♫ I’m gonna break out!
♫ I’m gonna drive my car, I’m gonna get up and go!
♫ I want some action!
♫ I’ve been working’ so hard I’m gonna overload!
♫ Can you feel the beat?
♫ Everybody’s rockin’ in the summer heat!
♫‘Til the sun goes down...
♫ Well, deep down inside I feel my temperature rise
♫ For those Wild Nights! Hot and crazy Days!

---Lyrics from the song “Wild Nights, Hot & Crazy Days” by Judas Priest

I grew up in a suburb called Lower Sackville, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. Yes, it was really called Sackville! There was a Middle and Upper Sackville too, but everybody just called the whole thing Sackville. Our village prided itself in being the World's Largest Nothing. They actually taught us that in school – Sackville, NS, they said, was the world's largest population with no civic status. We were not a city, not a town, nor a village, hamlet, or anything else. We were simply a very large cluster of approximately 30,000 residents living on streets that were built without the slightest nod to civic planning. Even today, if you look at a map of Sackville your first thought would be "What were they thinking?"

Streets go in every direction, looping toward but often not touching each other, making navigating the place a nightmare if you don't know your way around. There was some thought put into naming them though – all the streets in one section start with "S", another section they all start with "C", another "N", and so on, but other than that it is wholesale chaos, and even this tiny nod toward organization didn't apply everywhere. One nice thing about this layout was the foot paths that went between streets. They were of little use to adults trying to get somewhere, but to us kids they were the highways. Everywhere we went, we went via path, and we could usually get somewhere faster on a bicycle than could be done by an adult in a car.

Sackville is located 15 minutes North of the city of Halifax. Most of the streets are clustered around a lake shaped like a lady's high heeled shoe, creatively called First Lake, and on the north shore of this lake, near the heel of the shoe there is a beach. Approximately 300 metres from the beach, on the western shore, is a high school. 300 metres in the other direction, on the northeastern side, stood a shopping mall called the Sackville Town Centre, complete with grocery store, liquor store, video arcade, and a candy store. I should make special mention of the liquor store because in Nova Scotia all alcoholic beverages had to be bought from these government owned liquor stores, and there was usually only one per town. There were other stores in that mall as well, but these are the only ones that mattered to a teenager. The shopping mall has long since been closed and abandoned, but in the 1980's this was the place to be. Between the high school, beach, and shopping mall it was all woods, crisscrossed by paths teenagers had made shortcutting between the features, and there were several clearings where teenagers drank.

And boy, did the teenagers drink. I've always felt that Sackville was somewhat of a perfect storm for teenage drinking. 30,000 residents, the vast majority of which were baby boomers with teenage children. Between the sheer volume of teenagers and the combination of high school, beach, woods, and liquor store, and added to that a severely undersized and understaffed police department, it was a perfect recipe for teenage drinking parties. These parties went on every weekend, from Thursday to Sunday, in any weather and at all times of the year. The parents and police knew of these parties, of course, but there was little they could do – police would regularly patrol the area, but every time their presence became known somebody would shout out "COPS!!!" and you'd instantly see several hundred teenagers disappear. We kids knew those woods far better than those cops did, so we could easily hide. On the rare occasion somebody would get caught and they'd get hit with the $310 Underage Drinking fine, but it didn't happen very often and certainly did nothing to discourage the parties. The moment the tail lights of the cop car disappeared the teens would all spill back into the clearings and the parties would resume.

Not that I was one of those partying teenagers. Not usually, anyway. I was too young, only 12 years old or so, and I never did develop a taste for alcohol. I was your typical young suburban boy. I belonged to your typical middle class suburban family (a Mom, a Dad, two older brothers, a younger sister, a dog, and a cat). I was tall for my age, fairly thin, with a deep voice and platinum blond hair that only got brighter in the summer. Like most boys my age I liked bicycles, camping, fishing, arcade games, building soap box cars and forts in the woods. My friends and I spent most of our waking lives outside of school hours (and indeed, many within them) hanging around at the mall or fishing at the beach. I had posters of heavy metal bands and cars on my bedroom walls, and would watch TV shows about cars, fishing, and hunting whenever I could. When I wasn't watching these shows I was reading magazines about cars and fishing. I had a small black & white TV in my room, which usually saved me from having to watch whatever Dad was watching in the living room, and connected to this TV was an Atari video game system.

My friends and I figured out early on that even though we were too young to partake in the parties we could certainly benefit from them. All those drinking teenagers would leave behind beer bottles, and beer bottles were worth money. At first we'd go to the woods and collect the bottles each morning, but as competition between us and other kids became stronger we started hanging out with the teenagers during the parties. They only tolerated us because we kept the area fairly free of trash (sometimes the rowdy teens would break a bottle here and there, but it was frowned upon), but eventually they came to embrace us because we not only acted as sober lookouts for the cops, we also could be trusted to keep an eye on their booze. And other things. It was quite common for the small-time drug dealers to tell us where their stashes were so they could go get drunk and not have to worry about remembering. Because of this we sort of became mascots at these parties, and the teens were fiercely protective of us. Of course it helped that my older brother Mark, who was very popular, was always at these parties as well. People knew not to mess with us.

When I say those bottles were worth money, I am not kidding. On one particularly lucrative graduation night party there were five of us working together, pooling our resources, and we each ended up with $152.50 worth of bottles. Let that set in for a moment. $152.50 each for five of us, or $762.50 in total. Beer bottles were worth a buck a dozen back then, so that meant that at least 762.5 dozen beer were consumed that night. That's 9150 bottles of beer. But that only tells half the story. That number does not count broken bottles, which were non-returnable and so were left behind. Also, back then, beer bottles were the only thing worth money. Beer cans, pop cans, liquor bottles, wine bottles – all worthless, so all were left behind. I don't know how many were drinking their beer from cans, or drinking hard liquor, or drinking wine, but I would say it's not an insignificant amount. It also doesn't include joints smoked, acid popped, or any other drugs consumed. All of this from one night's worth of teenagers drinking in eight acres of woods.

So yes, I was your typical, average, every day, normal young suburban boy. Listening to heavy metal, hanging around with friends at the lake, riding my BMX bike, and doing spectacularly average in school. There was absolutely nothing different about me at all. That is, until puberty struck. Puberty hits all kids hard, of course, but it hit me in a different way than most. This book tells the story of me, a perfectly normal kid with one big difference, a difference that was a huge part of me but that I would keep hidden for most of my life.