Queens Line Lads and Constance Bay Boys at Quyon Quebec

 

The 1988 or 1989 Labour Day weekend found us in Quyon Quebec at a dive of a joint called McGavins on Saturday night. As a teetotaller, I really didn't belong there. I always felt out of place in a drinking establishment. I definitely didn't belong at a drinking establishment on the wrong side of the Ottawa River. They say, "Nothing good ever happens after midnight". Well, nothing good ever happened over there in that dump, period. This particular night, however, nothing good was happening over there in that dump and was drawing yours truly right into it. 

There was trouble brewing out back. We hardly even got there and someone was calling Mike outside. Outside out back. That was way worse than outside out front. Out front was more or less Main Street; well populated and well lit. Out back was just a gravel parking lot with lots of room, tailor made for scrapping. And bloodletting.

I'll be the first to say in a place like that the smartest thing to have done when trouble first reared its ugly head was to have just noped it right out of there. Quebec is a bad, bad place for Ontario boys of any stripe to be when something bad goes down. But we were still young and dumb. It can't really be that bad, can it? Wellll...

I was a Queens Line Lad through and through. Born and bred. And, while Mike and Scott and Rodney were considered Queens Line Lads as well, they were late to the game. They came from Constance Bay and still had old ties down there. Lots of them, and I had only ever met a select few. Whatever was happening, it was way bigger than that select few, I can assure you. That much I'm certain of. There was unfinished business among some of them; I don't know who. I had no idea what was going on. I mean, Absolutely, Positively, No Idea Whatsoever. It was all Constance Bay Boys stuff that had nothing whatsoever to do with me. It was only strings of the MacKay boys' old ties from their old stomping grounds that were having a dispute. A dispute that is, that somehow threatened to involve the entire back parking lot. Mike felt dragged into it to arbitrate. Or was dragged into it to arbitrate. I don't know. All I knew was, you could smell trouble brewing; big trouble, and it had been doing so for some time. Like all summer long. Wounded pride. Add alcohol and the high point of the summer of the Labour Day Weekend loutfest, and the formula became an explosive powder keg. All it was going to take was some drunken idiot to strike a match to it...

Allow me to interject here that, while I may have been referred to as an idiot by other people from time to time, with maybe more than a modicum of merit to the accusation, nobody could ever honestly accuse me of being a drunken idiot. 

Anyway... 

Tensions were really rising out there. Mike started to walk out into the middle of the back lot. I handed my jean jacket and glasses to Denise and started after him. She started crying and grabbed my arm and begged me not to go; "Dan! Don't go! PLEASE! You could get hurt!" Or killed. But I didn't say that out loud. I just grimly thought it to myself. She knew whatever was going on was extremely volatile and dangerous. But neither of us had a clue what it really was. This wasn't our turf at all.

I just said, "Mike's not going alone" and followed him out and didn't look back. Scottish brudders don't let Scottish brudders get jumped.

Too late for noping now.

There were mixed feelings on my part for sure. I was glad I was here for Mike's sake. I just really wished he wasn't here at all. Then even if I still was, I wouldn't be part of this mess. I'd just be an innocent bystander. Well, I somehow still was that by rote, but nobody was going to take the time to listen to that verbal defense once I was standing out there and the poop hit the propeller.

It's a long time ago, so I can't recall where Scott was. Probably whooping it up with his buddies Claude and Andre in Kanata. Rodney was with their cousin, Steve, in his 454 Corvette, in the Quyon area somewhere, but off driving like a maniac in parts unknown. No way to reach them mobile in those days. Come what may, Mike and I were on our own. 

The smartest thing to have done when Mike was called out the back door would have been to have just gone out the front door instead to my trusty Pontiac J2000 and hauled donkey out of there. But he would have never come, reputation and all, and I would have never left him behind, loyalty and all. So there we were.

Very quickly, Mike was drawn right into the very middle of whatever the trouble was. He seemed to be called in to represent someone or other. I didn't know a single face anywhere around me but his. He was faced off to a guy that stood head and shoulders above him, and was already very angrily shouting away. As I stood back to back with Mike, warily looking over my shoulder to him and back to the angry dudes all around me, I quickly caught the idea in the wind that there was a girl involved in this somewhere with more than one guy. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep... Chachi, Chachi, Chachi... 

The guy was up so close to Mike that Mike's face was in his chest. Mike heaved him back for breathing space and stabbed his finger into the guy's chest and told him to get the #%@! out of his face, and I thought, "This is it!", and braced myself for whatever or whoever was coming. I thought sure that would do it, the other guy seemed so revved up. There was no clear line drawn. Because I didn't know anybody, I didn't know who was friend or foe. Anyone could be on Mike's side, which (hopefully) meant they were effectively on my side, and anyone could be against Mike, which meant they would be against me as well; guilty by association. I didn't know who Mike was representing. Or who he wasn't. Or anything, really. They knew, but I didn't. Not a fun situation to be in, lemme tell ya. 

I was intently reading faces to see who was mad at me for being with Mike and who was glad and who didn't care. The only upside was I was stone cold sober, so I had all my wits and faculties about me, and, trust me, they were all tuned in to all frequencies gathering as much intel as possible as fast as possible. See every motion. Hear every sound. Scan every face, but don't make eye contact with anyone. Be ready, but don't fight stance or ball my fists to trigger anyone. 

Did I mention I might have been a little scared? If I said I wasn't I'd be a bald faced liar. I don't mean like frozen with fear or petrified except for peeing myself. And definitely not running away. I mean thinking I could get in a fight and lose and get beat up good and proper, and very, very shortly at that. Don't forget I had no boozy brain buffer to insulate me from clear and present danger and stark and harsh reality. Maybe I was a little dumb allowing myself to get drawn into this situation, but I wasn't exactly stupid, either.

Everybody involved was angry. And hopped up on alcohol and who knows what else. There were several groups in each other's faces and shoving and poking and mouthing off to each other, just goading someone into starting it. They were mad and ready to rumble. I wasn't. I barely had any idea what was going on much less was mad about it, so my only source of adrenaline was tension and anxiety. 

Too many people. Far too many. All too edgy. And everyone knew more about The Situation than me. Welcome to the Danger Zone.

This is nuts. N. U. T. Z. 

Now, whatever happened behind me, I was confident that, as long as I had his back, powerfully built Mike would juggle that guy and maybe his best friend, too. He was like a compact version of the Ultimate Warrior, and very fast and agile to boot. He wasn't a guy to mess with. I would try to keep anyone from blindsiding him. Or me. If someone engaged me, Mike was on his own. And so was I.

I couldn't see how we could make it any worse, and Mike's mediation certainly wasn't going to stop it from happening, either. Whatever was about to take place, there was way too much resentment in the buildup and momentum to this juncture in time and space. Whatever it was, it was gonna go down: Tonight. That was all there was to it. 

Did I mention I didn't know a bloomin' soul here? This wasn't quite how I had envisioned our evening... 

Somehow, Mike pushing the big guy back didn't set him off. That surprized me, really. Maybe he didn't want a piece of him. Not that many really would. Maybe he was just more huff than stuff. I'd seen that before at a sandwich joint in Pembroke called Nostimo's. I don't know. I didn't know anything other than it dawned on me very early on that this was the last place on the face of the earth we should be tonight. 

As the big dude bellowed away his grievances on behalf of someone else to Mike, about 6 feet away, the tension hit the flash point with the sharp crack of a fist against a cheek bone. Go Time! Just like *that*, the entire back yard exploded into a brawl. Because of the nature of the tension, I guess it would really better be described as a rumble. I never saw anything like it. Pocket fights all over. One on one. Two on one. One on two. Smaller groups on smaller groups. Larger groups on larger groups. A really pretty girl came sprinting near where we were and tried to leap onto a guy's back. Mike snatched her out of the air by the waist like catching a bouquet of flowers, and bodily hauled her out of it. Nobody laid a finger on him because he was rescuing a girl. There was at least that much order and respect left. "No no no no no...", he softly admonished her by name as he restrained her for her own good and let happen what all and whatever was going to happen. I saw a seasoned maturity in him there and then that I hadn't been aware of up until that point.

She dissolved into sobs on his shoulder; "Oh, Mike!" I guess her boyfriend was getting six colours of crap beaten out of him in there. Or, maybe, less likely, her brother. I didn't see who it was she was futilely trying to defend. It could have been anyone in that feverishly blurred mass. The guy she tried to jump was quickly absorbed by the seething throng. Maybe he was getting seven colours of crap beaten out of him by now. There was no way to tell. 

I couldn't believe it; we were right in what I thought was the very thick of it; the epicenter, but it exploded outwards radially from us, and never involved Mike or I at all. Not that I'm complaining about that. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me make that point perfectly clear: While it might have been a little disappointing at the time in the height of youth and energy, I see no downside to it whatsoever from where I sit writing this now. It all worked out very well for us in the long and short run. I was going to go home with all my teeth still residing in my smile instead of in my pocket. Mike too. I considered that factoid hard to find fault with. A little action could always be fun at that age, but all this was a little too much action for my taste. Mike aside, I had nothing in this or to do with this and I didn't care to have anything taken out of me for it, either.

Even though it was around midnight, I would have rather been at home forking a stinking, steaming spreader load of manure. Or two. Or three. Anything but this. This wasn't my cup of tea at all. This was way outside my ordered little world of being a meek and mild farm boy by day and heroic newspaper carrier by night. 

Mike, the big loudmouth dude, maybe a few others that had enough common sense to stay out of it, and I were like an island in a boiling sea of humanity. Anywhere you turned and looked there was violence and fury. Flesh and blood and bone in the blender.

It quickly sorted itself out into a ragged, chaotic, complete non-involvement of us and I gratefully more or less settled into a (still somewhat defensive) spectator mode. No bragging rights, but no last rites either. At the same time Denise probably thought I was being killed out there just for the sake of showing up, but it was all a little too galvanic for me to make my way back to her just yet.

There was every kind of action; two lanky, very evenly matched six footers had each other by the shirt collars with one hand, and were mashing the other's face into pulp with the other fist. Just nasty. They both would be a mess the next morning. Dudes rolling around in the gravel. One guy ran across a car hood to try to kick another guy in the back of the head, but he slipped on the hood and came down with the back of his head on the edge of the fender and was out. I had no sympathy for him because of the attempted sneak attack. Served him right. Another pair went from a fistfight to the one grabbing the other below the butt, throwing his shoulder into him, and picking him up and running about 10 feet to smash his back into a set of concrete steps going up into what was likely a stock room. That guy I really felt sorry for. 

It was everywhere.

Just pure chaos. Cracks and thuds and thumps and dented car sheet metal sounds and grunts and yells and roars laced with profanity continued to dominate the muggy late night air. Torn clothes everywhere. And probably blood and teeth, but it was a bit too dark and fast moving to see anything small. Thankfully nobody produced a knife or a gun. Those were days when you settled your differences with your fists, not weapons. But it was still a very dangerous, fluid situation. 

They were all going to feel that tomorrow. A couple of them were probably going to look at a different dude in the mirror for the rest of their lives.

From this (wonderfully) distant vantage point of time, I can't even remember how it all ended. I do remember a fair bit of it spilled over right around the building to the street out front. That's when Steve and Rodney showed up. Steve backed his 'Vette right into the mele' and lit up the big 50 series under the back of it in a huge burnout, filling the street between the buildings with an acrid cloud of bluish-gray smoke and the atmosphere with the cacophony of a healthy 454 in full cry through 3 inch pipes. When he was done everyone was cheering. I must say, it was a pretty epic way to break up a brawl. I don't think we even went back inside. We all left shortly after, thinking better of our lives and health than to stick around for any more of that kind of alcohol and jealousy fueled madness. 

There were blessings to be counted in all of this. I wasn't going to the morgue in a meat wagon over some floozy I never met and didn't care to. That was good. I was going home fully intact without the snot beat out of me. That was even better. The fact that Mike shared my state of affairs made it better still. The same couldn't be said for quite a few guys that night.

All that over one girl that probably wasn't all that great anyway. Sheeesh... 

I learned my lesson.

I don't know about anyone else, but I never went back to that place, or any place much like it. That nonsense just wasn't for me. One thing was made vividly and graphically apparent to me that night: Constance Bay Boys are way crazier than Queens Line Lads and Quyon Quebec is the last place you'd ever want to run into them.