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| $110.00 worth of meat, in 1977 dollars... |
Louis Shalako
Pilfering. In the world of work, the criminal
instincts are sort of subsumed by the need to keep a job, to earn a paycheque,
and to stay out of trouble. To the average worker, this means to avoid anything
that would bring discredit to the employer, to avoid anything that would tend
to lose a contract or a renewal. This was a secondary consideration. Simply
put, if one must pilfer, it is best not to get caught. Stealing from the
customer is as bad as stealing directly from the employer.
These attitudes aren’t exactly universal. At C.H.
Heist, serving Chemical Valley with high pressure water-blasting, industrial
vacuum and sandblasting services, I worked the vacuum side. The foreman on the
water side asked me if I wanted to work a shift. Honestly, I should have said
no, but I was still short of hours, and only working sporadically. You needed
six hundred hours to get into the union.
I asked him for a pair of rubber boots, size thirteen
and some fresh face-shields for our helmets. The fucking goof (Mokey), asked me, ‘can’t
you just steal that from Dow?’ I ended up jamming my feet into size twelve
rubber boots and used a scratched-up face-shield that I could barely see
through. And that was the foreman—
A guy I worked with, who seemed like a pretty good
bloke, Steve, was in the union. He’d been there some years. He had a house. He
was an operator on a vacuum truck, for that you need the airbrake
certification, whether that be DZ or AZ, I don’t really know the difference.
Admittedly, he could get a good job driving a big truck pretty much anywhere,
and yet he’d invested a certain amount of his time with Heist, and probably
expected to retire out of there someday, far in the future, with his house paid
off, his pension maxed out by contributions, often matched at some rate by one’s
employer. A pretty sweet set-up, assuming this is what you want to do for the
next twenty-five or thirty years.
Steve was seen. Steve was seen at the plant—probably
Dow, possibly somewhere else. Someone made a quick phone call to the shop, laid
on a pretty strong complaint. Someone was watching when poor old Steve brought
the rig back to the shop after another long day…someone caught him red-handed.
Steve lost his job, ladies and gentlemen, over three boxes of disposable paper
coveralls, stolen from Dow, which he dragged out of the rig and stuffed into
the trunk of his car, before even heading into the building to turn in reports,
take off the boots and get instructions or orders for the next day. For the
sake of a hundred and fifty dollars of disposable coveralls, he lost a pretty
good job in an instant. To put that into perspective, the real overtime hogs,
working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, plus the odd hours here and
there—some guys literally slept in their truck and pulled 24 and 36-hour ‘shots’,
well. They were pulling down $70,000.00 a year, and getting three weeks paid
vacation a year once they’d been there long enough.
 |
| Let's hope it was worth it, eh... |
Some of us would have killed for that sort of a job;
that sort of money. That sort of future. Steve was just dumb.
***
Still trying to finish off my Grade 12 at Lambton
College, I got a part-time job at the Hallmark Auto Centre, a concessionaire of
the old Woolco department store chain.
I did oil and filter changes. I put grease in the
differentials of vehicles, I greased ball joints, which was still a thing back
then. I did air filters and PCV valves, fuel filters, and I did tires. I put
new tires on, rotated tires, changed from snow tires to regular and back again.
I learned how to fix a flat, which I have done on my own tires in the years
since.
What was I getting? Minimum wage.
When I got out of school, at least I had a full-time
job, which was enough to keep the old man off of my back for a while.
The sheer convenience meant that I bought a case of
oil. I bought tires, the boss sort of appreciates that. I bought a few tools
from the retail section outside the garage proper. Yet when he wasn’t around,
we did sort of roam around in the stock room. If I needed four spark plugs, I
probably grabbed them. I had a pair of quartz halogen bulbs, still in the
package, in the toolbox for many years. I never got around to converting the MG
to higher-powered lighting. Nowadays, it’s almost as if car headlights are too
bright, well, not back then—British electrics of the day being what they were.
There comes a day, when you’re asked to come in on your day off, and help out
with the yearly inventory.
With a slightly guilty conscience, one had to wonder
if there was a little more to it than that, and if maybe there was some sort of
a hint being dropped…
But some guys were real bad at pilfering. Guys with
wives and kids and good jobs, and they just can’t seem to help it. That
temptation is there, and some of them absolutely abuse it.
***
Willy had his welding ticket by this time, and he helped
me to get in at Bice Specialties, which sold and serviced industrial doors,
residential garage doors, and steel doors and frames for the construction
industry.
I mostly worked with Pete, who had exactly one year of
experience, whereas I walked in the door with zero experience, other than some
minimal mechanical experience. For six bucks an hour, which was better than
minimum wage, what do you expect. I was a helper, and Pete had a temper. I
could keep my cool, but he had the responsibility when we were out on a job. I
imagine he felt the pressure, with a wife and a kid and a home in the Sherwood
Park area of town.
Pete had the pilfering instinct real bad.
Fuck, at some point, you lose patience with the guy.
We’re at some warehouse at the back of a big refinery
in Chemical Valley. I’m taking the ladders off the truck, I’m shaking out
extension cords and opening up the tool bins, I’ve got my tape measure, I’m
checking out the door opening, and checking out the door sections to see if
this thing’s going to fit.
Where the hell is Pete? Going up and down the aisles
in this deserted building, dusty old shelves full of…valves. Flanges. Gaskets,
little boxes with bits of hardware and boxes of one-inch bolts for bolting big
pipelines and valves together. Racks and racks of electrical conduit, pipes of
various sizes, rack after rack after rack…of nothing he could use.
