Counted out, but didn't give up dream

I’ve been counted out a lot, sometimes in the form of a fate-changing 10-second boxing count out with the ref standing above me and the crowd either obnoxious or hopeful as I gasped on the canvas, or a low and slow cook over charcoal with a country song in the background – “You ain’t going to make it, buddy” – on repeat over weeks and months.

I’ll tell you about the first time.

Sixteen years old, not knowing much about anything beyond what I learned in the hundreds of pulp sci-fi books I had. Afraid of the unknown but tall and strong, knowing the physical me might help the other timid me, the one who dreamed of the cosmos. My father, who worked at the paper mill in Saint John, a place that paid pretty much the highest wages in the city, wanted me to work deep in the New Brunswick woods with forest rangers for the summer - and then I’d head to the mill to work there after high school graduation. Make me a man, I suppose, before I headed to heavy labour at the mill. I really had no choice, back in those days you didn’t really.

On the Monday morning after the last day of high school that year, my father dropped me off near a logging truck that had finished bringing a load of wood to the mill before going back to the deep woods. “There’s your ride,” he said. He wished me luck and left, just like that. I wasn’t pleased but was happy to get out of the city, where I was being bullied constantly. (Another story)

I looked at the length of the truck. I’d never been in such a massive vehicle. The driver was muscular and tattooed.

“You scared?” he asked when I struggled to get into the cab.

I nodded. He laughed a deep and long laugh, not of the “in the openness of my heart I’ll help this young guy” kind. My first lesson. No vulnerability - limbs get torn apart by tattooed lions.

That lesson stuck as I worked at the paper mill over the next six years. The guys there were a tough bunch. There were fights and drinking on the job and drugs sold by bikers who worked at the mill as a side gig. Some guys even smuggled in a stripper past the security guards one night. It was out of control, a zoo. I loved it and hated it.

I’d bring books and magazines to help pass the 12-hour shifts. I got questioned a lot about my choices.

“Why the sci-fi bullshit, weirdo?”

“Why waste your time reading that shit? Get a Playboy magazine.”

I did take that advice and got a Playboy. The first time I brought it out, the billionaire owner of the mill, an Irving, walked through the mill at 3 a.m. (he was notorious for showing up at any time) and strolled right up to me. He looked at me and then the magazine and walked away not speaking. The next shift I was called into the office. No more Playboys.

I took abuse at the mill for being bookish. I didn’t have to. I was strong - among the strongest. I tossed big logs all day, and I mean tossed, but inside I was timid, living in my world of words. I tried to fit in – drank a lot, partied with the others – but I was an outsider, my mind elsewhere. The money was damn good though. Only the thousands of ship workers at the drydock across the street made more. I stuck it out for almost six years.

Then I woke up one day in the midst of a seven-day stretch of 12-hour shifts and decided that was enough. I needed something else. What that was, I didn’t know. I started asking some of the engineers when they came by our work areas about university. To me, university seemed as far away and mysterious as a castle in the Portugal mountains. One engineer told me that I’d like the pretty girls there. That was appealing, but I knew he said it in a condescending way, like I had no chance. I was a log tosser, big and strong and most importantly dumb. He was the thin, suave university dude. I saw him out at the bars sometimes with his university buddies.

I got up in his face a bit, all sweaty and smelling of wood: “Too bad the girls ignored your skinny ass during your university days, buddy.”

He stepped back.

Word got around the mill somehow about my crazy plan, it always did.

I walked into a lunchroom at 3 a.m. one night with 15 guys inside: “Look who it is, Mr. Books, going off to school. Why? You’ll make more money here, plus you ain’t got it, man. You’re not like them. You’re like us.”

He wasn’t the only doubter. Pretty much nobody could understand how I was going to leave a gold-standard job to sit in a classroom “as broke as a snail” for four years with people younger and smarter than me.

Over and over I heard that.

I was asked why I was leaving only a few times. I didn’t want to get away from them as they perhaps thought. I wanted more. That’s all. I wanted to test me. Like the characters in the sci-fi books, I wanted to explore new worlds, and I wanted to understand me.

I made it through university. I became a journalist, a writer.

I don’t look back at the ones who counted me out with malice or celebrate how wrong they were. They were who they were.

All I celebrate is that I got off the canvas.

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