I remember grooming my dad....

Dad would turn on the television for Hockey Night in Canada. He'd stretch out on the floor on his stomach, his chin on his arms, to watch the game. My sister and I would run for the curlers, a glass of water, and a comb. Whichever girl got there first got to sit on Dad's massive back. As long as we weren't too noisy, we could sit there and put curlers in his hair for the whole game!

Dip the comb in the water. Comb up a piece of hair. Put the curler at the tip and roll down to the root. Insert bobby pin. Enjoy the smell of Brylcreem wafting up from Dad's hair. Repeat.

My dad's hair wasn't long, but it was very thick, and we could use dozens of curlers before we had to take them out and start again. I saw nothing strange in this activity. I thought all girls put curlers in their fathers' hair while they watched hockey. I realize now that this wasn't so, and my respect for my father is immense.

I remember discovering a phrase that had been coined about me....

Year: 1987
Place: Friends' apartment near Denman Street, Vancouver

A whole gang of us had been out dancing and drinking and having fun. It was late in the evening, and we, one big leather-clad, spiky-haired, metal-studded monster, stumbled back to Adam and Geoff's apartment. One of the girls, maybe Nancy, headed into the bathroom to puke. When she came out, she flopped straight onto the couch and passed out like a dead thing. Somebody laughs. "Hey, she pulled a Paula!"

Ummm...I'm sitting right over here. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"Oh, man...you used to do this every f***in' night! We always had to drag you home from somewhere."

"Oh, yeah. That." I pretend to laugh because everybody is looking, but that really bothered me. Who were these people that I trusted so much, so much so that I was willing to walk around unconscious and let them guide me? I didn't really know any of them at all. I knew their names, but I knew nothing about their hearts.

I secretly vowed to become better at holding my liquor.

I remember winning a little drag race....

It was summer down in Southern Alberta, and it was hot. HOT. HOT!!! Our family was driving to Lake Newell near Brooks to spend a day at the lake. My little sister and I were sitting in the back seat of Dad's 1974 Mercury Montcalm, legs sticking to the vinyl from the heat.

As we pulled up to a stop light in Brooks, a very shiny red fancy car pulled up beside us. I don't know what kind of car it was, I was only a kid. Dad, with a twinkle in his eye, looked through Mom's open window to the young driver and revved the engine. The guy looked back at Dad, saw the family sitting in the giant boat of a car, and laughed. Dad revved the engine again.

The light turned green. The young guy put the pedal to the floor and pulled away, but Dad only let him get up to the front bumper, and then Dad hit it. We soared past that sports car and left him in the dust!! My little sister and I were bouncing up and down in the back seat from excitement! Wahoo!! The family beat the young hot shot! We looked back at him through the rear windshield and laughed and hooted.

At the next red light, the sports car pulled up beside us. "What do you have under the hood of that thing?" he asked my Dad. Dad told him some big number, 235 or 438 or something (I was just a kid, I don't remember!). The young man looked very impressed. He learned not to judge a car by its cover that day.

Too bad they weren't racing for pink slips!

I remember getting my first tattoo...

I was dating young Adam. He had a home-made tattoo gun, real punk rock: the motor was taken from a ghetto blaster, the needles were enclosed in a Bic pen casing and duct tape, and when he needed ink, he just went down to Office Depot and bought some. He was doing tattoos on anyone who would let him, and it was only a matter of time before he asked me if I wanted one. I certainly did! It was time to do something permanent in my very unstable life; plus, I could picture me as a grandmother one day, calling over the grandkids and saying, "Looky here at Granny's tattoo!"

I thought about it, and decided I wanted a Chinese-type dragon. Adam said he could do that. I decided that if I was getting a tattoo, I wanted to be straight--nothing to numb the pain (no alcohol, no drugs), and nothing to blame my choices on. Adam said that was really cool, and suggested listening to loud punk rock music to distract me some.

A home-made tattoo gun works very slowly. Adam worked on my right shoulder blade for four long hours the first day. "That's all I can do, my hand is cramping. We'll have to finish the colour work tomorrow." I came back to his little apartment the next day and he worked for four more hours on the already red and raw dragon. That may have been the longest four hours of my life! I don't care how loud you turn up the Black Flag or Subhumans...a slow tattoo still hurts.

Yup, that's me in the photo, a few weeks after the job was done. About a year later, Adam added scales to the body, but he had a real gun by that time, and it only took about an hour. When I went for my most recent tat, I told the artist about Adam's home-made gun, and I could see his level of respect for me rise about 98%. He had never seen a tattoo made with a gun like that, though he had heard about such guns.

I still can't wait to show my tattoos to my grandkids one day, IF I ever have any. I doubt they'll be as impressed as that last tattoo artist, but it'll still make my day.

I remember the first time I tried acid...

I worked with a skinny little fellow, lets call him Simon. He managed a little downtown bar off of Denman Street in Vancouver, and I was bartending there part-time. Picture a shorter, skinnier version of Tiny Tim, and you are picturing Simon.

