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.

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen. Stealing Dope. Louis Shalako.

Two or three grams of coke.

Louis Shalako

 

Stealing dope. Stealing dope. It really wasn’t my idea, not at all, but, as usual, I got sucked in by a friend.

Good old Swimmy had some friends, they lived out in the country. They were growing dope, outdoors. Like many a fool, they talked about it. Most likely, on their own farm. Quite a long ways out in the country, as it turned out. He had a rough idea of where it was—they had a farm. They had an address, on some county road. They had fences and ditches and a big woodlot at the back of the property. There were only so many places it could be.

And of course, at this point I was either still living in my dad’s basement, or I had gone away for a while, to some other town—having failed there after two or three years, I was right back in my dad’s basement again.

The point here is that I had a place, but I couldn’t really hang up a bunch of stolen dope to cure. My old man would have had kittens. Swimmy couldn’t really do it at home, as he and his elderly mother, dying of cancer, but with a bathroom medicine cabinet full of little pill bottles brimming with brightly coloured doses of morphine, lived in a two-bedroom apartment on an upper floor of a house on Mackenzie Street.

Swimmy calls me up, its harvest time and he figures on bagging some pot. He’s got some guy in Point Edward, who’s got a place to hang the stuff up to dry. I borrowed my old man’s turbocharged Volvo station wagon, and I pick up Swimmy and this other guy, and off we go to a bunch of dirt and gravel sideroads in the northern part of Plympton-Wyoming.

We head north on such and such a side-road or concession. We drop off Swimmy, and he heads off across a field of soybeans. There’s a bit of a moon, but mostly pitch-black with a few lights here and there from the occasional farmhouse. I’m cruising along in my old man’s Volvo, talking to some guy I’ve never seen before, and all we can really do is to make a right turn when we get to the lake road, Lambton 7. We go east one concession and make another right, we go south for a while, make another right turn, and another.

Now we’re heading back to where we dropped good old Swimmy off. Only one problem, of course: Swimmy isn’t there. All we could do, bearing in mind we’re just a couple of guys cruising up and down gravel side-roads in my old man’s car, was to circle around. Again. And again. Yeah, just a couple of guys circling around the block. Over and over again. At some point, I started circling around to the left, and this way around was a lot longer. At some point, we are tempted to abandon good old Swimmy, and let the bastard make his own way home—

Finally, making one last pass, my erstwhile companion spots Swimmy…the poor fucker is slugging a good forty pot plants over his shoulder, staggering along under the load, and wondering just where in the fuck we were.

Swimmy had crossed a few ditches, at least three farms, floundering in the dark all the way. He’d finally found his buddy’s bush-lot. He’d floundered around in there for a while, and finally stumbled upon a pretty good patch, almost by accident. Now he’s got to cut and pull and yank away until he’s got as much pot as he can reasonably be expected to handle. He throws that over his shoulder and starts walking. Having done all that, at least he knows enough to follow the moon or whatever, and make his way back to our fucking home away from home, that fucking side-road…

So.

I pull over. My passenger had no idea of how to open the tailgate, but Swimmy and I stuffed all this dope into the back end, he hops into the right back seat, and we drove, back roads all the way, back home to good old Sarnia.

We got off the highway and found his buddy’s place in Point Edward. When I got out of the car, there was pot—the tops of the plants, still sticking out of the bottom of the tailgate.

Yeah, it’s a good thing a cop didn’t come up behind us…

Going down the road with pot plants hanging out the back end...fuck.

We start dragging all this lanky, skunky old pot into this guy’s place, in the front door and up the stairs to a big closet on the second floor. Already, this guy’s wife is kicking up a fuss. They’ve got a kid, this is their home, and I can’t help thinking he had no idea of what he was getting into, any more than I had. This was one of those deals where I really didn’t see much out of it. The buds were one thing, all the leaves and stalk and roots and dirt were something else. The guy’s wife was pretty hot, by that, I mean angry.

Swimmy and I got the hell out of there.

What I will say, and this is probably a good thing, is that Swimmy had fifty cents, and we went down to a car wash and vacuumed a lot of dirt, leaves and bits of pot out of the back end of the Volvo before dropping him off and heading on home again.

My old man would have appreciated that, I am sure.

***

So, good old Swimmy calls me up one evening in winter. This would have to be before 1993. I didn’t know the guy, the name didn’t mean anything to me. I don’t recall the name, but I do recall the house—literally a block from my old man’s house.

