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| The leisure suit, ladies and gentlemen. Aspirational to a certain class of creep. |
Louis Shalako
Liars, cheats and frauds. I’ve known a few liars,
cheats and frauds in my time. Some were worse than others. So, I was at Lambton
College, studying little photocopied math booklets and trying to get my Grade
12, and this is how I met I.M. Stoner.
Stoney was there for the same reasons I was, out of
work, not too interested in getting a job, and milking those unemployment
benefits for all they were worth. Not that it wasn’t a good program and
everything, in the end we mostly got jobs and stuff like that. Stoney had four
years of English Literature at Western University. His dad had gotten him a job
at Polysar, a Crown Corporation in Chemical Valley, eventually sold off to
private interests including Nova, Bayer A.G and B.A.S.F. He lasted about a year and a half...
This is where he got into speed, amphetamines, the
good old-fashioned stuff, and not all this new-fangled meth shit, what with
being up all night on twelve-hour shifts and thinking he was God’s gift to
women. Which he was, in many a case, mostly ugly women. Sorry, but that is just
my opinion.
Anyhow, he was a few years older. We ended up playing
badminton in the gym, skipping out for an hour or so from various classes. He
went on to qualify—a nice word, but qualify he did as a stationary engineer. In
academic upgrading, in spite of being literate
and all, Stoney preferred to buy little slips of paper with the test results
all written down by the numbers. Question one, the answer is A. Question two,
the answer is D, that sort of thing. With a continuous intake course, people
work at their own speed, and the instructor gives them a chit and sends them to
the testing centre when they’re ready to write the test on Chapter Four. There
were really only three different tests for each chapter. Stoney had a one in
three chance of passing any test, and he paid two fucking dollars per test, for
the privilege of cheating his way through what passed for Grade 12.
The funny thing is, he did. I have to admit, I was
sorely tempted, when I got to the chapter on quadratic equations. Fuck, it took
me several tries to pass that section, which was like second to last in the
Grade 12 math pamphlets…if you could crack quadratics, after that, it was
pretty much all downhill. Here’s the thing. Stoney got into the Stationary
Engineer program, (extending his unemployment benefits), based on these marks.
Based on his prior performance, Stoney figured out how to buy the test results,
and faked his way through the program. He finally got himself hired by Ontario
Hydro, getting a very good job down at the old Lambton Generating Station. (A
job like that might have changed my life.) Where he was duly checked out by
their head operator and found to be incompetent at virtually every aspect of
generating electrical power through the use of coal-burning, turbine-generated
power…at some point they said the hell with him, only by this time he had made
it through the ninety day probationary period and was in the union and
everything. He really hadn’t done anything wrong at this point. All they could
do was to give him a little ladder, and send him up and down, all over the
plant, making him change the light-bulbs in the stairwells and shit like that,
presumably in the hopes that he would topple off and fall down like nineteen
sets of stairs or something like that.
Fuck, that guy was uncoordinated, and I have to admit,
we were friends for many years.
Stoney didn’t have jeans, he didn’t have a pair of
running shoes. He pulled off his shoes and socks and played badminton barefoot.
He was so uncoordinated, it took him three or four false swings before he could
finally bring himself to hit the birdie and send it back towards the net.
Think about that, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve barely
hit the birdie and he’s already taken two or three swings at it. He drank like
a chimney, smoked like a fish, and at the very least, he had a bit of cash and
knew one or two people who could get pot. The truth was, he was intelligent and
entertaining as all hell…at first.
***
For safety, no one works alone. His co-worker was
female. She had recently broken off with her boyfriend. Not entirely without
imagination, Stoney asked her out. He sent her flowers, the only guy I ever
knew who had an actual account at a florist’s. He bought her perfume and took
her out to the most expensive restaurant in town. I’m tempted to think he fell
in love, but he was mostly in love with himself. What I really think, is that this one was at least semi-beautiful. Far more so than the usual one-nighters. That might have been the difference. When she decided to go back to
the old boyfriend, a better man might have been hurt, but at least accepted it.
Not Stoney.
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| She might have been fooled, but not for long... |
By coincidence, the boyfriend lived around the corner
from Stoney’s parents’ place. He went out at four a.m. and stole the bags of
garbage sitting on the curb for collection and took them home. He rifled
through all that and came up with the carbons—signed stubs from credit
purchases, as mentioned in a previous section, you had to sign back then when
you made a purchase. All he really wanted was the card number and the name of
the service provider.
Late at night, good old Stoney walked to a phone booth
in a nearby plaza, fed in a handful of quarters, and phoned into the Shopping
Network…this was a 24-hour cable television network. He seized on an idea. And
he set to work. This poor guy starts finding packages and delivery notices in
his mailbox. It’s addressed to him, of course he opens it and finds that he has
somehow purchased a bunch of jewelry, all cubic zirconiums and white gold, and
all of this is going on his credit cards. At some point, more of such shit
appears in the mailbox. At the end of the month he’s shocked by the credit card
bill.
Stoney hated that guy. He told me once the guy was
bald—I’ve still got all my hair, says Stoney. The guy had one missing tooth. I
still have all my teeth, says Stoney. At times like that we bite our lip, as a
friend and say nothing. Quite frankly, no one could have dissuaded Stoney from
harassing this guy, and it went on for months…yeah, Stoney was known for
stalking and harassing old girlfriends. As uncomfortable as that might be for
all of your friends. You know what that other guy had, Stoney? He had a fucking
personality, that’s what.
One night, broke, walking home from the bar, he stops
in at my house.
He asked if I had any beer. He asked if I had any pot.
