Louis Shalako: My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen. Shoplifting, and Theft. Louis Shalako.

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Louis Shalako

Theft and shoplifting. Well, it was one of those nights, winter coming on and dusk coming on even sooner.

There’s a pounding at the back door and it’s Zoomer. My old man is in the living room, but by this time I was inhabiting the basement.

He wants a ride, enough so that he pulls out a fairly large joint and sparks it up—some of that good, green, pine-tasting California sensimilla. All I have to do is to borrow Frank’s car and he will see that I get a little something out of it.

This time it’s shoplifting. Zoom has a few orders to fulfill, and he knows exactly where to go. If truth be told, he’s been there before and done it all before.

Zoom is wearing this kind of polyester bomber jacket. It’s big, it’s bulky, more importantly, it has big sleeves and tight, elastic cuffs. I drive over to Mitton Street, pull into the back of the parking lot, and Zoom goes into Shopper’s Drug Mart, just to pick up a few little things…

I suppose perfume and cosmetics are good things, but this is a more likely target for light-fingered young women and girls. No, Zoom was after bigger game. They had a wall display. Two, three, possibly four Norman Rockwell collector plates go in through the open collar, the zipper on that big old jacket pulled down a bit, and then, moving along, he somehow manages to steal, or ‘schmiel’, in the hyper-localized argot or cant, a criminal language all of its own, a couple of Royal Dalton figurines. (Royal Doulton. - ed.) These go into the side pockets and all of a sudden, out the door and he’s there at the car, in something of a rush.

I fire up that fucking old red Volvo, and cruise out of that parking lot, and head on back eight or ten blocks, and no one seems to pay us the least bit of attention. Yes, it was night, yes, it was coming on to Christmas. Here he is, banned in half the stores in town, for just such an offense, or series of offenses, and yet no one has paid him a second glance. Honestly, they had his picture up beside the till at pretty much every store in Lambton Mall…

Oh, and if I’m lucky, I get a tiny little bud and some kind of a thrill—some kind of transient entertainment value out of it.

After a while, he’s gone off to flog off the proceeds of a half an hour’s work, and for me, it’s back to the television and another long winter’s night.

Years later, when someone broke into Stoney’s and stole a shit-load of his mother’s Norman Rockwells and Royal Doultons, the first person I thought of was Zoomer—the second person I thought of was Stoney himself. He might have gotten just that desperate, you never know.

***

I won’t say we worked together. With Zoom, you were a patsy, an accessory, a useful fool, or a victim, maybe even an innocent bystander. But the pair of us had headed out, in my big old Chrysler, another dark, stormy, freezing winter’s night. We found ourselves down at the Moore Township Arena, which is just off the parkway along the St. Clair River.

The moon hung in the sky off to the west, there were stars and it was cold as hell. Zoom goes all over the parking lot. There is a hockey game or something going on inside the building…he’s right back at my window.

Get on out here, he needs help. Someone has just scored a goal inside, judging by the sound, and I hop out and follow him to a vehicle, which he has already scoped out. He’s cut some wires or pulled some plugs, and I scurry back to the Chrysler with a pair of wedge-shaped DeVeaux speakers from the back window.

Ye olde fashioned tennis courts, ladies and gentlemen.

I nipped back, and into the passenger side of that vehicle, a sporty, muscle car with a high-end stereo system in the dashboard. A fucking Blaupunkt or something. Zoom has pulled the wires, the plugs and fuses…he’s got the knobs and the face-plate off. I stuff all that into my pockets. No, ladies and gentlemen, the real problem is the stalks. The long, threaded rods that control the box, are fucking long…real long, and the hex-nuts are inset into deep sockets, and the threads are fine. It’s a cold winter night, and that hockey game can only go on for so long.

He’s spinning away with the fingers of his right hand, I’m spinning madly away with the fingers of my left hand, and for fuck’s sakes, it seemed to take forever to get them fucking nuts off of there. Finally we had them, and the thing falls out the back and he grabs it. Holy shit, and it is one fucking hell of a relief to get off that river road, head east on fuck-shit concession, go one or two past the Highway 40, (north), and then finally weasel our way back into town, all on back roads, without any major problems.

***

It’s not always easy to put a date on certain events. I was possibly working as an unarmed security guard, twelve-hour shifts, three days on and three days off. I might have been driving cab, or on call at Heist, where good old Stoney had at least gotten me in, and if I had survived long enough, I might have even gotten into the union. High-pressure water blasting is tough, brutal work.

But I was in my usual place, sitting there in front of the television, when an unfamiliar vehicle zooms up the driveway, there are hurried footsteps, and the usual pounding at the back door…broad daylight and all.

It’s McNuggets and Buddy Two-Shoes. They’ve made a big score and the first person they thought of on the way back to town was me.

First, a couple of Iron Horse mountain bikes that were all the rage at the time. That part’s bad enough, at least they can ride them away, bearing in mind they’ll have to leave them for the time being, as they’re driving a leased vehicle and they have to return it. No, the real thing is that they’ve charged up a dozen VCRs, video cam-corders, on stolen credit cards, and for the time being, those will have to sort of be stashed in the back of a closet—at my house.

