Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

Outside those welcome summertime forays into Toronto nightlife, Lefebvre had his favored Calgary hangouts. One was the Prairie Dog Inn, a Seventeenth Avenue SW pizza joint located between Seventh and Eighth Streets, on the south side, with a skinny row of outdoor tables elevated slightly on a balcony that overlooked Tomkins Park across the street. Lefebvre recalls,

Mike, who ran that restaurant, was a little fat Mexican guy. He had a jukebox in the back, with songs like “Ruby Tuesday” and “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” and Jefferson Airplane. We’d smoke pot and go in there and buy pizza and beer, pizza and Coke. It was kind of like a beat place — gingham red-and-white tablecloths, beads hanging in the doorways.

There was the Java downtown, too. It was on First Street. Guys with motorcycles and black leather jackets would go there, chicks with long straight blond hair. It was more beat than the Prairie Dog, a little bit more on the greasy intellectual side. They weren’t longhaired guys; they were guys who looked like Jack Kerouac. Later, it turned into the Love Shop, one of Calgary’s first sex shops. And there was the Apollo Ballroom. It used to be a church, on Eighth Avenue a bit west of Fourth Street. That was where “Bible Bill” Aberhart preached — that was his church.

Aberhart, a Baptist minister elected premier of Alberta from 1935–43, believed people needed to spend their way out of the Great Depression and gave away government cash to families.

Lefebvre continues, “They’d get bands in there like Redbone. They had that song ‘Come and Get Your Love.’ We had tons of fun and nobody knew what the fuck we were doing. Our parents, I mean. The first time I did acid was probably 1967–68. People didn’t have a clue.”

Especially the people who ran St. Mary’s Boys’ School, for which Lefebvre no longer had time. More interested in acid than economics, he dropped out of twelfth grade in January 1969, two courses short of graduating. He wanted to be a freak, and his friends at the time were the Hoggan brothers, Frank, Jim, and Joe, especially the latter two. They all went to St. Mary’s Boys’ School together and formed part of a group of psychedelic Calgarians that also included Steve Lewis, Murray Christie, and Craig Humphries. All of them except Jim and Joe Hoggan, said Lefebvre, are dead. “Those guys were hard-livers.”

While Lefebvre increasingly felt he had little time for a straight education and, like most teenagers, was chafing under his mom’s discipline, Louise decided to go back to school and get a master’s in counseling and psychology. She commuted back and forth between Gonzaga University, Spokane, and Calgary. While she was away, Anne was the oldest and in charge. John was the wild one — that was a given — but Ted could be counted on to be responsible. And there were family friends on hand to help out, as there had always been.

Even when his mom was away, Lefebvre felt somehow that she was still in control. After his father died, an inescapable thought grew in his mind that the mom he had known in those early years had ceased to exist and a new version had taken over, a kind of mom/dad composite: “My mother overcompensated and concentrated on being a disciplinarian rather than a mother. She was trying to get us out to music lessons, get us out to serve mass in the morning, get us out to choir practice.”

It would be obvious to anyone outside the immediate family unit that Louise had to revise her parenting strategies after the loss of her husband. And maybe it wasn’t much of a stretch: based on Lefebvre’s memories of his dad, Mun wasn’t exactly the stern disciplinarian when he was around. But teenage perceptions, however refracted, can harden. Lefebvre explains, “In a way, I spent most of my adolescence and maybe my early adult years — and maybe even some of my middle adult years — jonesing for affection and approval all over the place.”

By the time Louise returned to Calgary to take up her post at St. Mary’s Girls’ School as a guidance counselor, her eldest son had a well-developed rebellious streak and was clambering to get into the real world of being a working stiff and getting high a lot. When he was sixteen he got hired onto a construction crew contracted to build Woolco department stores in Calgary. Turns out Lefebvre didn’t have much time for construction, either. On his first crew, he lasted until his initial check arrived. He quit and headed to the Highlander on Sixteenth Avenue NW, a tavern that had long been one of Calgary’s notorious drinking establishments, located just west of Fourteenth Street and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. People went there with the intent to drink and party hard. “It was a huge barn in those days,” says Lefebvre, “eight hundred seats and a rock ’n’ roll band. You could order a table full of draft.”

On weekends and sometimes even nightly, especially in summer, the space was crammed with drunken Calgarians, many of whom had ingested or smoked something else besides. “You could drink tons of beer and smoke lots of hash and drop lots of mescaline and psilocybin and be hippies in the bar.” Not just hippies, though. Students, laborers, transients on the road to Banff — didn’t matter, the place could fill up with rock ’n’ rollers and rednecks and acidheads and old drunks and dope smokers and crazies. By the end of the night everyone would be blitzed from all the cheap draft. From age sixteen to twenty-four, almost a decade, the Highlander was a Lefebvre stomping ground, a place to hang out, get loaded, score dope, chase women — a young man’s entire universe in microcosm.

Lefebvre did stick around construction sites long enough to pick up some schooling from an older coworker, a journeyman:

One day I was working with this carpenter. He seemed like a really old guy to me — he was probably forty. He was down on one knee and nailing at some concrete forming, rough carpentry. I was helping him. He was always down on one knee and all of a sudden he turned around and put his elbows on his one knee and shook his head and said, “You haven’t been away from home long, have ya?”

I thought, How the fuck did he know that? That was my first intuition that I had some things I had to learn how to hide yet. I started paying a bit more close attention to guys who were around me and how they were responding. There’s a mystique in our society about what men do and what men don’t do and you get a really good picture of it from the construction side of things. Everybody you run into has the same basket of problems. They may have a different flavor, maybe a different extent. But our problems are no worse than anybody else’s, probably a lot less than most people’s.

I remember this other guy, a smaller guy but he was big and round and he had one of those mustaches that you twist the end of it. I was eighteen and he was forty-five maybe and an unskilled laborer. I asked him about himself and he said there was a point at which he was drinking two bottles of whiskey a day.

“Two bottles! How can anybody possibly drink two bottles a day?”

“It’s not that hard.”

He had pins in his shin where he’d broken his leg from being drunk. Pins in his shoulder cause he’d broken his collarbone being drunk. Told me he drank so much rye it made him fat. Probably rye and Coke, right? I’m looking at the guy and thinking he’s spending each day of his life thinking, If I work all day, then after I work I can do whatever I want for as long as I want, as long as I get up to go to work at eight. And if I just do it long enough to get pogey [welfare] , then I can do whatever I want all I want and collect my pogey.

At age sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, well on his way to becoming a hippie, Lefebvre managed to get a few glimpses of the future, at least what it would be if he wasn’t careful about it. He learned that a lack of ambition wasn’t what underlined the plight of these construction lifers. There was ambition all right — the ambition to arrive at oblivion’s doorstep every night. He explains,