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| All very innocent. A college party. |
Louis Shalako
Cocaine. The first time I ever saw cocaine, let alone
did it, was in the autumn of 1983. I had gone back to school, at the age of 25,
in order to study Radio, Television and Journalism Arts at Lambton College of
Applied Arts and Technology, now known simply as Lambton College.
Someone had invited me to a good old college party,
which was in an apartment in a high-rise apartment along Finch Drive, within
walking distance of the college. There are two or three buildings on that
stretch, and it’s still popular today with students—assuming they can pay the
rent.
I don’t recall if my girlfriend of six years was with
me or not—if so, I don’t think we stayed all that long. We were six or seven
years older than the college crowd, mostly 18 or 19 year-olds, away from home
for the very first time in many cases. We had each other, we didn’t need to
lose our virginity or go looking for sex or whatever.
And this Dan guy invites me and one or two others into
the bedroom. He lays out a few small lines on a magazine or album cover on top
of a tall dresser and we all took a little snort or two off of that. I know,
you’re supposed to use a mirror, (and a razor blade), and over the course of
time, we did all that too.
When you snort a couple of small lines, you get the
instant lift. It is a stimulant. You can dance with a whole new energy, and
this was sort of the tail end of the disco era. Women like to dance, and they
don’t much care what era it is…after a while, you get that taste in the back of
the throat, right where the sinus passages sort of drain. Other than that, it
was more of a novelty, especially as Dan had paid $140.00 for a gram of powder
cocaine, in the rather interesting little hand-made envelope, cut and folded as
often as not from a full-colour porno magazine.
And that was it, at least for the next several years.
I lasted a few months in the RTJ program. Employed as a carpenter for three or
four years, the Ontario Student Assistance Program had a rather elevated
expectation as to what I ‘should’ have saved for my education, to the extent
that I only got about $1,600.00 in grants, and another $1,600.00 in loans. I
had maybe a thousand of my own, and the fact is, when I told my employer that I
would be leaving at the end of August, he promptly laid me off. Quite frankly,
I think he was pissed off, having put up with a few things, possibly, and yet
now this highly-skilled employee was going…
Even if I had worked another month or two, the savings
account wouldn’t have been all that much more. I paid up a few months of rent
and bought the books.
***
Little by little, and bit by bit, cocaine will suck
you in. I’ve seen perfectly sensible people, at least I thought they were, get
sucked in until it positively ruled their life. I’ve heard the justifications,
how it was just a little ‘treat’, and they really didn’t do it all that often.
I suppose I’ve been there myself, locked in my bedroom, with an ashtray, a pack
of smokes…a bottle of rye whiskey, a hash pipe, and a bag of pot…and a gram or
so of coke, ladies and gentlemen.
A fucking typewriter.
Yeah, I was the guy who put cigarette ashes in the
hash pipe. I was the guy who used the tip of a jackknife, to sprinkle a bit of
the fine white, crystalline powder, onto the bed of ashes. I was the guy who
hit on that, several times, with a butane lighter…and went back to trying to
write some fucking shit book or story.
Half my friends had jobs and homes and families, and
then there was the other half.
At some point, a couple of dudes showed up at the back
door, an eight-ball in hand, that’s like three and a half grams for two hundred
dollars, and proceeded to show us how to cook that up, in a spoon. I was just
some guy, I was there. People knew me. They could hide out there for a while…it
was their money and their dope, at some level. It was also my dad’s basement.
With some water, and a bit of baking soda, and they
show you how to heat that up, with a butane lighter. The baking soda sort of
took out the impurities, whatever it was cut with, baby formula, or fucking
Drano for all anyone knew…yes, I knew a guy who blew out his sinuses, blew a
fucking hole in his palate and needed surgery, although Drano was hardly
necessary for that. Cocaine is pretty corrosive on its own, even at its purest,
that is for sure. I think this is why people started to smoke it, rather than
keep snorting it up the nose all the time.
It’s not about partying and dancing any more.
And when the oily fluid begins to cool, when it begins
to congeal, you can stick a pin, a probe, the tip of a jackknife in there, and
the cold metal serves as a very good place for a crystal of relatively pure,
crack cocaine, to collect, and after a while, it dries out and you can put a rock
or two into that little pipe of yours…
***
It’s not like we didn’t know what we were doing, it’s
not like it hadn’t been in all the papers, all the magazines, all the
late-night newscasts. Cocaine, for whatever reason, was sweeping all across
America, and by extension, Canada. Television police dramas were chock-full of
black briefcases filled with clear plastic sacks of white, crystalline powder, that
is to say when they weren’t filled with neat stacks of greenbacks. Yes, this
was the time of the Uzi-toting TV bad guy, and this was an era where many a lad
went to jail, twenty, thirty, forty years in the bucket in a lot of cases. This
is Canada, where the situation or perhaps the consequences weren’t so dire—at
least we told ourselves, but cocaine penetrated into every small town, every
county, and every street.
