My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen. Stealing Dope. Louis Shalako.

Two or three grams of coke.

Louis Shalako

 

Stealing dope. Stealing dope. It really wasn’t my idea, not at all, but, as usual, I got sucked in by a friend.

Good old Swimmy had some friends, they lived out in the country. They were growing dope, outdoors. Like many a fool, they talked about it. Most likely, on their own farm. Quite a long ways out in the country, as it turned out. He had a rough idea of where it was—they had a farm. They had an address, on some county road. They had fences and ditches and a big woodlot at the back of the property. There were only so many places it could be.

And of course, at this point I was either still living in my dad’s basement, or I had gone away for a while, to some other town—having failed there after two or three years, I was right back in my dad’s basement again.

The point here is that I had a place, but I couldn’t really hang up a bunch of stolen dope to cure. My old man would have had kittens. Swimmy couldn’t really do it at home, as he and his elderly mother, dying of cancer, but with a bathroom medicine cabinet full of little pill bottles brimming with brightly coloured doses of morphine, lived in a two-bedroom apartment on an upper floor of a house on Mackenzie Street.

Swimmy calls me up, its harvest time and he figures on bagging some pot. He’s got some guy in Point Edward, who’s got a place to hang the stuff up to dry. I borrowed my old man’s turbocharged Volvo station wagon, and I pick up Swimmy and this other guy, and off we go to a bunch of dirt and gravel sideroads in the northern part of Plympton-Wyoming.

We head north on such and such a side-road or concession. We drop off Swimmy, and he heads off across a field of soybeans. There’s a bit of a moon, but mostly pitch-black with a few lights here and there from the occasional farmhouse. I’m cruising along in my old man’s Volvo, talking to some guy I’ve never seen before, and all we can really do is to make a right turn when we get to the lake road, Lambton 7. We go east one concession and make another right, we go south for a while, make another right turn, and another.

Now we’re heading back to where we dropped good old Swimmy off. Only one problem, of course: Swimmy isn’t there. All we could do, bearing in mind we’re just a couple of guys cruising up and down gravel side-roads in my old man’s car, was to circle around. Again. And again. Yeah, just a couple of guys circling around the block. Over and over again. At some point, I started circling around to the left, and this way around was a lot longer. At some point, we are tempted to abandon good old Swimmy, and let the bastard make his own way home—

Finally, making one last pass, my erstwhile companion spots Swimmy…the poor fucker is slugging a good forty pot plants over his shoulder, staggering along under the load, and wondering just where in the fuck we were.

Swimmy had crossed a few ditches, at least three farms, floundering in the dark all the way. He’d finally found his buddy’s bush-lot. He’d floundered around in there for a while, and finally stumbled upon a pretty good patch, almost by accident. Now he’s got to cut and pull and yank away until he’s got as much pot as he can reasonably be expected to handle. He throws that over his shoulder and starts walking. Having done all that, at least he knows enough to follow the moon or whatever, and make his way back to our fucking home away from home, that fucking side-road…

So.

I pull over. My passenger had no idea of how to open the tailgate, but Swimmy and I stuffed all this dope into the back end, he hops into the right back seat, and we drove, back roads all the way, back home to good old Sarnia.

We got off the highway and found his buddy’s place in Point Edward. When I got out of the car, there was pot—the tops of the plants, still sticking out of the bottom of the tailgate.

Yeah, it’s a good thing a cop didn’t come up behind us…

Going down the road with pot plants hanging out the back end...fuck.

We start dragging all this lanky, skunky old pot into this guy’s place, in the front door and up the stairs to a big closet on the second floor. Already, this guy’s wife is kicking up a fuss. They’ve got a kid, this is their home, and I can’t help thinking he had no idea of what he was getting into, any more than I had. This was one of those deals where I really didn’t see much out of it. The buds were one thing, all the leaves and stalk and roots and dirt were something else. The guy’s wife was pretty hot, by that, I mean angry.

Swimmy and I got the hell out of there.

What I will say, and this is probably a good thing, is that Swimmy had fifty cents, and we went down to a car wash and vacuumed a lot of dirt, leaves and bits of pot out of the back end of the Volvo before dropping him off and heading on home again.

My old man would have appreciated that, I am sure.

***

So, good old Swimmy calls me up one evening in winter. This would have to be before 1993. I didn’t know the guy, the name didn’t mean anything to me. I don’t recall the name, but I do recall the house—literally a block from my old man’s house.

