King of The Road Page 8
I could fill a book with everything going through my head at that moment. I was up there looking down at his face and he was looking up at me. It seemed that I was going to crash right through the windshield, and maybe he thought that, too—he didn’t like that idea, so he took his foot off the throttle. I could hear the engine die for a split second. As I was hanging up in the air getting ready to go through his windshield I could see that it was a column-shift automatic transmission. His left-arm window was gone because I smashed it open with the tire iron, and I decided that if I rolled off the windshield I would reach in the side window. I figured that if I grabbed the steering wheel the vehicle would keep going, and if I grabbed the driver the vehicle would keep going, but if I grabbed the gearshift and put it into park, then it would stop. I was also thinking that if I did that, my arm would be stretched out and I would have no way to defend myself, and he would give me a few good punches in the face, but that couldn’t be helped.
So I fell down off the hood, and as I was bouncing off the fender and hitting the ground I reached in through the window, grabbed the gearshift, and put it in park. In a split second the truck stopped dead, bang, just like that, and just as I expected, the driver was taking advantage of my position and choking the shit out of me. My throat was going to be sore for a week, but the truck was stopped. In fact, it skidded a little when I threw it into park and the back end swerved into the fire. So this was still a troublesome situation. The truck may be stopped, but I was getting choked to death and the back end of the truck was sitting in the fire pit with the gas tank sitting right above the flames.
At this point Greg came to the rescue. He came running out of the bush with a bottle in his hand and smashed that other side window open. There was someone else in the backseat, and as soon as Gregory smashed the window, that guy jumped out and took off running. Now the driver let go of my neck and got out. He couldn’t go anywhere because the truck was in park and I’d taken the keys and put them in my pocket. The truck’s back end was in the fire and now he was concerned about his vehicle. A few seconds ago he was running guys over and choking me, but now all he could think about was his truck. That’s how dumb these Mitchell guys are.
The fire started going up the side of the truck. I yelled, “Let it burn, just leave the damn thing in there and let it burn.”
But they got right inside this fire pit and started jumping up and down, trying to put the fire out and move the truck. I figured, These guys are all half drunk and even though they were trying to kill us a minute ago I’m worried about them, too. So I decided, Well, I better get in there and help them put the fire out. Dumb as they are. I got in there, jumping up and down, doing the fire dance, the three of us.
And the girls were watching, and after a minute they yelled at me because the fire was coming up under my jacket, coming out of my collar, and from where they were standing it looked like it was coming up the back of my head. Finally it got so hot I got the hell out of there. By this time some of the Mitchells had backed up another truck to the fire. They said to me, “Can we pull the truck out of the fire?”
I was thinking that pretty soon the gas tank was going to explode if somebody didn’t move it. “Go ahead.”
They hooked it up with a chain and pulled it out of the fire. When they were finished I went over to their other truck and took the keys out of the ignition.
One of them looked at me. “Give us the keys.”
“No. I’ll give the keys to the police.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cops are on the way, and nobody is leaving until they get here.”
All around us it was like a battle scene. This one guy was lying on the ground with a broken leg. It was folded over backward and twisted sideways, and he was laying there screaming, and people were trying to lift him into the pickup and he was screaming bloody murder. He was in rough shape. Finally they got him into the back of the truck and they went rushing off to the hospital with tires spinning. That’s the worst thing about these parties, people get injured and guys start playing ambulance. They’ve been drinking and now they’re doing their best to scoop up the injured and kill them on the way to the hospital.
Another kid was on the ground, fighting for breath, and I thought he was finished. He was just as gray as ashes and he couldn’t breathe, he just gulped like a fish out of water. What happened was the truck ran him over and his lungs swelled up and he was having a heck of a time breathing. I got everybody to kneel down around him and we all said a prayer. Somebody found a blanket or coat and covered him up and waited for the ambulance, which of course had gotten lost on the bush roads. They didn’t have cell phones in those days, and the ambulance couldn’t find us, so somebody finally found the ambulance and guided it in. The paramedics scooped up that kid and rushed him to the hospital and he actually survived.
Eventually the cops arrived, too, and started hauling people off to the hospital and to jail. It was quite a body count. There were kids with broken bones and severe burns, and some were knocked unconscious. All kinds of girls were traumatized and crying uncontrollably, and by the time it all got sorted out fifty-one of these graduating students had to be treated for shock. Butch Mitchell, the one who caused the whole thing, was charged with four counts of criminal negligence causing bodily harm. It was more like attempted murder if you ask me. The fact that he didn’t kill anyone was sheer luck. I guess the soft ground helped, too, although I doubt that Butch was taking that into consideration when he was gunning the truck into the crowd and driving over people.
3
TIME TO GROW UP
“There’s nothing like failure to show you where you fit in the world.”
My mother always wanted me to make something of myself, to be a lawyer or an engineer or some kind of professional. And I always got pretty good marks in school even though I was a wild man. So in the fall of 1971 when I was eighteen years old I enrolled in the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. Let me tell you, not too many guys from my neck of the woods went to university, so that was pretty good. Louise was in nursing school in Edmonton, staying in a dormitory residence, and I was studying hard myself, trying to live up to the dreams that my mother had for my future.
