King of The Road Read online

  Anyway, I looked around. I couldn’t judge distance. It felt like looking through a jar of water—every light was a blur. I turned around and around—lots of farms in every direction. I thought, Screw it, I’m taking that one. And I took off for help, with ripped jeans, no shirt, and one moccasin. The first fence I came to I stepped in a furrow and friggin’ fell through the fence and ripped my back open with the barbed wire. The next fence I grabbed the wire and tore a hole in my hand.

  After running for about a mile I showed up at this farmer’s house and beat on his door. This was one o’clock, two o’clock in the morning. He came to the door wearing a gown.

  “Call an ambulance! I’ve got a couple of badly injured guys out there!”

  So he called the ambulance. I went into his kitchen and stuck my head under the water taps. I was trying to wake up and wash the blood and dirt off my face at the same time, I guess. He went out there to take me back to the accident and he was so jumpy he tried to start three vehicles in a row, killing the battery and flooding each one before he could manage to get a vehicle started.

  Finally we went down to the accident site and the ambulance was there along with two police cars. And there was nobody there. When I left them, Tom was lying on the seat and Fred was staggering around in the middle of the highway. I didn’t like that because I thought he was going to get run over. But what could I do? I didn’t think I could just stand here and babysit them. I figured I had to go and get help.

  One of the cops said, “Where are your buddies?”

  “They must have gone home. Or someone must have given them a ride.”

  “Come on. We’re going to look for them.”

  We piled into the cars and took off. The police car in front, the ambulance behind, red lights flashing. After a couple of miles, we got to the Dolls’. They had this big kind of ranch house. As we pull into the yard I asked them to turn the sirens off. This was going to be bad enough already without all the flashing lights and sirens. The policeman and I got out of the car. He had his big boots on, covered in mud, so I asked him to wait at the front door.

  As soon as we went into the house I could see footprints in blood leading into the kitchen and into the bathroom, where the bathtub was half full of water and blood. There were bloody handprints on the walls and blood on the mirror where somebody was smearing it with a bloody hand. There was friggin’ blood everywhere. So I thought, Well, I guess it’s no big deal that I’ve got a bit of mud on my feet!

  I went into the bedroom, where Fred and Tom were sleeping. Some guy picked them up and gave them a ride home. So I woke up Fred and told him, “Fred, we have the ambulance here. The cops are here. We need to get Tom to the hospital. His head’s split open.”

  We got Tom out of bed and managed to get him through the bathroom, through the kitchen, and out to the ambulance. Oh, I was so happy we got out of there. And we never woke up anybody in the house, believe it or not!

  When we got to the hospital the police officer came in and said, “Well, what happened?”

  “I was going down the road, all of a sudden it just took off to the left. I don’t know, like it broke a tie rod or something. That’s all I remember.”

  “How much were you drinking tonight?”

  My head was still going in circles from the shock. “Uh . . . two beers.”

  “You weren’t smoking any of that grass, were you?”

  This was 1970, and I read a lot of newspapers and magazines, but I barely knew what it was. “I’ve never even seen that stuff.”

  “Tell the truth.”

  “Okay, I have smoked a few things.”

  “When?”

  “You know what rhubarb looks like when it has flowers on it? It’s got that hollow stalk up the middle of the flowers?”

  “Rhubarb.”

  “Yeah, about two years ago, I cut that stalk off and made a pipe out of that, and got a bunch of dried grass and leaves and I put it in there and I tried to smoke that.”

  The cop was just looking at me.

  “I had a headache for three days.”

  “Okay,” the cop said, and walked out of the room. He had decided I was just another dumb farmer. And maybe he was right.

  More Lunacy Behind the Wheel

  I’m driving through Whitecourt one time in 1972 and there’s a young woman in curlers standing by the road hitchhiking. She has curlers in her hair and a couple of bags of groceries in her arms. She climbs into the vehicle, not realizing that she’s putting her life in my hands, and tells me that her husband is off working on the rigs or something. She doesn’t have a vehicle, so she gets around to the store and so forth by hitchhiking. Fine, off we go.

