Number Two (3 page)

T
he email chain was pretty innocuous. The subject line read: “President at Cameron Indoor Stadium.” The first email was from Dustyn Waite, one of our researchers on
Fox Sports Live
,
and it was inspired by President Obama's upcoming visit to Duke University to watch their men's basketball team play.

“The only previous U.S. president to appear at Cameron Indoor Stadium was Ronald Reagan in 1988.”

To which Ian Martin, one of our production assistants, replied: “Next sentence: ‘Reagan, the nation's 40th president, spoke during an anti-drug seminar.'”

This was followed by a reply from Andy Meyer, another of our researchers a little older than the rest of the staff. Okay, a lot older.
Like my age. We had all dubbed him “Handsome Andy” for his matinee idol good looks and jovial nature. Andy wrote: “Just say no, Ian. Just say no . . .”

And the email chain stopped abruptly there.

He got nothing.

No further replies, no LOLs. I hadn't been responding to the chain so I assumed the conversation had simply just died out, but later that evening when I ran into Handsome Andy in the hallway near my offacle (not quite an office, not quite a cubicle—the walls didn't go up to the ceiling, but there were walls and it was better than fighting for a computer with the interns like I did back at TSN), I mentioned to Andy how much I enjoyed his “Just say no” comment.

“You're the only one! No one else even gave it a mention.”

“Really? No one else understood it?” I said, perplexed.

“No one said a thing. No one replied. I feel really old! I made a really old reference and no one got it. You and I were the only ones.”

I understood exactly what he meant. Thirty years ago making a “Just Say No” reference would have been met with a laugh, or acknowledgement at the very least. Now, it was just as much a promotional campaign memory as “Where's the Beef” or “Calgon Take Me Away” (even I was too young for that last one).

If the 1970s were cocaine's big coming out party, then the 1980s were the depressing morning-after crash and comedown. So many musicians, actors, Hollywood executives, and general douchebags who'd experimented with the drug after the '60s were over and thought that it could do no more harm than smoking a joint suddenly found themselves addicted and strung out and in need of serious help.

One of the most infamous stories comes from the ultimate cocaine-obsessive band of the late '70s, the Stevie Nicks/Lindsey
Buckingham lineup of Fleetwood Mac, who were apparently given rations of the devil's dandruff before they went on stage: one Heineken bottlecapful each. That led to the best story about Nicks in which her cocaine addiction became so bad she burned a hole in her nasal passageway (true), leading to her demanding that her assistant administer the drug suppository-style into her behind with a straw (denied by her, of course).

If you were like me, a child born in the 1970s who really came of age in the 1980s, you were subjected to an incredibly effective advertising campaign meant to make you think that drugs were
no longer cool
.

In his book and subsequent documentary
The Kid Stays in the Picture
,
former Paramount Pictures chief Robert Evans discusses his descent into cocaine addiction and subsequent arrest that led to, as part of his sentence, an all-star version of an anti-drug video featuring some of the biggest movie and television stars of the day singing a “We Are the World”–style anti-drug song. The video also featured a confused looking Bob Hope. I can only imagine how strange it must have been to be a part of that shoot, explaining to an aged Hope why the anti-drug message was so important. Such videos were pretty much commonplace at the time. Big-name Hollywood players like Evans, who had their wrists slapped, suddenly became contrite anti-drug crusaders. Then there were the child stars of the day like Soleil Moon Frye (Punky Brewster) and Ricky Schroder (Rick Stratton from
Silver Spoons
). They were part of the generation that was recruited for the “Just Say No” campaign, which was championed by then first lady Nancy Reagan.

Seeing these child stars, all my age, so vehemently anti-drug really worked. It had a profound effect on me and my peers. In our minds cocaine was truly evil, and trying it once was a one-way ticket to the gutter. But it didn't stop there. Even pot, in my tender
elementary school mind, was an addictive and evil substance that would surely lead me to ruin. Once again it was the prevalence of anti-marijuana commercials that drew me to this conclusion. Teenagers shown throwing away lives full of massive potential because they couldn't resist taking another toke. All those campaigns were terrifying and, it should be said, extremely effective.

