Specs & Spectacle

I think every kid at one point or another has a dream that their school catches on fire, maybe it’s the night before a big test or for me every-time I lit up one of those schoolhouse fireworks on the holidays. This ended up being so much greater than a dream one spring day in Grade 11. Halfway through English class which was beyond painful as it was reading day it started. Reading day was an experiment by our teacher who thought, it would be a great idea to have the class read Shakespeare out loud. Each student would read half a page. He assumed that it would make us more involved but since most of the class were idiots is was just horrible to sit through. I almost always skipped reading day but we had a quiz so I was forced to make it in.

Sound the alarm

The fire alarm kicked off and like usual we just sat there thinking it was a test or a false alarm. The secretary then came on over the loudspeaker and her voice was clearly shaking.

“Teachers please evacuate the students from the school, stay calm and proceed in an orderly fashion to the parking lot”

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My good friend Mark Quail came into town tonight from Toronto for a visit, we had a great dinner and chat at Shiro’s in Belltown. Amazing sushi! On the way out of the restaurant we got stopped by Ed a Seattle homeless guy. He didn’t ask for money he just wanted to know what we thought of the sushi, he then preceded to tell us that while Shiros was good Umi a place down the street had not only had better sushi but the best sake this side of the Mississippi (not an expression often associated with Japanese drink). Ed then gave us a rundown of the best Italian places in Seattle; 3 grubby fingers for a place in Wallingford and two grubby fingers for the place beside Shiro’s…awesome! After that we went across the street to grab some gin at Viceroy and got accosted out front by a chubby drunk white rapper. He was taking a break from recording a rap song based on Easy Rider and was having trouble remembering the characters and lines from the movie. So I whipped out my iphone and thanks to imdb and wikipedia his rap song will now be factually accurate. After a few drinks I walked Mark back to the Ramada and called a cab. The cab driver that picked me out was crazy!! (see attached picture). He drove me to Cap Hill doing almost 60MPH the whole way, I was pretty sure we were going to die at one point. He was obsessed with finding out real estate prices in my hood and kept looking back at me (as opposed to at the road) as I was answering a question. Like most taxi drivers he was also simultaneously having a cell phone conversation with someone in a foreign language.

Everytime I go out in Seattle cool, slightly crazy shit happens which is a big reason why I love this city!

The first day I met Kurt we went to pick up smokes for bottle-toking hash. When we got up to the counter he pulled out two fistfuls of quarters, slapped them on the counter and asked for a large pack of Players Light (Canadians will know that brand).

No need for ID

Despite the fact that we were 15 the clerk never asked for ID. I think she was so taken aback that we planned to pay in change, everything else was forgotten. I thought it was a little odd! Throughout that week everything Kurt bought (food, magazines etc..) was paid for with a seemingly endless supply of quarters he kept in his knapsack (backpack if your American). Kurt was a pretty intense kid so I didn’t really say much since I hadn’t known him very long.

At his house all is revealed

A week or so later I went to his house for the first time and after walking into his room I noticed 4 payphones lined up in the closet.

Me: “Dude what the fuck?? Why do you have payphones in your house?”
Kurt: “Oh I found them in the woods”

Kurt was the best criminal I have ever met mainly because he would never admit to a crime even when it was blatantly obvious what he had done. You would always end of having to piece it together based on little bits of information discovered independently from all our friends.

Quiet nights in Springbank Park

Turns out one night on his way home (and while quite high) Kurt took a detour through the park. He stumbled across a payphone and figured there might be some free money in there. He went home, got a hammer and headed back to the park. He then spent a few hours busting open the payphone and taking out all the change. After seeing how time consuming the crime was he realized it would be easier the next time to just take the whole phone (after smashing it off the stand), bring it back home and then break into it at his leisure. So the next weekend he stole the 4 remaining pay phones in the park.

Making mother proud

Kurt’s poor mother had to watch her son break apart pay phones in the backyard and I am sure not be satisfied with whatever excuse he must have come up with to explain what he was doing. Like any good mother she was so loyal to Kurt that she always just went along with his schemes. Each phone netted in about $150.00 so it took quite a while for him to work through all that change. I asked him why he didn’t just roll it up and go to the bank, but I think he just liked the looks on peoples faces when he paid for all our dinner with quarters!

