My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen. The New Highway. Louis Shalako.

 

Mine was a dark blue, with steel rims and baby-moon hubcaps. Not quite so cool...

Louis Shalako

The new highway. The first time Johnny and I became aware of the new highway, the project had barely gotten started. We were heading north on a gravel side-road, in his full-size Dodge cargo van. He’d paid about $1,500.00, it had a six-cylinder engine and three speeds forward, with the gear shifter on the steering column. I drove the thing, and the brakes were four-wheel drums, and the steering wheel a large, skinny plastic thing.

The clutch was heavy, and over time, your left leg would end up bigger than the right leg…this in spite (or because), of a brake booster. You didn't need to push nearly so hard on the brakes, that's what I'm saying. The steering was pure manual.

Judging by the remains of a red stripe around the mid-line of the vehicle, it was part of a fleet owned (or previously owned), by a local leasing company. Vans were popular, this one had been customized inside, and it was a big step up from the Cricket. Yes, Johnny had a bed and everything in the back…

It was getting dark out, we’d had a couple beers anyways, a doobie or two maybe. And there it was. This big, double lane cut through the forest and the bush-lots behind the farms along London Line, otherwise known as Highway 22. Back then, the legal age for drinking was 21 years of age, and this is where we learned to cruise the back roads.

It must have been in the newspaper, but the highway was actually built in short sections. This one was all mud, heavy equipment, road graders parked here and there, stacks of metal culvert, piles of sand and gravel. They had the basic soil profile, with two long flat strips for paving and a total of three ditches, one on each side and one up the middle…

At one time, the 402, a multi-lane divided highway, used to end at the city limits. Traffic was dumped onto good old London Line, through the Golden Mile, four lanes, two-way traffic, a commercial strip on the city limits, and then it was two lanes, or three with a central, two-way passing lane, all the way to London, sixty miles down the road. The building and completion of the 402 was a big thing for its time, and here we were, bumping across it on some kind of extended crop tour, and the night was black as pitch.

Johnny's was an old leasing vehicle, with a few miles on the clock.

That middle passing lane on what is now London Line, was the scene, and the cause, of many head-on collisions over the years, and at some point that thing had to go. Up north, a short section of similar roads will have passing for northbound traffic, and then the next centre lane section has passing for southbound traffic, and hopefully, never the twain shall meet…although it probably does still happen.

***

The first new section of the highway was open. The second new section was more or less complete…but not yet open. I pulled onto the ramp, slowed it to a stop. My girlfriend hops out, pulls aside one or two big orange traffic cones and I pull the MGB through the gap. She pulls the cones back into position. She hops back in, closes the door and we are off down the curving ramp, onto a big, beautiful, brand-new highway that is absolutely deserted. The top is down, we are in love, it is a beautiful, sunny evening and in a moment, she’s got the wine out. A twist of the wire, a pull on the cork, and the bubbling, sparkling cheap-ass wine blows the cork off into an eighty mile per hour slipstream.

The cork is gone, I caught a quick glimpse in the mirror, of it bouncing down the road, but we aren’t likely to need it again anyhow.

After some hour, the construction workers have gone home, at some point, it is a weekend, a holiday. We were trespassing, considering potential hazards, dangerous driving, speeding, disobeying detours…alcohol, marijuana, the girlfriend in a sun dress with no bra and no panties, kicking off her sandals and shifting up that dress, a hot and naked girl, my finger inside her wet pussy as she went down on me, well. I guess you could say it was pretty much all illegal.

Worth every minute of it, one has to admit—but still plenty illegal.

In that sense, we really were criminals.

We were also having the time of our lives…

***

Image Credit.

Willy had married his childhood sweetheart at this point, Trina was six months pregnant when they got married, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, which was legally permissible without the parents’ permission…

The four of us were cruising in his dad’s 1975 Chevy Impala station wagon, upon which he’d mounted a pair of Mean Mother Magnums, 800-watt spotlights, more normally associated with bush trucks and Australian poachers jacking ‘roos at night in the outback.

We were on the way home from a very long tour, a crop-tour, with plenty of wine, doobies, all kinds of sexual foreplay and other kinds of provocation of a womanly kind, and somehow I woke up in the driver’s seat. One guy can drive, his wife or girlfriend on the seat beside him, and the other guy and female person can fuck in the back end. We didn’t have too many inhibitions back then.

Willy, was asleep in the seat beside me, and the two ladies were snoring quietly away in the back seat. This is when I realized that I was driving.

Fuck—

I sat up a little straighter. I pushed the button and lowered the window in the tailgate to get a little oxygen through there.

