Sooey Says

This is the first in a series of "The Summer of Banff" stories, but it's one of my favourites because I use the expression, "I'm going to write a letter to the Globe & Mail!" in it.

After my first year, I went out West in search of jahbs!jahbs!jahbs! because the minimum wage in Alberta was $3.50 at the time and in Ontario it was $2.65 or something. Also, the sister of the guy I wanted to make my boyfriend (more on him to come in subsequent stories - he was short, full of himself and Jewish like you wouldn't believe of someone who technically, not according to me but according to Jewish laws of Jewishness, wasn't Jewish at all) was working out there for the summer and although we were friends already and it hadn't helped me in my quest to make her brother my boyfriend, I didn't have much in the way of job prospects, either, so - what the hell, I figured. It's only a bus ride halfway across Canada (I was starting from the Sault) - what else am I gonna do this summer?

But this story is about police brutality so I'll skip the part where we only ate Fudgsicles for a week to lose weight and go straight to the part where I hooked up with a guy who it turned out was a "known-to-everyone-even-completely-out-of-it-me" FLQer keeping a low profile on the lam in Banff.

Fred, was his name. Separation, was his game.

Staunch federalist though I may be, Fred was loads of fun and although he liked me in "that way" I didn't have to worry about him making moves on me because he liked every woman "that way" and for some reason kept thinking I was underage anyway and any advances would be "untoward".

So, I hung out with him quite a bit, my cache in Banff, I realized, not going anywhere and we did lots of hiking together to various taverns and house parties while I juggled being fired from one job after another, apparently too incompetent to do laundry at the Banff Springs Hotel.

It was true. I was too incompetent to do laundry at the Banff Springs Hotel. They had one rule - do not be seen in the Banff Springs Hotel unless you are in the laundry room doing laundry - and I broke it by getting caught buying souvenirs in the main lobby.

One night, we decided to hit "The Silver Rail" a local tavern of medium appeal (Fred couldn't go into the Cascade, my favourite hangout, due to events he chose not to divulge to my underaged virgin ears) and as we were going down the stairs, a couple of men were coming up. Unbeknownst to me, Fred had muttered "narc", recognizing the one as the notorious Al Pineau, undercover narc in Banff, apparently known to everyone - and despised accordingly for both his crazy temperament and the fact that everyone knew who he was even though he was supposed to be undercover. Which really just made his presence in all the local taverns inconvenient for drug dealers wanting to go out for a drink now and again.

The next thing I knew, I'd been hauled backwards up the stairs and slapped up against the brick wall of the building, a hand around my throat. Fred was laying on the ground beside me with the other cop yelling at him to get up (he'd done the passive resistance thing I should have done). Al Pineau yelled at me to get out my ID, his hand still around my throat, pinning me to the brick wall, when I recovered my middle-class, right-side-of-the-tracks voice and shouted back at him, "I'm going to write a letter to the Globe & Mail!" (Which I STILL haven't actually done, dammit...)

The other cop, meanwhile, pleaded with me to do as I was told, explaining his partner was pretty crazy and I didn't want to mess with him and I shouldn't be hanging around with FLQ guys if I knew what was good for me because he'd heard his partner say several times that Fred was going to find himself floating down the Bow River to Canmore without a boat and he'd hate to think I'd be going with him, etc etc. He was young and good looking and entirely believable because Al Pineau was screaming abuse at Fred the entire time he had his hand around my throat, so I cooperated (cops really should get a clue as to how cooperative perps will be if you don't yell at them) and got out my ID. Which Al Pineau threw on the ground so I ended up like Woody Allen in Annie Hall in the scene where he rips up his driver's licence in front of the cop because "I have problems with authority".

I could not pick up my ID. I just couldn't. He yelled and threatened and as scared witless as I was (that Globe & Mail letter threat was still just hanging in the air like a lead balloon), I couldn't pick up my ID. You know, because I'm just like Woody Allen and I, too, have problems with authority. So finally, the young good looking non-psycho cop says, "Please pick up your ID. Do it for me."

And I did. Not for him but because at that point, I was starting to realize I wasn't in Kansas anymore, as they say, and I hadn't even sent my mother a postcard, so it wasn't really very likely that I'd get around to writing a letter to the Globe & Mail and, even if I did, I was starting to realize Al Pineau probably only ever read the Sun, anyway, and how likely was it that Bill Davis, Premier of Ontario, read the letters section and all those sorts of middle-class, right-side-of-the-tracks thoughts I still believe are useful in maintaining your composure in a crisis of mistaken identity to this very day.

Later, Fred told me about the "narc" comment he'd made and told me he'd be moving on to B.C. the next week, that Banff was just too small for both him and Al Pineau.

I was pretty relieved, to tell you the truth. And the several times I saw Al Pineau after that and gave him the hairy eyeball, he gave no indication of recognizing me at all. Which was pretty insulting to my dignity, really. The young good looking cop I never saw again. Maybe he'd been on a "how to be a crazier cop" exchange or something. Who knows? These days, I figure it must have been way worse for him, having to spend time with a nut like Al Pineau that it was for any of us who only had to deal with his hands around our throats every once in a lifetime.