I drove to pick up Swimmy, and then parked across a circle in the tree streets. You’d have to see the layout, but the car was barely fifty metres from the home in question…yet it’s not like we can just pull into the driveway, the guy has neighbours and they might be pretty good friends.

They might know his vehicle is gone—and who the hell are these guys, right.

Swimmy knows the guy. He knows the guy has some good coke. He knows the guy lives alone, he knows where he works and he knows the guy’s schedule. He’s a tradesman, working twelve-hour shifts, down at the plants on some shutdown. Fuck, he even knows where the spare key is kept.

We get out of the car and start walking. There is no one around, not even kids playing outside. And Swimmy opens up the front door. We take a quick look around, up and down the street, and go on in.

The place is silent. My job was to stay on the main floor, Swimmy figures the coke is down in the basement—somewhere. That is the challenge here. It’s a corner house. So, I’m floating back and forth between the window at the back door, where I can see up the street, and then back to the front of the house, where I can see quite a ways down the other street, left and right, and across this circle thingy, which is quite frankly, peculiar to that little area of town.

And fucking Swimmy is down there forever. I mean, he’s down there for half an hour, maybe more, carefully searching every fucking drawer, every little nook and cranny, opening stuff up and closing it back again, trying to find the stuff. He’s unscrewing heater grilles and looking in the crawl space under the back stairs. He’s looking in toolboxes, closets, bookshelves.

Every so often he’s calling up to me, (softly, but calling), and I’m sure he could hear me prowling back and forth. I don’t know how reassuring that was, but probably better than being abandoned down there, with the potential for being surprised and cornered.

The odd car goes by, but I tell him it’s still clear—for now.

You really start to sweat after a while. The worst that could happen is that the guy comes home, in which case we go boiling out the other door and head for the car—that part is just plain stupid, but we may have been able to just walk around a block or two. Let the guy get his boots off, get his coat off, right. We could come back to a parked car, if we had to, even the next morning. Who would guess, right. Assuming we haven’t found it, no real harm done, although the guy would wonder if we didn’t lock up in our haste to get out—assuming he didn’t see or hear us as he came in whatever door was the habit.

Yet people forget to lock doors all the time—human psychology plays a role in any plan.

Assuming Swimmy ever did find anything, we’d be out of there like a shot, and the odds of someone arriving home at that exact moment would be fairly astronomical.

I was just telling Swimmy we might as well give it up and get out of there, and finally, he’s fucking found the stuff. I can’t recall what he grabbed, probably two or three grams out of what had to be a much larger stash.

At some point, the guy would realize he was coming up a bit short on his ounce or two ounces or a quarter pound of powder cocaine, but if enough time went by, he would likely just figure he’d been doing a little more of his own product than he quite recalled.

Dude. I got it.

That was good to hear.

Fucking Swimmy comes up the stairs, relief written all over him. We were out the door. Swimmy puts the spare key back where he found it. Once we were in the car, I fired it up and drove around the block and parked it at my place. I forget exactly what he gave me for that one, probably half a gram, perhaps a little more—we did up a couple of crack tokes, but not too much, as I still had to drive him. I would imagine he locked himself in for a day or two that time.

It really was that kind of dope, the idea that you could save some for tomorrow was pure fantasy.

***

Buddy Two-Shoes had a neighbour. The neighbour had a bit of a thicket at the back of the yard, with a kind of fence made out of piled-up rocks and saplings, trees, weeds, in a rather vain bid for privacy. He took me to the back of his parents’ yard and showed me.

The neighbour had put out a few little pot plants in green plastic self-watering pots. If no one came along, at least not too close, they blended in well enough. Buddy wasn’t likely to steal them, it was right next door. They were tiny little plants, early in the season, no buds on there.

Buddy had good pot all the time, admittedly all the real thieves had their cycles of boom and bust.

It was probably a few days later. I waited until dark, in fact I stayed up until three or three-thirty in the morning. It was fairly warm, early summer. And I went for it.

And it was stupid enough. I walked about halfway down the block, in the dark and behind the fence line. I dropped to my belly, ladies and gentlemen, and damp it was too, with the dew settling on the grass. And I crawled. Whenever lights flashed across me from the end of George Street, I bellied-down and froze there. Finally, I got up to the back of the yard and all was quiet.

