There was a Winnipeg restaurant where I was a dishwasher as a teenager, Ruggi’s, and we had a juke box with an interesting cross section of tunes. There were a lot of disco drugs floating through the kitchen consumed by the wait staff. Percodans, Valium and Amyl Nitrite. It was 1978. Ruggi himself, a wide man uncomfortably squished into small red chairs, would often be at the staff table discreetly smoking a hash and tobacco mix from a small soapstone pipe he clasped in his palm. Never before did I see someone smoke drugs in public believing nobody noticed. He felt entitled, it was his place. We eventually had a reputation, supposedly narcotic officers were showing up. When we suspected which tables they occupied, the cook, Cheemer, who was the same age as me but tall with an adolescent moustache and the first Indigenous person I ever got to know, would melt the grated cheese that came on top of the Pita bread, embellishing their order with cheddar penis shapes because it fit the reputation those type of cops were known by colloquially. It was 1978, Some Girls by the Rolling Stones came out then. On first listen it was sloppy and uninteresting but over the next twelve months the radio stations made almost every track a staple. I realized then if something is repeated over and over, it sells. The one song never played is the one that actually got me in the heart, Before They Make Me Run by Keith Richards about the bust in Toronto and realizing how to move on with dignity. I changed my mind about the value of that record or maybe its just that I became so familiar with every track I couldn’t dismiss it as easily. That’s why there’s now two commercials before most Youtube videos, that’s why there’s twenty minutes of commercials before the movie in the theatre starts, that’s why there’s enormous billboards distracting drivers on the expressway. Advertising works like it or not. When the shift ended, sometimes we had the problem of customers who didn’t want to leave. Me and Cheemer had contests to see how unwelcome musically we could make them feel. I used Billy Joel’s I Love You Just The Way You Are should (all Billy Joel repels me) but my playlists were inferior to Cheemer who was the champ. His go to was side B of Purple Haze – Crosstown Traffic. No one trying to sustain a romantic night, lasted more than four Crosstown Traffics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"