My Criminal Memoir, Part Nineteen. Squiggly. Louis Shalako.

Squiggly had his own little system...

Louis Shalako

Squiggly. Squiggly was an interesting character. Another one of those guys who wasn’t a jock in high school, neither was he a sparkling student. I didn’t know him then, but he would have been a little pudgy, yes, thick glasses. Wish-washy blue eyes, frizzy red hair. Very fair. The sort of guy who could get a sunburn on the subway—here’s another one of those guys who always wore long pants. Fuck, it was like Stoney, and Willy to some extent. They’d never taken their shirts off in their entire lives…he would have wheezed under physical stress. Stoney had effeminate mannerisms with his hands, and that sort of spastic effect, which made his badminton so odd—unpredictable, and he did win the odd one…Willy walked with a swagger he’d never quite earned.

Squiggly wasn’t quite that bad, not being interested in fake personas.

Squiggly was the kid who always knew where to get dope. And knowing where to get dope, plus some small financial sense, meant he got into selling pot, and he did that all through high school. A guy like that shows up for school, he’s got a quarter pound of Columbian or Mexican or something at home—that’s like a whole hundred and fifty bucks at the time, eh. He’s got two or three quarters on him, and some smaller packages, eighths and grams and stuff like that.

There’s more than one way to be popular in high school, and he’d obviously figured that much out somewhere along the way…a quick study in that sense.

He’s always got a few joints rolled up and stuck in his cigarette pack. It’s all too easy to step off the school property, where all the cool kids smoked, and dispose of all that dope even before lunchtime.

Then, of course, there are those who will show up at his place, at lunchtime—then it’s back to school for the afternoon shift, and then there’s all those folks coming around after school. Last time I saw Squiggly, he had a little oxygen tank sitting beside the couch. There was like a plastic tube and a nose-clip. But Squiggly was also smart enough to have a job. He was an insulator, but what probably killed him, if he isn’t still alive, would be the asbestos removal. It pays well, but the life expectancy isn’t very good, ladies and gentlemen. Squiggly had a brain, and I was at his house, two or three times a week, buying an eighth for thirty-five dollars, and it was, for the most part, all the same weed. Good quality, flavour, tight, sticky stuff that had to be cut up with scissors. And of course we talked.

At some point, you begin to regard such people as friends.

So, he had the construction type job for months on end. In winter, he had pogy, unemployment insurance, coming in at a decent rate; much better than some guy on minimum wage. He lived in his parents’ basement, which was nicely fixed up, with his own bathroom and a living room, a bedroom. He didn’t have to make his living from dope sales. He didn’t have to live entirely on his pay, either, and the expenses were certainly manageable.

This guy nickeled and dimed it all over town for over thirty years. As long as you’re not drinking and driving, and Squiggly was a good driver, you can get away with it for a very long time. Yeah, him and Lady Di, a kind of platonic girlfriend. The girl next door, there might have been something there at one time, but they were just good friends now. She’s even married some other guy, and had a kid, separated, widowed, divorced, whatever.

Nothing blends in quite like a shit little car.

There were times though, when his driveway had six or seven vehicles in it. The basic rule was that you had to stay for at least half an hour, and there were times, fucking payday or whatever, when there was quite the little group, quite the little party going on in Squiggly’s basement. The idea was not to run in and out, and yet people inevitably did it. The idea was not to leave some dumbass that Squiggly didn’t know sitting in the car in the driveway for half an hour at a time, but that also inevitably happened…there is a lesson here, I am sure.

It was always interesting to open up the back door and his elderly mother is sitting at the kitchen table, beaming sort of maternally at you as you turned and went down the stairs. She really was a sweet old lady—probably had seen it all by now, what with two older sons cast from a similar mold. One of them older brothers might have spotted him that first ounce, come to think on it.

Fuck, none of us were exactly young, at this point. I would have to have been in my early forties by this time, and we were all mostly of an age.

I was tempted to leave Squiggly out of this memoir. But there came a time when he and a couple of other guys cut me off—they just cut me off. I’ve never been entirely sure what that was all about, but paranoia, good, old-fashioned paranoia probably played a role.