I drove to pick up Swimmy, and then parked across a circle in the tree streets. You’d have to see the layout, but the car was barely fifty metres from the home in question…yet it’s not like we can just pull into the driveway, the guy has neighbours and they might be pretty good friends.

They might know his vehicle is gone—and who the hell are these guys, right.

Swimmy knows the guy. He knows the guy has some good coke. He knows the guy lives alone, he knows where he works and he knows the guy’s schedule. He’s a tradesman, working twelve-hour shifts, down at the plants on some shutdown. Fuck, he even knows where the spare key is kept.

We get out of the car and start walking. There is no one around, not even kids playing outside. And Swimmy opens up the front door. We take a quick look around, up and down the street, and go on in.

The place is silent. My job was to stay on the main floor, Swimmy figures the coke is down in the basement—somewhere. That is the challenge here. It’s a corner house. So, I’m floating back and forth between the window at the back door, where I can see up the street, and then back to the front of the house, where I can see quite a ways down the other street, left and right, and across this circle thingy, which is quite frankly, peculiar to that little area of town.

And fucking Swimmy is down there forever. I mean, he’s down there for half an hour, maybe more, carefully searching every fucking drawer, every little nook and cranny, opening stuff up and closing it back again, trying to find the stuff. He’s unscrewing heater grilles and looking in the crawl space under the back stairs. He’s looking in toolboxes, closets, bookshelves.

Every so often he’s calling up to me, (softly, but calling), and I’m sure he could hear me prowling back and forth. I don’t know how reassuring that was, but probably better than being abandoned down there, with the potential for being surprised and cornered.

The odd car goes by, but I tell him it’s still clear—for now.

You really start to sweat after a while. The worst that could happen is that the guy comes home, in which case we go boiling out the other door and head for the car—that part is just plain stupid, but we may have been able to just walk around a block or two. Let the guy get his boots off, get his coat off, right. We could come back to a parked car, if we had to, even the next morning. Who would guess, right. Assuming we haven’t found it, no real harm done, although the guy would wonder if we didn’t lock up in our haste to get out—assuming he didn’t see or hear us as he came in whatever door was the habit.

Yet people forget to lock doors all the time—human psychology plays a role in any plan.

Assuming Swimmy ever did find anything, we’d be out of there like a shot, and the odds of someone arriving home at that exact moment would be fairly astronomical.

I was just telling Swimmy we might as well give it up and get out of there, and finally, he’s fucking found the stuff. I can’t recall what he grabbed, probably two or three grams out of what had to be a much larger stash.

At some point, the guy would realize he was coming up a bit short on his ounce or two ounces or a quarter pound of powder cocaine, but if enough time went by, he would likely just figure he’d been doing a little more of his own product than he quite recalled.

Dude. I got it.

That was good to hear.

Fucking Swimmy comes up the stairs, relief written all over him. We were out the door. Swimmy puts the spare key back where he found it. Once we were in the car, I fired it up and drove around the block and parked it at my place. I forget exactly what he gave me for that one, probably half a gram, perhaps a little more—we did up a couple of crack tokes, but not too much, as I still had to drive him. I would imagine he locked himself in for a day or two that time.

It really was that kind of dope, the idea that you could save some for tomorrow was pure fantasy.

***

Buddy Two-Shoes had a neighbour. The neighbour had a bit of a thicket at the back of the yard, with a kind of fence made out of piled-up rocks and saplings, trees, weeds, in a rather vain bid for privacy. He took me to the back of his parents’ yard and showed me.

The neighbour had put out a few little pot plants in green plastic self-watering pots. If no one came along, at least not too close, they blended in well enough. Buddy wasn’t likely to steal them, it was right next door. They were tiny little plants, early in the season, no buds on there.

Buddy had good pot all the time, admittedly all the real thieves had their cycles of boom and bust.

It was probably a few days later. I waited until dark, in fact I stayed up until three or three-thirty in the morning. It was fairly warm, early summer. And I went for it.

And it was stupid enough. I walked about halfway down the block, in the dark and behind the fence line. I dropped to my belly, ladies and gentlemen, and damp it was too, with the dew settling on the grass. And I crawled. Whenever lights flashed across me from the end of George Street, I bellied-down and froze there. Finally, I got up to the back of the yard and all was quiet.

So, what do I do now?

I sort of had to stand up, crouching. I grabbed four or five of the little planters and clutched them to my chest.

And I scuttled home, as there is just no way to crawl like that…I never heard back, I never heard anything about it from Buddy, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up.