Then Louise got pregnant with our daughter Shielo and we had to make a decision. Well, for me, there was no deliberation required. I loved her and I wanted her to be my wife. We were going to have a baby. It was all good. Her father never had much use for me, and when I went to see him he said, “She’s too young to get married. We’re not going to hold you responsible for this. You take off, go ahead, and we’ll deal with it.”
I told him it wasn’t going to work that way. I told him Louise and I were gonna get married and we wanted the families to be a part of it. But I let them know that we were going to get married either way. I guess at that point he realized he had lost his long and hard-fought campaign to keep me away from his daughter, and they just agreed to support us.
We decided the wedding would take place back home in Fairview. Actually, we didn’t decide anything. Once we told them that we were getting married the two families pretty much took over. They planned the whole thing. It was the middle of the winter and we were going to school down in Edmonton and all they did was tell us when to show up for the wedding. That’s the way it worked in those days.
We didn’t have a cent between us, but we were lucky because the families put it all together. My Auntie Lala made a beautiful wedding dress for Louise. My only job was to deliver it. Louise went up before me to attend the bridal shower and do all those girly things to get ready for the wedding.
Louise Debogorski
Alex and I were high school sweethearts. We met at a town dance in the Fairview Legion Hall.
We had our obstacles, like everyone. My dad didn’t like Alex. He thought he drove too fast and wasn’t good enough for me. He thought Alex was on the wild side, like way over on the wild side! When I was sixteen, Dad sent me down to Calgary to babysit for
the summer, hoping that would break us up, but we couldn’t stay away from each other.
When we were both eighteen, we were living in Edmonton and going to school and trying to make something of ourselves. Then I got pregnant and Alex said, “We’re getting married.”
There was never any question in his mind about it. And he went to see my dad and had a difficult conversation with him and settled the matter. But a lot of years went by before he told me about the time that he talked to my dad.
I didn’t know a thing about getting married. I’d never done it before! In those days, your dad forked over for the wedding and everybody in both families helped out. So we were lucky and it worked out wonderfully. Alex’s Auntie Lala made me a beautiful dress and I remember how special I felt when the ladies all fussed over me and helped me get ready.
It was January 28, 1972, very cold, but I picked green as the color of a new beginning. We danced all night, more dances that I’ve had with Alex before or since, and we both now agree it was the best wedding party we’ve ever been to. Down at the end of the street in Fairview there was this pink motel called the Flamingo. It had a big flamingo out in front and my girlfriends and I used to marvel at this big bird when we were little kids. When the wedding party was over, Alex and I went down to the Flamingo and had our one-night honeymoon. We had never stayed in a hotel or motel before, so we thought it was quite an adventure.
Eighteen years later Alex drove down to Florida for a little break. He likes doing that. He’ll just jump in a car and go. He put some bullhorns on the front of his big old Cadillac and took off for a couple weeks. We had six kids, so I stayed home. He phoned me from Florida and told me he missed me. “Why don’t you jump on a plane and come down here and see me?”
I reminded him that we had six kids and I couldn’t just disappear. But Alex is not the sort of person who takes no for an answer. So I scrounged around and managed to find friends who would watch my kids for a week, and I flew down to see him. We went to Disney World and spent hours standing in line to go on rides. It was just like we were teenagers again. I told Alex, “Let’s call this the honeymoon we never had.”
Auntie Lala gave me the wedding dress in a neat cardboard box and all I had to do was get it up to Fairview in one piece and not be late for the wedding.
I was driving this ’63 Acadian and wouldn’t you know, I had mechanical problems on the way home. The truth is, I was driving a little too fast. This car only had a small engine in it, and I blew the engine between Whitecourt and Fox Creek. So there I was sitting on the side of the road in a dead car at 30 degrees below zero.
I was dressed like most silly kids are when they’re eighteen or nineteen—light jacket, skinny shoes, and blue jeans. So I got out on the side of the road and started hitchhiking with this big box under my arm with my wife’s wedding dress in it. I guess it made a pretty good story for the people who picked me up. Here’s this kid with the wedding dress on his lap, looking at his watch because he’s worried he’s going to miss his own wedding.
I hitchhiked home with this wedding dress, then I conned my uncle into lending me a car for the wedding. It would be kind of bad to make your wife hitchhike to her own honeymoon.
The wedding took place at the Legion Hall in Fairview, Alberta, the same place we met, come to think of it. I’m not sure of the actual date because I get confused over which day is her birthday and which is our anniversary.
My dad never drank much. Every once in a while he went for a few drinks at the Legion and he would be sick for three days afterward. Anyway, he decided to have a few drinks at the wedding about midnight, but by then we had run out of booze. My dad got this idea in his head that Louise’s side of the wedding party drank most of it, and he said my father-in-law had hidden the rest so he could drink it himself. My dad was pissed off that he had finally decided to have a drink just when the booze was all gone. So the wedding could have wound up in a brawl, but it all worked out peacefully, more or less.
