JOHN LEKICH
THE PRISONER
OF SNOWFLAKE
FALLS
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
Text copyright © 2012 John Lekich
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lekich, John
The prisoner of Snowflake Falls [electronic resource] / John Lekich.
Electronic monograph.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-55469-979-7 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-55469-980-3 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8573.E498P75 2012 JC813’.6 C2011-907572-5
First published in the United States, 2012
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011942581
Summary: Teenage burglar Henry Holloway is sent to a small community that tests his criminal resolve.
Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Design by Teresa Bubela
Cover photo by Perry Danforth
Author photo by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
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15 14 13 12 • 4 3 2 1
For Jesper
Contents
PART ONE: MY LIFE IN CRIME
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
PART TWO: WELCOME SNOWFLAKE FALLS
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
I am writing the story of my life in a notebook I stole from a drugstore. Come to think of it, I stole the pen too. Given this information, there is no particular reason for you to believe that I’m especially honest. But I figure writing things down might be a good start in the trust department. I’m hoping that when you know a few things about me, you might begin to understand how I ended up where I did.
I’ve decided to try a little experiment. While writing my story, I’m going to be one-hundred-percent honest. You never know. I might even get to like it.
With this in mind, I think it’s only fair to let you know my real name right off the bat. It is Henry Thelonius Holloway. Feel free to call me Henry anytime you like. You may think, what’s the big deal? Everyone has a name. Actually, in my case, I have a bunch of different names. I have a student ID card that says my name is Horace Latimer. I have a library card that claims I am Marvin O’Hara. And I have a driver’s license that swears I am a legally bonafide driver named Antonio Pastorelli.
I first came across the late Mr. Pastorelli’s license while making an unauthorized visit to his former home. With the addition of a few borrowed tools, including an X-Acto knife, a laminating kit and a small picture of yours truly, I was able to make some handy changes to Antonio’s former id. By the time I was finished, the Motor Vehicle Department version of Mr. Pastorelli went from being a seventy-seven-year-old senior citizen to someone who happened to look just like me.
It’s not that I’m some big-time forger or anything like that. But with a little knowhow and determination, I was able to alter the original license so that it looks close to genuine if you are casually inspecting it in a reasonably dark place.
Even though I may look a few years older than my age, I am only fifteen. That’s one of the good things about being the new and improved Antonio Pastorelli. Thanks to my handiwork, it is a documented fact that Antonio has just turned seventeen and can operate a motor vehicle all the livelong day.
By now you’re probably wondering why I have so many different names. Let’s just say that it’s to my advantage to have as many different names as possible. You should also be aware that I steal a lot more than stationery supplies. In fact, I have stolen everything from a stick of gum to a 1957 Thunderbird convertible. For some reason, I always think better while I’m chewing gum. And driving.
Mind you, I returned the convertible to its original parking space after a couple of hours of driving around and organizing my thoughts. I even ran it through the car wash and tuned up the engine a bit, since I noticed it was running a little rough. I didn’t return the gum. But show me someone who wants their used gum back and I’ll show you someone whose company you should definitely avoid.
You know how some people are good at playing sports or solving math equations? Well, I’m good at picking locks and hot-wiring cars. I’ve also been told that I have a natural ability as a pickpocket. Although, the one and only time I liberated someone’s wallet, I felt so guilty that I had to put it right back into the side pocket of the sports jacket in question. I don’t mean to brag. But the man on the bus who happened to be wearing the sports jacket at the time never even knew that his wallet was gone.
I wanted to get the fact that I’m a thief out of the way as soon as possible. When people find out I’m a thief, they usually react in one of two ways. They are either totally disgusted or they figure my life is like one of those movies where burglars crawl under laser beams to steal valuable paintings or jewels.
I would like to say right here and now that I’ve never crawled under a laser beam in my life. Also, I do not steal anything that someone has taken the trouble to hang on a wall. In fact, I am currently restricting myself to stealing only the basics. Given my current predicament, I tend to focus on taking money and food. One thing about living in a tree house? There isn’t a lot of room for storing excess merchandise. Plus, it’s very easy to draw the attention of law enforcement when you’re walking down the street carrying a flat-screen tv.
