My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. Groped. Louis Shalako.

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My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven. Fireworks, BB Guns and Porn. Louis Shalako.

"What didst thou havest in mind, oh Droogy-droogs???"

Louis Shalako

 

Fireworks, BB Guns and Porn. And that's just for starters. We had our own little gang, back in the early seventies. It was better to be in a group. We walked everywhere. There were a lot more young people back then, there were some rough neighbourhoods, and punks everywhere or so it seemed.

Walking out to the mall with a few dollars burning holes in their pockets, teenage boys will comb an entire store, an entire mall, looking for something to buy—at one end of the old Woolco store, there was a sporting goods department, right next to automotive. One of their displays was jackknives, buck knives, including the longest legal knife, long and skinny. The length when opened, of just on nine inches…a folding stiletto, if you will.

But seriously, kids will go up and down every aisle, what with a brand-new mall on the edge of town, and this is where I saw a fedora, and it was like $2.99.

I suppose I had been reading A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. I suppose it had played at a local theatre, perhaps the old Mustang Drive-In on Plank Road…where kids from the south end were occasionally known to walk out that way on a summer’s eve, braving swamp and mosquitos to infiltrate in from the woods beside and behind the place, waiting until dark to steal in a little closer to the last few rows of parking spots, where we could at least hear the sound through all of those tinny little speakers, with their coiled wires and hanging on a post beside each parking spot.

Considering Alex and his droogs, we really couldn’t do the white long johns and a codpiece in the midst of a Canadian winter. What we did, was to adopt steel-toed work boots, jeans, leather jackets, and those fucking fedora hats. Oh, yeah, jackknives…

It’s not like we ever used them, but once you assumed that every other fucking kid in town had one, you sort of realized the dangers of pulling one out. The point is, that they knew it too—

Yeah—and every fucking one of us had a condom in our wallet, which you could get from a wall dispenser in any bar or even a gas station rest room, for a quarter. Twenty-five cents, ladies and gentlemen. And let’s be honest: you never know when you’re going to need one, right. Also, back then, any honest storekeeper would sell a bunch of teenage boys a pack of Colts or Old Port, wine-dipped cigars, which smelled good, looked cool but kind of tasted a lot like shit after the first few puffs.

Quite frankly, we might have been a little before our time, but we had a dance, a kind of mix between the Charleston and the Soupy Shuffle. Yeah, you’ve got a line of teenagers, walking out to the mall, in our boots and our jackets, all lined up under a streetlight and we were just plain boogying, ladies and gentlemen.

We can only marvel, and wonder what the occasional passing motorists might have thought of all that.

***

The Universe is composed of endless amounts of bullshit. Kids have to put up with a lot of such things, but we get our revenge too…

In my old man’s garage, tucked away in a massive home-made workbench, were two or three Playboy magazines.

A source of endless fascination to boys as young as ten or eleven years old, I don’t remember too much of the actual contents…we weren’t there to read the articles, but the one thing that does stick out is Elke Sommer. According to sources, she was one of the more popular pin-up girls of the time, in addition to her acting career, appearing in the pages of Playboy in 1964 and in 1967. The one I recall, was her walking nude around some Hollywood mansion, fresh, natural, just a nice, healthy young woman in her birthday suit. She really was beautiful, if you watch the Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark, there is a shot where her and Peter Sellers are at a nudist colony, and it is still something of a thrill to see her naked, from behind, from the waist up…you have to admit, dimples above and behind the hips, nice shoulders and good proportions have an allure.

Just around the corner from Willy’s house, (and garage), was a place called Bell’s Variety. These little corner stores once dotted the city. The store was on the ground floor, taking up a couple of rooms, presumably the living room, front hall and closet deleted, and the dining room knocked together. The proprietors invariably lived in the building, a converted house, something which is almost unheard-of today. Let’s just say the health department frowns on the owner of a store or restaurant having a bed in the back room and sleeping on the premises. The bylaw officers frown on it too, as a place of business and not zoned residential.

