Category Archives: Stories

Notorious Outlaw Motorcycle Gang

Bill Crow, blog, cartoon, Kelly Tough, Miss October, Playboy, playmate, Stories, William Crow, writer, writing, , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted: January 17, 2020 at 4:00 pm

It was harder and harder to get the chemicals we needed to make crystal meth. Barrels of ephedrine, we used to be able to get them easy, and they were cheap. Something like $500. But the prices kept going up and up, and then there was a big drug bust, so the prices doubled again. The new cost of one big blue barrel of ephedrine was $60,000, if you could get one. This caused things to be a little dry for crystal meth users (me) and crystal meth cookers (also me). So I wasn’t surprised to hear Jamie discuss his plan at his house with Wrench and Mullet Mike.

The three men crowded around a scarred coffee table, covered in empty bottles, cigarette butts and baggies of various drugs.

“The girl needs to be rescued, Jamie,” said Mullet Mike.

“Yeah,” said Wrench. “The cook’s holding her in that house and she has her kids there too. That cocksucker cook’s gotta pay for that.” 

Jamie fired up a joint and let the smoke wrap around his face a bit before answering. “OK, let’s go get her. And since he’s cooking, and we’ll be there anyway, we’ll just take whatever else he has on hand.” The other two men laughed like Jamie made the best joke ever. “We’ll go tonight. And Bunny, you’re driving.”

I often drove for Jamie’s little capers. Not for what I might get out of it, but just because these guys were my friends. I had my own pickup truck, and I was the only one with a driver’s license. Most of the people I knew had criminal records and were careful because of warrants. They were secretive about where they went, what they were doing. Cars and licenses had too many records attached. And cars were a burden to look after; it was just easier to steal one, or ask me.

About 4am I cut the lights of my truck as I drove the last 100 feet to the meth cook’s house. It was a quiet residential neighbourhood with a primary school down the street and basketball nets on driveways. You would never guess there was a major drug operation going on in that house; it had a garden, and a wicker mailbox, and looked just like the others. Jamie, Wrench and Mullet Mike slipped on balaclavas. They openly carried guns.

“Bunny, you stay here.” Jamie waited for the other two guys to go around the back of the house and then Jamie let himself in the unlocked front door. Unlocked?

There was nothing to do in my truck while I waited. I didn’t understand what could be taking so long. There was no screaming, which was good for a change. I expected that after a few minutes they’d come out with the girl and maybe a couple of bags of crystal meth. I must have nodded off and woke with a start to realize they’d been in the house for a couple of hours. After all that time I still wasn’t worried about what might have happened to Jamie. Nothing ever happened to Jamie. He was the reason bad stuff happened to other criminals.

Jamie walked out the front door and came to the driver’s side window. He was sweating quite a bit. “Bunny, open up the tailgate and the cab. We gotta get this shit out of here.” Jamie returned to the house.

When he next came out, Jamie was struggling, carrying a 50 gallon barrel. Only Jamie could carry a 50 gallon barrel by himself. The other guys carried pails in each hand, something spilling out at each step. By the smell alone, I knew it was wet crystal meth. It had been cooked, but was still in liquid form.

“What the fuck? We’re taking all this?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Jamie. “And there’s more. I figure it’s about a million bucks worth.” Jamie went inside and retrieved three more barrels. When the fourth barrel and several buckets were loaded, Wrench came out of the house holding the hand of a 20-year-old girl. She wasn’t dragged out, but she didn’t look happy to be rescued either. She didn’t look like much of anything, with a vacant, haunted look on her face common with addicts.

“Are you all right? I heard we were supposed to come and get you,” I said. The girl had started crying, and was talking, but it was mostly nonsense. There was something in there about her kids being at her mother’s place, so that made me feel better. The girl looked really worried, and only then I figured out it was an inside job. The story about saving a trapped girl was fake. She was Wrench’s connection, and she must have told him the address and when to come when the cook wouldn’t be there. No wonder the door was unlocked. The girl just realized the consequences of crossing the cook’s boss. 

