My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty. Pilfering. Louis Shalako.

$110.00 worth of meat, in 1977 dollars...

Louis Shalako

Pilfering. In the world of work, the criminal instincts are sort of subsumed by the need to keep a job, to earn a paycheque, and to stay out of trouble. To the average worker, this means to avoid anything that would bring discredit to the employer, to avoid anything that would tend to lose a contract or a renewal. This was a secondary consideration. Simply put, if one must pilfer, it is best not to get caught. Stealing from the customer is as bad as stealing directly from the employer.

These attitudes aren’t exactly universal. At C.H. Heist, serving Chemical Valley with high pressure water-blasting, industrial vacuum and sandblasting services, I worked the vacuum side. The foreman on the water side asked me if I wanted to work a shift. Honestly, I should have said no, but I was still short of hours, and only working sporadically. You needed six hundred hours to get into the union.

I asked him for a pair of rubber boots, size thirteen and some fresh face-shields for our helmets. The fucking goof (Mokey), asked me, ‘can’t you just steal that from Dow?’ I ended up jamming my feet into size twelve rubber boots and used a scratched-up face-shield that I could barely see through. And that was the foreman—

A guy I worked with, who seemed like a pretty good bloke, Steve, was in the union. He’d been there some years. He had a house. He was an operator on a vacuum truck, for that you need the airbrake certification, whether that be DZ or AZ, I don’t really know the difference. Admittedly, he could get a good job driving a big truck pretty much anywhere, and yet he’d invested a certain amount of his time with Heist, and probably expected to retire out of there someday, far in the future, with his house paid off, his pension maxed out by contributions, often matched at some rate by one’s employer. A pretty sweet set-up, assuming this is what you want to do for the next twenty-five or thirty years.

Steve was seen. Steve was seen at the plant—probably Dow, possibly somewhere else. Someone made a quick phone call to the shop, laid on a pretty strong complaint. Someone was watching when poor old Steve brought the rig back to the shop after another long day…someone caught him red-handed. Steve lost his job, ladies and gentlemen, over three boxes of disposable paper coveralls, stolen from Dow, which he dragged out of the rig and stuffed into the trunk of his car, before even heading into the building to turn in reports, take off the boots and get instructions or orders for the next day. For the sake of a hundred and fifty dollars of disposable coveralls, he lost a pretty good job in an instant. To put that into perspective, the real overtime hogs, working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, plus the odd hours here and there—some guys literally slept in their truck and pulled 24 and 36-hour ‘shots’, well. They were pulling down $70,000.00 a year, and getting three weeks paid vacation a year once they’d been there long enough.

Let's hope it was worth it, eh...

Some of us would have killed for that sort of a job; that sort of money. That sort of future. Steve was just dumb.

***

Still trying to finish off my Grade 12 at Lambton College, I got a part-time job at the Hallmark Auto Centre, a concessionaire of the old Woolco department store chain.

I did oil and filter changes. I put grease in the differentials of vehicles, I greased ball joints, which was still a thing back then. I did air filters and PCV valves, fuel filters, and I did tires. I put new tires on, rotated tires, changed from snow tires to regular and back again. I learned how to fix a flat, which I have done on my own tires in the years since.

What was I getting? Minimum wage.

When I got out of school, at least I had a full-time job, which was enough to keep the old man off of my back for a while.

The sheer convenience meant that I bought a case of oil. I bought tires, the boss sort of appreciates that. I bought a few tools from the retail section outside the garage proper. Yet when he wasn’t around, we did sort of roam around in the stock room. If I needed four spark plugs, I probably grabbed them. I had a pair of quartz halogen bulbs, still in the package, in the toolbox for many years. I never got around to converting the MG to higher-powered lighting. Nowadays, it’s almost as if car headlights are too bright, well, not back then—British electrics of the day being what they were. There comes a day, when you’re asked to come in on your day off, and help out with the yearly inventory.

With a slightly guilty conscience, one had to wonder if there was a little more to it than that, and if maybe there was some sort of a hint being dropped…

But some guys were real bad at pilfering. Guys with wives and kids and good jobs, and they just can’t seem to help it. That temptation is there, and some of them absolutely abuse it.

***

Willy had his welding ticket by this time, and he helped me to get in at Bice Specialties, which sold and serviced industrial doors, residential garage doors, and steel doors and frames for the construction industry.

I mostly worked with Pete, who had exactly one year of experience, whereas I walked in the door with zero experience, other than some minimal mechanical experience. For six bucks an hour, which was better than minimum wage, what do you expect. I was a helper, and Pete had a temper. I could keep my cool, but he had the responsibility when we were out on a job. I imagine he felt the pressure, with a wife and a kid and a home in the Sherwood Park area of town.

Pete had the pilfering instinct real bad.

Fuck, at some point, you lose patience with the guy.

We’re at some warehouse at the back of a big refinery in Chemical Valley. I’m taking the ladders off the truck, I’m shaking out extension cords and opening up the tool bins, I’ve got my tape measure, I’m checking out the door opening, and checking out the door sections to see if this thing’s going to fit.

Where the hell is Pete? Going up and down the aisles in this deserted building, dusty old shelves full of…valves. Flanges. Gaskets, little boxes with bits of hardware and boxes of one-inch bolts for bolting big pipelines and valves together. Racks and racks of electrical conduit, pipes of various sizes, rack after rack after rack…of nothing he could use.

