Louis Shalako

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.

Thank you for reading, and listening.

Friday, November 17, 2023

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight. Growing Dope. Louis Shalako.

Basically, just smokeable homegrown pot.

Louis Shalako

Growing dope. The inspiration for this plan actually came from the Sarnia Observer and statements made by Sarnia Police Services. I would like to give proper credit where it is due. Anyhow, it was front-page news at the time.

It seems someone had found a bunch of pot growing down at the old Polysar dump, which was accessed off of Scott Road. I’ve been there myself, working at a company called C.H. Heist, specializing in industrial services, including high-pressure water-blasting, industrial vacuum services, and sand-blasting. We were just dumping water and plastic pellets into a pond, a legitimate occupation even if I say do so myself…

According to the story, police found and destroyed an estimated one thousand pot plants, ranging in height from one foot to eleven feet. This sounds like it was grown from broadcast seed, on prepared or semi-prepared ground. They estimated the gross weight of this homegrown pot at about four hundred pounds. They estimated the street value of this alleged pot at a relatively-conservative sounding one thousand dollars a pound.

We might dispute the cops’ method of weighing wet pot, stalks, roots and dirt, much of which is unsellable. We could also make a case for turning unsellable pot into weed oil, but even so.

And it made me think.

What if we could grow pot—any kind of pot at all. What if all we could grow was indifferent pot.

Pot, good pot, Columbian and Mexican, was going for anything up to $1,800.00 per pound. The real primo California sensimilla, a lime-green, piney-tasting seedless variety, brought anything up to $300.00 per ounce. Sensi, would bring considerably more per pound, assuming you could even grow it. I had regularly paid $15.00 for a gram of sensi, wrapped in a bit of tinfoil, where I would get four, very skinny little joints, and if you saved some decent roaches, you might cut that up with scissors and get an even skimpier roach joint. Fifteen bucks a gram. Guys in high school or college were getting up to $420.00 per ounce, assuming they could find the customers to buy it at that rate, and assuming they didn’t smoke all their own product.

Okay, so we had no knowledge. We had no experience. But good old Stoney, who was nothing if not literate, had gone down to the library and rather than check a book out, never return it and basically just steal it, he had taken the time, had the inspiration, and just this once, a little cash on hand. Otherwise, he might have lost his library card, ladies and gentlemen—

He’d spent ten cents a page, to use the coin-operated machine and photocopy the entire book from front to back, complete with pictures, diagrams, and all the text.

Our fantasy was all too real, when looking at pictures of fourteen-foot pot plants, admittedly grown indoors in California, judging by the architecture of what were some pretty high-end homes. Yeah, we were going to split four ways—we were also going to take our money, head to the west coast and buy a sailboat. The four of us were going to buy a fucking sailboat, load it up with provisions, and head for Tahiti, ladies and gentlemen. It was a nice dream, you have to admit…

I reckon this was about 1985 or 1986, based on the fact I was still driving a Chrysler New Yorker, which will play a role in the rest of this story. It was crazy enough, it might just work, or so we told ourselves at the time.

***

There were four of us, sitting around, smoking pot, watching something shitty on television, and just bullshitting in general.

Four hundred pounds of pot, at a thousand dollars a pound, and this was the basic premise.

That would be a hundred grand each.

A piss-pot full of money, when you thought about it.

Stoney. I haven’t been all that complimentary in a previous chapter, but Stoney had a job, and he was still living at home at the age of thirty-six or whatever. His folks went back to the U.K. pretty much every summer, but only for a few weeks. He couldn’t really do a closet. All he could really do was to pitch in on supplies like peat pots, potting soil, Rapid-Gro plant food, big plastic bales of peat moss, plastic self-watering pots and stuff like that. Willy, had an apartment in the south end. He was good with electricity, and he had a second floor apartment in an old house. He had a closet about four by five feet and this was one of our closets. My brother, the Duke, had a closet. We had a small fluorescent light and an old sun lamp for illumination. We were starting with seeds, and everyone had a bag of fucking seeds back then, what with all the Columbian, Mexican, California sensimilla, Hawaiian, Panama Red, Jamaican, and good old Acapulco Gold. We were growing pot seeds in dirt, and we must have had two or three hundred seedlings ready to go by the May 24 weekend.

