King of The Road Read online

  Teresa says she’ll make some inquiries, and asks me to call her back in a few days.

  I wait for a few days, but Teresa hasn’t called me back with news about Yellowknife because we don’t even have a phone. I pack up my truck, load my two dogs in the cab, kiss my wife and babies goodbye, then head off to this little village called Blue Sky, Alberta, where there’s a pay phone beside the road. I pop some coins in the slot and get Teresa Murphy on the phone. She says, “My dad found you a job at a place called Robinson Trucking.”

  “Thank you very much, Teresa. I will see you Monday morning.”

  So I hang up the phone and climb back into my truck and turn north instead of south, driving north to Yellowknife, not knowing that I would be spend the rest of my life there.

  It’s the beginning of August 1976, and the road to Yellowknife is nowhere near as smooth as it is now. As I drive north the pavement turns to gravel, and the gravel finally turns to mud, and then the mud road gets so bad that I’m having a hard time getting through the ruts even in my four-wheel-drive truck. To top it off, there’s no place to buy gas, and I haven’t brought along jerry cans of extra fuel. When I get to Edzo, about sixty miles from Yellowknife, the truck’s gas tank is dead empty, but somehow the engine keeps running and I manage to carry on to Yellowknife.

  I’m a bit overdue because of the road, but when I phone Teresa she says, “No problem, just go to Robinson tomorrow and you’ll have a job.” I don’t have any money for a room, so I go out to Long Lake campground and set up my tent. On Tuesday I leave the dogs at the camp and go out to Robinson Trucking to start my job with them, running a CAT and driving a truck. They have lots of work for me. The government is moving the capital of the Northwest Territories from Fort Smith to Yellowknife. There are two large operating gold mines right in the city, and everything is going great guns. If you can saw a board in half, you’ve got a job. Can you start tomorrow? Great, you’re hired. If you weren’t a drunk you had it made. And if you were a drunk, you probably had a job anyway. Guys would walk up to you and say, “Nail down that floor and I’ll pay you two hundred dollars.”

  The place is full of women, too. Nice-looking young women. This was a shock to me, coming from backwoods Alberta. You’d go to a dance back home and there wouldn’t be a woman in sight who wasn’t taken. You’d end up dancing with a coat rack. Yellowknife, the capital city and a government center, was full of secretaries and waitresses and office girls. I learned a little lesson, and if I was talking to a young man today I would say, “If you’re looking for a wife, go to Yellowknife.” Of course, I had a wife already, so I wasn’t in the market, but I still noticed all these women walking around.

  My plan is to dig myself out of debt, but it’s dicey because Ford Motor Credit is still looking for their brand-new pickup truck, and Shell is looking for their credit card. If either of them catch up with me, I’ll lose my transportation and my job, too. So I need to elude them until I’ve earned enough money to get current with my payments. In those days if you bought less than fifty dollars with your charge card they wouldn’t phone it in, so I make sure to keep my purchases under fifty dollars and meanwhile I’m living like a hunted outlaw.

  Teresa, the girl who’s gotten me the job, is working at the hospital in the kitchen and that’s how I get food. I tell her I have these two dogs and would appreciate any scraps for them. She says, “No problem, there’s lots of garbage from the hospital kitchen.”

  For the next couple of weeks that’s how I stay alive. Every few days Teresa fills a couple of plastic bags with scraps, thinking it’s for the dogs, and that’s how the dogs and I survive.

  Every night at six o’clock I get off work, filthy and tired, and go home to Long Lake. They have a wooden raft a hundred feet offshore, and I swim out there with a little piece of soap in my pocket and hide behind the raft and scrub myself off. The other swimmers are giving me funny looks because I’m treading water, acting natural, and there’s this big cloud of soap bubbles rising all around me. Washing in the lake works pretty well until autumn comes, but with the arrival of the cold weather at least there’s no one around to watch me lather up. My last swim in Long Lake takes place on October 6, and it’s so cold that when I plunge into the water I’m almost paralyzed, and there are black spots twirling in front of my eyes as I gallop back ashore!