I know this sounds crazy, but I was always talking about writing books. This was my big ambition in life. McNuggets was damned ignorant when I mentioned The Trailer Park Boys and writing, not so much about great train robberies or even murder, but basically small-town stuff…small town punks, essentially. McNuggets was damned threatened by the very idea itself. (Well, your worst fears have been confirmed now, eh.) But Squiggly was amused enough when I told him about my idea for a World War One memoir, sort of inspired by Snoopy versus the Red Baron.

(Heaven Is Too Far Away, by Louis Shalako. Available from many fine online platforms. – ed.)

I borrowed books from Squiggly. His old man had served on light cruisers and escort carriers during World War Two. What do you give a veteran for Christmas? Another fucking book on World War Two, ladies and gentlemen. That’s what you give them. It’s better than another bottle of aftershave. Well, the family had a whole shelf of them, down in the basement. One wonders if that did not become somewhat tiresome, after a while, veterans must get sick of it all at some point.

One day in the early 2000s, I pulled out of Squiggly’s driveway there, right on Indian Road, a busy thoroughfare. I went south, made a left and cut through the subdivision. I ended up on Confederation Street going east. I was headed out to see a guy about a derelict MGB which was out in front of their place of business. The guy had a small company running school buses at the time, their yard was fenced, but here is this MGB, no roof, mostly intact, rotting into the ground, and of course I had seen it when going by.

I was prepared to offer five hundred dollars, and I still am, if only for the parts and their resale value…

I was probably carrying an eighth, but the cop didn't really ask.

This fucking cop gloms onto me…he was right there, just around the corner. He followed, real close for a while, getting my license number probably. He dropped back. He made the same turns I did. After a while, he’s five hundred metres back, but I know fucking well he’s following me. Finally, he zooms up, pulls me over, way the hell out in the rural part of the municipality. I am stopped by the side of the road…what’s weird, is that with his lights flashing, the guy parks three hundred and fifty feet back. He comes walking up, visible in my mirror, with that fucking gunfighter walk…it’s like this measly prick thinks he can make me run for it.

I mean, seriously, he parked three hundred fifty feet back. I know fucking well he’s had time to arrange for a backup…for pursuit. Right?

He looked at my license, my insurance, all that sort of shit. I asked him why he had stopped me, I sure as hell wasn’t speeding or anything—I’d seen him coming, after all.

Suspicious vehicle in a school zone, he says. And then he let me go—he had nothing and he knew it.

And then I went to check out the MGB. I did not buy it, or it would be safer to say the guy wouldn’t sell it. I can’t recall the name, but this guy had a two-tone, blue Austin-Healey, whether that be the 100-6 or the 3000, I can’t quite recall. I’d seen it around. He was a little patronizing, but such folks are busy enough as it is.

The thing is, I told Squiggly, and others, about this little incident. I guess that was my mistake.

The other thing is, methamphetamines were all over the news. This was back when it was news, if you take my meaning—there are new, even worse drugs all over the news now, including all the usual suspects like fentanyl and oxy-whatever. Right? I recall mentioning it…truth is, I was all against it. And I still am, right.

So, all of a sudden, I am persona non grata, just like that.

Some months later, Squiggly and Peanuts are in the paper. They’ve been busted, going down the road, in Squiggly’s little Ford Tempo. According to the newspaper clipping, which I probably still have in my files, the police seized marijuana, cocaine, oxycontin, cash, methamphetamines, stolen credit cards…and stolen cell-phones.

Peanuts had the more extensive record, in fact I reckon the cops wanted him real bad. They both did some stiff time for that, about four years for Peanuts and two and a half for Squiggly. That must have been a bit of a shock for Squiggly. He might have been busted for possession as an underage offender, which would have resulted in a fine and a couple of years on probation.

I don’t know for sure, but he might have been popped for possession as an adult, which would be a hell of a lot better than trafficking, even though, even at the time, the cops probably knew enough about him. Once he made bail, he probably didn’t do another minute in jail—just a fine and more probie, as they call it.