When predictably, things began to go awry.

Poor old Willy crashed his motorcycle and no one could get a hold of him. My brother had some work going on, renovating a friend’s kitchen, and he was just as likely to crash on the people’s couch as drive home at the end of a day. It was left to Stoney and I, in late May, to box up all those plants and get the last of the really big ones planted out in the woods. It is true that Willy and the Duke had given some help with our initial plantings. We simply could not do them all at once. We ended up with seven small patches, scattered all over central and north Lambton.

My brother, what with a phone call from a friend and an opportunity, had gone off up to Georgetown, framing houses, which really was his calling in life anyways. But I kept his closet alive…

***

...440 cubic inches up front and otherwise pretty anonymous...

Stoney and I emptied out the last few plants from my brother’s closet. These were the biggest ones, and they took up the entire trunk of my Chrysler New Yorker. We’d been drinking and partying all day, driving all over the county. You can smoke a lot of dope and drink and piss out a lot of beer. We’d dragged a pile of stuff out of the vehicle and into the back of a big field north of Arkona. And it was all wrong—fuck, Stoney was pissed, but it was all wrong. We ended up lugging all that shit back to the car, knapsacks, cardboard boxes with pots and tubs and a bale of fucking peat moss, shovels, water jugs…fuck, it was insane in what turned out to be pretty open country.

We were lucky to get the hell out of there, ending up back at his place, where the poor boy was, by this time, fast asleep, what with all this traipsing around in the woods, over hill and over dale, all the while in long pants, that fucking safari jacket, and bloody big black cowboy boots…it was late at night. I had his keys, I got into his house. I had slept on the couch in the living room before, and his mother, before taking off for Old Blighty for the summer, had laid in a generous supply of frozen entrees and such for her little boy…and his friends. They had a gas barbecue out back as well, incidentally.

And all of a sudden the fucking cops are in the driveway…I can see the lights and the shapes out through the sheer curtains on the front window. Taking the bull by the horns, I stepped out the back door and there they were. One of the neighbours, knowing the folks were away, had called it in. But I had Stoney, (one hell of an alibi), asleep in the car and this was also his home—the pot plants were in the trunk. I asked the cops to help me get poor old Stoney, snoring away in the passenger seat, into the house if not his bed, and this is when they began to lose interest. They had my ID, they had my license. More than anything, they already knew Stoney. One cop said something about the smell and I suggested there might be a minor gas leak somewhere in the neighbourhood—their own radio was squawking, and their priorities were already elsewhere.

I went back out a couple of hours later, slapping him in the face, waking him up, and finally getting him into what was his own house, after all. He must have weighed two hundred sixty pounds, ladies and gentlemen…

What with several different expeditions, all four of us working at it on and off, we ended up with seven different patches, beginning with seedlings and some fairly large plants, and when in doubt, we scattered film canisters full of seeds of all different strains, once we’d dug up the earth and prepped the soil.

Can you show us some ID, sir.

***

We found out later that Willy had been racing another guy on his motorcycle. Hitting a patch of sand on the road, he’d spun off, slammed into a fire hydrant and busted up his ankle, to the extent that he now had three steel pins in his ankle. The plants in his closet had died, due to lack of watering and other care, but he cheerfully handed over a big bag of immature pot, sitting there with one leg up, crutch beside him, and rolling joint after joint of what was a kind of cannabis, after all…

