My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Two. Dee. Louis Shalako.

She's all growed up now.

Louis Shalako

Dee. Some years had passed and Dee had grown into a beautiful young woman. In some sense, she was a statistically-average 20 year-old, but then I don’t particularly need humongous breasts, the massive backside which seems to be a fashion in certain circles these days. She was well-formed, with all the bits and pieces in all the right places…the sort of girl who really should have been painted on the nose of a B-17 bomber.

After seven years together, the relationship between my girlfriend and I had ended.

I have to accept full responsibility for that, admittedly, I was suffering from some pretty bad depression after my big failure in journalism. My girlfriend had a really good job, I was dead broke, and what was almost worse, there was some pressure to marry. Willy told me. He told me I had six months to propose, or she was probably going to walk anyways. His wife and my girlfriend, were very good friends. The information was credible enough.

Truth is, I broke off with her, and to say that my depression got even worse, and went on and on and on, with no relief in sight, would be nothing more than the truth—

So, when Zoomer finally got caught, and sent away, I was both single and at something of a loose end.

A guy like Zoomer, once he’s got a charge or two against him, he’s out on bail. If he fails to attend court, that’s another charge. If he evades the police, that’s another charge, if they get him on camera shoplifting, that’s another charge. When they finally do catch up to him, he’s got a long list of charges. Some of that goes away with a plea agreement, even so, he’s looking at some time in the bucket—and the local jail isn’t really meant for long terms of incarceration, with no provision for recreation, no provision for education, not even remedial reading, let alone a trade. Once he’s been sentenced, he’s likely to be assigned to a provincial (or federal), institution somewhere a little further down the road. This time he ended up in the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre, located in southwest London, Ontario.

When Dee asked me to drive her up to London so she could visit her boyfriend in jail, I probably hesitated a bit, but she was buying gas—maybe a cheeseburger and fries if I was lucky, and we probably did have a joint or two for the ride.

***

There I was, with a sweet-smelling young woman on the seat beside me. It’s a good hour’s drive up to London. She’s not overweight. She’s not all skinny and scrawny…she had nice knees, thick, dark brown hair, brown eyes and good shoulders. She was never heavy on the makeup, her nails were never big, long, painted claws. She’d never needed it, I suppose. She was exactly perfect just the way she was, and this is an assessment from forty years later—well, there’s no accounting for taste, as they say. Assuming four or so years younger than either Zoom or I, she would be twenty-two or twenty-three years old.

While her history was well known to me, what with being Zoom’s criminal accomplice, in all so many things, it was like the girl next door, wholesome and healthy. But she had the driver’s license, grandma’s car, she could get over the river into the U.S. where Zoom was banned. Her and a girlfriend could go over the river and come back with a couple of 60-oz bottles, a carton of cheap smokes and somehow stuff all that into their rather oversized purses.

Perfect, and yet one had to wonder what went on in her head…and mine.

Good enough to eat.

Yeah, if only I had the nerve.

We have to talk about something. She hadn’t finished high school, she had no real education, and as far as I could determine, no real ideas of her own. She seemed bright enough, and at some point we’re at the gate. We’re parking the car, pushing a button and gaining admittance to the public area of what is a maximum-security prison.

It’s pretty easy to get an idea. It’s pretty easy to get a bit of a crush, what with being lonely, as well as physically healthy. Truth is, I was as horny as a ten-peckered Billy goat, and I probably spent a little too much time thinking about the significance.

Truth is, she just needed a ride, no one else was available—or that dumb, yet Zoom seemed glad enough to see me as well as her—otherwise, he might not have seen her at all. Probably, her grandma would not allow her to take the vehicle for hours at a time, not to another town a hundred kilometres away, and most especially, not to visit Zoom in jail.

It was me or nothing, probably.

There it is, the Middlesex-Elgin Detention Centre.

And of course, I got this horrible crush on her.

It was sappy enough, as such things often are. But with me, she wouldn’t have to steal, or so I told myself. With me, she wouldn’t have to worry about me cheating on her, with me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, with me, she wouldn’t have to worry about coming down HIV positive due to dirty needles and a lifelong amphetamine habit, which was one reason guys like Zoom don’t want to go to jail in the first place.

