Louis Shalako: My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen. Stealing Dope. Louis Shalako.

Two or three grams of coke.

Louis Shalako

Stealing dope. Stealing dope. It really wasn’t my idea, not at all, but, as usual, I got sucked in by a friend.

Good old Swimmy had some friends, they lived out in the country. They were growing dope, outdoors. Like many a fool, they talked about it. Most likely, on their own farm. Quite a long ways out in the country, as it turned out. He had a rough idea of where it was—they had a farm. They had an address, on some county road. They had fences and ditches and a big woodlot at the back of the property. There were only so many places it could be.

And of course, at this point I was either still living in my dad’s basement, or I had gone away for a while, to some other town—having failed there after two or three years, I was right back in my dad’s basement again.

The point here is that I had a place, but I couldn’t really hang up a bunch of stolen dope to cure. My old man would have had kittens. Swimmy couldn’t really do it at home, as he and his elderly mother, dying of cancer, but with a bathroom medicine cabinet full of little pill bottles brimming with brightly coloured doses of morphine, lived in a two-bedroom apartment on an upper floor of a house on Mackenzie Street.

Swimmy calls me up, its harvest time and he figures on bagging some pot. He’s got some guy in Point Edward, who’s got a place to hang the stuff up to dry. I borrowed my old man’s turbocharged Volvo station wagon, and I pick up Swimmy and this other guy, and off we go to a bunch of dirt and gravel sideroads in the northern part of Plympton-Wyoming.

We head north on such and such a side-road or concession. We drop off Swimmy, and he heads off across a field of soybeans. There’s a bit of a moon, but mostly pitch-black with a few lights here and there from the occasional farmhouse. I’m cruising along in my old man’s Volvo, talking to some guy I’ve never seen before, and all we can really do is to make a right turn when we get to the lake road, Lambton 7. We go east one concession and make another right, we go south for a while, make another right turn, and another.

Now we’re heading back to where we dropped good old Swimmy off. Only one problem, of course: Swimmy isn’t there. All we could do, bearing in mind we’re just a couple of guys cruising up and down gravel side-roads in my old man’s car, was to circle around. Again. And again. Yeah, just a couple of guys circling around the block. Over and over again. At some point, I started circling around to the left, and this way around was a lot longer. At some point, we are tempted to abandon good old Swimmy, and let the bastard make his own way home—

Finally, making one last pass, my erstwhile companion spots Swimmy…the poor fucker is slugging a good forty pot plants over his shoulder, staggering along under the load, and wondering just where in the fuck we were.

Swimmy had crossed a few ditches, at least three farms, floundering in the dark all the way. He’d finally found his buddy’s bush-lot. He’d floundered around in there for a while, and finally stumbled upon a pretty good patch, almost by accident. Now he’s got to cut and pull and yank away until he’s got as much pot as he can reasonably be expected to handle. He throws that over his shoulder and starts walking. Having done all that, at least he knows enough to follow the moon or whatever, and make his way back to our fucking home away from home, that fucking side-road…

So.

I pull over. My passenger had no idea of how to open the tailgate, but Swimmy and I stuffed all this dope into the back end, he hops into the right back seat, and we drove, back roads all the way, back home to good old Sarnia.

We got off the highway and found his buddy’s place in Point Edward. When I got out of the car, there was pot—the tops of the plants, still sticking out of the bottom of the tailgate.

Yeah, it’s a good thing a cop didn’t come up behind us…

Going down the road with pot plants hanging out the back end...fuck.

We start dragging all this lanky, skunky old pot into this guy’s place, in the front door and up the stairs to a big closet on the second floor. Already, this guy’s wife is kicking up a fuss. They’ve got a kid, this is their home, and I can’t help thinking he had no idea of what he was getting into, any more than I had. This was one of those deals where I really didn’t see much out of it. The buds were one thing, all the leaves and stalk and roots and dirt were something else. The guy’s wife was pretty hot, by that, I mean angry.

Swimmy and I got the hell out of there.

What I will say, and this is probably a good thing, is that Swimmy had fifty cents, and we went down to a car wash and vacuumed a lot of dirt, leaves and bits of pot out of the back end of the Volvo before dropping him off and heading on home again.

My old man would have appreciated that, I am sure.

***

So, good old Swimmy calls me up one evening in winter. This would have to be before 1993. I didn’t know the guy, the name didn’t mean anything to me. I don’t recall the name, but I do recall the house—literally a block from my old man’s house.

I drove to pick up Swimmy, and then parked across a circle in the tree streets. You’d have to see the layout, but the car was barely fifty metres from the home in question…yet it’s not like we can just pull into the driveway, the guy has neighbours and they might be pretty good friends.

They might know his vehicle is gone—and who the hell are these guys, right.

Swimmy knows the guy. He knows the guy has some good coke. He knows the guy lives alone, he knows where he works and he knows the guy’s schedule. He’s a tradesman, working twelve-hour shifts, down at the plants on some shutdown. Fuck, he even knows where the spare key is kept.

We get out of the car and start walking. There is no one around, not even kids playing outside. And Swimmy opens up the front door. We take a quick look around, up and down the street, and go on in.