For fuck’s sakes, Pete, what do you expect to find
back there?
 |
| This was called The Georgian, back in the day. We had the end unit on the left. |
Pete is stealing a four-foot pipe wrench, not so much
because he needed one, or had much use for one in our work. No, it was the only
thing he actually recognized, ladies
and gentlemen.
All the plants had their colour codes—the tools are
painted in the company colours, and on your way out the gate, you’re just
praying that the security guards don’t ask to have a look in the bins or behind
the seat of your pickup truck…
Pete hardly qualified as a criminal—those guys at
least had some sense, a lot of the time.
Pete had no sense at all, and it was only luck that he
never got caught at it.
***
When we were about eighteen my girlfriend and I moved
in together. We had a townhouse on Indian Road, two bedrooms, a basement, with
a laundry room. So, we had a fridge, a stove, a washer and a dryer. A bathroom
upstairs and a half-bath down below.
Johnny agreed to take a bedroom and help out with the
rent. I was working at Fibreglas, making pretty good money for an eighteen
year-old.
My girlfriend worked in the ladies wear at a local
department store, and Johnny worked at Dominion Grocery Store, at Eastland Plaza
on Indian Road South.
Theoretically, we should have been able to make it,
but we were young. We liked to drink, to eat, to smoke, and to party…it is also
true that Fibreglas Canada would lay me off when orders, and hence work, were
short. If the line’s going to be down, even for a few days, it’s kind of
expensive to keep forty guys standing around, and the best thing is a temporary
layoff. The unemployment people downtown certainly understood this, and they
didn’t push you to go look for another job when you clearly would be going back
in the immediate future…only real problem, was the delay. Your last paycheque
might have had only a few days on it, and your first pogy cheque can’t come in
for two or three weeks, and that one might be only for one week anyways, at
whatever the rate: sixty percent of earnings, nowadays it might even be lower,
fifty-five percent or whatever.
Fuck, it’s not like any of us had any savings, ladies
and gentlemen.
So, poor old Johnny calls me up one night. He’s
stocking shelves on the night shift for like $2.85 per hour, for crying out loud…
Check outside the back door, behind the trash
compactor, he says, hanging up just as abruptly.
 |
| "...check outside the back door," says Johnny. |
Well, I can take a hint. I take the car down to the
alley behind the store. Setting the handbrake, leaving the lights on, the car
idling away, I step out and holy, fuck. There’s a wooden crate with green
grapes. Full. I have to admit, I like grapes, and so we took them. I forget who
was with me, probably Willy or my brother The Duke. Twenty-five pounds of fucking
grapes, and I reckon we shared them around as best we could—yes, Johnny got
some too.
A few days later, the guy’s grabbed a case of tins of
cashews…fuck, I love cashews. These
were a premium brand. Okay, one morning he comes home, looking proud of himself,
and he’s lugging a big cardboard box. He’s gotten a hundred and ten dollars’
worth of meat.
We all know this can’t last, and one must admit, this
is no way to sustain any kind of household, a point that I have made in a
previous chapter. It’s all right for a while. But sooner or later, Johnny was
going to get caught, and I reckon we told him that, and I also reckon he got
it. But my girlfriend’s older sister had also broken off with Johnny. Now he’s
sharing a house with us, we’re fucking like minks and he’s just down the hall…nothing
wrong with the poor guy’s hearing.
Like many a thing, it has its natural lifespan, and
the arrangement was arguably doomed to fail anyways, bearing in mind our ages
and our levels of maturity. I’m not making any claims or comparisons there—it
was what it was, as they say.
First, Johnny moves down to the basement, and within
two weeks, he announces he’s getting a lot of pressure from the old lady, she’s
all worried about him. And he’s moving back home. My girlfriend’s parents are
putting on the pressure as well—they’re willing to help out if she wants to go
to university, ah, but first, young
lady—
Yes, ladies and gentlemen. My girlfriend’s moving back
home to her parents’ house.
Not that it really changed things, we were together
for seven years all told. As for the place on Indian Road, we were in and out
of there in about three months.
By this time, I was back at work, of course—and back
in my dad’s basement, as well.
***
When I worked at the Delhi News-Record, circa 1984,
when it was time to quit, the last thing I did, was to open up the supply
locker and grab a half a dozen rolls of film. I suppose it was illegal. I
suppose it was simply unnecessary, I just did it. I had a few rolls of Ilford
HP-5, and a few of the HP-4, black and white 35-mm films.
I don’t even know why I did it. I had been cut off at
the motel where I had lived for a few months, I had been sleeping in my car. At
the motel, I paid off the bill, no problem there—but he just didn’t want to do
it any longer. I couldn't pay in advance...can’t say as I blame the man for that.
I had been making $210.00 a week…I suppose I didn’t
need a reason, I just did it.
Yeah, I took my key off the ring, left it on the
editor’s desk, along with a brief note.
Unlocking the window, I raised it, stepped across the
sill, and let her down again quietly in the night.
I got in my MGB and drove home to Sarnia, with a
couple of suits, a small gym bag, and whatever dignity I could muster…
That,
is a fairly long story and this isn’t the place to tackle it, not by a long
shot.
END
Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.
Grab yourself a free copy of One Million Words of
Crap, available from Google Play.
Check out Working With Pete, right here on this blog.
See The Note, by Ian W. Cooper.
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.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Nineteen.
Thank you for reading, and listening.
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