By the time I reached fifth grade, I had never so much as seen a recreational drug of any kind in my life and I didn't want to. That's how deeply the “Just Say No” campaign had affected me. The aftermath of unbridled excess from the late 1970s had turned everyone into preaching teetotalers in the 1980s—at least the ones who were on NBC's prime-time lineup. It was simply
not cool
to do drugs in our little ten-year-old minds, and it was up to us to keep our school, the only elementary school in town, drug free and safe from the influence of leather-clad hooligans who might try to push their illegal demon weed on fellow students with weaker, less informed minds on the subject.

When I was in grade five, we had a group of grade seven students crammed into our school while they waited for classrooms at the high school to be renovated.

Since we had an extra 120 students squeezed into our tiny school, and since those extra 120 students were now too old to be hanging around on the playground or playing soccer in the nearby field, many of them simply loafed around like a bunch of ne'er-do-wells. Between discussions about the hot new television show of the moment,
Miami Vice
,
one group caught our attention: a bunch of dudes sporting leather jackets and dirty jeans who walked around like they were semi-comatose. Each and every noon hour they would make their way into the forest that surrounded our
school. That's right; I said “forest that surrounded our school.” The school was situated right on the edge of town, so there was plenty of opportunity to wander into the trees and get into trouble.

One day just after we moved to town, my sister and our new neighbour Karina Gregory wandered into the forest after school and discovered a nearby creek that flowed from the mighty Athabasca River. The creek was absolutely spectacular: fresh, clean water that was so delicious looking we all scooped it up and took a drink. “Why not just live here forever?” we wondered as we planned our new utopian society where we would forage fresh berries for food and wipe our bums with the leaves of the poplar trees that grew so plentifully around us. It all seemed so idyllic. We could leave behind school, we could leave behind leather ties, and we could all start again right there in the forest next to town—possibly in the nude.

Eventually the sun went down and we decided to head back, getting a little lost along the way before finally making it home. Once we bid goodbye to Karina, my sister and I walked up the steps to the front door of our little rented duplex. My parents had wanted to buy a home, but the newly opened Athabasca University—a correspondence school—meant that every available property had already been snatched up. We opened the front door and my mom's eyes were like saucers.

“Where have you two been?” she asked frantically.

Before we could manage an answer, my dad emerged from the back bedroom area with a fire and rage in his eyes the likes of which I had never seen.

“Where the hell were you two?” His voice was not quite a yell, just a notch below; it was the best he could manage in that situation. “We have been calling around, worried sick! Did you not think we would wonder where you were?”

In this day and age before cellphones allowed parents to keep watch on their children like Big Brother, in a town where we were able to roam freely and play anywhere and everywhere we liked, we had finally pushed the boundaries too far. Apparently, my parents had come to the conclusion that their children had been kidnapped and would never be seen again. They had just moved to a new town with their family, and I can only imagine the thoughts that were running through my mother's mind as she frantically called my dad to come home from the drugstore and help her look for the ten-year-old and the eight-year-old who had somehow gone missing and were a full hour late for dinner on a weeknight. We were grounded for the first time in our lives.

The forest was not our friend that day.

But that didn't mean we stayed away. Instead, for the rest of the summer we went back into the forest every chance we got. It became our home away from home, our own private, secret hideout. We just made sure we kept an eye on our Swatches so we would be home in time for dinner.

So when we began observing these leather-jacket-sporting hooligans disappearing into the trees every day, we decided it was up to us to defend the forest from whatever shady deeds they were committing. We were convinced that the Leather Jacket Gang (as we began calling them) was heading into the trees to . . . wait for it:

Smoke marijuana.

It was time to get to work. Inspired by the “Just Say No” campaign, we decided to call ourselves the Dopebusters. Finally, we had a purpose for our recess and noon-hour breaks.