  The road was extremely slushy, with about six inches of snow on top of ice. There were these ruts running through the snow and the ruts were half frozen. If you got out of the ruts the car would start going all over the place. I’m driving like a mad fool just like usual, ’65 Ford hardtop, and she’s just talk, talk, talk. She was a real nice gal, and she was just talking away, over there on her side of the seat with a knife in her hand peeling an orange for me.

  Neither of us are wearing seatbelts, of course. I’m going down the road at about seventy-five miles an hour, and as I pull out to pass this car I hooked the slush in the middle of the road and be darned if I don’t turn crossways. I turn broadside, and as I go by this family, their eyes go as big as saucers as we go sliding past them. I thought I was going to kill everybody.

  And this farm gal just keeps peeling the orange. She raises her eyes to look at this car passing us, turns her head a bit sideways to see what’s coming at us on the road, then lowers her eyes and just keeps peeling that orange. I was going substantially faster, so I was passing them sideways, but she doesn’t seem too concerned. Finally I got it straightened out, got my heart beating again, and she never said a word.

  I say, “Sorry if I scared you.”

  She says, “Oh, no, I can see you’re a pretty good driver.”

  I think, Holy mackerel, this lady has a cast-iron constitution.

  Another time I pulled a girl out of a car that was going sixty miles an hour. She was a pretty young thing who had been captured by dastardly villains, and my brothers Richie and Mark and I decided she needed rescuing.

  This happened the weekend of my cousin’s wedding. I had rented a 1977 Cougar, which was a fast car back in those days. Whenever I rented a car the main thing I cared about was the size of the engine. I don’t think I ever climbed into a car without taking it out onto a straight stretch of road and stomping on the gas to see what it would do. So we had this Cougar and it moved. Mark swore that he wasn’t going to drink, but he got his hands on a bottle of vodka and by the time we got there his eyes were red and there was dribble coming out of both corners of his mouth and the bottle was empty.

  These farm boys at the party were trying to spin doughnuts with their pickup trucks. They would spin in a circle and the trucks would tilt up onto one side and then fall down and they would try to do it again. Richie was watching this. “That’s pretty pathetic,” he said. “Should we show them how to do it?”

  “Yeah, let’s show them how to spin a doughnut.”

  I punched the gas on that Cougar and we started going around, and around, and around, and big clots of earth were flying, ants, tree roots, rocks, all of this stuff was spitting out from under the tires and these farm boys were yelling at us. By the time we finished that whole pasture looked like it had been rototillered, and I just punched the gas, shot through the ditch, and gunned it down the road and out of sight. We were a long way from home, and there was no sense in getting into a scrap with a bunch of irate farm boys. Especially since we’d fought with some of their brothers before and we weren’t all that popular with them to begin with.

  So we were ripping down this dirt road, and after a few miles I spotted two guys stopped dead on the road lining up for a drag race. They were probably two hundred yards ahead of us and I just hammered it, heading
right for them. They were sitting about four feet apart, but if you’ve ever been in a drag race, especially on a gravel road, you know that the cars tend to pull apart a little bit as they accelerate. The back end of a car will start fishtailing when you pour on the power, and guys are nervous about running into each other so they separate a bit as they come off the line.

  Well, I was probably going eighty miles an hour as I came up behind them. Richie and Mark were whooping in encouragement and the cars separated just at the right time and we shot right in between, coming so close I almost took off their side mirrors.

  We left them in our dust. Then, as the sun was coming up, I looked ahead and I’ll be darned if there wasn’t a Marlin, a turquoise one, driving along just ahead. It was probably the last time I saw a Marlin on the open road. It had big tires on the back and one tire was wobbling so badly it looked like it was going to fall off.

  Richie and Mark were fast asleep, so I woke them up and said, “Hey, look, it’s a Marlin! And it’s falling apart!”

