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| Squiggly had his own little system... |
Louis Shalako
Squiggly. Squiggly was an interesting character.
Another one of those guys who wasn’t a jock in high school, neither was he a
sparkling student. I didn’t know him then, but he would have been a little
pudgy, yes, thick glasses. Wish-washy blue eyes, frizzy red hair. Very fair.
The sort of guy who could get a sunburn on the subway—here’s another one of
those guys who always wore long pants. Fuck, it was like Stoney, and Willy to
some extent. They’d never taken their shirts off in their entire lives…he would
have wheezed under physical stress.
Stoney had effeminate mannerisms with his hands, and that sort of spastic effect, which made his badminton
so odd—unpredictable, and he did win the odd one…Willy walked with a swagger
he’d never quite earned.
Squiggly wasn’t quite that bad, not being interested
in fake personas.
Squiggly was the kid who always knew where to get
dope. And knowing where to get dope, plus some small financial sense, meant he
got into selling pot, and he did that all through high school. A guy like that
shows up for school, he’s got a quarter pound of Columbian or Mexican or
something at home—that’s like a whole hundred and fifty bucks at the time, eh.
He’s got two or three quarters on him, and some smaller packages, eighths and
grams and stuff like that.
There’s more than one way to be popular in high
school, and he’d obviously figured that much out somewhere along the way…a
quick study in that sense.
He’s always got a few joints rolled up and stuck in
his cigarette pack. It’s all too easy to step off the school property, where
all the cool kids smoked, and dispose of all that dope even before lunchtime.
Then, of course, there are those who will show up at
his place, at lunchtime—then it’s back to school for the afternoon shift, and
then there’s all those folks coming around after school. Last time I saw Squiggly,
he had a little oxygen tank sitting beside the couch. There was like a plastic tube
and a nose-clip. But Squiggly was also smart enough to have a job. He was an
insulator, but what probably killed him, if he isn’t still alive, would be the
asbestos removal. It pays well, but the life expectancy isn’t very good, ladies
and gentlemen. Squiggly had a brain, and I was at his house, two or three times
a week, buying an eighth for thirty-five dollars, and it was, for the most
part, all the same weed. Good quality, flavour, tight, sticky stuff that had to
be cut up with scissors. And of course we talked.
At some point, you begin to regard such people as
friends.
So, he had the construction type job for months on
end. In winter, he had pogy,
unemployment insurance, coming in at a decent rate; much better than some guy
on minimum wage. He lived in his parents’ basement, which was nicely fixed up,
with his own bathroom and a living room, a bedroom. He didn’t have to make his
living from dope sales. He didn’t have to live entirely on his pay, either, and
the expenses were certainly manageable.
This guy nickeled and dimed it all over town for over
thirty years. As long as you’re not drinking and driving, and Squiggly was a
good driver, you can get away with it for a very long time. Yeah, him and Lady
Di, a kind of platonic girlfriend. The girl next door, there might have been
something there at one time, but they were just good friends now. She’s even
married some other guy, and had a kid, separated, widowed, divorced, whatever.
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| Nothing blends in quite like a shit little car. |
There were times though, when his driveway had six or
seven vehicles in it. The basic rule was that you had to stay for at least half
an hour, and there were times, fucking payday or whatever, when there was quite
the little group, quite the little party going on in Squiggly’s basement. The
idea was not to run in and out, and yet people inevitably did it. The idea was
not to leave some dumbass that Squiggly didn’t know sitting in the car in the
driveway for half an hour at a time, but that also inevitably happened…there is
a lesson here, I am sure.
It was always interesting to open up the back door and
his elderly mother is sitting at the kitchen table, beaming sort of maternally
at you as you turned and went down the stairs. She really was a sweet old
lady—probably had seen it all by now, what with two older sons cast from a
similar mold. One of them older brothers might have spotted him that first
ounce, come to think on it.
