By the time I was 12 years old I had gangs of my buddies skipping school and taking off downtown with me. There I would organize them into pairs, give them their lines (“Excuse me, ma’am, but I have to call my mom, and I don’t have a dime for the phone”), and send them out with an exact number of dimes to panhandle. We would then meet at the agreed upon location, where they’d give me what they had collected. This coin I would change into bills. Then I would watch all the people going into the liquor store, spot the person in the crowd who I knew would go in and buy beer for me (my accuracy at this became legendary), and then take the beer and get drunk with the boys in an alleyway. Simple, really.
The first time the cops brought me home I was about eight, and by 10 years old I’d had a few run-ins with them. By the time I was 12 or 13 I was dropping lots of acid, sometimes 10 to 20 hits of the good old White Blotter. (This was only barely out of the sixties, so the acid was powerful and uncut.) I was smashing out liquor store windows for booze and popping stolen morphine pills like they were candy. I was smoking dope, oil, and hash and drinking Lysol with my back alley Native buddies in the middle of Winnipeg winters—basically doing anything that spelled trouble.
By age 14 I’d been sent to Vancouver by my parents to escape threats on my life for stealing some very bad drugs from some very bad people (that’s when I became a Christian). After that, my parents tried to place me in an expensive private school (St. John’s-Ravenscourt)—I had to wear a uniform and tie!—to get me away from all the bad influences at school. What my dear parents didn’t realize was that I was the bad influence at school.
I didn’t last the year, but because my grades were quite high, they passed me anyway—on the condition that I never come back there again (that meant even setting foot on their property). The next year I was kicked out of four junior high schools in six months (that would be all of them), so really, after that there was just no more school. I rarely came home for long. By the time I hit 16 I’d already been to California twice. My folks knew some people down there who were in the middle of some kind of revival. I guess they hoped some of it would rub off. A whole chunk of my life was spent going back and forth between Winnipeg and Bakersfield, California. It’s all a bit of a blur as I made the trip three or four times. That was when I got into smoking PCP. The last time I went I just didn’t come back again. It’s hard to keep things straight in my head. I was young and there was just so much happening.
But long before I stayed in California, I had overdosed several times on strange combinations of weird psychotropic, psychogenic, and psychoactive drugs, as well as some other kinds of brain chemicals, the names of which I have no idea of. (I took them all at once and downed them with a 26 of vodka.) I wasn’t trying to hurt myself; I was just curious to find out what would happen.
On one of these overdoses I woke up a few days later in my father’s psych ward with some whacked-out character’s face planted against the glass-walled observation room I was in, euphorically cackling in hysterical glee, “THE SNOWFLAKES! THE SNOWFLAKES ARE EVERYWHERE! CAN YOU SEE THEM? THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!” That was just the first time. Hell, it’s no wonder I can hallucinate whenever I want to. That was not to be the only time I was in his ward for overdosing on strange pills. (I think I was in there three different times.)
When I went back to California for the fourth time, what followed was an insane nightmare of heavy IV drug use, drunkenness, and degradation I cannot even begin to describe. Now it’s mostly a dark haze, from which, from time to time, come horrifying memories that emerge to torment me—things I so much wish I could forget—terrible things.
I know now that at the end of my time in the States I was demonically driven and oppressed (my father’s friend John Wimber told me he got rid of at least seven or eight) and had several dangerous run-ins with some extremely nasty black witchcraft and occult stuff.
I eventually wound up getting kicked out of the States for good after I was thrown in jail for stealing that Burmese python. It was there that I was to learn real quick all about respect and survival. Cook County Jail (the Chicago city bucket) taught me a lot of brutal lessons. But even there, God’s hand was on me, protecting me and giving me favour with some of the heaviest members in the entire jail system. I was … untouchable. Someone stole from me—once; that same day I received back almost three times what I’d lost.
When I got out of jail I returned to Canada (well … let’s just say the USA asked me to leave quite pointedly) and began a long 24-year stint of hitchhiking all over the country. I’d just turned 26 years old. When I wasn’t couch surfing, most of the time I was sleeping outside (often in the winter) or in stairwells, on heater vents, or anywhere else warm that I could crawl my way into. It would take extreme conditions to drive me into a hostel or shelter. I hated them … despised would be a more accurate term.
After a time, I could no longer tolerate the insanity of the larger cities and usually just stayed on the outskirts of them, drinking anything and everything every waking second of every single day, just moving from town to town, city to city, coast to coast, and back again, not knowing where I was going or why. I was just running hard from God knows what and using anything and everything I could to feel nothing. The loneliness I felt during this time was simply overwhelming. Often I would grab a bottle and sit alone, crying to God for some kind of solution—anything to fill that horrible hole in my soul.
I know this chapter seems to jump around a lot. I apologize and ask for your patience.
It is not my intention to give you a chronological picture but rather to give you a quick sketch of the kind of kid I actually was. My life during those early years was so insane I myself can scarcely believe I survived it. Really, I should never have lived long enough to even see the beginning of my teens. I was, in short, completely uncontrollable and desperately trying to prove to myself I was without fear. That meant I did a lot of incredibly stupid and dangerous things. As I look back now, I literally shudder and shake my head at God’s mercy and protection.
It has only been as I reflected on my past that I have realized that throughout my whole life highly unusual things kept on happening to me—almost like they were chasing me. Unexplainable things. Amazing things. Events I had to understand. What follows is every word the truth to the best of my ability. I know it’s the truth—I was there. Sometimes others were too. I’ll try to just stick to the facts, but believe me, there were a whole lot of feelings involved as well. I had to look. All I wanted was to understand—to make sense of what had happened to me. What I found was more than my heart could contain.
Do I regret the decision I made as that seven-year-old? Think about it. Did I really have any other choice? I was “set up” … remember? (And I’ll leave that for all you predestination hounds to bark and howl at!) But no matter what your conclusion is, you’ve got to admit that God always has a plan … doesn’t he?
3: Knowing
As I mentioned earlier, I was playing with freight trains by the time I was eight or nine years old. We were doing things around them, in them, and on top of them that give me nightmares every time I look at my son. When I see how small and vulnerable he is, I find it almost unbelievable (astonishing, really) that no matter how I slice it, I did the insane things I did on those trains when I was his age. (It’s the only thing that makes me grateful my son is into video games.) As I think about it, I’m amazed that I even survived into my double digits! That’s around when we started taking the longer trips on them. I couldn’t have been more than 11—maybe 12 at most.
We did a few short runs from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Regina, Saskatchewan, and back, and once we accidentally found a real sneaky way into the States. (I think we wound up in South Dakota.) I’m not sure where all we went—it’s kind of lumped together. Of course, this was all in the late sixties and early seventies when people weren’t so paranoid. It was simpler then. No electronics, no cellphones, very loose security,