  Eventually, after about a month, the Parks people kick me out of the campground, so I set up my tent in the equipment yard at Robinson Trucking. I had to move again when Robinson’s decided to build their new shop right where my tent was pitched. Just when it looked like things can’t get much worse, I met a salesman who worked for Bowman Bolts. His name was Greg Dexter. He invited me to share his apartment at Rockridge with him. It was none too soon because it was colder than heck and winter was coming. After I had lived with him for a couple of months, I found out he was an uncle of one of my buddies from Grande Cache.

  Ernie Filowich gave me his taxi, car 6, to drive, so I no longer needed the vehicle. I sold my truck and used the money to pay off Ford Motor Credit. Robinson’s did a fall layoff and I was part of it. That October I started my own business, Eagle North Contracting. Pretty soon I was working day and night. By day I was contracting and by night I was driving the taxi and working as a bouncer at the Explorer Hotel in a cabaret called the Snowshoe.

  4

  LIFE IS A CABARET

  “Can’t dance, can’t sing, but boy I’ve got a hard head. Punch me and you’re going to hurt your hand.”

  My job is to check identification at the door, make sure no one comes in with a knife or other weapon, keep the place under control, and take the cover charge. Yellowknife is a pretty wild community, and this is the best party bar in the town, so it’s an intense job. You’ve got a couple hundred people in the room, and when the party gets going there’s always some guy who starts causing trouble. In an emergency you’ve got the bartender and the waiters for backup, but they’re not getting paid to do your job, so ninety-nine percent of the time you’re pretty much on your own.

  But I’ve been fighting drunks all my life, so I figure I might as well get paid for it. Plus I got my liquor for free.

  High Noon at the Snowshoe Bar

  Most of the time I bounced by myself. Of course, you had the waiters and the bartender to help you out occasionally, but I usually depended on customers when the fights got too big and they would jump in and give me a hand. Sometimes you’d get in a fight and you’d be fairly confident that you weren’t going to have too much of a problem, but when a fight starts strange things can happen.

  I remember one night about eight o’clock, the band hadn’t started yet and there weren’t very many customers. I was about twenty-three years old, and this young fellow started trouble. I was smoking a long cigarillo-type thing called a More. I punched this fellow and knocked him back a bit, and just as he was coming at me I tapped the ash off the cigarette, put it back in my mouth, and let him have it right between the eyes. I didn’t hurt him any. Hurt his dignity, I guess you could say, but the whole point was trying to look cool. Those Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns were popular at that time and everyone was doing their best to look cool.

  Our impaired clients presented plenty of challenges, but every once in a while a guy will come in, stone sober, and take you on. That happened to me more than once. I remember this one guy who came in. I’d never seen him before, but he just lit into me for no reason. I had the chain up at the door and a two-dollar cover charge, and he just ranted and raved and called me everything in the book. Even after he sat down he wouldn’t shut up. I had a couple of customers come up and ask me why I wouldn’t slap him because they were getting kind of fed up with the way he was carrying on. I told them it was okay and I just ignored him.

  But he wouldn’t stop, and one thing led to another, and he finally gave me a cuff or something. I grabbed him and drove him down a little flight of stairs, and I ended up kneeling on top of him with my hands raised getting ready to hit
him just on the side of the head. I figured I would stun him, stand him up, shove him outside, and hold the door shut until he got tired of wrestling with the door handle and went home.

  Then he whispered something.

  I said, “Pardon me?”

  When you’re fighting you kind of get that roaring in your head, and I missed what he said. I went to hit him again and he whispered something again.

  “Pardon me?”

  He was talking really softly, and after all the yelling and screaming I couldn’t believe my ears.

  He says, “Boy, you have a lot of patience.”

  I’m kneeling on top of him. “Excuse me?”

  “Boy, you have a lot of patience.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  ‘Yeah.”