The truth is, Squiggly was a likeable guy—he had a million friends.

I’m just not one of them, but that was his choice, and not mine so much—

Funny thing is, Squiggly is one of the few old ‘friends’ that I still miss.

Ye olde triple-beam scales, stolen from many a high school science class.

***

He had more than one source of income on the side. It sounds crazy, but he had his own baseball league. He organized it, he arranged for the time on the municipal baseball diamonds. He wrote up the schedule, refereed the games. He did everything. But if it takes nine or ten people to make up a baseball team, and if each of them pays a mere ten dollars, and if there are five, or six, or seven or eight teams, each playing one or two games a week, then everybody’s having fun and getting their ten dollars’ worth. With a high-school friend working at the parks department, it wasn’t all that hard to work his own (free, no diamond fees), sort of schedule around the established schedules for all the other local minor leagues.

What does Squiggly get out of it? He gets to hold the money for the season. I showed up at his place one morning and he was trying to figure out a schedule. He was making notes in an exercise book, a book full of names, phone numbers, team lists, all that sort of thing. And he had a big stack of cash, fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars. A guy like Squiggly could do a lot, backed up by an additional two thousand dollars, cash on hand, all ready for whatever opportunity might arise. Also, Squiggly would bring a few quarters of pot to the games…all those names, all those people, and if someone had a cooler of beer in the back of the car, no one made a big thing about it.

Knowing Squiggly, he would have it all thought out and by the way, it’s two bucks a beer. A dollar for a can of pop for the kids, probably—knowing Squiggly.

So, at the end of the year, Squiggly has a few small trophies engraved, he has to throw a barbecue in the back yard, with a few cases of beer and a few packs of buns, wieners, hamburgers on the grill. Some condiments. He gets to make a speech, hand out the trophies, and whatever is left of the cash was all his at this point—

Let’s hope he liked baseball, he sure as hell got enough of it.

Maybe he just liked people, eh.

***

Here’s a guy with time to kill, at least when he’s not working or selling dope. No baseball in the wintertime. Where he got the idea, I don’t know, but all of a sudden, he’s on the internet, he’s on Ebay.

He’s selling tobacciana—tobacco memorabilia.

And yes, there really is such a thing.

He’s going to local auctions, estate sales, and specializing in the two-dollar lots. A box of stuff from some old house, and he must have found an interesting tobacco tin—and then he must have looked it up on the internet.

Some of those things are worth real money. Squiggly learned all that, self-taught in every sense of the word. One year, he told me he’d made six thousand dollars selling stuff most people wouldn’t have taken a second look at.

If I had sold six thousand dollars’ worth of ebooks in any given year, I would have been a best-selling author, ladies and gentlemen.

I sold him one or two items myself, when I bought my elderly great-aunt’s house in the south end, and there were definitely a few rare finds in there. The place went back to the forties, after all—last century, not this one. I sold him tobacco tins, my great uncle's pipes, some ceramic figurines, and oddly enough, some hand-made ice fishing tackle. I kid you not.

This guy had a brain in his head, one of a few that actually impressed me.

Seriously.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Kobo.

See his art on ArtPal.

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.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seventeen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eighteen.

 

Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eighteen. Those Little Insecurities. Louis Shalako.

The car for hairy-chested he-men.

 

Louis Shalako

Insecurity. When I was eighteen years old, I was working at Fibreglas Canada. It was in Chemical Valley, a union shop, and my old man, the epitome of fiscal restraint, had co-signed a loan for me at the Polysar Employees Credit Union.

This is how I knew he was proud of me—finally. For however long that might last, and it probably wasn’t all that long, looking back…

The loan was for fifteen hundred dollars, to be paid off at the rate of $75.00 per month over two years.

This is how I got the 1971 MGB which plays such a prominent role in this memoir.

Willy was the most insecure person I ever met, although Stoney might have run a close second with the whole James Bond-slash-Casanova ethos going on there. Some of the real criminals had somehow accepted themselves, which was interesting—the whole lifestyle had become natural to them and they didn’t worry what anyone thought of them anymore.

