 |
| A plastic boat, but at least it went where you pointed it... |
Louis Shalako
Joe, and strip bars. Joe was a typical example of the
low-level drug dealer. He had a job. He had a few connections, to the extent
that he always had dope, one way or another. He ended up marrying my
girlfriend’s older sister, in a ceremony held right here in Sarnia, although
the couple lived in Guelph.
They’d already had a baby, I have to admit, the kid
was pretty cute…
She clearly took after her mother, and not Joe—
The first time I ever took the train, and went up to
Guelph to visit my girlfriend, Joe had left us a bit of pot. The girls were going to university, sharing an apartment, and since he had a
place of his own, we had the place to ourselves.
Joe had a Hungarian accent. It’s an interesting story,
just how he came to Canada. In Hungary, part of the Eastern Bloc back then,
they had compulsory military service. Joe and another 18 year-old ended up
guarding the border. They weren’t so much trying to keep people out, but trying
to keep their own people in. They were supposed to walk up and down, rifles on
their shoulders, and at some point, a corporal came along to check on them.
They were standing there, smoking and chatting and the guy gave them proper
shit.
When he went away again, they figured they had more of
that coming when their shift was over.
This is when they got the bright idea, what with being
young and all, to drop the weapons, to take their fates in their own hands—and
to start walking west.
***
Joe had pot, three or four different kinds. He was the
guy who had ‘beans’, dropping one or two to dissolve in his coffee, first thing
in the morning, before heading off to work. He worked at Rockwell
International, assembling power tools and the like on piecework. I’m not sure
if these were genuine speed, (amphetamines),
or something similar like Benzedrine sulphate or ephedrine sulfate, or
whatever. It sounds strange, but in places like Ohio, you could buy them at any
truck stop—over the counter, big plastic jars at roughly $20.00 per thousand.
These were compound pills, a bit of this, a bit of caffeine, a bit of something
else to keep you going through the long hours of the night…
(Benzedrine was a brand name for
amphetamine sulfate. It was used to treat many different
conditions from the early 1930s to the 1970s. Misuse of the drug eventually led
to a major decrease in production and tighter control of the drug by 1971.
Today, amphetamine is used to treat ADHD, narcolepsy, and obesity. – ed.)
Okay, thanks, Ed. Reading that, we probably all did
speed in one form or another, although I’ve never injected anything—that was
probably for the best, looking back, ah, through the mists of time and all.
So.
He had five-gram vials of weed and hash oil, he had
hash occasionally. In the late seventies and early eighties, cocaine and all of
that lay some ways in the future, one must assume—none of us were doing it at
the time, as far as I know. Sisters being sisters, and buddies being buddies,
we visited back and forth.
 |
| Speed tablets, by any other name, in one size, shape or another... |
And so it was, that we found ourselves sleeping in a
spare room, in the summer of about 1979.
Joe left the plant for an hour at lunch time. He
phoned home, and picked me up—we’re already burning daylight as far as lunch
hour goes, but the plant was nearby and so was our destination. I recall that
it was the Manor. A well-known strip bar in Guelph at that time, and an
oversexed individual like Joe knew it well.
This was my first time at a strip bar, and of course,
Joe had to burn a joint in the car on the way there. We stepped out for
another, just outside a rear entrance, and in between him buying lap dances and
one for me too, incidentally, as my birthday was coming up…
And of course, he has to get back to work, in which
case we burn another joint on the way back. This is the guy who worked two
blocks from home. At some point, some guy he knew sold him a case of small
bottles of laughing gas—and as a friend, one wonders just how far all of this
shit is going to go. He’s literally zipping home on his fifteen minute coffee breaks,
just to have a little sip of that gas bottle and get high before going back to
work. I suppose it’s no wonder that the marriage didn’t last all that long, and
before long, she was single, back home in Sarnia and with the little kid and
all.
It struck me that Sarnia had three or four strip bars,
and I hadn’t been in any one of them—a situation that would surely be rectified
before long.
As for Joe, those manufacturing jobs, small factories
in small towns at least here in southern Ontario, are a thing of the past. At
that time, Guelph was not much larger than Sarnia, if at all, and the biggest
thing it had going for it was the university, a bit of history and a kind of
hilly terrain, which I liked as where I live, it’s mostly flat.
***
The bunch of us had gone camping one summer, up at
Cypress Lake on the Bruce Peninsula. Willy and his wife, Joe and his wife, and
my girlfriend and I. I had brought up a little sailboat, a fucking Sunfish,
about ten feet long and with a lateen sail. Willy had his wood and canvas
kayak, he and the wife going off to the other side of the lake to fuck in the
bushes and all of that sort of a thing, and Joe and his wife had borrowed what
was, after all, a pretty shitty little boat. It was more for kids, a fun day at
the beach, than any real serious sailboat. It was a plastic boat, and I at
least had life jackets.
We’d been drinking wine, smoking pot, popping pills,
cooking bacon and eggs, hamburgers and hot-dogs on an open fire. Shooting the
shit and talking a lot of nonsense. We were lucky, in that the weather was
cooperating—more or less. We had boots and parkas, and we had cut-off jean
shorts and tee-shirts. We had the weekend to party.