Fuck, at this point, all I want is one of those cameras. Of course they promised, and of course, it never happened. They were back once or twice a day, until every fucking one of them had been sold—it’s not like they would ever keep one for themselves.

***

That fucking old Volvo.

At the time of this writing, December, 2023, Christmas is less than a month away. Sometime in the mid-nineties, Buddy Two-Shoes was knocking at my back door. It was dark, overcast, with some snow on the ground and the promise of more to come. Predictably, he needed a ride. It seems he’d been reading Community Calendar, a regular feature in the local daily.

I don’t know if he had any more advance information than that. But I had sort of inherited dad’s red, 1971 Volvo at this point. (My old man had four Volvos, all in a row, and that’s what he drove for over forty years, ladies and gentlemen.)

I drove Buddy up to a school in the north end of the city, at the corner of Indian Road and Errol.

Apparently, there was a musical thing, little kids, parents, teachers, old people singing Christmas carols and all of that sort of thing. This was going on in the school gymnasium. The parking lot along Errol Road was mostly full, but I found a spot way down at the end, and Buddy gets out and has a look, with a tiny little pocket flash and his trusty bent coat hanger at the ready. I used to shut her down, but it was all warmed up by now and she still started easily…

He was back in five minutes. Let’s go, he says.

So, I pull out, head east on Errol, and then hook a right. This area was well-known to me, the same little subdivision mentioned in the chapter on Escape and Evasion. (He means High Speed Chase. - ed.) Cash is anonymous, although I didn’t know exactly what he’d scored. The thing is to get away with some cool, some aplomb, from the scene of the crime. My own hands are clean, my pockets don’t have any evidence in them. Not my problem, right. It was early yet, they’d be in the school for quite a while, right. It’s not like people were chasing us, not at all…

And holy, fuck, the guy pulls out four hundred-dollar bills. I thought he was just bragging, but no—this was for me. This was my cut. Holy, fuck. I just about shit myself. Seriously. These guys weren’t known for being generous—that’s a contradiction in terms when it comes to thieves, right.

Good old Buddy must have hit the motherlode that night. Oh—and someone else lost a big whack of cash. At that fucking rate, it must have been thousands. We were back at my place within half an hour, forty-five minutes. I sure as hell stopped at the beer store that evening, I will confess.

Sure beats five bucks for gas and a couple of joints, and if you’re lucky, a rancid cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup, right.

When somebody makes a score like that, there’s no sense in leaving the cash and taking a credit card, which has its own problems and risks.

In a case like that, it’s take the money and run.

***

Right outside the back door...

The tennis courts. There are tennis courts at Germain Park. Thieves haunted the parking lots at Germain Park. For one thing, the tennis courts were on the other side of the Botanical Gardens, a couple of hundred metres from the parking lot. People left their wallets in their cars all too often. Also, Jackson Pool was right beside the parking lot, with all kinds of people coming and going. Again, all them wallets and other valuables, theoretically locked in the car…the Strangway Centre, a seniors’ centre is on the other side of the parking lot, and then the Parks Department works yard is right there as well, the employees also park along in there.

The thieves had pulled a picnic table over, just behind a hedge, this is right by the Zen garden. They were out of sight, yet one or two of them could simply get up to stretch the legs and see what was going on in the parking lot.

They were looking for some little old lady to leave a ‘white elephant’ in the trunk of a car, going into the Strangway Centre for a card game, a fitness class, or a free cup of coffee and a gossip. The term denotes a big fat purse, usually in white leather. They were looking for the vehicle, the one where a couple of people parked, got out, and went and played tennis for a while. They were looking to see where the municipal parks people were, always running about in their little golf-carts and Cushman, three-wheeled vehicles…they were looking to score, and the fact is, with a bottle of water or pop, their own tennis rackets and wearing the athletic clothes, shorts and T-shirts and running shoes, one or two bicycles parked around, they blended in well enough.

The size and composition of the crew varied, they weren’t always there, but Zoomer for one specialized for many years in theft from vehicle.

It was his thing—it was what he did, ladies and gentlemen. As for his long-time girlfriend Dee, she at least could keep a driver’s license—Zoomer was banned for life at an early age, whether by the courts or the insurance companies, is not for me to say. But these guys could use an ‘orv’, a bent coat-hanger, with the best of them. An Orville derives from Orville Reddenbacher—hot buttered popcorn. Orville Reddenbacher rhymes with bread and butter—and a bent coat hanger was how they made their living. A purse in the trunk was no problem, not once they’d seen it go in—all you have to do is open the door, open the glove-box and push the button, at this point in history. And little old ladies so very seldom have alarm systems, back in the day.

Every so often, Dee would have to babysit, or maybe it was just that her brother had grandma’s car.

A ‘dub’, or a ‘walter’, was a wallet. No one used their real names, although everybody knew everybody else. But you can’t be yelling ‘hey Dave, Dave Smith (or Jones)—the cops are coming’ across the parking lot. No, it’s Dogger, or Baddy, or Swimmy, or Peanuts or whatever.

Oh, and if you and your partner go out of town, it’s best to switch to new fake names for a while, or at least this is how Stan and Ollie saw it.

It makes sense enough to me.

END

Louis has books and stories available from Smashwords.

See his works on Fine Art America.

Grab yourself a free copy of 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.