Poor old Willy had real bad acne as a teenager. He wasn’t real big, he was not an athlete, he wore thick glasses from an early age. The thick and frizzy red hair, parted on the side and piled up on top, swept over in a big slanting wave, did nothing to help. His nickname in elementary school was Fungi, a name he hated and which would provoke a fistfight every time it was used…it was one he could not just let slide, and so the real bullies, who are basically just cowards that are bigger than their victims, knew after a while that they could always provoke him to a fight, a fight which they would almost surely win—especially when there were two or three of them.

Which he surely should have known, but that part didn’t seem to matter.

A more confident person might have been able to control that, or to get over it, but Willy couldn’t.

As a friend, we learn where all the buttons are, and avoiding those buttons becomes second nature after a while. We got along fine—what with all the model rockets, and airplanes, and cars and sailboats and kayaks and stuff. We had our common interests.

When I bought the MG, Willy was still driving his parents’ Chevy station wagon. He’d cracked up their 1973 model. This is how they ended up with a later model of the exact same car…

He and Johnny had borrowed the thing out of the driveway. His mother didn’t drive, his dad was out on the Imperial Sarnia, a small oil tanker plying the lakes for many years, where he was the pump master. He’d be gone for weeks at a time, even when he was home, he was still pump master, so it was a quick visit, one where the man still had to do 12-hour shifts down at the Imperial Oil docks along the St. Clair River. His mother would take a cab to bingo, where she would be until at least ten or ten-thirty p.m.

Willy was showing off, and doing a burnout just down the street and around the corner, he ended up going onto someone’s lawn and smashing into the front porch, there the car hung up and there was just no getting away. Johnny ran home, at first I thought he was joking, but no. No, it was true—

His mother never believed that I was basically just sitting in their living room, watching colour television and cable TV, which we did not have at home at the time. It was probably easier to blame me. Right?

Yes, for two hundred dollars, Willy had bought a motorcycle. It was basically just a power unit, a frame, and all the bits and pieces, wheels, forks, handlebars, clutch and transmission, a handful of cables, from the shop teacher at the old Central Public High School. This was located on East Street back in the day—coincidentally, just across the street from Germain Park and well within walking distance for pretty much all of us.

Hell, even I went there for a while. About three weeks as I recall.

Willy wasn’t stupid, far from it. He put that thing back together, he had it running, and he got his motorcycle license before very long.

Built from parts, all in black.

He was so fucking proud of that thing, he somehow got it over to our house on Christmas Eve, this with ice and snow on the roads. He admitted he’d gone down once or twice, but oh, well, eh.

It was a two-stroke engine. It was a Kawasaki 500 triple, which may have been a marvel of power and efficiency at one time, but he was too impatient to prove himself, to ever bother with properly breaking in the newly-rebuilt engine. With predictable results, in the sense that the rings weren’t properly run in and it puffed a blue, oily smoke that really was excessive.

Willy couldn’t help himself. When he came over to my place, he’d turn from Russell Street onto Bright St, eastbound. He’d pop wheelies—seriously, winding her out for two blocks, jamming on the brakes as late as possible. He’d sit there at the intersection of Bright and East Street, blipping the throttle like it was the World Championship or something and the start flag is all set to drop…

When the road was clear, he’d pop the clutch, do another two or three wheelies, blapping out big clouds of blue smoke all the way, and then do a full-acceleration run, on the 400-block of Bright Street, before jamming on the brakes and pulling up into our driveway.

It was the same thing when he left…here’s this guy, revving the piss out of this horrible old black motorcycle, which was the biggest thing in the world to him. He’s doing a big burnout and popping the front wheel off the ground with every shift, certainly in the lower gears. And the fucking neighbours hated him—and by extension, they weren’t too fond of me either, but no one could control that guy. No one ever talked any real sense into a guy like that, and Willy was no exception.

***

Bob had bought himself a Triumph TR-6, I had the MGB. Willy’s parents finally agreed to co-sign a loan, only two conditions: he had to keep a job, (any job), and it had to be from General Motors and the local dealership.