Lately I’ve been thinking about concentrating on smaller items. You know, wedding rings, wristwatches or the occasional engraved cigarette box. But it turns out I have a problem taking things that people are sentimentally attached to. I have even tried specializing in digital cameras. But then I’ll start scrolling through the pictures of some happy family on vacation in Hawaii or Disneyland, and I’ll end up leaving the camera right where I found it. I guess that’s one of my rules. No matter how hungry you are, nobody has a right to steal someone else’s memories.
Not that I’m making excuses or anything. After all, plenty of people are sentimentally attached to their own personal collection of money. And I take cash just about every time I can find any lying around. Also, I came very close to cutting and eating a slice of an untouched birthday cake once, which is about the lowest thing you can do just before someone else’s birthday. Especially when you’ve just broken into their house.
The only thing that stopped me from cutting into the cake? I couldn’t figure out how to slice it without ruining all the pink roses on top. According to the fancy lettering, somebody named Angela was just about to turn nine. Anyway, I didn’t want to ruin Angela’s ninth birthday. So I never took anything that day. Not even a sliver of cake.
The candles were already stuck in the frosting and everything. It reminded me of when I was about to turn nine, which was just after my mother died. My Uncle Andy ended up buying me an extra big cake that year. But nobody felt much like eating it. I hope Angela’s birthday was better than that.
If it makes any difference, I try my best to be a very neat and orderly thief. One of the fringe benefits of being a burglar is that I’ve developed a genuine appreciation for the hectic nature of modern life. Sometimes I’ll enter a house and it will be so messy you’d think it had already been burglarized. If I like the feeling of a particular home, I’ll straighten up the place before I leave. You know, make the beds, load the dishwasher. That sort of thing.
In fact, I always try to remember that I’m a guest in whatever home I’m burglarizing. An uninvited guest, mind you, but a guest just the same. If it weren’t for the unsuspecting hospitality of the people I burglarize, I’d probably be stuck in some foster home right now.
Remember what I said about being honest? Well, here’s one of the most important things you should know: my privacy and independence are very important to me. My biggest fear is that I’ll end up eating foster-home oatmeal with a bunch of strangers.
Whatever happens, I want to make my freedom last as long as I can. That’s why I’m currently spending the summer in an abandoned tree house. Like the big house next to it, the tree house belongs to the widow of Mr. Pastorelli, the man whose driver’s license I now carry. Her name is Evelyn, and she has no idea that I’ve secretly taken up residence on her property. Since Evelyn gets around with one of those aluminum walkers and doesn’t venture outdoors much, I consider her the perfect landlady for my particular situation. There have been a couple of times when I’ve had to stay very still while the maintenance man serviced her outdoor swimming pool. But that’s not so bad when you consider that I get free rent for as long as I can remain under the radar.
I have discovered that Evelyn has a lot of pictures in her house. She is a grandmother a few times over, but her children and grandchildren never come to use the pool. This fact gives me a very melancholy feeling. So even though Evelyn never fails to leave a spare key under the mat—that’s about as convenient as it gets in my line of work—I make it a point never to steal from her unless it’s absolutely necessary.
I’ve used the pool a couple of times late at night. I like swimming alone in the dark. It’s one of those feelings that’s peaceful and not lonely at all. Of course, I try not to abuse my midnight swimming privileges. The worst thing someone in my position can do is get emotionally attached to a place you may have to vacate at any moment.
It’s not that I’m complaining or anything. As a rule, I always try to be grateful for at least one thing every day. For instance, today I’m very grateful that it’s summer; it makes my current domestic situation a lot easier and automatically eliminates the whole “Why aren’t you in school?” question. I tend to stay very active during the warm weather, which tends to keep me from worrying too much. Let me explain.