And we had a plan to get a few fresh porno magazines, assuming we followed the plan and everyone did their jobs.

You have to admit she's cute...

At the back of the store was a magazine rack. Back then, the front covers of such magazines did not have to be obscured in the rack, with a strip of metal or wood high enough to blot out the pictures, leaving only the name of the magazine visible to casual shoppers, some of whom would definitely be children, or uptight adults, for that matter.

There were bundled products. These would be three low-budget, relatively unknown magazines, full-colour, but not Playboy, Penthouse or Hustler, to name the top three…

Ye olde magazine rack, home of comic books and porn.

Willy went into the store, asking the lady for large bottles of orange pop. Warm, orange pop. So, the lady turns, taking it at face value, ignoring Johnny, already in the store and in the back corner, ostensibly looking for Mad Magazine or comic books or something.

As soon as she disappeared into the back room, Johnny grabs three bundles of pornographic magazines, sealed in their plastic bags, which admittedly didn’t cost much but could not be sold to the underage group.

I was just coming in with a quarter and a dime in my hot little hand. Johnny goes running out the door. The lady comes back in, yelling. Willy literally puts up his hand.

I’ll get him, he says, whereupon he bolts for the door. And my job was to stand my ground, not being involved, after all. Fuck, all I want is a bag of chips and a chocolate bar. Reluctantly, the lady sort of has to stick around with this unknown teenager in the store…

What is really nuts is that Bell’s Variety was literally, two or three hundred feet from Willy’s house. He must have been in there every day, every second day at the least, but good old Johnny lived a couple of kilometres away. He didn’t have to worry about going back there, as I said, there were variety stores on practically every block back then.

Willy couldn’t have that stuff at home, not even in the garage, so after a suitable interval, and after having a good look through our booty, it ended up with a few other odds and ends in the ‘fort’ made of salvaged plywood up in the rafters of my old man’s garage.

***

I don’t know how I managed to get out of it, perhaps I was just manipulative. I was an idea man, whatever the hell that means. We pulled essentially the same stunt at another store, a good distance from our own neighbourhoods. This was a store on London Road, at the corner of Mitton Street, not too far from downtown. The original building was two-storey, brick, built in the 1920s by the look of it. This guy had fireworks, so it must have been early to mid-May. Back then, ‘firecracker day’, as the kids called it, was the May 24 weekend—Queen Elizabeth’s birthday.

Willy was pretty bold when it came to shoplifting from the small, neighbourhood stores. He had a big green parka, industrial grade, which had big side pockets to begin with. With the hood up, it obscured the face to some degree, and half the town was wearing those jackets anyways. He’d also cut a big horizontal slit, on the inside of the lining, one on each side of the zipper. He’s the only kid I knew, who could get a couple of the big glass pop bottles, twenty-five ounce bottles, into the side pockets and then, which was really brazen, to pick out a ten-cent bag of chips and actually pay for that at the counter. This after hanging around the cooler at the back of the store for some moments.

This time, Willy goes to the back of the store. Johnny is in one of several aisles, looking for whatever—something he was having trouble deciding on, or maybe just unable to find what he was looking for. I’m at the counter, where the owner is trying to decide, do I sell this kid a pack of Old Ports and take his money? Or do the right thing and refuse. Just as he turns to get the smokes, Willy grabs three of the biggest boxes of fireworks in the display. He makes his way down the opposite side of the store, obscured by the shelves, four or so feet high, with products lined up on top as well. All the guy can see is his head and shoulders, Johnny’s perfectly placed so that the one aisle the guy can actually see down from his place behind the counter is blocking his view of Willy as he goes past.

One more aisle, across the front of the store, and Willy bolts for the door…

“Don’t you worry, Mister—I’ll get him.” Johnny drops his candy or whatever and runs from the store.

All the poor guy could do was to take my money and hand over the cigars.

All I could do was give a shake of the head and shrug philosophically. Kids these days...right?

What are going to do about it...right?

Hours of fun for bad boys and other children.