Willy ended up with a Chevy Vega, which on the face of it, had an overhead cam engine, an aluminum block, and 140 cubic inches. He ended up working at an auto body shop in Petrolia, which sort of justified the need for a car, right.

We were talking cars one day, and he asked why I had bought the MGB. I told him I liked the styling. When you looked out over the hood, you saw the gently rounded hood, the tops of the rounded fenders…the view is very similar to the TR-6, or a Spitfire, or a GT-6, a Fiat Spyder, or any number of cars from the era. My mistake was to tell him it was a like a beautiful woman, and from that point on, the MG was a ‘girl’s car’, but really, it was just a little more civilized than the rather flat-planed TR-6, (which I also liked), and if truth be told, the Vega had all the same styling influences. The Vega had all those same soft curves and fairly good proportions for a small car…none of that mattered to good old Willy. I learned to take it all with a grain of salt with that man.

I had my little girlie car and he had his big, hairy-chested Vega…right.

When I went looking for cars, there were no TR-6s to be had. Also, Bob paid a lot more to get a 1974, he paid $2,995.00 from a car lot somewhere. The TR-6 was narrow, noisy, leaky, and built on a frame. When you went over railroad tracks or hit a bumpy corner, the car would flex, the doors and hood and trunk would rattle, whereas the MGB had a unitized body, a monocoque with small sub-frames, but it was a much stiffer and much more liveable vehicle.

None of this meant anything to Willy, my best friend for many years.

He was the one with the world’s second largest inferiority complex, after all, he was the one with all the little insecurities, sexual or otherwise.

Where one person, such as myself, might be a bit shy around girls and women, guys like Willy took it way the hell in the other direction, thinking that being a lecher was somehow proof of their masculinity.

Fuck, Willy, everybody likes sex—it’s not like you invented it.

In that sense, he had a touch of that same vanity that obviously plagued Stoney, in the dark hours of the night, when surely even he must have had the occasional moment of introspection. He was wildly overcompensating for something. Both of them, really.

More than anything, Willy craved a kind of attention.

***

Bob got himself a pretty nice car, his was in British Racing Green.

In some old documentary, it was said that a well-trained pilot in an inferior aircraft could beat a badly-trained pilot in a superior aircraft. That’s true enough in aerial combat, with the Japanese naval pilots of WW II arriving at the front with less than a third of the hours of training of those who had attacked at Pearl Harbour. While the Japanese Zero was initially superior to the Grumman Wildcat, U.S. pilots were getting hundreds of hours of training. They had learned superior tactics, their planes at least had armour plating and self-sealing fuel tanks. The analogy only goes so far: there were also a hell of a lot more of them.

It is also true that in Formula One and other racing series, drivers have won races in cars that really shouldn’t have won. There was some attrition in the front rows. Some other cars were badly set up, and someone at the rear of the pack had gotten everything just right, including proper pit strategy and a few lucky breaks along the way.

But for Willy, it was not the machine—it was the man, and of course he was referring to himself when he said that. At some point, this is the guy who’s in an Austin Mini, which he’s built up with bolt-on parts to produce a little more power, he’s chasing and trying to pass a BMW M-1, north of Oakville on Appleby Line. Sure, you can catch up on the corners, but then that other driver clearly isn’t an idiot, and it’s not worth stuffing an exotic sports car into a ravine just to impress some young guy in a clapped-out Mini. In spite of the roll cage, reclining bucket seats and four of the Mean Mother headlights across the front…it’s still a piece of shit, Willy.

Yes, Willy was the man, the better man, racing his scruffy Kawasaki 500-triple through a new subdivision, right here in Sarnia, trying to pass his buddy Rick on the inside of a turn, for surely Willy had the guts to beat a brand-new Suzuki GS-1100.  For after all, it is the man that counts…not the machine. There was a real streak of jealousy in that guy, but when he hit a patch of sand and gravel, slid into a fire hydrant and ended up with three steel pins in his ankle, even then I doubt if the man ever really learned anything from it…

All that blue smoke coming out of the engine must have blinded him to the truth. All that vanity got in the way of having a smidgeon of common sense.

