Louis Shalako
I was heading to the smoke shack to get a couple of
packs of smokes.
There was a familiar figure coming up the street on
his crappy old bicycle, most likely stolen or given to him to pay off some
small drug debt, (from a bigger loser than him?)
Let’s call him Zoomer.
We’re the same age. We grew up on the same street. We
went to the same school.
We played street hockey together. As we got older we
drank together, smoked pot together, chased girls together, and indulged in a
little bit of petty crime together.
Zoomer was clearly well on his way to alcoholism even
back then. He was the only guy I know who could carry a two-four of beer on a
ten-speed bike. This guy rolled joints the size of your thumb, but then he
never worried about where the next bag was coming from. He would just go out
and steal some more money when he ran out. This was quite shocking to staid,
working class guys like me.
See, I always had to work, to earn my money.
Later, when I was going to college and had a real nice
girlfriend, Zoomer was making the papers, the Provincial Court section, several
times a year. He has a rap sheet as long as your arm.
He’s the one that stole a Datsun 240-Z, (someone left
the key in it). He was drunk as a skunk, high on acid, and
doing laps around the Central High School track, which at the time was packed
clay and gravel. (Sounds kind of fun, eh.)
He looks pretty wild these days. His hair is all over
the place, but I doubt if he’s cut it in years.
His face looks like it could hold a three-day rain.
His eyes dart back and forth. He’s absolutely nuts. He cruises around on that
bike, looking for stuff to steal. When a mitre-saw disappeared from my garage a
few years ago, he was the first one I thought of. It might not have been him.
It could have been somebody else. There are plenty of them, after all.
I guess I forgot to lock the garage.
His girlfriend left him and hooked up with a big
coke-head. For a while there, back in the eighties, I would drive her to London
so that she could visit him when he was in jail. She looked pretty good then,
and I have to admit, my attraction to her felt kind of disloyal.
There’s no
doubt she would have been better off with me…such was my thinking.
After seeing her in recent years, I’m kind of glad
that didn’t happen.
She dumped him when her mother died and there was some
chance of inheritance…I guess she could see, even then, which way the wind was
blowing. It wouldn’t have lasted very long, would it? A half a million bucks
would have kept Zoomer and her going for about two, two and a half years…
There were times when I envied that guy—envied him.
Shit, he had girlfriends, some of them not too bad looking, and at some point
in my life, I was always alone. It was only when you went to their house, sat
there and listened to them talk, when you figured it out.
Who else would have him?
No one in their right mind.
The women were as bad as he was.
No one was more impressed than I was, when Zoomer got
a job. Predictably, it was the sort of job where no one really cared if you
showed up hung over, called in sick, or stepped outside to smoke a quick doobie
or two on your lunch hour. When the bosses went home at four-thirty, that’s
when the beer magically appeared. Guys down there love their overtime, eh?
It was a shitty place to work—all kinds of resin,
fibreglass, and fumes in there, and
so I never applied there.
My buddy taught me how to boost a car stereo, open a
car door with a coat hangar, how to shoplift, how to make rock cocaine from
powder, all sorts of things really.
He’s still out there. He’s on the street, although
I’ve seen him and one or two others coming and going from the homeless shelter.
One wonders where he would find a landlord dumb enough to rent to him. The welfare
claim is pretty much automatic, although the looking for work, and the job
searches can’t be all that credible. I’ve never seen him wearing the orange
vest and picking up cigarette butts downtown. It’s beneath his dignity, one
would think. Why work when you can steal?
He doesn’t seem to have any teeth left.
Poor old Zoomer looks like sheer hell when you see
him.
I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want him to know
where I live. I don’t want him asking about my family.
I don’t want to come home one day and find that he’s
cleaned me out, or if not him, then it would be somebody else.
At his age, one would think that he is beyond hope,
beyond cure, beyond caring any longer what happens to him.
It’s probably true, too.
Was he ever a good man?
Not that I can really recall.
With that guy, it all started when he was about
fourteen years old.
And I’m guilty too. Twenty years went by when I was
just killing time, trying to stay drunk, or stoned, or just not bothering to
try. I was trying to avoid responsibility for my life. Even then, I thought of
writing books—I was a crashing bore on the subject, but it just seemed so
unlikely.
It was just too
hard, ladies and gentlemen.
I don’t care if you pity or condemn Zoomer, who
eventually found the meth.
It’s cheap, it gets you high, and it kills a lot of pain—that’s what I’m
thinking.
And I’ll bet he’s got a lot of pain to kill. He’s got
a whole, wasted lifetime of guilt and pain which he will never acknowledge
outside of a rehab
group therapy session, and probably not even then. He’s never been honest with
himself, unless it was part of a ploy to gain sympathy—a ploy to beg, borrow or
steal some more money.
Some of these guys are real good with the sob stories.
Their dads are always there to bail them out of jail, too.
That must be an interesting conversation.
Eh?
A lot of that money must have come from his own
parents.
There but for something—call it luck, call it
determination, call it the grace of God if you must, go I—and I know that very
well.
It is all too easy to let go and not give a fuck about
anything anymore. Or anyone—and I can assure you that he did have a mother, a
father, a sister and a brother.
When people don’t respect themselves, you can hardly
expect them to respect anyone or anything else. That includes other people's property. It’s
all the same to a meth-head.
He had a nice girlfriend, and he had some pretty good
friends there for a while.
This is his fate—and that’s okay with me as long as
it’s okay with him.
And if you don’t want to hear about my books and
stories, that’s okay too.
I don’t need him any more than I need you.
Maybe that’s the difference.
Maybe the poor guy never got pissed off at himself.
Maybe the poor guy never asked the question.
Maybe he never looked inside of himself and found
something there that was worthwhile.
Maybe that guy never found any guts.
But I did. I did, ladies and gentlemen. In that sense,
even an atheist can be truly blessed.
And I can tell you that there is something better than
this.
I will keep going until I find it.
As for you guys, you can do what you want.
It’s not like I give a fucking shit. I got my shit
together, it took a while, but it did happen.
No one is going to take that away from me.
END
