FROM OCTOBER 2022 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

“I started a kid riot”

BY MEGAN KINCH

I didn’t mean to start a riot in the limbo of summer between Grades 5 and 6. It was 1993 and we were all the new kids living in a brand-new housing co-op in Richmond Hill, half members of my dad’s union and half social housing.

The co-op had a newsletter, and the maintenance guy had written an editorial saying that kids shouldn’t play on the sidewalks or take their bikes on the road or in the uncompleted playgrounds, and that we shouldn’t talk on our stoops lest we disturb the neighbours.

I was livid. That was basically everywhere. My rights as a kid to play, guaranteed by the UN, were being infringed upon. So I decided to write a letter to the editor. When I was finished, it didn’t seem like enough. So I turned it into a petition. I started going around the co-op getting kids to sign it, and I got about 100 signatures. But then even the petition didn’t feel like enough. So I told the kids to meet me in front of my house at 2 p.m. We all went home and made signs. My kindergartener sister made one in her cute child writing that said “Let us play.”

When I went out on my front porch and addressed the mob of children, there were 200 of us. We marched around the block, shouting, “Kids need to play outside!” The plan had been to put the petition in the mailbox of the newsletter’s editor. But now that we were near the community centre, I decided that we should storm it and present the committee with our demands.

That’s when my mom intervened.

She’d been around the whole time, not interfering but watching. She said that this time we’d gone too far, that the committee wouldn’t understand that we had real demands if we showed up with a mob. She snatched the petition out of my hand and made me put it in the mailbox and told me to tell the kids to go home. It felt anti-climactic.

Later, the co-op committee had a meeting where it was revealed that the writer of the anti-kid letter had been abusing his authority, had stolen all the co-op’s blueprints and was generally acting like he was the king. The co-op resident board fired him. And the kids in our co-op won the right – whether it was our doing or not – to get back outside.

“Blood spurted all over the place!”

BY GREG THOMAS

I shot my sister between the eyes with my bow and arrow when I was 9. I ambushed her. I waited for her along the side of our house in Moosomin, Sask., and when she came around the corner, I popped out, drew back my bow and shot her square between the eyes. The arrow stuck for a moment as the horror spread across her face. My sister ran into the house with her hand over the wound and told my mom that I just shot her in the face with my bow and arrow. My mom – who, it should be noted before reading what she replied, is a lovely woman – said, “So what.”

My sister removed her hand and, as she would later tell me, “blood spurted all over the place.” It might have been an exaggeration, but fine: I could have blinded her. While this scene was unfolding in the house, I was hiding in the woods. My sister remembers my mother wondering aloud, “Why the hell do they have bows and arrows in the first place?”

The reason we had bows and arrows was because she had already bought us jackknives. I took mine into the woods with my best buddy, Colin Haggerty, and we fashioned ourselves bows and whittled ourselves some really sharp wooden arrows. It was fun. It felt like olden times.

But that one bad decision, aiming at my sister’s face, ended all of that.

“My brain boiling in the heat and fear, I decided to jump”

BY SHAUGHNESSY BISHOP-STALL

At 18, I left Vancouver to hitchhike to Costa Rica.

Six months later, I crossed into Honduras, having dodged a fair amount of trouble. This included a surreal sojourn at the Church of Sun-Myung Moon in Seattle, a similarly sketchy stay with a lustful marijuana grower in Big Sur, and several rides from drivers who apparently believed all young hitchhikers were sex workers.

I wore my knife-case upside down, as a Portland busker had shown me, for easier access, but had kept my hands in view when a car salesman demonstrated how quickly he could draw his gun while speeding over the Hoover Dam.

I’d annoyed an angry crocodile in Mexico, had become lost after dark on a volcano in Guatemala. But still, by the time a large white truck appeared on the road in northern Honduras, there’d been nothing I couldn’t get out of.

There were no paved roads except in the capital of Tegucigalpa, where I was headed, and also very few motor vehicles. I jumped into the back, took off my satchel, leaned against my duffel and, for the first while, all was okay.

Okay, but hot – with nowhere to hide from the sun. I was out of water, but only a couple of hours from the capital, though suddenly it seemed farther, as if we were travelling in the wrong direction. We couldn’t be. The sun was blistering. I rapped on the window at the back of the cab, but they ignored it. I rapped again, then harder, beginning to panic. One of them turned, showed me a gun and grinned.

It seemed like hours had passed before I decided to jump, my brain boiling in the heat and fear. I timed it with slowing for a mountain switch-back and landed mostly on my duffle, rolling toward the jungle’s edge, then getting up and running before any pain could register. When it finally did, it came with an image: my satchel on the white truck bed, in it the last of my money, my I.D., my address book and the journal where I’d written what had happened so far.

It took a while to realize that in fleeing the frying pan I’d leapt into the fire. Essentially, I’d managed to rob myself, and safety with my friend in Costa Rica was now a universe away.

But what finally brought more trouble than I could ever escape was the missing travel journal: It was in trying to re-create what I’d already written that I got lost in the dark jungle of becoming a writer.

“We stole three hens, then went back for a fourth”

BY PHILLIP CRYMBLE

In 1975, my family moved from Northern Ireland to Chililabombwe, a town in the Copperbelt Region of Zambia. A year into our stay, my parents divorced. It was acrimonious. My mother left. My brother and I remained with my father while he served out the rest of his two-year contract as an electrician at the Konkola mine.

My father worked long hours. When he wasn’t working, he drank heavily. My brother and I were rarely supervised, which meant we had plenty of opportunity to explore and get into mischief.

The most trouble I ever got into in Zambia was when we decided to steal hens from a neighbour’s coop. After constructing a makeshift chicken run, we snuck through the banana grove that served as a border between our properties. The henhouse had a corrugated tin roof that I was able to lift just high enough for my brother to slip in. We stole three hens, then went back for a fourth. Our neighbour confronted me while my brother was inside the coop. I dropped the roof and ran.

When I returned with my father, we discovered that my brother had been locked in our neighbour’s house. The man refused to release him, so my father forced his way in. At that moment, the police arrived.

The Zambian police had little patience for juvenile delinquents. Although we weren’t handcuffed, my brother and I were taken to the jailhouse and placed in a cell. The jailer told us stories about the criminals who were ordinarily locked up there. Then he let us go. All these years later, I’ve never forgotten his face. Sometimes, he appears to me in dreams.

“I bought a jug of red wine, the cheapest and largest bottle available”

BY TASNEEM JAMAL

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I was a boring teenager, and I’ve often wondered if my personality was an act of defiance against my extroverted and social parents, the type who threw raucous parties and seemed unsatisfied by their own company.

In my early teens, my social life consisted of playing basketball or hanging out in my friends’ basements watching television and drinking Coca-Cola. When I was 15, however, we discovered the pleasures of alcohol and house parties. I didn’t care for the taste and bloating power of beer – which is all we drank then – but my friends were endlessly trying to acquire some.

Ahead of a Saturday night party one week, it was my turn to supply the alcohol. At the nearby mall, I walked into the liquor store and – I suppose because I was unusually tall – purchased some with no issue at all. But I was panicked the whole time and, in this heightened emotional state, bought a jug of red wine, the cheapest and largest bottle available. I thought maybe it would taste like grape juice.

I hid the jug of wine at the back of my bedroom closet until, a couple of days later at the party, my friends happily drank it all. (I declined more than a sip; it did not, as it turned out, taste like grape juice.)

About a year or so later, on a lazy Sunday evening, my mother and I were sitting in the living room, watching TV or talking, when she sighed.

“I would love a glass of red wine,” she said, mostly to herself, “but I have none in the house.” She slowly turned toward me. “You don’t have any in your closet, do you?”

“In an instant, their angel second-born had become a lying drug fiend”

BY NOBU ADILMAN

Dinner was always set for 6 p.m., which meant I had a couple of hours after school to deliver drugs for a local pharmacy at College and Major. In the summers, I zipped around the neighbourhood on my BMX bike loaded up with crisp white paper bags filled with magic pills for all. Everyone needed something. It didn’t matter if they lived in Victorian homes along the Annex’s tree-lined streets, in the dimly lit rooming homes or in the Scott Mission.

But it was January now, grey and depressing. Rushing in from my rounds, I had no idea how much more depressing it was about to become. I was weeks away from turning 14, halfway through Grade 9 and smoking weed every chance I got.

My family’s dinner table was like a newsroom, helmed by my journalist father who interrogated us all about our daily goings-on. We were taught not to bury the lede.

As I happily plopped into my chair, seated next to my brother, I was met with an unusually specific and daunting question.

“Nobu, if an unmarked envelope with a letter is left on the dining room table, what do you think should be done with it?”

I had already dived into one of my mother’s incredible meals – was it spaghetti alle vongole, sushi handrolls or soufflé? The culinary memory has been wiped clean by the trauma that was to follow. I managed a quick “Oh, I would just leave it if it wasn’t mine.”

“Is it yours?” my father asked, as the image of the envelope flashed white hot in my mind.

“Yes.”

I started to clue in to what was unraveling. I sensed my brother – never short of a snide or taunting comment – was tense, rigid in his seat, looking straight ahead, silent. The interrogation continued.

“Is what is in the letter true?” My next five months would hinge on this question. But I didn’t have a lawyer present. So I did what any normal kid would do when faced with having to tell the truth: I lied. The letter, written to a best friend on P.E.I., where we spent our summers, contained the step-by-step chronicles of a young, dumb kid (me) who was excitedly exploring drugs for the first time. How I had indulged in weed or hash for eight weekends straight. This was typed double-spaced, printed off and carelessly left in the blank envelope on the dining room table. I had set myself up.

“No. I was just joking around.” With that, all hell broke loose. In an instant their angel second-born had become a lying drug fiend. It didn’t help that my inconsolable mother thought hash was heroin. I was grounded for five months – no phone calls, no TV, though I was, ironically, allowed to keep delivering drugs for the pharmacy. I turned around and, as I did the perp walk to my room, I saw my brother’s shoulders relax. I had not mentioned him in the letter but easily could have. I was too petrified and shocked to process what was happening, but in the very back of my mind I thought, “He owes me one.”

“The cops in the parking lot tried to grab us as we zig-zagged our way into the trees”

BY NIKO STRATIS

They wrote the word trouble on my report card one year. Just that word, next to a series of Ds and Fs and absences. My life summed up in a single word. They weren’t wrong, to be fair. I was directionless and hiding a lot of things in my life, both from myself and from everyone around me, so I sought solace in getting into situations I might never walk away from. Drinking, drugs, partying. Those things all became more important than school, a future.

For a time, one of my friends held a job as the night janitor at a daycare a few blocks from my house in Whitehorse, right above where 38 Famous Video used to be, right next to the pretty good Chinese takeout place. We used to go there when he was working, with our white plastic grocery bags full of loose cans of whatever alcohol we managed to get our hands on: dusty Kokanees or a mostly empty mickey of Crown Royal. One night we were all there, eight or nine of us sounding as if there were a hundred. Perhaps it was the strength of noise emanating from a boombox blasting Rage Against The Machine; perhaps we weren’t as good at being low key as we thought we were, as we yelled and threw beer cans at each other in the night.

We all heard it at the same time, a voice in some unplaceable location yelling “Freeze!” We did the opposite. Eight or nine half-drunk teenagers running from the cops and the lady who owned the daycare above the 38 Famous Video. The friend who worked there tripped and fell as we bolted for the door. I leaped over him like an Olympian clearing a hurdle on the track. I was down the stairs and out the door as cops in the parking lot tried to grab us while we zig-zagged our way into the trees. The only one of us who got caught was the one who worked there, his job ruined in an instant because of us. Everyone knew what we had done all the same. It branded us for a time, a mark we couldn’t shake. Trouble.