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.

 

 

Pain is Good.

Mr. Scruffles and the Evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff

Mr. Scruffles and the Evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff

Pain is good.

Pain is part of living.

The author has had some pretty sweet back pain for the last six days.

This is a good thing and I’ll tell you why.

For one thing, this is the first time this year when it’s been really bad. It wasn't always this way. At one time I became addicted to narcotic pain pills. It was for the pain, and the doctor prescribed Tylenol-3, which have 30 mg of codeine per tablet. I was having a lot of problems at the time, and it just went on and on and on...

They also make you high—you’re not supposed to operate heavy machinery and stuff like that, although I was probably roofing or using power tools readily enough at the time. One reason I took the pills was because we all need to make a living, right? Half of the construction workers out there are probably on some kind of pain pill.

So I get a little reminder that I beat the addiction twelve years ago.

One of the things about low back pain is that it’s almost impossible to sleep. Last night was pretty bad. These days, three aspirins and a couple of tall cans of beer is usually enough to kill most pain that I experience.

At some point the aspirin will eat your gut and I can’t really afford to drink constantly. Let’s just say you run out of beer at some point.

Be that as it may, my long term exercise program, the one where I walk in winter, ride my bike and swim in summer, do minor little exercises from time to time, actually works.

Those exercises must actually work, ladies and gentlemen, because this is the first major big outbreak of pain in 2015.

Simple logic at work.

One time, a few years ago, when my old man was still alive, but suffering Parkinson’s, we had a real bad winter. It snowed a lot, and the driveway was about eighty feet long. It took a lot of shoveling, and after a while, my back blew up. I suffered from late November until the first week of January. I can’t describe how frustrating that was, and with the old man basically dying very slowly right in front of my eyes.

My point is that this too will pass, and then we have that contrast. The simple sense of relief is overwhelming. A huge load will have been lifted off my aching back!

I get a little reminder of how lucky I am when I'm not hurting.

A lot of the time, I get out of my car. I stand up straight, and walk confidently, chin and chest held high, into the grocery store to pick up my nineteen dollars and twelve cents worth of food.

And there are times, when people must see that, and question the validity of that little old pension.

That’s okay, because we pay for everything we get in this life.

And don’t knock it until you’re tried it.

Pain, ladies and gentlemen.

It’s not entirely without its uses.

In fact, it’s a wonderful behaviour modifier.

A little bit of pain once in a while might just smarten us up.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be standing waist-deep in that cold Lake Huron water and at about ten o’clock, I’ll be knocking at the front door of the liquor store.

In the meantime, we just have to make it through the night.

END

Publishers Anonymous: my name is John.

Louis Shalako

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is John, and I have a problem.

I am a binge publisher.

It began innocently enough.

I was a social publisher at first. That’s how it starts. At parties, maybe once or twice a year, with a few friends.

It’s insidious. It’s seductive. You get sucked in over time.

You, know, where we’d sit around in our friend’s basement apartment, with their parents thumping around up above, and experimenting with words, and poems, and writing stuff, and ultimately, yes: publishing.

Even now, I don’t consider myself a publishaholic. There may be some level of denial there, but the truth is that I have a problem and that’s why I’m here tonight.

Every so often, it’s like I just can’t stand it any more. It’s like I’ve been on the wagon long enough and it’s time to dive overboard and wallow in it.

My habit.

The monkey on this old back, ladies and gentlemen.

And I’m tired, and I want to go home.

As if you could ever really go back there again, eh?

Oh, yeah, eh. This time I’ve got a whole shit-load of stuff. The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue was published exclusively on Kindle Select Program. After ninety days, I get her back. Then she must be published on Smashwords, OmniLit, Google Books and Google Play, and then it will go into all of those distribution channels. That one is already published in 4 x 7” and 5 x 8” in Createspace and Lulu paperbacks, which doesn’t conflict with the terms of Kindle Select.

My new mystery novel, The Architect of His Own Destruction, will be done in the next few days. I’m not going with Kindle Select on that one. I want the book in all stores, using all distribution platforms, by Christmas. There is some time lag when using Smashwords, and it takes time to filter through. They don’t have real time automatic shipping and distribution as there is an internal human review process. Simply put, they ship on Thursdays, and you need to have it in and vetted on time. The stores at the other end have their own internal time lags.

It's my bag, ladies and gentlemen. It's what I do.

Between the five pen-names I have, there are six more books published either exclusively on Kindle (without actually being enrolled in Select) or coming out of Select in the next two or three months. What that means is that I get to publish six books over all of those other stores/platforms. The most time-consuming is OmniLit, where they don’t have a grinder-process, and you have to upload multiple file formats…sorry, I forgot myself for a moment there.

It was getting so bad, I had to make a list. Seriously.

I just published a couple of horror short stories, and knowing me, it’s like I’m fricking rummaging around in drawers and closets, trying to see if I got something worth selling. I’m wracking my brains trying to remember somebody, anybody that might owe me money. Where can I borrow seven or eight bucks for a marketing image? Who can I talk into giving me a lift to take them beer empties back? Do I have few rolls of nickels or even pennies in the back of a drawer?

Never know, might as well have a look.

'Cause I know damn well there's more stuff I could publish.

There has to be. It didn't all just dry up and blow away now, did it?

Right?

That’s just how it is, sometimes, ladies and gentlemen. You’re desperate, and you’ll do almost anything short of looking for work in order to get a fix…you know what I’m talking about.

You been there too.

Right?

So that’s why I came out this evening.

Maybe some kind of twelve-step program can help me. I mean, seriously, when I first started out, a couple of books, a story or two a year were enough to keep me going. But it’s getting bad lately, it really is. There’s never enough to satisfy me any more, and it’s like a real bad craving.

It’s all you think about from the time you wake up in the morning to the time you go to bed. You see it in your dreams…and you drool just a little bit.

I don’t know, ladies and gentlemen. I might have waited too long and left it too late.

The odds are that I am incorrigible, and that no matter how hard I try, I can never be saved.

Which is kind of sad, when you think about it.

END