Monday, December 11, 2023

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-One. Joe, and Strip Bars. Louis Shalako.

A plastic boat, but at least it went where you pointed it...











Louis Shalako




Joe, and strip bars. Joe was a typical example of the low-level drug dealer. He had a job. He had a few connections, to the extent that he always had dope, one way or another. He ended up marrying my girlfriend’s older sister, in a ceremony held right here in Sarnia, although the couple lived in Guelph.

They’d already had a baby, I have to admit, the kid was pretty cute…

She clearly took after her mother, and not Joe—

The first time I ever took the train, and went up to Guelph to visit my girlfriend, Joe had left us a bit of pot. The girls were going to university, sharing an apartment, and since he had a place of his own, we had the place to ourselves.

Joe had a Hungarian accent. It’s an interesting story, just how he came to Canada. In Hungary, part of the Eastern Bloc back then, they had compulsory military service. Joe and another 18 year-old ended up guarding the border. They weren’t so much trying to keep people out, but trying to keep their own people in. They were supposed to walk up and down, rifles on their shoulders, and at some point, a corporal came along to check on them. They were standing there, smoking and chatting and the guy gave them proper shit.

When he went away again, they figured they had more of that coming when their shift was over.

This is when they got the bright idea, what with being young and all, to drop the weapons, to take their fates in their own hands—and to start walking west.

***

Joe had pot, three or four different kinds. He was the guy who had ‘beans’, dropping one or two to dissolve in his coffee, first thing in the morning, before heading off to work. He worked at Rockwell International, assembling power tools and the like on piecework. I’m not sure if these were genuine speed, (amphetamines), or something similar like Benzedrine sulphate or ephedrine sulfate, or whatever. It sounds strange, but in places like Ohio, you could buy them at any truck stop—over the counter, big plastic jars at roughly $20.00 per thousand. These were compound pills, a bit of this, a bit of caffeine, a bit of something else to keep you going through the long hours of the night…

(Benzedrine was a brand name for amphetamine sulfate. It was used to treat many different conditions from the early 1930s to the 1970s. Misuse of the drug eventually led to a major decrease in production and tighter control of the drug by 1971. Today, amphetamine is used to treat ADHD, narcolepsy, and obesity. – ed.)

Okay, thanks, Ed. Reading that, we probably all did speed in one form or another, although I’ve never injected anything—that was probably for the best, looking back, ah, through the mists of time and all.

So.

He had five-gram vials of weed and hash oil, he had hash occasionally. In the late seventies and early eighties, cocaine and all of that lay some ways in the future, one must assume—none of us were doing it at the time, as far as I know. Sisters being sisters, and buddies being buddies, we visited back and forth.

Speed tablets, by any other name, in one size, shape or another...

And so it was, that we found ourselves sleeping in a spare room, in the summer of about 1979.

Joe left the plant for an hour at lunch time. He phoned home, and picked me up—we’re already burning daylight as far as lunch hour goes, but the plant was nearby and so was our destination. I recall that it was the Manor. A well-known strip bar in Guelph at that time, and an oversexed individual like Joe knew it well.

This was my first time at a strip bar, and of course, Joe had to burn a joint in the car on the way there. We stepped out for another, just outside a rear entrance, and in between him buying lap dances and one for me too, incidentally, as my birthday was coming up…this is where he told me that he whacked off once a week, just to maintain his independence, as he put it.

And of course, he has to get back to work, in which case we burn another joint on the way back. This is the guy who worked two blocks from home. At some point, some guy he knew sold him a case of small bottles of laughing gas—and as a friend, one wonders just how far all of this shit is going to go. He’s literally zipping home on his fifteen minute coffee breaks, just to have a little sip of that gas bottle and get high before going back to work. I suppose it’s no wonder that the marriage didn’t last all that long, and before long, she was single, back home in Sarnia and with the little kid and all.

It struck me that Sarnia had three or four strip bars, and I hadn’t been in any one of them—a situation that would surely be rectified before long.

As for Joe, those manufacturing jobs, small factories in small towns at least here in southern Ontario, are a thing of the past. At that time, Guelph was not much larger than Sarnia, if at all, and the biggest thing it had going for it was the university, a bit of history and a kind of hilly terrain, which I liked as where I live, it’s mostly flat.

***

The bunch of us had gone camping one summer, up at Cypress Lake on the Bruce Peninsula. Willy and his wife, Joe and his wife, and my girlfriend and I. I had brought up a little sailboat, a fucking Sunfish, about ten feet long and with a lateen sail. Willy had his wood and canvas kayak, he and the wife going off to the other side of the lake to fuck in the bushes and all of that sort of a thing, and Joe and his wife had borrowed what was, after all, a pretty shitty little boat. It was more for kids, a fun day at the beach, than any real serious sailboat. It was a plastic boat, and I at least had life jackets.

We’d been drinking wine, smoking pot, popping pills, cooking bacon and eggs, hamburgers and hot-dogs on an open fire. Shooting the shit and talking a lot of nonsense. We were lucky, in that the weather was cooperating—more or less. We had boots and parkas, and we had cut-off jean shorts and tee-shirts. We had the weekend to party.

I reckon my mother bought that little plastic boat for about ninety-nine dollars on sale, put it on layaway at the department store toy department, and presented it to us all on Christmas morning, which is the way such things were done back then…

I’ll be honest with you, ladies and gentlemen, all they really did, insofar as boating is concerned, was to go across to the other side of the lake and fuck in the bushes.