Mother becomes clean up expert

About three weeks later a friend of ours that lived just outside of town on a farm came to school with a crazy story. He had almost crashed his truck on the way to school because as he turned a sharp corner he was confronted with 4 pay phones laying in the middle of the road. Turns out Kurt’s mother was scared the police would come and take him off to jail so late one night she carried all the phones to her car, drove just outside of town and dumped them on the road. This would not be the first time she was forced into playing accomplice to Kurt’s endeavors.

The park becomes just a little more dangerous at night

The city’s responses to the thefts was to not replace the phones at all. This meant being in the park late at night was even more scary since you couldn’t even call for help if there was trouble. Kurt was happy since he learned a lot from the experience of busting the phones open. Knowledge that would help him, Tyler and Eddie embark on a spree of robbing vending machines and parking meters across the city. That summer became known as “The Summer of Change”.

In high-school I used to play in bands and every year we got to perform in front of the whole school (2500 kids) along with some friends bands. All the other bands played covers but my bands always did originals; I like to think it was cause we were cooler but I think the real reason was we sucked too much to learn other people’s music.

They hated us too!

I hated most of the people in my high-school as well as the majority of teachers so having the chance to play loud guitar and scream into a mic was very cathartic. This particular year’s performance was going to be good cause we had nice gear (thanks to the savvy criminal mind of Kurt). Kurt and I had Marshall Stacks and Paul had a huge old 70’s bass stack, this meant we were going to be super fucking loud. Both of the other bands had to boost their sound with the schools temporary sound system (the main one had mysteriously gone missing several weeks before), since they were both playing the same tool cover it didn’t matter too much.

Kurt’s big idea

About 45 min before the show Kurt decided we should drop 3 hits of LSD. Sounded like a great idea at the time so we both did it. Paul and our drummer Allen thought we were totally nuts, but by the time we told them it was too late. The plan was to play one original song then segue into a cover of mission impossible so we could play two songs (which we were not allowed to do)

Big crowd (at least that’s what I was told)

As we walked on stage Kurt and I were very tweaked out. When I used to get high I would get this shivering feeling and clam up if I had to be in front of a lot of people so I was pretty freaked out. Kurt’s reaction was to become totally silent and non-responsive so I was hoping he would remember how to play the song. All I remember visually is that the mic (which was gold colored) looked massive and the crowd was just a blur very far in the distance. Afterwards our friends said it was good and everyone else hated it cause it was way too loud…. a job well done. The best part was the Audio/Video nerds couldn’t turn us down cause we had our own gear.

A small wrinkle

For the second song we had the drums and keyboards on a tape that was plugged into the school system, and Allen came up front to yell “mission impossible” into the mic during the chorus. When we were practicing we boosted the volume of the track with a power-amp that used to be part of the schools sound system (another story). Kurt and I both thought bringing the amp back to the scene of the crime might be a bad idea so we left it at home. This meant that the backing music was way too quiet and we couldn’t even hear it on stage.

Kurt makes a break, Allen get left behind to shame

About 30 seconds in Kurt freaks out, drops his guitar and walks off stage. Right after I did the same thing as did Paul which left Allen all alone on stage yelling “mission impossible” for about a min before he realized we had all left him up there.

Hatching a plan over the greatest cigarette ever!

Kurt walked right off stage, down the corridor and out the door to the parking lot. By the time I got there he was half way through a smoke. Having a smoke after performing was awesome but being that high made us feel like the dudes from Reservoir Dogs, super fucking cool. One thing about Kurt and I when we took LSD was we became even more selfish than usual and very impulsive + we tended to be total assholes. Kurt decided he was hungry so we should go to Fast Eddies for burgers. He pulled out two pairs of throwaway 3d glasses and says we should race. So we hopped in our cars and raced each other about 5km through city streets over to the fast eddies. Kurt always won our races as he was a fucking crazy driver and this was no exception. The funny thing is I don’t remember finding it very hard to drive with the 3d glasses on, I mean it was pretty damn dangerous now that I think about it.

Back at the school

So poor Paul and Allen were left to explain why we had just left to the teachers, and they had to turn off our gear as we left the guitars at full volume feeding back when we walked off stage. Allen was super pissed!! After eating Kurt and I came back to help pack up and then we figured we should take the rest of the day off so we left and went home.

