Crazy Al

A slice of life vignette

Photo by Norbert Buduczki on Unsplash

Let’s talk about Crazy Al…

The first time I met Al, he was introduced to me as the uncle of the girl I was seeing at the time. I was probably 21-22, and he was maybe 20. She was 19. I ended up moving in with her, and when we broke up a year later, he was standing there after the dust settled. We ended up hanging out together for a while.

The thing about Al is the his nickname among my friends was “Crazy Al”. And he was crazy. He liked drugs and he liked to fight. I liked drugs, but didn’t see the need to fight. We used to drop acid together. I was more into Speed and Acid combined. I remember we were sitting in a bar one day. I told him I dropped some Speed and was on my way to Edmonton to visit my brother. He said we should do some acid to celebrate. He bought fifteen hits of Purple Micro-dot acid someone was selling in the bar, lined them up on the table in front of us, opened them, then dipped his fingertip in his beer, and proceeded to ‘drop’ 15 of them. “You could at least give me one,” I said, and so he did.

Nobody believes me when I tell them that story. They say no one can do that much acid and not have it affect them. Well, he was up for four days. He actually fell asleep, and woke up still stoned. I even managed to get him a job at the mill and he was there with me on graveyard shift, still stoned, and wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night. I remember we were at a friend’s house one night and I was just starting to peak. I began to talk; to pontificate; to wax poetical. I was on a roll. I spoke non-stop for about forty-five minutes. He sat on the floor in front of me and couldn’t stop laughing. I was doing a light show with my lighter and cigarettes I was weaving through the air in figure 8’s and circles.

I’d lose him once in a while during the course of the three days, and suddenly find him in the weirdest of places. Once, he was hiding in a corner outside of the club we were in because it was raining and he was trying to slap the raindrops away. Another time, there was a fight and he thought he would give advice to the two fighters. One guys had the other on the ground and was going to punch him in the head. Al said: “I wouldn’t do that if I was you.” The guy did, the guy on the bottom moved his head and the other guy punched the pavement and broke his hand. “See? That’s why you don’t do that sort of shit. Fuckin’ hurts, don’t it?”

Once I finally found him, I told him to get in the car. Now, I don’t advise anyone to go driving while you’re high on acid and speed, but we used to do it for shits and giggles. He was freaking out and I told him to relax. I said the road was huge and we weren’t doing anything wrong. I said it was so big they had to divide it in half. All we have to do is stay on this side of it.

Al had a tattoo on his chest: a dragon with wings, and he used to walk around the clubs with his shirt undone. We were always telling him to do it up. Steve liked Al because he was crazy. He like to fight, and Steve’s brother liked to fight, and Scotty liked to fight. They all liked to fight. Except me. I didn’t fight. I liked to get high, and didn’t see the need to fight.

But Al was fun…for a while. We were downtown drinking in a bar called the Dufferin. It was a place to get good drugs, except he could never get anything when he was with me because I looked like a Narc. Clean jeans, nice shirt, sports coat and nice shoes. I told him I had to go to work. He said don’t worry, he’d get me there in time. He drove down the shoulder of the freeway all the way from Vancouver to Surrey. A ride that should’ve taken at least forty minutes because of the traffic. He had me home in 20 minutes.

And then I lost touch with him. He got too high I suppose, and quit his job at the mill. He ended up working as an enforcer for a drug dealing friend he had, and was beating people up that owed money. He said he found his calling in life. And then I introduced him to my new girlfriend. She was Indian, I told him. He said he was part Indian. I told him not that kind, the other. He looked at me blankly. “Not ‘feather’, but ‘dot’,” I said. He said if I was going to go out with her we couldn’t be friends anymore. I said, “Wow. Really?” “If it ain’t White, it ain’t right,” he said. “That’s too bad. But I think I’d rather be with her.”

I heard two years later that he’d been killed. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I thought. He was crazy. It was in the eyes. We’ve all see someone like that at one time or another. The man with the eyes that are cold, and bore right into your soul. His pupils were always dilated because of the chemicals he used to do, and by that time mine were pinholes because I’d discovered something different.

The thing about Crazy Al was that if I hadn’t met his niece first, we would’ve never been hanging out with each other. But she was a special woman. I didn’t work out with us because I was mature enough to be with her. She worked with special needs children and was just getting herself sorted out having been a victim, like so many other women out there. Not to get into any details, but I’d fallen asleep when she told me about the ordeal she’d been through. My brother ran into her at a dinner party some years ago. They recognized each other, and he told me that she took special needs foster children in, and had raised over fifty of them over the years. I told my brother she was a better person than all of us, and he looked at me and said: “Certainly you.”