My Criminal Memoir, Part Five. Bicycles and Blowguns. Louis Shalako.

Circa 1973, 10-speed bicycle.

 

Louis Shalako

Bicycles and blowguns. Once a few of us had studied Grade Eight English a couple of times, there came the day when we ourselves were finally in Grade Eight. And of course it was crushingly boring. Some wit at the school board decided that we didn’t have to take it again, as it sort of embarrassed those jocks, those who carried our proud school colours in intra-scholastic basketball games which we invariably lost, those who had probably already failed it once or twice, you know, the cool athletic types habitually sitting at the back of the class, and when it came time for them fuckers to stand up and read aloud from the book, it was just all too excruciatingly painful for all concerned.

You aren’t the only one suffering, asshole—that’s just my opinion and I’m sticking to it, right.

A guy called Phillip Morrison and I had the unique and rather rare privilege of being sent to the library during English classes. We had time to kill and the librarian, a reedy young man in his middle twenties, didn’t have all that much to do and only two kids in the room. With a promise from us to be quiet, and not get into trouble, he would head off to the staff room, where I believe he was in a relationship with the coffee machine; and Phillip and I quickly devised a game of table-top hockey, which we played with twelve-inch wooden rulers and a thin roll of masking tape which we rummaged up from somewhere. It was all right, but it only lasted so long. All we needed was a nice, long table...

I can’t recall who won that one.

And we wandered around. We looked in drawers, we looked in his desk. Fuck, we stood there looking out the windows for a while, opening the door and peeking down the hall. Fuck-head’s voice ringing out, loud and clear and we sort of grinned at each other—Mr. Abela, right, giving somebody shit for something again, right. And after a while, I was walking up and down the aisles, looking at the titles on the shelves. After all these years, it is difficult to say just how many books I stole out of that place, but there was a few of them anyways. When the bell rang at the end of the school day, the librarian still hadn’t come back, and everybody else, including the teachers, were mostly hell-bent on getting on out of there.

For me to come down the hallway with a book or two under my arm, well, it didn’t seem all that interesting, and this is how I ended up with The Big Book of Weapons. The Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci. A few books, I have to admit.

My old man had made me a bow, a really nice one, when I was about six years old. My younger brother had a fibreglass bow. We used to shoot them in the park. My old man had a .22 rifle. He had made a couple of crude ball-butted duelling pistols in fucking high school shop of all things—he probably got an A for that project, back in the early fifties at good old SCITS, the Sarnia Collegiate Institute of Techology and Scholastics, for fuck’s sakes.

Anyhow, in the book were everything from stone spear points made of flint, a sling, drawings mostly, of everything up to and including a plan of a Norman keep—I made a sling once, out of half of one of my mother’s brassieres, a couple of strips of fabric. I sent an apple a hundred yards with that thing, broke a window on the back of our school and had to give it up for my own sort of peace of mind.

Ahem.

There were tanks, mortars, all kinds of weapons in that book, from bill-hooks to flamberges (wavy) swords, bows, suits of armour…catapults, mangonels, ballistas, and a few such other things as primitive as a blow-gun.

A flamberge, of German origin. A 'flame bladed' sword.

***

The first McDonald’s in town was on London Road, in a department store plaza, at the corner by Murphy Road. And McDonald’s was cheap—you could get a hamburger for fifteen cents. The fries were about the same. The milkshake was nineteen cents. And with that milkshake came a short length of plastic straw about a quarter-inch in diameter…

And of course I had been reading that damned book. When your buddy Johnny pulls the straw out of the milkshake and blows cold, wet chocolate milkshake into your face right in the middle of the restaurant, in the middle of a snowstorm and you have some ways to walk to get home again, it sure sets a man to thinking.

In a brief historical aside, this was an era where boys would make churikiens, ‘kung-fu stars’, in sheet metal during shop class, whenever Beak, Mr. Laudenbach, wasn’t looking.

There must be some cultural reference there, whether it was the television show Kung Fu, starring David Carradine or maybe the popular Bruce Lee movies, but yeah. It was out there somehow.

So, following along, what you do is to rinse out the straw, more than one if you can get it.

Let that dry properly…

You need to go to your mother’s sewing kit, where she has things like straight pins. You need to cut up a pink eraser into little cubes, little better than one eighth-inch square, and you need to find a few bits of soft foam rubber. I had allergies—I couldn’t handle the goose-feather pillows, so my mother had gotten me a pillow of foam rubber. When one bit of seam came loose, I could pull a bit of foam rubber off of the corner, sufficient to my purposes.