All they want, is to keep going—they’re never going to quit, and they’re usually the first ones to admit it.

As for your girlfriend, Zoom, quite frankly, she could do better. Maybe even a lot better.

Alas, it was not to be.

***

This went on for some weeks, visiting Zoom once a week or so. At some point it’s like Stockholm syndrome, where you’re sort of captive, and yet dependent. It was better than being alone all the time, and of course I had my thoughts. Which were predictable enough.

One night she called me up. Asked me what I was doing, and I said nothing much. She said she’d stop by and smoke a joint with me. I was grateful enough, what with being out of work six months in a row. There might have been a bit of a recession going on, or maybe I had just lost all confidence…

Depression will do a lot of funny things to an otherwise sensible person.

She pulled into the driveway, on a warm summer evening. We sat on lawn chairs in the door of my old man’s garage, and she pulled out a big joint and lit it up. She told me she was going out with one of her girlfriends and wondered if I wanted to come along—I shrugged, saying I was broke and she didn’t exactly insist.

Dee was wearing a pair of thin, short shorts in some floral pattern, with a bit of lace around the legs. She had brown leather sandals on, and she had good feet. Her top was thin, stretchy cotton, not exposing the midriff but not meant to be tucked in, either. She smelled good and the smile was good. Fuck, she hung around for fifteen or twenty minutes and then off she went, presumably to have a good time.

It’s a good way to remember her. Young, healthy, and cuter than the belly-button on a tsetse-fly, as my old man used to say.

It was also one hell of a signal, or so I remember thinking. The only question was what to make of it.

In the end, all I made was a big mess, and if nothing else, embarrassed the hell out of me, and probably, her too.

***

Speaking purely objectively, I knew what love was—and love lost. I also knew what sex was, and I’m thinking that might have been part of the problem. There was nothing wrong with my imagination, ladies and gentlemen. There was nothing objective about this situation, it was all subjective.

Somehow I knew her birthday was coming up, maybe a week or two before mine. Here I am, a pretty nice guy by almost any standard, and I have no idea of how to go about it.

Somewhere I scraped up a ball or two and decided to do something about it, come hell or high water, and let the chips fall where they may. Just to put that in its proper perspective, I’m trying to fuck my buddy’s girlfriend, while he’s in jail, and who knows where that might go, if only a man was lucky enough—

She was definitely worth a gamble.

One way or another, the situation must be resolved.

***

This one was worth a gamble...

So, firing up the Wayback machine here, setting the time and the date, circa 1985 or ’86 or so, pulling the big red handle, the wheels go round and round…I must have had some money. I don’t see how I could have done it otherwise.

Let’s say it was payday and I was working at Central Cab. I had a few connections of my own. I bought a gram of cocaine. I bought a 40-oz bottle of Wiser’s Canadian Rye Whiskey. I had a quarter bag of pot…I had a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

I scraped up the nerve and dialled the phone. After a few rings, she picked up…my heart sank. By the sounds of things, the party had already broken out over at her place…I asked her if she wanted to get together, what with it being her birthday and all.

She laughed over the phone.

‘Oh, Louis,’ she says. Oh, Louis.

Yeah, I’m a nice guy and everything—oh, well.

That night, I came very close to shooting myself, right in the head.

I didn’t, but I came awful close. I still had her on the phone. She was distracted by stuff happening at her end. I wanted her to hear the shot…

Bang. I let the phone drop to the floor.

I could still hear her laughing…finally, I pushed the button and hung up.

If that didn’t put things into perspective, I don’t know what will, as the saying goes.

There’s not a whole hell of a lot more to add.

Don't try this at home, kiddies.

All I can really say, is that a .22-calibre short, fired from a Cooey bolt-action sporting rifle, will go through ten or eleven paperbacks, and lodge, slightly misshapen, in the twelfth paperback. Don’t try that at home in your bedroom, kids…

That would have made real mess of my head, wouldn’t it. Not that it wasn’t pretty messed up at the time.

Right?

***

I was at a gas bar downtown a few years ago, and some woman in the checkout line was talking to me. I had no idea of who it was, I didn’t recognize her until she started talking about my old man—she’d seen the obituary, and she called him Big Frank.

