Friday, December 1, 2023

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen. Shoplifting, and Theft. Louis Shalako.

This one's worth $200.00, today's prices.
















Louis Shalako



Theft and shoplifting. Well, it was one of those nights, winter coming on and dusk coming on even sooner.

There’s a pounding at the back door and it’s Zoomer. My old man is in the living room, but by this time I was inhabiting the basement.

He wants a ride, enough so that he pulls out a fairly large joint and sparks it up—some of that good, green, pine-tasting California sensimilla. All I have to do is to borrow Frank’s car and he will see that I get a little something out of it.

This time it’s shoplifting. Zoom has a few orders to fulfill, and he knows exactly where to go. If truth be told, he’s been there before and done it all before.

Zoom is wearing this kind of polyester bomber jacket. It’s big, it’s bulky, more importantly, it has big sleeves and tight, elastic cuffs. I drive over to Mitton Street, pull into the back of the parking lot, and Zoom goes into Shopper’s Drug Mart, just to pick up a few little things…

I suppose perfume and cosmetics are good things, but this is a more likely target for light-fingered young women and girls. No, Zoom was after bigger game. They had a wall display. Two, three, possibly four Norman Rockwell collector plates go in through the open collar, the zipper on that big old jacket pulled down a bit, and then, moving along, he somehow manages to steal, or ‘schmiel’, in the hyper-localized argot or cant, a criminal language all of its own, a couple of Royal Dalton figurines. (Royal Doulton. - ed.) These go into the side pockets and all of a sudden, out the door and he’s there at the car, in something of a rush.

I fire up that fucking old red Volvo, and cruise out of that parking lot, and head on back eight or ten blocks, and no one seems to pay us the least bit of attention. Yes, it was night, yes, it was coming on to Christmas. Here he is, banned in half the stores in town, for just such an offense, or series of offenses, and yet no one has paid him a second glance. Honestly, they had his picture up beside the till at pretty much every store in Lambton Mall…

Oh, and if I’m lucky, I get a tiny little bud and some kind of a thrill—some kind of transient entertainment value out of it.

After a while, he’s gone off to flog off the proceeds of a half an hour’s work, and for me, it’s back to the television and another long winter’s night.

Years later, when someone broke into Stoney’s and stole a shit-load of his mother’s Norman Rockwells and Royal Doultons, the first person I thought of was Zoomer—the second person I thought of was Stoney himself. He might have gotten just that desperate, you never know.

***

I won’t say we worked together. With Zoom, you were a patsy, an accessory, a useful fool, or a victim, maybe even an innocent bystander. But the pair of us had headed out, in my big old Chrysler, another dark, stormy, freezing winter’s night. We found ourselves down at the Moore Township Arena, which is just off the parkway along the St. Clair River.

The moon hung in the sky off to the west, there were stars and it was cold as hell. Zoom goes all over the parking lot. There is a hockey game or something going on inside the building…he’s right back at my window.

Get on out here, he needs help. Someone has just scored a goal inside, judging by the sound, and I hop out and follow him to a vehicle, which he has already scoped out. He’s cut some wires or pulled some plugs, and I scurry back to the Chrysler with a pair of wedge-shaped DeVeaux speakers from the back window.

Ye olde fashioned tennis courts, ladies and gentlemen.

I nipped back, and into the passenger side of that vehicle, a sporty, muscle car with a high-end stereo system in the dashboard. A fucking Blaupunkt or something. Zoom has pulled the wires, the plugs and fuses…he’s got the knobs and the face-plate off. I stuff all that into my pockets. No, ladies and gentlemen, the real problem is the stalks. The long, threaded rods that control the box, are fucking long…real long, and the hex-nuts are inset into deep sockets, and the threads are fine. It’s a cold winter night, and that hockey game can only go on for so long.

He’s spinning away with the fingers of his right hand, I’m spinning madly away with the fingers of my left hand, and for fuck’s sakes, it seemed to take forever to get them fucking nuts off of there. Finally we had them, and the thing falls out the back and he grabs it. Holy shit, and it is one fucking hell of a relief to get off that river road, head east on fuck-shit concession, go one or two past the Highway 40, (north), and then finally weasel our way back into town, all on back roads, without any major problems.

