Somewhere between heaven and hell

Back in the day I used to hang with a dude who had a contract to run bricks out of Canada Brick in Brampton. Those were boom times. Those bricks went all over southern Ontario and into Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. 

Buddy owned and operated what was known as a “brick train.” What that looked like was a Peterbilt tractor with a giant Cat engine, and two trailers behind it, each one equipped with its own boom crane to unload the bricks. That costed out at about 100 thou for the tractor and two hundred for the trailers. 

But those were boom times! He was grossing well over two grand per day, and we’re talking over thirty years ago! There was no amount of debt that kind of cash flow couldn’t handle. Plus, he had a slightly shady side-line that put another 5Gs in his pocket every month.

Seems the management at Canada Brick was a little sloppy. They had a quality control department, and once or twice a week one or two batches came out of the kilns not fit for service. They were loaded up and taken to the crusher, and then recycled into fresh bricks. The fact that they didn’t track the flawed bricks opened up an entrepreneurial opportunity for Buddy.

Instead of driving around the building to the crusher, he’d skedaddle out the gate and deliver that load to a job-site in Ohio or Michigan. Then he’s got a train worth of good brick that’s totally off the books of anybody, and there’s way more brick driveways and brick patios than you can imagine that were built with purloined bricks at the homes of people who knew somebody who knew somebody who could get you a really good deal on bricks. Cash only, of course! 

Things were going so great Buddy bought another set of trains, so that the one could be loaded while the other was being delivered, and he’d go from eight deliveries per week to twelve or fourteen. 

Fat city!

Fat city indeed. An occupational hazard in the trucking biz is you get to meet a lot of truck-stop waitress kinda gals. So while the sun was shining and Buddy was making hay, he was also accumulating girlfriends from Ontario to Ohio to Michigan. They all thought he was rich, as did his wife back in Guelph. And he sorta kinda looked it for awhile. He’d blow into town once a week, spend lavishly, and off he’d go. It was a win-win for all concerned.

Alas, there’s always lean years after the fat years, and the building boom unexpectedly wound down. To nothing. He’s half a million in debt and has essentially no income. By then his wife had found bank statements from an account he’d opened in Michigan. Around the same time his stateside gals were figuring out he wasn’t rich anymore.

He’s broke and homeless and living in the truck that’s going to be repossessed any day, and he’s telling me the guy who sold him that second set of trains had insider info about the coming collapse in construction. He’s planning to kill the guy.

Hey man, that’s really stupid. First of all, you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail. Secondly, when you die, you’ll go to hell for all eternity. Is that what you want? 

Hell?

He looks at me. 

What? 

You mean this isn’t it?

That same “economic downturn” took me to my own heaven-to-hell adventure. I’d fancied myself an up-and-coming wheeler-dealer. I had a three-plex here and a six-plex there and had built a couple of new homes and had bought the lots to build a couple more. That was all put together with about a million dollars of debt, most of it floating at prime plus 6%. 

The fact that a guy who had never showed more than $14k in annual income on his tax returns was able to get a million dollars into debt tells you how loose things are when times are good. And were they ever good. If I squinted at my financials in just the right light, all that shit I owned was worth a good two million, maybe even three…

In a matter of months my floating rate loans had floated to the 26% range. The market for new construction was dead. I had 15k going out every month and not even half that coming in.  

In the end, the only people who got stiffed was the accounting firm that wanted me to pay a four thousand dollar bill incurred to figure out I was bankrupt, and Revenue Canada, who took this moment to audit me and decide that the last five years of capital gains I’d declared were actually income rather than capital gains, and I owed them forty thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money when you don’t have any.

My first rehab I briefly shared a room with a serial rehabber. He’d been through the Homewood’s addiction treatment program half a dozen times. He had a goodly stash of very fine weed with him, and between that and the shit they shot into your ass-cheeks three times a day, I guess you could say we were in heaven 24/7.

One day Buddy shows me his photo album.

On one page he’s got pictures of the summer picnic from the Pentecostal church where he’s a sometimes Sunday school teacher.

On the next page he’s got pictures from the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club summer picnic.

In my youth, those were the baddest buggers about when it came to outlaw motorcycle clubs. You had your Devil’s Disciples and Paradise Riders, but Satan’s Choice was considered the real deal. Every couple of years they’d show up in Maryhill and trash either Vic’s bar or Ralph’s bar. Maryhill had twenty houses and two pubs at the time, on opposite sides of the street on the same corner. 

The locals were what I would consider a fairly rough crowd, but all it took was one SC guy swinging a manure-spreader chain in the parking lot and the place cleared out pronto.

So Buddy had this ongoing struggle between the alcoholism and the heroin on the one shoulder, and the Sunday school teacher on the other…

He was always somewhere between heaven and hell.