By the time I pulled away, the sun was up and it was 730 Monday morning. We had to drive the crystal meth to a safe house across town, Pete Woodson’s place, and we were in bumper to bumper rush hour traffic. Every time I came to a stop, some of the crystal meth sloshed onto the floor of the cab. The kind of chemicals you don’t want splashing in your truck: red phosphorus, ephedrine, iodine. The stink was overwhelming and I worried the other drivers could smell it from their cars too. It’s not like we were racing past each other; there were drivers right beside me, sitting still in traffic. If I got caught there, I was in big trouble with the cops. My car, my name, I’m done.

The girl looked like she had been up for days, which wasn’t unusual for a crystal meth addict. She continued to cry, so I said, “It’s OK, we’re going to a safe house, right? We’ll go somewhere where no one will know where we are.” 

As soon as we got to Pete’s place across town, and carried the crystal meth into the house through the garage door so no one would see, I asked Jamie for my cut.

“Sure, Bunny, sure,” Jamie said. “You can have this.” Jamie threw me a small package.

“An eight-ball? All you’re giving me is an eight-ball? I don’t want that. I want money.” An eight-ball is 3.5 grams of drugs, worth about 100 dollars.

“That’s what you’re getting,” said Jamie. “If you want money, you can just sell that.” I didn’t want to complain too much because there was lots of crystal meth in that house, and I knew that by hanging around, I could use it for free. Even though we had all been up all night, we immediately began putting the wet crystal meth in filters and drying it. We’d only know how much we had when it was all dry, which would take a couple of days.

No sooner was it dry, the owner of the stolen crystal meth discovered who had his product. Neither the owner nor the thief were happy to discover the identity of the other.

“The Notorious Outlaw Motorcycle Gang?” asked Jamie. “We stole a million bucks of meth from the Notorious Outlaw Motorcycle Gang?”

“Yeah,” said Pete. He had come to the house because the Notorious Outlaw Motorcycle Gang asked him to be their go-between with Jamie. Normally they’d just kill whoever crossed them, but since it was Jamie, they needed a different approach. “I can tell you they weren’t too pleased to hear it was you, either. You know they’re afraid of you.”

“They might be afraid, but they won’t let me just keep it. What a fuckin’ mess.” Jamie flopped onto the couch and crossed his motorcycle boots on the coffee table.

“I was talking to their guy, and he was shitting too, because it was you,” said Pete. “But he tried to act all brave like, and he said if you just give back the twenty keys you stole, they’ll let you off. They won’t kill you.”

“Twenty keys?” asked Jamie. “They want back their twenty keys?”

“Uh-huh. That’s what the cook said he had when you got there.”

Jaime let out a howl. “Those fuckin’ cooks. They all lie. He had thirty keys. He planned to sell ten on the side, I bet. He probably does that every batch. Sure, I’ll give them twenty keys back. I’ll just keep the other ten, and the boys will never fuckin’ know.”

Excerpt from “Tough”

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Posted: September 21, 2019 at 3:42 pm

In the upcoming book I’m writing with Kelly Tough (Miss October 1981), Kelly recalls some childhood trauma:

Sitting in the middle row of my Grade Two classroom, trying to be invisible. The cool kids sat in the back and the keeners in the front, and I was neither of those. For the thousandth time I stared blankly at the alphabet row above the blackboard, 26 squares, each with a capital and lower case letter, and a picture of something that started with that letter. Apple to zebra, except the ‘P’ was missing because Brian Castel stole it and drew a penis on the other side and the teacher caught him trying to sneak it back into place. School was torture for several reasons. I was the new kid, and on welfare, and the other kids never let me forget it. I had blotchy skin and stringy hair. It didn’t help that Dawne, a year behind me in school, was pretty while I was ugly,  smart while I struggled. The fact that Dawne was also new and on welfare didn’t seem to register with anyone. The kids chose me as the weaker sister and aimed all their teasing and abuse my way, progressively worse each day.