The place is silent. My job was to stay on the main floor, Swimmy figures the coke is down in the basement—somewhere. That is the challenge here. It’s a corner house. So, I’m floating back and forth between the window at the back door, where I can see up the street, and then back to the front of the house, where I can see quite a ways down the other street, left and right, and across this circle thingy, which is quite frankly, peculiar to that little area of town.

And fucking Swimmy is down there forever. I mean, he’s down there for half an hour, maybe more, carefully searching every fucking drawer, every little nook and cranny, opening stuff up and closing it back again, trying to find the stuff. He’s unscrewing heater grilles and looking in the crawl space under the back stairs. He’s looking in toolboxes, closets, bookshelves.

Every so often he’s calling up to me, (softly, but calling), and I’m sure he could hear me prowling back and forth. I don’t know how reassuring that was, but probably better than being abandoned down there, with the potential for being surprised and cornered.

The odd car goes by, but I tell him it’s still clear—for now.

You really start to sweat after a while. The worst that could happen is that the guy comes home, in which case we go boiling out the other door and head for the car—that part is just plain stupid, but we may have been able to just walk around a block or two. Let the guy get his boots off, get his coat off, right. We could come back to a parked car, if we had to, even the next morning. Who would guess, right. Assuming we haven’t found it, no real harm done, although the guy would wonder if we didn’t lock up in our haste to get out—assuming he didn’t see or hear us as he came in whatever door was the habit.

Yet people forget to lock doors all the time—human psychology plays a role in any plan.

Assuming Swimmy ever did find anything, we’d be out of there like a shot, and the odds of someone arriving home at that exact moment would be fairly astronomical.

I was just telling Swimmy we might as well give it up and get out of there, and finally, he’s fucking found the stuff. I can’t recall what he grabbed, probably two or three grams out of what had to be a much larger stash.

At some point, the guy would realize he was coming up a bit short on his ounce or two ounces or a quarter pound of powder cocaine, but if enough time went by, he would likely just figure he’d been doing a little more of his own product than he quite recalled.

Dude. I got it.

That was good to hear.

Fucking Swimmy comes up the stairs, relief written all over him. We were out the door. Swimmy puts the spare key back where he found it. Once we were in the car, I fired it up and drove around the block and parked it at my place. I forget exactly what he gave me for that one, probably half a gram, perhaps a little more—we did up a couple of crack tokes, but not too much, as I still had to drive him. I would imagine he locked himself in for a day or two that time.

It really was that kind of dope, the idea that you could save some for tomorrow was pure fantasy.

***

Buddy Two-Shoes had a neighbour. The neighbour had a bit of a thicket at the back of the yard, with a kind of fence made out of piled-up rocks and saplings, trees, weeds, in a rather vain bid for privacy. He took me to the back of his parents’ yard and showed me.

The neighbour had put out a few little pot plants in green plastic self-watering pots. If no one came along, at least not too close, they blended in well enough. Buddy wasn’t likely to steal them, it was right next door. They were tiny little plants, early in the season, no buds on there.

Buddy had good pot all the time, admittedly all the real thieves had their cycles of boom and bust.

It was probably a few days later. I waited until dark, in fact I stayed up until three or three-thirty in the morning. It was fairly warm, early summer. And I went for it.

And it was stupid enough. I walked about halfway down the block, in the dark and behind the fence line. I dropped to my belly, ladies and gentlemen, and damp it was too, with the dew settling on the grass. And I crawled. Whenever lights flashed across me from the end of George Street, I bellied-down and froze there. Finally, I got up to the back of the yard and all was quiet.

So, what do I do now?

I sort of had to stand up, crouching. I grabbed four or five of the little planters and clutched them to my chest.

And I scuttled home, as there is just no way to crawl like that…I never heard back, I never heard anything about it from Buddy, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up.

By the time that stuff had dried, it crumbled to a fine, green powder and it made up about three and a half joints…what the fuck, eh.

***

Doing time.

McNuggets had done time with some guy. But he was getting out, and the other guy had some time still on his sentence. He had a patch, a big one. He drew a map. He gave directions, and McNuggets promised to put some money in his account.

McNuggets was duly released from jail, and a few days later, he went looking.

Somewhere up by Clinton, Ontario, quite a long ways from home. He had a knapsack, and a few plastic garbage bags…and much to his own surprise, he found it.

It was the field of dreams, to hear him tell it. He grabbed all the fucking pot he could grab, jammed his pack and the bags full, as much as he could carry. He managed to get out of there undetected…he managed to get back home to Sarnia.

And he thought he had it made, but raw pot has to be dried. Buds have to be cut, and clipped and cured…he had nowhere to put it all. He lived at home with the parents, and he sure as hell didn’t trust his own friends with such a haul. They’d steal him blind, right.

He had more fresh pot than he could safely deal with…

The field of dreams, or so he said...

The story as he told it, was that ninety percent of it went mouldy, and quite quickly. Now he’s got a stinking mess on his hands and all he could do was to bag it up, go for a drive and dump all that in a ditch somewhere.

What the fuck, eh.

I doubt if that other guy ever saw any money, either.

END

Louis has books and stories available from GooglePlay.

See his art on ArtPal.

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.