***

It was summer, and we had arranged to meet in a vacant lot just across from the Beer Store on Mall Road. This was just behind a defunct scrap yard, where we took our BB guns a time or two, blasting away at abandoned cars. You can get pretty good at shooting out headlights, tail-lights, side mirrors, although the windows were a bit tough for even a CO2-powered BB gun. Even Rock’s .22 CO2 pistol, throwing lead pellets, had a hard time with the side windows, and the windshields were impenetrable…

Anyhow, Soupy was a few years older than us, and he had already gone into the beer store and grabbed a case of 24 bottles of Molson Golden Ale. Right about then, Johnny shows up, and he’s pissed. The four of us had our beer, and Soupy didn’t want to go back, and let’s be honest. It’s illegal to purchase alcohol for minors, right. He’s only pushing his luck so far. We were going roller skating, and knocking back six beers in a cornfield out behind the township arena sure made life a lot more interesting.

So, I took Johnny’s two dollars and said I would have a go. I was fifteen, wearing that leather jacket, with a little seventeen-hair mustache and I really didn’t think I was fooling anybody. To my surprise, the man behind the counter took my money and handed over a six-pack of Labatt’s 50, which we sort of denigrated as ‘an old man’s beer’, but that’s what Johnny’s dad drank and I suppose Johnny didn’t much care, it was what he was used to drinking, (when he could manage to sneak a few out of the beer fridge in the basement bar his old man had built).

I have to admit, I was fairly proud of that accomplishment, only problem now, was that we didn’t really need Soupy any more—now I got to go in and buy the fucking beer.

Such is the price of being tall, ladies and gentlemen.

And confidence is everything.

An old man's beer.

Imagine five of us, pounding back six beers each, over the course of half an hour, standing around in an empty patch in a cornfield. This would be the result of flooding, a low spot, but it served the purpose.

Once in the arena, the fucking change rooms were just clouds of smoke, back in those days. Some guy you know says, hey, and passes you a joint, and what are you going to do? Take a couple of puffs and hand it back, that’s what.

And after three hours of skating, it was time to walk home again. On at least one occasion, Johnny’s older sister literally picked me up, slung me over her shoulder, and carried me most of the way.

I always thought she really ought to have fucked me.

Well. If I was teasing her, it was only simple justice for her to tease me—and she did.

Yeah, she did.

Don’t worry, nothing ever came of it.

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

Louis has art on ArtPal.

Listen to his free audiobook, One Million Words ofCrap, here on 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.

Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Ten. High Speed Chase. Louis Shalako.

Mine was Primrose yellow, and was slightly modified...

Louis Shalako

High speed chase. High speed chases are a very bad idea. Zipping across a public park, at night in an Austin Mini, was dumb enough, and yet it was also purely impulsive.

One dark and stormy night, I was alone in my 1971 MGB, heading west along Lakeshore Road in what was then Sarnia Township. It was freezing rain. The road was ice. For that reason, I was probably only doing 60-65 kilometres per hour, admittedly in a 50 kph zone. I’d lived with the car for a while. I had put in a lot of time in that seat. The fact that I had Hooker tube headers, an Ansa free-flow exhaust system, I had ported and polished the head, probably resulted in another five or ten horsepower to an engine that was rated at 94 brake horsepower. I had lightened up the vehicle, and substituted a 12-volt battery in the trunk for two six-volt batteries under a panel behind the seats. The hood was aluminum instead of steel, I’d pulled this off a scrapped ’69, this is also where I got the new cylinder head to work on. This may have improved the forward-rear balance of the car. Looking at the photo, my car had the steel ‘rallye’ wheels, not wire wheels. Even the stock air cleaners were big and heavy, but I had fabbed up a couple of metal plates for each of the dual carbs and used little circular filters from a Pinto or something. This is a frequent mod for the vehicle, one barely frowned-upon by the purists, who could be a real pain the ass sometimes.

Interestingly, I had taken out side-marker lamps, a requirement for the North American market. What did that save, a fucking pound or two? I had removed the air pump, a pollution control device…I had the head milled down by thirty-thousandths of an inch to up the compression. I had driven, (crazy as it was), at night, eighty miles per hour (or more), on gravel roads.