So, you have a few pins.

Shove the pin through one bit of eraser, shove on the foam rubber, and shove on another bit of eraser. Now you have what we call a dart, ladies and gentlemen, and of course the dart goes in the McDonald’s straw, more than one straw if you can get them—and we did, we did, ladies and gentlemen. What with babysitting for fifty cents an hour, we at last had a little cash flow to go on…important enough at almost any age.

I shot my sister in the ass with one of them things, as she ran screaming down the length of our kitchen and it worked very well indeed, pinning the fabric of her pajama bottoms to her left buttock in a very satisfactory manner.

Do I have regrets?

Oh, I don’t know.

***

The pro models from New Guinea...illegal in Canada.

So, Johnny comes over to my place on a fine summer morning. We both have the new ten-speed racing bikes, all the rage. Odd as it seems, one year before, anyone who rode a bike was a square, man. All of a sudden everyone has one and they’re cool again.

We took the time to load up three McDonald’s straws each. We took the time to poke a few darts down through the fabric of our shirt pockets, on the inside, where they couldn’t be seen. We set off north, out of my backyard, across Germain Park, finding our first victims, heading north along Cecil Street, or barely five minutes after setting out.

So Johnny and I are on the sidewalk, coming up from behind and he shoots some little girl in the back end. She screams and turns, crying, and Johnny drops down a driveway, off the sidewalk and onto the street. I come up, fire one into mom’s hip or something as she’s turning to see what’s with the girl. I zoom down the grassy strip, over the curb and onto the street. We start pedaling hard. We’re a hundred and fifty metres away before anyone has any idea of what has happened.

What with the turn to the left, another turn to the left, and then a turn to the right, and the reader or listener gets the idea. We nailed a few people, even stopping in a park, out of breath to some extent. We reloaded our straws. We were in the south end, at this point, miles away, and working our way back home again. We’re just a couple of kids on bikes, and one wonders, just how in the hell anyone would have ever caught us. Johnny and I had ridden thirty miles south down the river, done steak and beans over a small fire on the riverbank, just south of the old Lambton Thermal Generating Station. That place is long gone at this point, but the moral of the story is, after a long ride, a swim, cooking lunch, then we had to ride home again—another thirty fucking miles, ladies and gentlemen.

One thing we could do, was to ride.

Back to our mission, I distinctly recall, I nailed this one guy, kind of a muscular man a few years older than we were. I got him in the middle of a thick leather belt, and yet I know he felt it—his one hand came around and he sort of flinched in the walk.

Imagine, a little pin-prick, just a few vertebra, right up from the tail-bone.

Imagine, getting home, after a long day at work. You’re taking off the work boots, emptying the lunch bucket, stripping off for the shower, you’ve got this irritating little series of jabs right in the lower back, and you discover the fucking dart sticking out of your belt.

By this time, of course, Johnny and I were long gone.

They didn’t see us coming, and they didn’t see us going, either.

As for my sister, she did, eventually, forgive me, perhaps just forgot about it might be a better way of saying it.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Kobo.

See his works on ArtPal.

Check out this here free audiobook from Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four. Female Sexual Behaviour. Louis Shalako.

"Yes, Louis. I am a good Catholic..."

Louis Shalako

Female sexual behaviour. Why I hated one teacher more than any other has always been a good question. In later years, I liked my high school teachers, at least to some degree. I might have even admired my college instructors.

We weren’t kids anymore. We were adults, certainly in college we were there because we wanted to be, and not because someone had dragged us to school by the ear or the collar or whatever.

It is also true that I quit school at about fifteen and a half years old, and there was nothing, nothing, this side of heaven or hell, that could ever make me go back…

We have to understand the time and the place. The Catholic school board had to follow provincial directives. They brought in proficiency testing for mathematics and English skills. Somehow it turned out that I was reading at a first-year university level, which is not bad for a grade six student. Truth was, that was the top of the scale. It did not go any higher. The people who designed such tests never even considered the possibility that even a grade eight kid might achieve such scores, and the math skills were all right as well—this is the benefit of actually reading the book, and of course doing the homework, no matter how much kids hate homework.

So, what they did, was to take a handful of Grade Six and Seven students, and scatter us among a couple of Grade Eight classes for math and English. And this, of course, is where the bullies enter the picture. To be called a ‘browner’, or ‘teacher’s pet’, and to be regularly assaulted, by small groups of males, whether in the school yard or on the way to and from school, may in some small way help in explaining my sort of difficult attitude towards certain teachers. All of whom (the bullies, I mean), were bigger, stronger, had more experience, and operated in groups because a bully is just a coward that is bigger than you—just one more important lesson on the journey that is life. And they do like an audience, don't they.

