so much momentum when he added his homemade hill to the roof’s pitch, he hit the driveway and just kept going…right into the path of the huge city snowblower making the rounds of the cul de sac. So little Johnny, while getting points for ingenuity, was unceremoniously spread right back upon his own parent’s driveway. I’ll bet it was a fucking Crazy Carpet too. No control, too much speed.
“C’mon, it’ll be awesome! TJ, get the wineskins, we’ll fill em up and hit the slope just this side of Blackburn Street.”
Oh no, I thought. This was moving from rudimentary planning to the operationalizing stage, way too fast for my liking.
I looked over at TJ, hoping he would take my side, but sadly he had the familiar vacant sort of faraway look with a twinkle in his eye, that usually meant he was up for anything. C’mon, didn’t they know that children between the ages of five and nine, account for 40 per cent of all sledding related injuries in Canada!?...over 20 per cent of these injuries involve concussions, internal injuries or broken bones…most injuries are caused by colliding with an object (e.g., trees/rocks/signs) or from being thrown from the sled!!?? OK, so those stats are for kids, not adults, but if you factor in the alcohol, I was pretty sure we were fast heading for the same risk group.
”Minus 40 man! Minus fucking 40 without the wind and there’s gonna be wind as we hurtle down the friggin hill ya stupid bastards!!”
“C’mon ya old woman…,” Edge said, “….get off yer fat fucking goo-filled ass and lets go.”
“Listen, I like ya guys….” I weakly protested, “…but the three of us aint gonna be able to squeeze onto that thing.”
“No prob, there’s another one back in the cold storage!” Edge exclaimed with glee.
It was no use, we were going tobogganing. I might as well embrace it.
“One more drink, and we’ll dig up the snow-gear.” I said, feigning some enthusiasm.
OK, so now its time for the disclaimer.
You have to understand, when you’re in high school, and it’s the mid eighties, drinking and driving was sort of like cheating on your girlfriend. Ones propensity to commit the offence was directly related to the likelihood of being caught. In 1984, in sort-of-small-town Ottawa, the cops weren’t all that interested in policing this sort of thing. They had their hands full with the fights, and the steady stream of drunkenness coming back into downtown from the bars in Hull, Quebec.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to glamorize stupidity, or justify suicidal or anti-social behavior, but it has to be stated for the record that the consequences of our actions really never crossed our minds.
As a case in point, while it may seem inconceivable now, at one point in time someone had to commission medical studies to prove that smoking was bad for you. These studies were intended to show the world that smoking – might just be – bad for our health. Sure, it sounds nutty now, but holy fuck man, doctors themselves appeared as pitch-men for the very consumer product that would kill thousands of people a year. Sure, drinking and driving kills, but when you’re a kid? Well, we’ll take those odds.
My folks were smart enough to lock up the car-keys, but TJ had a big van and we loaded the gear which consisted of; vodka, (which was just below the label by now) 3 wineskins, 5 Labatt’s Blue and one mixed tape.
Now it really wasn’t TJ’s van, it was him employer’s van. His boss was (un)affectionately referred to as ‘Griz’ which was short for Grizzly Bear. That nickname was in reality far too generous, for when TJ’s boss got mad, he made a Grizzly Bear look like a fucking Kuala.
TJ had a strange relationship w Griz, one that Edge and I really didn’t understand. It seemed that no matter what TJ did, he was never in jeopardy of losing his job. Last weekend was a perfect example of this weird benevolence.
After dropping us off, and on his way home from our favorite watering hole, TJ ploughed the van into the snow-filled ditch. Truth be told, he simply fell asleep, which was pretty common for TJ. In fact, it was practically a hobby. We all hated having him drive by himself because he had some narcoleptic tendencies that really needed to be offset by boisterous passengers.
In the early morning last week, he was only minutes away from his parent’s place, when he dumped that huge van into the ditch, taking out the highways exit-ramp sign in the process. A few feet to the left, and he would have cleared the sign, but I suppose he would have wrecked it anyway, eventually, cuz he was definitely snoozing.
We all drove by the next day, after the tow-truck pulled it free, to see where he ditched it. I remember sitting in my truck, on the side of the road, staring at what was left of the sign, laughing so hard there were tears streaming down my cheeks.
The left hand support-post was completely gone, but the balance of the signage was still affixed to the right-hand post. If one was able to actually find the passenger side rearview mirror assembly, and hold it up to the remains of the sign, they would find it fitting perfectly. It looked as if someone took a jigsaw and carefully cut out the profile shape of the passenger side and rear-view mirror assembly.
