Grade 10

In grade 10 I switched high schools and left the suburbs to go to a school downtown. Here is a little background about Kingston: The first fact is that it takes about 15 minutes to drive from one extreme end of the city to the other, 18 if you hit traffic. Traffic lasts for about 20 minutes at 5:00 when everyone gets off of work. Consequently looking back there was a lot of great divisions culturally in Kingston squeezed into a very small amount of space. Everything seemed so far apart and every part of town had it's own feel and it's own population yet dividing the wealthiest most well manicured part of town and the poorest most dangerous part of town was separted by about 5 minutes of driving.
Driving about 7 minutes from my neighbourhood to where my high school was located made a big difference. Everyone in my neighbourhood really strived to be the same and everyone was into hockey, tapered jeans, no fear shirts and grades. Downtown everyone was into haircuts, punk rock, all ages shows, pot, acid and mescaline. Drugs didn't interest me too much but new music did so I liked all these new alternateens immediately and was soon wearing ripped oversized work pants, shirts and ties and dying my hair blue.
The other fact that I want to make known is that every area in Kingston is not referred to in a north, south, east, west fashion it is referred to by name. The west was the "township" which is where I lived and basically everything else east of that was downtown even though it wasn't all downtown. My area, the township, was divided into 3 parts. My immediate neighbourhood was Reddendale, the middle was Henderson Place, and north of that was Bayridge or more affectionately known as the Ridge. The Ridge also had Cataraqui Woods which was inhabited solely by skids.
Downtown could be easily broken up into 3 main parts north and south of Princess (street) and Rideau Heights. North and south of Princess has always been a phenomenon and as easily as I can put it the south side is rich and well kept and the north side is considerably crappier and shadier. By phenomenon I mean that literally either side of Princess st which is a two lane street that spans the city is divided into these two extremes. Not to say that north of Princess or N.O.P. was horribly bad it was just a little undesirable. I spent a better part of my youth on this end of town and most of my friends and my girlfriend lived there. My high school was south of Princess and that neighbourhood was almost exclusively inhabited by doctors, lawyers, business and property owners and Queens University professors and all their long haired, burnout kids. It was downtown and much more open minded than my neighborhood but still sheltered by money. Rideau Heights was the force in town not to be reckoned with.
Rideau Heights was the northwest corner of the city which was out of everyone's way. We didn't go to their neighbourhood and they didn't come to ours, it was a different world. It was the projects of Kingston and compared to Rexdale it probably looks like Beverly Hills but lets face it this was a sheltered, small city and this neighbourhood of criminals and bikers was scary shit where I was from. For one semester of grade 11 I went to the feeder school for Rideau Heights, Queen Elizabeth Collegiate or QE for short. A lot of QE kids families had generations of family in prison, people had dirt floors, drug addictions and parents offering you bong hits while trying to sell you stolen stereo equipment. Everyone was doing B&E's, everyone had a child of their own in grade 10 and they were feeding their infants fries and Coke. There was a fight every period, the cops came at every break to make sure everything was ok and the fire alarm got pulled almost every other day. It was the best time every had in high school. I was at QE in a special theatre program with no homework and kids attending from all over the city, I was dating a 19 year old when I was 16 and we partied every night. I got a 90% in the program and I almost got to have sex.

