My Criminal Memoir, Part Five. Bicycles and Blowguns. Louis Shalako.

Circa 1973, 10-speed bicycle.

 

Louis Shalako

Bicycles and blowguns. Once a few of us had studied Grade Eight English a couple of times, there came the day when we ourselves were finally in Grade Eight. And of course it was crushingly boring. Some wit at the school board decided that we didn’t have to take it again, as it sort of embarrassed those jocks, those who carried our proud school colours in intra-scholastic basketball games which we invariably lost, those who had probably already failed it once or twice, you know, the cool athletic types habitually sitting at the back of the class, and when it came time for them fuckers to stand up and read aloud from the book, it was just all too excruciatingly painful for all concerned.

You aren’t the only one suffering, asshole—that’s just my opinion and I’m sticking to it, right.

A guy called Phillip Morrison and I had the unique and rather rare privilege of being sent to the library during English classes. We had time to kill and the librarian, a reedy young man in his middle twenties, didn’t have all that much to do and only two kids in the room. With a promise from us to be quiet, and not get into trouble, he would head off to the staff room, where I believe he was in a relationship with the coffee machine; and Phillip and I quickly devised a game of table-top hockey, which we played with twelve-inch wooden rulers and a thin roll of masking tape which we rummaged up from somewhere. It was all right, but it only lasted so long. All we needed was a nice, long table...

I can’t recall who won that one.

And we wandered around. We looked in drawers, we looked in his desk. Fuck, we stood there looking out the windows for a while, opening the door and peeking down the hall. Fuck-head’s voice ringing out, loud and clear and we sort of grinned at each other—Mr. Abela, right, giving somebody shit for something again, right. And after a while, I was walking up and down the aisles, looking at the titles on the shelves. After all these years, it is difficult to say just how many books I stole out of that place, but there was a few of them anyways. When the bell rang at the end of the school day, the librarian still hadn’t come back, and everybody else, including the teachers, were mostly hell-bent on getting on out of there.

For me to come down the hallway with a book or two under my arm, well, it didn’t seem all that interesting, and this is how I ended up with The Big Book of Weapons. The Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci. A few books, I have to admit.

My old man had made me a bow, a really nice one, when I was about six years old. My younger brother had a fibreglass bow. We used to shoot them in the park. My old man had a .22 rifle. He had made a couple of crude ball-butted duelling pistols in fucking high school shop of all things—he probably got an A for that project, back in the early fifties at good old SCITS, the Sarnia Collegiate Institute of Techology and Scholastics, for fuck’s sakes.

Anyhow, in the book were everything from stone spear points made of flint, a sling, drawings mostly, of everything up to and including a plan of a Norman keep—I made a sling once, out of half of one of my mother’s brassieres, a couple of strips of fabric. I sent an apple a hundred yards with that thing, broke a window on the back of our school and had to give it up for my own sort of peace of mind.

Ahem.

There were tanks, mortars, all kinds of weapons in that book, from bill-hooks to flamberges (wavy) swords, bows, suits of armour…catapults, mangonels, ballistas, and a few such other things as primitive as a blow-gun.

A flamberge, of German origin. A 'flame bladed' sword.

***

The first McDonald’s in town was on London Road, in a department store plaza, at the corner by Murphy Road. And McDonald’s was cheap—you could get a hamburger for fifteen cents. The fries were about the same. The milkshake was nineteen cents. And with that milkshake came a short length of plastic straw about a quarter-inch in diameter…

And of course I had been reading that damned book. When your buddy Johnny pulls the straw out of the milkshake and blows cold, wet chocolate milkshake into your face right in the middle of the restaurant, in the middle of a snowstorm and you have some ways to walk to get home again, it sure sets a man to thinking.

In a brief historical aside, this was an era where boys would make churikiens, ‘kung-fu stars’, in sheet metal during shop class, whenever Beak, Mr. Laudenbach, wasn’t looking.

There must be some cultural reference there, whether it was the television show Kung Fu, starring David Carradine or maybe the popular Bruce Lee movies, but yeah. It was out there somehow.

So, following along, what you do is to rinse out the straw, more than one if you can get it.

Let that dry properly…

You need to go to your mother’s sewing kit, where she has things like straight pins. You need to cut up a pink eraser into little cubes, little better than one eighth-inch square, and you need to find a few bits of soft foam rubber. I had allergies—I couldn’t handle the goose-feather pillows, so my mother had gotten me a pillow of foam rubber. When one bit of seam came loose, I could pull a bit of foam rubber off of the corner, sufficient to my purposes.

So, you have a few pins.

Shove the pin through one bit of eraser, shove on the foam rubber, and shove on another bit of eraser. Now you have what we call a dart, ladies and gentlemen, and of course the dart goes in the McDonald’s straw, more than one straw if you can get them—and we did, we did, ladies and gentlemen. What with babysitting for fifty cents an hour, we at last had a little cash flow to go on…important enough at almost any age.

I shot my sister in the ass with one of them things, as she ran screaming down the length of our kitchen and it worked very well indeed, pinning the fabric of her pajama bottoms to her left buttock in a very satisfactory manner.

Do I have regrets?

Oh, I don’t know.

***

The pro models from New Guinea...illegal in Canada.

So, Johnny comes over to my place on a fine summer morning. We both have the new ten-speed racing bikes, all the rage. Odd as it seems, one year before, anyone who rode a bike was a square, man. All of a sudden everyone has one and they’re cool again.

We took the time to load up three McDonald’s straws each. We took the time to poke a few darts down through the fabric of our shirt pockets, on the inside, where they couldn’t be seen. We set off north, out of my backyard, across Germain Park, finding our first victims, heading north along Cecil Street, or barely five minutes after setting out.

So Johnny and I are on the sidewalk, coming up from behind and he shoots some little girl in the back end. She screams and turns, crying, and Johnny drops down a driveway, off the sidewalk and onto the street. I come up, fire one into mom’s hip or something as she’s turning to see what’s with the girl. I zoom down the grassy strip, over the curb and onto the street. We start pedaling hard. We’re a hundred and fifty metres away before anyone has any idea of what has happened.

What with the turn to the left, another turn to the left, and then a turn to the right, and the reader or listener gets the idea. We nailed a few people, even stopping in a park, out of breath to some extent. We reloaded our straws. We were in the south end, at this point, miles away, and working our way back home again. We’re just a couple of kids on bikes, and one wonders, just how in the hell anyone would have ever caught us. Johnny and I had ridden thirty miles south down the river, done steak and beans over a small fire on the riverbank, just south of the old Lambton Thermal Generating Station. That place is long gone at this point, but the moral of the story is, after a long ride, a swim, cooking lunch, then we had to ride home again—another thirty fucking miles, ladies and gentlemen.

One thing we could do, was to ride.

Back to our mission, I distinctly recall, I nailed this one guy, kind of a muscular man a few years older than we were. I got him in the middle of a thick leather belt, and yet I know he felt it—his one hand came around and he sort of flinched in the walk.

Imagine, a little pin-prick, just a few vertebra, right up from the tail-bone.

Imagine, getting home, after a long day at work. You’re taking off the work boots, emptying the lunch bucket, stripping off for the shower, you’ve got this irritating little series of jabs right in the lower back, and you discover the fucking dart sticking out of your belt.

By this time, of course, Johnny and I were long gone.

They didn’t see us coming, and they didn’t see us going, either.

As for my sister, she did, eventually, forgive me, perhaps just forgot about it might be a better way of saying it.

 

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.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.