***

It’s not always easy to put a date on certain events. I was possibly working as an unarmed security guard, twelve-hour shifts, three days on and three days off. I might have been driving cab, or on call at Heist, where good old Stoney had at least gotten me in, and if I had survived long enough, I might have even gotten into the union. High-pressure water blasting is tough, brutal work.

But I was in my usual place, sitting there in front of the television, when an unfamiliar vehicle zooms up the driveway, there are hurried footsteps, and the usual pounding at the back door…broad daylight and all.

It’s McNuggets and Buddy Two-Shoes. They’ve made a big score and the first person they thought of on the way back to town was me.

First, a couple of Iron Horse mountain bikes that were all the rage at the time. That part’s bad enough, at least they can ride them away, bearing in mind they’ll have to leave them for the time being, as they’re driving a leased vehicle and they have to return it. No, the real thing is that they’ve charged up a dozen VCRs, video cam-corders, on stolen credit cards, and for the time being, those will have to sort of be stashed in the back of a closet—at my house.

Fuck, at this point, all I want is one of those cameras. Of course they promised, and of course, it never happened. They were back once or twice a day, until every fucking one of them had been sold—it’s not like they would ever keep one for themselves.

***

That fucking old Volvo.

At the time of this writing, December, 2023, Christmas is less than a month away. Sometime in the mid-nineties, Buddy Two-Shoes was knocking at my back door. It was dark, overcast, with some snow on the ground and the promise of more to come. Predictably, he needed a ride. It seems he’d been reading Community Calendar, a regular feature in the local daily.

I don’t know if he had any more advance information than that. But I had sort of inherited dad’s red, 1971 Volvo at this point. (My old man had four Volvos, all in a row, and that’s what he drove for over forty years, ladies and gentlemen.)

I drove Buddy up to a school in the north end of the city, at the corner of Indian Road and Errol.

Apparently, there was a musical thing, little kids, parents, teachers, old people singing Christmas carols and all of that sort of thing. This was going on in the school gymnasium. The parking lot along Errol Road was mostly full, but I found a spot way down at the end, and Buddy gets out and has a look, with a tiny little pocket flash and his trusty bent coat hanger at the ready. I used to shut her down, but it was all warmed up by now and she still started easily…

He was back in five minutes. Let’s go, he says.

So, I pull out, head east on Errol, and then hook a right. This area was well-known to me, the same little subdivision mentioned in the chapter on Escape and Evasion. (He means High Speed Chase. - ed.) Cash is anonymous, although I didn’t know exactly what he’d scored. The thing is to get away with some cool, some aplomb, from the scene of the crime. My own hands are clean, my pockets don’t have any evidence in them. Not my problem, right. It was early yet, they’d be in the school for quite a while, right. It’s not like people were chasing us, not at all…

And holy, fuck, the guy pulls out four hundred-dollar bills. I thought he was just bragging, but no—this was for me. This was my cut. Holy, fuck. I just about shit myself. Seriously. These guys weren’t known for being generous—that’s a contradiction in terms when it comes to thieves, right.

Good old Buddy must have hit the motherlode that night. Oh—and someone else lost a big whack of cash. At that fucking rate, it must have been thousands. We were back at my place within half an hour, forty-five minutes. I sure as hell stopped at the beer store that evening, I will confess.

Sure beats five bucks for gas and a couple of joints, and if you’re lucky, a rancid cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup, right.

When somebody makes a score like that, there’s no sense in leaving the cash and taking a credit card, which has its own problems and risks.

In a case like that, it’s take the money and run.

***

Right outside the back door...

The tennis courts. There are tennis courts at Germain Park. Thieves haunted the parking lots at Germain Park. For one thing, the tennis courts were on the other side of the Botanical Gardens, a couple of hundred metres from the parking lot. People left their wallets in their cars all too often. Also, Jackson Pool was right beside the parking lot, with all kinds of people coming and going. Again, all them wallets and other valuables, theoretically locked in the car…the Strangway Centre, a seniors’ centre is on the other side of the parking lot, and then the Parks Department works yard is right there as well, the employees also park along in there.