My friend Robin Bobocel was an only child—a rarity in a small prairie town where families usually had at least two children since so many people lived on farms and acreages, and boredom was sure to cause an isolated child to drive their parents absolutely crazy.
Robin was different. Robin was an accident. I know this because he would remind us about it all the time. His parents had obviously told him at a ridiculously young age, but Robin had such an easygoing disposition that nothing ever seemed to bother him—not even his parents informing him that his entire presence on our planet was simply the result of too much red wine and too little caution with birth control. Robin was as relaxed and happy a kid as I ever met. He had clearly never wanted for anything. A visit to his “playroom” next to his bedroom at his family's house just a few kilometres outside of town was like a visit to the nearest Toys “R” Us.

Robin had the latest of everything and was also one of the first kids I knew with satellite television. He used to come to school and regale us with exciting tales of MTV beamed in from the United States, while we were stuck with plain old MuchMusic in Canada. Years later he would be one of the only students to actually receive a new car for his sixteenth birthday, a forest green Jeep YJ that made our jaws drop as he casually pulled up to school one day cranking the beats of Sir Mix-a-Lot.

Back in fifth grade, though, Robin was a valuable member of the Dopebusters team, because in addition to the toys and the satellite dish and the trampoline in his expansive backyard, Robin was also the only one of us who had his own camera.

After several recess breaks spent performing covert surveillance on the Leather Jacket Gang, we decided we needed actual photographic evidence to bring these “perps” to justice. No way were we going to stand by and simply spy on these rule-breaking drug fiends; we needed to teach them and their kind a lesson—that drugs of any kind would not be tolerated in our school.

During one particularly fruitful spying session, we hung around long enough to watch the Leather Jacket Gang leave early before
the bell rang, giving us the opportunity to check for evidence left behind in the little forest clearing where they sat around, laughing at their own jokes—a little too hard for our liking. Once the jacket squad had cleared out, we carefully snuck down to the clearing, and it was there that my fellow Dopebuster, Kevin Meyer, found . . . wait for it . . . an empty container of cough syrup! The boys were drinking sizzurp years before it was cool with hip hop stars and Justin Bieber. Taking out one of the Glad sandwich bags I had stuffed in my jacket pocket that morning while my mom was preparing my lunch, I carefully scooped up the empty cough syrup container to be stored back in my cubbyhole for safe keeping, not taking into account that if our teachers or principals actually considered drinking cough syrup some sort of crime, then I was basically putting the evidence in my own possession. It was like someone finding a murder weapon and putting their fingerprints all over it. Columbo I was not. I was not even Angela Lansbury from
Murder She Wrote
.

But even with the cough syrup bottle, we still felt we needed photographic evidence. So the next day, Robin, Kevin, and I, plus the other idiots we'd convinced to join us in this ridiculous venture, all snuck into the trees near the school at lunch hour and resumed our stakeout. The goal was simple: Get a picture of these ne'er-do-wells smoking, drinking, or ingesting actual drugs so we could take it to our teacher, Mr. Galonka, and rid our once clean and serene school of the scourge of drugs forever. We watched the clock impatiently, thirsting for justice, knowing that nothing was going to stand in our way of putting these scumbags behind bars.

When that bell finally rang we tore up the hill as fast as our ten-year-old legs could carry us, hoping to beat the Leather Jacket Gang to their favourite spot. We set up shop near the clearing—dangerously close—and waited.

Sure enough, a few minutes later the Leather Jacket Gang showed up and sat on tree stumps in a circle like they were about to start a campfire. One of them fired up a lighter, and a billow of smoke wafted through the air.

The demon weed!

This was our moment. Illegal drug activity was taking place right before our very eyes and now was our chance to stomp it out.

Sadly, this was years before camera phones could have captured the action with the silence required for such a covert operation. Robin's camera was not so quiet. Robin was on his elbows, clicking away, and lying on my stomach just a few feet away I thought it all sounded dangerously loud. How could the Leather Jacket Gang not hear Robin snapping away with his camera like a young Annie Leibovitz?