Grade 9

Grade 9 was a great year... For a while. I am only going to talk about the good aspects of it though, mainly about getting more and more immersed with alternative rock and punk. My friend Robbie and I had been listening to a lot of Green Day and Offspring and we had at this point now bought their back catalogue and I had also bought the Dead Milkmen's first record Big Lizard In My Backyard. We knew that what we were listening to was mainstream but it was also new and we had never heard music that was fast and aggressive like this basically we didn't know what punk was and we didn't know we were listening to it. All I knew was that punks had Mohawks but I didn't know what they listened to. So we started finding other punk bands like Bad Religion and Rancid to listen to but at the same time I was listening to new bands like Blur, Oasis, Bush, Nine Inch Nails and Eric's Trip. Then one day I got a big order from Columbia House and a band called Weezer came in the box with a bunch of assorted junk. I wore this record out. I started with the single Buddy Holly and then listened to the back half of the record over and over again for about a week, then I decided to listen to the first four songs and they were incredible too. Once I started listening to the record in a linear entirety I was completely sold. Never had I heard such a well built album that mixed a sort of alternative pop punk with the feedback of Sonic Youth (even though I didn't know Sonic Youth at the time but I had to describe the record using them) and perfect three part harmonies. But it rocked too, the songs had a fantastic pop sensibility and were fun and big, there were great hooks and it was new. Although I have listened to thousands of bands since then and have had great loves in music for some reason that band has followed me through my entire life since then I have never gotten tired of their music and especially their eponymous debut record. I listened to the entire record everyday for years afterward occasionally finding unreleased tracks to keep me occupied until the new record was released which I kept praying for. In the meantime I found other interesting bands to listen to like Ween which would also stay in my interest through out my highschool years and even until now. I was dating a girl named Jenna Robins who lived in a big house on the edge of my neighbourhood. I can't remember how I met her but I do remember she liked the Beastie Boys a lot and so did I so we became friends and eventually started dating. Before the end of our month or so long relationship she showed me an album her sister had bought called Chocolate and Cheese by a band called Ween. This was different stuff, I didn't even know what genre it was because every song was different on the album, songs about HIV, spinal meningitis, a sick pony, lots of songs about food. I went out right away and bought it and I remember having fights at Jess' going away party about whether we should listen to "Baby Bitch" or "Mr. Would You Please Help My Pony" first. Next up grade 11 and Steve Webster's punk collection and I buy hear Weezer Pinkerton.

Why don't black kids like punk?

Why don't black kids like punk and alternative rock? I don't know. Maybe it's because they have been excluded from so much in white society that they just want to connect more with the music that speaks to their culture ie. rap. Why did I connect so well with alternative rock and punk? One explanation was that it was the immediate voice of my generation. I was always more interested in the melody and the song structure more than the lyrics though. That's not to say that I don't know or was not interested in the lyrics of songs I just paid more attention to the music itself. Anyhow, I connected well with aggressive and faster music like NOFX, Nirvana and Weezer because I was a hyper kid with lots of energy. Also, I identified well with more experimental rock like Pavement, Ween and Erics Trip because I was also interested in more artistically slanted composition. However, I was never interested in rap. A lot of my friends were interested in rap when we were younger but I just never identified with it at all and I hadn't ever liked anything I heard. I thought it was repetitive and boring and slow. I identified with a bigger and faster sound. However I can see now why a lot of kids in Kingston were interested in it: Because we had no black culture to learn from or connect with at all. Rap was distant and strange and new and white suburban kids were interested in that. A lot of kids loved to mimic the identity of rappers because they seemed dangerous and different and although everyone wants to fit in when they're young they also want to be different and unique. To be honest it was a very hard line to balance on and I always sucked at trying to be different and comfortable with myself. This was because I was different than most kids I knew when I was young and I didn't know how to fit in because I didn't know what I was interested in. And I wasn't interested in sports which is what EVERYONE was interested in. When I found music I realized what I was interested in finally and I started feeling more comfortable and confident. But I'm getting off topic.
Now as I have mentioned before their were very little visible minorities in Kingston. The minorities who were present wanted to fit in or just grew up with white music like everyone else and were obviously going to be interested in it. My friend Ali Kadeer was a Muslim who was into hardcore music so loud and fast it was incomprehensible. Johnny Manicat a Pilipino kid from the burbs who was the leader of a skate punk band. Mike Butler was a jazz saxophone player and although he tried he was still the whitest black kid I have ever met. So, instead of having actual black people in our city white kids created their own division of ethnic diversity through music. Punk kids who would skate out front of the church on Princess st. would have to endure white kids who thought they were black cruising by in Honda Civic's with obnoxious sound systems and blasting Puff Daddy so loud out of their subs they would set off parked car alarms. It's kind of like in Jurassic Park when their are only female dinosaurs and they spontaneously changed sexes in order to breed, such was a really white town lacking black culture. Some kids had to take it upon themselves to listen to rap and call each other "niggaz" and wear big white jeans from Stitches. God Bless Styles and Flo aka Chris Stebans and Andrew Wagger the original gangsters of Bayridge.