The thieves had pulled a picnic table over, just behind a hedge, this is right by the Zen garden. They were out of sight, yet one or two of them could simply get up to stretch the legs and see what was going on in the parking lot.

They were looking for some little old lady to leave a ‘white elephant’ in the trunk of a car, going into the Strangway Centre for a card game, a fitness class, or a free cup of coffee and a gossip. The term denotes a big fat purse, usually in white leather. They were looking for the vehicle, the one where a couple of people parked, got out, and went and played tennis for a while. They were looking to see where the municipal parks people were, always running about in their little golf-carts and Cushman, three-wheeled vehicles…they were looking to score, and the fact is, with a bottle of water or pop, their own tennis rackets and wearing the athletic clothes, shorts and T-shirts and running shoes, one or two bicycles parked around, they blended in well enough.

The size and composition of the crew varied, they weren’t always there, but Zoomer for one specialized for many years in theft from vehicle.

It was his thing—it was what he did, ladies and gentlemen. As for his long-time girlfriend Dee, she at least could keep a driver’s license—Zoomer was banned for life at an early age, whether by the courts or the insurance companies, is not for me to say. But these guys could use an ‘orv’, a bent coat-hanger, with the best of them. An Orville derives from Orville Reddenbacher—hot buttered popcorn. Orville Reddenbacher rhymes with bread and butter—and a bent coat hanger was how they made their living. A purse in the trunk was no problem, not once they’d seen it go in—all you have to do is open the door, open the glove-box and push the button, at this point in history. And little old ladies so very seldom have alarm systems, back in the day.

Every so often, Dee would have to babysit, or maybe it was just that her brother had grandma’s car.

A ‘dub’, or a ‘walter’, was a wallet. No one used their real names, although everybody knew everybody else. But you can’t be yelling ‘hey Dave, Dave Smith (or Jones)—the cops are coming’ across the parking lot. No, it’s Dogger, or Baddy, or Swimmy, or Peanuts or whatever.

Oh, and if you and your partner go out of town, it’s best to switch to new fake names for a while, or at least this is how Stan and Ollie saw it.

It makes sense enough to me.

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Smashwords.

See his works on Fine Art America.

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.


Thank you for reading and listening.

 

 

 

 


Wednesday, November 29, 2023

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fourteen. The Hash Bash, and A Trip to the Rez. Louis Shalako.

That one interests me...












Louis Shalako


The hash bash. The hash bash, and a trip to the rez. So, there we were at college, trying to get our academic upgrading, grade 12, and at the same time collecting pogy, slang for unemployment insurance. We had a little money, what with living at home in our parents’ (or parent’s) house, and I had been asking around about some pot.

Finally Stoney found some guy, and he had a gram of hash. One. Fucking gram. Of hash. This was the first time I’d ever bought the stuff, and a teeny-tiny little rectangular brick of red Lebanese it was, too. I have to admit, I hesitated, to the extent of becoming something of a pain in the ass. Finally, on Stoney’s word, I bought it. This was in a common area, just off to the side of the main entrance. It was pretty public and of course this involved dope. There were only two choices, right. We went over to the guy’s house at lunch hour and he showed me how to smoke it. I was the guy with a car, after all, and we could always grab a sandwich at a corner milk store—

This was the era of Mac’s Milk, Becker’s, and a coffee pot on a hot ring, one that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any modern office setting. Basically just some kid trying to run a store and keep the pot full of lukewarm coffee and hopefully the high-school kids not stealing them blind sort of thing. Anyhow, this is where I met Chris’s sister, who was a very great help at a later date, as she worked in the Lambton College Financial Aid department.

And I did go back to college later, right.

That's a nice chunk of hash.

I have to admit, with three or four of us smoking that hash, and of course I did want to take some home, I wasn’t all that impressed.

Anyhow, Stoney was getting better pogy, unemployment insurance, than I was. He’d also lost his driver’s license when he knocked over some 90 year-old man in a parking lot. So, when he came to me with the tickets for the hash-bash, I have to admit I was intrigued. He’d already paid for my ticket, and I could pay him back later—surely by next Tuesday, like J.Wellington Wimpy, known from the Popeye cartoons.