For most people, summer is a time of fun and relaxation. They go to neighborhood barbecues, catch an air-conditioned movie or take a vacation to the south of France. But, apart from Christmas, summer is the busiest season of the year for a burglar. In summer, homeowners and apartment dwellers get distracted by the heat. They leave their doors and windows open in order to get a nice cross-breeze going. Or better yet, they leave a ground floor window open while they make a trip to the store to get lemonade or bug spray. While I can pick a wide variety of basic locks, an open window on the ground floor is a gift that I can never resist.
Of course, the beauty of a summer burglary is that most of your potential problems are likely to be outdoors, frolicking in the backyard. I am often envious of such carefree behavior. During the summer, I’m too busy going through open windows to enjoy a backyard barbecue even if I were invited to one. Which I never am. Sometimes the wind shifts and I can smell the drifting smoke from the burning coals in some nearby barbecuer’s yard all the way up in my tree house. Man, does that ever make me hungry.
I can hear everyone laughing and having a good time, the way they do at barbecues. It makes me want to drop by unannounced and say, “Hi, there. I’m you’re new neighbor from the oak tree just down the street. How about setting out another paper plate?” There are even times when I entertain thoughts of liberating a steak from right off the grill. Or maybe even waiting until dark to liberate the entire barbecue set.
Of course, barbecued steak is a little out of my league these days. Most times I have to content myself with whatever leftovers I can find in a stranger’s fridge. I have a couple of cans of chili stored in Evelyn’s tree house. But if there’s anything that brings on that pesky lonely feeling, it’s eating your second-to-last serving of cold chili out of a can.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t help getting hungry on a regular basis. That’s how I came up with the idea of the Henry Holloway Emergency Fund. The charity that keeps on giving—to me.
In fact, if it weren’t for the generosity of my benefactors, I’d probably starve. I should point out that I prefer to think of the people I steal from as my benefactors and patrons. Each and every one of them are making unaware—and totally unselfish—contributions to my emergency fund. I often think that it’s too bad I can’t leave them an official receipt for tax purposes. I guess they’ll just have to settle for my unofficial gratitude.
Some of the cash portion of the Henry Holloway Emergency Fund goes toward the continuing demands of personal hygiene. Thanks to recent events, I’m facing various challenges in the cleanliness department. There are many times when I have to be especially resourceful where my personal grooming is concerned. If I run out of coins for the neighborhood laundromat, I can sometimes grab a fresh T-shirt off the outdoor clothesline from a nearby backyard. I always try to return the garment folded and freshly laundered. But I have to make sure nobody’s watching. It would be genuinely humiliating to get caught returning something I stole in the first place.
Of course, some of my basic daily needs are quite easily addressed. Thankfully, there are a few public washrooms within walking distance. It’s especially fortunate that there’s a condominium complex less than a block away from Evelyn’s. The complex has an outdoor pool with an attached bathroom and shower. The shower facilities are locked up at night. But there are no security guards or cameras. So it’s usually very easy to hop the low fence, pick the simple lock and clean myself up.
The problem? The condo dwellers are starting to have these summer pool parties that can run until after midnight. It’s not a good idea for me to be out on the streets after dark, since that can attract the attention of law enforcement. So lately I have been a little negligent in the soap-and-water department.
You might think this is a tough way to get by. But believe it or not, there are many things I like about living in a tree. Most of the time, if I’m not feeling too hungry, I’ll just lie back on my stolen sleeping bag and chill. I like the fact that you get a much better look at the sky from a tree house. Probably because you’re a lot closer to it.
I enjoy looking up at the roof of my current residence and watching the little slivers of blue that peek through the cracks in the planks. I guess some people would complain about having a few gaps in their roof. But I always try to keep in mind that I don’t pay rent. Which is very reasonable when you consider that I also have the after-hours use of a regulation pool.
I get my accommodating side from my mother. I never knew my dad, who took off before I was born and could have been quite impetuous for all I know. About the only solid information I have on him is from my mother, who said, “He played the saxophone.” When I asked if I should know anything else, she added, “He played the saxophone quite badly.”