I had mixed emotions as the recess bell rang. I liked to play tetherball, depending on who played that day. The game could take a nasty turn in a flash. By the time I got to the tetherball pole at the back of the playground, I could see most of my usual tormentors, including my sister,  already assembled. I turned on my heel to escape, but too late; I’d been spotted. Uh-oh.

“Hey, Smelly Kelly, where’re you going?, said one of the girls from Grade Three. Most of the girls called me Smelly Kelly because I have a brown birthmark the size of a nickel on my ankle; the kids decided it looked like a plop of poo. “Don’t you want to play with us?”

The situation looked grim, but it would be worse to refuse. “Uh, yeah.” I shuffled up to the group and hoped they’d forget I was there.

Tetherball at my school was based on the pyramid system. There was one kid at the top, then two kids at the next level, then three at the next. No matter how many levels there were, I was predictably on the bottom. When it was my turn to play, I always had to battle the girl at the top of the pyramid, Marcie McCormack. She was two grades ahead of me, bulky and mean. Marcie bullied me the most, and tetherball afforded her another opportunity to humiliate me. She pounded that ball so it swung on its rope so fast it was impossible to hit back. All I could see was a white blur as I pathetically stabbed everywhere the ball wasn’t. Marcie was setting me up for her standard move, one I fell for every time. With her most vicious and powerful blow, she smashed the ball so it swung directly at my temple, knocking me to the ground. 

I lay with one side of my face in the dirt, pebbles pressing into my cheek. 

One of Marcie’s henchwomen bent over and poked me in the ribs to see if I was dead.

“That was a big mistake, Karen,” said a girl out of my view. “You just touched Smelly Kelly. Now you have fleas!”

“No way! Look!” Karen rolled up her sleeve and I knew what was there without looking. She had ‘SFP’ written in blue ink on her forearm, a practice that had spread thorough the school like wildfire. Super Flea Protection. With this indelible safeguard, Karen could touch me without receiving a flea infestation. 

As the girls erupted in laughter, I saw Dawne with my one available eye, pointing at where my t-shirt had risen slightly.

“I’m telling Mum, I’m telling Mum, you’re not wearing an undershirt!”, said Dawne.

“Shut your face, Dawne,” I screamed.

“An undershirt?”, said Marcie. “Only little kids, and poor people wear undershirts!” The girls howled.

“I’m telling M…” Before Dawne could finish her threat, I lunged at her, grabbed her hair, and pulled her to the dirt. We wrestled and punched and scratched, making non-human screeches like racoons. The crowd egged us on, but I rolled off of Dawne when she started crying. I rose slowly, hoping the bell would ring. Someone pushed Marcie into me but I didn’t fall.

“You pushed me, Smelly Kelly,” said Marcie.

“No I didn’t. You pushed me.” I knew that was a mistake, but either way I was doomed. Marcie said nothing, a thin smile on her lips. With one hand she grabbed my hair, and with the other, the collar of my jacket. She swung me around in a circle a couple of times like the Olympic hammer throw and let go. I flew through the air, bounced in the dirt and rolled twice. The bell rang and the girls, including Dawne, giggled as they walked past me. 

I thought my ordeal for the day was over. When I entered the school, covered in dirt and dust, Marcie jumped from behind a pillar and punched me with all her might in the shoulder. Just a regular recess.

