Barring any unexpected May blizzards, summer has arrived in Edmonton. The signs are all around us: Slurpee cups are piling up in the gutters, bar patios are occupied by more than the usual gang of banished smokers, and people are wearing less and less clothing to varying degrees of aesthetic success.
For me, though, the approach of summer brings with it a lingering sense of injustice. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that I would have been getting out of school for the summer, worried only about catching my final report card from the mailbox before my parents could, and figuring out how I was going to spend the my two months of freedom.
Growing up in deepest, darkest, pre-population-boom Millwoods, there wasn’t a whole lot to occupy a kid’s time. There were a lot of schools, lots of soccer fields, and lots of as-yet-unoccupied houses. That was pretty much it.
And in early ’80s Millwoods, there were a lot of kids with a set of working parents. Just about every kid I knew had housekeys tied around his or her neck with a shoelace. With limited parental supervision, we had to fend for our own entertainment. Some kids enjoyed sports, while others would occupy themselves with lame summer clubs, but organized activities were never my bag.
Me? I loved watching movies. Videotapes were just becoming be the big thing, and I couldn’t get enough of them. At the time, the selection at our local movie store was very limited, so I’d have to rely on my corner (not-so) convenience store, the Red Rooster... or as we lovingly referred to it, the Red Rip-Off.
To call the Rip-Off’s movie selection sparse would be putting it kindly. They had about nine movies for rent, all of which I would watch in a steady rotation. It was a big part of my summer routine. Some days I wouldn’t even watch my rental, but God help me if, for the briefest of seconds, I felt (cue scary DUM-DUM-DUM!) bored. So just about every day, I’d spend my scrounged dollar on a video. This would be my routine for a couple of summers: roll out of bed, eat some cereal, take a bike ride around the neighbourhood to check on my various half-built forts or half-destroyed anthills, and head to the Red Rip-Off for my movie.
One morning as I entered the store, something was different. The video shelf seemed a little more cluttered than usual. As if a new movie had been added to the collection.
No. It couldn’t be.
It took a second for my eyes to adjust and a second longer for my little mind to process this exciting new information. On the shelf, right between The Hotel New Hampshire and Clan of the Cave Bear (both of which I rented with disturbing frequency), stood a cover for a video I’d never seen there before—and attached to the corner of it was a bright green clip announcing “NEW RELEASE.”
My hands shook a little as I picked it up, I didn’t recognize the title—First Blood—but I recognized the picture of a dead-eyed Sylvester Stallone, barely visible through the trees and brush, muscles rippling, Bowie knife glistening. That year, its sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, had hit theatres and was insanely popular. I was a couple years too young to see it, and it would be years before it would come to the Rip-Off’s video shelf. I quickly turned the movie box over in my hands, not really reading the synopsis as much as savouring it—hypnotized by words like “revenge,” “destruction,” and “one man army.” These magical words confirmed what my heart already knew: I had discovered the secret (at least to me) prequel to Rambo.
I raced to the counter with my new find, scared that the clerk would find some reason to snatch it away from me. (“Oh, you’re not supposed to have that.”)
But she didn’t, and merely gave me the normal eyeroll I had come to expect. She might have said something about how I should be spending my days outside, or how the crap I watched would rot my brain, but it was all pops and squeaks to me at this point. I wanted my Rambo, and for 99 cents, he was all mine... well, for a day, at least.
But that day soon became a week, and that week stretched on and on throughout the summer. I was renting First Blood over and over, returning it every morning and then immediately shelling out for it again. I may have been single-handedly supporting the Rip-Off’s video rental division, but my love for mindless action movies had been awakened. First Blood had it all. One man versus the world, fighting a war he didn’t start. Abandoned. Forced to survive on his own, his mind and his knife the only weapons he needed. There was something about his plight that spoke to me, a geeky, overimaginative, undersupervised, sometimes bullied 10-year-old with a newfound love for needless violence, explosions and... You know, now that I’m thinking about all of this, I’m realizing my life could have turned out a lot differently!
There was a little forest behind my house—although calling it a forest might be too generous. It would be more accurate to say there was a tiny cluster of a half-dozen pine trees that the neighbourhood cats used to crap under. That was my battleground, and there I was Rambo. No, I was HAMBO! I spent entire days setting up booby traps—laying tripwires made from stolen skipping ropes and sharpening twigs for Punji traps I intended to build. I would sit in the bushes, laying in wait for invisible enemies. Playing Rambo is something I did, for the most part, by myself. (It was pretty tough trying to convince other kids to pretend to be Brian Dennehy.) But I didn’t mind that my adventures were so solitary—I was a self-sufficient instrument of destruction... well, at least until I was called in for supper.
One day, after my now-customary morning routine of dressing in camouflage and affixing my prized plastic Bowie knife (the one with the removable compass in the handle) to my belt, I raced on my bike to the battleground, mentally planning that day’s maneuvers. As I approached the belt of trees, I saw something that stopped me dead in my tracks. Surrounding the little cluster of pines was now a four-foot chainlink fence and, ominously parked off to one side, a bulldozer.
My heart leapt into my throat. The bad guys had found my secret base! I watched in horror as over the next couple of months, they flattened my patch of trees, poured asphalt on top of them, and eventually, on top of that, built a shiny new 7-11. A terrible, yet inevitable domino effect had been set in motion.
The new 7-11 caused the closure of my beloved Red Rip-Off, which went through a variety of facelifts. For a while it was a patronless fish-and-chips joint, later a patronless poolhall/hair salon (called Cues & Curls), until finally God intervened and turned it into a church, which I will forever think of as Our Lady of the Red Rip-Off. More importantly, my forest was gone. My little pretend war had been fought and lost, and I wasn’t even allowed to play. Progress sucks like that.
At the end of First Blood, Rambo winds up back in the custody of his caretaker, Colonel Trautman. At the end of my First Blood summer, I wound up back in the custody of the Edmonton public school system. From the window of Mr. Foreman’s classroom, I could see my old battleground, which was now a parking lot. I’d sit there and stare at it, thinking about all the tiger traps I had set just below the surface.
I type this, looking out my widow at a beautiful day. Summer must be here; I’m starting to get that ripped-off feeling.
