Dillon Ojo

 Nosepress to Lipslide, Montreal, Quebec. Photo: Alexis Paradis

Portrait: Oli Croteau

BEST STORY EVER - DILLON OJO 

I can’t really think of any crazy stories right now, but just last weekend I threw a cottage party and some wild things went down. The party was on Saturday, but I went up to the cottage with a couple of the guys on Thursday to hang and get things ready. On Thursday night, we ended up drinking a bunch because we were at the cottage, so we had no choice. We eventually went to bed and what do I wake up to? LP Dorval, who has punched a huge hole in the wall of my room. Apparently, he was sleepwalking, getting all aggressive, and going full Hulk on things—like chairs. The only reason why we know this is because my friend Julien was sleeping in the room with him and saw all of this go down from under the covers of the top bunk. He didn’t want to stop LP because who would want to wake up a sleepwalker going ape shit on everything? 

That was the start of the mayhem. On Friday, we headed into the village to buy the tools we needed to fix the wall. Instead of spending the day in town, LP wanted to fix the wall right away, so we went back to my cottage and as we walked inside, we could hear the noise of a waterfall. We ran into the kitchen and water was falling from everywhere! The toilet upstairs had broken somehow and the water wouldn’t stop running. Water was coming from the upstairs bathroom into the kitchen and down into the basement. It was like an indoor waterpark. 

We were all freaking out and no one really knew what to do, so we started grabbing buckets and bowls, trying to catch the water. I had no idea how to turn the water off, but finally figured it out and we were able to stop the flooding. We started cleaning up as fast as we could because we were having the Nowamean movie premier the following night at the house. My mom ended up showing up and calling the insurance company, who were going to come and rip out everything damaged on Saturday morning. 

We ended up going back into town to skate and left my mom with the insurance guys at the house. Everything got sorted out and later that night the people involved in the Nowamean movie showed up for the premier and pre-party night. We watched the movie on a big screen and everyone was partying it up. I had just started to forget about the whole water problem when some people came running out of the woods, screaming for water. There are some abandoned houses and barns in the forest next to my place, and everyone likes to go play around in them because it’s so creepy at night. Everyone was drunk and ended up finding an old, crusty, rusty melted bottle with some kind of liquid in it. Someone dared Alexis Mailhot to drink it and of course he did. Next, they all came running out of the forest and he fell on the ground, shaking and throwing up. He couldn’t lift himself up because he was so weak. Not one person was sober and my parents had gone back home. No one there was a doctor and we had no idea what he drank. We sat him up inside and he was breathing so fast. Somebody called the health line, who said to call an ambulance. Like I said, everyone was either drunk or on something, and no one could think straight. Alex was able to talk to us and said he was OK, and just wanted to sleep, but you could tell that something was wrong. It probably wasn’t the best idea, but we decided that letting him sleep was the right thing to do. I put an alarm on for every 20 minutes to make sure he was still alive. He was able to get up in the morning, but the whole next day he was still shaking and vomiting. We also discovered that Je Page had gotten some of the mystery liquid in his eye when Alex drank it and almost went blind. His eye was the size of a tennis ball all weekend. 

On Saturday morning, I was in stress mode because the weekend was a living hell. The insurance guys were there, ripping the ceiling out and installing fans all over the house. People were starting to show up for the party and my dad kept calling to make sure I wasn’t burning the house down. We went out to have some fun and ride around on the dirt bikes. One guy showed up with his four-wheeler and soon after went flying into a tree, totaling his bike and ripping open his knee. He ended up leaving for the hospital to get patched up, but came back later like a champ and partied. 

Party time came around and at least there weren’t any problems with that. Psyche! At around 1 a.m., another group of people came walking out from the abandoned houses and someone had sliced their hand open on a piece of glass. He came into the house and bled all over the rug, front door, and front steps. We got him wrapped up in order to keep the party going, but he ended up getting stitches the next day. 

I woke up on Sunday to a HUGE mess, but that was expected. What wasn’t expected was having no grass left on my property. Someone had got in their big pickup truck— drunk—and used my field as a derby track. There were deep tire marks and dirt all over the place. Great stories for my parents just kept coming up. In the end, the party was a success with a lot of people, loud music, a big fire, fireworks, babes, and anything you would want at a cottage party. 

All my dad had to say in the end was, “Good job on throwing a bomb-ass party!”