 I watched the hands of the wall clock slowly inch ahead the rest of the afternoon while Miss Lawson droned on about times tables and division. It seemed like a waste of time since I wasn’t planning on multiplying or dividing anything when I was older; I turned my brain off so it wouldn’t get full of stuff I’d never need. I awoke from this dreamlike state when the bell rang and the floor squealed from 30 chairs sliding away from desks. Everyone talked at once, well, 29 children talked at once, chattering about their plans after school. Children  grouped in twos and threes to walk home together, to hang out at each other’s houses until dinnertime, where moms made them hot chocolate and peanut butter cookies. There weren’t any moms making hot chocolate at my house. I held my spiral binder close to my chest and walked alone, hoping the kids would forget about picking on me for the rest of the day.

On the way home, I usually stayed off the main streets as much as possible, even though this made the walk longer. I thought no one knew I used a long alley past the school, but something whizzed close past my head. Did someone just throw a rock at me? A rock ambush wouldn’t be unusual. The next missile hit my cheek and rebounded to my feet. It wasn’t a rock, but a dog biscuit. A Milk Bone dog biscuit because I was a dog. A dog with fleas, if recess was any indication. As I examined the biscuit, a volley of ten or twenty biscuits bombarded me from behind a peeling wooden fence. And another volley. Not as painful as the rocks I often endured, but those biscuits were still hard enough to sting. The real sting, however, came from the barks and muffled laughter of several girls behind the fence.  Dawne’s pink scrunchie, the one Mum bought her at Value Village but told her was new, bobbed above the fence’s top.

The Singing Playmates

blog, Hef, Heidi Sorenson, Hugh Hefner, Kelly Tough, Michele Drake, Miss October, Nicki Thomas, Playboy, Playboy Magazine, playmate, Singing Playmates, Sondra Theodore, Stories, Vic Caesar, writer, writing, , , , , , , , , ,
Posted: May 7, 2019 at 7:58 pm

I am currently writing a book with Kelly Tough, Miss October 1981. One of the many unusual episodes of her life was her membership in Playboy’s only Super Group, The Singing Playmates. Kelly is featured in this month’s edition of Playboy, 38 years after her first appearance in the magazine. Here’s the story from Playboy:

TITANIC TESTICULAR TRAUMA

blog, cartoon, coffee burn, hot coffee, mcdonald's, McDonald's coffee, mcdonalds, mcdonalds coffee, Stories, writer, writing
Posted: April 11, 2019 at 9:49 pm

When Bone and I planned our road trip, we never imagined the day would end with great sheets of skin peeling off my testicles.

We were 20-year-old college kids with summer jobs in a soap factory. Our shift didn’t start until 4pm that scorching, sunny day, so we decided to take a day trip to the University of Guelph to hang out with some girls Bone knew from school. Early morning, Bone idled his Austin Mini in the McDonald’s parking lot while I went inside to order coffees for the trip to Guelph. Regular readers of this blog will be surprised I ever patronized McDonald’s, the purveyor of fake food. But I was young and foolish, and Starbuck’s hadn’t been invented yet.

I returned to Bone’s car and carefully set the coffees on the passenger side floor while I attached my seat belt. It’s important to the story I mention I was wearing the flimsiest and shortest of summer gym shorts, blue with an understated, thin white trim (more on this later). 

“Bone, don’t move the car just yet.” I held a large cup in one hand and carefully removed the plastic lid so I could add cream and sugar.

“Sure thing, Billy.” Bone thought his car was idling in neutral, but he still had the clutch engaged. At the word “Billy,” Bone let out the clutch, and the Mini, still in gear, bucked violently. The entire cup of scalding coffee spilled on my lap. For a split second, my gym shorts held off the burning liquid, but then it reached bare skin. Screams of hysteria and pain. My flesh continued to burn as my shorts kept the coffee in contact with my crotch. I had to get the fabric away from my skin, had to exit the car, but in my panic I fumbled with my seat belt. The car started to smell like something tasty was on the barbecue. I was finally able to unclick my seatbelt, bolt from the car, and tear my shorts away from my skin. 