What in the hell was a hash-bash. Five fucking dollars, and Stoney was asking for a ride at the very least…

One of the guys in our class was selling tickets. Five dollars, all the hash you can smoke. His place, high noon. It was a ground floor apartment on the one hundred block of Bright Street. Dennis had three or four tables pushed together, where in the hell he’d found all the chairs was a good question. There were four or five propane torches, the ubiquitous Bic lighters. People were showing up, some of us had fast food and others had brown-bag lunches. Dennis was in the kitchen. Back then, you could get a quarter ounce of blonde Lebanese hash for fifty dollars. It was less dense than the black and the red, and a quarter of blonde was surprisingly large. He was cutting up the first quarter, putting tiny little chunks of hash on the bottoms of upside-down saucers. It was a gas stove, and we did a couple of hot-knives before I took the first of several saucers, carefully balancing them, out to this long dining area of the apartment. Where presumably he lived—

...whatever happened to good old Dennis...
Heating up a sharp knife, Dennis cut hundreds of the little chunks, the temperature in there warming up considerably.

Out in the big room, guys and girls had four or five propane torches going, heating up the tips of butter knives red-hot…tapping a bit of hash onto the end, the tips of the knives coming together, the clouds of hot and resinous smoke sort of squeezing out on both sides, heads down and inhaling…it seemed a rather weird sort of party had broken out, and all for the price of five dollars, a sandwich, and an apple, and a cup of fairly shit coffee from some corner milk store…most of these people were strangers to me.

His girlfriend was really something too. A kind of strawberry blonde, I still recall her name, I remember her walking down the halls in tight jeans and a tight sweater. She had small, natural, high-mounted breasts…it’s like I never really forget a girl or woman that really interested me. That one interested me.

The really interesting thing is that for fifty bucks worth of hash you had to sell ten tickets to cover your costs, and I reckon he had a few people more than that. If he was buying it by the ounce, his costs were lower still, admittedly, it was no way of making a living.

Perhaps that wasn’t exactly the point, when you’re just partying.

You’re looking at a fair amount of hash consumed in a pretty short period of time, and I reckon we all got our money’s worth. Yes, Dennis had figured out how to smoke, and how to get high for free. I heard he headed out to California for a while. I have no idea of what happened after that, the name is so generic, an internet search is nothing if not inconclusive. One wonders what the landlord or the neighbours thought of all that, but it was the middle of the day and not all that noisy.

Oh, I’m sorry. What happened after that, is that we went back to school and kept trying to finish our grade twelve.

Heating up for 'hot knives'.

I did mention that I was kicked out a time or two—that was mostly for non-attendance. Taking attendance was one thing the instructors actually did, bearing in mind the federal government and the unemployment folks were paying for these courses.

Fuck, all you had to do was to keep showing up, if nothing else, the government cheques kept a-rolling in, and in the end, a lot of us did finish the fucking course.

Let’s hope the government got their money’s worth.

Honestly, there were times when you showed up, O.J. or whoever took attendance, and at least some of us headed down to the gym for a while, whether shooting a few hoops or maybe a game of badminton. I’ve never played so much badminton in my life, before or since.

It was better than wrestling with quadratic equations, I will say that much.

***

If one must cheat, at least let her be good looking...

Stoney beckoned from the doorway. I was in math class, presided over by the long-suffering O.J. Callahan, more often referred to by the soubriquet ‘the Juice’.

Casually, oh, so casually, I stood up, left my books on the desk, and headed out to see what he wanted. The big difference between high school and college is that they sort of treated you like an adult. If you needed to go to the washroom, you basically just stood up and walked out. He had one of his gaggers, a misshapen joint, rolled with two papers, and knowing Stoney, probably a few seeds and sticks in there as well. That guy never did learn how to roll a joint. Back then, Lambton College was still small, a huddle of concrete masses in a brutalist style. When I started, there were about 800 students all told. Nowadays there are thousands, four or five thousand at least. There was a door on the southeast corner. While in view of the road coming in from Wellington Street, this was at the opposite end from the residence. It was on the other side of the building from the parking lot. There was no one around. We stuck a convenient rock in the door-frame, otherwise we’d be locked out and have to walk around the building to get in again. It was also cold as fuck out there. We puffed our doobie as quick as we could and headed back in.