So, that fateful night TJ ran home, leaving the crippled van in the ditch. Had it not been for a tragic twist of fate, he might just have gotten away without his boss finding out, as he indeed had solid plans to cover his tracks. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the way it panned out.
Griz got a call the next morning, from one of his neighbours who had spotted the van on his way back home from her night shift. Normally, given how deep the van was buried in the snow, it’d be hard to spot, but (un)luckily for TJ, the van was emblazoned with the company name and logo in 2 foot high blue-on-white lettering. Griz’s busy-body neighbour was calling it in as she was worried one of Griz’s employees might be hurt in the crash.
Griz knew there was nothing wrong with any of his employees. TJ worked as an audio-visual technician in a posh downtown hotel. Griz knew all too well the nightmare TJ lived at work – if the meeting rooms weren’t setup on time, clients would be furious, and Griz’s pager would go off, and there’d be hell to pay.
Griz snapped a quick sideways glance at the clock on the bedside table.. 7:38 AM – No, TJ was just fine, because those hotel rooms didn’t get setup by themselves.
Ironically, while Griz spoke with his neighbour, the van was being towed out of the ditch and would momentarily be en route to a downtown body shop to assess the damage. By the time Griz arrived at the exit where the van was spotted, it was already gone. All that remained as evidence of any wrongdoing was the wrecked highway signage, and a huge long scar in the pristine snow where the van went in, and then out of the ditch.
By 10:45 AM, a new bumper, and rearview mirror assembly was installed, and by 11:15 AM, TJ’s buddy at the auto-shop was driving the van down into the belly of the Westin Hotel’s loading dock, where TJ sat waiting to pay the man. Cash, $856.23…no questions asked. We secretly figured the body-shop guys kept 1982 GMC Van bumpers and mirrors in stock, at all times, just for TJ.
You’d think with this kind of track record, we’d be wary as we loaded the toboggans into the van. Nope. All aboard the Stupid Train – next Stop… “Wind Chill Central”.
The toboggan slope wasn’t too far from home, which was mandatory, cuz if you were driving around on the juice, it was wise to keep to familiar neighborhoods and short hops.
Because the van was a panel version, built for hauling equipment in, there were only two seats up front. There were a couple plastic record cartons stolen from a Macs Milk just behind the driver’s seat though. One was filled with gaffer-tape, the other with an assortment of horribly jumbled audio cables. These were usually flipped over as makeshift seats. TJ loved taking the corners hard, or just plain erratically, sending the hapless 3rd passenger flying around the cargo bay like a rag doll. Once you took your first header into the van’s interior wall, and you started to laugh hysterically, it was impossible to right-yourself on the milk carton again. For some insane reason, Edge usually opted for the unstable seat, and tonight was no exception.
TJ was fond of the ‘fake the nice-n-easy left, then hard-right’ maneuver, which would almost always unseat the resident Milk-Carton Rodeo King. As ZZ-Top yelled about the virtues of cheap sunglasses on the crappy stereo, Edge bounced around the back of the van. Unfortunately the fourth or fifth sprawl into the van’s wall caught Edge’s forehead on one of the trucks internal ribs. TJ and his boss had installed plywood to the interior ribs, because Griz was tired of repairing the dents caused by the equipment cases rolling into the exposed interior sections. They ran out of wood, and while that didn’t pose much of a problem under normal circumstances, Edge quickly found out why having the entire interior outfitted with the plywood would have been a nice value-add for the trip.
Blood was trickling out of a nice gash just above Edge’s left eyebrow, but he seemed unfazed. Besides, we were at the slopes, and he had the sliding door open before TJ had even pulled into a parking spot.
We earlier loaded the evening gear inside my parent garage, and my folks were the kind of people to custom-build a home with a heated garage. This really made the actual temperature outside a real shock for us all. The wind ripped into the van, slicing at our faces with enough ferocity to make us gasp. Holyfuckinshititscold, TJ and I exclaimed in unison. Edge, again, was unphased.
I could hear my dad in my head – “son, the human body loses 90% of its heat through the head, you need the hat son, its mandatory.” My dad was always good for a spontaneous science-fact. I thought of that statistic as I watched Edge literally take flight (if only momentarily) just before heading down the slope. Naturally, No damn hat.
He grabbed the 1969 Bent Wooden Torpedo, with the cushion-pad still attached, and threw his body up and over onto it, and he seemed for a second or two to be hanging in the air. For a fellow who had drank his weight in 100 Proof vodka, there was a real grace to the whole thing. He didn’t even fall off when gravity slammed him into contact with the slope. A small weird snow squall seemed to be shifting its way all over the slope, and the wind sand-blasted our faces. I couldn’t see Edge anymore.
“Beer?” TJ asked.
“Sure.” I said.
Clearly I could slow down a tad on the sauce, as was evident by my complete lack of stability on a toboggan slope who’s crest was all but covered in ice. My Kodiaks with the ‘zero-grip sole’ weren't helping much either, and I was soon wishing I had put on warmer socks.
TJ and I each held our beers up to the light from the lamp-standard, to see if they were frozen… as they were left in TJ’s van when we were in my parent’s basement. As soon as we cracked the twist-offs, the liquid solidified, spraying foam onto our gloves. As we both bent over to catch what we could in our mouths, I wondered how many times in my life this would happen before we stopped holding beers up to the light in the middle of the winter.
Shockingly, from the snow-squall, emerged three young children, about 10 or 11 years old. They were dressed in appropriate nanook-of-the-north outerwear, with only their eyes visible as they approached us.
“Michael! Evan, c’mon. lets go!” I heard from behind us in the parking lot.
TJ was so startled to see anyone else on our hill, that he suddenly launches into an ‘oops slip-recover, oops slip-recover’ dance, finally landing on his back. The beer bottle is dropped, and it shoots down the slope like a missile.
“You Bastards!” we hear from the parking lot…
“Don’t you know kids play here! Why would you bring beer bottles here, they’ll break, you idiots!”
For a second, we feel sheepish, but the do-gooders are quickly off, and we are all alone once again with the biting wind, and a sinking feeling that we really shouldn’t have ventured out at all. TJ and I stand together for what seems like a long while, peering down the slope.
We spot Edge ascending the hill slowly, and he seemed to be wearing the toboggan as a hat, with the curved front placed over his head. One arm stretched backward, holding the length of the sled behind him, and the other holding TJ’s runaway beer. It seemed unlikely he would get to the top without performing the same dance-number TJ just executed, but somehow, miraculously, he is suddenly standing next to us.
Now Edge is a hardy fellow, but one look at his face convinced us he was done with sledding for tonight. The blood from his earlier van-wound was now frozen to this face, and he was sporting the same pained facial expression Jack Nicholson had at the end of The Shining.
“Time to go home kids.”
We piled back into the van, which was now radiating cold inward upon its hapless occupants. No Milk-Carton Rodeo for the trip back home. TJ was so cold, it looked like an effort just to turn the big steering wheel and aim us back out towards the main road. When you’re this cold, you can’t even speak. ZZ Top was playing decidedly slower, as the tape mechanism tried in vain spin at the proper speed.
The headlights of an oncoming car put Edge’s head in relief, as I had taken his spot on the milk carton behind the passenger seat. His ears caught my attention, as they had an odd hue. I reached out, and began to say…. “Edge, man yer ears are friggin white, do you….” And my words froze in my throat when my finger made contact with his skin. I felt his ear crack when I touched it, and suddenly without any warning I was flooded with a horrible sense of failed responsibility.
Now I have never really been my brother’s keeper. He’s always been his own guy, and was mature way past his years. But I was 19, and he was 14, and I could hear the whimper in my brain growing to a crescendo-scream of OH MY GOD, FOR FUCKS SAKE I FROZE MY BROTHER’S EARS OFF!
It’s hard to describe this kind of panic, for in a split second you get the visual of your kin's disfigurement, your mother’s reaction of horror, and cheap sunglasses that will never, ever stay on his damn head, without gaffer tape.
Edge clearly wasn’t grasping the gravity of the situation, as he gingerly touched one ear, then the next, with an odd grin on his face.
We got back to the homestead and naturally continued to drink (I, more than was needed) and I cannot recall much past side two of the Johnny Cash album.
The next morning Edge was acting brave, but he was clearly in a ton of pain. He likened it to having his ears actually on fire. Somehow, miraculously, his ears didn’t fall off, and while he seemed to have suffered some frostbite, at least he could wear shades.
Sometimes, not too often, I will dream of that night. I awake in a sweat, with the same feeling in the back of my throat, that I felt that ungodly cold night in the mid eighties. My brother and I have never spoken of that night again.
To this day though, Edge doesn’t ever venture anywhere past September without a hat. His ears are now sadly hyper-sensitive to cold, and while it took our ill fated toboggan adventure to drive the lesson home, Edge doesn’t lose any of his body heat from his head, anymore.