So, what do I do now?

I sort of had to stand up, crouching. I grabbed four or five of the little planters and clutched them to my chest.

And I scuttled home, as there is just no way to crawl like that…I never heard back, I never heard anything about it from Buddy, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up.

By the time that stuff had dried, it crumbled to a fine, green powder and it made up about three and a half joints…what the fuck, eh.

***

Doing time.

McNuggets had done time with some guy. But he was getting out, and the other guy had some time still on his sentence. He had a patch, a big one. He drew a map. He gave directions, and McNuggets promised to put some money in his account.

McNuggets was duly released from jail, and a few days later, he went looking.

Somewhere up by Clinton, Ontario, quite a long ways from home. He had a knapsack, and a few plastic garbage bags…and much to his own surprise, he found it.

It was the field of dreams, to hear him tell it. He grabbed all the fucking pot he could grab, jammed his pack and the bags full, as much as he could carry. He managed to get out of there undetected…he managed to get back home to Sarnia.

And he thought he had it made, but raw pot has to be dried. Buds have to be cut, and clipped and cured…he had nowhere to put it all. He lived at home with the parents, and he sure as hell didn’t trust his own friends with such a haul. They’d steal him blind, right.

He had more fresh pot than he could safely deal with…

The field of dreams, or so he said...

The story as he told it, was that ninety percent of it went mouldy, and quite quickly. Now he’s got a stinking mess on his hands and all he could do was to bag it up, go for a drive and dump all that in a ditch somewhere.

What the fuck, eh.

I doubt if that other guy ever saw any money, either.

 

END

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My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Ten.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due to content. 18+)

My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fourteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen.

Thank you for reading and listening.

 

 

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen. Shoplifting, and Theft. Louis Shalako.

This one's worth $200.00, today's prices.

Louis Shalako

Theft and shoplifting. Well, it was one of those nights, winter coming on and dusk coming on even sooner.

There’s a pounding at the back door and it’s Zoomer. My old man is in the living room, but by this time I was inhabiting the basement.

He wants a ride, enough so that he pulls out a fairly large joint and sparks it up—some of that good, green, pine-tasting California sensimilla. All I have to do is to borrow Frank’s car and he will see that I get a little something out of it.

This time it’s shoplifting. Zoom has a few orders to fulfill, and he knows exactly where to go. If truth be told, he’s been there before and done it all before.

Zoom is wearing this kind of polyester bomber jacket. It’s big, it’s bulky, more importantly, it has big sleeves and tight, elastic cuffs. I drive over to Mitton Street, pull into the back of the parking lot, and Zoom goes into Shopper’s Drug Mart, just to pick up a few little things…

I suppose perfume and cosmetics are good things, but this is a more likely target for light-fingered young women and girls. No, Zoom was after bigger game. They had a wall display. Two, three, possibly four Norman Rockwell collector plates go in through the open collar, the zipper on that big old jacket pulled down a bit, and then, moving along, he somehow manages to steal, or ‘schmiel’, in the hyper-localized argot or cant, a criminal language all of its own, a couple of Royal Dalton figurines. (Royal Doulton. - ed.) These go into the side pockets and all of a sudden, out the door and he’s there at the car, in something of a rush.

I fire up that fucking old red Volvo, and cruise out of that parking lot, and head on back eight or ten blocks, and no one seems to pay us the least bit of attention. Yes, it was night, yes, it was coming on to Christmas. Here he is, banned in half the stores in town, for just such an offense, or series of offenses, and yet no one has paid him a second glance. Honestly, they had his picture up beside the till at pretty much every store in Lambton Mall…

Oh, and if I’m lucky, I get a tiny little bud and some kind of a thrill—some kind of transient entertainment value out of it.

After a while, he’s gone off to flog off the proceeds of a half an hour’s work, and for me, it’s back to the television and another long winter’s night.

Years later, when someone broke into Stoney’s and stole a shit-load of his mother’s Norman Rockwells and Royal Doultons, the first person I thought of was Zoomer—the second person I thought of was Stoney himself. He might have gotten just that desperate, you never know.

***

I won’t say we worked together. With Zoom, you were a patsy, an accessory, a useful fool, or a victim, maybe even an innocent bystander. But the pair of us had headed out, in my big old Chrysler, another dark, stormy, freezing winter’s night. We found ourselves down at the Moore Township Arena, which is just off the parkway along the St. Clair River.

The moon hung in the sky off to the west, there were stars and it was cold as hell. Zoom goes all over the parking lot. There is a hockey game or something going on inside the building…he’s right back at my window.

Get on out here, he needs help. Someone has just scored a goal inside, judging by the sound, and I hop out and follow him to a vehicle, which he has already scoped out. He’s cut some wires or pulled some plugs, and I scurry back to the Chrysler with a pair of wedge-shaped DeVeaux speakers from the back window.

Ye olde fashioned tennis courts, ladies and gentlemen.

I nipped back, and into the passenger side of that vehicle, a sporty, muscle car with a high-end stereo system in the dashboard. A fucking Blaupunkt or something. Zoom has pulled the wires, the plugs and fuses…he’s got the knobs and the face-plate off. I stuff all that into my pockets. No, ladies and gentlemen, the real problem is the stalks. The long, threaded rods that control the box, are fucking long…real long, and the hex-nuts are inset into deep sockets, and the threads are fine. It’s a cold winter night, and that hockey game can only go on for so long.

He’s spinning away with the fingers of his right hand, I’m spinning madly away with the fingers of my left hand, and for fuck’s sakes, it seemed to take forever to get them fucking nuts off of there. Finally we had them, and the thing falls out the back and he grabs it. Holy shit, and it is one fucking hell of a relief to get off that river road, head east on fuck-shit concession, go one or two past the Highway 40, (north), and then finally weasel our way back into town, all on back roads, without any major problems.

***

It’s not always easy to put a date on certain events. I was possibly working as an unarmed security guard, twelve-hour shifts, three days on and three days off. I might have been driving cab, or on call at Heist, where good old Stoney had at least gotten me in, and if I had survived long enough, I might have even gotten into the union. High-pressure water blasting is tough, brutal work.

But I was in my usual place, sitting there in front of the television, when an unfamiliar vehicle zooms up the driveway, there are hurried footsteps, and the usual pounding at the back door…broad daylight and all.

It’s McNuggets and Buddy Two-Shoes. They’ve made a big score and the first person they thought of on the way back to town was me.

First, a couple of Iron Horse mountain bikes that were all the rage at the time. That part’s bad enough, at least they can ride them away, bearing in mind they’ll have to leave them for the time being, as they’re driving a leased vehicle and they have to return it. No, the real thing is that they’ve charged up a dozen VCRs, video cam-corders, on stolen credit cards, and for the time being, those will have to sort of be stashed in the back of a closet—at my house.

Fuck, at this point, all I want is one of those cameras. Of course they promised, and of course, it never happened. They were back once or twice a day, until every fucking one of them had been sold—it’s not like they would ever keep one for themselves.

***

That fucking old Volvo.

At the time of this writing, December, 2023, Christmas is less than a month away. Sometime in the mid-nineties, Buddy Two-Shoes was knocking at my back door. It was dark, overcast, with some snow on the ground and the promise of more to come. Predictably, he needed a ride. It seems he’d been reading Community Calendar, a regular feature in the local daily.

I don’t know if he had any more advance information than that. But I had sort of inherited dad’s red, 1971 Volvo at this point. (My old man had four Volvos, all in a row, and that’s what he drove for over forty years, ladies and gentlemen.)

I drove Buddy up to a school in the north end of the city, at the corner of Indian Road and Errol.

Apparently, there was a musical thing, little kids, parents, teachers, old people singing Christmas carols and all of that sort of thing. This was going on in the school gymnasium. The parking lot along Errol Road was mostly full, but I found a spot way down at the end, and Buddy gets out and has a look, with a tiny little pocket flash and his trusty bent coat hanger at the ready. I used to shut her down, but it was all warmed up by now and she still started easily…

He was back in five minutes. Let’s go, he says.

So, I pull out, head east on Errol, and then hook a right. This area was well-known to me, the same little subdivision mentioned in the chapter on Escape and Evasion. (He means High Speed Chase. - ed.) Cash is anonymous, although I didn’t know exactly what he’d scored. The thing is to get away with some cool, some aplomb, from the scene of the crime. My own hands are clean, my pockets don’t have any evidence in them. Not my problem, right. It was early yet, they’d be in the school for quite a while, right. It’s not like people were chasing us, not at all…

And holy, fuck, the guy pulls out four hundred-dollar bills. I thought he was just bragging, but no—this was for me. This was my cut. Holy, fuck. I just about shit myself. Seriously. These guys weren’t known for being generous—that’s a contradiction in terms when it comes to thieves, right.

Good old Buddy must have hit the motherlode that night. Oh—and someone else lost a big whack of cash. At that fucking rate, it must have been thousands. We were back at my place within half an hour, forty-five minutes. I sure as hell stopped at the beer store that evening, I will confess.

Sure beats five bucks for gas and a couple of joints, and if you’re lucky, a rancid cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup, right.

When somebody makes a score like that, there’s no sense in leaving the cash and taking a credit card, which has its own problems and risks.

In a case like that, it’s take the money and run.

***

Right outside the back door...

The tennis courts. There are tennis courts at Germain Park. Thieves haunted the parking lots at Germain Park. For one thing, the tennis courts were on the other side of the Botanical Gardens, a couple of hundred metres from the parking lot. People left their wallets in their cars all too often. Also, Jackson Pool was right beside the parking lot, with all kinds of people coming and going. Again, all them wallets and other valuables, theoretically locked in the car…the Strangway Centre, a seniors’ centre is on the other side of the parking lot, and then the Parks Department works yard is right there as well, the employees also park along in there.

The thieves had pulled a picnic table over, just behind a hedge, this is right by the Zen garden. They were out of sight, yet one or two of them could simply get up to stretch the legs and see what was going on in the parking lot.

They were looking for some little old lady to leave a ‘white elephant’ in the trunk of a car, going into the Strangway Centre for a card game, a fitness class, or a free cup of coffee and a gossip. The term denotes a big fat purse, usually in white leather. They were looking for the vehicle, the one where a couple of people parked, got out, and went and played tennis for a while. They were looking to see where the municipal parks people were, always running about in their little golf-carts and Cushman, three-wheeled vehicles…they were looking to score, and the fact is, with a bottle of water or pop, their own tennis rackets and wearing the athletic clothes, shorts and T-shirts and running shoes, one or two bicycles parked around, they blended in well enough.

The size and composition of the crew varied, they weren’t always there, but Zoomer for one specialized for many years in theft from vehicle.

It was his thing—it was what he did, ladies and gentlemen. As for his long-time girlfriend Dee, she at least could keep a driver’s license—Zoomer was banned for life at an early age, whether by the courts or the insurance companies, is not for me to say. But these guys could use an ‘orv’, a bent coat-hanger, with the best of them. An Orville derives from Orville Reddenbacher—hot buttered popcorn. Orville Reddenbacher rhymes with bread and butter—and a bent coat hanger was how they made their living. A purse in the trunk was no problem, not once they’d seen it go in—all you have to do is open the door, open the glove-box and push the button, at this point in history. And little old ladies so very seldom have alarm systems, back in the day.

Every so often, Dee would have to babysit, or maybe it was just that her brother had grandma’s car.

A ‘dub’, or a ‘walter’, was a wallet. No one used their real names, although everybody knew everybody else. But you can’t be yelling ‘hey Dave, Dave Smith (or Jones)—the cops are coming’ across the parking lot. No, it’s Dogger, or Baddy, or Swimmy, or Peanuts or whatever.

Oh, and if you and your partner go out of town, it’s best to switch to new fake names for a while, or at least this is how Stan and Ollie saw it.

It makes sense enough to me.

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Smashwords.

See his works on Fine Art America.

Grab yourself a free copy of One Million Words of Crap,available from Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Ten.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due to content. 18+)

My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fourteen.

Thank you for reading and listening.

 

 

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fourteen. The Hash Bash, and A Trip to the Rez. Louis Shalako.

That one interests me...

Louis Shalako

The hash bash. The hash bash, and a trip to the rez. So, there we were at college, trying to get our academic upgrading, grade 12, and at the same time collecting pogy, slang for unemployment insurance. We had a little money, what with living at home in our parents’ (or parent’s) house, and I had been asking around about some pot.