Fuck, none of us were exactly young, at this point. I
would have to have been in my early forties by this time, and we were all
mostly of an age.
I was tempted to leave Squiggly out of this memoir.
But there came a time when he and a couple of other guys cut me off—they just
cut me off. I’ve never been entirely sure what that was all about, but paranoia, good, old-fashioned paranoia
probably played a role.
I know this sounds crazy, but I was always talking
about writing books. This was my big ambition in life. McNuggets was damned
ignorant when I mentioned The Trailer Park Boys and writing, not so much about great train robberies or even
murder, but basically small-town stuff…small town punks, essentially. McNuggets
was damned threatened by the very
idea itself. (Well, your worst fears have been confirmed now, eh.) But Squiggly
was amused enough when I told him about my idea for a World War One memoir,
sort of inspired by Snoopy versus the Red Baron.
(Heaven Is Too
Far Away, by Louis Shalako. Available from many fine online platforms. –
ed.)
I borrowed books from Squiggly. His old man had served
on light cruisers and escort carriers during World War Two. What do you give a
veteran for Christmas? Another fucking book on World War Two, ladies and
gentlemen. That’s what you give them. It’s better than another bottle of
aftershave. Well, the family had a whole shelf of them, down in the basement. One
wonders if that did not become somewhat tiresome, after a while, veterans must
get sick of it all at some point.
One day in the early 2000s, I pulled out of Squiggly’s
driveway there, right on Indian Road, a busy thoroughfare. I went south, made a
left and cut through the subdivision. I ended up on Confederation Street going
east. I was headed out to see a guy about a derelict MGB which was out in front
of their place of business. The guy had a small company running school buses at
the time, their yard was fenced, but here is this MGB, no roof, mostly intact,
rotting into the ground, and of course I had seen it when going by.
I was prepared to offer five hundred dollars, and I
still am, if only for the parts and their resale value…
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| I was probably carrying an eighth, but the cop didn't really ask. |
This fucking cop gloms onto me…he was right there,
just around the corner. He followed, real close for a while, getting my license
number probably. He dropped back. He made the same turns I did. After a while,
he’s five hundred metres back, but I know fucking well he’s following me.
Finally, he zooms up, pulls me over, way the hell out in the rural part of the
municipality. I am stopped by the side of the road…what’s weird, is that with
his lights flashing, the guy parks three hundred and fifty feet back. He comes
walking up, visible in my mirror, with that fucking gunfighter walk…it’s like this measly prick thinks he can make me run
for it.
I mean, seriously, he parked three hundred fifty feet
back. I know fucking well he’s had time to arrange for a backup…for pursuit.
Right?
He looked at my license, my insurance, all that sort
of shit. I asked him why he had stopped me, I sure as hell wasn’t speeding or
anything—I’d seen him coming, after all.
Suspicious
vehicle in a school zone, he says. And then he let me go—he
had nothing and he knew it.
And then I went to check out the MGB. I did not buy
it, or it would be safer to say the guy wouldn’t sell it. I can’t recall the
name, but this guy had a two-tone, blue Austin-Healey, whether that be the
100-6 or the 3000, I can’t quite recall. I’d seen it around. He was a little
patronizing, but such folks are busy enough as it is.
The thing is, I told Squiggly, and others, about this
little incident. I guess that was my mistake.
The other thing is, methamphetamines were all over the
news. This was back when it was news,
if you take my meaning—there are new, even worse drugs all over the news now,
including all the usual suspects like fentanyl and oxy-whatever. Right? I
recall mentioning it…truth is, I was all against it. And I still am, right.
So, all of a sudden, I am persona non grata, just like that.
Some months later, Squiggly and Peanuts are in the
paper. They’ve been busted, going down the road, in Squiggly’s little Ford Tempo.
According to the newspaper clipping, which I probably still have in my files,
the police seized marijuana, cocaine, oxycontin, cash, methamphetamines, stolen credit cards…and stolen cell-phones.