While I do owe some debt of gratitude to my tormentors, who if nothing else taught me not only to fight, or how to fight, but the value of doing so. Because not to fight was to be destroyed in some way. Not to fight was to join them, and to become their punching bag, and to never have a day’s peace for the rest of your life.

When four of the worst offenders borrowed daddy’s car one night, when one of their older brothers bought them some beer, when some other friendly neighbourhood character sold them a bag of grass and a few hits of acid, when the four of them died in an almost predictable flaming car wreck, I will admit that I thought it served them right.

As for the teacher, that may be another story. The school board, in their usual heavy-handed but also totally incompetent fashion, had little choice but to provide some rudiments of ‘sex education’, mandated by the province, and the results were also pretty predictable.

I once brought Miss Hillman, our grade seven teacher, to tears with a question I asked in front of the class. In fact, she ran crying from the room, down the hall to the principal’s office, and oddly enough, she went on to marry our Principal, Mr. G. Boucher. So, in some sense I was the one that brought them together.

It was a good question, too.

I asked what business a 47 year-old virgin, never married and presumably a good Catholic, had in teaching sex education.

"What are your qualifactions."

Not very tactful, one must admit. I had also asked teacher Joe Abela, about sexual intercourse.

“Sir. There is some suggestion that the sexual act can be pleasurable. Any truth to these rumours, sir.”

“Ah, yes, Louis. Ah, yes, I think I can safely say, that there is some pleasure involved.”

Of course sex education was a joke—a Catholic school board was surely going to skip over contraception, and masturbation, and abortion, and any number of things. Of course I’d read the book—The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, where the reader can find a fairly clinical description of the act of sexual intercourse, at least among primates. I had read The Happy Hooker, by Xaviera Hollander, for fuck’s sakes, and of course Dr. David Ruben’s, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask. This was a big best-seller of the time, and of course my mother was an inveterate bookworm, and my old man probably read them too.

Why not? I sure did.

When your teacher tells you, “The penis is placed in the vagina and sperm is released,” you aren’t telling kids anything they don’t already know. No, we were supposed to be innocents. All you had to do, was to listen to the talk in the schoolyard, and you would have known better than that, ladies and gentlemen…

You’re just making fools of yourselves at that point, and I have always despised stupidity. I despise anyone who wastes my time, ladies and gentlemen. That one is deeply ingrained in my nature, whatever the hell that means.

But. It was the sort of thing you really can’t say to your teacher, or even your parents, for that matter.

This little bit of background may go some way in explaining what happened next…

It’s not as bad as you may be thinking, in fact, it is worse.

Funny thing is, I have never been ashamed of it.

I ain’t all that proud of it, either, but it does kind of make for a good little story.

***

Down in the basement, in the back of my father’s workshop, there was a small chest of drawers, and in that chest there was a book.

A small, hardcover book, with a fabric spine and the rest of it was covered in thin zinc. On the cover, it said, Female Sexual Behaviour. Opening the book, the inside was cut out—just like in a spy movie. The outer rim of the pages were glued together. Inside this hollow cavity was a little clip for a battery. There was a capacitor and an induction coil, basically just wire wrapped around a piece of metal, which was there more to hold the shape as much as anything. Attached was a thin strip of spring steel, with a magnet on one end. On the inside of the front cover was a small steel plate. When the book was closed, the magnet was stuck to the plate, and the circuit was dead. When you opened the book, the magnet lifted up, and up, until the tension on the spring overcame the attraction of the magnet. Fine wires led from the battery, one to a metal frame or plate glued onto the back cover of the book. The other wire led to that stainless-steel clip and magnet thing.

When it released, the circuit was closed, and that spring-loaded contact hit a plate, over and over and over again until some sort of equilibrium was restored and it would lift off again of its own accord.

The result was maybe ten thousand volts, but also only about one ten thousandth of an amp, when coursing up through your fingertips, your hands, all the way up to the shoulders.

As one can imagine, once I’d found a battery and put it in there, the first thing I did was to open the book and try that thing out…

The only way I can describe the sensation is that it is a lot like a whole bunch of sledgehammers pounding right up through both arms, from the inside out if that makes any sense.

