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| Stolen image, which is par for the course around here... |
Don't fall asleep. My buddy's dad had the '66 Cadillac, with the four
doors and the 512 cubic inch engine up front. Bob borrowed it one night, we
grabbed a six-pack of Brador or something. A malt liquor, 6.6 % alcohol, which
was more than sufficient for a couple of sixteen, seventeen year-olds. We
headed out of town, on paved roads all the way, which was better than giving it
a wash when we got home. Fifty cents is fifty cents, after all. At some point, Bob let me drive it. Coming home, we
headed north out of Wallaceburg, eleven o'clock at night, on Kimball Road.
That's 80 kilometres per hour these days...I took her up. I took her up all right, she's floating along like a cloud, with that soft suspension and the long wheelbase. I had her at a hundred and ten miles per hour when poor old Bob woke up on the passenger side, so I had to let off and bring it on into town at a more reasonable speed. I kind of feel sorry for Bob—even more so for his dad, who had to pay the bill, but within a very short time, a day or two later, the thing was knocking and sputtering. I don't know if we burnt a valve or spun a bearing, but that was pretty much it for what had once been a pretty nice car.
Fuck, I wanted to drive Formula One, something awful it seems looking back. Which would almost be safer on some level, much more professional than a couple of kids in daddy's car...some of us were just plain dangerous. Quite frankly, it affected my judgement sometimes.
***
Okay, let’s say we were thinking of writing our
criminal memoirs. One, you’re talking about your friends here, and two, now you
got to think up a whole bunch of fake names…for people who were often known by
nicknames and various handles to begin with. Some of those names are pretty
colourful. It’s not like they read books anyways. And I can use a fake name of
my own. And where would I start? At the beginning I suppose.
***
My first scam was the old Puss ‘N Boots free roll of
film scam. This was a popular brand of tinned cat food at the time, late
sixties, early seventies at the latest. If you cut on the dotted line, and
peeled off the paper label, there was a coupon. You filled that in, mailed it
to the company, and you would receive a free roll of colour film in the format
of your choice, whether it be 120, 126 cartridge, or 35-mm format. Limit one
per family or household, and of course here is where the scam comes in. I sent
in at least three coupons, also borrowing stamps and envelopes from my mother’s
stash. Stamps cost money you know. There comes a time when they go to pay the
bills and there are no envelopes, no stamps and of course they sort of wonder
where all that went. Right up until the point when you, a nine or ten year-old
kid; gets a mysterious package in the mail and you sort of come home from
school one day to find they simply could not help themselves, but had no choice
but to open up that fucking package…and now they’re starting to catch on.
Then they get two or three more, but by now they know
it’s just a roll of film, and oh, yes, you’ve borrowed dad’s Baby Brownie from
the 1950s and also, your brother and sister and the kid next door and the
family down the street and your buddy Willy three blocks away are getting free
rolls of film in the mail, and while mom and dad are sort of appalled at the
thought of all those rolls of film, and firecrackers, and model planes and
rockets and small explosions going off in the backyard, they are also sort of
marvelling at your enterprise and quite frankly, your imagination. This is what
you get for having a cat, and of course they have to eat pretty regular and
stuff like that.
The cat, I mean—
Also, you want to be a photographer someday and you
can always take over camera duties on Christmas day, right. As I recall, that
was the year my folks made the serious tactical and strategic error of giving
me a cheap-ass Kodak Instamatic 126-cartridge camera, complete with a couple
more fucking packs of film and those all-important flash bulbs. Which you can
short out with a bit of metal across the electrodes, or even just use an empty
camera to send short, brilliant light signals across Germain Park in the middle
of the night, (when you really should have been in bed or doing your homework);
assuming one of your friends’ parents have been thoughtful enough to give them
such a camera for Christmas as well…
Right?
**
So there you are, ladies and gentlemen, when sometime
later, (after all of this logical progression of events), ah, you find yourself
laying on a sheet of plywood, up in the rafters of my old man’s garage, sheets
we picked up out of a local park, after some guy got drunk, stole a Datsun
240-Z and took it through Germain Park, yet forgetting the sort of green
plywood enclosure for lacrosse of all things, smashing through it and tossing
bits and pieces all over, and trying to get a good picture as your buddy snipes
at plastic ship models with a .177 calibre pellet rifle. Someday, I will tell
you all about filling them up with fireworks, solid stuff from model rocket
engines, Christmas bulbs with gasoline and firing pins and the powder from
dismantled shotgun shells and how, ah…Bob, (not his real name), lit that up,
and how the battleship Yamato went up
with a series of big bangs as we sort of sheltered in my 1969 Austin Mini,
which I bought for $50.00, dragging it up and out from the weeds behind H &
S Sports Cars, which was on the corner of Ontario Street and Russell, (I
think). My old man and I dragged it home on the end of a rope, one end of which
was attached to his old Volvo and the other end attached to me and that Mini. I
was only fifteen, and I suppose we putted along about twenty miles an hour on
back streets…The Hood, the Bismarck and the Rodney didn’t fare much better, looking back through the mists of
time. I’ve been towed once or twice since then, to be honest with you. I
remember, we opened up the garage door and this big black cloud came out.
He (Willy, not his real name), once shot some Chinese
girl in a plastic raincoat, right in the ass with that thing. The range was
short, and we figured it went right through the raincoat. She swatted at her
ass and turned to look, right. The front room in his folks’ place had these
really old-fashioned windows, where there were three holes drilled along the
bottom for ventilation, and a hinged wooden bar you lifted to let a little air
in. There wasn’t even a fucking screen. He fired the shot, and dropped the
stick, and we crouched there, giggling like schoolboys, which we were at the
time.
I swear to God, that place must have been built by a
Newfie.
Willy blew me up one day. He called, and he said,
‘come on over’. He was out in the garage, one of our hangouts. Yes, back then,
you weren’t nothing if you didn’t have a garage to hang out in. I get off my
bike, and he’s watching, literally timing it from the time of his call. He hits
a little switch, a little electrical model rocket engine igniter goes off, and
about three rocket engines, all taken apart and just powder and blocks of
propellant, goes off right between my feet, right in front of the side door of
his garage. I was wearing shorts, I had a few singed leg hairs but nothing real
serious. You know me: I had to phone my brother straight away. I told him to
get on over to Willy’s place.
I couldn’t really talk on the phone, but there was
something he just had to see.
END
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