Ch ch ch changes…

They say change doesn’t happen overnight but it’s not true because on my 18^th birthday I went from imagining being part of ANY social scene at all to being smack dab in the middle of the coolest one in Sault Ste. Marie.

The year was 1977 and it was the end of February. I was halfway through grades 12 and 13 (doing five years in four because I figured the sooner I got to university in The Big Smoke, the sooner I could re-invent myself as a social scene super star). The plan was for Babs (my bookworm friend who had read Atlas Shrugged AND The Godfather by age 12) to meet me at my place at 6:30 so we could get to the Vic before 7:00 p.m.

I was wearing my new plaid flannel shirt from The Cat’s Meow, navy blue Levi cords from Davis Clothing, and had my precious Age of Majority card in one coat pocket, $5 in the other. My one bushy eyebrow had been recently plucked to make two skinny eyebrows (ouch!) and I’d even tried a little round face contouring with a liquid tint product that was soon no longer for legal sale.

I’d also tinted my lips with it so if I die mid-writing this blame toxic make-up products from Woolco.

You might think $5 wasn’t much for a night out but with draft at 25 cents a glass, and me a novice drinker, it was plenty. You might also think getting to the Vic before 7:00 was kind of lame, but we actually had to line up to get in, which was totally nerve-wracking, but then the last of the day drinkers cleared out and we were good to go.

The Vic was no place for a young person during the day, it being dreary with old men, including the dads of friends. Dodging dads was a part-time gig for my friends, but my mother wouldn’t have been caught dead in the Vic, so no worries for me. I don’t know if women were even allowed to day drink at the Vic.

School nights could be dreary/dodgy, too, and I remember one Wednesday night my friend Vicki, who was supposed to be in her room doing homework, like me, suddenly slipping under the table mid-sentence, her dad having just walked in. Luckily, he headed to the other side, the Vic being split into two big rooms, and we were able to get out the back door and head over to the Algonquin.

It was already hopping when Babs and I got in, popular kids from Collegiate and other high schools, notably Sir James Dunn, where my mother was the librarian, were everywhere, the waiters (male members of the Chow/Chan owners) busy delivering their best “put-upon” service.

In time, Desmond Chan would become Ev’s (later in the story) and my regular waiter. He had a bit of a thing for Ev, who was underage but looked older than me, which for some reason reassured everybody should the cops ever show up to do an ID check, which fortunately they never did.

The door checked my ID every. single. time. because they knew I had it. Ev’s never, even though she had expertly faked ID, courtesy pinching an older drinking friend’s Age of Majority card and working her magic on it before returning it, our older drinking friend none the wiser. In fact, Ev’s fake ID had her at 21, so she was even legal to drink over in Sault Michigan on Sunday nights at the Alpha and the Backdoor. We had to get me a fake ID so I could do it, too, but I forget now how we did that. Maybe an old one of my sister’s (5 years older so completely ridiculous since at 18 I looked 16, not that the Alpha or Backdoor ever checked our IDs anyway).

Unimaginable now but Ev and I used to hitchhike across the International Bridge with fake ID, drink with a bunch of strangers, and hitchhike back across again, my mother and Ev’s parents thinking we were out bowling. I think I even remember getting pulled over once and getting in trouble about the fake ID but then a custom’s guy giving us a ride home.

Lessons were different back in the day. Sometimes the lesson was your life was completely over as you knew it, sometimes you got a ride home from a custom’s guy.

So there we were, Babs and I sitting at a table with a bunch of strangers, because there was no such thing as a table to yourselves on a Friday night at the Vic, excited to be anywhere, but thrilled to be, finally, at the coolest spot in town.

All of a sudden, I think it was around 8:00 p.m. there was a shout from across the room.

“McLeod! Hey, McLeod! I’ve been wondering when you’d show up here! Join us!”

It was Ev, from way back in grade 5, but then moved to another part of town, and she was sitting with the wildest girl from school, Patti, who was so far out of my social league that Babs, when I looked at her to see if we dared, subtly shook her head.

Alas for Babs this was pretty much everything I’d ever dreamed of and so it was that we parted ways, our friendship left to childhood and our beggars-can’t-be-choosers teen years, Babs graciously bowing out with a “Be careful – they’re kind of… bad”.

(A year and a half later Babs would give up a full scholarship to Queen’s for a jerk named Dave, who broke up with her shortly after her return home to the Sault. Of course, being studious, in spite of reading too many Harlequin romances, as my mother said, she would go on to become a chartered accountant – by correspondence. Man did she have to suck up a lot of disappointment from her parents. Cripes, HER parents? My mother was furious, “What the hell’s the matter with that girl?! She gave up a full scholarship to Queen’s! I went to Queen’s! And for that jerk! What did I always tell you?! She read too damned many Harlequins!”)