And like any kid, of course I had very little choice but to try that out on my brother, my sister, all of my friends, their brothers and sisters…everyone who ever opened the book screamed and threw it, and one learns to duck, to run, but holy crap. That book worked very well.

It strikes me that somebody gave my old man that book. Some of his friends chipped in and bought it for him. A stag party, a bunch of young men drinking beer, swapping crude jokes and slapping him on the shoulder.

Oh, and presenting him with that book, after a short and suitable speech by whoever was going to be the best man at the wedding—and there’s that rather provocative title, and it’s only natural that a young fellow looking marriage square in the eye, would have little option but to open that book and have a look—right.

That’s the way I have it figured, it’s as good an explanation as any.

***

As for my own little revenge, I have to admit it was pretty fucking diabolical, ladies and gentlemen.

You see, it went a little something like this…

I took the book to school one day, and resisted the temptation to try that out on a couple of buddies. No. I had bigger fish to fry.

It was afternoon, Miss Hillman was up at the front of the room, blathering on about some fucking shit book. Phoebe was the story of an underage girl, having premarital sex, and who got pregnant, and of course the teacher is reading this aloud, all part of our anti-sexual indoctrination which passed for sex education in the Catholic system.

I took out the book, head down, and I pretended to read. Looking up and around, I caught the eye of the guy to my left. I showed him the title and of course he was interested. Maybe even impressed. I let the top of the book show over the top of my desk once or twice, still pretending to read in class—which I was known for. What do you expect, when school is so unbelievably boring, possibly even irrelevant ladies and gentlemen.

I turned the other way, and showed the title to a girl in the row to the right.

Right on cue, she giggled and put her hand over her mouth. Turning back, probably with a sly grin, a quick glance up at the teacher, I pretended to read some more.

When the bell rang for afternoon recess, I armed that fucking thing with a nice, fresh battery—I slipped that into the desk, dropped the top closed, and went outside with the rest of the class.

***

"All right, people. Chapter Nine in the math book--and no bullshit."

After recess, we all come trooping back into the classroom. The lid of my desk is flipped up. Pens, pencils, textbooks and exercise books are scattered all around my desk. And there’s that fucking book, Female Sexual Behaviour, it was open, laying face-down on the floor. I scooped all that shit back up, put it away. I sat down, all prepared to face whatever shit was about the hit the fan.

Nothing happened.

After a few minutes, Mr. Burger, a grade six teacher from down the hall, poked his nose in the door, taking a quick and sweeping glance across all of us. I wouldn’t say he paid any particular attention to me, but to do that to me, would be to acknowledge me. I was probably the one guy he didn't look at.

He told us to do whatever—exercises for chapter nine of the math book or whatever.

“I’m leaving the door open, I’m just down the hall, and you will be quiet.” He gave us his trade-marked glare and stalked off down the hall.

I suppose we all kind of looked at each other—and the clock.

For the most part, people just shrugged, not having the slightest clue of what was going on, and with a collective sigh, I reckon we all opened up the math book and had a bash at Chapter Nine

It was no more than a few days later, a Thursday night. My mother was going out, she was in the bathroom, where as you know, women spend an inordinate amount of time, and when they come out the place smells like hair spray, soap, steam in the air, whatever.

Anyhow, there was a knock at the door and I went to answer it.

To my shock, it was Miss Hillman.

She and my mother were going roller skating. I had no choice but to let her in, and to tell my mother that she was there, sitting, in fact, in the armchair in front of the television set.

We didn’t have much to say to one another. I headed for the bedroom and whatever book I was reading, but a message had been sent—and received.

What is really bizarre, is that I never heard another word about it.

One can only speculate as to what they found to talk about, on their ladies night out…

They had no idea of what to do about me, in fact, neither of my parents ever mentioned it.

None of my teachers, the principal, no one said one fucking word about it.

Perhaps that was for the best.

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromSmashwords.

See his art on Artpal.

Louis has a free audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, available from Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three. Escape and Evasion. Louis Shalako.

All of 38 horsepower.

Louis Shalako

Escape and evasion. People run from the police all the time. Sometimes they’re on foot, sometimes in a vehicle. I’ve known guys who made life so hot for themselves in their own home town, in that they have literally pulled up roots or tent-pegs and moved to another town. Some of them went out west; where inevitably, almost invariably, they just kept on keeping on.

This would have predictable results, and in fact, in order to escape the immediate consequences in British Columbia, for example, they hopped a bus or even hitch-hiked back home, where at least they had friends and family. They could rely on a hot meal and a bed for the night…two or three years have gone by, and for the most part, the cops have forgotten all about them—however temporary a state of affairs that might be.

