Soon afterwards, I got myself into the crosshairs of the Alberta Cafe and Hotel. I loved the Alberta Cafe the first time I was there. The place is closed now, but it was one of the institutions of Dawson Creek.
To go to Dawson Creek and not go to the Alberta Cafe is like visiting Paris and not going to the Eiffel Tower. The Alberta Cafe was a benign anachronism. It was the late 80's/early 90's.
The cafe had on its loudspeakers the music of Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Harry Chapin Carpenter, Jim Morrison, John MacLaughlin, Ravi Shankar and the Mahavishnu orchestra, etc. I soon got a job at the Alberta Cafe as a prep cook. The Alberta Cafe had connected a live television cable wire to the back of a radio, and the only soundtrack to the kitchen of the Alberta Cafe was 99.
3 The Fox which was beamed in all the way from Vancouver. The owners of the Alberta Cafe, Chris Ashcroft and his wife Helen are geniuses. What an innovative, cultured couple.
Chris once told me, "There is an old German saying: The best time to leave a party is when you are having the most fun." Dawson Creek is nestled in the heart of the Northern British Columbia prairie lands with the oilfields of Fort St. John just a couple of hours drive away.
Dawson Creek was 'Mile O' of the Alaska Highway. Due to some falling out resulting from nothing more than the fact that then, I was a dripping wet behind the ears unevolved youth who did not know even 50% of the things that he knows today, I soon moved out of Sally's house and moved into a single room in the Alberta Hotel. This was to start some of the most bohemian times in all my life.
Recall the Fat Freddy and the Freak Brothers cartoon of Fat Freddy and Phineas Freak with shirts and ties, and a conservative short combover haircut, the caption for this picture says "Before Pot". Then in the next frame, Fat Freddy in his characteristic frizzy hair and Phineas Freak with long hair, and they are holding a roach-clip sharing a joint between them, the caption for this picture says, "After Pot". It was in Dawson Creek that I first smoked pot.
Now the effect that this had on my life can not be understated. Because simply, I have been on a perma-stone ever since!!
!!!
I don't remember the first first time, and who with, but soon, I was drawn into the web of small town parties where the staple party favours were Maui Ribs, beer, hashish, and B.C. At the end of my first trip, probably as a spiritual Aztec dispatch as a reward for my bravery in undergoing the risk of travelling, a waiter from the Alberta Cafe shared with me a gram of cocaine which we greedily snorted from a desktop in one of the offices of the Alberta Hotel.
This waiter, Rene Rivieres was an extremely cultured guy. He was from Quebec. He had a mustache like a walrus.
Rene liked fine music and he was the music coordinator in terms of what sounds were piped through the ambient sound system of the restaurant. Rene was amongst many things, a drink connoiseur. Once, he let me try four drinks in a row.
The second last drink was a syruppy concoction and the last drink was a thin spicy liqueur. The effect of it was the sensation of a large female spider in my mouth all of a sudden shooting a thick and voluminous web! I think that this is a trick that all booze connoisseurs know about, and it is a good one to try on a girlfriend.
I only stayed in Dawson Creek for a couple of months the first time. I returned to Vancouver. Only to return to Dawson Creek three weeks later!
The second trip was very hardcore. Much of it is a blur. I met some real interesting people whom I will never forget.
They may be dead now. Mind you, they were quite old and really quite reprobate in their profligate drugs use. On the first time, I only tried, tested, and tasted pot.
They say that it takes about a half a dozen tokes until you get high for the "first" time. My first pot high was in Dawson Creek. I never had a high like that ever again.
It was doing a mild hallucinogenic. The hallway to me room seemed to stretch ahead of me for miles and miles. When I sat on my bed and looked down at my feet dangling over the edge of the bed just inches above the floor, it seemed like I was looking over a high precipice!
Luckily, I had a tapedeck and put on 'The End' by The Doors; a great pot song. It was 4:20 in the afternoon. I had to report to work at the Cafe for a four hour shift starting at 6:30 pm.
I woke up and looked at the clock; 6:15. I still have fifteen minutes! When I ran downstairs and saw that there was no people and the kitchen door was still locked, I realized that it was 6:30 am!
The Rip Van Winkle effect! Talk about your Einsteinian time dilations! I met Greg Wise This man is a hardcore guy.
He spent ten years in Milhaven for armed robbery. Greg was an M.D.
U.; a multiple drug user, and he was not above being a pill-popper. Miltowns in Milhaven.
He told some funny stories about prison, L.S.D.
, and stories of being on L.S.D.
while in prison! I don't imagine how anyone could handle a place like that sober, let alone all soused on acid! Gary and I smoked an incredible amount of hashish together, it was almost like the Midnight Express, but without the prison-yard oppression.
Although I was not a tobacco smoker at the time, Greg used to mix the hashish with drum tobacco, a rancid psychotomimetic mix, to be sure and I wound up being a despairing tobacco addict. This was to be a habit that I was to not stop completely until 1995. Roderigo de Ochoa, is another personality that I met in Dawson Creek.
Roderigo had spent literally, months and months on end talking about Thailand whenever people used to visit his room and get high. Roderigo worked as a waiter at the Alberta Cafe. It was Ron that awakened an interest to go to Thailand.
During this time in my life, one of the very few tapes that I had was Sade 'Diamond Life' and I recall listening to this album then, dozens of times. Work as a cook at the Alberta Cafe during the day. At night, work as an accountant of sorts for Chris Ashcroft.
The Offices of the Alberta Cafe at the time, Autumn 1989, had a computer and the computer program currently in trend then was the 'Lotus AccPac'. I recorded entries for the ledger and had to compile balance sheets in which the two columns on the sheet had to add to exactly the same amount. At this time, an ex-boyfriend of one of Chris's daughters came to Dawson Creek all the way from Salzburg, Austria.
And I thought that Vancouver to Bangkok was a hell of a commute. What convoluted and winding paths he must have taken to get from Austria to Dawson Creek. What a genuine European partier!
The salt of the Earth. Sebastian liked very much to smoke hashish which he has more than once referred to as 'the glasses of freedom'. Before a toke, he once said, "Take the glasses of freedom.
" Liked in the past tense. I have no idea whether he still likes to use recreational drugs now. At about this time, I also met a Belgian Canadian chef named Mick Nelson.
I was to stay with Mick and his girlfriend Tracy Whyte for a month during my fourth trip to Dawson Creek. Mick was a very handsome guy. He looked like Keanu Reeves in the movie 'River's Edge'.
Mick was an artistic painter as well as a chef. Mick actually studied at the Vancouver Community College on Pender and Hamilton Streets to be a chef. Mick is very much a chef just like 'Kitchen Confidential' Anthony Bourdain is a chef.
Mick liked to smoke marijuana. More of the same. Soon afterwards, I got myself into the crosshairs of the Alberta Cafe and Hotel.
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