One day at work, he asked me if I'd ever done LSD. I hadn't. He asked me if I wanted to. I thought about it, and I did want to try it. He said we'd need a whole day and a safe place where we wouldn't be disturbed. I had no roommates, so my apartment was to be the place. It seemed to take a lot of planning; marijuana took no forethought at all, other than the need for a match. I wondered how hippies had managed to take LSD so successfully if it took so much organization.

Simon buzzed my apartment on the decided morning. I was quite excited. I had read about hallucinations, and I was hoping I wouldn't be disappointed. I wanted to see things that weren't there! Simon entered the apartment and handed me a little square of paper. "What's this?"

"That's the acid. You put it on your tongue."

"I'm supposed to eat paper?"

He popped his little square onto his tongue, showboating his experience compared to my naivete. "Just let it get soggy, then swallow it. Then we wait."

"We have to wait?" Again with the planning. With weed, you smoked it, you got high, just about that quickly. I was going to have to wait? "How long do we have to wait?"

"It takes awhile. Just relax. Remember, if you start freaking out, I'm here to guide you through your trip." Simon was being very superior, I thought, but I was glad there was someone there with experience.

We sat in my apartment talking for awhile. I looked at my hand and noticed that it seemed to be breathing on its own, which I thought was really cool. I asked Simon if perhaps the acid was starting to kick in. He said that it was, and not to be scared. I wasn't scared at all! I looked around the apartment, and I could see the walls breathing, too! It made me laugh out loud. I knew it was just induced by the drug, so I didn't see what there was to be afraid of. I began exploring my apartment, enjoying all the silly and bizarre things it seemed to be doing.

I have no idea how long I was distracted by the walls and the carpet fiber, but when I looked back at Simon, he was laying flat on the floor with his eyes closed and his body rigid. "Simon?" He didn't respond to me at all. He just kept moaning about horrible things, calling out to Satan to leave his mother alone, that sort of thing. Yecch. I didn't know what to do for him. If his eyes did open, he'd look at me and start talking to me as if I was his mommy. Blech!!! He didn't appear to be in any physical danger, so I decided the best thing to do would be to leave him to his private nightmares and go sit on the deck.

The sky was beautiful. The light rays bouncing from high-rise to high-rise were electric. If Simon the Experienced was having a bad trip, I was having a good one. I just sat on the deck for hours, watching the sun move across the sky, watching a spider build a web, watching feathers form on the back of my hand...that sort of thing.

When Simon finally regained lucidity, he joined me on the deck. I tried to tell him how he was all freaked out, but he seemed to think nothing had happened, no time had passed. I let it go. The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. We went for a walk when we started to come down. That was about it.

I wish my first trip had been a bad one, actually. The experience had been so magical for me, I made LSD my drug of choice for almost a year after that, dropping acid on average twice a week. I didn't have any bad trips until the last two. The second last one was scary, and I decided that if that ever happened again, I'd quit. The next time I took acid, the last time, I was so nearly permanently disturbed that I knew the ride was over. I wonder how many memories I traded for those little pieces of paper? The whole reason I started this blog are because of the giant holes in my mental history, and I am convinced that the huge amount of LSD I took are what put them there.

Break on through, indeed...

I remember getting bit by a dog...

It was the summer of 1985, somewhere in eastern Nebraska. I was selling books with the Southwestern Book Company, based in Nashville, Tennessee. I won't even get into the psychological brainwashing you have to allow in order to be successful at door-to-door sales. I just want to tell this one story.

It was my day to ride with our sales manager, to follow her around and see how it's done. She had a car, so she was selling out in the country, driving to farmhouses to show them books. Linda was so good at the job, she sold books at almost every house we stopped at. I was in awe. We pulled into another farm house, and as I got out of the car a big farm dog loped towards me. He looked friendly compared to some we'd seen, so I was able to push away my normal fear of strange dogs (I had been terrorized by a neighbor's dog when I was a child, and I had a healthy respect for dogs I'd never met). I reached out to pet him, and he bit my wrist, quite hard. I turned away from him slightly, and as he released his grip on my wrist, his teeth snagged my back pocket, ripping through my pants and cutting my skin a bit.

My reaction was swift and immediate. "BAD DOG!! Go lie down!!!" He hunkered down in shame and ran over to the corner of the house and curled up. I couldn't believe it. If I had tried to run, that dog would have been all over me, but somewhere in my bookseller-brainwashed-I-can-solve-every-problem brain, I found the right thing to do.

It turns out nobody was home at that farm, so we put a couple of band-aids on my wrist and headed to the next one. You don't stop selling books for a little thing like a dog bite.

I remember sneaking illegal substances past the border guard....

I had traveled alone on a Greyhound bus down to San Francisco for a vacation back in 1989. My friend was working there, and she hooked me up with all the great parties. I have a few memories from this trip, they'll probably work into other blog entries....but for now, I'm thinking about the ride back.