However futile it must turn out to be.

And it was only a matter of time before they got picked up again. Even then, old charges might simply be ignored. The Crown would have a much better chance of a conviction for something you had just done the day before—that’s especially true if they caught you with dope, stolen property, somebody else’s ID or wallet or purse or bank card, whatever…witnesses, documents, material evidence. Security footage of you wheeling a fridge or something out of a local department store, with the added touch of stealing one of their heavy cargo carts as well.

It wasn’t always criminal stuff, although one wonders why any driver, any motorcycle rider would try and get away from a simple traffic stop. One must assume drugs, alcohol, perhaps an outstanding warrant. Perhaps the license is out of date, perhaps they don’t have insurance. No insurance, that’s a $5,000.00 fine here in Ontario.

Maybe they’re just crazy, in fact some of them undoubtedly are.

***

One of my buddies and I were just kids, all of sixteen years old. I had finally gotten my little Austin Mini on the road. I did have a proper license. I had a proper license plate and I had six months of insurance, which back then, for a new driver, was about $680.00 for six months. How in the hell I scraped that much up back then is a good question, but I did have a job, either at the grain elevators, or mopping floors in a downtown bar at the time.

We were out for a cruise, talking mostly about cars, girls and cars. More girls…cars, motorbikes. Girls.

I don’t even recall why, or what it was about, probably chirping the tires or speeding, or going around a corner too fast—but the cops were on to us. We got into the side streets, bounded by East Street, Exmouth Street, Indian Road and London Road. It’s a grid, fairly irregular, and we were zig-zagging. We were on Oxford Street, and we literally saw a cop car zooming down East Street as we crossed Lincoln Park…it was a dark and overcast night, late autumn or early winter.

With a 1,000-cc engine and all of 38 horsepower, I knew I couldn’t exactly outrun them. They were closing in. I kept on going south, pulling up to a stop sign at the corner of Oxford Street and London Road.

And it struck me—inspiration struck, ladies and gentlemen. What I did, was to drive across London Road. I went up (or down), someone’s driveway. Popping it into second gear, snapping off the headlights, and I just kept going. The cop must have gone through the intersection, east, west or south, right. This house had no garage. There were trees and stuff, but just enough light spilling from the house and the parks department workshop off to our right about forty metres. This was home territory, after all, and I knew there was no fence along the back of the yard, either. My biggest worry was hitting someone out walking the dog—which demonstrates just how reckless I was. I was probably doing ten, twelve miles per hour, but even so. Even so. So now, I’m out onto the grass of Germain Park. The little gravel trails of the botanical gardens and the lights on the edges of the park were the only sources of illumination. I could at least pick out a few things in the gloom, nowadays, there’s quite the little forest along in there.

I took the car past the tennis courts…across a strip of grassy ground and right into the old man’s backyard. My buddy (who shall remain nameless), hopped out, opened the garage door, and cranking the steering wheel hard, I pulled into the garage. My buddy closed the door and I shut her down.

We were standing inside the dark interior of the garage, lights out, all is quiet, the two of us looking out the little rectangular garage windows…sure enough, right about then a cop car goes zooming down Bright Street, from west to east, (right to left, from our vantage point). Opening up the side door, we went to the corner of the house, just in time to see brake lights flash, and the cop car turned hard right onto Sycamore Street.

I imagine they probably were looking for us. What were they after? Probably a speeding ticket, improper turn…signal lamp burnt out? We were not drinking, we were not smoking dope. We weren’t thieves and we weren’t wanted for anything.

We were just dumb, young, and immature, when you think about it.

Roaring down East Street...

***

This story is almost funny. It was, strangely enough, one of those little anecdotes, probably true, where so many years ago, I originally thought of writing about criminals. It wasn’t going to be about great bank or train robberies, or a daring art heist, or taking down a casino or an armored car.

A buddy, whom I can’t even think of a suitable fake name for, was walking down a street, not exactly downtown, but a few blocks away. Call it the central city area. A police cruiser drives past him, head-on sort of thing. A quick glance over the shoulder, and he knows the cop-car has pulled into a driveway—and now it’s backing out again. And poor old Buddy Two-Shoes has some paper on him. He’s got a warrant, he’s missed his court date, he’s in violation of bail or parole, whatever. The conditions of release, right.

The cop has recognized him on sight, and why not—they’d been arresting him for years already. All kinds of stuff, over the years.