Tom loved heavy metal music but his mother was a stickler for the whole “heavy metal is satanic” thing so he pretty much had to keep it hidden. We used to buy metal cassette tapes (before CD’s were super popular) and Tom would scrape off the lettering so it would just look like a blank tape. Occasionally his mother would grab a tape and listen, that would usually result in us not seeing Tom for a couple weeks and at least one horror story about getting beaten with her favorite riding crop. Since she didn’t own a horse I can only assume that her and Tom’s step dad had some form of super-repressed kinky sex life. Eddie and I used to muse about that and make ourselves shiver at the thoughts/images that came up.

When I found out Tom was getting shipped off to South America to help Amway bring Pyramids to the Brazilians I had a great idea. I would get him a bunch of Christian Death Metal tapes. That way he could enjoy metal and appease his mother. There was a Christian book store near my place so I went to check it out. The first shocking thing I noticed was that they had ‘listening’ copies of all the music just sitting on the table beside a cassette player. Also it was the first time I had been in a store and not gotten followed around by suspicious staff (I had a mohawk and 20 hole doc martin boots).

I figured this was too good to be true, and since it was a Christian book store if I got caught stealing I could just beg for forgiveness. So I loaded up on all the tapes, popped them in my bag and headed off. I did have to remove the ‘listening copy’ stickers off the covers once I got home but a cup of hot water and a paper towel made quick work of that. Then I sat down and took a listen to the music. It was awesome!! It was like the bands got a free pass on lyrics, they just used bits from the old testament and screamed them into a microphone.

The next day I gave Tom his gift. He was so excited since he was leaving in two days and his mother had found his current stash of tapes and threw them away. Tom called me that night and said he wouldn’t be able to see Eddie or I again and that his mother decided that Christian Death metal was just as subversive as the standard fare so she threw all of the tapes away and grounded him.

At least I tried…

Eddie and I met Tom in Grade 8. Tom’s mother and step dad were hard-core born again Christians in addition to working for Amway (I wonder what GOD thinks about pyramid schemes?). He used to have to attend church almost every night and when he got in trouble his mother used to hit him with a riding crop, poor bastard. The end result was an angry kid who was obsessed with destroying property and always seemed about 2 seconds away from totally losing it. Since Eddie was a total instigator and I was bit of an enabler this led to trouble for Tom, and much hilarity for us.

We started by watching Tom smash the windows at our public school with a 2×4. Breaking windows really made Tom happy, he would smile from ear to ear as we made our escape. After a few weeks we moved to watching Tom setting the dumpster’s at school on fire, that was more fun since we got to hide and wait for the fire trucks to come and put it out. Then we used to get Tom to light the plastic garbage cans on the public baseball diamonds on fire, they took 30 min or so to burn/melt and were fun to watch.

Eddie’s disdain of people gradually started to rub off on Tom and he starting getting a little more personal. He went to a large apartment parking lot one night and slow punctured one tire in every car. When our science teacher gave him a bad grade he tossed a rock through his window during a dinner party.

It seemed the tighter the constraints he had a home the worse he became, we started to ditch him all the time because he would have crazy freak-outs. Then one day we found out his family was moving to Brazil to indoctrinate South America for Amway. We said we would keep in touch (well I did, Eddie could give a shit) but that was pre-facebook so I never found out what happened to that kid.

Rat Face used to come out to Eddie’s basement once in a while but it was always tense. Tyler and Eddie didn’t really like him but he came in handy for doing the risky work on a crime since they had no compunction in leaving him behind if things went south.

One night as Rat Face came into the basement his wallet fell out of his back pocket and fell on the ground beside the couch. I was about to tell him when I saw Eddie’s long leg reach out and cover the wallet with his foot, then gradually pull the wallet back to where he was sitting. After Rat Face left to go home Tyler and Eddie took a look through the wallet which unsurprisingly didn’t contain much. He did have a video membership card to the rental place near the post office so Eddie headed over there to see what they had. About an hour later Eddie arrived back with 6 Super Nintendo games which he had no intention of returning.

About two weeks later Rat Face came by (Eddie smartly kept the offending games hidden) and was complaining about the video store.

Rat Face: “That fucker tried to tell me that I rented 6 fucking games and that I owed him 20 dollars in late fees or 200 for the games”
Eddie: “Really… are you sure you didn’t rent them?”
Rat Face: “Yeah I am fucking sure, fuck that I am never going back there”
Tyler: “That’s too bad…it’s the only video store near your place..”

About a month later after the store manager threatened to call the cops Rat Face ended up having to pay the 200.00 for the games. He also broke the store window several times to try and equal the value he lost which did make him feel better.