I reckon my mother bought that little plastic boat for
about ninety-nine dollars on sale, put it on layaway at the department store
toy department, and presented it to us all on Christmas morning, which is the
way such things were done back then…
I’ll be honest with you, ladies and gentlemen, all
they really did, insofar as boating is concerned, was to go across to the other
side of the lake and fuck in the bushes.
I think it’s safe to say Joe was inspired by that little boat. The possibilities were endless,
although not quite infinite.
***
I have no idea of what that crazy Hungarian bastard
was thinking—but the next time we went up to visit, he’d bought this horrible
old contraption. To call it a boat would be to insult a hundred thousand years
of boat evolution. This thing was a wedge-shaped slab, made of a couple of
sheets of three-quarters inch plywood, a big block of white Styrofoam, a
two-by-four for a mast, and a fucking white bedsheet for a sail…
Let me back up a bit.
Okay, we’re staying the weekend, my lovely girlfriend
and I, she and the sister are going off somewhere and Joe and I are going down
the road in his Austin Marina, and he’s teaching me how it’s possible to drive,
and to roll a joint at the same time, what with holding the wheel with his left
knee and balancing a small rolling tray, dope, papers, scissors and a roach
clip on his lap while doing so.
All the while, talking away in the high-pitched accent
that only foreign people can do so convincingly…
 |
| Rolling a joint while we go down the road. |
So, this fucking alleged boat has brackets. On the brackets, is a bench-like thingy. The one
and only seat is behind the boat, to the extent you have to reach between your
knees to hold the tiller, which is set into door hinges for pivots. There is no
safety clip, and the thing keeps floating up and out of the hinges, making the
boat uncontrollable…the actual rudder is cut from plywood, but even plywood has
a grain, and this guy has cut it ninety degrees all wrong. Try and turn the
boat, the rudder just bends. Joe had been just plain crazy enough to sign up
for a membership at a little ‘yacht’ club located on Guelph Lake, basically
just a flood control reservoir on the Speed River upstream from the city. These
were not yachts, they were dinghies,
all of them better than this piece of shit.
This is where I caught my first glimpse of that
fucking shit-shingle of a so-called boat of his. Neither one of us had
life-jackets; what we did have was a six-pack of strong beer and a cigarette
pack, each of us, with a few doobs. Fuck. What are you supposed to do.
The wind was at our back as we drifted downwind across
that little lake.
The flat deck of that boat was absolutely level with
the mean surface of the water, with the two of us aboard—whatever teeny-tiny
little waves the gentle breeze was raising actually broke across the desk and
passed over our bare feet unimpeded; but by this time there was no going back…
 |
| We ended up in the right arm of the lake, unable to maneuver our shit-shingle. |
The boat could not be maneuvered. The boat could not
be steered, the boat was fucking useless, the boat was driftwood on the wind
and the waves. We’re getting farther and farther away from the club, at first
it’s okay as we’re sipping cold beers and burning a joint, smoking cigarettes
and sort of celebrating being men,
somewhat stupid for all of that, but men,
after all—
Once we’ve run out of room in what is a pretty small
lake, on the downwind end of things, Joe turns her around and begins to tack
into the wind, only problem is, she just ain’t going to go. We’re in a
constricted arm of the lake, there are narrows, and this is there the headwinds
are strongest. This thing ain’t ever going to tack into the wind, and this is
about where I abandoned ship, dove overboard, and swam ashore.
Come what may, almost anything was better than this,
and I have to admit, there were still a couple of cold beers in a box screwed
to the deck just at the base of the mast.
***
This is what happens when a stoner, but also some kind
of an idiot, buys a boat.
This is what you get when you spend half a bag of pot
on a boat…
When I opened my eyes, the water was green. I had
maybe seventy-five, a hundred metres of algae-ridden shit ahead of me, and
then, dry land. I got to a patch or band of real seaweed, tangled green shitty
stuff that clung all over me, and then, having fought my way through it, I
waded up the bank through the weeds and the long grass and found myself
barefoot beside what passed for a highway back at that time.
I’m sure all you readers and listeners have a pretty
good idea of what roadside gravel looks like, and I walked in the hot sun,
slowly drying, along the highway for a couple of kilometres. Luckily, I had a
head for navigation, looking at the map, there are side-roads off to one side, and
then there is the club at the end of another long gravel stretch.
At this point, I pulled out my smoke-pack, laid my
lighter, a few joints, and a few damp cigarettes out on a rock in the wan
sunlight, and waited for that crazy Hungarian bastard, who took forever to get
out of the mouth of that little bay, work his way back five or six hundred
metres, the sun falling towards the horizon and the wind eventually dying off
in the fading light of late evening.
I
still miss that shirt, it had two large upper pockets and
Velcro fasteners…just a minor point, ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah. Joe was pissed off at me, but there was no way
that fucking shit-shingle of a boat would have ever gotten the two of us back
across that lake. My feet didn’t hurt too much, and it had taken him so long,
we managed to get a joint to burn, and I have to admit, I bummed one or two of
his smokes on the way home, which was a fairly quiet trip after all that fresh
air, hot sun and wind and surf on the face.
END
He's got an audiobook, Speak Softly My Love, on iTunes.
Poor old Louis Shalako has books and stories available from iTunes.
Grab yourself a free copy of One Million Words of
Crap, available from 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. 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.
Thank you for reading, and listening.
.jpg)
.jpg)