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| Mine was a dark blue, with steel rims and baby-moon hubcaps. Not quite so cool... |
Louis Shalako
The new highway. The first time Johnny and I became
aware of the new highway, the project had barely gotten started. We were
heading north on a gravel side-road, in his full-size Dodge cargo van. He’d
paid about $1,500.00, it had a six-cylinder engine and three speeds forward,
with the gear shifter on the steering column. I drove the thing, and the brakes were four-wheel drums, and the steering
wheel a large, skinny plastic thing.
The clutch was heavy, and over time, your left leg
would end up bigger than the right leg…this in spite (or because), of a brake booster. You didn't need to push nearly so hard on the brakes, that's what I'm saying. The steering was pure manual.
Judging by the remains of a red stripe around the mid-line of the
vehicle, it was part of a fleet owned (or previously owned), by a local leasing
company. Vans were popular, this one had been customized inside, and it was a big
step up from the Cricket. Yes, Johnny had a bed and everything in the back…
It was getting dark out, we’d had a couple beers
anyways, a doobie or two maybe. And there it was. This big, double lane cut
through the forest and the bush-lots behind the farms along London Line,
otherwise known as Highway 22. Back then, the legal age for drinking was 21
years of age, and this is where we learned to cruise the back roads.
It must have been in the newspaper, but the highway
was actually built in short sections. This one was all mud, heavy equipment,
road graders parked here and there, stacks of metal culvert, piles of sand and
gravel. They had the basic soil profile, with two long flat strips for paving
and a total of three ditches, one on each side and one up the middle…
At one time, the 402, a multi-lane divided highway,
used to end at the city limits. Traffic was dumped onto good old London Line,
through the Golden Mile, four lanes, two-way traffic, a commercial strip on the
city limits, and then it was two lanes, or three with a central, two-way
passing lane, all the way to London, sixty miles down the road. The building and
completion of the 402 was a big thing for its time, and here we were, bumping
across it on some kind of extended crop tour, and the night was black as pitch.
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| Johnny's was an old leasing vehicle, with a few miles on the clock. |
That middle passing lane on what is now London Line, was the scene, and the cause,
of many head-on collisions over the years, and at some point that thing had to
go. Up north, a short section of similar roads will have passing for northbound
traffic, and then the next centre lane section has passing for southbound
traffic, and hopefully, never the twain shall meet…although it probably does
still happen.
***
The first new section of the highway was open. The
second new section was more or less complete…but not yet open. I pulled onto
the ramp, slowed it to a stop. My girlfriend hops out, pulls aside one or two
big orange traffic cones and I pull the MGB through the gap. She pulls the
cones back into position. She hops back in, closes the door and we are off down
the curving ramp, onto a big, beautiful, brand-new highway that is absolutely
deserted. The top is down, we are in love, it is a beautiful, sunny evening and
in a moment, she’s got the wine out. A twist of the wire, a pull on the cork,
and the bubbling, sparkling cheap-ass wine blows the cork off into an eighty
mile per hour slipstream.
The cork is gone, I caught a quick glimpse in the
mirror, of it bouncing down the road, but we aren’t likely to need it again
anyhow.
After some hour, the construction workers have gone
home, at some point, it is a weekend, a holiday. We were trespassing,
considering potential hazards, dangerous driving, speeding, disobeying
detours…alcohol, marijuana, the girlfriend in a sun dress with no bra and no
panties, kicking off her sandals and shifting up that dress, a hot and naked
girl, my finger inside her wet pussy as she went down on me, well. I guess you
could say it was pretty much all illegal.
Worth every minute of it, one has to admit—but still
plenty illegal.
In that sense, we really were criminals.
We were also having the time of our lives…
***
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| Image Credit. |
Willy had married his childhood sweetheart at this
point, Trina was six months pregnant when they got married, shortly after her
sixteenth birthday, which was legally permissible without the parents’
permission…
The four of us were cruising in his dad’s 1975 Chevy
Impala station wagon, upon which he’d mounted a pair of Mean Mother Magnums,
800-watt spotlights, more normally associated with bush trucks and Australian
poachers jacking ‘roos at night in the outback.
We were on the way home from a very long tour, a
crop-tour, with plenty of wine, doobies, all kinds of sexual foreplay and other
kinds of provocation of a womanly kind, and somehow I woke up in the driver’s
seat. One guy can drive, his wife or girlfriend on the seat beside him, and the
other guy and female person can fuck in the back end. We didn’t have too many
inhibitions back then.
Willy, was asleep in the seat beside me, and the two
ladies were snoring quietly away in the back seat. This is when I realized that
I was driving.
Fuck—
I sat up a little straighter. I pushed the button and
lowered the window in the tailgate to get a little oxygen through there.
