Wednesday, November 15, 2023

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven. Liars, Cheats and Frauds. Louis Shalako.

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.

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—

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 Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.


Thank you for reading, and listening.




 

 

 

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