My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven. Fireworks, BB Guns and Porn. Louis Shalako.

"What didst thou havest in mind, oh Droogy-droogs???"

Louis Shalako

 

Fireworks, BB Guns and Porn. And that's just for starters. We had our own little gang, back in the early seventies. It was better to be in a group. We walked everywhere. There were a lot more young people back then, there were some rough neighbourhoods, and punks everywhere or so it seemed.

Walking out to the mall with a few dollars burning holes in their pockets, teenage boys will comb an entire store, an entire mall, looking for something to buy—at one end of the old Woolco store, there was a sporting goods department, right next to automotive. One of their displays was jackknives, buck knives, including the longest legal knife, long and skinny. The length when opened, of just on nine inches…a folding stiletto, if you will.

But seriously, kids will go up and down every aisle, what with a brand-new mall on the edge of town, and this is where I saw a fedora, and it was like $2.99.

I suppose I had been reading A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. I suppose it had played at a local theatre, perhaps the old Mustang Drive-In on Plank Road…where kids from the south end were occasionally known to walk out that way on a summer’s eve, braving swamp and mosquitos to infiltrate in from the woods beside and behind the place, waiting until dark to steal in a little closer to the last few rows of parking spots, where we could at least hear the sound through all of those tinny little speakers, with their coiled wires and hanging on a post beside each parking spot.

Considering Alex and his droogs, we really couldn’t do the white long johns and a codpiece in the midst of a Canadian winter. What we did, was to adopt steel-toed work boots, jeans, leather jackets, and those fucking fedora hats. Oh, yeah, jackknives…

It’s not like we ever used them, but once you assumed that every other fucking kid in town had one, you sort of realized the dangers of pulling one out. The point is, that they knew it too—

Yeah—and every fucking one of us had a condom in our wallet, which you could get from a wall dispenser in any bar or even a gas station rest room, for a quarter. Twenty-five cents, ladies and gentlemen. And let’s be honest: you never know when you’re going to need one, right. Also, back then, any honest storekeeper would sell a bunch of teenage boys a pack of Colts or Old Port, wine-dipped cigars, which smelled good, looked cool but kind of tasted a lot like shit after the first few puffs.

Quite frankly, we might have been a little before our time, but we had a dance, a kind of mix between the Charleston and the Soupy Shuffle. Yeah, you’ve got a line of teenagers, walking out to the mall, in our boots and our jackets, all lined up under a streetlight and we were just plain boogying, ladies and gentlemen.

We can only marvel, and wonder what the occasional passing motorists might have thought of all that.

***

The Universe is composed of endless amounts of bullshit. Kids have to put up with a lot of such things, but we get our revenge too…

In my old man’s garage, tucked away in a massive home-made workbench, were two or three Playboy magazines.

A source of endless fascination to boys as young as ten or eleven years old, I don’t remember too much of the actual contents…we weren’t there to read the articles, but the one thing that does stick out is Elke Sommer. According to sources, she was one of the more popular pin-up girls of the time, in addition to her acting career, appearing in the pages of Playboy in 1964 and in 1967. The one I recall, was her walking nude around some Hollywood mansion, fresh, natural, just a nice, healthy young woman in her birthday suit. She really was beautiful, if you watch the Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark, there is a shot where her and Peter Sellers are at a nudist colony, and it is still something of a thrill to see her naked, from behind, from the waist up…you have to admit, dimples above and behind the hips, nice shoulders and good proportions have an allure.

Just around the corner from Willy’s house, (and garage), was a place called Bell’s Variety. These little corner stores once dotted the city. The store was on the ground floor, taking up a couple of rooms, presumably the living room, front hall and closet deleted, and the dining room knocked together. The proprietors invariably lived in the building, a converted house, something which is almost unheard-of today. Let’s just say the health department frowns on the owner of a store or restaurant having a bed in the back room and sleeping on the premises. The bylaw officers frown on it too, as a place of business and not zoned residential.

And we had a plan to get a few fresh porno magazines, assuming we followed the plan and everyone did their jobs.

You have to admit she's cute...

At the back of the store was a magazine rack. Back then, the front covers of such magazines did not have to be obscured in the rack, with a strip of metal or wood high enough to blot out the pictures, leaving only the name of the magazine visible to casual shoppers, some of whom would definitely be children, or uptight adults, for that matter.

There were bundled products. These would be three low-budget, relatively unknown magazines, full-colour, but not Playboy, Penthouse or Hustler, to name the top three…

Ye olde magazine rack, home of comic books and porn.

Willy went into the store, asking the lady for large bottles of orange pop. Warm, orange pop. So, the lady turns, taking it at face value, ignoring Johnny, already in the store and in the back corner, ostensibly looking for Mad Magazine or comic books or something.

As soon as she disappeared into the back room, Johnny grabs three bundles of pornographic magazines, sealed in their plastic bags, which admittedly didn’t cost much but could not be sold to the underage group.

I was just coming in with a quarter and a dime in my hot little hand. Johnny goes running out the door. The lady comes back in, yelling. Willy literally puts up his hand.

