"The Shed" and "The Brick"

Editors Note:  During this era, while growing up in Souris, one of the main places where kids who were rebels used to congregate, usually to drink, was a place nicknamed as the “brick”.  This was actually a flat slab of concrete, on a shaded dirt road, behind the properties on our street.  This structure had reportedly had something to do with the water supply, but which had become a convenient and relatively secluded place within town limits to drink as a teenager.  The brick was located very close to our home and was a very convenient drinking spot, on a road known as “the back road’.  As the popularity of the brick grew so did police supervision of the area, this probably was a good reason for Reggie creating “the Shed”

“The Shed” was actually a playhouse or small cabin that was formerly built for my aunt.  Reggie took over this innocent playhouse and covered it with Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath posters and it became a smoke (marijuana or hash) filled place where his friends came and drank and smoked throughout the high school years. Inside the shed, they collected the beer caps that were drunk there between the studs by nailing plastic sheeting between them and there were hundreds or thousands of beer caps.  With alcohol consumption came urination, and as Reggie hated David Lee Roth of Van Halen fame, he had erected a plastic coated picture of David Lee adjacent to the front porch of the shed so that they could pee over him.  This was the main gathering point of Reggie and his friends during their high school and college years.

In keeping with the whole ‘evil’ theme of heavy metal, Reggie had an unusual lottery ticket nailed to the wall, which I retrieved from the trash one day.  My dad had bought instant pick lottery tickets and was checking the numbers after the draw had occurred, and I heard him remark, “isn’t this a strange number” or something to that effect, as he threw the ticket in the trash.  I picked up the ticket and saw that the number was 666666, with a bonus number of 6.  This is a highly unusual number, and if you are familiar with the Iron Maiden song, “The Number of the Beast”, or the Book of Revelation, you’ll appreciate the significance.  I showed this ticket to Reggie and he kept it and put it into the shed.  Bad karma might be an appropriate term in hindsight, for the whole heavy metal drug lifestyle and mindset that he was experiencing in the shed.