Turns out that Eddie didn’t really like the games he took so after Rat Face paid the video store he just threw them away.

I got home after school and heard my mother talking on the phone to my Aunt(fake) Sarah sounding concerned. I say fake aunt because we had no family in Canada so my parents friends became our aunts/uncles and their kids our cousins. Anyway she explained that my little cousin Sam (grade 4) had his pizza day ruined at school because all the pizza money was stolen from the portable his class was in.

Sam’s school happened to be between my house and Eddie’s so I was pretty sure they had something to do with it. After dinner I headed down to Eddie’s, when I got there Tyler and him were lounging on the couch smoking weed and eating pizza.

Me: “Did you bastards steal children’s pizza money and buy pizza??”
Eddie: “Dunno did we?”
Tyler smiles broadly…

The night before Tyler and Eddie were wandering around and decided to break into the portables at little Sam’s public school. Tyler like to use a crowbar that left marks, that way he could remember which one he had already broken into. After getting into the room he noticed all the desks had envelopes with 10.00 each in them labeled pizza money. Eddie came up with the idea to take the money out but leave the envelopes so that the kids wouldn’t know until it was too late.

Tyler: “How do you know?”
Me: “My little cousin Sam was in that class!”
Tyler smiling even more: “Did they cry?”
Eddie: “I hope they cried, little fuckers!”
Tyler: “This is the best pizza I have ever tasted”

I have to admit the pizza did taste delicious.

My brother had just moved out of the house with his new girlfriend and wanted to get a TV. Since he knew my friends pretty well he asked me to see how much it would cost for a TV through non-traditional channels. This idea did not go over well with her, but being young and just getting started in life budget was a big issue so she relented.

I love my brother so I wanted to make sure he got a nice TV. All the ones at our High School were 20” and that wasn’t really big enough. That took Tyler and Mike out of the game as they had a principal around only stealing from institutions and big businesses not from actual people (aka homes). I would have asked Kurt but he only stole for himself.

What I needed was a lower level criminal that had less moral qualms. Enter Rat Face. Rat Face came from a family of crime, his father was always in and out of jail and often would appear in the mall to say a quick hello as he evaded a warrant. Once he arrived at the mall,  handed us 10 debit cards, told us to try random pin numbers said good luck and disappeared. Three days later the cops found him (warrant for break and enter) and he went back to jail. Oh yeah, we didn’t get any of the pin numbers right so that was a write off as well.

Rat Face said he could get a 32” TV for a couple hundred bucks and told me to stop by in three days to an apartment in Westminster Towers and pick it up. He liked to do break and enters during the day since no one was usually home. It was more risky because he would have to wander down the street in daylight carrying a TV but he said that was better that getting confronted by an angry homeowner in the middle of the night. Now Rat Face was a small stocky boy at about 5’5” and this was not a flat panel TV so I still don’t know how he managed to get it out of the house by himself and traverse the 15 or so blocks back to the apartment. When I picked it up, my brother and I both had to carry it and it barely fit into the back seat of our car.

The crime went off without a hitch until he got back to the apartment and realized that he forgot the remote control. This was not the first time he made that mistake and the last time he lost half the value since the buyer refused to pay full price without the remote. So he had to go all they way back to the house (very risky) break back in and take the remote. A smarter man might have just gone to a TV store and asked for a replacement but this was not a smarter man.

That TV lasted for many years and actually stayed with my brothers girlfriend long after their relationship ended. She always wondered whether Karma might bite her for buying stolen goods, it didn’t.

In his travels around the school Eddie had come across a laminated poster sized floor plan for our high school. He put it up on his bedroom wall and Tyler went to work documenting key notes such as:

• Which rooms they had already hit and had nothing of value
• Which rooms had things they wanted
• Which sets of mid-hallway doors were locked after hours
• Which door the janitor came in at after the alarm went off

During school hours Tyler and Eddie would roam between rooms looking in cabinets, rooms and desks identifying targets that could be placed on the map.

• Digital scales
• A teachers watch hidden in his desk
• Camcorders, TV’s and VCR’s
• Computers
• Musical Equipment

Then on the night of a crime they would mark up their planned route to make sure the locked mid-hallway doors didn’t interfere and they maximized their 15 min in the building. Once they returned to the basement the items would be erased from the board as well as the route.

Often friends that came over to hang out would add items of value to the map based on the classes and rooms they were in. The map was like a community project, we all looked forward to making a contribution or adding an item we wanted.