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| The three killers, ladies and gentlemen... |
Louis Shalako
Jail, and killers. It was in 2003 when I found myself
in jail, for the first and only time in my life.
As one might imagine, the experience was extremely
educational.
A bit of background. I had bought my Great Aunt’s
house in the south end. She was in an old age home, and my Aunt Sharon
suggested I put in an offer. My mother encouraged me as well.
The house wasn’t even on the market, but she’d been in
the old age home for over a year, and it was clear she wasn’t getting out—she
wasn’t coming home, ever again. I hadn’t been there three weeks when I knew
there was a problem. The neighbour was already showing his true colours. The
one guy on my right side was the instigator, and the guy who lived to my left
was his work buddy, in fact an employee. I was on disability. Unfortunately for
me, I could still walk, I could still talk. Quite frankly, it was too bad I
didn’t die, it would have made things a lot easier for everybody else.
The problem was pain,
ladies and gentlemen. I’d fallen through a scaffolding, May 4, 1989, working on
a building in Hamilton, Ontario. Some guys had been asked to clear a bunch of
stuff off the roof. Like the dangerous fools that they were, they yelled to look out down below, and proceeded to
throw all these scaffolding frames and cedar planks off of the top of a
six-story building. As one might imagine, they were fired on the same
afternoon. The construction company, what with being a bunch of cheap pricks
and all, kept the planks, and one of them split as I was walking across it. This
is where I failed to fall to my death, ladies and gentlemen.
There were a few brothers. The one guy who did not get
fired was Mike, who was not there that day. Mike was in court that day. Mike
was out on bail, on a homicide beef, this guy had a wife and a kid living
downtown. I heard later he was convicted, after all these years, he is probably
out by now…
There I was, living on a $930.00 per month Ontario
Disability Support Program pension, and I’ve just bought a house, and the
fucking neighbour didn’t like it—
That is all I can figure there, it makes as much sense
as any other explanation.
I lasted four years, with intermittent but persistent
harassment from more than one neighbour. When I moved in, I weighed two hundred
and ten, two hundred and fifteen pounds. When I moved out, I weighed one
hundred seventy-eight pounds…I was riding my bike back and forth to the food
bank, I was visiting my old man, now retired, mostly for the purpose of
watching his TV, drinking his tea and coffee, and yes, bumming his smokes.
When I went home, he’d let me take a few slices of
bread, all buttered up with margarine and a tin of soup or something, a handful
of tea bags…a half a dozen cigarettes.
Over the course of those four years, people would bang
their fists on the side of my house when coming and going. People followed me
around, more than once. On one occasion, driving my dad home from a place
uptown, after he’d had one too many drinks, a familiar vehicle came up behind.
Recognizing me somehow in the darkness, they proceeded to make mock ramming
attacks at the back end, and when a Sarnia cop accidentally observed this
behaviour, she pulled me over—not
them.
“And what did you do to provoke them, Mister Shalako.” What a stinking whore,
ladies and gentlemen.
I’m convinced, only the presence of my old man asleep
on the passenger seat saved me from a quick and dirty little roadside
execution, and yes, that sounds an awful lot like paranoia.
Some little prick put toast in my mailbox. They put
toast in the front and back screen doors, they put toast on every window ledge.
What message were you trying to send?
I’m toast? You’re going to burn my house down while
I’m sleeping some night?
But that’s what I was up against.
 |
| "Who made this diagnosis...???" |
When I complained to the police about the neighbour’s
harassment, they took me to the loonie bin for three days of observation.
When I wrote letters to the editor complaining about
criminal harassment, they were never published, and in the end, the cops came
around and took me to the loonie bin again…admittedly I was terribly depressed
by this time, but even so.
And when my goofy little neighbour accused me of
criminal harassment, the cops promptly arrested me and tossed me in the bucket.
I was accused of taking his photograph while him and the other neighbour were
illegally dumping behind a local department store, where I had pulled in to
answer a call—from my mother, who had given me a cheap flip-type cell-phone, in
the rather forlorn hopes that I wouldn’t feel so isolated, so vulnerable to
these creeps. Who was I going to call?
Certainly not the Sarnia police, that is for sure,
ladies and gentlemen.
That was a quick road to hell, in my experience.
Just for the record. Yes, Willy and Squiggly, and
Buddy Two-Shoes and Zoomer were in and out of my house. McNuggets offered to
set up a grow-op, and was seriously disappointed when I said no. I said no,
ladies and gentlemen. I wasn’t willing to risk my fucking house and my fucking
pension over it—and social services fraud is a serious offence. That was my
thinking, of course guys like that didn’t understand it. They’re guys with nothing to lose.
I still thought I did
have something to lose.
I guess maybe I still had a lot to lose.
I had gotten so hungry, so desperate, that I started
working for my brother, two hours here, four hours there…I had some hopes that
this would get the creepy neighbours off my back, naturally they just assumed
it was all more criminal stuff, or something. Like when I scraped up every
nickel and every dime, after six or eight months of ten bucks an hour, and
bought myself a little General Motors S-15, a club-cab, V-6 little pickup
truck.
When I asked the ODSP for the proper forms to report
income as a business, they started in
and I endured two and a half years of bureaucratic harassment from them…
It just went on, and on, and on. They didn’t want to
give me the proper forms, they wanted me to use the little thingy that comes in
the mail, where there is no provision to claim allowable deductions for things
like mileage, tools, work clothes. In my mind, all of this shit was somehow related, but of course there was no way
in hell to prove it, and no one else was ever going to investigate it.
 |
| Letters to the editor ain't going to help you. Left, the county bucket, right, the courthouse. |
You can write letters to the editor all day long, no
one cares.
So. In documents submitted to the court by Sarnia Police,
it was stated that I was ‘paranoid and delusional, dangerous and out of
control, and an unexploded bomb waiting for a chance to happen’. In other
words, just plain bullshit, and yet it does have a way of taking away all
credibility, any realistic hope for defense against a charge that was already
pretty bogus to begin with.
The judge asked who had made this diagnosis.
I yelled, “My fucking neighbour, that’s who—”
And they all laughed, and the court moved on…
It cost me a couple of grand in legal fees. I sold my
house and moved back in with my old man. During the nine months I was out on
bail, I suffered anxiety attacks, real bad ones, which I had never suffered
before, and I have never suffered since. I was afraid to go anywhere alone, for
fear of running into Mr. K, my name for this fucking goof, and having him make
a hurried phone call to the Sarnia cops and I just felt so defenseless.
Truth is, he didn’t even have to see me around—but luckily, he didn’t have the nerve just to
make something up, which would have worked well enough at this point. His worry
there would be that I might be
sitting around a dinner table, with a bunch of people the cops couldn’t
marginalize, and then his own bullshit story would have begun to unravel.
Hell, even the cops aren’t that stupid. Seriously,
they might have caught on. In about a million years.
Otherwise, I would have been back behind bars in a
heartbeat. I have no illusions about this piece of human filth having any kind
of a conscience. I know better than that, and that goes for the cops, the
courts and the social workers as well. Even my so-called psychiatrists weren’t
even half the man I was, and quite frankly, there was no hope they would ever
become so. If that sounds like sour grapes, well. Why not? What else did you
expect?
You still expect me to like you, after all of this bullshit. It’s just like that scene in Catch-22…yeah, you’re just trying, ever
so hard, to help me.
 |
| Just a crummy little truck. It was all held against me, of course. |
I had no rights at all, and that is especially true
once the cops have transported you to the loonie bin once or twice. Talk about
insidious. Trust me, those guys really know what they’re doing when they set
out to destroy, absolutely destroy someone…
So, the police take you out of their holding cell, and
take you to the county bucket. You are processed, where I was inspired enough
to mention the word ‘suicide’, and why not?
I was pretty depressed by this point, and they stuck
me in the hospital wing of four cells.
It was later that evening when they brought in Nick.
Nick and two of his brothers had beaten a man to death in the south end of this
city over some kind of a drug debt.
He was in the cell to my right…he was tall,
well-built, long dark hair, and a warrior in some sense. These guys have never recognized the Crown. Can’t say as I
blame them, on some level…
Three days later, it’s time for a bail hearing. They
take you through a tunnel over to the court house, and into a holding cell with
six or seven males in there…there’s a red-haired, blue-eyed guy, not all that
unusual for a native guy, and this is another one of the brothers—he’s
eyeballing me, sitting there on a bench, and he’s walking up and down the cell.