For fuck’s sakes, Pete, what do you expect to find back there?

This was called The Georgian, back in the day. We had the end unit on the left.

Pete is stealing a four-foot pipe wrench, not so much because he needed one, or had much use for one in our work. No, it was the only thing he actually recognized, ladies and gentlemen.

All the plants had their colour codes—the tools are painted in the company colours, and on your way out the gate, you’re just praying that the security guards don’t ask to have a look in the bins or behind the seat of your pickup truck…

Pete hardly qualified as a criminal—those guys at least had some sense, a lot of the time.

Pete had no sense at all, and it was only luck that he never got caught at it.

***

When we were about eighteen my girlfriend and I moved in together. We had a townhouse on Indian Road, two bedrooms, a basement, with a laundry room. So, we had a fridge, a stove, a washer and a dryer. A bathroom upstairs and a half-bath down below.

Johnny agreed to take a bedroom and help out with the rent. I was working at Fibreglas, making pretty good money for an eighteen year-old.

My girlfriend worked in the ladies wear at a local department store, and Johnny worked at Dominion Grocery Store, at Eastland Plaza on Indian Road South.

Theoretically, we should have been able to make it, but we were young. We liked to drink, to eat, to smoke, and to party…it is also true that Fibreglas Canada would lay me off when orders, and hence work, were short. If the line’s going to be down, even for a few days, it’s kind of expensive to keep forty guys standing around, and the best thing is a temporary layoff. The unemployment people downtown certainly understood this, and they didn’t push you to go look for another job when you clearly would be going back in the immediate future…only real problem, was the delay. Your last paycheque might have had only a few days on it, and your first pogy cheque can’t come in for two or three weeks, and that one might be only for one week anyways, at whatever the rate: sixty percent of earnings, nowadays it might even be lower, fifty-five percent or whatever.

Fuck, it’s not like any of us had any savings, ladies and gentlemen.

So, poor old Johnny calls me up one night. He’s stocking shelves on the night shift for like $2.85 per hour, for crying out loud…

Check outside the back door, behind the trash compactor, he says, hanging up just as abruptly.

"...check outside the back door," says Johnny.

Well, I can take a hint. I take the car down to the alley behind the store. Setting the handbrake, leaving the lights on, the car idling away, I step out and holy, fuck. There’s a wooden crate with green grapes. Full. I have to admit, I like grapes, and so we took them. I forget who was with me, probably Willy or my brother The Duke. Twenty-five pounds of fucking grapes, and I reckon we shared them around as best we could—yes, Johnny got some too.

A few days later, the guy’s grabbed a case of tins of cashews…fuck, I love cashews. These were a premium brand. Okay, one morning he comes home, looking proud of himself, and he’s lugging a big cardboard box. He’s gotten a hundred and ten dollars’ worth of meat.

We all know this can’t last, and one must admit, this is no way to sustain any kind of household, a point that I have made in a previous chapter. It’s all right for a while. But sooner or later, Johnny was going to get caught, and I reckon we told him that, and I also reckon he got it. But my girlfriend’s older sister had also broken off with Johnny. Now he’s sharing a house with us, we’re fucking like minks and he’s just down the hall…nothing wrong with the poor guy’s hearing.

Like many a thing, it has its natural lifespan, and the arrangement was arguably doomed to fail anyways, bearing in mind our ages and our levels of maturity. I’m not making any claims or comparisons there—it was what it was, as they say.

First, Johnny moves down to the basement, and within two weeks, he announces he’s getting a lot of pressure from the old lady, she’s all worried about him. And he’s moving back home. My girlfriend’s parents are putting on the pressure as well—they’re willing to help out if she wants to go to university, ah, but first, young lady—

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. My girlfriend’s moving back home to her parents’ house.

Not that it really changed things, we were together for seven years all told. As for the place on Indian Road, we were in and out of there in about three months.

By this time, I was back at work, of course—and back in my dad’s basement, as well.

***

When I worked at the Delhi News-Record, circa 1984, when it was time to quit, the last thing I did, was to open up the supply locker and grab a half a dozen rolls of film. I suppose it was illegal. I suppose it was simply unnecessary, I just did it. I had a few rolls of Ilford HP-5, and a few of the HP-4, black and white 35-mm films.

I don’t even know why I did it. I had been cut off at the motel where I had lived for a few months, I had been sleeping in my car. At the motel, I paid off the bill, no problem there—but he just didn’t want to do it any longer. I couldn't pay in advance...can’t say as I blame the man for that.

I had been making $210.00 a week…I suppose I didn’t need a reason, I just did it.

Yeah, I took my key off the ring, left it on the editor’s desk, along with a brief note.

Unlocking the window, I raised it, stepped across the sill, and let her down again quietly in the night. An interesting point: I could have locked the front door, but only from the outside. I would still have the damned key, wouldn’t I.

I got in my MGB and drove home to Sarnia, with a couple of suits, a small gym bag, and whatever dignity I could muster…

That, is a fairly long story and this isn’t the place to tackle it, not by a long shot.

 

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his art on Art Pal.

Grab yourself a free copy of One Million Words of Crap, available from Google Play.

Check out Working With Pete, right here on this blog.

See The Note, by Ian W. Cooper.

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. 

Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

 

 

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine. Cocaine. Louis Shalako.

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.

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.

***

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 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.

 

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

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Thank you for reading.