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| He went down like a sack of shit... |
Louis Shalako
The knock-out punch. Zoom and I were sitting in the
basement. I was trying to buy a gram of pot, which was always a bit of a
problem back in those days. If a person had money, real money, you wouldn’t be
looking for grams, would you—you’d just throw down sixty or seventy dollars and
get yourself a quarter bag…
Anyhow, Zoom wasn’t so bad back then. When he was
really flush, after a series of good scores, he might get the usual bag of good
pot and a case of beer, send out for a pizza kind of thing. He knew, (and he
would know), a guy with good amphetamines. Speed, as it was called back then,
real clean stuff and he’d buy enough for a few arm-pokes. The real speedos used
the quick high and the burst of energy to stay up for days on end, going on a
real run of speed, theft, and in the end, in the long hours of the night, doing
a bit of house-cleaning before finally nodding off and crashing. And when they
crashed, they burned, to the extent that the drug hangover was so bad, the only
real cure was to go out and get some more…it was a self-fulfilling prophecy,
and they were mostly okay with it.
All of that came later for Zoom. It was just an
occasional treat, as they say—
So, I finally get my gram, I roll up the obligatory
joint to smoke with the guy, who probably has an ounce of dope in his own
pocket, but that was Zoom. Zoom took every advantage, and this included his
so-called friends. With Zoom, friendship was more of a one-way relationship,
and his would-be friends learned to accept that after a while.
All of a sudden, his brother, Buddy Two-Shoes, is
pounding away at my back door—and he’s pissed about something. Really pissed.
The pair of them still lived just up the street, at least when they weren’t
living somewhere else.
Zoom is being accused of stealing Buddy’s stash,
whether it be pot, some other kind of dope, or maybe just money. Not that I
would put it past him, either one of them really.
It's not my job to judge, right.
Zoom goes up the back stairs in a flash, losing his
temper, thinking he’s tougher than Buddy. Zoom was more bully than fighter,
more bluff and bluster than anything. He was the larger of the two. The pair of
them are fighting on my patio, and on my back lawn, we do have neighbours, and
thank Darwin that my old man was at work. I reckon the three of us were like
twenty or twenty-two years old…
Buddy had Zoom down on the ground, Zoom was bleeding a
bit from a small cut to the face, and Buddy was just kicking at him, Zoom on
the ground, rolling from side to side and bawling his eyes out…I mean, Buddy
was laying a real beating on his older brother and I had to put a stop to it.
I told him a couple of times. He didn’t listen, and
then I hit Buddy.
It was a good hit, a beautiful hit, right to the side
of the face and head, and he went right down—hard.
He went down like a sack of potatoes or something, he
went down like a ton of bricks.
Zoom is still crying, trying to get up now that he has
a chance…and Buddy rolls over, drags himself up to his hands and knees, head
down.
This is when I get scared, quite frankly, no one was
more surprised by that punch than me, ladies and gentlemen. I have no idea of
where that came from, it came out of nowhere, but it has been thrown and now I
have to live with the consequences. When he gets up, he’s going to be real
angry and about ten times as strong. I know this from experience—
I’m damned if I’m going to take a beating from this
guy.
This is when I literally kicked him in the face,
throwing him over onto his back again. Poor old Buddy will probably wear the
scars on the bridge of his nose, for the rest of his life. The scars left by
the laces of the running shoe on my right foot, and it’s a good thing they
weren’t work boots either.
Just to compound matters, as he lay flat on his back,
arms up around his head and knees up, I dropped to my knees, putting both hands
together and giving him a two-handed pile driver, right to the middle of that
big fat belly of his. That was what it took—three really good blows, ladies and
gentlemen. It’s not like the fights you see on television or in the movies.
Buddy was unconscious. Zoom was still mad, but he
didn’t go on the attack, not straight away—I think he was as much in shock as
anything else. He’s looking at me, he’s looking at his little brother on the
ground…
So was I. I thought with a kind of sickening lurch in
the guts that I might have killed poor old Buddy, I really did.
That is one hell of a revelation, ladies and
gentlemen.
I nipped over and turned on the back hose, getting
some cold water out of there, and then I splashed water all over poor old Buddy-Two
shoes, and lifting up his head and gently slapping at the face.
Buddy.
Buddy. Wake up, Buddy—
Shit like that, right.
Fuck, finally he came around. I don’t think he
remembered much, we sort of had to tell him about it later.
I’ve never hit anyone since, ladies and gentlemen, and
that is probably for the best.
***
The fence. For every stolen item, there has to be a
customer. For every ten thieves, for any number of thieves, there has to be a
fence. In a town of this size, we’re not talking great art heists or jewel
thieves disposing of the Pink Panther diamond or the Crown Jewels.
As often as not, it’s not their main source of income,
but some people are more likely to buy hot goods, and having bought once, or
twice, they might even put in a special order—something Zoom and others tried
to fulfill. I’ve done it myself.
Some guy wants a high-end car stereo and speakers for
the rear deck, some guy on a bicycle and with a bent coat hanger will try and
find one for you. Seriously, if you have the money, or the dope, or maybe the
guy just owes you already, and this is one of several options for paying it
off…
Someone had to buy all the tools, the box itself, when
Zoom and I drove out to a bingo hall on the outskirts of town, this was before
legalized gambling casinos and slot machines killed the market for what was originally billed as a game of skill.
