Tunesday : Surfin' on Heroin

Surfin' on Heroin

(DeSadist, M/ Houston, C) Performed by Forgotten Rebels

I'm surfin' on heroin. I'm surfin' on heroin.
Get a needle gonna stick it in.
I'm surfin' on heroin.
I'm so drugged up, I'm so fucked up. I'm surfin' on heroin. Yeah.

Annette and Frankie went to junkie beach.
Lots of smack was so close to reach.
Shot up at a luau down at Waikiki.
Freakin' at the sunset now they're hap-happy.

Met Eric Zipper, introduced him to me.
Now I'm surfin' on heroin. Yeah.

I'm surfin' on heroin. I'm surfin' on heroin.
Get a needle gonna stick it in.
I'm surfin' on heroin.
I'm so drugged up, I'm so fucked up. I'm surfin' on heroin. Yeah.

So fucked up I can't remember my name

Tried it once I'll never feel the same

I'm swimmin' in a sea of puke.

Lend me a quarter play myself on the juke.
Got my kid brother hooked yesterday.
Pimping him pays for my habit today. Yeah.

I'm surfin' on heroin. I'm surfin' on heroin.
Get a needle gonna stick it in.
I'm surfin' on heroin.
I'm so drugged up, I'm so fucked up. I'm surfin' on heroin.

Yeah, so fucked up I can't remember my name

Tried it once I'll never feel the same

I'm swimmin' in a sea of puke

Lend me a quarter play myself on the juke.
Got my kid brother hooked yesterday.
Pimping him pays for my habit today. Yeah.

I'm surfin' on heroin. I'm surfin' on heroin.
Get a needle gonna stick it in.
I'm surfin' on heroin.
I'm so drugged up, I'm so fucked up. I'm surfin' on heroin. Yeah.

I'm surfin' on heroin. I'm surfin' on heroin.
Get a needle gonna stick it in.
I'm surfin' on heroin.
I'm so drugged up, I'm so fucked up. I'm surfin' on heroin. Yeah.

I don't know if I should have started with a warning about explicit lyrics, but maybe it's good to have something shocking(ish) here every now and then; at least to prove that I was a normal teen once upon a time. That's a picture of me at the top, dancing to this song in the radio station at the U of L (thirty years ago?), and I think I'll spend the rest of the summer just memorialising these songs that the other members of my gang of friends introduced me to. I liked this kind of punk because you could dance to it, and what's most important to remember is that the lyrics felt ironic to us: no one we knew was using heroin, so the image of swimming in a sea of puke was funny to us, not tragic, and we totally got the joke of the Beach Boys pastiche. Even the swearing was hilarious because none of us were particularly foul-mouthed (I never said any of us were legit punks; man, I fear we were actually geeks).

As I remember it now, going out dancing at bars was the number one thing that VOMIT did together. The drinking age in Alberta is 18, but with a birthday in December, I had to sneak into bars during the first semester of university (and although I wasn't technically a student until the following semester, I was already hanging out with this crowd through Kevin). Most of my friends were already of age, and getting me in was as easy as them vouching for me as I explained to the bouncer that "I must have forgotten my ID", and as the staff at these places got used to my face, they stopped asking for my proof of age (I guess it was a simpler time). Curtis initially had more trouble getting in: not only was he a year younger than the rest of us, but he was a total babyface: Curtis was a smoker, and when Alberta implemented a law that make it illegal to buy cigarettes if you're under 16, he had to flash his ID at the 7/11 until he was in his 20s, tee hee. Curtis got around the bouncers by writing "C Simpson" on his grade 12 student photo ID card and swiping his brother Cameron's birth certificate: these two pieces of ID together got Curtis into any place he wanted to go.

We'd usually converge on a bar on Third Avenue (that I can't remember the name of) and we'd sit around drinking blender cocktails (usually Mai Tais) until the DJ would play one of our favourite songs. Then, ten or twelve of us freaky looking kids would stampede the dance floor to get, erm, freaky. Unsurprisingly, Surfin' on Heroin would not have been part of the scene (I'm actually surprised that my DJ friends got away with playing it over the university airwaves). Drugs in general were never part of our scene, but I do remember being offered poppers by other freaky looking kids: when I asked what poppers were -- they came in glass vials, and as I understood it, you were supposed to deep inhale the fumes -- I was told it was some kind of engine fluid that killed your brain cells for a temporary high, and I demurred. (I thought it was weird that some head shop in Lethbridge was pouring engine fluids into glass vials and reselling it to freaky kids -- I also wondered why these kids didn't just figure out the recipe and eliminate the middle man -- and I'll acknowledge that it's hypocritical for me to have so many stories that involve both heavy drinking and the refusal of drugs with an aura of haughty superiority; I made plenty of bad decisions, but have always been basically law-abiding; if you don't count the years of underage drinking.)

As I wrote about before, sometimes a few of us would drive up to Calgary on a Friday night to go dancing at the Republik or the Warehouse (which, while fun, was never entirely comfortable for me: we may have been outrageous for Lethbridge, but in Calgary, I felt like a bit of a poser; these are places that would have played expletive-filled punk). During Reading Week of that first year of university, we all went up to Edmonton to check out the scene there. Most of the group drove up together -- I remember Rob (the secondary Rob) was hesitant to take his Mustang up to Edmonton, because unlike Lethbridge, Edmonton used road salt and he was pretty sure that just driving there for a few winter days would corrode his baby. But he and Hillary did drive up in the Mustang; they were excited to make the trip because they had called ahead and booked road tests at some luxury car dealership (Jaguar? BMW?); such preppies; such posers. Michelle (the secondary Michelle) and I made a bus trip instead: her older sister was a student at the college in Olds, and she invited us to come spend a couple days with her. Michelle and I bought coolers and sneakily drank all the way there, whiling away the hours on the rural milk run, stumbling and giggling down the stairs at the other end. Now, I had never been to Olds before, but it was exactly what I expected: a small farming community in the middle of nowhere; a total one horse town. And yet, Michelle's sister was really good to us, and she took us out dancing at the coolest (only?) place in town, the Cow Palace. Naturally, Michelle and I, in our trenches and spiked hair, looked like total freaks in a place called the Cow Palace, but they made a serviceable Mai Tai (after we guessed at the ingredients for the bartender), and eventually, the DJ put on some songs that we could get freaky to. After a couple of days, we carried on to Edmonton and spent our evenings at the bar that the advance team had found: Goose Loonies. 

We loved this bar: it was two stories, with a huge dance floor on the main level, and balconies overlooking it from upstairs. There were two more dance floors on the upper level and shooter bars and pounding bass and strobing lights: this was a place to get freaky and I fit right in somewhere between the punks and the geeks. I don't think I ever had more fun at a bar than I did at Goose Loonies, and when I eventually moved to Edmonton and the bar I worked at downtown became a happening hotspot, I always wondered why these people weren't at a real night club like Goose Loonies (yet, weirdly, I never went back to the Goose after I moved up to Edmonton; I suppose it was on the other side of the city and I was trying to be a grownup). 

Funny that I don't remember much more about that Edmonton trip than Goose Loonies (I know we all stayed in one hotel room and everyone just slept where they fell; I don't remember seeing much more of the city than this; I don't even remember how long I was there for), but that just underlines how important the dancing was to us: just about all my favourite times with this group involved getting freaky on a dance floor somewhere, spinning and stomping, surfin' and slammin'; this was definitely one of the happiest times of my life; I can't imagine what the Forgotten Rebels would have thought if they knew this song was part of the soundtrack to so much joy.