I had no idea of how we had gotten there…

I have no idea of how we survived that last fifteen or twenty kilometres, I have no idea of when we switched seats, the only thing that probably saved us was the fact that we must have gotten onto the new, empty, deserted highway…those big fucking lights blasting away from the front bumper. Also the fact that the road was mostly straight. What was really food for thought, was the one or two kinks in the road. Even on the dead straight sections, it really was some kind of a secular miracle.

It was a boat, with a 350 cubic inch engine and a few power accessories.

Just past Warwick, westbound, I pulled off down the ramp, ah, I think Highway 21. The Forest road. With no one to help, I put it in park and pulled the traffic cones out of the way. Back in the vehicle, people were still asleep. Rather than get back on the highway, for the next section was now open, I took it north and followed Michigan Avenue back into town. This was better than a major highway, and let’s be honest. People had phones and truckers had CB radios back then, and sooner or later, someone is going to call it in: those crazy teenagers driving on the new highway again…surely someone must have remarked upon it.

Once or twice, we saw other folks out there, farmers or other young people. We just ignored each other.

It was a good thing Burger King was open late back in those days, or we might have starved to death…just an observation, ladies and gentlemen.

If you don’t believe in resurrection, you should see people sort of wake up and sit up and look around them when you tell them that you’re home, and is there anything in particular you want from the drive-through…???

Oh, and do you guys have any money on you.

***

I was heading out of town, not going anywhere in particular. It was a dark, wet, autumn evening. I had a few joints, most likely, and a cold six-pack of something sitting on the passenger seat beside me. I was driving my 1967 Beaumont, which sounds cool. It had a certain body style, although nowhere near as desirable as a Chevy II S.S. The thing is, you could sort of use the body to build one—assuming you had money. It would be a fake Chevy II, still desirable for all of that, especially with a 327 cubic inch V-8 and a four speed Muncey transmission and a Hurst shifter…

Mine had a six cylinder engine, and a two-speed automatic, shiny (and very slippery) vinyl seats. Bias-ply tires, mostly bald, and baby-moon hubcaps.

The radio was on and a song was playing…All of My Love.

I had never heard it before. It had a plaintive, sad kind of vibe to it, and furthermore, I know that voice—I know that guitar. Fuck, I knew those drums. Convinced, I turned it up a bit, cruising along at about 65 mph, and when the song ended, the on-air personality told us that John Bonham, the drummer for Led Zeppelin, had passed away and it was all very sad.

I smoked a joint, drank a couple of beers and headed on home.

It was the end of an era, really.

Those days would never come again.

***

One day the highway was open. I was alone in the MGB, eastbound on the 402. I took it up, holding the pedal right to the floor. Traffic was light, the road was dry and the car took a bit of time…finally, we’re going over a hundred miles per hour or forty miles per hour over the limit. At about 106 mph, the engine starts to knock and it was time to shut her down…

Fuck.

She blowed up at about 106 mph...

I humped it over farm fields and ditches, and through the woods to a farmhouse along London Line, where the people graciously allowed me to use their phone.

Of course. The first question my old man asked was, ‘did you check the oil?’

Well, that’s dad for you. It had all kinds of oil, although the oil pump may have been on the way out. It is also true I had been running it pretty hard. Basically, I had ‘spun a bearing’, and when I took the thing apart, sure enough, the little curved pieces in the oil pan were paper-thin. The block and the crank were fine, but sometimes it’s cheaper just to find a used motor somewhere than doing a major rebuild.

This, is why we pulled an old ’69 MGB, up, and out, it was literally sinking into the ground in a backyard along Pine Street. The roof was collapsed, the bottom of the vehicle sitting on the ground and the wheels stuck in holes of their own. I used to see that thing all the time, walking over to Pete’s Variety at the East Street Plaza.

For fifty bucks and a bit of labour—a stout rope and my old man’s Volvo, a bit of air in the tires, I got another engine block, a transmission, and that aluminum hood. They even had the ownership, which is important. I stripped that thing down to nothing and then had it towed for scrap.

But that, as they say, is a story for another day.

END

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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.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due to content.)

Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

Author’s Note. Chapter 12 was difficult to write, not so much from the technical aspects of writing, but from the emotional standpoint. I also sort of knew I had to do it—for reasons which are difficult to explain or even justify. I was lower than a sidewinder’s belly at the bottom of Death Valley for a couple of days beforehand. Writing it seemed to help, and then again, the day after, I was literally in tears a couple of times, perhaps for myself. Perhaps more so for all those other victims, most of them a lot more serious than my own experience.

 

#Louis