Free All the Way by Jordin Tootoo Page A

payments.”
    â€œYou need fuel? You need food? What’s the grocery store’s number? I’ll call the gas station and open a tab for you.”
    â€œNo, just send us some money.”
    I knew what they were really trying to get at. They wanted to order booze.
    Usually it wasn’t my dad who asked for the money; it was Mom: “I got no money. Dad doesn’t know how to pay bills. I got to pay everything.” Well, meanwhile, my mom’s playing bingo three times a week, plus buying booze. She always had an excuse, but in the end she was just using us. She used her kids to pay for her fucking addictions.
    My parents still think I’m the Jordin who will just give, give, give, give, give, and nothing’s ever good enough for them. You know, I called home and told them I bought a new truck, and their reaction was, “Why would you buy a sixty-thousand-dollar car when you could have spent that money elsewhere?” In their minds they’re thinking, There’s sixty thousand gone and no money for us. It’s never: “Oh, I’m proud of you” or “Congratulations!” There’s never any encouragement or anything. When I told them I bought my place in Kelowna, my mom gave me the old “Well, fuck, that’s not very smart of you to spend two million dollars on a house and fucking waste all your money on that.”Like, what’s wrong with you? Mom, I fucking worked hard all my life for this. Why can’t you just say congratulations and leave it at that?
    BACK THEN, coming home in the summer meant that I was partying right alongside my parents and everyone else. That’s actually when I drank the most. It was my time off. People in the community would be amazed, seeing me and Terence drunk so often. They’d be thinking, Holy shit, do they live like that all the time? When do they ever play hockey? But no one complained— especially my parents—because we supplied the booze. They sure weren’t going to tell their kids not to drink and at the same time drink the booze we were providing.
    In Rankin Inlet, alcohol is supposed to be controlled, and you’re supposed to need a permit to bring booze in. Not when I came home. It was a big piss-up. I’d bring up cases and cases of beer—coolers full of beer—plus the hard stuff, all brought home on the plane. Our bedroom was like a liquor store and, for our parents, it was like, Fuck, yeah, this is fucking great. They’d place an order before we came home—we need ten cases of this and five bottles of that—and we would deliver it. I would come home with ten checked bags with bottles clinking inside them and no one fucking questioned me.
    Then it would be one long fucking shindig until we left again. The whole town would be fucking hammered thanks to us. The word would get out that Jordin and Terence were homeand partying somewhere, so have at ’er. All our buddies and relatives would show up, and we’d all party together.
    The whole time I was home it’d just be one drama after another—my buddies feuding with their girlfriends, and husbands fighting with wives, and older guys partying and getting thrown in the drunk tank—but I didn’t fucking care. It was a circus, but I didn’t care because we were having fun. A lot of my friends and people in the community don’t drink that often, but when they do it’s mayhem. Like I said, you turned into a fricking devil. Back then, I never understood why my buddies’ girlfriends would get pissed off at them for partying with me. Well, now I know that when they’d go home and they were pissed drunk, it was a different story—and I didn’t have to deal with it.
    You don’t see that when you’re living in that cloud. But now, when I come home, I think, What the fuck was I doing? Being selfish, and doing it all for the wrong reasons. To us, bringing the booze home was a way