  As we pulled alongside I could see that there were two young guys in the Marlin, about sixteen years old, and in the backseat was a girl. She was about the prettiest black-haired girl you’ve ever seen, and she looked very unhappy about being stuck in that car. The wheel was shaking, the car was swerving all over the road, and they were just laughing. I looked in the window at her and she just gave me this look, like, “Can you rescue me from these maniacs?”

  I said to Richie, “Get her to roll down the back window, and help that girl climb from that car into ours.”

  We were right up beside their car, going about seventy miles an hour, and Richie rolled down the window and stuck his big hands out. If you could see my brother Richie, he’s got great big hands and long arms, arms so long that his big hands would drag on the ground if his legs weren’t so long. Anyway, the girl climbed out the window and Richie helped her as she gave a big leap and somersaulted into the front seat of our car.

  It was one of those mornings where everything seemed to be happening. As luck would have it, she no sooner landed in the seat of our car than the wheel came off the Marlin and it went swerving all over the road and almost went into the ditch.

  In no time, those guys were a little dot in my rearview mirror.

  Meanwhile, the girl was looking at me, who she didn’t know from Adam, looking at Mark, who smelled like a wino and had drool coming out of his mouth and looked like a werewolf, and I could tell she was worried that maybe she’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire. I just told her, “Don’t worry, we’re the Debogorski brothers. You’re in the safest hands in the Peace River country.”

  She said, “Can you take me home?”

  I said, “Where’s home?”

  “You have to turn around.”

  “I don’t want to turn around.”

  “Please.”

  “Listen, girlie, it’s four o’clock in the morning, and I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

  “Then let me out.”

  “How are you going to get home?”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “You’ll get eaten by a bear.”

  “That’s better than driving in the wrong direction.”

  “Well, I can’t just leave you on the side of the road.”

  “Then drive me home. I’ll give you a beer.”

  So I turned the car around and headed off in the opposite direction.

  She gave me directions and we ended up going so far back in the bush that there were trees growing across the road. But it’s a small world, because it turned out that I knew her brother. So there you have it, one good turn deserves another, and we ended up sitting in the kitchen having a beer with her brother to finish off the night.

  Mike Greenwood

  I’m seventy-four years old and I’ve been selling trucks and cars all my life. If you come to my house in Edmonton you always see six or eight vehicles parked around it, in the driveway, in the yard, and my kitchen and living room are stacked to the ceiling with snow tires and air filters and auto parts of one kind or another. I guess it’s pretty obvious that I don’t have a woman in my life. And the city officials are not too wild about the way I live, either. They are always giving me a hard time about operating a business out of my home. They don’t seem to care all that much about the guys selling dope in my neighborhood, though. Middle of the night, you hear the ambulances and cop cars going by. A gentleman across the street came home from work one night, and as he got out of his car j some doper took his money and stabbed him in the chest. This poor fella had worked hard all his life, and ended up bleeding to death in his own driveway.

  I’ve known Alex Debogorski since he was a teenager. He’d come down to Edmonton from the Peace River country where his farm was and I would get him work from time to time. My first impression of him was, This is a strong hard-working boy. He wants to make something of himself. That was pretty clear. But he had a wild side to him as well. It’s like he had two little genies perched on each shoulder, one of them was whispering bad things in his ear, the other was urging him to be good.

  I got him a job painting the ceiling of a garage and it was so cold in there that he ran a car to warm it up and almost gassed himself. He drove an old Chevy with a telephone pole imprint on the side of it. I guess he had rolled it over in a ditch and the entire body was out of whack. Then he rolled again, the other way, and kind of straightened it out. It looked like an outhouse coming down the street. The windshield was broken so badly that he just took a hammer to it and cleaned it right out. You’d see him driving this old Chevy with no windshield. I guess he caught a few bugs in the eye at sixty miles an hour because he started wearing goggles, especially when it got cold. You’d see him driving around town with one of those leather helmets that the aviators wore in World War I, with goggles and gauntlets and a snowdrift in the back seat of the car.