Our road trip was cancelled. Instead of going to a doctor like a rational person, I asked Bone to take me home. Once there, I retreated to my bedroom to find puffy white hunks of skin hanging off my private parts and my fish-belly-white inner thighs. I couldn’t show my mother, of course, but when I recounted my ordeal she forbade me to go to work. Naturally, I went to work, after promising her I would see the company doctor at the factory before starting my shift. Remember, this was 40 years ago, before Kramer sued the coffee company for making its coffee too hot. In the real world, it was also before a woman successfully sued McDonald’s for the same offence. It was a time when if you did something stupid, you took responsibility for your actions, rather than look for someone else to blame or sue.

I knew the doctor at the factory, a kindly man who previously bandaged my thumb when I sliced it open with a box cutter while working on the Ivory Soap production line. What I didn’t know was he left at 3pm each day (likely to golf), leaving his smokily hot nurse, Miss Travers in charge. I’m not making up the smokily hot part. When you’re 20, and a beautiful woman, probably 24, wears a tight nurse’s uniform, well, you get the idea. I found many, many reasons to run errands past the nurse’s station that summer.

That day was the first time I was ever unhappy to see Miss Travers. I shyly explained my injury.

“OK, stand over there and pull down your pants and underwear. We’ll have a look.” When Miss Travers said this in my dreams every night, I wasn’t hiding third degree burns. I dutifully lowered my gear and Miss Travers perched on a stool she dragged in front of me. Her head was level with my private parts. She leaned forward, her nose inches from what must have looked to her like a frightened turtle, covered in white bubbles of skin. She gingerly raised my manhood between thumb and forefinger to take a peek at the damage underneath. 

“Hmmm, that looks pretty bad,” she said, as my humiliation reached scorching levels. “But I think I have just the thing for it.” Miss Travers left me standing there, pants and underwear still bunched at my ankles, steel-toed work boots poking out. No matter how cool a guy looks, or think he looks, he can only look vulnerable and idiotic when bare from the waist to his work boots. Especially when the other person in the room is wearing a saucy nurse’s uniform. Miss Travers returned holding a large plastic jar with a screw top. What was inside was gooey and yellow and could only be described as orgy butter.

“Don’t be alarmed…I don’t think this will hurt when I put it on.” The nurse resumed her seat, face still crotch level, and liberally spread her ointment over the affected area, my favourite area, with a broad tongue (depressor). She then covered the area with large cotton bandages, lightly held in place by clear tape. When I put my pants on it looked like I was wearing a diaper in front. I completed my shift on the packing line, eight hours in agony.

As Jackie Chiles told Kramer, no one knows what a balm will do. By the next day, the burns were substantially less painful. Before my shift, Miss Travers re-applied the goo and changed my bandages. By the third day, I had no more pain, and the new skin was much less raw. I still felt it sensible to have Miss Travers provide another application. On the fourth day, I was sufficiently healed that I didn’t need Miss Travers. But I convinced her another treatment was necessary. By the seventh consecutive day, she started to get suspicious…

Three Vignettes From France

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Posted: December 5, 2018 at 3:13 pm

Having lived in France a couple of times, and written 200 fish-out-of-water blogs, I thought I’d exhausted my quiver of quirky stories highlighting the differences between Canada and France. Not so! Upon my recent return to Aix-en-Provence with Carol, three vignettes stood out. These situations would never happen in Canada:

1.      Reflected in Carol’s sunglasses, I saw the foulard at my throat was tied in the jaunty, insouciant, Aixois fashion. We sat at a spindly, wrought iron table, charmingly crooked due to its cobblestoned base, at a crowded outdoor restaurant in downtown Aix. We sipped from a carafe of Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages, not in a hurry to be served our goat cheese and arugula pizza. I spied our waiter coming from the bowels of the restaurant, bedecked in Aix’s standard straight-guy clothing: white wife-beater t-shirt, scarf wrapped thrice around his neck, dainty pirate boots with many buckles. He held a large pizza in his left hand, another two in his right, and balanced a fourth on his forearm. Since the patio tables were tightly squeezed together, his easiest access to his customers was the middle of the narrow street, dodging pedestrians and the occasional Smart Car. I could see our lunch on the waiter’s forearm. Laden as he was, you’d think the waiter would unload his pizzas as quickly as possible. You’d think that if you didn’t know the waiter’s male friend appeared around the corner at the top of the street. Our waiter stifled a squeal and hustled toward his friend, away from the restaurant, still carrying the pizzas. By the time he caught up to his friend, our waiter was a half block away, but the kisses on each cheek were still audible from our table. The friends’ chitchat was brief, albeit loud, and our waiter quickly returned to his job (after two more kisses good-bye). Our pizza was still hot.

2.      Finishing our pizza, Carol and I tucked into our salads. At a nearby table sat three fashionable young women, one of whom held a baby. Children aren’t encouraged to attend restaurants in France – there aren’t kid menus, or placemats to colour, or jars of dull crayons. Restaurants don’t supply high chairs or booster seats. And I’ve never seen a restaurant washroom with one of those fold down baby changing tables. If you bring your kid to a restaurant, they had better sit quietly and eat a grownup meal (and they do). But seeing a baby on a mother’s lap was even more unusual. As the mother continued her lively conversation with her friends, she deftly moved her cutlery, her wine glass and her table’s flower arrangement to one side. She rooted around in an impossibly large Hermès purse and found a small fuzzy blanket, which she spread flat on the table. You’ve probably guessed what happened next…she lay her baby down and changed his nappy. In a packed restaurant. Six feet from where we were eating. 

I knew I would write this story one day; in the interest of accuracy I leaned forward in my seat to get a better look. Yes, just as I expected: numéro deux.

3.      A day before we were to board the train in Aix towards Paris, SNCF workers went on strike. SNCF is the French national railway, and its workers often strike. It wasn’t a big surprise, but was inconvenient because, (a) if we didn’t get to Paris we would miss our non-refundable flight home, (b) Aix to Paris was too far to drive in the time we had, and (c) Air France triples its prices whenever SNCF is on strike.

In a normal strike, in non-France countries, all trains are cancelled. It’s disruptive, but travellers are calm because no one can get anywhere. During SNCF strikes, one of every seven scheduled trains will run. You just don’t know if your ticket is for that one-in-seven train. You have no choice but to arrive at the station and hope you win the train lottery. I don’t know how they decided running one of every seven trains causes maximum mayhem (not 1 in 3, not 1 in 10), but I expect they have PhDs armed with algorithms and supercomputers bent to the task. Suffice to say, running one in seven scheduled trains ensures the maximum number of people in the train station with the minimum number of these people boarding a train. Any train.

Regular readers of this blog will know when faced with an intractable train problem, there is only one solution: call my friend Nickipedia. Nick has run a Parisian travel company for 30 years, and possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of SNCF and every available scheme to game the system. His advice? Go to the station and sneak onto any train bound for Paris. How could this possibly work, I wondered.

The trick, according to Nick, was to slip past the ticket-checker on the platform and go straight to the bar car. Once there, no SNCF employee will kick you off the train (as they’re not paid for confrontation). We didn’t have tickets for that train, which would’ve warranted seats, but we could stand on any train travelling to Paris, Nick advised. I was nervous when the SNCF employee came through the bar car and checked our tickets which corresponded to a cancelled train. She didn’t bat an eye – even better, she eventually found Carol a seat two cars over. I stayed happily in the bar car; if you must stand, I feel that’s the best place. I was quite content watching the countryside race by at 300 kilometres per hour, drinking several single-serve red wines from plastic bottles.

Thanks to Nick, the pièce de résistance occurred when we arrived in Paris. He said our tickets were fully refundable since our train was cancelled. Even though SNCF transported us from Aix to Paris, a distance of 700 kilometres, on the fastest train in France, we were credited $250.