“I’ll bet you a dollar you won’t do it,” Jen said to us.
We were sitting around in the dim table-lamp light, half drunk on cheap vodka in our dorm room. Rod chewed on an unlit cigar thoughtfully. On the one hand, Joey had brought up the idea of going to Canada as a joke. On the other hand, Jen had called our bluff. We had a fine tradition in those early college years of following through whenever someone called our bluff. We had a reputation to uphold. We had another something to prove. And the details and reasons didn’t matter. We didn’t worry about details because we knew everything back then.
I looked at Rod and Joey. None of us had to say anything. What was going to happen was going to happen. Jen was sitting crosslegged on my grandma’s old orange recliner. She leaned back and smiled smugly.
“We can take my car,” Joey said.
“How far are we from Canada anyway?” I asked.
“It’s about a six hour drive,” Rod replied.
“Canada adventure tomorrow!” I declared.
“I’ll drink to that,” Joey said.
We filled four shot glasses and drained them. “What about you Jen? You in?” I asked.
She set her empty shot glass down on a milk crate bookshelf near the recliner and stood up. “No. I’ve got a study group tomorrow. You boys have fun on your little adventure though.”
She walked out and closed the door behind her, leaving us to continue planning and drinking. Mostly drinking. We weren’t exactly alcoholics, but we were trying real hard.
“You know,” Rod said, taking the soggy cigar out of his mouth, “The legal age to buy liquor in Canada is nineteen. We could buy our own liquor for once. On top of that, Cuban cigars are legal as well.”
“Shit yes. Let’s make this a smuggling trip,” I said while pouring more shots.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Joey said.
I lifted up the nearly empty bottle of Vodka and shook it in the air. “Look at the small amount of alcohol we have left, take this shot, and think again.”
We had one day off from classes. I don’t remember why, but I do remember that the day off was a Tuesday. That meant that if we were to get back to the university in time for Wednesday morning classes, we were going to have to do the whole trip to Canada and back on Tuesday. We left at 8:30 AM, all of us bleary eyed and hungover.
“I’m going to drink a pint of Maple Syrup when we get there.”
“Can’t we just have Canada come to us?”
“This will be the longest trip I’ve ever done with my car.”
And then we were off. The university buildings faded away behind us, and we were welcomed with open arms into the school of smugglers.
The road can heal broken hearts and hangovers. I leaned back and let the white lines speeding by work their healing magic. Joey insisted on driving the whole way, so Rod bided his time making little violent Canadian flipbooks on the corners of a book; small owls fighting maple leaves with knives and matches and the like. I started documenting the trip in my ‘road log’, as was my habit for any long drive or extended trip at that point in time.
Through a light rain, we made it into Minnesota. By 2:30 we were at the border town of International Falls. Joey drove us over the Rainy River Bridge; over the imaginary line separating neighbors. He pulled up to the Canadian Border Patrol building, and handed our passports through the car window to an agent in the booth. She inspected them, typed a bit on a computer, handed back the passports, and waved us through. We had made it to Fort Francis, Ontario. We were in a promised land for underage American drunks and cigar connoisseurs.
“Well if crossing into Canada was any indication, I’d say we’ll have no problem bringing our loot back.”
First stop, the liquor store. We wanted to get absinthe, but they were out, so we settled for a couple forties and a bottle of whiskey. As Joey’s car didn’t have a spare tire, but had a spare tire well in the trunk, we naturally hid the alcohol in it.
Next stop was the tobacco shop. It was a store called Don’s Fresh Cuban Cigars. We walked into a robust smelling wooden room with a whole bunch of humidor display cases along the wall. The fellow that ran the store, Don, was a goofy middle-aged man with a beard and a cowboy hat.
Rod decided not to beat around the bush. “Say mister, we were thinking about bringing some Cuban cigars back to the states. What’s the safest way to do that?”
“Well that’s as simple as shitting your pants. You guys got pockets?”
Rod looked at Joey and me questioningly, and then nodded his head at the cigar man.
“Well just stick ‘em in your pockets. They can search the vehicle all they want, but they aren’t going to search the clothes you’re wearing.”
That seemed reasonable to us. We proceeded to buy about one hundred dollars’ worth of Cuban cigars and shove them in our pockets like children with Fig Newtons.
All these purchases made us hungry, so we stopped at a diner across the street from the cigar store. We sat by a big plate glass window, scarfing down towers of pancakes that were drenched and drizzled with what we were sure was the freshest Canadian maple syrup in the world. We were travelled. We were cultured.
Outside the window, three men were trying to pick a dead moose up off the ground and put it in back of a pickup truck. From the looks of the glass scattered on the ground around it, the moose had not looked both ways before crossing the city street. The dead creature was enormous and the three men were struggling to get it into the truck. They dragged it over to where the truck was parked. They lifted its head up into the back end. One of the men hopped into the truck bed and pulled on an antler, while the others pushed, until the moose’s mountainous shoulders were in. We watched the process unfold while eating and discussing plans.
“If the border patrol agents ask what we were doing up here when we cross back into the US, what should we tell them?” Rod asked.
“Let’s say we came up to do lunch with family or to visit a friend,” I suggested.
“No,” Joey said. “Let’s just tell the truth.”
“Let’s just tell the truth. It’ll be easier that way.”
“So we’ll just tell them that a friend bet us a dollar that we wouldn’t go to Canada, so we went. Then we decided that as long as we’re here, we may as well buy a bunch of Cuban cigars and alcohol to smuggle back for our underage friends. Is that what we should tell them?”
“Well we won’t tell them all of that, but we’ll tell them the truth.”
“Joey, I respect your stance, but I think telling the US Border Patrol the truth in this situation will seem more like a lie than actually telling a lie,” I said.
“I’ll be doing the driving,” Joey responded, “So I’ll do the talking at the window. Don’t worry.”
Rod went back to watching the moose debacle, Joey went back to climbing his pancake tower, and I pulled out my road log and journaled it up to date.
“Where do you all live?” the customs agent asked Joey through the window.
“Right, but where in America?” asked the agent.
“Oh. Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We live in the university dorms there.”
“How long were you in Canada for?”
“What was the purpose of your visit today?”
“Well you know, sort of just to see if we could.”
The customs agent stared at Joey for a moment, and seeing that Joey was not going to elaborate, he said, “Let me see if I got this right. You drove all the way from Eau Claire, Wisconsin just to see if you could drive all the way here from Eau Claire, Wisconsin?”
“Well that, and someone bet us a dollar that we wouldn’t,” Joey said.
“Oh. I see. There’s a whole dollar riding on it. OK then. How about you pull your car to the parking spot beside this building, and come inside so we can discuss this further.”
Once inside at the front counter, the customs agent slid a form our way.
“This is a claim card,” he said. “Write everything you bought in Canada and are bringing back to America on it.”
I wrote in the iron-on patch I had bought for my jacket, and Joey wrote in the bottle of maple syrup he had bought. We left the rest blank.
I’ve always thought that maybe Don the cigar man was in cahoots with the border patrol because of what he told us at his store. The very first thing the agents did after we handed back the claim card was pat us down and frisk us. They immediately found the cigars in our jacket pockets.
“That’s real strange, boys. No one mentioned any Cuban cigars on the claim card. You got anything else you’d like to admit?”
We thought long and hard. I was shaking my head ’no’, when Joey said, “There’s alcohol in the trunk of my car.”
The agents took Joey’s keys, popped the trunk, found the tire well, and took all of our precious alcohol out of it. They searched the rest of the car and found my road log, which they proceeded to read. That notebook was in a real damning state at that time. I hadn’t mentioned the background bet that started the trip. I had only written a general outline of happenings since we hit the road. As my main goal with the trip had become purchasing and smuggling absinthe and Cuban cigars, the notebook may have made it seem like that was the only purpose of our crossing into Canada.
An agent came in and started a severe round of questioning specifically aimed at Joey for some reason. He waved the road log in his face and said, “What was your real reason for going to Canada?!”
“To see if we could get there and back in one day. It’s the longest trip I’ve made with my car.”
“To see if you could get there and back! You think we believe that shit?”
“A friend called our bluff. There’s a dollar bet on it.”
“I’m going to ask you one more time, and then I’m going to stop being nice,” the agent said coldly. “What was your real purpose in coming to Canada?”
Joey looked at the notebook in the agent’s hand, looked at me, and then back to the agent. “We came for Cuban Cigars and alcohol,” he said defeated.
The agents got all our confiscated goods into one fun looking pile and brought them into the supervisor’s office. We sat outside the office, waiting for the axe to fall, staring at a framed portrait of George Bush on the wall, and chatting with the agents.
“So you’re a history major?” one of them asked Joey.
“So then you know why we can’t have Cuban cigars, right?”
“It’s a trade embargo because they’re communist. But I don’t get it. China is communist and we still import their goods.”
“Yeah, well… I don’t know…I don’t make the laws, I just enforce them,” the agent responded.
The supervisor called us into his office. “Well boys, because you cooperated, we won’t be giving you a fine. But I do think the incident should be cited on the record. So I figure we can either put it on all of your records, or you could save us the paperwork and we can just put it on one of your records.”
We mulled it over a moment. “You guys got coins?” Rod asked us reaching into his pocket. “We’ll do odd man takes the rap.”
We each got a coin and flipped them at the same time while the supervisor watched on, looking more and more impatient and angry.
“Tails. We all got tails…” Rod said looking at the coin in his hand. Screw it. Just put it on my record.”
Rod stayed in the office, breaking in his record, and the agent from the window, now holding our alcohol, escorted Joey and I outside.
“So you can see how we dispose of it,” the agent said, cracking open the whiskey and pouring it down a sink attached to the building. It was a depressing moment. All those good times never to be had were just swirling away from us.
“You know,” the agent went on, “all this stuff is available in the states. You didn’t have to drive six hours to get it.”
“We can’t buy it in the US. We’re underage, remember?” I said.
The agent chuckled. He knew as well as I did that there are easier ways for an underage kid to get alcohol than driving to Canada. Especially at a university.
Rod got out just in time to see the last golden foam of his forty going down the drain.
“Goodbye, kids. Be careful out there,” the agent said walking back to the customs building door with the empty bottles in his hand.
“Wait!” I shouted to the agent. “What are you going to do with the cigars?”
“Oh. We’ll destroy those too,” he said and walked inside.
And I’m sure they did. Probably by slowly burning each one, puffing away on them with pleasure.
We pulled off at the first gas station in America. I bought us all cheap cigars and we smoked them, leaning on the car in the twilight.
“You guys got a slap on the wrist,” Rod said with a smirk. “I got a slap on my permanent record.”
Five and a half hours later and we were back in the dorm room. Between the three of us, we were a dollar richer for the trip. Joey and I decided to give our thirds of that dollar to Rod.