I’ll get him, he says, whereupon he bolts for the door. And my job was to stand my ground, not being involved, after all. Fuck, all I want is a bag of chips and a chocolate bar. Reluctantly, the lady sort of has to stick around with this unknown teenager in the store…

What is really nuts is that Bell’s Variety was literally, two or three hundred feet from Willy’s house. He must have been in there every day, every second day at the least, but good old Johnny lived a couple of kilometres away. He didn’t have to worry about going back there, as I said, there were variety stores on practically every block back then.

Willy couldn’t have that stuff at home, not even in the garage, so after a suitable interval, and after having a good look through our booty, it ended up with a few other odds and ends in the ‘fort’ made of salvaged plywood up in the rafters of my old man’s garage.

***

I don’t know how I managed to get out of it, perhaps I was just manipulative. I was an idea man, whatever the hell that means. We pulled essentially the same stunt at another store, a good distance from our own neighbourhoods. This was a store on London Road, at the corner of Mitton Street, not too far from downtown. The original building was two-storey, brick, built in the 1920s by the look of it. This guy had fireworks, so it must have been early to mid-May. Back then, ‘firecracker day’, as the kids called it, was the May 24 weekend—Queen Elizabeth’s birthday.

Willy was pretty bold when it came to shoplifting from the small, neighbourhood stores. He had a big green parka, industrial grade, which had big side pockets to begin with. With the hood up, it obscured the face to some degree, and half the town was wearing those jackets anyways. He’d also cut a big horizontal slit, on the inside of the lining, one on each side of the zipper. He’s the only kid I knew, who could get a couple of the big glass pop bottles, twenty-five ounce bottles, into the side pockets and then, which was really brazen, to pick out a ten-cent bag of chips and actually pay for that at the counter. This after hanging around the cooler at the back of the store for some moments.

This time, Willy goes to the back of the store. Johnny is in one of several aisles, looking for whatever—something he was having trouble deciding on, or maybe just unable to find what he was looking for. I’m at the counter, where the owner is trying to decide, do I sell this kid a pack of Old Ports and take his money? Or do the right thing and refuse. Just as he turns to get the smokes, Willy grabs three of the biggest boxes of fireworks in the display. He makes his way down the opposite side of the store, obscured by the shelves, four or so feet high, with products lined up on top as well. All the guy can see is his head and shoulders, Johnny’s perfectly placed so that the one aisle the guy can actually see down from his place behind the counter is blocking his view of Willy as he goes past.

One more aisle, across the front of the store, and Willy bolts for the door…

“Don’t you worry, Mister—I’ll get him.” Johnny drops his candy or whatever and runs from the store.

All the poor guy could do was to take my money and hand over the cigars.

All I could do was give a shake of the head and shrug philosophically. Kids these days...right?

What are going to do about it...right?

Hours of fun for bad boys and other children.

***

It was summer, and we had arranged to meet in a vacant lot just across from the Beer Store on Mall Road. This was just behind a defunct scrap yard, where we took our BB guns a time or two, blasting away at abandoned cars. You can get pretty good at shooting out headlights, tail-lights, side mirrors, although the windows were a bit tough for even a CO2-powered BB gun. Even Rock’s .22 CO2 pistol, throwing lead pellets, had a hard time with the side windows, and the windshields were impenetrable…

Anyhow, Soupy was a few years older than us, and he had already gone into the beer store and grabbed a case of 24 bottles of Molson Golden Ale. Right about then, Johnny shows up, and he’s pissed. The four of us had our beer, and Soupy didn’t want to go back, and let’s be honest. It’s illegal to purchase alcohol for minors, right. He’s only pushing his luck so far. We were going roller skating, and knocking back six beers in a cornfield out behind the township arena sure made life a lot more interesting.

So, I took Johnny’s two dollars and said I would have a go. I was fifteen, wearing that leather jacket, with a little seventeen-hair mustache and I really didn’t think I was fooling anybody. To my surprise, the man behind the counter took my money and handed over a six-pack of Labatt’s 50, which we sort of denigrated as ‘an old man’s beer’, but that’s what Johnny’s dad drank and I suppose Johnny didn’t much care, it was what he was used to drinking, (when he could manage to sneak a few out of the beer fridge in the basement bar his old man had built).

I have to admit, I was fairly proud of that accomplishment, only problem now, was that we didn’t really need Soupy any more—now I got to go in and buy the fucking beer.

Such is the price of being tall, ladies and gentlemen.

And confidence is everything.

An old man's beer.

Imagine five of us, pounding back six beers each, over the course of half an hour, standing around in an empty patch in a cornfield. This would be the result of flooding, a low spot, but it served the purpose.

Once in the arena, the fucking change rooms were just clouds of smoke, back in those days. Some guy you know says, hey, and passes you a joint, and what are you going to do? Take a couple of puffs and hand it back, that’s what.

And after three hours of skating, it was time to walk home again. On at least one occasion, Johnny’s older sister literally picked me up, slung me over her shoulder, and carried me most of the way.

I always thought she really ought to have fucked me.

Well. If I was teasing her, it was only simple justice for her to tease me—and she did.

Yeah, she did.

Don’t worry, nothing ever came of it.

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

Louis has art on ArtPal.

Listen to his free audiobook, One Million Words ofCrap, here on 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.

Thank you for reading, and listening.