  “Can I let you stand up? Or do I need to smack you again?”

  “Oh, no, I’ll be fine.”

  I’m kneeling on him and he’s talking to me like we’re having a cup of tea or something, and this after half an hour of verbal abuse. So I stood up, carefully, thinking that now I’ve let him up he’s going to hit me and we’re going at it again.

  He shook my hand. It was almost like some kind of a test. I had this funny feeling that he was a policeman, checking to see if I could control my temper, but I don’t know. Nobody had ever seen this guy and he never came back.

  Other guys, you’ll throw them out and they’ll just go nuts. I’ve seen guys beat the hell out of a phone booth or punch a cement wall with their fists. It’s an awful thing to watch. You’re thinking, Why isn’t he punching me instead of the wall? He’s hurting himself seriously, breaking his knuckles, and not just for a night but for life.

  Another night this guy came into the bar. He wasn’t that big, but he had quite a reputation for being ridiculously strong. He worked in the mine and they called him the Buffalo. It was early in the evening. The band wasn’t playing yet. Nobody was drunk and there was hardly anybody in the bar. Then the Buffalo walked in with his buddies, and without saying a word he walked up to me and gave me a slap across the face.

  So of course the fight was on. I hit him in the solar plexus and I thought, Holy mackerel, the guy is like a rock. I was only twenty-three and I didn’t know that God made people that hard. I hit him three times in the chest area as hard as I could and he didn’t even flinch. I thought, Uh-oh, this is not working . Finally I kind of curled my fist and caught him just on the point of the chin under the ear. This wasn’t a hard punch compared to the others. I just tapped him there and he dropped like a bag of sand. After a moment or two he climbed up off the floor and put out his hand. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s enough for me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir, have a good night.”

  He nodded to his friends and they all walked out the door.

  Well, I didn’t know it at the time, but they were testing me. It happened fairly regularly and I never caught on. It was thirty years before I found out. Some of the guys I fought with became my friends later. And about five years ago, I mentioned it to some of them and they burst out laughing. They said, ‘You were new in town. You weren’t a northerner, so we thought we’d have some fun.”

  They explained that they’d find a big guy who was pretty tough, buy him a bunch of drinks, bet some money, and dare him to come in and fight me. By the end of the night he’d be all primed up and ready to come over to the Snowshoe and give me a beating. He’d walk in and give me a cuff in the nose and the fight would be on. I’d knock him down to his knees or whatever and the guy would get up and say, “Thank you very much. Have a good evening.”

  And he’d shake my hand and I’d think, Thank me for what? Are these people mad at themselves? Why is he thanking me for knocking him on his ass? I never clued in that it was a setup. There’s only so much entertainment in a mining town, and these guys were laughing when they told me about it. “Oh, heck, we just wanted to see how tough you were.”

  Here Come the Cops

  I’ve always gotten along with the police. In fact, I came very close to becoming a cop myself. When I was a young guy, I was pretty much torn between police work and becoming a soldier. My dad, having been in the military for twelve years, taught me respect for anyone in uniform. It may have bothered a lot of Canadians, but I wanted to join the U.S. military and go to Vietnam, largely because of the anticommunist leanings in my family. Many of my relatives had been put in Siberia by the communists and as a result some died. So like a lot of young men everywhere, I wanted to find adventure and go over to the jungles of Southeast Asia and fight communism on the side of the good guys.

  My second choice would have been police work. I thought of policing as a sort of civilian version of the military—you’re out doing battle with the bad guys every day. I could see myself getting a lot of satisfaction from that. I didn’t mind conflict. However, I ended up moving north and becoming a jack-of-all-trades and an ice road trucker. But whenever I see a guy in a police car I think, That could be me.