Our best patch was in behind a cemetery in Warwick Township. Farmers go round and round on their tractors, leveling the fields, but the cemetery still held some trace of the original terrain. With all the tombstones, a few trees, once we got to the back, the old vehicle was out of sight, it was also a kind of medium green colour. Stoney and I dug a hole ten feet long and six or eight feet wide. We put in a dozen and a half of our small seedlings, scattered seeds, sprinkled peat moss, and Miracle-Gro, and then dug a few smaller holes in a promising open area. These were mostly Indica, each one a few fairly dense four to six inches tall in a six-inch plastic pot. These ones turned out beautiful. Just beautiful…

Another good patch was along the Ausable River. Looking back, it seems awfully stupid, but we followed some farmer’s laneway, along the edge of a tobacco field, with the forest and the riverbank falling away, somewhere out of sight, off to our right. Again, these were fairly nice potted plants, cannabis, grown from selected seeds, and while it was difficult to actually get back there and water the things, at least they were in the ground and one could always hope for a bit of rain, periodically, throughout the summer.

In some kind of miracle, we managed to find at least some of our little dope-patches, weeks and months later when it had actually grown into some kind of a crop.

***

So, with a bit of dope from Willy’s closet, and allowing for some of the more marginal patches, and allowing for small attempts which we could not even locate, what with open, empty spaces in amongst the forest growing up to five or six-foot underbrush in the intervening weeks, we all ended up with about three quarters of an ounce of some fairly decent buds. They were potent to some degree, and at least tasted like pretty good buds, sweet, perhaps a bit of skunk or pine or even salt-air Hawaii bud in there. And, we each got a plastic bread bag, with about one and three-quarter pounds of a green, leafy home-grown, which, if you stuck two rolling papers together, jammed as much pot in there as you possibly could and still roll a joint, well. It was still all right.

It was better than nothing, and the truth is, if we had succeeded, it might very well have killed us—when you consider a crew of inexperienced sailors, chipping in and buying themselves a good used sailboat, loading her up with a few grand in provisions, and then setting off in all innocence, or possibly just stupidity, for the South Seas.

Nowadays, you can buy an ounce of pot for twenty dollars, which may or may not be all that potent, it may or may not, be all that tasty or flavourful, but I have to think that it probably beats our shit all to hell, and think of all that work that you don’t actually have to do, in order to smoke a fucking joint, after all.

That is literally a 1960s price, in the 21^st Century, and it’s all nice and legal.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Later in the story, I may talk a bit about stealing dope—but that’s a story for another chapter.

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromiTunes.

Louis has art available from Fine Art America.

He’s got this free audiobook, One Million Words ofCrap, from Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

Thank you for reading, and listening.

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven. Liars, Cheats and Frauds. Louis Shalako.

The leisure suit, ladies and gentlemen. Aspirational to a certain class of creep.

Louis Shalako

Liars, cheats and frauds. I’ve known a few liars, cheats and frauds in my time. Some were worse than others. So, I was at Lambton College, studying little photocopied math booklets and trying to get my Grade 12, and this is how I met I.M. Stoner.

Stoney was there for the same reasons I was, out of work, not too interested in getting a job, and milking those unemployment benefits for all they were worth. Not that it wasn’t a good program and everything, in the end we mostly got jobs and stuff like that. Stoney had four years of English Literature at Western University. His dad had gotten him a job at Polysar, a Crown Corporation in Chemical Valley, eventually sold off to private interests including Nova, Bayer A.G and B.A.S.F. He lasted about a year and a half...

This is where he got into speed, amphetamines, the good old-fashioned stuff, and not all this new-fangled meth shit, what with being up all night on twelve-hour shifts and thinking he was God’s gift to women. Which he was, in many a case, mostly ugly women. Sorry, but that is just my opinion.