***

A few years have gone by. My old man and I are sitting on the front porch, and there’s a familiar roar down at the end of the street…

It’s Willy, in that fucking Mini of his.

Uh, oh, says my old man…here comes Mad Dog.

I had to laugh.

It was a good name for him, and of course he loved it.

Sure enough, he’s racing up through the first two or three gears…approaching the house…cranking the steering wheel to the left, he pulls real hard on the handbrake, the car spins, now going backwards, and it slides to a stop at the curb, in front of our house, and just tucked in behind my old man’s latest Volvo, a 1980 sedan with all the options, including overdrive, a sunroof, leather seats.

Of course the fucking neighbours hated Willy.

What a fucking nut-case.

***

...still trying to outrun Mad Dog Willy somewheres...

Please don’t think I don’t have a few insecurities of my own, because I have, and I did, and I probably still do.

I struggled for years, and I also failed for many years. I failed to even try, for some years. We beat ourselves up for an awful lot of shit, ladies and gentlemen, and while some of what happens to us is within our control, there’s a few things we can’t control, and of course our attitude, towards ourselves, is extremely important. I say that, without being able to explain just exactly how that works, but trust me—it does. It does.

The way we talk to ourselves is pretty important to our overall well-being, and I suppose, in some way, it will be reflected in our results.

One has to wonder just what exactly was going on in people’s heads, sometimes.

So. How did Mad Dog Willy drive that 1974 Chevy Vega?

How do you think he drove it—

And I promise not to bore you to death.

 

 

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. He’s always got something up for free, for example The Handbag’s Tale, the original short story that inspired The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series.

See his art on ArtPal.

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.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seventeen.

 

Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seventeen. A Knock-Out Punch, and the Fence. Louis Shalako.

He went down like a sack of shit...

Louis Shalako

The knock-out punch. Zoom and I were sitting in the basement. I was trying to buy a gram of pot, which was always a bit of a problem back in those days. If a person had money, real money, you wouldn’t be looking for grams, would you—you’d just throw down sixty or seventy dollars and get yourself a quarter bag…

Anyhow, Zoom wasn’t so bad back then. When he was really flush, after a series of good scores, he might get the usual bag of good pot and a case of beer, send out for a pizza kind of thing. He knew, (and he would know), a guy with good amphetamines. Speed, as it was called back then, real clean stuff and he’d buy enough for a few arm-pokes. The real speedos used the quick high and the burst of energy to stay up for days on end, going on a real run of speed, theft, and in the end, in the long hours of the night, doing a bit of house-cleaning before finally nodding off and crashing. And when they crashed, they burned, to the extent that the drug hangover was so bad, the only real cure was to go out and get some more…it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and they were mostly okay with it.

All of that came later for Zoom. It was just an occasional treat, as they say—

So, I finally get my gram, I roll up the obligatory joint to smoke with the guy, who probably has an ounce of dope in his own pocket, but that was Zoom. Zoom took every advantage, and this included his so-called friends. With Zoom, friendship was more of a one-way relationship, and his would-be friends learned to accept that after a while.

All of a sudden, his brother, Buddy Two-Shoes, is pounding away at my back door—and he’s pissed about something. Really pissed. The pair of them still lived just up the street, at least when they weren’t living somewhere else.

Zoom is being accused of stealing Buddy’s stash, whether it be pot, some other kind of dope, or maybe just money. Not that I would put it past him, either one of them really.

It's not my job to judge, right.

Zoom goes up the back stairs in a flash, losing his temper, thinking he’s tougher than Buddy. Zoom was more bully than fighter, more bluff and bluster than anything. He was the larger of the two. The pair of them are fighting on my patio, and on my back lawn, we do have neighbours, and thank Darwin that my old man was at work. I reckon the three of us were like twenty or twenty-two years old…

Buddy had Zoom down on the ground, Zoom was bleeding a bit from a small cut to the face, and Buddy was just kicking at him, Zoom on the ground, rolling from side to side and bawling his eyes out…I mean, Buddy was laying a real beating on his older brother and I had to put a stop to it.

I told him a couple of times. He didn’t listen, and then I hit Buddy.

It was a good hit, a beautiful hit, right to the side of the face and head, and he went right down—hard.

He went down like a sack of potatoes or something, he went down like a ton of bricks.

Zoom is still crying, trying to get up now that he has a chance…and Buddy rolls over, drags himself up to his hands and knees, head down.

This is when I get scared, quite frankly, no one was more surprised by that punch than me, ladies and gentlemen. I have no idea of where that came from, it came out of nowhere, but it has been thrown and now I have to live with the consequences. When he gets up, he’s going to be real angry and about ten times as strong. I know this from experience—

I’m damned if I’m going to take a beating from this guy.

This is when I literally kicked him in the face, throwing him over onto his back again. Poor old Buddy will probably wear the scars on the bridge of his nose, for the rest of his life. The scars left by the laces of the running shoe on my right foot, and it’s a good thing they weren’t work boots either.

Just to compound matters, as he lay flat on his back, arms up around his head and knees up, I dropped to my knees, putting both hands together and giving him a two-handed pile driver, right to the middle of that big fat belly of his. That was what it took—three really good blows, ladies and gentlemen. It’s not like the fights you see on television or in the movies.

Buddy was unconscious. Zoom was still mad, but he didn’t go on the attack, not straight away—I think he was as much in shock as anything else. He’s looking at me, he’s looking at his little brother on the ground…

So was I. I thought with a kind of sickening lurch in the guts that I might have killed poor old Buddy, I really did.

That is one hell of a revelation, ladies and gentlemen.

I nipped over and turned on the back hose, getting some cold water out of there, and then I splashed water all over poor old Buddy-Two shoes, and lifting up his head and gently slapping at the face.

Buddy. Buddy. Wake up, Buddy—

Shit like that, right.

Fuck, finally he came around. I don’t think he remembered much, we sort of had to tell him about it later.

I’ve never hit anyone since, ladies and gentlemen, and that is probably for the best.

***

The fence. For every stolen item, there has to be a customer. For every ten thieves, for any number of thieves, there has to be a fence. In a town of this size, we’re not talking great art heists or jewel thieves disposing of the Pink Panther diamond or the Crown Jewels.

As often as not, it’s not their main source of income, but some people are more likely to buy hot goods, and having bought once, or twice, they might even put in a special order—something Zoom and others tried to fulfill. I’ve done it myself.

Some guy wants a high-end car stereo and speakers for the rear deck, some guy on a bicycle and with a bent coat hanger will try and find one for you. Seriously, if you have the money, or the dope, or maybe the guy just owes you already, and this is one of several options for paying it off…

Someone had to buy all the tools, the box itself, when Zoom and I drove out to a bingo hall on the outskirts of town, this was before legalized gambling casinos and slot machines killed the market for what was originally billed as a game of skill.

I parked and waited in my usual fashion. Zoom was back to the car in his usual fashion, and this one was another problem child: a big, heavy toolbox in the back end of a local contractor’s vehicle, a big, full-size van. I don’t recall the exact company, they come and go, in this small, grimy, northern industrial town, and this was so long ago. It took the two of us, lifting from both ends, to drag that fucking thing across the darkened parking lot and get it into the trunk of the vehicle. Zoom goes back, and grabs a few more things, fuck, extension cords and hammer-drills, some sort of industrial vacuum cleaner and all the hoses…and just literally everything he could get.

We drive to the other end of town, and to my surprise, sell it all off in fifteen minutes, to a guy who shall remain nameless. These are literally used tools, a rusty old toolbox. To be fair, we got so much cash, not all that much, and quarter bag of pot each. It was pretty good pot too, and this is how I got to know these people. At some point, I cleaned a bunch of junk out of my old man’s garage and sold him that too—

I mean, this guy would buy just about anything.

Rotties.

I couldn’t help but note that the wife, a rather hefty native girl, had quite the collection of house plants. She seemed to like plants, and so I asked her about it.