Thanks to the care and attention of my mother’s brother, Andy, I have never been all that curious about my dad. I don’t know how my dad would feel about my current lifestyle. But I can definitely tell you that my mother wouldn’t be too pleased. When I think about how disappointed she would be, I really miss the days when I didn’t have to climb a tree to enter my front door.
The place I am currently calling home is one of those tree houses that’s a miniature version of the grown-up house on the same property. There’s a peaked roof and glass windows with curtains. But I think I like the view best of all. It makes everything look far away and beautiful. Like nothing bad can ever touch me.
Sometimes, when I catch a glimpse of Mrs. Evelyn Pastorelli in her kitchen window, shuffling along with her aluminum walker, I feel guilty. She’s getting a bit forgetful, and I can tell it’s starting to worry her.
I must confess that, once in a while, I check on Evelyn using a pair of very expensive binoculars that I liberated back in the days when I was concentrating on procuring valuable merchandise. Mostly, this is just to make sure she hasn’t fallen and injured herself. I try my best not to invade her privacy. But sometimes I can’t help seeing things that make me feel a little guilty.
Yesterday I watched as Evelyn opened her fridge and stuck her head inside for a long time. I could tell that she was trying to find the grapefruit that was there before I decided to eat it. And when she realized it was gone, there was this scared expression on her face. Like she was thinking, Maybe my daughter is right and I should move to one of those retirement homes where I will never have to keep track of grapefruit again.
I try to make it up to Evelyn by doing little chores around the house when she’s out running errands. For instance, I found an old oilcan in the basement and fixed one of her squeaky kitchen cupboards. After she got back, I watched her open the cupboard door and look a little sad. I mean, it was almost as if she wanted the old, familiar squeak to still be there. I guess you can never tell what a person will miss when they get to feeling lonely.
Evelyn has a piano in her house, and once in a while she’ll play something with the windows open. She is partial to classical music, which I find very peaceful on a still summer evening. However, I wouldn’t mind hearing a little jazz. Mostly because that’s the kind of music my mother used to play.
When my mother was alive, she played piano in one of Vancouver’s less respectable cocktail lounges. This meant that I spent a lot of evenings with Uncle Andy. My mother was always saying, “I love your uncle. But he has some bad habits.” Looking back, I guess her biggest fear was that Uncle Andy would teach me to steal. Sometimes she just couldn’t help bringing up the subject out of nowhere. She would come home, stooped over from wearing her heavy piano-playing dress with all the silver spangles, and automatically go into this long speech about how theft was the lowest form of human behavior.
I can never remember my mother actually finishing her speech about theft. Most of the time, she would get a decent start before throwing her arms around me and starting to cry. I would stand there for a while, feeling the spangles of her dress pressing against me and smelling the smoke from a thousand cigarettes. She would hug me tighter and say something like, “I’m sorry, Henry. It’s been a bad night for tips.” Then she would say, “Just promise me you’ll never steal anything.” And, naturally, I promised.
Sometimes I lie awake and think about how many times I have broken that promise to my mother. How, you may ask, does a fifteen-year-old end up stealing things if he feels so guilty about it? Well, I’d have to say it all started because of a hot-fudge sundae.
I was seven years old when I entered my first private residence without permission. Up until that day, I was always very law-abiding. Back then, I had no idea how unfair life could be. For example, it never occurred to me that my mother could get cancer from all the secondhand smoke in the clubs she played. But she did, even though she never took a puff from a cigarette in her entire life. That’s what she kept trying to explain to the doctors over and over. “You don’t understand,” she would say. “I don’t even smoke.”
It was a bad time all around. So one afternoon my Uncle Andy decided to take me out for a special treat. My mom had one of her medical appointments at the clinic and I think he just wanted to cheer me up a little. I’m sure what happened next wasn’t planned or even expected. But like Uncle Andy always says, “When opportunity knocks, it’s always a good idea to invite it in for a cup of coffee.”
My Uncle Andy has always been a little different. For one thing, he never failed to carry a bunch of dog treats in his pocket. Even though he has never owned a dog in his life. When I asked him why, he said, “It’s just a little professional tip I picked up from the postman.”
