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Notorious Outlaw Motorcycle Gang

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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.”

Kelly and Dorothy

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Posted: November 14, 2019 at 4:57 pm

Coincidentally, Kelly Tough (Miss October 1981) went to school with Dorothy Stratten (Playmate of the Year 1980). Dorothy was murdered by her jealous husband at just 20. In my next excerpt from “Tough,” Kelly and Dorothy build their friendship:

“The walls in my school weren’t smooth; stacked cinder blocks, thickly painted white so you could still see the outlines of each brick. There were posters for the weekend dance and flyers for school clubs I would never join, stick-tacked to the walls. I walked alone in the corridor, and caught a faint wisp of smoke. We were only allowed cigarettes in the smoke pit outside, but I could tell someone was smoking in the girls’ restroom. I really, really needed a cigarette, and thought maybe I could bum one. 

Even before I pushed the heavy restroom door, the kind with an oblong steel plate instead of a doorknob, I heard the giggly chit-chatter of several girls. As I entered, three faces turned my way and all talking stopped. I knew these three: in my head I called them the Milk Bone Girls, the ringleaders of the dog-biscuit-throwing gang which included my sister. They hadn’t thrown anything at me for years, and now, in high school, the power balance had shifted. I was now known at school as wild, undisciplined with no parental supervision, kind of a badass. At 14, I had the fully developed body of a woman, and the interest of the older boys. I made the Milk Bone Girls look (and feel) like children in comparison. All three girls lowered their gaze and made a beeline toward the door, which I still held open. As the last former bully shuffled past, I lunged at her with just my head, the rest of my body immobile. She flinched, and a flush of satisfaction washed over me.

The source of the smoke sat amidst the sink pipes under the restroom counter. Dorothy Hoogstraten was a girl I knew since kindergarten. She sat under the sinks when she smoked because she didn’t want to get caught; I never understood how sitting under there would help. Dorothy wore what she wore for years, a pale blue ski jacket with white trim. I expect she wore it so long because her family was poor, her mom raising her and her siblings alone. She had long strawberry hair, and never used makeup because she didn’t need it or didn’t care. Just like me, she attracted the attention of boys, but never got asked out. I didn’t want to get asked out…I knew what sex was and I didn’t want anything to do with that.

“Hey,” said Dorothy.

“Hi. Can I have a drag?”

“Yeah.”

I crawled down beside her, not for the first time. We often shared cigarettes under there, sometimes hers, sometimes mine, whoever could scrounge them. We weren’t really friends, just cig buddies. We mostly sat together in silence, but neither of us said much in school either. Dorothy had been shy and guarded since kindergarten. I rarely talked to kids at school because my life was different; I wasn’t doing homework and watching Starsky & Hutch at night like them. I worked in night clubs until 3am. How could my classmates relate to that? 

Just two loners, sitting under the counter, passing a cigarette back and forth. Even though we weren’t close, Dorothy was never one of the bad people, never one of the bullies. She knew what the bullies had done to me for years. I was comfortable sharing a cigarette with her, comfortable sitting under the counter with her, comfortable not talking. The closest person I had to being a true friend who wasn’t a friend at all. I couldn’t imagine then how this quasi-friendship would play out in the future.”

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.

Prologue from “Tough”

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Posted: August 6, 2019 at 11:24 am

The following is the prologue from “Tough”, the memoir of my co-author, Playboy Playmate Kelly Tough (Miss October 1981):

For an eight year old, it was hard for me to understand why Don Kirby had his tongue down my throat, right?

I sat on the kitchen counter in my flannel nightie, bare legs hanging over the edge. Pushing the buttons on the phone while holding the receiver thingy down. I didn’t want to make a real call, because Mum would get mad. The phone was cool because it had this long, long cord so you could talk and even be in another room. I don’t know why I was playing with the phone that day. Maybe I hoped someone would call me, but I knew that wouldn’t happen because I didn’t have one friend. 

