Game of Fools. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

This is a not-so-funny story which I only just made up.

There are three guys sitting around a table in the county bucket. Everything is all bolted down in a jail.

The first guy says, “When I got picked up, I had over nineteen thousand in cash, cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and three knives, and a set of nunchucks.”

The second guy says, “That’s cool. When I got picked up, I had forty-seven thousand in fentanyl, five or ten in coke, twelve-hun in cash, brass knuckles, and a loaded pellet pistol.”

The third one says, “Ha! That’s nothing. When I got picked up at the Bluewater Bridge, I had fifty keys of methamphetamines and thirty semi-automatic pistols, all Glocks and Colts and Rugers…”

The other two guys are pretty quiet for a minute.

The first guy finally says, “Yeah—yeah. That’s pretty cool.”

The second guy nods. “Yeah—cool, man.”

The funny part is, they really do think it’s cool—even though every one of them is looking at some pretty hard time these days.

It’s not ‘catch and release’ anymore, it’s not a slap on the wrist, and anybody that’s fronted you that stuff isn’t exactly happy about losing their money either. You may have to face them, and explain where all the money and dope went. You may have to face your family, your spouse and your kids, out on bail, and waiting to go back to court where your fate will be determined.

There is no such thing as free dope, and it is only a matter of time before you get caught.

The police are gathering criminal intelligence all the time. There are cameras everywhere.

Your own neighbours might get involved and drop a dime. One of your buddies may be facing a little trouble himself, or herself, and one way to keep their own backsides out of jail might be to let them have someone else—you, for example.

You cannot run a household on the proceeds of petty crime. I’ve known people who tried to do it, guys and girls I grew up with. They never succeeded, although they might have had it all right if they were still living in their parents’ basement. They put in more hours in a typical week than any regular worker ever had to. They were constantly on the go, and it was a lifestyle of at least some choice.

Some were also children of abuse or neglect.

I found the obituary of an old buddy. He passed away at the age of 62. Poor guy got into it young. He was a thief already, which kept an energetic teenager in beer, pot, and all the fast food he could eat. All it took back then was a bent coat hanger and a kind of persistence. Or an unlocked door, an open window.

Over the course of time, someone turned him onto speed. After a particularly good score, he must have tried it, liked it, and what started off as an occasional treat, became a daily habit. No one was more impressed than I, when he got himself a job. A real, forty-hour a week job. By then, he had a wife and two kids, and he did stick with it. For a while.

Last time I saw him, he was on a bicycle, probably stolen or even just found by the side of the road. His jaw was going back and forth from side to side, he had one tooth sticking up out of the side of the lower jaw. The rest were mostly gone. The eyes were shifting, even the front wheel was going from side to side in a kind of spastic, involuntary manner.

He was hurting and it was obvious he needed a hit real bad. And the only way to get it was to make some money, the good, old-fashioned way, that is to say by stealing something, almost anything, from somebody else, somewhere.

No one would rent to him, and the bit of welfare he might have gotten was never going to be enough.

Funny thing was, there was always someone, a very lonely woman with a habit, an old buddy, who would take him in. It never lasted, and I reckon he slept on a park bench as often as not—he sometimes lived at the homeless shelter, if he wasn’t too messed up on arrival.

As a young guy, he thought the dope dealers were his friends.

They were the only friends he had—the worst kind of friends.

Selling hard dope is a game for fools.

As for myself, I avoid you people like the plague.

 

END

 

Note. This story is not intended as a commentary on legal bud shops or bud shops on indigenous sovereign lands.

  

Louis Shalako has books and stories available in ebook and audio from Google Play. The Handbag’s Tale is the short story that inspired The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series and is currently free.

The Pusher, Steppenwolf. (Youtube)

Criminal Intelligence. (CBC Aug 18/24)

Images. Top: Morguefile. Lower: free with trial membership from a stock company which I have already forgotten.

Thank you for reading.