He had a proposition.

He knew a couple of native girls. I had a car. They wanted a ride to the Kettle Point reservation. I wasn’t too sure about all of this, but the promise of gas money and of course pot was enough to seal the deal. The girls were heading home at lunch time, it was a Friday, and while it would be tight, I figured it wasn’t that far and we’d make it back in time…sort of.

Well, one of the girls was fairly attractive, and the other one perhaps not so much—that one could be Stoney’s right, what with him not being quite so fussy. I also had a girlfriend, we’d been together a while, but she was away at university. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt the relationship. If one must cheat, at least let it be the good-looking one…

Right?

So, we grabbed all our books, coats and hats and piled into the Beaumont, under leaden skies and sideways-blowing snow flurries. One hell of a cold wind coming off of Lake Huron, that was for sure. We were up front and the girls in the back seat. A quick stop at the beer store on Mall Road, and we headed out on the highway, turning off at Lambton 30, the Oil Heritage Road. At Highland Glen, a right turn onto the lake road, Lambton 7, and it’s like fifteen miles to the rez. I reckon they knew Stoney’s game by now, although they each took a beer and sipped at it, as slowly as possible as generally speaking, ladies prefer not to piss in a ditch…everybody knew Stoney’s game by now.

We turn into the rez, make the first left, all the way to the end, then a right turn, finally pulling into a house about halfway to the actual point. I suppose it was barely noon at this point, and there is apparently a party going on—a daytime, possibly even an all-day sort of a party. An all-day, all night, all weekend long sort of party was just getting going.

For all we know, that party may still be going, ladies and gentlemen.

Stoney and I are sitting on a couch, the ladies know pretty much everyone. We don’t know anyone at all, but guys are pulling out joints, bags of pot, and we do have our case of beer, which was enough of an introduction as it seemed. We’d just driven somebody’s sisters home, which was not exactly a safe-conduct pass…

The rez.

At some point the girls disappeared…Stoney and I are sitting around drinking beer and smoking pot with a bunch of young native guys. It was all friendly enough, no one was giving us trouble, but my instinct was that we weren’t getting too far with the ladies, and maybe it was time to go. We handed out a few beers, took the rest of the case and headed on back to Sarnia.

Stoney would most likely try again another day, as for myself, I didn’t much care—I was there on sheer speculation, and I did have a regular girlfriend. I used to go up to Guelph on the weekend, and she came home for holiday weekends. Stoney was always on the prowl.

And we rolled up into the college parking lot trailing a big cloud of pot smoke, about one-thirty in the afternoon. Counting up the remaining beers, it seemed we had drank eleven beers each, in fact, we’d stopped in Forest on the way home, and grabbed up another twelve-pack.

The really hard part, of course, was going back to class.

I had already been kicked out once or twice, so all I could do was to sit there and stare at the book, sort of regretting the fact I hadn’t eaten anything all fucking day, and that was a hell of a lot of beer. Stoney had taken off somewhere else.

That was kind of a wasted day, with nothing to show for it but a bit of a headache, one that would almost surely turn into a hangover by next morning.

I never did see that gas money.

Sometimes it just doesn’t seem worth it.


END


Louis has books and stories available from iTunes.

See his works on Fine Art America.

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.)

My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen.

 

Thank you for reading and listening.

 

 

 


Monday, November 27, 2023

My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen. The New Highway. Louis Shalako.

 

Mine was a dark blue, with steel rims and baby-moon hubcaps. Not quite so cool...







Louis Shalako


The new highway. The first time Johnny and I became aware of the new highway, the project had barely gotten started. We were heading north on a gravel side-road, in his full-size Dodge cargo van. He’d paid about $1,500.00, it had a six-cylinder engine and three speeds forward, with the gear shifter on the steering column. I drove the thing, and the brakes were four-wheel drums, and the steering wheel a large, skinny plastic thing.

The clutch was heavy, and over time, your left leg would end up bigger than the right leg…this in spite (or because), of a brake booster. You didn't need to push nearly so hard on the brakes, that's what I'm saying. The steering was pure manual.

