Conspiracies, Psychedelics, and Friendship: The Gino Saga

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:18):
When I was growing up, one of my best friends
was a guy we called Gino. His real name was David,
but after he first moved to Toronto in tenth grade,
we nicknamed them Georgina, after the little town he moved from.
I guess it was just kids being cruel, a way
of reminding him that he was sort of an outsider.
But as David stuck it out and proved that he

(00:39):
could hang with us, Georgina got abbreviated to Gina, which
ended up turning into the masculinized Gino. Gina won our
respect pretty quickly too, and not just because he could
handle a little playful abuse. He was obsessed with the
counterculture of the nineteen sixties. He loved the music, the
rebellious attitudes, and he was fascinated by the whole concept

(01:01):
of psychedelia. So it should be no surprise to know
one that Gino was the first of us to seek
out something a little stronger than the cans of Molson
that we used to steal from our dads. We were
big into partying, so we wanted to try stuff like
weed or LSD. But only Gino had enough balls or
street smarts really to go off looking for it, and

(01:22):
things stayed like that for years. We'd be happy to
just sit in someone's bedroom, passing around to one hitter
and watching Koyana Scatzi. But Gino wanted to keep raising
the stakes and pushing the envelope. He wanted to learn
how to brew up his own super powerful LSD and
then go out into the woods and trip for days.
And like most things with Gino, if he said he

(01:44):
was going to do something, you could bet your butt
that he was going to go ahead and do it.
He was wild. He loved a party, but he never
let his lifestyle get the better of him. He did
okay in high school, graduated from college, and then landed
himself well paying job at some financial company near the waterfront,
all while making home brewed batches of high potency LSD

(02:07):
in his apartment's spare bedroom. He was like Jim Pattison
on Monday and then Jim Morrison on a Friday, which
is an awesome joke if you're Canadian, I swear now. Anyways,
So Gino carries on like that for years and years,
slowly ramping up his psychedelic adventures until he was doing
things like going to Mexico to do peyote with indigenous

(02:29):
tribespeople or Peru to take part in some ayahuasca ceremony
hosted by his very own personal shaman, and we never
worried about him. Gino always seemed to be in control,
and I guess that remained true right up until the
day he seemed to just lose it. It started when
his sister started calling around his social circles, which obviously

(02:52):
included me and a bunch of mutual friends who all
went to the same high school. Gino's sisters said neither
she nor their family had heard from him all week,
and we tried calling Gino on his cell phone and
he wouldn't pick up any of our calls either. By
the end of the next day, his family had called
the cops to file a missing person's report, and as

(03:13):
you can imagine, we were all pretty worried about him.
But then a few weeks later, Gino reappeared, only to
not check in with his folks or let us know
that he was okay. All he did was clear out
his apartment and leave a letter in his parents mailbox,
one that basically said, sell or burn anything I left behind.

(03:34):
I'm not coming back. Every One was as freaked out.
As you can imagine, we went from mildly concern to
extremely worried about him, and the not knowing was the
worst part. Like I personally had this irrational fear that
he'd been kidnapped or murdered or something, and that some
one else had written the letter to confuse people or
throw the cops off their trail. But when the cop

(03:57):
spoke to Gino's landlady, she confirmed that he'd been in
town that day and that although he seemed rushed, she
didn't think that he was in fear for his life
or anything like that. He hadn't given her any kind
of forwarding address. He just packed up what he could
and then left on paper that was contact right there.
And knowing Gina was alive might have been enough for

(04:18):
some other folks to call off the search, But then,
because his folks still didn't know what was happening, they
told the cops that they still wanted him found so
they could confirm that he was safe. And by that
time we'd given up trying to call his cell phone,
and it was a weight off our shoulders knowing that
he was still alive and that he hadn't fallen victim
to a murder or a kidnapper, or really anything. But

(04:42):
we knew that there must have been something that made
him run off like that, and I worried over that
almost as much as I wondered where he'd gotten to.
About two or three months went by, with me and
Gino's other friends keeping in constant touch with his family,
and then one day we heard that the cops had
gotten a tip from some one up way over near Ottawa,

(05:03):
and that's how they traced him to some cabin out
in the Algonquin Provincial Park. A few cops went out
to talk to him, and he only told them who
he was after they promised to leave him alone. The
cops left, but immediately told Gino's family where he was.
Gino's brother then went up to try and talk to him,
but he was gone, moved on again to who knows where.

(05:26):
Gino's family tried to get the cops to carry on
looking for him, but that's not how those missing person
things work. If the person doesn't want to be found,
the cops can't very well go stalking them from place
to place, even at the behest of the person's family.
If they wanted to track Geno down, they'd have to
do it themselves, and looking back on it, it seems

(05:47):
like the obvious thing to do would be for everyone
to keep looking and not give up. We'd been handing
out flyers, putting up posters, and this was in the
early days of my Space too, so I remember Gino's
sister making a little page for him and adding a
bunch of people to try to raise awareness. But that
was before the cops went to talk to him out

(06:07):
at that cabin, before a word got around that he
basically decided that he hated everyone and that he didn't
want to see or talk to us anymore. People didn't
take that well. They took it personally. They didn't see
it for what it was. And I say all that
from experience. We've basically grown up together. We were best friends,

(06:28):
and I was ready to drive out there myself to
go see him, because just hearing that he didn't want
to see us wasn't nearly enough to make us want
to quit. It was leaving the cabin that did it.
Leaving the cabin said this isn't some cry for help.
Stop looking for me. Leaving the cabin said I don't
owe you an explanation, which was honestly, all we really needed.

(06:51):
We didn't want to control him. We just wanted closure,
and I feel like we were entitled to it at
the very minimum. That was in early two thousand and four,
and there was a time when I thought that we'd
still be looking by the time it was two thousand
and five, but in reality, we'd all stop looking by then,
even his family. We figured that if he wanted to

(07:13):
reach out, he'd do so, and it was all just
a matter of time until that day came. Now cut
to twenty eleven, a full seven years later, when I
get a call from a mutual friend of ours named Obdy.
Hed got in a miss call while he was at work,
and when he listened to his voicemail, he heard a
familiar voice on the other end telling him to call

(07:34):
a number they left in the message at the exact time.
The caller never said who it was, but when my
buddy Abdy called me, he said that he was ninety
nine percent certain that it was Gino, and then asked
if I wanted to come over so I could be
there when he called the number he'd given me. I
drove over to his place almost immediately, and we talked

(07:56):
about the call, and how sudden it seemed, right up
until it came time to call the number, at which
point we sat down at his table with a pen
and paper in hand, and then gave it a call.
We didn't actually talk for all that long, but the
long and short of it was this. It was Gino
that had left the message on Abde's voicemail, and although

(08:16):
he didn't say where he was, he told us that
he needed our help. He thought it was a big ask,
considering that we hadn't talked in seven years, but that
he didn't know who else to call, even though he'd
spent the last few days trying to track down a
working cell phone number for one of us. He'd understand
if we told him to go f himself. Needless to say,

(08:38):
we didn't tell him to do that, And although he
had a ton of questions, Gino said that he'd answered
them all if we agreed to meet him at this
place called Whitney, which turned out to be a small
town about halfway between Toronto and Ottawa. We were nervous
on the drive up there, and we mistimed our arrival
by around fifteen minutes, so we had to sit there

(08:59):
biting our nails and wondering if Gino was actually going
to show up or not. But lo and behold, right
on the stroke of six, we spotted someone walking into
the parking lot of the little Burger place that served
as our meeting spot, someone who looked a lot like
Gino if he'd spent seven years living on the streets,
or more accurately, living out in the middle of nowhere

(09:21):
in the woods. It was an emotional reunion now tears
were shed. It felt very positive, but it was intense,
really intense, and mainly because Gino started out by telling
us how sorry he was. He said cutting off contact
was a mistake and one he'd never forgive himself for,

(09:42):
and that it hurt to think about all the time
that we had lost. Hearing all that pretty much knocked
us off our feet. I mean, he covered a lot
of stuff that we wanted to talk about in his
opening little speech, and after that there really wasn't much
else to ask him. We wanted to know where and
how he'd been living, but he wanted to know all

(10:02):
that same stuff from us too, And since we had
him right where we wanted him, we figured that we
could get him up to speed while we went inside
and got a burger. We got to talking about all
kinds of things, but eventually me and Abdy were able
to ask Geno two things. Number one, where had he
been living? And number two what did he need our

(10:23):
help with? Both questions could be answered by finishing our burghers,
getting back into our car, Geno included, and letting him
direct us towards the place that he was living, which
was way out near this place called Little Hay Lake.
As it turns out, Gino had been living almost completely
off the grid for almost six years in a trailer

(10:45):
that he'd managed to haul down a dirt road and
then far enough into the trees so that you couldn't
see it anymore from the track. He walked into Whitney
every so often to pick up whatever he couldn't shoot
or forage for, and then hitched a ride for or
a field whenever he needed to make a few bucks.
And the way he was earning those few buckoroos was

(11:06):
by making LSD Ultra Potent Medical Strength LSD. And then
because he was making it, he was having to test
it out too very frequently. But as far as we
could tell, that suited him just fine. I guess Geno
just sort of found his calling, and the way he

(11:30):
talked about it, he was happy, at least for a
while he was. Anyways, he had everything he needed out
in that trailer. The place was relatively clean. He had
a little generator that he'd used to power a laptop,
and he had no Internet, but Gino didn't mind. He
had his DVDs and that was all he needed. But
then came the problem that he needed our help with.

(11:52):
And at first I was actually kind of scared that
he'd killed somebody or something and that he wanted our
help disposing of a body. As it turned out, that
wasn't the case, and there was nothing Gino needed help
disposing of. But by the end of the next morning,
there would be a body, and it wouldn't be one
we needed any help disposing of at all. We did

(12:14):
a little more catching up back at the trailer, but
then after a little looking around, I asked Gino half
jokingly if he was about to enlist our help in
digging a shallow grave. Gino actually seemed kind of offended
at first, but then Obdy started to laugh. It was
a release of tension, I guess, pure relief that whatever
Gino needed didn't involve covering up some horrible crime. I

(12:38):
remember Abdy joking around saying, well, whatever the hell it is,
it can't be worse than that, as in helping Gino
hide the body that is. Gino had been kind of
laughing along with us, at least after shaking off the
offense that he took at the suggestion that he was
a murderer. But when Abdy joked about how things could
have been worse, Gino didn't laugh, he didn't even smile,

(12:59):
because to him, things were about as bad as it
was possible to get. I think maybe an hour passed
between us arriving at the trailer and Geno actually sitting
down and telling us what he needed help with, And
when he did that, nervous tension returned again. I mean,
if it was more serious than hiding a dead body,
then it must have been really serious, right, serious enough

(13:20):
to be scared of the consequences, serious enough to consider
just getting the hell out of there if he dropped
a bomb on us. But when he actually told us,
it was this weird mix of depressing and relief. Basically,
Gina wanted us to call up just about everyone we knew,
or everyone whom we wanted to save, as he put it,

(13:41):
and invite them out of the woods to set up
an encampment. If we didn't, they were all going to
suffer a fate worse than death. In so many words,
Gino said that there was going to be a major
change in Canadian society, that folks were going to be
rounded up by massed soldiers and taken away to camps
to be fitted with microchips and all sorts of crazy stuff.

(14:04):
It was basically this giant conspiracy involving international governments looking
to wield absolute power over the people, and the only
way to really enforce that was to eliminate huge sections
of the population, basically any one who might put up
some sort of resistance. Gina was convinced the whole thing
was going to start within a month, and although he

(14:25):
wouldn't go into too much detail about how he knew
all that stuff, he seemed to think giving away sources
would put them on some kind of government hit list.
He seemed completely and utterly convinced that his predictions were correct.
What followed was around six hours of convincing Gino that
he was wrong. It wasn't easy, which is why I
mentioned the six hours thing, but by the time night

(14:48):
had fallen and Gina was riding a low dose of LSD,
we'd gone from making a little headway to actually getting
through to him that his theories might just be wildly wrong.
We didn't fully convince him, not all the way, but
we did talk him down to the point where he
agreed to come home, mainly by convincing him that he'd

(15:08):
be in the best possible position to rescue people if
the government did decide to start putting people into camps.
He could be like an early warning system. He could
recognize the signs, and that way he could be the
hero we needed when we needed him most, and it
was a win win either way. We proved things weren't

(15:29):
as bad as he thought, and he could save our
butts and we'd follow him to hell and back, and
that seemed like the idea that really got its hooks
in him. Gino agreed to come home with us, but
not before he sobered up a little. We could sleep
in our car, he'd sleep in the trailer, and then
come sunrise we get ourselves some breakfast and then drive
back down to Toronto and drop him off at his

(15:51):
parents' place. After we agreed on that course of action.
We finished off our beers, walked back to our car,
and agreed to head back over to the trailer come
sun up. It felt like a huge victory, and the
second we got back to the car, we were texting people,
mainly Gino's family, and telling them how he was finally
ready to come home. We were so excited we could

(16:14):
barely sleep. I kept thinking about how happy everyone was
going to be, how driving back into Toronto was going
to feel like a victory parade,