I asked if he was a postman. I was always trying to figure out what my one and only uncle did for a living. He seemed to have a steady supply of ice-cream money and no job to go with it, which I found very mysterious.
“No, I’m not a postman,” he replied. “Although I do encounter the occasional uncooperative pet in my line of work.” Then he looked at me and added, “I am very proud to say that I have never been bitten by a dog in my entire career. Chased, certainly. But never bitten.”
For a while, I thought my Uncle Andy might be in real estate. He always took an extra special interest in other people’s houses, especially if there was an accumulation of newspapers on the porch. On the way to getting our ice cream that day, I remember telling Uncle Andy that a fireman had come to our second-grade class to talk about his job. “I think I might want to be a fireman someday,” I said.
We were walking along a back lane, next to a nice old house, when Uncle Andy said, “See the ladder in that yard, Henry? How would you like to practice being a fireman right now?”
I looked around, like maybe there was some house on fire that I didn’t know about. Uncle Andy pointed to a partially opened window on the second floor. “Do you think you could squeeze into that little window if I held the ladder for you?” he asked.
“No problem, Uncle Andy,” I replied. Like I said, I was only seven and very eager to test my ladder-climbing skills.
“Okay,” said Uncle Andy, quickly leaning the ladder under a window. “I’m going to go around front and ring the doorbell. If nobody’s home, I will be back to steady the ladder.” Then he looked at me very sternly and added, “Stay right here and don’t try climbing the ladder by yourself.”
At the time, I didn’t realize that by squirming through the window and unlocking the door for my uncle, I was about to commit what the police call breaking and entering (or “B and E” for short). A few years later, Uncle Andy would try to put things into perspective for me. “Since we never actually broke anything, we were only guilty of the entering part,” he said.
I don’t even remember what we took that day. But I do recall this unique feeling of guilt mixed up with genuine excitement. Uncle Andy made it clear that my first B and E—or what he liked to call my “first E”—was a one-shot deal and that I wasn’t to tell my mother. He explained that he was in the business of liberating items from other people’s homes. Uncle Andy made it very clear that he did not want me going into the liberation business. But I guess it didn’t work out that way.
Ever since my mother passed away, Uncle Andy has been my official guardian. It was his idea to pretend that his friend Cindy was my aunt. They even had a fake marriage certificate made up. Just in case the government wanted proof that I was enjoying what they like to call “a stable domestic environment.”
Sometimes Uncle Andy has a problem with stability. For example, he is currently in prison for selling a series of instructional DVDs entitled, The Happy Handyman’s Digital Encyclopedia of Home Repair. You may ask, “How is going door to door selling instructional DVDs breaking the law?”
Well, technically, my uncle did not actually sell the entire Happy Handyman series. In fact, he only sold the first one, which, while accompanied by a lavishly illustrated booklet, merely covered home repair from A to B. This was perfectly fine, if all you cared about was replacing the filter on your air conditioner or repairing a cracked bathtub. But, as it turned out, a lot of people were interested in the rest of the home repair alphabet.
The trouble was that Uncle Andy only had thirty copies of the first DVD. He had discovered it while breaking into a delivery truck when nobody was watching. Fortunately, my uncle is a rather persuasive salesman. He even managed to sell the DVD to a few people who didn’t own computers or tvs. Unfortunately even they got quite annoyed. As the judge put it, “When an individual writes a check for a complete series of DVDs, they have a legitimate expectation of receiving the remaining discs.”
Usually when my uncle is in jail, it’s only for a couple of months at a time. I’ve always been able to stay with one of his longtime associates in the house Uncle Andy rented. Unfortunately, most of the associates that Uncle Andy trusts are in jail or out of town right now. Also, thanks to Uncle Andy’s most recent incarceration, he fell behind on the rent and we had to move out of our latest house.