My friend, D., happened to be in Frisco doing some band business (she was a promoter for alternative and punk bands). It made way more sense for me to travel back with her in her van than to buy another Greyhound ticket! D. planned to drive back all in one shot, using speed to help her stay alert on the road. My job as navigator was to mix the speed into our drinks and keep an eye out for the cops (I had to stay awake, too, to help D. stay awake!!). We drove too fast, listened to loud punk rock music, we waved at cute boys in other cars...it was quite a trip.

We pulled up near the border in the very middle of the darkness of the night. The speed was all gone, no problem there...but there was a bit of marijuana that we planned on smoking once we got home so we could fall asleep. What to do? Obviously, I wasn't thinking that clearly anymore, and I suggested that we hide it. I took D.'s little garbage can by the driver's seat, dumped it on the ground, then took a nondescript dark plastic container out from the midst of the refuse. I stashed the weed in the container, dumped all the garbage back into the can and put it back by the seat. "There! He'll never see it." We felt very clever.

When we got to the border, the guard took one look at us, all tattooed and wild-eyed, and told us to pull over. I can tell you honestly that I wasn't nervous at all. We sat side by side on a little bench while he proceeded to go through every box and bag and suitcase in the van. As he came across all the band merchandise that D. had, he was very suspicious--the one band, Lard, had given D. baggies of actual lard to use as band promotional material. We could see the guard hold up the baggie full of a white square like he'd hit the jackpot....we saw him open the baggy, stick his finger into the lard, then taste it to see what drug it was....it was all we could do to keep from screaming with laughter!

After about half an hour of fruitless searching, he let us go. I promptly rolled a big joint as soon as we were on the Canadian highway, and we toasted each other's good fortune.

This story. I don't know how to tell it. I look at it now, and I am amazed that we didn't end up with a huge fine or a criminal record. I feel like I should turn it into a morality tale of how bad drugs are....but I just can't. Don't get me wrong...I think drugs stole the best part of my brain, and I have no desire to do them again--yes, kids, they are bad. But this story! We got away with it! We stuck it to the man!! No other experience I've had can match the glowing feeling of invincibility we had as we smoked that weed on the last leg of the journey home.

I remember feeling bad for Peter.

Grade 8 in small-town Alberta, sitting in class listening to the teacher. She asks me to read aloud from the text. I stand and read, clearly and with good diction. I feel somewhat proud of my reading ability. She asks the person behind me to read, and they do so, and so on down the row. She gets to Peter, the last in the row. He stands to read, and he can barely get the words out. He is sounding out simple words, words like "actual" and "promise". I become very embarrassed for him. Some kids are giggling, but I can't join in. I wonder how he can have got to Grade 8 without being able to read. I want to stand up and read for him. I want to tell the teacher to quit asking him to read, she knows he can barely do it. I do none of these things. I feel bad.

I remember my sister talking to me about love...

I was hanging out in my bedroom way back in, oh...1977 or '78. My oldest sister, Carol, who was home for a visit, waltzed into my bedroom and flopped onto my bed.

"Love is grand!"

I had no idea what she was talking about.

"Look at the hat he bought me at the Calgary Stampede! It was really expensive!!" He had bought her a cowboy hat. I tried it on, but at the age of 11 or 12, my head was already much bigger than Carol's, and it perched on top of my hair like a novelty hat. We laughed.

"He makes me feel so wonderful! I just want to spend all of my time with him! One day you will fall in love, too, Paula, and you will see what I am talking about." She sighed happily, then floated out of the room.

I sat down on my bed, wondering if there was someone out there who would buy me a cowboy hat one day, and would that actually make me float like Carol.

I hoped so.

I remember my first black eye...

It did not happen in my childhood. I had scrapes and bruises like most kids, but no black eye, no broken bones. It did not happen in my teenage years. I wasn't really a brawler.

It happened at a Red Hot Chili Peppers' concert. I was in my early twenties, probably 1989. The Peppers were playing at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, the place with the springy dance floor. I was very excited, everybody I knew was excited...the Peppers were touring the "Mother's Milk" album and it was going to be an explosive show.

The dance floor was packed. The term "mosh pit" hadn't really come into vogue yet, but picture a mosh pit with about 800 people, all just going bananas! (There were no spectators, if you know what I mean.) I was right in the middle of the floor, dancing like a maniac. At one point I vaguely remember making contact with some sweaty hunk's elbow...we grinned at each other and kept on dancing. I didn't think anything of it--I was making contact with everyone around me!

At the end of the night when I went to the ladies room to freshen up, I saw I had a huge shiner! My left eye was turning that beautiful purple-black colour. It must have been the elbow from the cute hunk...

This black eye became a badge of honor for the time it took to heal. "Where'd you get the black eye, Paula?"

"Oh, I was slamming seriously hard at the Chili Pepper's show..."

Inevitably..."Coooooooooool!" with a tone of hushed reverence and awe.

Yup, I milked that black eye for all it could give me. Looks like I still am!