I think it’s safe to say Joe was inspired by that little boat. The possibilities were endless, although not quite infinite.

***

I have no idea of what that crazy Hungarian bastard was thinking—but the next time we went up to visit, he’d bought this horrible old contraption. To call it a boat would be to insult a hundred thousand years of boat evolution. This thing was a wedge-shaped slab, made of a couple of sheets of three-quarters inch plywood, a big block of white Styrofoam, a two-by-four for a mast, and a fucking white bedsheet for a sail…

Let me back up a bit.

Okay, we’re staying the weekend, my lovely girlfriend and I, she and the sister are going off somewhere and Joe and I are going down the road in his Austin Marina, and he’s teaching me how it’s possible to drive, and to roll a joint at the same time, what with holding the wheel with his left knee and balancing a small rolling tray, dope, papers, scissors and a roach clip on his lap while doing so.

All the while, talking away in the high-pitched accent that only foreign people can do so convincingly…

Rolling a joint while we go down the road. 

So, this fucking alleged boat has brackets. On the brackets, is a bench-like thingy.  The one and only seat is behind the boat, to the extent you have to reach between your knees to hold the tiller, which is set into door hinges for pivots. There is no safety clip, and the thing keeps floating up and out of the hinges, making the boat uncontrollable…the actual rudder is cut from plywood, but even plywood has a grain, and this guy has cut it ninety degrees all wrong. Try and turn the boat, the rudder just bends. Joe had been just plain crazy enough to sign up for a membership at a little ‘yacht’ club located on Guelph Lake, basically just a flood control reservoir on the Speed River upstream from the city. These were not yachts, they were dinghies, all of them better than this piece of shit.

This is where I caught my first glimpse of that fucking shit-shingle of a so-called boat of his. Neither one of us had life-jackets; what we did have was a six-pack of strong beer and a cigarette pack, each of us, with a few doobs. Fuck. What are you supposed to do. Here’s a funny thing. If your boat is shaped like a wedge of cheese, then the front of the boat has essentially no flotation. Also, any proper sailboat has a keel. Whether it’s a dagger-board, or a drop keel, or a fixed keel, some kind of keel is essential to keep the boat from just drifting sideways in the wind. A proper rudder and keel are also essential, this is especially true if you are hoping to tack into the wind—for example getting back to the club on Guelph Lake.

The wind was at our back as we drifted downwind across that little lake.

The flat deck of that boat was absolutely level with the mean surface of the water, with the two of us aboard—whatever teeny-tiny little waves the gentle breeze was raising actually broke across the desk and passed over our bare feet unimpeded; but by this time there was no going back…

We ended up in the right arm of the lake, unable to maneuver our shit-shingle.

The boat could not be maneuvered. The boat could not be steered, the boat was fucking useless, the boat was driftwood on the wind and the waves. We’re getting farther and farther away from the club, at first it’s okay as we’re sipping cold beers and burning a joint, smoking cigarettes and sort of celebrating being men, somewhat stupid for all of that, but men, after all—

Once we’ve run out of room in what is a pretty small lake, on the downwind end of things, Joe turns her around and begins to tack into the wind, only problem is, she just ain’t going to go. We’re in a constricted arm of the lake, there are narrows, and this is there the headwinds are strongest. This thing ain’t ever going to tack into the wind, and this is about where I abandoned ship, dove overboard, and swam ashore.

Come what may, almost anything was better than this, and I have to admit, there were still a couple of cold beers in a box screwed to the deck just at the base of the mast.

***

This is what happens when a stoner, but also some kind of an idiot, buys a boat.

This is what you get when you spend half a bag of pot on a boat…

When I opened my eyes, the water was green. I had maybe seventy-five, a hundred metres of algae-ridden shit ahead of me, and then, dry land. I got to a patch or band of real seaweed, tangled green shitty stuff that clung all over me, and then, having fought my way through it, I waded up the bank through the weeds and the long grass and found myself barefoot beside what passed for a highway back at that time.

I’m sure all you readers and listeners have a pretty good idea of what roadside gravel looks like, and I walked in the hot sun, slowly drying, along the highway for a couple of kilometres. Luckily, I had a head for navigation, looking at the map, there are side-roads off to one side, and then there is the club at the end of another long gravel stretch.

At this point, I pulled out my smoke-pack, laid my lighter, a few joints, and a few damp cigarettes out on a rock in the wan sunlight, and waited for that crazy Hungarian bastard, who took forever to get out of the mouth of that little bay, work his way back five or six hundred metres, the sun falling towards the horizon and the wind eventually dying off in the fading light of late evening.

I still miss that shirt, it had two large upper pockets and Velcro fasteners…just a minor point, ladies and gentlemen.

Yeah. Joe was pissed off at me, but there was no way that fucking shit-shingle of a boat would have ever gotten the two of us back across that lake. My feet didn’t hurt too much, and it had taken him so long, we managed to get a joint to burn, and I have to admit, I bummed one or two of his smokes on the way home, which was a fairly quiet trip after all that fresh air, hot sun and wind and surf on the face.

 

END



He's got an audiobook, Speak Softly My Love, on iTunes. 

Poor old Louis Shalako has books and stories available from iTunes.

See his art on Art Pal.

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.

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. 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.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nineteen. 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty.


Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 


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