Remember, I wanted to drive Formula One, even though poor boys don’t stand a chance in hell…

And there is a set of oncoming headlights on what was a pretty empty road, understandable considering the weather conditions…it was probably eleven-thirty at night. I was a lonely guy, and long tours around southern Ontario were a form of recreation. I didn’t smoke and I wasn’t drinking…I wasn’t high on drugs. This was before I met my girlfriend.

I was real clean back then, with reflexes like a cat.

As that other car passed in the opposite direction, the reflective markings on the vehicle, and the typical ‘cherries’ on top told me it was a cop. And I just gunned it. I didn’t even think.

Sure enough, the fucker hits the brakes, and I saw the flash in the rear-view mirror.

He is turning into a driveway…he’s backing out, but I had a head start. The sensible thing to do, would be to simply pull over. Admittedly, he never really did put on the flashers, he did not turn on the siren. I could see him, a half a mile back at this point, and I was doing eighty or a hundred kilometres per hour by now. On the map, it looks pretty straight, but it did twist a bit, back and forth. Since then, they’ve leveled out some of the humps and straightened out some of the bends, but even now, it is not dead straight.

One of the things I did on that car was to put on bigger tires. The stock tires were 165 millimeters wide, originally, (on early-sixties cars), they would have been bias-ply tires, not radials. I had 175s on the front, and 195s on the back end, the benefit of a bit of reading up on mild performance modifications for the MGB. People thought I was nuts, of course. I worked at a tire shop, trying to get through the academic upgrading program at Lambton College…I could beat any other MGB in town, and that was just a fact.

The cop car was slowly gaining on me. It’s not a real long stretch, and at that time, Murphy Road was the boundary between the City of Sarnia and Sarnia Township.

The conditions played a role. I could imagine him on the radio, trying to coordinate between the two police forces. If the Sarnia cops could get into position, they could head me off. Just west of Modeland Road is a sharp right-hander, which drops off and then bends back to the left.

At some point, I saw that he wasn’t catching up any more…he was still a good half a kilometre back, and I could imagine the thoughts going through his head. He’s thinking these are really shitty driving conditions, especially in a big, V-8 powered Dodge.

He’s thinking of his wife and kids. He thought of the asshole in the little sports car, what with Dead Man’s curve coming up fast…by this time he might have gotten a ‘negative’ from the dispatcher. Sarnia cops unavailable. He stayed right where he was, probably wondering when I’d lose it and then he’d either have me, or they’d be scraping me off the road and out of the trees.

...you won't come back from Dead Man's Curve...

Rather than hit the brakes, which would show braking lights. I let off on the throttle…rolled on past the end of Modeland Road, down the drop and turn to the right. I haven’t lost him yet. I had just enough time. Turning off all the fucking lights, pitch black out there, I had it in second gear, using the emergency brake just to slow her down a bit. This did not throw brake lights; a good thing to know, right. I hung a left turn at Notre Dame Place, a short stretch, which leads to a right hander onto Sylvan Court.

In the mirrors, I saw the fucking cop car go past the end of the street, still proceeding west along Lakeshore Road. I reckon he was out of his jurisdiction, but whatever. And I popped out onto Cathcart Boulevard, having turned the lights back on as soon as I knew I’d lost him.

It was a bit of a tough call, but to go left would lead back to Modeland Road. Only so many options down that way. I turned right, ending up at the intersection of Cathcart and Murphy Road. I knew the area well, as we had been racing shitty cars through some of the subdivisions, which were made of curving streets, little crescents, cul-de-sacs in a more modern, upscale residential area. I made a left on Murphy, no sign of any cops…

I took the first right, and by this time I was well and truly away, even if they had caught up to me, Sarnia or Township cops. At this point, all I had to do was drive the speed limit, signal my turns and lane changes…

The officer had lost sight of me, which sort of equates with losing the ‘chain of evidence’ or something. Without even a radar reading, what in the hell were they going to say?