  He hitchhiked into town one day, soaking wet, with fifty cents in his pocket, and I said, “Sit down, Alex, we’re going to make some calls and find you a decent vehicle.”

  “Get me a nice car,” he says. “An Oldsmobile Toronado.”

  I told him I didn’t like to see him driving cars. He was always wrecking them, rolling them over or driving them into immovable objects of one kind or another. I said, “Alex, you need something that will take some punishment.”

  “Like what?”

  I had to think about that for a while. What kind of vehicle would stand up to Alex’s kind of abuse? “You need a bulldozer,” I finally said.

  “Naw . . . too slow.”

  “Okay, a road grader.”

  “That might work,” he nodded. “If you can find me one that’ll do eighty miles an hour.”

  One of my best cars was a Chevy Impala. I paid $275 for it in 1971 and boy, it was ugly. It had a telephone pole imprint on the side and no windshield and my buddy Mike Greenwood said it looked like an outhouse coming down the street. He didn’t think much of my cars, and was always trying to persuade me to buy a new pickup truck or something sensible. But this old Chevy ran like a hound. I’d roll it over a couple of times and then we’d just fire it up and keep on going.

  One time my buddies and me went down to Edmonton to have a good time. We hit a few bars, and we were walking down the street, feeling pretty good, when one of my buddies started doing chin-ups on this overhanging awning. Another guy joined him and the whole awning came crashing down. The owner of the store came out and grabbed us and told us he was phoning the police.

  We took off running and jumped in my car. We were racing down the street when we saw these girls hitchhiking. I pulled over, picked up the girls, and we sped off. Next thing you know, there was a big pile of sand and a hole in the middle of the street. I hit the pile of sand going about 70 miles an hour and flew right over the hole. It was like The Dukes of Hazzard. The girls were lying on the floor screaming, so I stopped the car and let them out. I was thinking, First you want a ride—then you don’t want a ride. Make up yo
ur mind!

  Anyway, that’s how the windshield got smashed. It’s difficult to drive safely with a smashed windshield, so I cleaned it out with a hammer. The cops would stop me and give me a hard time. That car was a cop magnet.

  I’d say, “Sir, as a matter of fact we’re just driving it to the body shop to get the windshield installed.”

  I drove it like that for months. Louise and I had gotten back together at this point. We were actually split up only for a couple of months. Her father couldn’t keep us apart, so finally he just gave up and started accepting me as one of the family. I don’t think he was too impressed with my cars, though, especially this Impala with no windshield. Louise would get wrapped up in a blanket and we’d drive all the way from Edmonton to Peace River, 350 miles with no windshield. One time we drove into a flock of birds and there were four screaming birds in the back seat.

  Another time in 1974, I was driving along on a dirt road in the middle of the night with no lights on. Lloyd Paul was in the back seat necking with a girl. I used to drive it with no headlights because the alternator didn’t work. It’s not as hard to drive in the dark as you might think. The dark line on the right side is the ditch and the dark line on the left side is the ditch, and you just keep the car between the two. So I was driving along, Lloyd was in the back seat kissing this girl, and I went right off the T-bone intersection at the end of the road and Lloyd and this girl chipped their teeth on each other’s mouths. It was a good car, but it had a hard time staying on the road.

  Then there was the time Lloyd and I decided to go hunting. We were going to try and jacklight a deer, which means shining a light in its eyes, then shooting it. It’s illegal, but it didn’t work and we never tried it again. The Peace River country was the Wild West. Anyway, we were driving through the bush and suddenly we found ourselves up to the door handles in swamp water. I walked a couple of miles to a nearby farm and borrowed a tractor to pull the car out. I didn’t ask permission. I just took the tractor. Tractors didn’t have keys in them in those days, and I’d often just go borrow somebody’s tractor when my car decided it was time to spend the night in the ditch. So we pulled it out, but when the farmer found out I’d taken his tractor without asking permission he was mad.