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The earring story...

My favourite picture of the wife

I was reading something today about someone getting her ears pierced when she was…I don’t know, grade five? But they got infected. She’d wake up and her ears would be all crusty. I smiled, because she said that she got them done in the doctor’s office.

I thought…a doctor’s office?

I smiled because it reminded me of when I got my ear pierced. It’s my left one; it was the 80s; and yes, I was stoned. Now, to put this into perspective, I want to say that before I got married, my wife and I “partied”…a lot. I was 23 and she was 19. I’d been at the mill for four years. I’d broken up with a girl I was living with and ended up moving in with my ex-brother-in-law. He used to hang out in a bar close to home while I was spending a lot of time down town, enjoying the Vancouver nightlife. There were a lot of bands coming up from the States before they made it big. Pearl Jam; Tom Petty; Bon Jovi; Bruce Springsteen; and the old favourites like Long John Baldry and Joe Cocker. In hindsight, moving in with my brother-in-law was probably not in my best interest. The only good thing that came out of it was that I met my wife at the bar/nightclub/hotel he used to hang out in. She worked behind the front desk of the hotel.

I saw her and was instantly smitten. She’s short (5 foot), dark (Fijian), and has a smile that lights up a room. I don’t want to get into all the sordid details of my drug days. They happened and now they’re passed. I did a lot of shit and somehow lived through it all. I also don’t want to make it sound like all we did was get high and have a lot of sex, we also figured out that maybe there was something there. There was. We’ve been married almost forty years now.

Anyway, back to the earring…

We had an electrician at work, Roscoe. We teased him because he was short, and he was Portuguese. He was fun. He was also on his way to being corrupted as well. He was married, had two girls, a house, and a business. He used to have a party once a year for everybody at the mill. They were wild, crazy affairs that I’m sure his wife simply tolerated. She was a wonderful woman. Linda. She was short, like Roscoe, had a round, cherubic face with an inviting smile. She was matronly, and the perfect hostess. The poor woman. She put out food that would never get eaten as much as she thought it would. But that was because most of us were on a chemical high. She put up with the dope smoking—you had to go outside and go for a walk because their two kids were sometimes home—but I don’t think she knew about the lines of coke in the bathroom; the acid, speed, and MDA—a forerunner to MDMA, and far better (it was cleaner.) It’s hard to eat when you’re on a three day speed bender, and just as bad when you’re on ‘DA. When you’re on ‘DA all you want to do is hug the person you’re with.

So, there’s the set-up, and there’s the crowd.

Now Roscoe lived close to where we were. My wife was in a small one bedroom apartment; I went over there the first night she moved in, and never left. We had no furniture. We had one of those fake fur rugs to sleep on, a transistor radio, and a backgammon board. Everybody else had a bit of a drive, so we decided to meet in a pub just around the corner from Roscoe’s house.

We took a cab.

When we got there we saw Tommy and Cherie; Joe Bubba and Sheila; Steve and his flighty girlfriend, Jeanine; Ward, the biker/millwright with his most recent wife; Steve’s brother, Brother “Nob” (Bob) one of the toughest street fighters in Vancouver at the time, and his girlfriend Barb; and Scotty and Bev.

The wife and I had dropped MDA and started peaking just as we entered the pub. Everybody was stoned on some sort of chemical, except maybe Sheila. That might be the reason she noticed that I was the only one sitting at the table who didn’t have an earring. Now, the thing about having an earring in the 80s, and in Canada, (as opposed to the States), was that if you wore an earring in your right ear, it meant you were gay. Canadians wore their earrings in the left ear—unless they were gay.

Someone said, “We should pierce it.” I think it was Sheila. She took her hoop earring out, grabbed an ice cube out of her glass and held it to my ear lobe, then tried to push the earring through. It bent. My wife took her stud out, gave it to Sheila who grabbed a coaster, and then pushed the post through my earlobe. I think Tommy dipped his fingers into his drink to sterilize it. I think Bob said maybe we should cauterize it.

We left for the party. I don’t even know who drove us there; I was feeling no pain. Linda met us at the door and saw my ear. She said, “What happened to your ear? It’s red.”

I told her they pierced it.

“When?”

“Just now. At the pub.”

“Did you put any peroxide on it?”

“Why?”

“So it doesn’t get infected. Jesus, what’s the matter with you guys? Wait here. I’ll clean it up for you.”

“Okay.”

I never took the earring out. I never cleaned it like she told me to, either. I’d turn it once in a while when I remembered, but for the most part, I just forgot it. I have two earrings now. I got the second one when my daughter asked if me she could have her ears pierced. She asked me to come with her, and then asked me if I’d get another piercing, in support.

“Okay.”

I still have my two earrings.

Don’t tell me you’re offended by anything I write about the mill. In the words of my wife: “Grow a pair!”

So I wrote this little piece because someone left me a comment saying they wanted to read about the mill. It’s not so much the mill as it is the characters that worked there, I think. Everybody had a nick-name. Joe Bubba ended up becoming a foreman. We called him Joe Bubba because he was in a bar across the line (Point Roberts, in Washington) and about to get into a fight. He grabbed the table in front of him and threw it to the side like he was in a bad movie. So we called him “Bubba”, like he was some big football player.

I’m willing to write stories whenever something triggers a memory; I just never know what’s going to trigger it. The thing I don’t realize is that because it was my only job, I didn’t know that it wasn’t like that in other places. I thought drinking on the job was what everybody did. I thought going to the pub for lunch and having a couple beers and a burger was normal. If I wanted to buy anything, I got it at work: Speed, coke, pot, acid, it was all there.

I told my wife I was going to write this because someone said they wanted me to write about the mill, and she said: “Buddy! You gotta.” I asked her if she remembered when I got my ear pierced and she started laughing. She said, “Remember when we went to THE PONDEROSA and got so high we had to take a cab home? But we lived so close it only cost us two dollars; the driver was pissed!”

“That’s why we gave him an eight dollar tip.”

The one thing I will say going into this, is that I will not even try to be Politically Correct. If you think you’re going to be offended because of the content, then don’t read it. Fair warning. But more than that, don’t leave me a comment telling me that I’ve offended you because I used the word “retard” and I can’t say that sort of stuff about people.

You don’t have to read it.

It’s offensive to you? I hurt your sensitivity?

Yeah right!

I’m a 65 year old retired mill worker. I use industrial language when I speak. That means I fuckin’ swear a lot. You can’t handle that sort of dialogue? I don’t really care. As an example of the Politically Incorrect dialogue, I give you Ward, the biker/millwright. He was well read and highly intelligent, but still, he’d say:

“Although I beat and flayed you

By the living God that made you,

You’re still a fuckin’ Hindu Gunga Din.”

Now, if my wife can laugh at that (see the picture above) what makes you think anything you say about being offended, is something I’m going to listen to? Sure it’s offensive, but get over it. Christ, I watched a Buddhist monk pour gasoline on himself and then light himself on fire…on the Six O’clock Evening News; I watched the Civil Right protests; I watched the Vietnam War. So you’ll have to forgive me if I think you’re a little over the top with your protests because a millworker I knew didn’t “understand” Gay Rights?

I do, and that’s what matters!

Oh yeah, one last thing. There’s no PAYWALL restriction. If you want to buy a year’s Subscription for $50, you still can. If you want to slip me $5/month, you still can. If you find yourself entertained by my friends in the mill, or maybe like my short stories, or maybe you like the novels, feel free to make a donation. Right now, it’s not fair to write a book for seven people. I have to build up a following. Let’s agree on a number, say…2000-2500 FREE subscribers before I put the Paywall up again. Does that sound fair?