By the time that stuff had dried, it crumbled to a fine, green powder and it made up about three and a half joints…what the fuck, eh.

***

Doing time.

McNuggets had done time with some guy. But he was getting out, and the other guy had some time still on his sentence. He had a patch, a big one. He drew a map. He gave directions, and McNuggets promised to put some money in his account.

McNuggets was duly released from jail, and a few days later, he went looking.

Somewhere up by Clinton, Ontario, quite a long ways from home. He had a knapsack, and a few plastic garbage bags…and much to his own surprise, he found it.

It was the field of dreams, to hear him tell it. He grabbed all the fucking pot he could grab, jammed his pack and the bags full, as much as he could carry. He managed to get out of there undetected…he managed to get back home to Sarnia.

And he thought he had it made, but raw pot has to be dried. Buds have to be cut, and clipped and cured…he had nowhere to put it all. He lived at home with the parents, and he sure as hell didn’t trust his own friends with such a haul. They’d steal him blind, right.

He had more fresh pot than he could safely deal with…

The field of dreams, or so he said...

The story as he told it, was that ninety percent of it went mouldy, and quite quickly. Now he’s got a stinking mess on his hands and all he could do was to bag it up, go for a drive and dump all that in a ditch somewhere.

What the fuck, eh.

I doubt if that other guy ever saw any money, either.

 

END

Louis has books and stories available from GooglePlay.

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.

Thank you for reading and listening.

 

 

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two. The Great Filter Queen Caper. Louis Shalako.

Photo is in the public domain.

Louis Shalako

All the names in this story have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. These are real people, many of whom have been apprehended, for one thing or another, and, over the course of time, been charged, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated, presumably paying some penalty for their crimes. In those cases, they have paid their debt to society, which of course leaves out the fact that they really only got popped for about one in a thousand of their petty little crimes—and some not so petty.

People also have the right to forget, and to be forgotten. We also have the right to forgive, to forget, and maybe move forward and make something more positive out of the shambles of our lives. The statute of limitations has run out long ago, and some of us, at least, finally did grow up.

So much for the disclaimer.

***

McNuggets was a thief, a con-man, and a fraud artist. Like many a fraud, he was personable enough. Good looks, a good brain, a bit of charm was very useful in his line of work.

Poor old McNuggets was on the prowl one day, whether on foot or on a bicycle is unknown. One of his little specialties was theft from automobiles. Back in the day, not every vehicle had an onboard security system. A bent coat hanger was enough to enter most locked vehicles. Some of these guys had plenty of practice. In the occasional case, where a vehicle had an alarm system, when the blaring horn went off, thieves either grabbed what they could—what they could see, or they would just take off at a dead run, or, as often as not, grab the bike and try and cover as much ground as possible. A wallet sitting in the console, or a woman who leaves her purse in the car while she just ran into the store for a minute, were bread and butter to these guys.

On this particular occasion, McNuggets found a set of keys laying on the ground, behind a commercial building. Someone had dropped their keys. A fairly bright guy, McNuggets stopped and picked them up. Two keys were from a Ford automobile, there were house and other keys on there as well. With a bit of traffic coming and going, McNuggets pocketed the keys and kept going. Back then, he would have been thinking about breaking and entering as much as anything else. The problem with the house would be to find out where it was. The problem with a business, would be to unlock and then kill the alarm within a very short time-frame. I’m sure he would have thought all of that. Yes, McNuggets had a very good, if slightly-criminal, brain.

He came back later, possibly even days later. It was dark this time, not broad daylight.  

And there it sat.

This was a medium blue, Ford Taurus station wagon, off the street, behind the building, and it was locked. He could see boxes in the back of the vehicle, which had the rear seat folded flat. Script on the sides of the boxes said Filter Queen and McNuggets had hit the jackpot; if only he had a plan. One, very expensive vacuum-cleaner would be a pretty good score. Sure enough, one key fit the lock. If he had a bike, he might have just abandoned it, (it would likely be a stolen bike anyways), but he was most likely on foot—he had a set of car keys after all.

He wasn’t really known as a car thief, and one wonders if he even had any contacts for the disposal of such a vehicle, probably not in my opinion. He would have gone straight there. Otherwise, one has to hide a stolen car, and you really can’t do that at your folk’s house. So, knowing the salesman or manager must be in the building, he hops in, fires her up and gets the machine out of there with a minimum of fuss and bother.