  I didn’t like calling in the police for backup when I was working as a bouncer. They’ve got their own problems to deal with, and if it wasn’t a real emergency I would try to handle it on my own. You can’t use excessive force and you have to be reasonable, but if the cops get to know you and come to understand that you are a responsible person, they let you handle the drunks with whatever force is required. And frankly, I would be happy to return the favor. More than once, I’ve helped cops who were having a hard time arresting somebody.

  Cops are better educated, but they aren’t as big as they used to be. I’ve got nothing against higher education, but there is nothing better for defusing a potentially violent situation than a couple of guys weighing a quarter of a ton between them showing up at somebody’s door. I mean, when I call a cop, I want to see a cop, not some soft-spoken guy with an ear stud and a degree in political correctness. You might think that I’m arguing for the good old days when cops could be violent with no repercussions, but I’m saying the opposite. It was very rare to hear of a cop shooting anybody in the old days. They kept their guns tucked away in a holster with a leather flap over it. If you lipped one off, he would knock you on your ass. If you pulled a knife, he’d break your arm with a nightstick.

  The trouble with these sensitive New Age cops is that they’re too quick to shoot somebody when they feel threatened. They’re not physically confident. They’re afraid of getting overpowered by some guy who’s a lot bigger than them, so that’s when they pull out the pepper spray, the Taser, or the gun. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the news clips on television. Some guy walks toward the cops with a screwdriver or a knife, and what do they do? They shoot him! It makes me crazy! I mean, I would take that weapon away from that guy in two seconds.

  I could do it easily because I’ve handled hundreds of violent people working as a bouncer. The trouble is, these young cops have too little training in fighting. If you walk up to a fearful dog, his fear is going to make him aggressive. It’s the same with a fearful cop. If some citizen gets out of control because he’s been drinking or taking drugs, he’d better show deference to the police who show up to deal with him. But he’s not going to show deference to them, because he’s out of his mind. He’s going to attack them, and they are going to Taser him or shoot him because they are afraid of violent people.

  The bottom line is, a fearful police officer is a dangerous police officer. They teach these young cops to get out their gun and shoot to kill if they fear that their life is in danger. Well, who decides if their life is in danger? It’s all subjective. If someone starts walking toward you with a pair of scissors in his hand or a knife, is that a good reason to kill that person? With any kind of training at all you can easily disarm a guy like that with your bare hands, if you know what you’re doing. If you have a nightstick in your hands it’s like taking candy from a baby.

  I often talk to the retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police who work on security in the diamond mine
s. These are the old guys from the old days. All these guys are six-two, they’re all big men, and they don’t think much of the new RCMP. They think that policing has really gone downhill. This one old RCMP guy told me he always carried a baseball bat behind the seat of his cruiser car. He also carried a glove and a baseball under the seat of the car, and when things got quiet he would hit a few pop flies for the neighborhood kids. He practiced what you call neighborhood policing before all those sociologists announced that they invented it. He knew all the kids by name, and he knew which ones needed a pat on the back and which ones needed a kick in the ass.

  He told me once that he pulled up to arrest these three hooligans. There’s three of them and one of him. And these are big tough guys with criminal records. These guys are leaning against a fence and as soon as he gets out of his car they nudge one another and start laughing at him. And so he opens the back door and slips that baseball bat up against his leg and walks up to them. He’s not making a big show out of it, he’s just strolling up to them with that baseball bat.

  And their smiles kind of fade away as he taps that Slugger against his leg and tells them to get in the car. So they look at one another, and nobody says anything. None of them are smiling anymore. Nobody wants to be the first one to challenge this cop and get whacked on the thigh with a hickory bat. So they walk to that police car and climb in the back seat. End of problem. Nowadays, you would need a team of cops and three or four cruisers to pick those guys up. The strobe lights would be flashing and they would be putting on a big show for the neighborhood. But this old boy didn’t need emergency lights and he didn’t need backup. And he didn’t need his pistol. All he needed was a persuader and the knowledge that he could handle this situation. The sad thing is, if he was on the job today and threatened three upstanding citizens like these with a baseball bat, he would probably lose his job.