There wasn’t anyone else in the kitchen. Mum was working late and my little sister was in our room, probably looking at herself in the mirror. I always played in the kitchen, mostly to avoid my sister, but also because it looked like the kitchen from Happy Days. That’s how I always think of that kitchen, even though I now know Happy Days didn’t start until later. But it was a ’50s kitchen, with an Arborite counter and a tired, pink and grey linoleum floor. The table and chairs had shiny chrome frames. The chairs were covered with plasticky seats, the kind that stuck to your legs in the summer, and the table top was off-white with worn stars on it. Mum had covered the fridge and stove with gold-patterned Mactac; she covered everything in Mactac. Above the sink, the window was made of a lot of little windows side by side, like in a barn. Some of the window frame paint was peeling. Each little window looked like a black square because it was evening, after dinner. 

“Oh, hi Kelly.” Mum’s boyfriend Don Kirby walked in, and used that really low voice of his, smooth, like he was Tom Jones without a Welsh accent. We always called him Don Kirby, both names, in full, because my sister’s name was Dawne. Don Kirby was tall, much taller than Dad, with wavy orange hair, like flames sticking up. He wore super sharp slacks, polyester green, with a brown vest and a peach-colored shirt underneath. Don Kirby never wore jeans or sweatpants. He always looked dressed up, with his shiny shoes, thinking he was Dapper Dan. I felt a little bad inside when I saw Don Kirby, because I hated him for so long and didn’t treat him very well. But now he was a nice guy, and since I hated him for so long I felt like I owed him something, right?

“How was school today?” Don Kirby had started taking interest in what I was doing, making an effort to do more dad things with me. I lied, of course, telling him I hung out with lots of friends at recess. It felt good to talk to Don Kirby, to talk to anyone, even though I had to lie to keep the conversation going the way I wanted. While we talked, Don Kirby clenched his jaw, biting down hard like he was trying not to cry. I pretended not to notice, but his eyes were all watery, and then a couple of tears slid down his face.

“Why are you crying? Did you have another fight with Mum?”

“Well, Kelly, sometimes with your mother…” Don Kirby wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I love your mom. I love you girls. Sometimes it’s just…” He stood there, stiffly, like he didn’t know what to do with his hands. I felt really sorry for him and reached out my arms to give him an almost-daughter hug. Don Kirby stepped over, and since I was sitting on the counter we were close to the same height. He pushed my knees apart and moved in between, pressing his chest against mine and hugging me pretty tight. Something inside of me, just for a second, felt a little bit weird. But it was only a hug, so it was OK. It got really not OK real quick. Don Kirby pulled his head back and I thought he was going to kiss me on the cheek like he often did. He held my chin, put his lips on mine and suddenly his fat tongue filled my mouth. It was huge, it was all gushy, it was insistent, racing around the inside of my mouth, the whole nine yards. I kind of gagged a bit, but he just pushed in harder. I was paralyzed. When I think about it now, I assume Don Kirby had an erection, but at the time I didn’t even know what an erection was. It felt like thousands of years Don Kirby kissed me like that, but it was probably only ten minutes. 

Slam. A car door slammed and we both knew Mum was home from work. Instead of jumping back like he was doing something wrong, Don Kirby released me and sat at the kitchen table, lighting a cigarette. He didn’t say anything, didn’t tell me to keep our secret. Don Kirby didn’t look sheepish, and wasn’t crying anymore.

“You’re still sitting around doing nothing?” my mother said, banging the kitchen door behind her. Don Kirby started to answer, but Mum cut him off. “Don’t give me that shit. I’m tired of it. And what’s wrong with you? Why do you look like that?”

That last part was directed at me. How did I look? I tried to look like nothing. I was in shock, confused. I couldn’t respond. Don Kirby and I had finally established a friendship after a couple of years of me not liking him, but this was different. This wasn’t a normal friendship thing, I was sure of that. 

“You’re just going to ignore me?,” Mum said, heat rising. “Why aren’t you answering me? What’s wrong with you? GET YOUR ASS IN BED.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around what had just happened to me, but I knew I felt like a piece of garbage.

The Singing Playmates

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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: