My Criminal Memoir. Louis Shalako.

 

Stolen image, which is par for the course around here...

Louis Shalako

Don't fall asleep. My buddy's dad had the '66 Cadillac, with the four doors and the 512 cubic inch engine up front. Bob borrowed it one night, we grabbed a six-pack of Brador or something. A malt liquor, 6.6 % alcohol, which was more than sufficient for a couple of sixteen, seventeen year-olds. We headed out of town, on paved roads all the way, which was better than giving it a wash when we got home. Fifty cents is fifty cents, after all. At some point, Bob let me drive it. Coming home, we headed north out of Wallaceburg, eleven o'clock at night, on Kimball Road.

That's 80 kilometres per hour these days...I took her up. I took her up all right, she's floating along like a cloud, with that soft suspension and the long wheelbase. I had her at a hundred and ten miles per hour when poor old Bob woke up on the passenger side, so I had to let off and bring it on into town at a more reasonable speed. I kind of feel sorry for Bob—even more so for his dad, who had to pay the bill, but within a very short time, a day or two later, the thing was knocking and sputtering. I don't know if we burnt a valve or spun a bearing, but that was pretty much it for what had once been a pretty nice car.

Fuck, I wanted to drive Formula One, something awful it seems looking back. Which would almost be safer on some level, much more professional than a couple of kids in daddy's car...some of us were just plain dangerous. Quite frankly, it affected my judgement sometimes.

***

Okay, let’s say we were thinking of writing our criminal memoirs. One, you’re talking about your friends here, and two, now you got to think up a whole bunch of fake names…for people who were often known by nicknames and various handles to begin with. Some of those names are pretty colourful. It’s not like they read books anyways. And I can use a fake name of my own. And where would I start? At the beginning I suppose.

***

My first scam was the old Puss ‘N Boots free roll of film scam. This was a popular brand of tinned cat food at the time, late sixties, early seventies at the latest. If you cut on the dotted line, and peeled off the paper label, there was a coupon. You filled that in, mailed it to the company, and you would receive a free roll of colour film in the format of your choice, whether it be 120, 126 cartridge, or 35-mm format. Limit one per family or household, and of course here is where the scam comes in. I sent in at least three coupons, also borrowing stamps and envelopes from my mother’s stash. Stamps cost money you know. There comes a time when they go to pay the bills and there are no envelopes, no stamps and of course they sort of wonder where all that went. Right up until the point when you, a nine or ten year-old kid; gets a mysterious package in the mail and you sort of come home from school one day to find they simply could not help themselves, but had no choice but to open up that fucking package…and now they’re starting to catch on.

Then they get two or three more, but by now they know it’s just a roll of film, and oh, yes, you’ve borrowed dad’s Baby Brownie from the 1950s and also, your brother and sister and the kid next door and the family down the street and your buddy Willy three blocks away are getting free rolls of film in the mail, and while mom and dad are sort of appalled at the thought of all those rolls of film, and firecrackers, and model planes and rockets and small explosions going off in the backyard, they are also sort of marvelling at your enterprise and quite frankly, your imagination. This is what you get for having a cat, and of course they have to eat pretty regular and stuff like that.

The cat, I mean—

Also, you want to be a photographer someday and you can always take over camera duties on Christmas day, right. As I recall, that was the year my folks made the serious tactical and strategic error of giving me a cheap-ass Kodak Instamatic 126-cartridge camera, complete with a couple more fucking packs of film and those all-important flash bulbs. Which you can short out with a bit of metal across the electrodes, or even just use an empty camera to send short, brilliant light signals across Germain Park in the middle of the night, (when you really should have been in bed or doing your homework); assuming one of your friends’ parents have been thoughtful enough to give them such a camera for Christmas as well…

Right?

**

So there you are, ladies and gentlemen, when sometime later, (after all of this logical progression of events), ah, you find yourself laying on a sheet of plywood, up in the rafters of my old man’s garage, sheets we picked up out of a local park, after some guy got drunk, stole a Datsun 240-Z and took it through Germain Park, yet forgetting the sort of green plywood enclosure for lacrosse of all things, smashing through it and tossing bits and pieces all over, and trying to get a good picture as your buddy snipes at plastic ship models with a .177 calibre pellet rifle. Someday, I will tell you all about filling them up with fireworks, solid stuff from model rocket engines, Christmas bulbs with gasoline and firing pins and the powder from dismantled shotgun shells and how, ah…Bob, (not his real name), lit that up, and how the battleship Yamato went up with a series of big bangs as we sort of sheltered in my 1969 Austin Mini, which I bought for $50.00, dragging it up and out from the weeds behind H & S Sports Cars, which was on the corner of Ontario Street and Russell, (I think). My old man and I dragged it home on the end of a rope, one end of which was attached to his old Volvo and the other end attached to me and that Mini. I was only fifteen, and I suppose we putted along about twenty miles an hour on back streets…The Hood, the Bismarck and the Rodney didn’t fare much better, looking back through the mists of time. I’ve been towed once or twice since then, to be honest with you. I remember, we opened up the garage door and this big black cloud came out.

He (Willy, not his real name), once shot some Chinese girl in a plastic raincoat, right in the ass with that thing. The range was short, and we figured it went right through the raincoat. She swatted at her ass and turned to look, right. The front room in his folks’ place had these really old-fashioned windows, where there were three holes drilled along the bottom for ventilation, and a hinged wooden bar you lifted to let a little air in. There wasn’t even a fucking screen. He fired the shot, and dropped the stick, and we crouched there, giggling like schoolboys, which we were at the time.

I swear to God, that place must have been built by a Newfie.

Willy blew me up one day. He called, and he said, ‘come on over’. He was out in the garage, one of our hangouts. Yes, back then, you weren’t nothing if you didn’t have a garage to hang out in. I get off my bike, and he’s watching, literally timing it from the time of his call. He hits a little switch, a little electrical model rocket engine igniter goes off, and about three rocket engines, all taken apart and just powder and blocks of propellant, goes off right between my feet, right in front of the side door of his garage. I was wearing shorts, I had a few singed leg hairs but nothing real serious. You know me: I had to phone my brother straight away. I told him to get on over to Willy’s place.

I couldn’t really talk on the phone, but there was something he just had to see.

END

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Thank you for reading.