Not a happy man, right. I had run into another guy that I actually knew, and we
just kept talking to each other.
We’re trying to ignore this creep, who has some kind
of burr under his saddle, and this is when the guards bring in the third
brother. This guy is clearly native, Ojibwe, and he’s huge. Maybe not as tall
as me, but holy, fuck, he’s three feet wide across the shoulders, he’s got legs
like tree trunks, his chest gives the impression of being a foot and a half
deep, front to back—you do not want to tangle with that guy. This is the third
brother, all of them held in custody at various institutions, depending on
where and when they were picked up. Let’s say one brother goes to trial first.
Realizing he’s sunk, he cops a plea to a lesser charge, and off he goes to
jail. The second brother comes to trial, and realizing he’s sunk, he also
pleads to a lesser charge. This may sound pretty hard on the third brother, as
they were all involved…and yet, they are also the only ones who know what really happened out there that night.
Their lawyers may have talked back and forth, and while they were brothers,
self-interest will also play a role. It always does—
So now, you’re in a holding cell with three killers.
 |
| Hiyee. Welcome to my court, where all are equal under the law. |
With a good lawyer, I made bail. So did Gibby, my new
buddy, and holy fuck, the next nine months were pretty bad. I sold my house,
paid off my aunt, and ended up with $27,000.00 in my pocket, which wasn’t much
consolation. All that really did was to drive the ignorant bitches downtown at
the ODSP into a real frenzy of applied cruelty and quite frankly, these days I
don’t talk to the fucking social workers any more than I have to.
I don’t have any good reason to talk to the cops.
Maybe if I saw a house on fire, or a terrible accident, but it would have to be
a good reason.
The last time I called the cops, I got nothing but
shit out of it—we had a problem child in the building, a guy who pounded on
things endlessly, and yet they never seemed to do much about it. Even the
landlord didn’t do much about it. Fuck, I saw a vacant unit in the building and
moved out from under the guy, and that is just the facts.
I did call the cops once, more recently—I would have
preferred not to give my name, but with the modern cell-phone, you don’t have
much choice if you do decide to call. Some guy, all addled up on strong dope
and probably not taking his anti-psychotic meds was having some kind of an
episode and I sort of felt I had no choice. I called it in, and pulled out of
my parking spot, and got the hell out of there—if the cops are going to shoot
some fucker in a bank lobby, at least it isn’t going to be me, ladies and
gentlemen.
Owning a home was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for
me, and I will never get a chance to own a home again. Basically, this
individual and I entered into a ‘bond at common law’, a so-called peace bond.
The charge was withdrawn, and that was it, everyone was happy but me.
Like I said—it was all very educational.
As for having a little money, all you can do is ‘spend
it down’ as best you can, all the while remembering that the ODSP can hit you
with an ‘overpayment’, in which case, now you owe them a substantial sum of
money, and in the end, you realize that the whole system is stacked against
you.
After all of this, I went into the worst depression of
my life. It went on for about a year and a half…the first thought I had upon
waking up was I have to kill myself.
The last thought that went through my head when I went to bed at night was I have to kill myself.
That is one hell of a way to live, ladies and
gentlemen. If suicide, or attempted suicide, or threats of suicide are
redirected aggression, and it probably is—yes, ladies and gentlemen, I really
wanted to kill that little piece of shit, and one or two Sarnia cops as well. I
had fantasies of driving my vehicle up the steps and into the front lobby of
Sarnia Police Services, and make them kill me—suicide by cop, as it is called.
I have no idea, some years later, of how I managed to
get real again. At some point it was over, and I could live again. I could
breathe again…
Want to know something funny? I have no criminal
record. For one thing, I wasn’t going to knuckle under to the likes of them,
and secondly, my good name means a lot to me.
Take it or leave it.
It is what it is.
Going back to the quote at the end of the previous
chapter, whether that’s accurate or not, I really can’t say. However, I have,
absolutely for sure, rubbed shoulders with four genuine killers in my lifetime.
That’s more than enough for me, thank you very much.
I guess I've rubbed shoulders with a few malignant little assholes as well.
END
Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.
See his art on Fine
Art America.
Check out One Million Words of Crap, an audio essay on
independent, digital publishing, in celebration of fourteen years here at Long
Cool One Books.
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.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Nineteen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-One
My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Two.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Three.
Thank you for reading, and listening.