My uncle is under the impression that I am staying with some good friends of Cindy’s while she has sublet her local apartment to make some extra cash. He thinks Cindy’s friends are a very nice couple called the Hendersons. This is only partially true. Until recently, I was staying with a couple called the Hendersons. But they weren’t all that nice. At least not as nice as my version of the Hendersons.
Not that things didn’t start out okay. When Cindy went off to learn how to be a professional card dealer, Mrs. Henderson did her best to make me feel at ease. The thing is, I don’t think Mr. Henderson was all that keen to have me around. He kept dropping these little hints. Like, “How long is that kid going to keep eating us out of house and home?”
To be fair, Mr. Henderson was dealing with a few domestic problems of his own. He was way behind on the bills and his landlord was getting impatient. I’ve been around a few rent dodgers in my time. So you’d think I’d recognize the signs. For example, Mrs. Henderson started getting very nervous and apologizing for no particular reason. “I’m sorry, Henry,” she said, putting her hand over mine. “Truly sorry.”
The next day, Mrs. Henderson sent me to the store to buy a few groceries. When I came back to the apartment, I could tell something had happened as soon as I put down the bag.
You end up experiencing a lot of different emotions when you spend time in strange houses. After a while, you sense certain things as soon as you get inside. Like when a place is vacant or when someone’s on vacation. There’s just this empty feeling that comes over you.
Of course, now and then, the feeling is totally wrong. So the first thing I did at the Hendersons’ was check the closets and the drawers. Except for a few hangers, the closets were empty. And all the drawers made that hollow sound you get when there’s nothing left inside. I looked around for a note. But I couldn’t find one anywhere.
I sat down to think for a while. Since I had no place else to go, I would have stayed in the apartment for as long as I could. But I heard someone coming down the hall. Then I heard a man’s voice. It was the landlord, talking to a couple of other people.
Thankfully, the apartment was on the ground floor. So I just opened a window and climbed out as quickly as I could. I heard the key in the lock as I was making my way out. I didn’t even have time to grab the bag of groceries. The good news? By the time they were inside, I was already running across the courtyard.
After I finished running, I figured out a few things. I knew I was never going to see the Hendersons again. Just like I knew Cindy wasn’t going to call back and check up on me. It’s not that they didn’t care, exactly. It’s just that they got caught up in their own problems and concerns. When they did, other things—like taking care of someone else’s kid—kind of fell through the cracks.
When I was a little kid, I remember asking Uncle Andy why my mother had to go away and never come back. He put his arm around me and said that life was like this big magic trick that nobody could figure out. “This is the way it works,” he said. “One day somebody’s here. And the next day they’re gone. It’s not your fault, Henry.”
“But they’re still gone,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Uncle Andy. “They’re still gone.”
TWO
Ever since my mother died, my Uncle Andy has done his best to look after me. I’m not saying he doesn’t have his faults. But I have watched him try to be a totally good person, even though it is clear to just about everyone that he has no natural talent for it. It’s funny how you can feel so close to someone, even though they are far from perfect. But that’s exactly the way I feel about my uncle.
For better or worse, I take after my uncle in many ways. Like Uncle Andy, I have never been able to say no to a challenge. Of all the weak spots in my character, the weakest is that I can never resist a bet. No matter how foolish. Someone could say, “Henry, I will bet you five dollars that you can’t eat a hotdog while standing on your head,” and I would automatically have to prove that I can.
One of the things I like best about my uncle is that if I said I could eat a hotdog while standing on my head, he would back me up one hundred and ten percent. He is constantly bragging about how I’m some sort of boy genius.
It all started with the special intelligence test they gave me back in elementary school. I was eleven years old when they put me in this room with several people whose job it was to test me on different things. I scored way higher than anybody my age without even trying, which my uncle has never forgotten. When I started to show some natural curiosity about burglary, he said, “What do you want to know that for? We have documented proof that you are smart enough to become a lawyer and steal the legal way.”
Of course, life with Uncle Andy always had its ups and downs. But I really miss the ups. In fact, the thing I miss most is that we used to live in a real house. It was only a rental, and it looked a little sad from the outside. The paint was flaking a bit and a few of the porch steps were loose. But the best part was, it always felt like home.