He breaks into a run, the cop car has no problem whatsoever of keeping up with him. The cop was probably on the radio—with one officer in the cruiser, to stop, park, get out and run is not your best option.

Let the guy run himself out…or let him go to ground and then just circle with a bit of help from other officers.

And Two-Shoes knows he can’t run forever, he’s looking from side to side. The blocks are small, and so are the odds, but he’s looking for a fence he can hop, bounding away like a rabbit through the backyards. It’s a long shot, but he knows he’s going away for a while, for sure, and he just doesn’t care. I have no idea as to whether he may have had some incriminating evidence of anything in particular in his possession. He really didn’t need it, did he—

And his eyes light up—he has it.

It’s like a miracle.

He sees a house, he knows the people. He turns hard left, dashes across right in front of the cop car, (who slams on the brakes, desperately trying not to kill the fucking suspect), up the steps, right into the front door. He’s like a reindeer, dashing through the snow, and he dashes right on out again through the back door. And this time, at least for a while, he’s made his escape.

The cop, right on his heels, in clear pursuit of a suspect, has also dashed up those front steps and into that front door. Only difference, on his way through—surely he must have at least glanced into the kitchen, right? He’s looking for his suspect. He sees some other young man he knows.

That other guy is at the kitchen table, he’s got himself a set of triple-beam scales, and he’s cutting up a quarter pound of Mexican or something into ounces, half-bags and quarters, with all those little sandwich baggies of pot, all lined up in a row on the kitchen table.

And if the cops can’t take the one, they’re not shy about taking the other.

It also struck me, in terms of inspiration for this book, is that it was pretty small-time stuff. It was like The Trailer Park Boys. I figured out, this one time, The Trailer Park Boys was essentially not any form of reality. It was satire. It was parody. More than anything, it was the Three Stooges, on dope, ladies and gentlemen.

It was tragicomedy.

***

Just a couple more little quickies here, this chapter is already long enough.

McNuggets was pounding on my back door one morning, pretty early. Unlocking the door, he was all out of breath. He’d run all the way across Germain Park. Pushing past me into my so-called basement apartment, he told me the cops were after him, but he didn’t think they were right on his heels. I locked it up right quick on hearing that.

Studying the park out of the bathroom window, looking out the kitchen window and the front window, bedroom windows on the east side, all that sort of thing, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

And, in a short time, we were back downstairs, rolling up a joint, where he told me the story.

It seems he’d gone to his girlfriend’s place. Only problem, he was under some sort of court order, a peace bond, whatever. Someone who must have known all about it must have seen him, and of course the cops turn up in no time at all. The next bit is a little fuzzy on the details, but it was a townhouse complex. Somehow he evaded the cop at the front door and the cop at the back door. Somehow, he got over a six-foot chain-link wire fence, and down into the ditch. Get this. It was the ditch along the 402 Highway, and even then there were the noise barriers all along that stretch. There are only so many ways to get out of there.

The cops were all over the place, and there he was, laying in the ditch, vehicles smashing by at a hundred-plus kilometres per hour. He’s wet, cold, miserable, mosquitos gnawing at him. And of course he knows he’s going in the bucket if he gets caught. From that area, once the heat died down a little bit—and it would have taken at least some time—he made his way along the off-ramp, across a major street, in through the subdivision, and by this time it is literally daylight. He runs across the park and finds his way to my back door.

He hung around for most of the day. My old man came home from work, in his usual style, and hopped in the shower. I brought the car up to the back door. McNuggets got in the wheel-well of the passenger side. I think I put a blanket over him, nothing suspicious about that, right, and I took him to a place in the north end, a nice neighbourhood. He couldn’t go home. Couldn’t go back to the lady friend’s place. Couldn’t stay at my place. He made a few calls, but no one was picking up. Ah, but his brother-in-law and sister had a different last name. Blood is thicker than water, or so they say. The cops aren’t going to get too many clues from the phone-book, right. Also, a few days later, he could call the lady.

Is the car still there. That would be good to know. This was about the time he moved to another town—after a quick stop at the folk’s place to grab a toothbrush and a razor and a few little things. I reckon he’d park a couple of blocks away and hoof it, late at night, for that one last visit home for quite a while.

***

Fuck, how dumb does it get around here, anyways...

This last one is a dumb one. Buddy’s brother, let’s call him Zoom. The family lived just up the street. I grew up with them guys. One day, he’s home, mommy and daddy are working of course. What with being a habitual thief, and a real creep besides, Zoom steps out the back gate and grabs himself a few free tomatoes from the community garden right there beside the fire hall. Somebody, possibly even one of the firemen themselves, phones it in. Maybe they knew him from somewhere…maybe they knew all about him. Maybe even a little too much about him.