So Babs gone I joined Ev, who would become my partner in fun for almost a decade, before husbands and kids and then, for whatever reason, not answering my calls anymore. At the time, I was hurt. But I get it now. I was too much and she’d had enough. Our friendship was a period piece and that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay, it’s wonderful. We’re forever young and fun, Ev and I, at the Vic, later in Venezuela, later still in Mexico.

And, actually, that evening Ev bowed out a couple of hours after Babs, the Vic not being her last port of call, Ev being more of an Algonquin or Eastgate girl.

Not me. I was always the Vic or nothing, although I put in time at the Algonquin and Eastgate – even the Canadian – for Ev’s sake. She was Black Sabbath, but I was Fleetwood Mac. Also, even though Ev was taller and broader than me, Swedish and Estonian, she wasn’t much of a drinker, and favoured mixed drinks over draft, which were more expensive.

Neither of us were about Tiffany’s, which was the disco in the Sault, and for some the hottest spot for sure. Also coke central where I spotted more than a few of our teachers, glittery-eyed, when we’d check it out the odd time, just in case whoever I had my eye on was there.

I always had my eye on somebody.

Beer and boys.

It was probably around 10:00 p.m. when it was just me and Patti and all her cool friends. There was Leonard, Billy (they were cousins), Kevin (23 year old drug dealer and my first boyfriend), Denise, Linda, and a bunch of other people who would come and go over the next few months as part of my new social scene. Really, I went from 0 to 100.

Linda, aka “hot box”, had the most amazing body I’ve ever seen, and I saw it in its entirety at a party at her parent’s cottage at Pointe des Chenes when she did a strip tease as a… party favour? It was one of those parties that was definitely out of my league, and Leonard’s, as we tried to figure out how we could escape and get back to town, after being conscripted into rolling joints for Hell’s Angels or Satan’s Choice or whatever that biker gang was that dropped by… invited?

But that night at the Vic and for many nights after, also at the Vic, Patti was the center, the star, and when she turned her attention to me, well, that was it, I was in, I was one of the cool kids. And as soon as the snow melted I was riding around Sault Ste. Marie on a bicycle built for two with the coolest girl at school, skipping class, getting stoned, trying to figure out how to end a possible pregnancy.

Hers, not mine, me being a late bloomer, as they say.

That night we became blood sisters. A little slice into our palms, intermingling of blood, in it for life.

Of course, blazing stars being what they are, by summer Patti had moved on and Ev had moved in.

Anyway, we were having so much fun my birthday night that when last call came, rather than be there when the lights came up, which became our thing, leaving before the lights came up, we headed out to Patti’s, her parents and zillions of brothers and sisters being elsewhere, to continue the party.

For whatever reason, but most likely the 25 cent draft, I’d completely blocked out my mother and her “Be home by 11:00 p.m.” And of course it being 1:00 a.m. already, well, we didn’t have cellphones back then and even if we did she’d have been just as mad getting called at 1:00 a.m. as she was when Patti called her at 3:00 a.m. to let her know I’d be staying over.

I was asleep under the kitchen table.

My mother didn’t speak to me for days? weeks? months? and yet instead of feeling punished, or like a kid, I felt free. I’d finally crossed a barrier my older sister crossed when she was 13, my younger sister would cross at 15, my brother never had to cross because it’s different for sons of widowed mothers.

Not that she wouldn’t have been livid at my brother, too. If there was one thing my mother could not abide it was being inconvenienced by kids. I get it now, though, I do. Kids are a lot of work and it’s not like we don’t know they’re pretty much out of love with us by age 12. Can’t kid a kidder, kid, I was 12 once, too.

Anyway, here’s the thing I really want to tell you about that night, because it’s the feeling I got when it happened, a feeling of belonging, like I’d been looking for everybody for a long time and then suddenly there they were. It happened on the way to Patti’s house. Leonard and I were goofing around and I lost my boot in a snowbank, and while we were digging around for it, Leonard turned to me, his face shining with happiness, and he said, “You’re so much fun – what school do you go to?”

And I said, “Collegiate! Leonard, I sit behind you in English!”

And we both laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world, me being there all that time and Leonard having no idea, like either he was blind or I was invisible, but now – a miracle! – he could see and there I was.

Anyway, that’s the true story of my 18^th birthday and a change that did happen overnight, it did, in spite of what they say. And it was the first of many overnight changes.

But those are stories for another time.