I ended up selling her a bunch of perennials, which I stole, all on my own, and some hanging baskets from the pergola in Germain Park. Fuck, those things were heavy, dragging them home all the way across the park. I got the usual quarter bag of pot and about twenty-five dollars cash, and I can honestly say, I was glad enough to have it…

***

Yeah. Over the years. Zoom came to my front door one day—

He sells me a Nikon 35-mm camera, and I was fortunate to have a couple of twenty-dollar bills in my wallet. So I got a Nikon camera for forty dollars, and then there was the time Zoom sold me a big plastic case with a rechargeable saw, a rechargeable light, there was a fucking charger and a battery in there, and there was a third tool—not a drill, but a screw-gun or something. I had that for years, truth is, I have no idea of what happened to it. For all I know, it was stolen right back again, but my point is that I wasn’t above a bargain myself…

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, when your old man’s four and a half horsepower boat motor disappears, right out of the basement one day, the first person you think of, is good old Zoom. Ditto, when a really beautiful mitre saw, a Christmas present from my mother, is just plain gone one day, and at this point, it is a bit late to make a point of locking the fucking garage door as a major point of religious dogma.

That fucking horse has long since departed.

***

Call for an estimate.

A few of the crew were sitting around Peanut’s house in Petrolia one evening. Peanuts wasn’t a fence, so much as he was a dope dealer. The only problem with being a dope dealer, of course, is all that nice, lovely money coming in—and no way to account for it all, including the fact that you, your girlfriend and her kid live in a pretty nice little Victorian farmhouse, right on the main drag of what is a pretty, but very small little town.

There’s some knocking at the door, the fucking dogs start barking, a couple of Rottweilers, and there are three guys there. I’ve never seen them before in my life, but Peanuts talks to them for a while…I guess he knows them from somewhere, probably from selling them dope of one kind or another.

You see, he’s got a little business, which started off as a front operation, just to sort of help to account for any sort of an income…it’s becoming a success in its own right. He’s got a few so-called employees and they build fences and decks. I don’t know where he got the idea to begin with, but he’s at least got a pickup truck, a post-hole auger and a few other tools. He’s got a phone number and some signs, and people are actually calling him and asking for estimates.

These guys are all coke addicts, of course, and the boys at the door are no different.

No, the only difference there is that they know him. They’ve got a whole pickup truck full of stolen fence and deck boards, they’ve got pressure-treated lumber, four-by-fours of various lengths, and they’re looking to sell. The sort of guys who back up to the fence at a local lumber yard, either hop the fence or cut the wire, and start tossing boards out to their buddies.

Me and Buddy Two-Shoes, Craig-Oh and Peanuts himself go out in the driveway and start humping this shit into the back yard, making sure we put some baulks of timber down and making a nice, neat series of piles of lumber. Yes, we were nothing if not neat, organized, and let’s be honest. If enough of this shit goes on, sooner or later Peanuts is going to get busted, and that’s why it’s wise not to get too involved sometimes. But Peanuts, like Zoomer and so many others is prepared to take any advantage. Buy low, and sell high, right.

Buy low, sell high.

He’s buying the materials at a deep discount, he’s paying in coke, which has a high markup, and not only that, he’s got guys prepared to do the work and take their pay any way they can get it.

If nothing else, it looks like they have a job—and they do, although nothing will ever come of it, and they just keep on, digging their own hole deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

If it keeps the mother-in-law off their backs, so much the better.

On the other hand, Peanuts always had pot, when he went away, he needed someone to look after the dogs, and at the time, people were spending a fair bit of time at his place. Sure, you had to go in first thing and clean up the dog shit, but he would always leave a bit of dope. He had that boat—he had a barbecue, and he had this massive television set, another one of those things, right. I figure he’d accepted that one in payment for some sort of a drug debt, oh, and if the cops asked questions about it, it had never been reported stolen and anything, any other piece of information than that; well, it was none of their business.

He also had a deep freeze full of steaks and hamburgers and that’s always good in a friend.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromAmazon.

See his art on ArtPal.

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.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen.

 

Thank you for reading, and listening.