Maybe someone had boosted a really nice car stereo, right out of the back parking lot…and in broad daylight, too.

Anyhow, at least one cop car comes rolling on in, and Zoom makes a fucking run for it.

Somehow, Zoom ends up in my garage. Our garage. My old man’s garage. Ten houses or so up the street.

My old man somehow saw him run in through the backyard, into the garage, closing the door as quick as a wink and then, basically, just keeping quiet. The old man watched out the bathroom window, sure enough, cops on foot, going along, looking for their tomato thief…

My old man told me all about it, later on.

According to him, after a while, he went out, opened up the door, and asked Zoom how he was doing.

“I’m doing very well, Mr. Shalako,” Zoom says.

My old man, he says, ‘oh, that’s good to hear’—and then he closed the door again and left Zoom in there for a while.

My old man said he still had the bag of tomatoes.

As for a nice, toasted tomato sandwich, that would have to wait.

I have to admit, my old man was pretty cool sometimes.

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Kobo.

Louis has art available from Fine Art America.

He’s giving away the free audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, here on Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One.)

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

Images. Stolen from the internet.

Thank you for reading.

https://www.flickr.com/people/65344061@N06

https://bringerofrain.blogspot.com/2015/04/zoomer.html

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two. The Great Filter Queen Caper. Louis Shalako.

Photo is in the public domain.

Louis Shalako

All the names in this story have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. These are real people, many of whom have been apprehended, for one thing or another, and, over the course of time, been charged, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated, presumably paying some penalty for their crimes. In those cases, they have paid their debt to society, which of course leaves out the fact that they really only got popped for about one in a thousand of their petty little crimes—and some not so petty.

People also have the right to forget, and to be forgotten. We also have the right to forgive, to forget, and maybe move forward and make something more positive out of the shambles of our lives. The statute of limitations has run out long ago, and some of us, at least, finally did grow up.

So much for the disclaimer.

***

McNuggets was a thief, a con-man, and a fraud artist. Like many a fraud, he was personable enough. Good looks, a good brain, a bit of charm was very useful in his line of work.

Poor old McNuggets was on the prowl one day, whether on foot or on a bicycle is unknown. One of his little specialties was theft from automobiles. Back in the day, not every vehicle had an onboard security system. A bent coat hanger was enough to enter most locked vehicles. Some of these guys had plenty of practice. In the occasional case, where a vehicle had an alarm system, when the blaring horn went off, thieves either grabbed what they could—what they could see, or they would just take off at a dead run, or, as often as not, grab the bike and try and cover as much ground as possible. A wallet sitting in the console, or a woman who leaves her purse in the car while she just ran into the store for a minute, were bread and butter to these guys.

On this particular occasion, McNuggets found a set of keys laying on the ground, behind a commercial building. Someone had dropped their keys. A fairly bright guy, McNuggets stopped and picked them up. Two keys were from a Ford automobile, there were house and other keys on there as well. With a bit of traffic coming and going, McNuggets pocketed the keys and kept going. Back then, he would have been thinking about breaking and entering as much as anything else. The problem with the house would be to find out where it was. The problem with a business, would be to unlock and then kill the alarm within a very short time-frame. I’m sure he would have thought all of that. Yes, McNuggets had a very good, if slightly-criminal, brain.

He came back later, possibly even days later. It was dark this time, not broad daylight.  

And there it sat.

This was a medium blue, Ford Taurus station wagon, off the street, behind the building, and it was locked. He could see boxes in the back of the vehicle, which had the rear seat folded flat. Script on the sides of the boxes said Filter Queen and McNuggets had hit the jackpot; if only he had a plan. One, very expensive vacuum-cleaner would be a pretty good score. Sure enough, one key fit the lock. If he had a bike, he might have just abandoned it, (it would likely be a stolen bike anyways), but he was most likely on foot—he had a set of car keys after all.

He wasn’t really known as a car thief, and one wonders if he even had any contacts for the disposal of such a vehicle, probably not in my opinion. He would have gone straight there. Otherwise, one has to hide a stolen car, and you really can’t do that at your folk’s house. So, knowing the salesman or manager must be in the building, he hops in, fires her up and gets the machine out of there with a minimum of fuss and bother.