Anyhow, he was a few years older. We ended up playing badminton in the gym, skipping out for an hour or so from various classes. He went on to qualify—a nice word, but qualify he did as a stationary engineer. In academic upgrading, in spite of being literate and all, Stoney preferred to buy little slips of paper with the test results all written down by the numbers. Question one, the answer is A. Question two, the answer is D, that sort of thing. With a continuous intake course, people work at their own speed, and the instructor gives them a chit and sends them to the testing centre when they’re ready to write the test on Chapter Four. There were really only three different tests for each chapter. Stoney had a one in three chance of passing any test, and he paid two fucking dollars per test, for the privilege of cheating his way through what passed for Grade 12.

The funny thing is, he did. I have to admit, I was sorely tempted, when I got to the chapter on quadratic equations. Fuck, it took me several tries to pass that section, which was like second to last in the Grade 12 math pamphlets…if you could crack quadratics, after that, it was pretty much all downhill. Here’s the thing. Stoney got into the Stationary Engineer program, (extending his unemployment benefits), based on these marks. Based on his prior performance, Stoney figured out how to buy the test results, and faked his way through the program. He finally got himself hired by Ontario Hydro, getting a very good job down at the old Lambton Generating Station. (A job like that might have changed my life.) Where he was duly checked out by their head operator and found to be incompetent at virtually every aspect of generating electrical power through the use of coal-burning, turbine-generated power…at some point they said the hell with him, only by this time he had made it through the ninety day probationary period and was in the union and everything. He really hadn’t done anything wrong at this point. All they could do was to give him a little ladder, and send him up and down, all over the plant, making him change the light-bulbs in the stairwells and shit like that, presumably in the hopes that he would topple off and fall down like nineteen sets of stairs or something like that.

Fuck, that guy was uncoordinated, and I have to admit, we were friends for many years.

Stoney didn’t have jeans, he didn’t have a pair of running shoes. He pulled off his shoes and socks and played badminton barefoot. He was so uncoordinated, it took him three or four false swings before he could finally bring himself to hit the birdie and send it back towards the net.

Think about that, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve barely hit the birdie and he’s already taken two or three swings at it. He drank like a chimney, smoked like a fish, and at the very least, he had a bit of cash and knew one or two people who could get pot. The truth was, he was intelligent and entertaining as all hell…at first.

***

For safety, no one works alone. His co-worker was female. She had recently broken off with her boyfriend. Not entirely without imagination, Stoney asked her out. He sent her flowers, the only guy I ever knew who had an actual account at a florist’s. He bought her perfume and took her out to the most expensive restaurant in town. I’m tempted to think he fell in love, but he was mostly in love with himself. What I really think, is that this one was at least semi-beautiful. Far more so than the usual one-nighters. That might have been the difference. When she decided to go back to the old boyfriend, a better man might have been hurt, but at least accepted it. Not Stoney.

She might have been fooled, but not for long...

By coincidence, the boyfriend lived around the corner from Stoney’s parents’ place. He went out at four a.m. and stole the bags of garbage sitting on the curb for collection and took them home. He rifled through all that and came up with the carbons—signed stubs from credit purchases, as mentioned in a previous section, you had to sign back then when you made a purchase. All he really wanted was the card number and the name of the service provider.

Late at night, good old Stoney walked to a phone booth in a nearby plaza, fed in a handful of quarters, and phoned into the Shopping Network…this was a 24-hour cable television network. He seized on an idea. And he set to work. This poor guy starts finding packages and delivery notices in his mailbox. It’s addressed to him, of course he opens it and finds that he has somehow purchased a bunch of jewelry, all cubic zirconiums and white gold, and all of this is going on his credit cards. At some point, more of such shit appears in the mailbox. At the end of the month he’s shocked by the credit card bill.

Stoney hated that guy. He told me once the guy was bald—I’ve still got all my hair, says Stoney. The guy had one missing tooth. I still have all my teeth, says Stoney. At times like that we bite our lip, as a friend and say nothing. Quite frankly, no one could have dissuaded Stoney from harassing this guy, and it went on for months…yeah, Stoney was known for stalking and harassing old girlfriends. As uncomfortable as that might be for all of your friends. You know what that other guy had, Stoney? He had a fucking personality, that’s what.