Judging by the remains of a red stripe around the mid-line of the vehicle, it was part of a fleet owned (or previously owned), by a local leasing company. Vans were popular, this one had been customized inside, and it was a big step up from the Cricket. Yes, Johnny had a bed and everything in the back…

It was getting dark out, we’d had a couple beers anyways, a doobie or two maybe. And there it was. This big, double lane cut through the forest and the bush-lots behind the farms along London Line, otherwise known as Highway 22. Back then, the legal age for drinking was 21 years of age, and this is where we learned to cruise the back roads.

It must have been in the newspaper, but the highway was actually built in short sections. This one was all mud, heavy equipment, road graders parked here and there, stacks of metal culvert, piles of sand and gravel. They had the basic soil profile, with two long flat strips for paving and a total of three ditches, one on each side and one up the middle…

At one time, the 402, a multi-lane divided highway, used to end at the city limits. Traffic was dumped onto good old London Line, through the Golden Mile, four lanes, two-way traffic, a commercial strip on the city limits, and then it was two lanes, or three with a central, two-way passing lane, all the way to London, sixty miles down the road. The building and completion of the 402 was a big thing for its time, and here we were, bumping across it on some kind of extended crop tour, and the night was black as pitch.

Johnny's was an old leasing vehicle, with a few miles on the clock.


That middle passing lane on what is now London Line, was the scene, and the cause, of many head-on collisions over the years, and at some point that thing had to go. Up north, a short section of similar roads will have passing for northbound traffic, and then the next centre lane section has passing for southbound traffic, and hopefully, never the twain shall meet…although it probably does still happen.

***

The first new section of the highway was open. The second new section was more or less complete…but not yet open. I pulled onto the ramp, slowed it to a stop. My girlfriend hops out, pulls aside one or two big orange traffic cones and I pull the MGB through the gap. She pulls the cones back into position. She hops back in, closes the door and we are off down the curving ramp, onto a big, beautiful, brand-new highway that is absolutely deserted. The top is down, we are in love, it is a beautiful, sunny evening and in a moment, she’s got the wine out. A twist of the wire, a pull on the cork, and the bubbling, sparkling cheap-ass wine blows the cork off into an eighty mile per hour slipstream.

The cork is gone, I caught a quick glimpse in the mirror, of it bouncing down the road, but we aren’t likely to need it again anyhow.

After some hour, the construction workers have gone home, at some point, it is a weekend, a holiday. We were trespassing, considering potential hazards, dangerous driving, speeding, disobeying detours…alcohol, marijuana, the girlfriend in a sun dress with no bra and no panties, kicking off her sandals and shifting up that dress, a hot and naked girl, my finger inside her wet pussy as she went down on me, well. I guess you could say it was pretty much all illegal.

Worth every minute of it, one has to admit—but still plenty illegal.

In that sense, we really were criminals.

We were also having the time of our lives…

***

Image Credit.

Willy had married his childhood sweetheart at this point, Trina was six months pregnant when they got married, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, which was legally permissible without the parents’ permission…

The four of us were cruising in his dad’s 1975 Chevy Impala station wagon, upon which he’d mounted a pair of Mean Mother Magnums, 800-watt spotlights, more normally associated with bush trucks and Australian poachers jacking ‘roos at night in the outback.

We were on the way home from a very long tour, a crop-tour, with plenty of wine, doobies, all kinds of sexual foreplay and other kinds of provocation of a womanly kind, and somehow I woke up in the driver’s seat. One guy can drive, his wife or girlfriend on the seat beside him, and the other guy and female person can fuck in the back end. We didn’t have too many inhibitions back then.

Willy, was asleep in the seat beside me, and the two ladies were snoring quietly away in the back seat. This is when I realized that I was driving.

Fuck—

I sat up a little straighter. I pushed the button and lowered the window in the tailgate to get a little oxygen through there.

I had no idea of how we had gotten there…

I have no idea of how we survived that last fifteen or twenty kilometres, I have no idea of when we switched seats, the only thing that probably saved us was the fact that we must have gotten onto the new, empty, deserted highway…those big fucking lights blasting away from the front bumper. Also the fact that the road was mostly straight. What was really food for thought, was the one or two kinks in the road. Even on the dead straight sections, it really was some kind of a secular miracle.

It was a boat, with a 350 cubic inch engine and a few power accessories.

Just past Warwick, westbound, I pulled off down the ramp, ah, I think Highway 21. The Forest road. With no one to help, I put it in park and pulled the traffic cones out of the way. Back in the vehicle, people were still asleep. Rather than get back on the highway, for the next section was now open, I took it north and followed Michigan Avenue back into town. This was better than a major highway, and let’s be honest. People had phones and truckers had CB radios back then, and sooner or later, someone is going to call it in: those crazy teenagers driving on the new highway again…surely someone must have remarked upon it.

Once or twice, we saw other folks out there, farmers or other young people. We just ignored each other.

It was a good thing Burger King was open late back in those days, or we might have starved to death…just an observation, ladies and gentlemen.

If you don’t believe in resurrection, you should see people sort of wake up and sit up and look around them when you tell them that you’re home, and is there anything in particular you want from the drive-through…???

Oh, and do you guys have any money on you.

***

I was heading out of town, not going anywhere in particular. It was a dark, wet, autumn evening. I had a few joints, most likely, and a cold six-pack of something sitting on the passenger seat beside me. I was driving my 1967 Beaumont, which sounds cool. It had a certain body style, although nowhere near as desirable as a Chevy II S.S. The thing is, you could sort of use the body to build one—assuming you had money. It would be a fake Chevy II, still desirable for all of that, especially with a 327 cubic inch V-8 and a four speed Muncey transmission and a Hurst shifter…

Mine had a six cylinder engine, and a two-speed automatic, shiny (and very slippery) vinyl seats. Bias-ply tires, mostly bald, and baby-moon hubcaps.

The radio was on and a song was playing…All of My Love.

I had never heard it before. It had a plaintive, sad kind of vibe to it, and furthermore, I know that voice—I know that guitar. Fuck, I knew those drums. Convinced, I turned it up a bit, cruising along at about 65 mph, and when the song ended, the on-air personality told us that John Bonham, the drummer for Led Zeppelin, had passed away and it was all very sad.

I smoked a joint, drank a couple of beers and headed on home.

It was the end of an era, really.

Those days would never come again.

***

One day the highway was open. I was alone in the MGB, eastbound on the 402. I took it up, holding the pedal right to the floor. Traffic was light, the road was dry and the car took a bit of time…finally, we’re going over a hundred miles per hour or forty miles per hour over the limit. At about 106 mph, the engine starts to knock and it was time to shut her down…

Fuck.

She blowed up at about 106 mph...

I humped it over farm fields and ditches, and through the woods to a farmhouse along London Line, where the people graciously allowed me to use their phone.

Of course. The first question my old man asked was, ‘did you check the oil?’

Well, that’s dad for you. It had all kinds of oil, although the oil pump may have been on the way out. It is also true I had been running it pretty hard. Basically, I had ‘spun a bearing’, and when I took the thing apart, sure enough, the little curved pieces in the oil pan were paper-thin. The block and the crank were fine, but sometimes it’s cheaper just to find a used motor somewhere than doing a major rebuild.

This, is why we pulled an old ’69 MGB, up, and out, it was literally sinking into the ground in a backyard along Pine Street. The roof was collapsed, the bottom of the vehicle sitting on the ground and the wheels stuck in holes of their own. I used to see that thing all the time, walking over to Pete’s Variety at the East Street Plaza.

For fifty bucks and a bit of labour—a stout rope and my old man’s Volvo, a bit of air in the tires, I got another engine block, a transmission, and that aluminum hood. They even had the ownership, which is important. I stripped that thing down to nothing and then had it towed for scrap.

But that, as they say, is a story for another day.


END


Louis has books and stories available from Barnes & Noble.

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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.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due to content.)


Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

Author’s Note. Chapter 12 was difficult to write, not so much from the technical aspects of writing, but from the emotional standpoint. I also sort of knew I had to do it—for reasons which are difficult to explain or even justify. I was lower than a sidewinder’s belly at the bottom of Death Valley for a couple of days beforehand. Writing it seemed to help, and then again, the day after, I was literally in tears a couple of times, perhaps for myself. Perhaps more so for all those other victims, most of them a lot more serious than my own experience.

 

#Louis