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| Huddled in Big Frank's basement... |
I was lucky, in that I still had some kind of work
ethic. The money didn’t come easy to me. To some of us. When you find yourself
putting a roof on some guy’s house. Every half hour or so, you’re moseying on
down that ladder, very casually letting yourself into the side door of that
garage—where your customer is laying out a few big rocks of very good cocaine,
and you hit on the pipe, and then it’s back on the ladder. Back on the roof
again. You find that all of that is deducted from your paycheque at the end of
the week. It’s his accounting that matters, and you find yourself cutting a big
hole in the roof. You frame up a huge dormer, put in walls, roof structure,
sides. You run the plumbing up from the ground floor, you put in a bathroom and
put in endless weeks of work, and in the end you’ve gotten fifty bucks here, a
hundred bucks there. A handful of pot at the end of it all, and you’ve smoked
thousands of dollars in coke, and at some point you realize that it really
isn’t worth it. He’s getting it cheap, and selling it to you, for your labour,
at quite the markup.
It’s no way to make a living, and yet, at the very least,
we really didn’t have to steal for it.
Until we did. After a while, you know at least a few
coke dealers, and good old Swimmy did too. Good old Swimmy knew I had a car, or
could at least get good old Big Frank’s fucking car, and good old Peanuts in
Petrolia had a boat. A boat, which he’d taken for some kind of big drug debt—a
cocaine debt, probably. It was a twenty-seven foot Regal, a fibreglass boat,
with all kinds of horsepower.
Only problem with the boat—and this would have taken
some money, from some original owner, who was already in debt up to his
eyeballs—well, short story long, it needed the stern-drive, which is basically
a transmission. The actual marine engine is inside the hull, the stern drive
bolts onto the back end with about four bolts, and a couple or three cables,
and probably one really big gasket.
Right?
Two cables, left and right, steer the boat as the
drive swivels, and there is a way to trim it up and down as well. Once you get
up to a certain speed, you can trim the thrust to ‘bring it up on step’. All it
really takes is some knowledge. The actual intelligence gathering is something
else. Somebody else had the information…somehow. They knew exactly where to go.
We had an order, in a sense—all we had to do was to fulfil that order, and the
world would beat a path to our door…one has to admit, a dark night was helpful.
One has to admit, good eyes, a few wrenches and a big, strong back were a good
thing to have as well.
Cocaine made people as paranoid as hell. I was the
only one that could leave the house to pick up a pack of smokes…a two-litre
bottle of pop. I sat on the couch. It wasn’t my money and it wasn’t my coke.
Buddy Two-Shoes throws me a little baggie with a gram of dried up pot in it and
I could at least roll a joint—they weren’t too interested. What was really
informative stems from my point of view. You’ve got two or three guys cooking
up a spoonful. Their backs are turned, the faces are down, totally intent on
their work. It was like they had no heads. Just bodies. I got to sit there and
watch perfectly rational people sort of shrink, and collapse into their own
little world, which, in the end was not my world. Not for long, anyways.
***
Let’s think about this for a moment. It is now 1992-1993. I was in college,
studying second year of Radio, Television and Journalism. I had some pretty
good OSAP this time around, I had my own apartment, cameras, computers…and an
uncle in the furniture business, as the old saying went.
How many times did I show up at school, hung over, up
all fucking night smoking pot, and crack, and drinking like a fucking whatever,
and still, I somehow managed to get good marks, I passed the tests, wrote the
stories and did the assignments. I was surrounded by young and beautiful women,
even at the rather advanced age of thirty-five or so, any asshole could see
that.
And I was a piece of shit on some level. I had no self-esteem. Everything was a cop-out, I was escaping, and evading, any number of issues. I was killing time, ladies and gentlemen. I still don’t have a diploma for that course, even though I was the last one there. At some point, the instructors wanted to go on their summer vacation. It was the broadcasting instructor, the late John Murray, who told me to pack up and go home. I had some project I wanted to finish, and yet our marks had been posted some time before…
There was no danger of flunking out. In one final irony, I did not get
my English 211. This was a requirement for the diploma. It was offered that
term, only on a Tuesday evening, seven to ten p.m. and I was literally falling
asleep in class.
***
I sent out resumes all over the country that summer,
without one single reply, not even from Fort St. John or Yellowknife, or
Summerside P.E.I, or fucking Akimiski Island, which is, even now, uninhabited.
I was back on welfare…anything was better than that, and I kept on with my
usual ways. I went back to school the following September to study ‘Art
Fundamentals’, which if nothing else, put more OSAP money in my bank account,
staved off some personal accounting for another year, and at least allowed me to
pay room and board.
As far as the actual art goes, I loved every minute,
and you have to admit, I was surrounded by beautiful women.
If only I had the guts to do anything, literally
anything, about it.
***
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| Practically given away, to clear off a drug debt. |
This chapter is disjointed enough, and it is time to
end it. The late eighties and early nineties were something of a blur to me,
after all these years. Truth is, I wallowed. I blotted out my life and my
problems as best I could. The middle twenty years of my life were not all that
noteworthy.
It was in April or May, of 1993. Back on welfare,
renting the basement apartment of my father’s house…
I paid four hundred fifty a month, which didn’t leave
much for anything else.
I took fifty bucks and walked a few blocks to
Blackie’s house. I bought a half a gram of coke and walked home, this still
before noon on a beautiful spring day.
And it was shit.
The stuff was duffed out all over the place, I got
like three half-decent tokes and that was it.
I’d been ripped off. I was broke, I had three weeks to
go with no money.
No money—too lazy to work, and too stupid to steal, as
the saying goes.
I think that was what saved me in the end.
END
Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.
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.
Thank you for reading, and listening.