Yeah, she was real sad to see him go.

It was her.

She was dying her hair, but then all women of a certain age are dying their hair.

She had dentures, at least on the uppers…it was winter, but she seemed a bit scrawny to me, frail, maybe.

She was like real glad to see me, and for the life of me, I could not think of one damned intelligent thing to say.

I couldn’t even think of anything stupid to say, which is definitely not like me—I’m usually pretty good at that sort of thing.

But.

To think I almost killed myself over that girl.

Fuck.

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Everand, a new ebook and audiobook platform.

See his art on Fine Art America.

Check out One Million Words of Crap, an audio essay on independent, digital publishing, in celebration of fourteen years here at Long Cool One Books.

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.

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.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-One

Thank you for reading, and listening.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-One. Joe, and Strip Bars. Louis Shalako.

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…this is where he told me that he whacked off once a week, just to maintain his independence, as he put it.

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. Here’s a funny thing. If your boat is shaped like a wedge of cheese, then the front of the boat has essentially no flotation. Also, any proper sailboat has a keel. Whether it’s a dagger-board, or a drop keel, or a fixed keel, some kind of keel is essential to keep the boat from just drifting sideways in the wind. A proper rudder and keel are also essential, this is especially true if you are hoping to tack into the wind—for example getting back to the club on Guelph Lake.

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.

See his art on Art Pal.

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nineteen. Squiggly. Louis Shalako.

Squiggly had his own little system...

Louis Shalako

Squiggly. Squiggly was an interesting character. Another one of those guys who wasn’t a jock in high school, neither was he a sparkling student. I didn’t know him then, but he would have been a little pudgy, yes, thick glasses. Wish-washy blue eyes, frizzy red hair. Very fair. The sort of guy who could get a sunburn on the subway—here’s another one of those guys who always wore long pants. Fuck, it was like Stoney, and Willy to some extent. They’d never taken their shirts off in their entire lives…he would have wheezed under physical stress. Stoney had effeminate mannerisms with his hands, and that sort of spastic effect, which made his badminton so odd—unpredictable, and he did win the odd one…Willy walked with a swagger he’d never quite earned.

Squiggly wasn’t quite that bad, not being interested in fake personas.

Squiggly was the kid who always knew where to get dope. And knowing where to get dope, plus some small financial sense, meant he got into selling pot, and he did that all through high school. A guy like that shows up for school, he’s got a quarter pound of Columbian or Mexican or something at home—that’s like a whole hundred and fifty bucks at the time, eh. He’s got two or three quarters on him, and some smaller packages, eighths and grams and stuff like that.

There’s more than one way to be popular in high school, and he’d obviously figured that much out somewhere along the way…a quick study in that sense.

He’s always got a few joints rolled up and stuck in his cigarette pack. It’s all too easy to step off the school property, where all the cool kids smoked, and dispose of all that dope even before lunchtime.

Then, of course, there are those who will show up at his place, at lunchtime—then it’s back to school for the afternoon shift, and then there’s all those folks coming around after school. Last time I saw Squiggly, he had a little oxygen tank sitting beside the couch. There was like a plastic tube and a nose-clip. But Squiggly was also smart enough to have a job. He was an insulator, but what probably killed him, if he isn’t still alive, would be the asbestos removal. It pays well, but the life expectancy isn’t very good, ladies and gentlemen. Squiggly had a brain, and I was at his house, two or three times a week, buying an eighth for thirty-five dollars, and it was, for the most part, all the same weed. Good quality, flavour, tight, sticky stuff that had to be cut up with scissors. And of course we talked.

At some point, you begin to regard such people as friends.

So, he had the construction type job for months on end. In winter, he had pogy, unemployment insurance, coming in at a decent rate; much better than some guy on minimum wage. He lived in his parents’ basement, which was nicely fixed up, with his own bathroom and a living room, a bedroom. He didn’t have to make his living from dope sales. He didn’t have to live entirely on his pay, either, and the expenses were certainly manageable.

This guy nickeled and dimed it all over town for over thirty years. As long as you’re not drinking and driving, and Squiggly was a good driver, you can get away with it for a very long time. Yeah, him and Lady Di, a kind of platonic girlfriend. The girl next door, there might have been something there at one time, but they were just good friends now. She’s even married some other guy, and had a kid, separated, widowed, divorced, whatever.