Peanuts had the more extensive record, in fact I reckon
the cops wanted him real bad. They both did some stiff time for that, about
four years for Peanuts and two and a half for Squiggly. That must have been a
bit of a shock for Squiggly. He might have been busted for possession as an
underage offender, which would have resulted in a fine and a couple of years on
probation.
I don’t know for sure, but he might have been popped
for possession as an adult, which would be a hell of a lot better than
trafficking, even though, even at the time, the cops probably knew enough about
him. Once he made bail, he probably didn’t do another minute in jail—just a
fine and more probie, as they call
it.
The truth is, Squiggly was a likeable guy—he had a
million friends.
I’m just not one of them, but that was his choice, and
not mine so much—
Funny thing is, Squiggly is one of the few old
‘friends’ that I still miss.
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| Ye olde triple-beam scales, stolen from many a high school science class. |
***
He had more than one source of income on the side. It
sounds crazy, but he had his own baseball league. He organized it, he arranged
for the time on the municipal baseball diamonds. He wrote up the schedule,
refereed the games. He did everything. But if it takes nine or ten people to
make up a baseball team, and if each of them pays a mere ten dollars, and if
there are five, or six, or seven or eight teams, each playing one or two games
a week, then everybody’s having fun and getting their ten dollars’ worth. With
a high-school friend working at the parks department, it wasn’t all that hard
to work his own (free, no diamond fees), sort of schedule around the established
schedules for all the other local minor leagues.
What does Squiggly get out of it? He gets to hold the
money for the season. I showed up at his place one morning and he was trying to
figure out a schedule. He was making notes in an exercise book, a book full of
names, phone numbers, team lists, all that sort of thing. And he had a big
stack of cash, fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars. A guy like Squiggly
could do a lot, backed up by an additional two thousand dollars, cash on hand,
all ready for whatever opportunity might arise. Also, Squiggly would bring a
few quarters of pot to the games…all those names, all those people, and if
someone had a cooler of beer in the back of the car, no one made a big thing
about it.
Knowing Squiggly, he would have it all thought out and
by the way, it’s two bucks a beer. A dollar for a can of pop for the kids,
probably—knowing Squiggly.
So, at the end of the year, Squiggly has a few small
trophies engraved, he has to throw a barbecue in the back yard, with a few cases
of beer and a few packs of buns, wieners, hamburgers on the grill. Some
condiments. He gets to make a speech, hand out the trophies, and whatever is
left of the cash was all his at this point—
Let’s hope he liked baseball, he sure as hell got
enough of it.
Maybe he just liked people, eh.
***
Here’s a guy with time to kill, at least when he’s not
working or selling dope. No baseball in the wintertime. Where he got the idea,
I don’t know, but all of a sudden, he’s on the internet, he’s on Ebay.
He’s selling tobacciana—tobacco
memorabilia.
And yes, there really is such a thing.
He’s going to local auctions, estate sales, and
specializing in the two-dollar lots. A box of stuff from some old house, and he
must have found an interesting tobacco tin—and then he must have looked it up
on the internet.
Some of those things are worth real money. Squiggly
learned all that, self-taught in every sense of the word. One year, he told me
he’d made six thousand dollars selling stuff most people wouldn’t have taken a
second look at.
If I had sold six thousand dollars’ worth of ebooks in
any given year, I would have been a best-selling author, ladies and gentlemen.
I sold him one or two items myself, when I bought my
elderly great-aunt’s house in the south end, and there were definitely a few
rare finds in there. The place went back to the forties, after all—last
century, not this one. I sold him tobacco tins, my great uncle's pipes, some
ceramic figurines, and oddly enough, some hand-made ice fishing tackle. I kid
you not.
This guy had a brain in his head, one of a few that
actually impressed me.
Seriously.
END
Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Kobo.
Grab yourself a free copy of 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.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due
to content. 18+)
My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Fourteen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Seventeen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Eighteen.
Thank you for reading, and listening.
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