Then I quit school and we moved back to the Peace River country. I worked pretty hard, but I was just nineteen and still pretty wild. Because my mum died when I was young, I never really had much experience watching my parents work together as a couple. My dad pretty much ran the show. After I got married to Louise I figured that I would do pretty much the same—I would carry on acting like a teenager, doing whatever I pleased, and she would just go along with it. Well, any of you guys who are married know that life doesn’t quite work that way.
Back home when my buddies and I weren’t working, we were carousing and carrying on. My buddies enjoyed provoking the situation, of course, and I was pretty much being pulled in two different directions at once. They wanted to carry on with our wild ways and Louise wanted me to grow up and be a husband. The worst thing was when we went to parties. That’s when the fights would start, and often my buddies would start them. They didn’t want to actually fight, of course. They just wanted to watch.
My Short Career as an Oil Rig Worker
There’s something in men that likes to fight. It’s pretty pathetic. You don’t have to look at the six o’clock news—with wars tearing up the world from one end to another—you only have to walk down to the local bar, where you’ll see otherwise sensible grown men suddenly trying to kill each other just because one guy bumped into the other. I worked as a bouncer once and I saw it firsthand. Totally normal guys have some kind of ingredient inside them that turns them into maniacs as soon as you add alcohol.
When I was working on the oil rigs I met my match. Oil riggers are pretty wild guys, and of course when they’ve had a few drinks they’re even wilder. My buddies had a run-in with this tough fella named Dwayne Baker, and they told Dwayne Baker and his pals that they were going to get some reinforcements and come back to kick his butt. Well, it turned out that their reinforcement was me. I told them, “What did you do that for? I don’t even know this guy!”
I wasn’t too pleased. But it was too late, the fight was already arranged. So we went to this party, and sure enough, about eleven o’clock Dwayne Baker and his friends walked in, all ready to have this brawl. And this Dwayne was one tough customer. He was built like a donkey. And he loved to fight. Win, lose, or draw, it was all the same to him. He was the not the sort of person you wanted to go bare knuckles with.
I’d already resigned myself to the fight, and I figured the best defense is a good offense. So as soon as Mr. Baker walked in I started throwing wisecracks at him. And he was giving it right back to me. But it seemed I was a little better with my mouth than he was, and before you know it he got frustrated and hit me right in the yap.
As I was falling I reached out to grab something, and as luck would have it I grabbed him by the collar, flipped him, and ended up behind him, punching him in the head. It looked like a pretty cool move, but it was purely accidental. The back of the head is a very poor place to punch somebody. You can stun them if you do it hard enough, but oh, my hands were hurting and I was thinking, I’m going to break my hands if I keep on doing this.
So we started wrestling, and he drove me out of the living room and into the bathroom, where as luck would have it, he fell into the bathtub with me on top of him. You’re in a lot of trouble if you’re in a bathtub with someone on top of you because it’s slippery in there and you’re not getting up. I used to chew Copenhagen in those days, and when he punched me a couple of good ones in the face there was snuff coming out my nose and mouth. So I turned on the taps and washed the snuff off my face and let the water rise until it was up to his ears. I was sitting on him watching the water rise, and his guys yelled, “Don’t drown him!” so I let him up. He thanked me for not drowning him and shook my hand.
So he went off, no hard feelings, and a couple of months later, what do you know, we ran into each other again at a party. Dwayne Baker and his buddies were having a party down at those shacks at Beaver Drilling where they worked, and when I showed up at the party, he made a few rude comments and gave me a shove. I we
nt reeling back against the door, the door flew open, I went backward down the stairs and into the mud. Down the stairs comes Dwayne and he started whaling on me with his fists. As I mentioned, Dwayne was a good fighter, and this time, our fight went something like this—he hit me in the mouth, I took three swings at him and missed. He hit me in the mouth, I took three swings at him and missed. After getting pummeled for a while I got tired of it, and decided to step back. At that point I realized I had no ankle. I had broken my ankle in the somersault down the stairs.
I couldn’t fight with a broken ankle, so I started crawling toward my car. All Dwayne’s buddies lined up and started kicking me in the ribs with their steel-toed boots as I crawled toward my little Toyota Corolla. It was like running a gauntlet. I was a mess of boot kicks from my ass to my armpits. And to top it off, when I climbed into the car they started kicking it, too, and they managed to put a couple of dents in the fenders. I thought that was a little excessive.
I drove myself to the hospital and limped in and told the nurse I’d broken my ankle. She told me to go and sit down and she’d call the doctor. About three hours went by and still no doctor. I was sitting in the waiting room in terrible pain, and it was now three o’clock in the morning and I was thinking, Hmm, this isn’t very good. I was wearing a brand-new pair of cowboy boots that I’d just bought for eighty dollars and my foot was so swollen I couldn’t walk. So I got into the wheelchair and wheeled myself down to the nursing station and asked her where the doctor was. It turned out she hadn’t bothered calling him. I was just a young guy and I guess she was accustomed to drunken rig workers coming in all beaten up and she’s just hoping I’ll fall asleep or go home or something.