I scraped up some sort of a roach-joint, (no beer), and just to get rid of him,
I offered a ride home. I used Big Frank’s vehicle as he always had to park
last, a bit of a quirk that at least saved him from having to move someone
else’s car when he went out to work in the morning.
A straight run up London Road to his street, but no—we
have to turn left on Indian Road…we have to turn right, into the driveway and
rear parking lot of a townhouse complex at the corner of Indian Road and
Maxwell Street. He’s peering at lit windows and he goes absolutely ballistic
when he sees a certain pickup truck parked in a certain spot.
Oh, yeah, now I’m getting sucked into helping Stoney
stalk this lady, and her boyfriend.
It’s easy enough to laugh at the stories, but of
course now I knew it was true. And this wasn’t the first or the last woman he
treated like that. Not unnaturally, he lost the job at the generating plant.
Stalking and harassing fellow employees is definitely grounds for dismissal,
and if enough talk got around, someone was probably going to beat the hell out
of him anyways, what with the lady being a lot more popular around there than
good old Stoney, that is for sure.
This is one of many reasons why I had to cut him off,
in about 1993…buddy, you do what you want, but do not drag me into your shit. I
do not want to be associated with that kind of behaviour, and with that guy,
all was vanity. This is the guy who walked around town, reeking of cologne and
aftershave, dressed in a sky-blue, polyester leisure suit, thinking he was
Roger Moore in Moonraker—what is
interesting is the sheer vast number of women who were fooled by the greasy
charm, the slightly British accent, the cheerful ordering of just one more
round—on his tab, which got so out of hand that he would be cut off at any
number of downtown bars. His prey was the sort of women who hung around in
downtown bars—
I used to see him walking uptown, heading to the bars,
whenever it was cheque day. He was living at the homeless shelter, and yet
there he was, shiny hard shoes, rumpled suit, shambling along like he’d studied
Sean Connery’s walk, which he probably had. Connery was a body-builder, Stoney
was all fish-belly white pudge underneath the costume.
***
McNuggets, as mentioned before, had gotten himself a
trade while serving four years in a federal prison. He even got a little
experience at a machine shop up in Pembroke, but he didn’t last long, and soon
ended up back home in Sarnia.
A few months of experience didn’t count for much, and
probably due to the circumstances of his leaving, he didn’t get much of a
reference from his previous employer. Ah, but he had the solution.
He found a big, impressive machine-shop operation out
of town—Kitchener, Cambridge, Waterloo. Not too far away, just far enough. He
literally wrote a script, detailing in glowing terms his seven or eight years
of experience operating plasma cutters, turret lathes, tool and die making,
computer operated CNC machines…all the goodies. He paid an answering service,
several months in advance. When someone called up the number he had provided on
his resume, the well-known, all across Ontario, 'Acme Machining and Tool-Making', asking all about him, the lady
basically just read the script.
“Oh, yes, sir, Mr. McNuggets was one of our most
valued employees…” Blah, blah, blah. “We were real sorry to see him go…”
And he got the job—
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| A turret lathe, the modern ones are all computerized...actual experience might have helped. |
Yeah, poor old McNuggets had it made, starting off at
a much higher rate than some other guy with no experience, no references. Only
problem was, (of course), that he simply could not do the work. A bit of
training and a bit of light experience was no substitute for the claims he was
making.
With a mother working at the bank, a good job and all
the best of intentions—guys like that are always trying to get back on their
feet, to go straight, to work hard and save their money just like any normal
person…anyhow, she got him a mortgage.
He started tearing the place apart, setting up grow
lights, setting up drip irrigation, setting up ventilation…he had eighteen pot
plants in one room and a couple of dozen in the other. This was down in the
basement.
One day at work, under pressure, and having just
ruined a $1,600.00 work-piece, a very expensive bit of high-tungsten steel and
all of his labour having gone out the window, he made the classic mistake of
losing his temper.
Somebody said something, and good old McNuggets grabs
a pipe wrench and threatens to pound his head in.
I had to go in with him the next day. We wheeled his
big toolbox out to the truck and that was pretty much it for his local career
as a machinist.
His unemployment payments were all right, and he had a
year or so to get another job. Unfortunately, he’d been putting all kinds of
stuff on his credit card—not content to grow dope in the basement, he was
ripping up floors, knocking holes in walls, putting in a luxurious rear deck
and doing all the things he’d seen on TV. Why, your home is the biggest
investment you will make in your life…right. When someone turned him on to the
balance transfer offered when you signed up for a new credit card, at three or
four percent for the first six months, he plunged just like any self-respecting
gambler would.
He and more than one friend ended up with a half a
dozen or more credit cards, all with relatively high limits, all of them maxed
out and unable to keep up with the monthly payments.
A credit card does not provide a second income. Sooner
or later, your time must run out.
You can only buy so much rope on promises and
bullshit. His time ran out, and he came to the end of his rope.
Whenever I see him around town—always walking, for
cars, insurance, license fees cost money after all, I often wonder, whose
wallet’s in your pocket?
This is the guy whose favourite cable television show was Criminal Masterminds, and home renovation shows...
All very entertaining, as long as you don’t identify
too closely with the premise of the show…
McNuggets was a very stupid man, when you get right
down to it.
I don’t think he ever figured it out.
What surprises me, is that I haven’t seen him in the
news, in Provincial Court.
Maybe he moved out of town and tried his luck
elsewhere.
END
Louis has books and stories available from Barnes & Noble.
See his works on Fine Art America.
Grab a free audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, available from Google Play.
My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).
My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.
Thank you for reading, and listening.
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