I’m sure some people would consider my former living arrangements rather unusual. I mean, not everybody has the unique privilege of living under the same roof with an assortment of small-time crooks. But that’s where my Uncle Andy was thinking ahead. The beauty of this arrangement? Even when he was being temporarily detained by the judicial system, there was always someone to look after me.
You can’t always count on a steady income from breaking the law. Sometimes things go your way and sometimes they don’t. So Uncle Andy would often take in boarders from among his various associates. Rent was always what my uncle liked to call “very democratic.” If you happened to be doing well at the moment, your rent was high. If you were down on your luck, your rent was practically nothing.
It is a well-known fact that responsibility can be very exhausting. That was the great thing about living in the same big house with a lot of irresponsible people. On their own, they would let a lot of parental-type things slide by. But as a group, there was always at least one person who could handle feeling responsible for a short period of time. When they got tired, somebody else usually took over.
You would think that a bunch of lawbreakers on the premises would be nothing but trouble waiting to happen. But nobody ever stole so much as a matchstick under our roof. It was considered very bad manners to steal from your own place of residence.
If you were going to live in our house, you had to obey a strict set of rules. Of course, when I was a little kid, I wasn’t supposed to know what the rules were. After pulling my first heist with Uncle Andy at the age of seven, he tried his best to keep me from the details of the burglary business. Of course my natural curiosity got the better of me. So it wasn’t long before I discovered that the house rules were posted in everybody’s room but my own.
I think it is a sensible set of rules, especially if you ever find yourself living under the same roof with an assortment of burglars and con artists. So I’ve decided to list them below.
• Should you encounter any problems with law enforcement, do not give them this address.
• No stealing on the premises. (This means YOU!)
• No talking about stealing in front of Henry.
• No swearing or coarse language in front of Henry.
• You will be expected to perform at least one domestic chore per week. (Feel free to let Henry see you doing this.)
• Should you fail to perform said domestic chore, you will be required to help Henry with his homework.
• If you do not feel qualified to help Henry with his homework, you must go to the library and select a book you feel he might enjoy. (Do not steal the book.)
• Family game night is mandatory. (Unless professional obligations intervene.)
My favorite rule of all was the one about family game night. Uncle Andy made this rule because he didn’t want anybody to sit in their room and brood or mope. To encourage what my uncle called “wholesome social interaction,” he came up with the idea of having a game night every Friday.
He got his hands on some old-fashioned board games. You know, games like Monopoly, Sorry! and Clue. You might not think that grown men would relate to games like that. But you would be very wrong. It wasn’t long before they were all playing Sorry! or Monopoly with unabashed zest. Everybody would shout and laugh or ask me to blow on the dice for good luck. It was a lot of fun.
I tend to look back on those more innocent days with a lot of affection. For one thing, I had learned to be independent at a very early age. I had my own room and never had to share anything unless I wanted to. As long as I kept my grades up, and did my share of the household chores, I was treated like a reasonable facsimile of an adult.
There were other benefits as well. You would be surprised at how many things you can learn from living with an assortment of small-time crooks, things that have nothing to do with avoiding the police. Some of these things can even be enlightening when it comes to understanding human nature.
For example, I’ve always found Wally Whispers attitude very inspiring. Wally’s real name is Walter Gurski. But everybody calls him Wally Whispers because he can’t talk above a whisper. I asked him why he was unable to raise his voice, and he said it was because of an unfortunate encounter with a very angry individual. “I cannot elaborate any further,” explained Wally. “I do not wish to alter your viewpoint on the basic goodness of human nature.”
That’s Wally for you—always very considerate. The reason he started teaching me how to pick locks is because I was in the habit of forgetting my house key. As a result, I would often have to wait a long time in the rain before Uncle Andy showed up. I started to complain to Wally that Uncle Andy wouldn’t let me leave a key under the mat. But Wally said that hiding a key outside your home was a very bad idea. “It is like having a neon sign on your doorstep that reads Please steal anything you consider valuable.”