Finally Stoney found some guy, and he had a gram of hash. One. Fucking gram. Of hash. This was the first time I’d ever bought the stuff, and a teeny-tiny little rectangular brick of red Lebanese it was, too. I have to admit, I hesitated, to the extent of becoming something of a pain in the ass. Finally, on Stoney’s word, I bought it. This was in a common area, just off to the side of the main entrance. It was pretty public and of course this involved dope. There were only two choices, right. We went over to the guy’s house at lunch hour and he showed me how to smoke it. I was the guy with a car, after all, and we could always grab a sandwich at a corner milk store—

This was the era of Mac’s Milk, Becker’s, and a coffee pot on a hot ring, one that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any modern office setting. Basically just some kid trying to run a store and keep the pot full of lukewarm coffee and hopefully the high-school kids not stealing them blind sort of thing. Anyhow, this is where I met Chris’s sister, who was a very great help at a later date, as she worked in the Lambton College Financial Aid department.

And I did go back to college later, right.

That's a nice chunk of hash.

I have to admit, with three or four of us smoking that hash, and of course I did want to take some home, I wasn’t all that impressed.

Anyhow, Stoney was getting better pogy, unemployment insurance, than I was. He’d also lost his driver’s license when he knocked over some 90 year-old man in a parking lot. So, when he came to me with the tickets for the hash-bash, I have to admit I was intrigued. He’d already paid for my ticket, and I could pay him back later—surely by next Tuesday, like J.Wellington Wimpy, known from the Popeye cartoons.

What in the hell was a hash-bash. Five fucking dollars, and Stoney was asking for a ride at the very least…

One of the guys in our class was selling tickets. Five dollars, all the hash you can smoke. His place, high noon. It was a ground floor apartment on the one hundred block of Bright Street. Dennis had three or four tables pushed together, where in the hell he’d found all the chairs was a good question. There were four or five propane torches, the ubiquitous Bic lighters. People were showing up, some of us had fast food and others had brown-bag lunches. Dennis was in the kitchen. Back then, you could get a quarter ounce of blonde Lebanese hash for fifty dollars. It was less dense than the black and the red, and a quarter of blonde was surprisingly large. He was cutting up the first quarter, putting tiny little chunks of hash on the bottoms of upside-down saucers. It was a gas stove, and we did a couple of hot-knives before I took the first of several saucers, carefully balancing them, out to this long dining area of the apartment. Where presumably he lived—

...whatever happened to good old Dennis...

Heating up a sharp knife, Dennis cut hundreds of the little chunks, the temperature in there warming up considerably.

Out in the big room, guys and girls had four or five propane torches going, heating up the tips of butter knives red-hot…tapping a bit of hash onto the end, the tips of the knives coming together, the clouds of hot and resinous smoke sort of squeezing out on both sides, heads down and inhaling…it seemed a rather weird sort of party had broken out, and all for the price of five dollars, a sandwich, and an apple, and a cup of fairly shit coffee from some corner milk store…most of these people were strangers to me.

His girlfriend was really something too. A kind of strawberry blonde, I still recall her name, I remember her walking down the halls in tight jeans and a tight sweater. She had small, natural, high-mounted breasts…it’s like I never really forget a girl or woman that really interested me. That one interested me.

The really interesting thing is that for fifty bucks worth of hash you had to sell ten tickets to cover your costs, and I reckon he had a few people more than that. If he was buying it by the ounce, his costs were lower still, admittedly, it was no way of making a living.

Perhaps that wasn’t exactly the point, when you’re just partying.

You’re looking at a fair amount of hash consumed in a pretty short period of time, and I reckon we all got our money’s worth. Yes, Dennis had figured out how to smoke, and how to get high for free. I heard he headed out to California for a while. I have no idea of what happened after that, the name is so generic, an internet search is nothing if not inconclusive. One wonders what the landlord or the neighbours thought of all that, but it was the middle of the day and not all that noisy.

Oh, I’m sorry. What happened after that, is that we went back to school and kept trying to finish our grade twelve.

Heating up for 'hot knives'.

I did mention that I was kicked out a time or two—that was mostly for non-attendance. Taking attendance was one thing the instructors actually did, bearing in mind the federal government and the unemployment folks were paying for these courses.

Fuck, all you had to do was to keep showing up, if nothing else, the government cheques kept a-rolling in, and in the end, a lot of us did finish the fucking course.

Let’s hope the government got their money’s worth.

Honestly, there were times when you showed up, O.J. or whoever took attendance, and at least some of us headed down to the gym for a while, whether shooting a few hoops or maybe a game of badminton. I’ve never played so much badminton in my life, before or since.

It was better than wrestling with quadratic equations, I will say that much.

***

If one must cheat, at least let her be good looking...

Stoney beckoned from the doorway. I was in math class, presided over by the long-suffering O.J. Callahan, more often referred to by the soubriquet ‘the Juice’.

Casually, oh, so casually, I stood up, left my books on the desk, and headed out to see what he wanted. The big difference between high school and college is that they sort of treated you like an adult. If you needed to go to the washroom, you basically just stood up and walked out. He had one of his gaggers, a misshapen joint, rolled with two papers, and knowing Stoney, probably a few seeds and sticks in there as well. That guy never did learn how to roll a joint. Back then, Lambton College was still small, a huddle of concrete masses in a brutalist style. When I started, there were about 800 students all told. Nowadays there are thousands, four or five thousand at least. There was a door on the southeast corner. While in view of the road coming in from Wellington Street, this was at the opposite end from the residence. It was on the other side of the building from the parking lot. There was no one around. We stuck a convenient rock in the door-frame, otherwise we’d be locked out and have to walk around the building to get in again. It was also cold as fuck out there. We puffed our doobie as quick as we could and headed back in.

He had a proposition.

He knew a couple of native girls. I had a car. They wanted a ride to the Kettle Point reservation. I wasn’t too sure about all of this, but the promise of gas money and of course pot was enough to seal the deal. The girls were heading home at lunch time, it was a Friday, and while it would be tight, I figured it wasn’t that far and we’d make it back in time…sort of.

Well, one of the girls was fairly attractive, and the other one perhaps not so much—that one could be Stoney’s right, what with him not being quite so fussy. I also had a girlfriend, we’d been together a while, but she was away at university. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt the relationship. If one must cheat, at least let it be the good-looking one…

Right?

So, we grabbed all our books, coats and hats and piled into the Beaumont, under leaden skies and sideways-blowing snow flurries. One hell of a cold wind coming off of Lake Huron, that was for sure. We were up front and the girls in the back seat. A quick stop at the beer store on Mall Road, and we headed out on the highway, turning off at Lambton 30, the Oil Heritage Road. At Highland Glen, a right turn onto the lake road, Lambton 7, and it’s like fifteen miles to the rez. I reckon they knew Stoney’s game by now, although they each took a beer and sipped at it, as slowly as possible as generally speaking, ladies prefer not to piss in a ditch…everybody knew Stoney’s game by now.

We turn into the rez, make the first left, all the way to the end, then a right turn, finally pulling into a house about halfway to the actual point. I suppose it was barely noon at this point, and there is apparently a party going on—a daytime, possibly even an all-day sort of a party. An all-day, all night, all weekend long sort of party was just getting going.

For all we know, that party may still be going, ladies and gentlemen.

Stoney and I are sitting on a couch, the ladies know pretty much everyone. We don’t know anyone at all, but guys are pulling out joints, bags of pot, and we do have our case of beer, which was enough of an introduction as it seemed. We’d just driven somebody’s sisters home, which was not exactly a safe-conduct pass…

The rez.

At some point the girls disappeared…Stoney and I are sitting around drinking beer and smoking pot with a bunch of young native guys. It was all friendly enough, no one was giving us trouble, but my instinct was that we weren’t getting too far with the ladies, and maybe it was time to go. We handed out a few beers, took the rest of the case and headed on back to Sarnia.

Stoney would most likely try again another day, as for myself, I didn’t much care—I was there on sheer speculation, and I did have a regular girlfriend. I used to go up to Guelph on the weekend, and she came home for holiday weekends. Stoney was always on the prowl.

And we rolled up into the college parking lot trailing a big cloud of pot smoke, about one-thirty in the afternoon. Counting up the remaining beers, it seemed we had drank eleven beers each, in fact, we’d stopped in Forest on the way home, and grabbed up another twelve-pack.

The really hard part, of course, was going back to class.

I had already been kicked out once or twice, so all I could do was to sit there and stare at the book, sort of regretting the fact I hadn’t eaten anything all fucking day, and that was a hell of a lot of beer. Stoney had taken off somewhere else.

That was kind of a wasted day, with nothing to show for it but a bit of a headache, one that would almost surely turn into a hangover by next morning.

I never did see that gas money.

Sometimes it just doesn’t seem worth it.

END

Louis has books and stories available from iTunes.

See his works on Fine Art America.

Grab yourself a free copy of One Million Words of Crap,available from Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Ten.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due to content.)

My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen.

 

Thank you for reading and listening.