The Athabasca tar sands are in Northeast Alberta, Canada. They consist primarily of silica sand, clay, water, and a semi-solid form of crude oil called bitumen. Rather than being drilled for, the extremely heavy crude oil of the tar sands is recovered through either pit mining or a process called “steam assisted gravity drainage,” which involves heating heavy underground oil so that it becomes free-flowing enough for extraction. Before modern methods of extracting oil from the sands were developed, people racked their brains trying to figure out an economically feasible means of getting at the bitumen. In the 1960s, a company pitched the idea of using small scale nuclear bombs to get at the stuff. Yes, really. Bombs, dude. People fucking love oil.
Money changes things. The tar sands being a big deal meant that my friend Matthew, who dropped out of high-school four months before graduation to go “work out west” was provably smarter than most of his university attending peers1. By the time he was twenty two, Matthew owned a house. Since he was a bachelor who spent three weeks per month in the Mordor of Canada, he let some of his high-school buddies live at his place, and we, now all pursuing degrees, still all very poor, had parties in that house every weekend.
Myself and my three best friends at the time all lived there together. They were all in a band and would practice in the basement. Another guy who was also in the band, their Billy Talent, lived in the house too, but I wasn't friends with him because he sucked as a person.
Anyway, picture this: it's the middle of January, the day after a snowstorm. The air outside is unbearably cold. We're having a house party. My friends and I are all standing in the kitchen. The girls at the party are all hanging out together in the living room. The guys wander in and out of their space, heading to other parts of the house where they can do drugs, or casually use racial slurs without fear of confrontation.
So my buddies and I are all standing in the kitchen, and Hannah, the most attractive girl in our social group as far as any man of taste and character is concerned, walks in. She and her breasts, legs, lips, neck, eyes, laugh, and potential approval or disapproval, all arrive in the kitchen. We know her. We’ve all talked to her plenty before. But she is weirdly hot and almost impossibly charming. If this were a scene in an 80s movie, one of my buddies would have released another from a headlock, a third would have stashed a porno-mag he was looking at in a drawer, and we all would have fixed our hair, tucked in our shirts, and tried to look a little less like stoned apes. Those specific things did not happen, but that’s the right vibe.
Hannah talks to Billy Talent first. It’s something about how his sister won some singing competition. Hannah thinks it’s great. Billy Talent agrees in a way that says, "I am proud of my sister and also would really like to fill you, Hannah, with buckets of my semen."
Then Hannah says, "So, what did you guys do today?"
My friend Luke, the bass player, the child of evangelical Christians who seems intent on turning the entirety of his 20s into an extended Rumspringa in essentia, comes alive. Luke is drunk, and on cocaine, which he never really does. I know that he's on coke because he's gone into the unfinished basement like six times in ninety minutes, which is where people at these parties go to do coke. "Oh, man," Luke says. He then steps into the center of us all, pivots, and shuffles back, making himself the focal point for the five other people in the room. "I watched this show about what you're supposed to do if you're attacked by a dog. What you gotta do is, you gotta take your shirt off and wrap it around your arm." Then, just as he has explained, Luke takes his shirt off and wraps it around his arm.
Luke is fat, not to the point of comedy; he's not the fattest guy we know, but no one would ever say that Luke wasn’t fat. He’s not the sort of dude who is ever casually shirtless, but he is tonight.
So Luke, who is fat, and who has taken his shirt off and wrapped it around his arm, says, “then you gotta, you gotta like, shove your arm forward and offer it to the dog." Luke then mimes himself doing exactly this.
Some more girls from the living room wander over to see what the ruckus is. All of them see Luke offering his forearm to an imaginary dog.
"So, when dogs bite onto you, they don't let go," Luke says. "I thought you had to, like, train ‘em to do that, but they actually just do that on their own." Then Luke, still fat, drunk, coked-up, and now sweating, moves down onto his knees. "So then," Luke says, "what you gotta do is, you gotta get down and uppercut the dog in the throat." Luke then uses his free hand, the one not wrapped in his shirt, to mime punching a dog in the throat.
Hannah is horrified. "Oh, my God," she says. "Why would you ever do that to a poor dog?"
"You gotta. He's coming for you. He wants to fuck you up.”
"Luke Thorton, you wouldn't do that if I were there. I wouldn't let you."
“What if he’s, like, a hellbound?”
"I don’t know what that is.”
"I'd be protecting you," Luke says. "I'd just be like…" and then, Luke, still on his knees, resumes shadow boxing with an imaginary dog. He is winded. Each punch he throws is accompanied by a grunt and followed by a sharp inhale of air.
Hannah, and all that is her, and all the potential of winning her affections, exits the room. The other girls do as well.
I start laughing. My friend Mike starts laughing. Luke starts laughing, but it’s an insane and sort of evil laugh. Billy Talent doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t think what just happened is funny. He calls us “childish,” and then heads to his room to be a shitty person in there.
And then the night just rolls forward, and none of us get any pussy.
Four years later, Matthew and Hannah are married. Apparently, she spent half her time at those parties texting him about what kind of bullshit his friends were pulling in his house. At this time, I still don’t have a real job, and the band has broken up. Luke is getting a PhD, but also in his late twenties, and living with his Jesus loving parents, and having to make amends for his “rebellious years.” Billy Talent lives in California, and was in an episode of The O.C. So good for him, I guess.
Of course Hannah married the guy who had the job and the house. Of course she was texting the guy who went to mount doom to do the thing that needed to be done, and not the boys who stayed in The Shire LARPing as adults while drinking to excess four days a week. I kind of feel bad about it, but I know Luke doesn’t. “Well, yeah,” Luke tells me over the phone, “Matthew got a hot wife, and a family, but also, everybody thought that shit about me killing the dog was so fucking funny.”
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twenty. Jesus, does anybody?
This assumes of course that having money equals intelligence. It doesn’t. But considering that all of us felt trapped in our rural maritime community, and that making money was the only means of escape any of us had ever seriously considered, and that Matthew achieved this long before any off us, then it is safe to say that Matthew was far more adept at applying his intellect than any of us.