Sexual perversity in Vancouver
Confessions of a student journalist part 3
“I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it—a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures. A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
Generation of Swine
When you hear the word ‘journalist,’ sex probably isn’t the first thought that crosses your mind. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that journalists—excluding the beauty pageant royalty who read the news on TV—are among the ugliest people on Earth.
And I’m not just talking about external, skin-deep ugliness. I’m also talking about inner ugliness, which many believe is the ugliness that truly matters.
But a lack of attractiveness doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of attraction. Quite the contrary, in fact. Student journalists don’t get many carnal opportunities, so they take whatever they can get—usually from each other.
Dear reader, please understand that I risk my very life in bringing you this exclusive story. Join me if you dare, as I break the code of silence and reveal the sordid truth about the secret sex lives of student journalists.
Over the years I’ve seen the inside of a dozen student newspapers, and every one, like a bug zapper that causes la petite mort instead of la mort, was an irresistible beacon for the kinky, confused, depraved and deprived. Whether large or small, every staff was a unique melange of freaks, geeks, jocks, queers, punks, goths, and—sickest of all—Japanese animation enthusiasts.
At The Peak, memorable minions included the Mohawk-sporting body-modification addict who changed his sexual orientation at least three times, the truck-driving leather dyke whose body was covered with recreational razor scars, and the candy raver who spent half her time on ecstasy and the other half tied up—when we phoned her to find out what she was planning for her section that week, her girlfriend would have to hold the phone to her ear.
But my favourite was the pot-smoking hippie nudist who unsuccessfully attempted to give birth to her daughter under water. In her living room.
(A few weeks after that, she and I got into an argument in the Peak lounge. “You are covered in the slime of hypocrisy!” she shouted, and then, before I could respond, she brandished her left breast and dampened my shirt with a fine spray of milk. We both broke up laughing. It was probably the craziest argument-winning gambit I’d ever seen, but it worked.)
As individuals, the Peak crew already qualified as a bit of a freak show. But when we paired off (or threesomed off, or foursomed off), Bosch himself could not render the unholy carnal scenes that came to pass.
Take, for example, the time a bisexual male editor and two gay male editors got drunk together and ended up in bed. The next day, the two gay guys were very upset with the bi guy—not because they’d both had sex with him, but because he had allegedly manipulated them into having sex with each other, which had propelled their relationship as roommates into uncharted and frightening waters.
Then there was the hyper-athletic female biologist whose fickle biological drives broke so many men’s hearts at The Peak that they joked about starting a support group. To this day, she and another ex-editor argue over who gave who herpes—although this is really a joke, because they know they each got their herpes from independent sources (trust me, it’s a bit too complicated to explain here).
Then there was the time a bizarre love quadrangle all but paralysed the paper for several weeks. A major office couple—a lesbian and a bisexual woman—broke up, after which the bi woman slept with one of the other lesbian editors and one of the straight male employees. A shitticane of jealously and resentment ensued, and before long none of the three women involved would come into the office if either of the others were there. Since all three occupied key editorial positions, this added untold hours of production time to each issue.
All of this being said, I must take care not to give you the wrong impression of The Peak. In spite of its pansexual excesses, our office was always an upstanding, politically-correct environment—this wasn’t a frat house where people were sexually harassed or made to feel uncomfortable.
Well, there were a few pure-hearted Christian types who ran off screaming because they didn’t want to be there when the rain of fire and brimstone began, but they were rare exceptions.
And now that I think of it, there was that advertising manager who quit, largely because he was tired of coming in at 7 a.m. to find a certain pair of editors fucking in the lounge.
And then there was that deplorable incident that made my experience with mammary irrigation look as trivial as spilt milk. One infamous morning, the girlfriend of a Peak employee sat down at a computer, reached for the mouse and put her hand in a pool of cold, wet semen.
We were all pretty sure from whom the spunk in question had spurted, but in the absence of conclusive DNA analysis, there was no way we could prove it. So all we could do in response was post a general statement about the virtue of cleaning up after oneself—surely one of the great internal memos of our time.