One night, broke, walking home from the bar, he stops in at my house.

He asked if I had any beer. He asked if I had any pot. I scraped up some sort of a roach-joint, (no beer), and just to get rid of him, I offered a ride home. I used Big Frank’s vehicle as he always had to park last, a bit of a quirk that at least saved him from having to move someone else’s car when he went out to work in the morning.

A straight run up London Road to his street, but no—we have to turn left on Indian Road…we have to turn right, into the driveway and rear parking lot of a townhouse complex at the corner of Indian Road and Maxwell Street. He’s peering at lit windows and he goes absolutely ballistic when he sees a certain pickup truck parked in a certain spot.

Oh, yeah, now I’m getting sucked into helping Stoney stalk this lady, and her boyfriend.

It’s easy enough to laugh at the stories, but of course now I knew it was true. And this wasn’t the first or the last woman he treated like that. Not unnaturally, he lost the job at the generating plant. Stalking and harassing fellow employees is definitely grounds for dismissal, and if enough talk got around, someone was probably going to beat the hell out of him anyways, what with the lady being a lot more popular around there than good old Stoney, that is for sure.

This is one of many reasons why I had to cut him off, in about 1993…buddy, you do what you want, but do not drag me into your shit. I do not want to be associated with that kind of behaviour, and with that guy, all was vanity. This is the guy who walked around town, reeking of cologne and aftershave, dressed in a sky-blue, polyester leisure suit, thinking he was Roger Moore in Moonraker—what is interesting is the sheer vast number of women who were fooled by the greasy charm, the slightly British accent, the cheerful ordering of just one more round—on his tab, which got so out of hand that he would be cut off at any number of downtown bars. His prey was the sort of women who hung around in downtown bars—

I used to see him walking uptown, heading to the bars, whenever it was cheque day. He was living at the homeless shelter, and yet there he was, shiny hard shoes, rumpled suit, shambling along like he’d studied Sean Connery’s walk, which he probably had. Connery was a body-builder, Stoney was all fish-belly white pudge underneath the costume.

***

McNuggets, as mentioned before, had gotten himself a trade while serving four years in a federal prison. He even got a little experience at a machine shop up in Pembroke, but he didn’t last long, and soon ended up back home in Sarnia.

A few months of experience didn’t count for much, and probably due to the circumstances of his leaving, he didn’t get much of a reference from his previous employer. Ah, but he had the solution.

He found a big, impressive machine-shop operation out of town—Kitchener, Cambridge, Waterloo. Not too far away, just far enough. He literally wrote a script, detailing in glowing terms his seven or eight years of experience operating plasma cutters, turret lathes, tool and die making, computer operated CNC machines…all the goodies. He paid an answering service, several months in advance. When someone called up the number he had provided on his resume, the well-known, all across Ontario, 'Acme Machining and Tool-Making', asking all about him, the lady basically just read the script.

“Oh, yes, sir, Mr. McNuggets was one of our most valued employees…” Blah, blah, blah. “We were real sorry to see him go…”

And he got the job—

A turret lathe, the modern ones are all computerized...actual experience might have helped.

Yeah, poor old McNuggets had it made, starting off at a much higher rate than some other guy with no experience, no references. Only problem was, (of course), that he simply could not do the work. A bit of training and a bit of light experience was no substitute for the claims he was making.

With a mother working at the bank, a good job and all the best of intentions—guys like that are always trying to get back on their feet, to go straight, to work hard and save their money just like any normal person…anyhow, she got him a mortgage.

He started tearing the place apart, setting up grow lights, setting up drip irrigation, setting up ventilation…he had eighteen pot plants in one room and a couple of dozen in the other. This was down in the basement.

One day at work, under pressure, and having just ruined a $1,600.00 work-piece, a very expensive bit of high-tungsten steel and all of his labour having gone out the window, he made the classic mistake of losing his temper.

Somebody said something, and good old McNuggets grabs a pipe wrench and threatens to pound his head in.

I had to go in with him the next day. We wheeled his big toolbox out to the truck and that was pretty much it for his local career as a machinist.

His unemployment payments were all right, and he had a year or so to get another job. Unfortunately, he’d been putting all kinds of stuff on his credit card—not content to grow dope in the basement, he was ripping up floors, knocking holes in walls, putting in a luxurious rear deck and doing all the things he’d seen on TV. Why, your home is the biggest investment you will make in your life…right. When someone turned him on to the balance transfer offered when you signed up for a new credit card, at three or four percent for the first six months, he plunged just like any self-respecting gambler would.

He and more than one friend ended up with a half a dozen or more credit cards, all with relatively high limits, all of them maxed out and unable to keep up with the monthly payments.

A credit card does not provide a second income. Sooner or later, your time must run out.

You can only buy so much rope on promises and bullshit. His time ran out, and he came to the end of his rope.

Whenever I see him around town—always walking, for cars, insurance, license fees cost money after all, I often wonder, whose wallet’s in your pocket?

This is the guy whose favourite cable television show was Criminal Masterminds, and home renovation shows...

All very entertaining, as long as you don’t identify too closely with the premise of the show…

McNuggets was a very stupid man, when you get right down to it.

I don’t think he ever figured it out.

What surprises me, is that I haven’t seen him in the news, in Provincial Court.

Maybe he moved out of town and tried his luck elsewhere.

END

Louis has books and stories available from Barnes & Noble.

See his works on Fine Art America.

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

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

Thank you for reading, and listening.

Monday, November 13, 2023

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six. The Women. Louis Shalako.

Mine at least has a little class...

Louis Shalako

The women. Women are important to this story, for surely man does not live by bread alone. Some of the women were fine, upstanding, and innocent. Some others, not so innocent after all. Some of them were just victims, in the end.

So, there was a group of guys and gals, virtually none of us actually going together, ‘going steady’, which is a term not much heard anymore.

One night, four or five of the guys, rather a few more of the girls, all nice kids from the north end of town, the product of some prosperity, some security, good homes, good families, nice houses…some of the guys were more of the south-end types. We met them while hanging out at Canatara Park, where all you had to do was to park your car, get out and start throwing a Frisbee around.

Oh—you had to talk.

Somehow or other, a whole gang of us decided to go to a pool hall—whose idea that was is now lost in the mists of time.

The pool hall did not serve liquor, but then we were underage anyways. It was simple enough to rent a pool table, sit at another long table, with a pop and a bag of chips, taking turns and quite frankly, not that interested in winning, or competition, or making bets and taking money. It was just for fun, and if there were a few raised eyebrows among the serious regulars, we had enough healthy young males to discourage any kind of trouble.

No one even tried to hit on the females, but presumably they were capable of taking care of that sort of thing on their own…it’s not like they hadn’t seen it all before.

After a couple of hours of this, we had the idea of grabbing a couple of pizzas. The whole bunch of us piled into three, four, five cars, having met up at Barb’s place, and I distinctly recall that someone asked if I didn’t mind picking up Geoff, and Doug, and Lisa, and Lori. This was probably the first time I’d met some of them. I ended up going to the Formula One Grand Prix at Mosport with Geoff and Doug, so that was pretty cool too.

The girls, very attractive. This is before they get married, get pregnant, have a few kids and begin that long, slow slide into staid middle age, all sagging tits, buttocks, stretch marks and lines in the face.

One on one, I was terribly shy with girls, but these folks had gone to school together, and some minimal conversation wasn’t all that hard.

So, with all those vehicles, and the pizzas, I had the idea of heading for my place.