His problems were not over. He only has so much time. He grabs one vacuum cleaner, an upright or something fairly light and portable, parking on a side-street, half a block or more away, and he sells it to a buddy for a hundred bucks and a gram of coke. Or whatever. When he comes out, there’s no one around and the car is still sitting there. And in a move of sheer, fucking brilliance, he takes it to the Bluewater Health parking lot. He pulls up to the drop-bar, pushes the button, and gets a little ticket to put on the dashboard of the vehicle. The bar raises, and he drives on in. He locks her up, takes the keys and walks away.

Once he has a little time to think about it, he gets spooked—he’s done time before, and this is grand theft auto. And he never goes back. What he did do, which is typical for these guys, was to tell someone about it. That’s a funny thing about cocaine—a couple little tokes on the crack pipe and you’re paranoid as all fucking hell.

***

So, this is where I come in. Swimmy, calls me up. We hung out back then. Swimmy had a good source of red and black Lebanese hash. We went back years.

And he had this idea. What he did not have was a car. You can probably see where this is going. All I had to do was to pick him up and drive him. Let him out, where he is just one of many people, coming and going from the hospital. Right during visiting hours, right? He opens the Ford with a coat hanger, grabs a vacuum, locks her up again, chucks it into the trunk, very large and capacious, of my old man’s Volvo. Off we go to sell the vacuum to his brother-in-law or somebody. Swimmy had clearly been doing a bit of fast-talking of his own. With free parking for two hours, it didn’t cost me a cent to go in, park, wait three minutes. You could unlock the trunk but leave it closed. Swimmy was quick, I will give him that. Back in a jiffy. I take a quick look and head for the exit. No one gave us a second glance, but then everyone has their own problems.

Bad as that sounds, even stupid, really, we actually went back two or three times. There were a hell of a lot of vacuum cleaners in that Taurus. My mother had one of the floor type models, (some of those guys had some high-pressure sales tactics), and while it had a lifetime warranty, the price of a Filter Queen was astronomical.

One day the Taurus was gone, and the party was over.

And that, was the great Filter Queen caper of somewhere in the late eighties or early nineties.

***

One of the issues with smoking pot back then, was that you had to go to a criminal to get it. Some of those guys worked harder at not working than they ever did at working at anything useful, or anything that might represent something with a future. Some of them were real wheelers and dealers.

McNuggets, oddly enough, had a trade, one which he’d learned in jail. It took some time to learn that you simply cannot maintain a household on the proceeds of petty crime. Some of them guys never learned it, and some of them are either dead, missing, or doing hard time for something somewhere. They didn't know when to quit. They just kept getting in, deeper and deeper...

That’s their problem, as far as I am concerned.

Interestingly, more than one of them eventually realized that you could just leave the $28.97 in cash in a wallet or purse. Why not take an exclusive credit card, American Express, Diner’s Club or something, one the victim did not use every day? And what about this tiny slip of paper, with four digits written on it, and gee, I wonder if that isn’t the PIN number for this here debit card. You don’t have to go into the bank, just find a bank machine and give it a try. With the cash still there, folks might not know they’d been had for days—and by then, it would be too late.

...just a bug on the wall, sometimes...

This is when guys like McNuggets learned to dress well but casual, shave, be polite, say yes, sir, no, sir, and thank you, Ma’am. This is when they learned to lease a car with one stolen credit card and then head two or three hundred kilometres up the road and do some real shopping with a handful, literally a handful, of stolen credit cards under different names. Back then you had to sign a slip. Human nature being what it is, retail staff virtually never looked at the signature. A sale is a sale, as the salesmen say. It was no skin off their nose.

What with food, booze, cocaine, pot, anything they wanted, really, I reckon McNuggets and one or two others (there is nothing like teamwork, eh), burned through several hundred thousand dollars in a year. Sheer madness, when you realize all the money that went through their hands and yet they never had a fucking thing to show for it. It was a little too easy come, and a little too easy, go. They’d make the most amazing score, two days later, they didn’t have a pot to piss in.

And it was only a matter of time, before there came the knock at the door and sure enough, they’re looking at another bit of time in the county bucket, or a provincial or federal prison.

To be a bug on the wall, and to just listen to the conversation was interesting as all hell, possibly even educational.

That’s not to say that I have an excuse, because I don’t. I was just young, ladies and gentlemen. And maybe just a little bit desperate.

For someone who wanted to write, even back then, it really was fascinating.

END

Poor old Louis has books and stories available fromAmazon. What the hell, its honest work.

See his art, available from ArtPal.

Check out My Criminal Memoir, Part One.

 

This audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, is presently free from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading.