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

The real goal is to get away from something. You’ve got a hole inside and you think you’re going to fill it up with alcohol or meth or whatever. You’re not loved by someone you want to be loved by. But you can’t remember that, you just remember the scar.

It’s like when you go to jail, you’re feeling really bad for yourself. You want to tell anyone who will listen how you got fucked. And you get about one second into it and some guy looks at you and says, “You know what, kid? Shut up, ’cause you’re making a fool of yourself. Do your own time.” These guys have things like children dying, terminal illnesses, alcoholism — big problems. It’s a little bit harsh, the lesson, but it’s important.

With the construction industry populated with such stoic but dead-end characters, Lefebvre was even more convinced he was in the vanguard of a revolution moving toward some new type of consciousness expansion. He was smoking dope, dropping acid, and developing a new way of seeing the world — a new connection with the cosmos. It was an intense period of discovery, and he and Jim Hoggan were all in.

They began reading Alan Watts’s This Is IT and other philosophy books. In his essay “This is IT,” written in the fifties, Watts argued that the true religious experience has nothing to do with religion or cosmology and everything to do with what is happening in the here and now. In the awareness, recognition, and acceptance of an eternal present, existence ceases to be a problem. Instead, we marvel that all things are self-evident and just as they are — as opposed to how we think they ought to be. Watts experimented with acid, mescaline, and marijuana in the early sixties, and Lefebvre and Hoggan followed his path. They would drop acid together and discuss this new consciousness they were developing, and it changed their lives.

Of course, sometimes they were so tripped out — trying to levitate in the living room, thinking they had levitated, telling Lefebvre’s mom they in fact had levitated — it was hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t. One time Louise was in Bragg Creek, twenty miles west of Calgary, and she received a panicky call from her son, “Mom, can you come right home?” Louise was terrified, but it turned out Lefebvre and his friend Jim had been practicing Transcendental Meditation. When she walked into the house, all her son could blurt was “Mom, I saw the white light!”

Louise recalls,

I used to come home from work and see there was a pear on the mantel — a real pear — and John’s friend was there. And you could smell incense. One of John’s eyes would turn in. They were meditating on the pear. Whatever it meant, I don’t know.

“John, you’ve been smoking that stuff again.”

“What stuff?”

By this point, Louise was no fool. She was a school counselor, and police officers had paid a visit to St. Mary’s to show her and everyone else samples of pot and hash. They all took a good whiff so they would recognize the former’s pungency and the latter’s sweetness. A younger teacher or two may have been obliged to feign ignorance.

Lefebvre soon moved out. He rented a room in a house in a downtown neighborhood called the Beltline with about a dozen other hippies, freaks, and acidheads. “It was a big house, maybe four or five bedrooms, with more in the basement for a couple, and a bed in the living room.” Lefebvre had a girlfriend named Patty who lived there with him. Or, more precisely, he had a girl he slept with. “Sometimes these other girls would come and Patty would say, ‘Yeah, that’s okay, go ahead, I’ll just sleep over here.’”

Jim Hoggan lived with his brother Frank in a house along the Bow River (which runs west to east and bisects Calgary) across from downtown, on Memorial Drive. Lefebvre recalls,

And near 1152 Memorial there were a couple of houses—1148 had some hippies in it. There were some guys who were actually selling dope and making money at it.

And then, where I was living, there was Murray Christie and Tom Johnson, an older hippie who had been in Britain. He had those boots with the little high heels on them, his fuzzy hair and muttonchops and British hippie clothes. He was hardcore, actually. He had already been interested in speed and he would take heroin sometimes.

An LSD trip lasted for eight to ten hours, which was a good deal. Even so, a hit went for anywhere between four and six bucks. “It was a lot of money in those days, but hey, it lasted a long time for me — decades — so it was worth it.” Forty-one years later, on the receiving end of three tabs of Sandoz Laboratories — quality LSD for his fifty-ninth birthday, Lefebvre would revisit his acid salad days. A half tab was all he would need to reinforce his conviction about the drug’s positive, mind-expanding power.

Between the three houses on the north side of the Bow and Lefebvre’s Fifteenth Street SW pad, there were plenty of opportunities to score acid. Word started to get around. Freaks would come to the door, often freaks no one at the household really knew, maybe a friend of a friend, maybe not. Lefebvre wasn’t dealing to make money. He wasn’t even dealing to cover his own consumption of drugs. He was just living in the house. If a hippie came to the door and wanted some acid he would happily oblige. He says,

I was just living with the dealers. What would happen was, guys would come to our houses and buy dope. They’d ring the doorbell and say, “Got any acid?”

“Sure, Tom’s got some,” I’d say. So I’d go down to the usual spot and get a couple of hits of acid, take the money, and give it to Tom or Murray or whoever. You’d sell dope to anybody.

On July 17, 1969, the sky was clear and the temperature hovered around seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, an excellent day for a freak to be alive. Lefebvre says,

That night we were going to see this band we’d never heard, but heard was really good. This guy named Daisy, who ended up being a biker in the King’s Crew — he was the real deal — had a 1953 Studebaker. He was going to pull up and five guys were going to jump in his car and drive up to Edmonton to see Led Zeppelin.

Another guy named John Champlain, he had a 1956 Plymouth station wagon. He pulled up and said, “Man, pack your bags, we got to go to New York! All these bands are going to play — Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, far out, man. But first we got to go up to Edmonton to see Led Zeppelin.” John, who had a curled-up mustache that made him look like a musketeer, was the guy who, upon finding his stash had been stolen, capped a bunch of Drano and put it in the same place.

And then the cops came.

So much for Lefebvre’s intention to get to the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 15–18, 1969. He wasn’t the only one out of luck — simultaneous multiple busts at a half-dozen houses netted about eighty freaks. “We were suffering under the illusion that if they didn’t come over and bust you with the dope you couldn’t get busted,” Lefebvre says. “We didn’t comprehend the idea of undercover cops.”

Two RCMP officers and a Calgary policeman had infiltrated the scene by dressing like hippies, coming to the door and scoring drugs. “From that summer on,” Lefebvre said, “we never, ever sold any dope to anybody we didn’t know. They taught us well.”

The cops came to the door at 7:30 in the morning, and Lefebvre didn’t have much time to react. “I just grabbed what was closest to me,” he said. “Turns out I put on jeans that belonged to Tom Dietermann, a guy from California.”

Most everyone in the house was awake because they were expecting Daisy to swing around in the Studebaker to pick them up. Lefebvre and his housemates were herded into their kitchen, where the cops gave them the shakedown. Outside, three squad cars and a police wagon idled.