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

Lefebvre said, “I went downtown to get booked, which was freaky. I was seventeen. A couple of the chicks got busted, too. Everybody except the girls was older than me — they were sixteen or seventeen. Whoever sold acid at the door got busted. I sold two grams of hash and maybe five hits of acid in three different transactions. For three months or so they were running around town buying dope from guys, taking pictures from down the street.”

Jim Hoggan didn’t get busted. He was never photographed at the front door in an exchange. He was more into giving it away. But little brother Joe was caught and ended up serving time. “He took it on the lam for a year,” says Lefebvre, “so we weren’t in jail together.”

The new consciousness wasn’t supposed to end this way for Lefebvre. His space trucking had seemed unstoppable — from flower power to Hendrix and Cream and psychedelic hard rock, from the riots of ’68 in France and America to the border of the Woodstock nation — he’d been flying. Now he’d plummeted and landed with a thud. Earthbound. Or was he?

He continues,

We’re downtown getting booked, and I saw that they were making guys empty their pockets, seeing what was in their pockets. That made sense to me. It also made sense to me to surreptitiously check my pockets. Well, I found two hits of lime green. I was sitting beside Steve Lewis and so I went like this to Steve [gesturing with his eyes toward his pocket], and he put his hand out and I dropped one in his hand, so I had one and he had one. And I was looking around and [pops tab in his mouth]. So the first night I was in jail I was ripped on lime green. It was good.

Lefebvre says captivity never put him or Lewis on a bummer: “It was freaky but we were calmed down by then, in a weird way. We’d been halfway around the universe and back again. I had a clear understanding that all of this shit was small-minded. A trip’s a trip, wherever you’re doing it — in jail, in London, in Balzac, Alberta — doesn’t matter.”

Lefebvre turned eighteen on August 6, 1969. He was convicted, sentenced to one year in jail, and entered prison in November 1969. He began counting days at the Calgary Correctional Centre, also known as Spy Hill, located on the northern outskirts of the city. He spent New Year’s 1969–70 with hardened criminals before being transferred sixty miles north to another penal institution. He says,

I wound up doing eight months. Six weeks in Spy Hill, which is a provincial jail, then six and a half months in a joint in Bowden, Alberta. At that time Bowden Institution was called Bowden Institute, and it was for first-time offenders — people doing two years less a day, or less. Anyone who was doing two years or more wound up in a federal penitentiary, either south in Drumheller or up in northern Alberta. Bowden was filled with not-heavy guys and about forty of my good friends. I learned a lot about bridge. They let us have a guitar in there.

The treatment of Lefebvre and his dope buddies wasn’t harsh by anyone’s standards, but it was an amusing pastime and, yes, a power trip for some guards to try to make the lives of these young men miserable. Lefebvre says,

The guards were guys who never made it past private in the army, and here was their chance to boss you around a little bit. Some of them were pricks. I was clear in my mind that although they were in a position of power they were small-minded fuckers. They didn’t get under my skin much because I realized, Okay, you guys got me now, but one day I’m going to be out of here and you’re still going to be here doing the same thing.

Eight months seems like a long time. Three days ahead seems a lot longer than three months behind. I started in Spy Hill, where there’s a bunch of guys who’d been in jail before. You learn quickly what you need to do to get by. The first rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight Club, and the first rule of being in jail is do your own time.

You’ve got to learn who’s in charge. In the inmate community there’s a hierarchy. The guys who have seniority are usually the guys who have been in the most, or who are the toughest on the street, more or less. It’s kind of like the David Milch series Deadwood . The way the inmate prison community is governed is about making it easy for everybody to do their time. Anybody who’s being a dink gets taken care of. Anybody who whines gets taught a lesson. I was fortunate because I knew forty guys who were doing bits at the same time I was. We weren’t all in the same dorms but among the forty of us it became known fairly quickly that these guys are a little bit different and you shouldn’t really fuck with them because they know some heavy people. And we did. Whatever else we were, we were drug dealers, and some drug dealers knew what guns were for. We weren’t all just little kids.

Lefebvre managed to quit doing drugs for four of the eight months he was in jail. In the middle of his stretch, a friend came for a visit and slipped him a bit of something. He recalls,

Actually, I remember Don Ochowicz got out for a Christmas day pass with his family. He came back with three joints and four hits of acid shoved up his ass in tin foil. He was having a hard time evacuating it, but eventually he did. I guess it was with Steve Lewis again — we did another hit of acid together in Spy Hill on Boxing Day 1969. We dropped the acid about two hours before lights out, and after lights out we lit up this joint. We were in bunks next to each other and we were passing this joint back and forth. We got in maybe three, four tokes each when somebody yells, “Hey, those guys got tokes!” So it was one more quick hit each and you ate it, gulp, like this. So we’re stoned on acid and pot and the screw’s running around trying to see who’s smoking dope. Those were the days. On New Year’s Eve there was a show on TV and Simon & Garfunkel were performing their new song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

Lefebvre’s story of incarceration seems quaint when compared to the modern perception of jail as a hellhole parallel society that reinforces negative sexual dynamics. Becoming someone’s bitch was never an issue, he recalls, despite the urban myth-making machinery of American television and films: “Sure, they talked about it, but you can’t fuck around with people like that. It wouldn’t take too long for the guys in charge to realize that I knew how to stay out of everybody’s hair. As a matter of survival, you get to know the guys you need to know to make sure nothing happens to you. So if there are violent homosexual guys, I never encountered them in all the times I’ve been in jail. I’m sure it happens, but for every violent homosexual guy there is in jail, you’re going to find two equally violent homophobes.”

With so many hours to fill and only so much reading to be done, Lefebvre had to figure out how to pass the time without losing his gourd:

We played a lot of bridge, all day Saturday and Sunday. It’s an intellectual game — that’s what makes it interesting. And in jail, it’s even more interesting because everybody there knows two hearts and two hearts [rubbing his nose] mean two different things. The second one means I’ve got a whole bunch of hearts but only up to the queen. If you just say two hearts then you’ve got at least the king and maybe the ace. They’ve got all this cheating built in. So you’ve got a tournament in jail, you got four guys sitting at a table and each guy sitting at the table has a scrutineer, and your scrutineer watches the guy beside you. It’s like: “He twitched!” “No, you twitched!” Pretty funny.

Louise Lefebvre, trained by faith and vocation to empathize with suffering, visited her oldest son regularly. She was heartbroken but supportive. Her psychology training and counseling at St. Mary’s — the girls’ school had amalgamated with the boys’ school and become St. Mary’s High School — came in handy. Every Sunday she drove north on Highway 2 for seventy-five minutes to the big house. John’s fifteen-year-old brother, Ted, who had always looked up to John and still does, accompanied her. Once there, they played bridge together — or tried. Ted, who watched, had other ideas. “He knew the ace of spades was a good card,” Louise remembers, “so he stuck it up his sleeve. It really botched up the game. Ted put on a brave front but was upset about John’s arrest, I found out later.”