Nothing blends in quite like a shit little car.

There were times though, when his driveway had six or seven vehicles in it. The basic rule was that you had to stay for at least half an hour, and there were times, fucking payday or whatever, when there was quite the little group, quite the little party going on in Squiggly’s basement. The idea was not to run in and out, and yet people inevitably did it. The idea was not to leave some dumbass that Squiggly didn’t know sitting in the car in the driveway for half an hour at a time, but that also inevitably happened…there is a lesson here, I am sure.

It was always interesting to open up the back door and his elderly mother is sitting at the kitchen table, beaming sort of maternally at you as you turned and went down the stairs. She really was a sweet old lady—probably had seen it all by now, what with two older sons cast from a similar mold. One of them older brothers might have spotted him that first ounce, come to think on it.

Fuck, none of us were exactly young, at this point. I would have to have been in my early forties by this time, and we were all mostly of an age.

I was tempted to leave Squiggly out of this memoir. But there came a time when he and a couple of other guys cut me off—they just cut me off. I’ve never been entirely sure what that was all about, but paranoia, good, old-fashioned paranoia probably played a role.

I know this sounds crazy, but I was always talking about writing books. This was my big ambition in life. McNuggets was damned ignorant when I mentioned The Trailer Park Boys and writing, not so much about great train robberies or even murder, but basically small-town stuff…small town punks, essentially. McNuggets was damned threatened by the very idea itself. (Well, your worst fears have been confirmed now, eh.) But Squiggly was amused enough when I told him about my idea for a World War One memoir, sort of inspired by Snoopy versus the Red Baron.

(Heaven Is Too Far Away, by Louis Shalako. Available from many fine online platforms. – ed.)

I borrowed books from Squiggly. His old man had served on light cruisers and escort carriers during World War Two. What do you give a veteran for Christmas? Another fucking book on World War Two, ladies and gentlemen. That’s what you give them. It’s better than another bottle of aftershave. Well, the family had a whole shelf of them, down in the basement. One wonders if that did not become somewhat tiresome, after a while, veterans must get sick of it all at some point.

One day in the early 2000s, I pulled out of Squiggly’s driveway there, right on Indian Road, a busy thoroughfare. I went south, made a left and cut through the subdivision. I ended up on Confederation Street going east. I was headed out to see a guy about a derelict MGB which was out in front of their place of business. The guy had a small company running school buses at the time, their yard was fenced, but here is this MGB, no roof, mostly intact, rotting into the ground, and of course I had seen it when going by.

I was prepared to offer five hundred dollars, and I still am, if only for the parts and their resale value…

I was probably carrying an eighth, but the cop didn't really ask.

This fucking cop gloms onto me…he was right there, just around the corner. He followed, real close for a while, getting my license number probably. He dropped back. He made the same turns I did. After a while, he’s five hundred metres back, but I know fucking well he’s following me. Finally, he zooms up, pulls me over, way the hell out in the rural part of the municipality. I am stopped by the side of the road…what’s weird, is that with his lights flashing, the guy parks three hundred and fifty feet back. He comes walking up, visible in my mirror, with that fucking gunfighter walk…it’s like this measly prick thinks he can make me run for it.

I mean, seriously, he parked three hundred fifty feet back. I know fucking well he’s had time to arrange for a backup…for pursuit. Right?

He looked at my license, my insurance, all that sort of shit. I asked him why he had stopped me, I sure as hell wasn’t speeding or anything—I’d seen him coming, after all.

Suspicious vehicle in a school zone, he says. And then he let me go—he had nothing and he knew it.

And then I went to check out the MGB. I did not buy it, or it would be safer to say the guy wouldn’t sell it. I can’t recall the name, but this guy had a two-tone, blue Austin-Healey, whether that be the 100-6 or the 3000, I can’t quite recall. I’d seen it around. He was a little patronizing, but such folks are busy enough as it is.

The thing is, I told Squiggly, and others, about this little incident. I guess that was my mistake.

The other thing is, methamphetamines were all over the news. This was back when it was news, if you take my meaning—there are new, even worse drugs all over the news now, including all the usual suspects like fentanyl and oxy-whatever. Right? I recall mentioning it…truth is, I was all against it. And I still am, right.

