Calgary is now a city of million-dollar condos. Where the prairie once spread out, it is now gnarled with traffic. The Rubik’s Cube of traffic, a Calgarian’s favourite topic. Nowadays, Calgary is a place where oilmen fight nightly for tables in wine bars. Thirty years ago there were no wine bars. Only bars. The Shamrock, the Calgarian, the Port o’ Call Inn. A port in the storm and a good place to get your head kicked in. You’d receive a beating for half-price between the hours of three and six. “Happy hour,” I believe they called it. In Alberta in the ’80s it was easy to be a punk. You just slept in one day and you were labelled. As young punks we drank at the Calgarian. Yep, first we took the natives’ land, and then we took their watering holes. These bars were so crappy, they chained up the toilet paper in the bathroom. Growing up, Calgary did not seem like a place where One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre or, my eventual salvation, the Loose Moose Theatre Company, could survive. Back then, a “water feature” was a garden hose. Calgary was not multicultural. Three Chinese students in every school, no more, no less. I’m still not sure how they arranged that, but they did. Calgary was not the forward-leaning city we see before us. Years ago, if you wore a pink T-shirt, you were “gay.” You were “gay” if you didn’t have dirt on your face. Or kept change in your wallet. Or used words with more than two syllables.

If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and used the word “copacetic” (a trending word in ’84) you’d get clobbered. It was easy to get thumped. I have a small scar on my lip from stopping a guy from hitting his wife in a Mac’s Milk. She gave it to me, not him. I was supposed to be minding my own f’n business, apparently. Back then, the guys had their cars up on blocks. They kept their cars on a pedestal, but not their women. It’s too bad that the great private journey of growing up has to happen in public. It’s too bad that the complicated act of becoming one’s self looks so ungainly from afar. We all know that we are different. At first, we aren’t sure in what way. There wasn’t a lot to do in Calgary 30 years ago. On the weekend, groups of people would “go out for cheesecake.” This actually happened, although I think our forefathers are trying to forget this phase of our history. But ask an old-timer like me, and we’ll recall that in “the old days,” groups of eight or 10 folks would get together on Friday night and go out and just eat cheesecake. Cheesecake restaurants littered Fourth Street. Also, I don’t know much about the internal workings of the human stomach, but I don’t think the way to get a woman into bed is to fill her with cheesecake.

Where wine bars now sit, there were head shops. Shops where, as a teenager, I bought girlish fringed unicorn T-shirts to piss off the cowboys. Cowboys ran the place then. Guys with hawks tattooed on their chests, and this was before they made good-looking hawk tattoos. The cowboys chased me. Offended that I wore my pink T-shirt, or pyjamas with not one but two tartan neckties. Or a cravat with a boy-scout shirt, its sleeves torn off, tucked into cranberry-coloured jeans, which were tucked into white go-go boots. As I ran from the cowboys, I remember trucks blaring the Irish Rovers and “Patio Lanterns” by Kim Mitchell. Nowadays... wait, you still hear “Patio Lanterns” every day. Can’t that be stopped? I drove around town in a series of banged-up, crappy Toyota Corollas. Cars so crappy, they doubled in value every time you filled them up with gas. We’d drive up and down Macleod Trail. That was the old days, when you could talk your way out of a DUI. We smoked menthol cigarettes whenever we drove drunk to help fool the cops. Back then, breathalyzers were still a brave idea of the future. I got out of a DUI one time by telling the cop I had to “pee really bad.” He actually said, “No wonder you’re veering all over the road like you’re drunk.” And let me go. We drove to Tom’s House of Pizza, drawn by the resplendent neon sign and the jukebox. We played Nazareth and “Cold Ethel” by Alice Cooper. One of the most exotic things you could do here at that time was order a Hawaiian pizza. And we did. I remember the summer that guacamole came to town. Children held the hands of their parents and waited patiently just to catch a glimpse of it. Old people wanted no part of it. Calgary was the city I had come to from Winnipeg as a child, when my parents’ marriage exploded and the fallout pushed us west. We moved to Braeside. The Brae Glen townhouse we lived in looked like the future back then with its cedar shingles and beige stucco. Calgary, for me, was the place I found myself. And more importantly—would find myself. As a teenager I remember walking through a Bowness thrift shop, looking for something and having no idea what I was looking for, but I feel that my sense of humour was formed almost entirely by this moment. I opened a dusty old Grade 6 health book that was in the 10-cent bin. Inside, there was a drawing of a “sloppy boy” with his hair askew and beside him a “proper boy” with his hair combed, smiling. The caption read, “It’s important to be well-groomed.” And out of the well-groomed boy’s head, someone, some heroic vandal, had drawn an arching, spurting dink. And I thought, yes, this is what the well-groomed people look like to me. To us. I was alone, but I laughed. Knowing I was not alone. I became obsessed with music. At age 15, I would go to someone’s house and rifle through the record collection that leaned against the stereo or, in most cases, sat inside a Canada Dry crate. I would flip through it, making disapproving noises at the soft, sucky selections before me: Homecoming by America, Cat Steven’s Tea for the Tillerman. Three Dog Night’s greatest hits. No, this would not do. Rock was for us outsiders.

I’d read the New Yorker (I think they were brought in by rail from Vancouver). I coveted it, like it was porn. When no one was looking, I would glance at it, longingly. Devour it. Memorize the pages. I disappeared into the “about town” tidbits. I knew then that I would one day be leaving here. It became my mission to leave town. My two like-minded friends and I talked about it constantly. Would we go to Vancouver where the girls were “easier”? Or to Toronto where there was a “thriving music scene”? Or perhaps even Montreal where it was rumoured you could get an apartment with a fireplace for $100 a month. I never found out. I would eventually choose Toronto. Until I was gone, music kept me going. A few years elapsed. I went to see Joe Cocker at the Stampede Corral. He had a look on his pained face that said, “What hick town have I found myself drunk in this evening?” When he sang, “not feeling too good myself,” I believed him. And, on his monitor beside his set list, there was another piece of paper. One he could see and, presumably, we could not. Unless, of course, you were crammed at the front of the stage like the rock-losers we were. He had a roadie-scrawled piece of paper that read “Calgary.” Meaning, “Joe, you are in Calgary!” To remind his gravelly voiced eminence where this stopover gig was. And between songs, whenever he glanced down and thanked “Calgary,” I thought it was hilarious. Also, he would pronounce it with an emphasis on the second syllable as people from somewhere else often do. “Pleasure to be in (glances down) Cal-gary.” We giggled. After the show I stole that paper from the monitors. Jumped partway on stage and grabbed it before I could be reprimanded. Meaning, before I could get my head kicked in. I stuck it on the wall of my bedroom beside my Blue Oyster Cult and Modernettes posters. I’d stare at it, “Calgary. Tonight, Bruce, you have found yourself in Calgary.” And soon, here, you will find yourself. I was going to Mount Royal at the time. It was a college back then. I took business for some reason. Perhaps a practical joke I was playing on myself. But I was young and dumb so I took business. I got 20 percent. Frankly I was shocked I got that much. So I was searching hard for what to do and be. I wasn’t a businessman, that’s for sure. I remember going to Theatresports at Loose Moose for the first time. I think I was confused. I thought it was something like “Reveen the Impossiblist,” the hypnotist who used his piercing eyes and stacked-up pompadour to ferret out your secrets. I was young then. My secrets were few. So I went. But the Theatresports show was even scarier than Reveen. It was comedy improv. On stage, there they stood, the small-world legends: Frank and Tony Totino, Jim Curry and Dennis Cahill. Day-jobbers by day, improvisers by night. They were the coolest people I had ever seen. (Perhaps still are.) They performed and the audience threw “boo-bricks” at them when, or if, they failed. The judges held up numbers to grade the scenes. And would stop them mid-stream if they sucked. They didn’t care, failure was their whiskey. Competitive and cruel. Exhilarating. I stared up at that stage like I had found my place, even though I had no idea how to get up there.