I parked and waited in my usual fashion. Zoom was back
to the car in his usual fashion, and this one was another problem child: a big,
heavy toolbox in the back end of a local contractor’s vehicle, a big, full-size
van. I don’t recall the exact company, they come and go, in this small, grimy,
northern industrial town, and this was so long ago. It took the two of us,
lifting from both ends, to drag that fucking thing across the darkened parking
lot and get it into the trunk of the vehicle. Zoom goes back, and grabs a few
more things, fuck, extension cords and hammer-drills, some sort of industrial
vacuum cleaner and all the hoses…and just literally everything he could get.
We drive to the other end of town, and to my surprise,
sell it all off in fifteen minutes, to a guy who shall remain nameless. These
are literally used tools, a rusty old toolbox. To be fair, we got so much cash,
not all that much, and quarter bag of pot each. It was pretty good pot too, and
this is how I got to know these people. At some point, I cleaned a bunch of
junk out of my old man’s garage and sold him that too—
I mean, this guy would buy just about anything.
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| Rotties. |
I couldn’t help but note that the wife, a rather hefty
native girl, had quite the collection of house plants. She seemed to like
plants, and so I asked her about it.
I ended up selling her a bunch of perennials, which I
stole, all on my own, and some hanging baskets from the pergola in Germain
Park. Fuck, those things were heavy, dragging them home all the way across the
park. I got the usual quarter bag of pot and about twenty-five dollars cash,
and I can honestly say, I was glad enough to have it…
***
Yeah. Over the years. Zoom came to my front door one
day—
He sells me a Nikon 35-mm camera, and I was fortunate
to have a couple of twenty-dollar bills in my wallet. So I got a Nikon camera
for forty dollars, and then there was the time Zoom sold me a big plastic case
with a rechargeable saw, a rechargeable light, there was a fucking charger and
a battery in there, and there was a third tool—not a drill, but a screw-gun or
something. I had that for years, truth is, I have no idea of what happened to
it. For all I know, it was stolen right back again, but my point is that I
wasn’t above a bargain myself…
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, when your old man’s four
and a half horsepower boat motor disappears, right out of the basement one day,
the first person you think of, is good old Zoom. Ditto, when a really beautiful
mitre saw, a Christmas present from my mother, is just plain gone one day, and
at this point, it is a bit late to make a point of locking the fucking garage
door as a major point of religious dogma.
That fucking horse has long since departed.
***
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| Call for an estimate. |
A few of the crew were sitting around Peanut’s house
in Petrolia one evening. Peanuts wasn’t a fence, so much as he was a dope
dealer. The only problem with being a dope dealer, of course, is all that nice,
lovely money coming in—and no way to account for it all, including the fact
that you, your girlfriend and her kid live in a pretty nice little Victorian
farmhouse, right on the main drag of what is a pretty, but very small little
town.
There’s some knocking at the door, the fucking dogs
start barking, a couple of Rottweilers, and there are three guys there. I’ve
never seen them before in my life, but Peanuts talks to them for a while…I
guess he knows them from somewhere, probably from selling them dope of one kind
or another.
You see, he’s got a little business, which started off
as a front operation, just to sort of help to account for any sort of an income…it’s becoming a success in its
own right. He’s got a few so-called employees and they build fences and decks.
I don’t know where he got the idea to begin with, but he’s at least got a
pickup truck, a post-hole auger and a few other tools. He’s got a phone number
and some signs, and people are actually calling him and asking for estimates.
These guys are all coke addicts, of course, and the
boys at the door are no different.
No, the only difference there is that they know him.
They’ve got a whole pickup truck full of stolen fence and deck boards, they’ve
got pressure-treated lumber, four-by-fours of various lengths, and they’re
looking to sell. The sort of guys who back up to the fence at a local lumber
yard, either hop the fence or cut the wire, and start tossing boards out to
their buddies.
Me and Buddy Two-Shoes, Craig-Oh and Peanuts himself
go out in the driveway and start humping this shit into the back yard, making
sure we put some baulks of timber down and making a nice, neat series of piles
of lumber. Yes, we were nothing if not neat, organized, and let’s be honest. If
enough of this shit goes on, sooner or later Peanuts is going to get busted,
and that’s why it’s wise not to get too involved sometimes. But Peanuts, like
Zoomer and so many others is prepared to take any advantage. Buy low, and sell
high, right.
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| Buy low, sell high. |
He’s buying the materials at a deep discount, he’s
paying in coke, which has a high markup, and not only that, he’s got guys
prepared to do the work and take their pay any way they can get it.
If nothing else, it looks like they have a job—and
they do, although nothing will ever come of it, and they just keep on, digging
their own hole deeper, and deeper, and deeper.
If it keeps the mother-in-law off their backs, so much
the better.
On the other hand, Peanuts always had pot, when he
went away, he needed someone to look after the dogs, and at the time, people
were spending a fair bit of time at his place. Sure, you had to go in first
thing and clean up the dog shit, but he would always leave a bit of dope. He
had that boat—he had a barbecue, and he had this massive television set,
another one of those things, right. I figure he’d accepted that one in payment
for some sort of a drug debt, oh, and if the cops asked questions about it, it
had never been reported stolen and anything, any other piece of information
than that; well, it was none of their business.
He also had a deep freeze full of steaks and
hamburgers and that’s always good in a friend.
END
Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromAmazon.
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.
Thank you for reading, and listening.
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