So, all of a sudden, I am persona non grata, just like that.

Some months later, Squiggly and Peanuts are in the paper. They’ve been busted, going down the road, in Squiggly’s little Ford Tempo. According to the newspaper clipping, which I probably still have in my files, the police seized marijuana, cocaine, oxycontin, cash, methamphetamines, stolen credit cards…and stolen cell-phones.

Peanuts had the more extensive record, in fact I reckon the cops wanted him real bad. They both did some stiff time for that, about four years for Peanuts and two and a half for Squiggly. That must have been a bit of a shock for Squiggly. He might have been busted for possession as an underage offender, which would have resulted in a fine and a couple of years on probation.

I don’t know for sure, but he might have been popped for possession as an adult, which would be a hell of a lot better than trafficking, even though, even at the time, the cops probably knew enough about him. Once he made bail, he probably didn’t do another minute in jail—just a fine and more probie, as they call it.

The truth is, Squiggly was a likeable guy—he had a million friends.

I’m just not one of them, but that was his choice, and not mine so much—

Funny thing is, Squiggly is one of the few old ‘friends’ that I still miss.

Ye olde triple-beam scales, stolen from many a high school science class.

***

He had more than one source of income on the side. It sounds crazy, but he had his own baseball league. He organized it, he arranged for the time on the municipal baseball diamonds. He wrote up the schedule, refereed the games. He did everything. But if it takes nine or ten people to make up a baseball team, and if each of them pays a mere ten dollars, and if there are five, or six, or seven or eight teams, each playing one or two games a week, then everybody’s having fun and getting their ten dollars’ worth. With a high-school friend working at the parks department, it wasn’t all that hard to work his own (free, no diamond fees), sort of schedule around the established schedules for all the other local minor leagues.

What does Squiggly get out of it? He gets to hold the money for the season. I showed up at his place one morning and he was trying to figure out a schedule. He was making notes in an exercise book, a book full of names, phone numbers, team lists, all that sort of thing. And he had a big stack of cash, fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars. A guy like Squiggly could do a lot, backed up by an additional two thousand dollars, cash on hand, all ready for whatever opportunity might arise. Also, Squiggly would bring a few quarters of pot to the games…all those names, all those people, and if someone had a cooler of beer in the back of the car, no one made a big thing about it.

Knowing Squiggly, he would have it all thought out and by the way, it’s two bucks a beer. A dollar for a can of pop for the kids, probably—knowing Squiggly.

So, at the end of the year, Squiggly has a few small trophies engraved, he has to throw a barbecue in the back yard, with a few cases of beer and a few packs of buns, wieners, hamburgers on the grill. Some condiments. He gets to make a speech, hand out the trophies, and whatever is left of the cash was all his at this point—

Let’s hope he liked baseball, he sure as hell got enough of it.

Maybe he just liked people, eh.

***

Here’s a guy with time to kill, at least when he’s not working or selling dope. No baseball in the wintertime. Where he got the idea, I don’t know, but all of a sudden, he’s on the internet, he’s on Ebay.

He’s selling tobacciana—tobacco memorabilia.

And yes, there really is such a thing.

He’s going to local auctions, estate sales, and specializing in the two-dollar lots. A box of stuff from some old house, and he must have found an interesting tobacco tin—and then he must have looked it up on the internet.

Some of those things are worth real money. Squiggly learned all that, self-taught in every sense of the word. One year, he told me he’d made six thousand dollars selling stuff most people wouldn’t have taken a second look at.

If I had sold six thousand dollars’ worth of ebooks in any given year, I would have been a best-selling author, ladies and gentlemen.

I sold him one or two items myself, when I bought my elderly great-aunt’s house in the south end, and there were definitely a few rare finds in there. The place went back to the forties, after all—last century, not this one. I sold him tobacco tins, my great uncle's pipes, some ceramic figurines, and oddly enough, some hand-made ice fishing tackle. I kid you not.

This guy had a brain in his head, one of a few that actually impressed me.

Seriously.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Kobo.

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.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seventeen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eighteen.

 

Thank you for reading, and listening.