He had given me all the basics (lying, stealing, talking back, how not to get caught, mess making, and sticking to my story). By the end of the following year I had taken things to a whole new level. I had added to my craft stealing smokes, school skipping, and its companion, note forging (a true art, for which I was paid). At the end of my third year I was the “Holy Terror” of the entire school, and it was thoroughly exasperated with me, never mind how my parents were feeling. They were hurt, confused, and exhausted. By the time I hit grade five, the school was going to kick me out for the second time. The only reason they didn’t was because it was just a couple of weeks till the end of the school year.
But to my dismay and confusion, the fear—it hadn’t really gone away. It continued to fester deep inside me. No matter what I did, I was still afraid, and I didn’t know why, and I felt like a coward for it. Yet there I was, at no more than eight years old, hopping on and off freight trains—sometimes hanging on to the side ladders and digging my boot heels into the gravel, skiing alongside the train and timing my hops to skip over the railway ties. By age 11 or 12 I was skipping school, riding long-distance railcars, howling into the wind, and jumping off high train trestles into the river—smoking, drinking, staying out way past curfew—and then, if my folks would try to ground me, I’d just slip out a window and be gone the minute I wasn’t being watched.
Yet I can see now that God’s hand of mercy, protection, and care seemed always to be on me. I clearly remember sliding down a long banister at school (which was strictly forbidden) and, at the bottom, flying through the air a good six or seven feet and smashing through a 12 by 8 foot sheet of plate glass for a nature exhibit. I also remember very distinctly feeling as though underneath me was a great cushioned hand, and it seemed as if I was almost floating through the air—to the point where when I glanced around I half expected to see the Pillsbury Doughboy’s fingers wrapped around my waist. This was all done with a detached observation or, at most, a mild surprise.
When I crashed through the glass I felt it as it closed in all around me. I had no fear of harm at all. Even while getting up amidst the great thick shards of plate glass and putting my hands into tiny splinters, I remember looking at the glass all around me, and all I felt was like “Well, that was odd.” Nothing. Not even one scratch. I never even thought twice about it.
Had you mentioned God might have been protecting me I’d have probably looked very gravely at you, shrugged my shoulders, nodded my head, and said something like “I know …” then turned around and in no more than five steps have some new mischief bubbling away in that endlessly diabolical imagination of mine. In my young mind, the whole not getting hurt by the glass thing was normal. I never got hurt, so all was simply as it should have been—as it always was. Everything had gone as naturally as things like that always did.
This bad behaviour was not kept to myself. By the time I was 12 years old I had gangs of my buddies skipping school and taking off downtown with me. There I would organize them into pairs, give them their lines (“Excuse me, ma’am, but I have to call my mom, and I don’t have a dime for the phone”), and send them out with an exact number of dimes to panhandle. We would then meet at the agreed upon location, where they’d give me what they had collected. This coin I would change into bills. Then I would watch all the people going into the liquor store, spot the person in the crowd who I knew would go in and buy beer for me (my accuracy at this became legendary), and then take the beer and get drunk with the boys in an alleyway. Simple, really.
The first time the cops brought me home I was about eight, and by 10 years old I’d had a few run-ins with them. By the time I was 12 or 13 I was dropping lots of acid, sometimes 10 to 20 hits of the good old White Blotter. (This was only barely out of the sixties, so the acid was powerful and uncut.) I was smashing out liquor store windows for booze and popping stolen morphine pills like they were candy. I was smoking dope, oil, and hash and drinking Lysol with my back alley Native buddies in the middle of Winnipeg winters—basically doing anything that spelled trouble.
By age 14 I’d been sent to Vancouver by my parents to escape threats on my life for stealing some very bad drugs from some very bad people (that’s when I became a Christian). After that, my parents tried to place me in an expensive private school (St. John’s-Ravenscourt)—I had to wear a uniform and tie!—to get me away from all the bad influences at school. What my dear parents didn’t realize was that I was the bad influence at school.
I didn’t last the year, but because my grades were quite high, they passed me anyway—on the condition that I never come back there again (that meant even setting foot on their property). The next year I was kicked out of four junior high schools in six months (that would be all of them), so really, after that there was just no more school. I rarely came home for long. By the time I hit 16 I’d already been to California twice. My folks knew some people down there who were in the middle of some kind of revival. I guess they hoped some of it would rub off. A whole chunk of my life was spent going back and forth between Winnipeg and Bakersfield, California. It’s all a bit of a blur as I made the trip three or four times. That was when I got into smoking PCP. The last time I went I just didn’t come back again. It’s hard to keep things straight in my head. I was young and there was just so much happening.
But long before I stayed in California, I had overdosed several times on strange combinations of weird psychotropic, psychogenic, and psychoactive drugs, as well as some other kinds of brain chemicals, the names of which I have no idea of. (I took them all at once and downed them with a 26 of vodka.) I wasn’t trying to hurt myself; I was just curious to find out what would happen.
On one of these overdoses I woke up a few days later in my father’s psych ward with some whacked-out character’s face planted against the glass-walled observation room I was in, euphorically cackling in hysterical glee, “THE SNOWFLAKES! THE SNOWFLAKES ARE EVERYWHERE! CAN YOU SEE THEM? THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!” That was just the first time. Hell, it’s no wonder I can hallucinate whenever I want to. That was not to be the only time I was in his ward for overdosing on strange pills. (I think I was in there three different times.)
When I went back to California for the fourth time, what followed was an insane nightmare of heavy IV drug use, drunkenness, and degradation I cannot even begin to describe. Now it’s mostly a dark haze, from which, from time to time, come horrifying memories that emerge to torment me—things I so much wish I could forget—terrible things.
I know now that at the end of my time in the States I was demonically driven and oppressed (my father’s friend John Wimber told me he got rid of at least seven or eight) and had several dangerous run-ins with some extremely nasty black witchcraft and occult stuff.
I eventually wound up getting kicked out of the States for good after I was thrown in jail for stealing that Burmese python. It was there that I was to learn real quick all about respect and survival. Cook County Jail (the Chicago city bucket) taught me a lot of brutal lessons. But even there, God’s hand was on me, protecting me and giving me favour with some of the heaviest members in the entire jail system. I was … untouchable. Someone stole from me—once; that same day I received back almost three times what I’d lost.
When I got out of jail I returned to Canada (well … let’s just say the USA asked me to leave quite pointedly) and began a long 24-year stint of hitchhiking all over the country. I’d just turned 26 years old. When I wasn’t couch surfing, most of the time I was sleeping outside (often in the winter) or in stairwells, on heater vents, or anywhere else warm that I could crawl my way into. It would take extreme conditions to drive me into a hostel or shelter. I hated them … despised would be a more accurate term.
After a time, I could no longer tolerate the insanity of the larger cities and usually just stayed on the outskirts of them, drinking anything and everything every waking second of every single day, just moving from town to town, city to city, coast to coast, and back again, not knowing where I was going or why. I was just running hard from God knows what and using anything and everything I could to feel nothing. The loneliness I felt during this time was simply overwhelming. Often I would grab a bottle and sit alone, crying to God for some kind of solution—anything to fill that horrible hole in my soul.
I know this chapter