I made it home, no problems.

Why did I do it? I could have handled a hundred-dollar ticket. It was just pure testosterone, at that age.

***

Not too many years later, in a similar incident, I outran the Ontario Provincial Police. I was northbound on Highway 19, coming out of Tillsonburg, Ontario. I was working as a reporter in Delhi, Ontario, and this was the best way to get home to Sarnia. I was on the curve at Salford, basically a hamlet at a crossroads, and I was probably doing over seventy in a sixty-mile per hour zone. Not that serious, I would be the first to agree, but there is this cop coming along from the opposite direction, and of course the OPP had the radar, what with policing major and regional highways.

Fuck, ladies and gentlemen. I was driving a 1972 Chrysler New Yorker, I’d paid $750.00 for it. A big, wide, long vehicle, admittedly lower to the ground than the typical modern SUV. It might have even weighed less, basically just a big metal envelope, two-door, with a fucking 440 cubic inch engine—7.2 litres in modern parlance. At a minimum, 225 horsepower, with bags of torque. Okay, bias-ply tires, hell, I had snowies on the back. But those vehicles loved the highway, they could cruise, essentially, at 80-plus miles per hour all day long, (or until you ran out of fuel), with no fuss and bother—also, they were a hell of a lot more comfortable than small, drafty, leaky old British sportscars…

We had adequate power, ladies and gentlemen...

Yes, fuck, ladies and gentlemen. I saw that cop, saw a couple of cars, headlights at least, in my rear-view mirrors. There was a car ahead of the cop and a couple of cars following along pretty close. What with the cop being there, they were all scrupulously going along at about 60 mph. Fuck, I just nailed it, ladies and gentlemen, with barely two and a half kilometres to the overpass just south of Ingersoll.

So, the poor cop has to figure out what’s going on. He has to put on a signal, pull into a driveway. He can’t even accelerate—the other drivers have no idea, and they’re just moseying along. He has cars behind him, and I have a few coming along behind me.

It all clicked in. Going by the map, it’s maybe two and a half kilometres, and then, up and over the overpass. What with the gathering gloom, all I had to go on were headlights in the mirror, but I had gotten lucky in that there wasn’t much ahead of me, and when there was, the road was clear and I could pass. I blew past one or two folks and then onto the overpass, letting her coast on the uphill bit to avoid braking…drop her down one gear, the transmission moans a bit, slowing her some more, back up into drive. I eased on down the ramp and got onto the Highway 401, westbound for London, (and then, the 402, westbound for Sarnia, just for detail.) The trip was about 140 miles.

And he must have caught a glimpse of that action, because he decided to go westbound on the 401. He could have gone eastbound 401, or he could have gone north into Ingersoll.

The 401 is a busy highway. I managed to use the fast lane, get ahead of a few vehicles.

I dropped her down to 65 miles per hour—no metric on those old gauges, and sure enough, someone gets a little pissed off, snapping on a signal and getting into the other lane. He passes, then another. They want to do 70, which is pretty safe as cops would prefer to write a ticket for something real.

...just coming around the Salford curve...

Fuck, at this point, I’m just some little old lady out for a Sunday drive, right.

There were transport trucks behind me, and right about then, that fucking cop car blasts past my door handle at eighty, ninety or a hundred miles per hour. No lights, no siren—just speed, ladies and gentlemen.

I watched him sail off up the highway…

Why did I even do it? We shared weekend duties at good old Cash Crop Farming Publications. With only so many reporters, and so many publications, every third week I had to pull the weekend. That meant two whole weeks away from my girlfriend.

It had been a long two weeks and I just wanted to get home…a young healthy male, right.

I guess.

It just struck me—if they had put the lights and put the sirens on, I might have stopped.

It’s a purely psychological thing, but I probably would have.

END

 

Image. MGB. By Mr.choppers.

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

Louis has art on ArtPal.

Listen to his free audiobook, One Million Words ofCrap, here on 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.

Thank you for reading, and listening.