The Beer Drinker, Surrey, 1983

There’s only one thing I miss about drinking: drinking buddies. I don’t mean to say that everyone I ever sat at a bar or table with was necessarily a soulmate or even a friend. Take the guy above.

I’d never met or ever saw again the subject of this portrait. But I made a point of buying him a beer — the one he’s raising — with the intention of befriending him for the sake of photography. The photo was made in some pub in Surrey, B.C. I can’t remember which. Perhaps the Pink Flamingo or some other dive on King George Highway.

My subject seemed to me quintessentially Surrey, Salt of the Earth Canadian. Whatever my perception, he was jovial and amenable to my intrusion. It’s amazing what a shared drink can lead to, isn’t it?

If I look back over the years, beginning with my 19th birthday, when the newly-elected NDP government lowered the drinking age to 19 in British Columbia, and I had my first legal beer in New Westminster’s cavernous Royal Towers Hotel pub, I can recall a host of working-class bars across the country.

I’ve stumbled into a blizzard, after a night in the Columbia Hotel, in Canal Flats, BC; hidden from the Montana heat in The Last Chance Saloon; drank with loggers and German hikers in the old Port Renfrew Hotel (before it burned down); got stared out of the Beaverdell Hotel (before it burned down); met my wife in Vancouver’s famous blues pub, the Yale; danced with Can-Can girls in the historic Red Onion in Skagway, Alaska. Celebrating our ascent of Mount Athabaska, best buddy Tom Hocking and I danced on tables with British soldiers in some pub in Jasper, Alberta … waking up in a gravel pit on the outskirts of town.

Toronto. Where to begin? Brunswick House, The Horseshoe Tavern, The Spadina Hotel, The Bamboo, El Mocambo, The Big Bop … I’ve forgotten more than I remember. But I cried in my beer at a few, laughed, danced and romanced in a few more. At quieter establishments, my companions and I pondered the mysteries of art and sex, the art of sex, the sex of art.

I remember those little (12-ounce?) glasses my casual friend above is raising — at 25¢ you could fill a terrycloth-covered table without breaking the bank. In the Lakeside Hotel, in Windermere, BC, my indiscretions caused a bouncer to break my head on the swinging doors. And the craziest pub of all? The “Snake Pit,” in Dawson City, Yukon. While, outside, it’s -40℃ and the wind raises spindrift off the frozen Yukon River, you can drink with Gwitch’in oil workers, arctic explorers and TV reporters, film crews from Japan, gold miners and long-lost friends.

“Ray, you old slut!” How the hell are you?”