But, dear reader, these unfortunate events were very rare deviations from the abnorm. Let me assure you that for every freakish or depraved incident that occurred at The Peak, there was a scene of equal and opposite obscenity.
Every time a queer Peakie finally came out of the closet and the rest of us said, “Yeah, duh, we’ve known all along,” The Peak was working its magic.
And every time two of our editors got married in secret because the bride’s parents would have condemned their union as an abomination, it was The Peak that made their match.
Verily, in its 40-year history I believe The Peak only failed to get one Peakie laid—a dude so pathologically shy and single that his desperation ultimately compelled him to publish a book about how he wasn’t getting any action [see A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy by Ryan Bigge]. But aside from this unfortunate fellow, The Peak seemingly had a lid for every pot.
Then there were the student journalism conferences. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! These thrice-yearly events were ostensibly about learning job skills and hobnobbing with high-profile professional journalists, but in reality they existed for the same reason that small pioneer communities once threw square dances: as a last-ditch attempt to prevent our inbreeding from reaching catastrophic levels.
In biological terms, student journalists are isolated clusters of sorry amphibians, half-tadpole, half-frog, flopping helplessly in the fast-drying mud of a vanishing puddle of sexual possibility. Decades ago, Canadian student papers realized that they had to form a national federation or face extinction. And so, Canadian University Press (CUP) was born.
CUP conferences, of which I attended several, were nothing short of hormonal free-for-alls where the desperately sequestered denizens of countless, far-flung papers collided in a consequence-free, nook and cranny-filled environment. The spectacle was not unlike that of hundreds of estrus-crazed sea lions grunting and writhing on a slime-covered islet—not an appealing image, I know, but nobody said the survival of the species had to be pretty.
These brave outcasts were only doing what had to be done, for as history has shown, papers that don’t join CUP are doomed to a gradual slide into mental and physical deformity (i.e. the University of Calgary Gauntlet). One year this genetic imperative was so compelling that one of our editors came back from a conference pregnant, thus ensuring that the cycle of life would continue.
By now, I’m sure you’re curious as to whether I was merely a dispassionate observer of these shenanigans, or an active participant in the unceasing Satanic blood orgy that was Peak sex.
Before I reveal my answer, I’d just like to say that after you’ve spent enough time in that leaky, twilit, subterranean bunker of an office, you go a bit peculiar. You start to fetishize your oppression, and your oppressors. And I, dear reader, spent more time in that place than anyone.
Yes, I’m as guilty of wanton acts of Peak debauchery as anyone. It’s not something I’m proud of, or ashamed of. It’s just the way it was. Working at The Peak is kind of like working on a cattle farm: sooner or later you’ll be obliged to stick your arm into a huge vagina.
People, I can’t deny that I sampled the uninhibited delights of conference sex. Or that I, too, indulged in the joys of off-hours masturbation in the production room. (You’re alone, it’s 4 a.m., you’ve got a smokin’ fast Internet connection, what else are you supposed to do?)
Indeed, I have tasted the illicit pleasures of weekend sex on the desks of despised co-workers, and I know well the visceral thrill of trading furtive glances with a co-worker you’re secretly fucking. And alas, I have smarted under the acrid sting of watching that same secret lover promptly turn around and start sleeping with someone else in the office long before you’re over her.
Aye, I’ve experienced all this and more. But I’ve told you all I can. The awful truth is that you, nor I, nor anyone else will ever know the full story of what has transpired within the walls of The Peak.
After all, filthy little secrets are the lifeblood of journalism, and perhaps there’s no joy in ferreting out the indiscretions of others unless you’ve committed a few of your own. And The Peak will forever keep the secrets we accumulated in its embrace, in that hallowed space where countless young eccentrics found love and lust, and occasionally even themselves, while they were supposed to be putting together a newspaper. •
Completed in 2004 for inclusion in the Wasting My Youth book.
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