We opened up the garage, turned on the lights. There was a picnic table, which was left inside, and as I recall, it was raining. We had some little radio up on a shelf. So, we laughed and joked and ate our pizza. All very well—

One of the girls gasped, and pointed out the door. My 1967 Dodge Fargo van was parked outside, it was customized. It was purple metal-flake. It had shag carpeting. It had the walls paneled, it had a built-in icebox, a fucking bar for crying out loud, and a quilted, fake leather bed in the back end. You lifted up a centre section, stuck in a steel pipe and you had a table. There were little tear-drop windows in the back, a sun roof, mag wheels, there was an eight-track tape player bolted up on the dashboard. A pretty cool vehicle…and it was rocking.

There was somebody in my van, ladies and gentlemen.

Naturally, I opened up the side door and had a look.

A cloud of blue pot smoke comes rolling out, a strong smell of alcohol, there was a distinctive laugh.

Zoom. Fucking Zoomer.

What the hell?

There was some light from the back door and I could see he wasn’t alone in there. He’s got a girl, and I have to admit, I wasn’t too pleased with all of this. Kind of hard to explain Zoom to nice girls, (or even nice guys), that is for sure.

In a kind of disgust, I shut the door and left them at it…at some point, our little party broke up and everyone went home. Finally, Zoom and the girl clambered out of the back of the van and went their own way.

Only one big problem. Dee was about fourteen years old. Zoom would have been about the same age as me, eighteen or maybe nineteen years old in his case.

I think it’s safe to say that I was a little shocked, but also, as a virgin, and as a kind of shy and lonely guy, one who sort of thought he’d be alone for the rest of his miserable little life, I have to admit I was kind of jealous.

Fuck, here’s Zoom, one of the most delinquent, most disruptive, rude, abusive, loud-mouthed people ever, and yes, a born thief, and for fuck’s sakes, the man’s at least getting laid.

The funny thing was, they were together for many years. She was his partner in crime.

When she started that young, I reckon she fell right in love with the guy. How in the hell would she know any better? With Zoom, booze, drugs, money, sex, a kind of mental and moral independence, it was probably quite the adventure…one big party, all the fucking way.

A built-in bar, an ice-box, and a bed in the back.

***

I got my first girlfriend as the result of a high-speed chase. Sounds crazy but it’s true. It’s also kind of a cute story.

As mentioned, we hung out quite a bit at Canatara Park, and people still do that, although the number of young people of a certain age has gone down due to the aging of the population.

We were in Johnny’s car, a Plymouth Cricket, which was a small, four-cylinder little sedan. We cruised the park, and didn’t see anyone we really knew, or if we did, the acquaintance was so slight. You have to wonder what they might have thought when we pulled up and joined the gang…mostly males, which was also a factor.

We’re just pulling out of the parking lot, onto an internal drive within the park, and here comes an Austin Mini, with three young women in it. Johnny’s beeping the horn, sticking his head out the window, waving at them, I’m yelling stupid shit like ‘I love you, Baby!!!’

The girl driving had thick, coppery tresses, blue eyes, and from what I could see, pretty good bone structure…

Huh.

How in the hell we ever expected that sort of thing to actually work, shows just how inept the pair of us actually were.

Johnny and I decided to follow them back into the park—maybe they were going to stop and hang out for a while, right? Pulling into a driveway and turning around, the girl in the back seat, looking out at these two weird guys, realizes we’re on their tail. The girl driving puts the hammer down and takes off through the park. The actual park road comes in off of Christina Street, and winds through the park, and then you pop back out onto Sandy Lane in what is Point Edward, a small municipal enclave surrounded on three sides by good old Sarnia. It’s a twisty little bit of road, perfect for the Mini and some female driving aggression, which is more common than you might think.

And she was good, certainly better than poor old Johnny. Fuck, when he got his beginner’s, I had my license and I took him out for a few driving lessons. Johnny had a hard time telling left from right, it’s like he suffered brain-lock when he didn’t know what to do. Me yelling instructions and curses, clutching the dashboard in panic, probably didn’t help, ladies and gentlemen.

We had them cornered—they’d taken the wrong turn, ended up down at the end of a cul-de-sac at the end of Beverly Road. Johnny blocked about half the road, and I got out, waving at the girls, basically we just wanted to talk to them…we wanted girlfriends and that’s just the truth of it. The redhead in the driver’s seat points the car right at me and she guns it. Laughing, I dove out of the way, and got in the vehicle, with Johnny madly trying to turn it around and to get on their tail again.

We followed them south, practically the full length of Indian Road, and they got so far and nipped into the subdivisions again. They made it through an intersection on the tail end of the yellow, Johnny being Johnny decided to stop—arguably the right thing to do.

We’re watching tail-lights disappear into the distance. The light changes and Johnny and I go racing off up Ontario Street, which cuts through the city on an angle, which is handy sometimes.

And in a move straight out of The Italian Job, the girls in the Mini have turned a corner and immediately pulled into the old H & S Sports Cars, the British Leyland dealer right there at the corner of Russell and Ontario Streets. They shut down the lights, turn off the motor, and duck down in the vehicle…she’s found a spot in a line of new and used Minis, and the truth is, we drove right on past them, searching in vain for what was hiding in plain sight. After a while, I suppose we gave up.

***

I must have been out of work. Back then, if you were laid off, you could get unemployment within about two weeks. If you quit, there was a penalty, but your cheques would start in six weeks. Ah, but the unemployment folks had ‘Manpower’ courses at Lambton College. Academic Upgrading. Fuck, they even had employment counselors at the unemployment office back then, and so this is how I ended up getting the ‘equivalent’ of Grade 12. In my usual form, I did not have to take English, but I did the work and got Grade 12 math, physics and chemistry. It also extended your benefits for one additional year, after that you were on your own. I even got kicked out once or twice, but I did finally finish and then at least I could get into the plants in Chemical Valley. Sure beats working at K-Mart, right.

I was riding my bike to school one day, and I saw a familiar little vehicle in the Sentry Department Store parking lot, at the corner of London Road and Murphy Road…just across the parking lot from McDonald’s, mentioned previously. I noted the car there more than once. With a continuous intake set of courses, I was in school, but the high school kids were out and I wondered if maybe one of them girls worked there in some sort of summer job.

Four gears and four cylinders.

I mentioned this to Johnny, and one evening we went to McDonald’s for a cheeseburger or whatever. This was even before they had a drive-through. And on the way out, we took a little tour through the Sentry Store parking lot. Sure enough, the Mini was sitting there in one of the rows.

What in the hell do we do now? Rummaging around, we found a pen and a bit of paper. We left a note. It went something like this: Please don’t run away next time. We’re friendly. Signed, two nice guys. Johnny, and Louis, and we put our phone numbers on there, which is sort of naïve, in fact unbelievable in the more modern world.

What is even more unbelievable, but true, is that I was sitting at home one night when the phone rang. With an odd look on his face, my old man said it was for me…

It was them—all of them, most likely listening in on an extension and trying not to laugh.

Anyhow, we talked a bit and then I asked if maybe, uh, like maybe if we could go out some time. I have often wondered if they drew straws to see just who would go—but that’s cynical.

Much to my surprise, she said yes. Much to Johnny’s surprise, he ended up going out with her older sister, the brunette. As for the third one, the blonde in the back seat, she was a cousin and had a boyfriend up in Quebec somewhere…she was just staying with them for a year or so, taking Grade 13 or something like that. That one is a bit fuzzy on the details; but her boyfriend’s name was Gilles, and one wonders if the parents were just getting her out of town for a while.

When I went to write French noir detective novels years later, Gilles was the coolest name I could think of on the spur of the moment, hence the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series.

Available from many fine online retailers.

As for the ladies, they will be back later in the story.

***

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Kobo.

Louis has some art available from Fine Art America.

If you’re a writer or interested in writing, here is my free audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, available from Google Play.