I had no idea of how we had gotten there…
I have no idea of how we survived that last fifteen or
twenty kilometres, I have no idea of when we switched seats, the only thing
that probably saved us was the fact that we must have gotten onto the new,
empty, deserted highway…those big fucking lights blasting away from the front
bumper. Also the fact that the road was mostly straight. What was really food
for thought, was the one or two kinks in the road. Even on the dead straight
sections, it really was some kind of a secular miracle.
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| It was a boat, with a 350 cubic inch engine and a few power accessories. |
Just past Warwick, westbound, I pulled off down the
ramp, ah, I think Highway 21. The Forest road. With no one to help, I put it in
park and pulled the traffic cones out of the way. Back in the vehicle, people
were still asleep. Rather than get back on the highway, for the next section
was now open, I took it north and followed Michigan Avenue back into town. This
was better than a major highway, and let’s be honest. People had phones and
truckers had CB radios back then, and sooner or later, someone is going to call
it in: those crazy teenagers driving on the new highway again…surely someone
must have remarked upon it.
Once or twice, we saw other folks out there, farmers
or other young people. We just ignored each other.
It was a good thing Burger King was open late back in
those days, or we might have starved to death…just an observation, ladies and
gentlemen.
If you don’t believe in resurrection, you should see
people sort of wake up and sit up and look around them when you tell them that
you’re home, and is there anything in particular you want from the
drive-through…???
Oh, and do you guys have any money on you.
***
I was heading out of town, not going anywhere in
particular. It was a dark, wet, autumn evening. I had a few joints, most
likely, and a cold six-pack of something sitting on the passenger seat beside
me. I was driving my 1967 Beaumont, which sounds cool. It had a certain body
style, although nowhere near as desirable as a Chevy II S.S. The thing is, you
could sort of use the body to build one—assuming you had money. It would be a
fake Chevy II, still desirable for all of that, especially with a 327 cubic
inch V-8 and a four speed Muncey transmission and a Hurst shifter…
Mine had a six cylinder engine, and a two-speed automatic, shiny (and very slippery) vinyl seats. Bias-ply tires, mostly bald,
and baby-moon hubcaps.
The radio was on and a song was playing…All of My Love.
I had never heard it before. It had a plaintive, sad
kind of vibe to it, and furthermore, I know that voice—I know that guitar. Fuck,
I knew those drums. Convinced, I turned it up a bit, cruising along at about 65
mph, and when the song ended, the on-air personality told us that John Bonham, the drummer for Led Zeppelin, had passed away and it was all very sad.
I smoked a joint, drank a couple of beers and headed
on home.
It was the end of an era, really.
Those days would never come again.
***
One day the highway was open. I was alone in the MGB,
eastbound on the 402. I took it up, holding the pedal right to the floor.
Traffic was light, the road was dry and the car took a bit of time…finally,
we’re going over a hundred miles per hour or forty miles per hour over the
limit. At about 106 mph, the engine starts to knock and it was time to shut her
down…
Fuck.
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| She blowed up at about 106 mph... |
I humped it over farm fields and ditches, and through
the woods to a farmhouse along London Line, where the people graciously allowed
me to use their phone.
Of course. The first question my old man asked was,
‘did you check the oil?’
Well, that’s dad for you. It had all kinds of oil,
although the oil pump may have been on the way out. It is also true I had been
running it pretty hard. Basically, I had ‘spun a bearing’, and when I took the
thing apart, sure enough, the little curved pieces in the oil pan were
paper-thin. The block and the crank were fine, but sometimes it’s cheaper just
to find a used motor somewhere than doing a major rebuild.
This, is why we pulled an old ’69 MGB, up, and out, it was literally
sinking into the ground in a backyard along Pine Street. The roof was
collapsed, the bottom of the vehicle sitting on the ground and the wheels stuck
in holes of their own. I used to see that thing all the time, walking over to
Pete’s Variety at the East Street Plaza.
For fifty bucks and a bit of labour—a stout rope and
my old man’s Volvo, a bit of air in the tires, I got another engine block, a
transmission, and that aluminum hood. They even had the ownership, which is
important. I stripped that thing down to nothing and then had it towed for
scrap.
But that, as they say, is a story for another day.
END
Louis has books and stories available from Barnes & Noble.
Louis has art on
ArtPal.
Listen to his free audiobook, One Million Words ofCrap, here on Google
Play.
My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).
My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted
due to content.)
Thank you for reading, and listening.
Author’s Note. Chapter 12 was difficult to write, not so much from the technical aspects of writing, but from the emotional standpoint. I also sort of knew I had to do it—for reasons which are difficult to explain or even justify. I was lower than a sidewinder’s belly at the bottom of Death Valley for a couple of days beforehand. Writing it seemed to help, and then again, the day after, I was literally in tears a couple of times, perhaps for myself. Perhaps more so for all those other victims, most of them a lot more serious than my own experience.
#Louis
