The stories of The White House and SNFU Rob
I used to live in an infamously debaucherous party house in Edmonton called The White House, in a former frat house just off Whyte Avenue.
In the three or so years we lived there, I’d guess twenty-five to thirty people passed through as residents. Maybe more. Counting accurately was impossible. People arrived. People vanished. Mattresses appeared. Someone’s vegan, straight edge cousin from Red Deer would sleep on the couch for a month and just suddenly be part of the ecosystem.
The parties we threw there remain, in my completely unbiased opinion, some of the greatest parties ever seen by human eyes. Truly the definition of legendary. The number of epics that start with “this one time at White House” are countless, I’m sure.
We had jacuzzis.
We had an outdoor sledding hill.
We had a bong of architectural significance.
There were keggers. Drag parties. Other gloriously queer parties. Bikini parties. Raves. DJs. Bands. Orgies, plural. At least one mosh pit, though regrettably no successful body-surfers, but not for lack of trying.
Because we were just off Whyte, the house functioned as a kind of neighbourhood crash pad. If you found yourself wandering the avenue with nothing to do, the White House giveth: big sagging couches, a packed bong, hand drums, a record player, cold beers, and almost certainly a tray of crispy tofu nachos, a house specialty, sitting on the counter.
It was at this house that I first met a Whyte Avenue legend: a street-rat kid known to everyone as SNFU Rob, named after the notorious Edmonton punk band of which he was the world’s number-one fan.
He even had a bleach-blonde dreadlock Mohawk , just like Mr. Chi Pig, SNFU’s Iconic, enigmatic frontman, one of the greatest punk rock singers of all time.
Rob can hold a room. Hell, any room, unlike anyone I’ve ever known. The brain on that guy is something else. The spectrum of knowledge stored in his mind grapes could fill several encyclopedias. 🧠🍇📚
He’s also an emotional firecracker who gives zero fucks, takes zero shit, and generally cannot be fucked with.
Over the last twenty-five years we’ve had a tempestuous relationship, including several long, mutually beneficial estrangements. But how we met is a story worth telling unto itself.
I was twenty, hanging out at the ol’Whitey one afternoon when there was a knock at the door.
I opened it to find SNFU Rob, who at that point I knew only by reputation. On Whyte Avenue he was something of a minor folk hero: the weed baron of Netwerks, an internet café meets low/high key cannabis dispensary, where popping in for herb was famously quick and painless.
Rob looked stressed.
“Hey man,” he said, “Listen,I’m glad you’re home. I’m in trouble and I need to talk to somebody.”
He had just come from the police station. Earlier that afternoon he’d been arrested for possession of cannabis. A lot of it.
“Someone told me you work with young offenders,” he said.
I nodded.
“Come in. Let me make a call, “ I said.
I phoned my dear friend Wallis Kendall, a storied Edmonton artist and legendary youth worker. I’d worked closely with him on his monumental sculpture project ‘The Gun Sculpture’, which I write about in my book, The Shape of After. Google The project if you’re unfamiliar.
Wallis has a particular talent for getting kids out of trouble.
Soon he was sitting on the White House couch, coffee in hand, calmly talking Rob through his options.
They eventually decided Wallis would accompany him to court as an advocate.
Wallis kept his word.
He connected Rob with lawyers who knew how to navigate the system, and when Rob’s case came up they steered it toward alternative measures. No criminal record. No jail. Just community service.
But the way Wallis structured that community service was pure Wallis.
Instead of sweeping parking lots or picking up roadside garbage, Rob got to do something that actually meant something to him.
For his hours, he helped produce a mural.
And then, in one of those strange loops life sometimes creates, he also co-produced an episode of the radio show I was hosting about young offenders.
The show was called Youth Menace, and it aired on CJSR-FM 88.5, Edmonton’s campus station.
Which meant the kid who had knocked on my door at the White House in a panic after getting busted for weed ended up sitting beside me in a radio studio, helping make a show about the exact system he had just passed through.
Not a bad outcome for a random afternoon knock on the door.