His problems were not over. He only has so much time. He grabs one vacuum cleaner, an upright or something fairly light and portable, parking on a side-street, half a block or more away, and he sells it to a buddy for a hundred bucks and a gram of coke. Or whatever. When he comes out, there’s no one around and the car is still sitting there. And in a move of sheer, fucking brilliance, he takes it to the Bluewater Health parking lot. He pulls up to the drop-bar, pushes the button, and gets a little ticket to put on the dashboard of the vehicle. The bar raises, and he drives on in. He locks her up, takes the keys and walks away.

Once he has a little time to think about it, he gets spooked—he’s done time before, and this is grand theft auto. And he never goes back. What he did do, which is typical for these guys, was to tell someone about it. That’s a funny thing about cocaine—a couple little tokes on the crack pipe and you’re paranoid as all fucking hell.

***

So, this is where I come in. Swimmy, calls me up. We hung out back then. Swimmy had a good source of red and black Lebanese hash. We went back years.

And he had this idea. What he did not have was a car. You can probably see where this is going. All I had to do was to pick him up and drive him. Let him out, where he is just one of many people, coming and going from the hospital. Right during visiting hours, right? He opens the Ford with a coat hanger, grabs a vacuum, locks her up again, chucks it into the trunk, very large and capacious, of my old man’s Volvo. Off we go to sell the vacuum to his brother-in-law or somebody. Swimmy had clearly been doing a bit of fast-talking of his own. With free parking for two hours, it didn’t cost me a cent to go in, park, wait three minutes. You could unlock the trunk but leave it closed. Swimmy was quick, I will give him that. Back in a jiffy. I take a quick look and head for the exit. No one gave us a second glance, but then everyone has their own problems.

Bad as that sounds, even stupid, really, we actually went back two or three times. There were a hell of a lot of vacuum cleaners in that Taurus. My mother had one of the floor type models, (some of those guys had some high-pressure sales tactics), and while it had a lifetime warranty, the price of a Filter Queen was astronomical.

One day the Taurus was gone, and the party was over.

And that, was the great Filter Queen caper of somewhere in the late eighties or early nineties.

***

One of the issues with smoking pot back then, was that you had to go to a criminal to get it. Some of those guys worked harder at not working than they ever did at working at anything useful, or anything that might represent something with a future. Some of them were real wheelers and dealers.

McNuggets, oddly enough, had a trade, one which he’d learned in jail. It took some time to learn that you simply cannot maintain a household on the proceeds of petty crime. Some of them guys never learned it, and some of them are either dead, missing, or doing hard time for something somewhere. They didn't know when to quit. They just kept getting in, deeper and deeper...

That’s their problem, as far as I am concerned.

Interestingly, more than one of them eventually realized that you could just leave the $28.97 in cash in a wallet or purse. Why not take an exclusive credit card, American Express, Diner’s Club or something, one the victim did not use every day? And what about this tiny slip of paper, with four digits written on it, and gee, I wonder if that isn’t the PIN number for this here debit card. You don’t have to go into the bank, just find a bank machine and give it a try. With the cash still there, folks might not know they’d been had for days—and by then, it would be too late.

...just a bug on the wall, sometimes...

This is when guys like McNuggets learned to dress well but casual, shave, be polite, say yes, sir, no, sir, and thank you, Ma’am. This is when they learned to lease a car with one stolen credit card and then head two or three hundred kilometres up the road and do some real shopping with a handful, literally a handful, of stolen credit cards under different names. Back then you had to sign a slip. Human nature being what it is, retail staff virtually never looked at the signature. A sale is a sale, as the salesmen say. It was no skin off their nose.

What with food, booze, cocaine, pot, anything they wanted, really, I reckon McNuggets and one or two others (there is nothing like teamwork, eh), burned through several hundred thousand dollars in a year. Sheer madness, when you realize all the money that went through their hands and yet they never had a fucking thing to show for it. It was a little too easy come, and a little too easy, go. They’d make the most amazing score, two days later, they didn’t have a pot to piss in.

And it was only a matter of time, before there came the knock at the door and sure enough, they’re looking at another bit of time in the county bucket, or a provincial or federal prison.

To be a bug on the wall, and to just listen to the conversation was interesting as all hell, possibly even educational.

That’s not to say that I have an excuse, because I don’t. I was just young, ladies and gentlemen. And maybe just a little bit desperate.

For someone who wanted to write, even back then, it really was fascinating.

END

Poor old Louis has books and stories available fromAmazon. What the hell, its honest work.

See his art, available from ArtPal.

Check out My Criminal Memoir, Part One.

 

This audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, is presently free from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading.