GUNS..

"take the mean, not the extreme."

.....Aristotle

When I came from that Minor Seminary in Roblin, I went to Churchill High School to finish off my school year.

In the first week my brother Richard wanted to show me around sort of, and was going to introduce me to a girl he knew.

Her name was Betty and she was pretty.

Anyway it was noon hour and Betty is walking home for lunch and she is about a half a block in front of us. So Rick calls out and asks her to wait up for us. But she kept on walking.

The person who did wait up for us was her weight-lifting pet gorilla she called her boyfriend, and he jumped on Rick like there was no tomorrow.

I couldn't believe the violence I was seeing. He was punching Rick and kicking him when he was down for about a minute or so.

And of course he was saying not so nice things too. I was shocked. I needed a big stick.

So I went down to the Army Surplus

store and bought a starting pistol. Actually it was a .22 pistol with a plug put in the barrel so it couldn't shoot. I drilled the plug out, and it was a .22 pistol again.

No one was going to lay a beating like that on me. And no one ever did.

So one thing led to another, I would take my gun to school and sometimes practice down by the river.

One day on Firecracker's Day us three boys were going to rob a store. No one was going to get hurt or anything like that, we were just going to take their money at gun point. We had a plan to enter a grocery store, me with the gun, and shoot at the ceiling and rob the store. We never did that but that was the plan.

Walter got himself in trouble with my Father so he sold us out so he wouldn't get a beating.

When I walked in the door the roof caved in.

My Father sat me down in the corner so I couldn't get away and twisted my shirt collar and started slapping me. I would quickly go unconscious and he kept slapping me and asking about a gun.

I kept saying I didn't know anything about a gun, and he kept slapping and choking me.

I remember looking at my Dad as he slapped me and putting on the smallest grin.

He said I was smirking and I said I wasn't. Then the darkness came and when I came to again, I would give him that little grin again, and away we would go into the night.

I looked pretty rough the next morning. And though I never admitted to knowing anything about a gun, Walter had told my Dad that my Grandmother was keeping the gun for me.

My poor Grandmother was on the spot all right and said that she would produce the gun for my Father to see, but then she would throw it in the river. Which is exactly what happened.

She told me about it the following day. And Richard and I ran away from home.

I have never been happy with Walter since then. I don't care about the issue anymore, it is Walter who I am uncomfortable with. He is a little different from Rick and I that way.

Years later I would have different guns.

Only once did I ever use one, when I was twenty nine years into my Life. And as it turned out, it was not such a hot idea. Never in my Life would I ever intend to or actually shoot anyone. The purpose of a gun was to get people to comply with my suggestions .

I guess you could say I was hanging out with the wrong people too. Well they were all a bunch of thieves, and none of them had a job.

So that is the wrong kind of people, right...?

Well one day we decide to go big time. And that was exactly what we would end up with too. Big time.

But I never really was a bad guy, I just knew a lot of them. And one day, I got swept up in the program and found myself walking into a bank with a sawed off .303 rifle. The bullets were about three inches long each, and the tip of the barrel where the bullet comes out was painted with red finger nail polish. It was an awesome looking thing and it certainly suggested compliance.

I used to know all the bank robbers in town, and they did have a crazy Life style. Back in those days the police drove around in little six cylinder cars and if you wanted to escape, you just drove away leaving them behind.

Today the police drive around in air craft carriers compared to the sleds they had back then.

Anyway, at first I was just a bystander. It was a June afternoon and this bank was going down and since I knew all the players, I was going to be walking my dog when it happened and I would see a bank robbery in action. I had never seen a bank being robbed before.

So these two guys go into the bank at exactly three o'clock in the afternoon. They went in at that exact time because the bank would then lock the doors from the inside. Then they could rob the bank with no one coming in or going out. On their way out, they just unlocked the door and left.

But they missed the boat by one second and the bank locked their doors at just the instant that they got there. So the robbery was put off to the next morning. Brinks, the money carriers, would pick up their weekly bags of cash sometime in the morning. The robbers, Ken and John wanted to get there just before Brinks, and take those bags for themselves. A haul worth an estimated $40,000 to $50,000. They just go in, and take it. Just like that. In and out and it is over.

So we met back at my place, and can you believe it, I asked if I could get in on it....

So the next morning, at 10:01 AM there we all were, each one coming from a different entrance.

Ken would go in first, and I would enter exactly sixty seconds later. Ken would ask the teller for one hundred single dollar bills as change from a hundred dollar bill. The teller would have to go into the vault to get a stack of one dollar bills and more important, the vault would be open when I arrived. And John would walk in right behind me. That was the plan, and that is what happened..... sort of.

First of all, I needed a disguise. You can't just walk into a bank looking like yourself.

So I decided to go in dressed as a woman. A friend of mine named Pat gave me a wig and ear rings. She made me practice taking little feminine steps as opposed to manly strides. And with a cotton filled bra, some lipstick and make up and all, well you couldn't tell it was me.

Later in the trial the teller would tell the court that first Ken entered the bank, and then a woman appeared at the door. The Prosecutor corrected her and said," You mean a man dressed as a woman appeared at the door."

"No," the teller replied, " it was a woman."

"Well could it have been a man dressed as a woman?" the Prosecutor insisted.

"No it was a woman." the teller answered. So my diguise was effective.

As a matter of fact as I was about to enter the bank some guy in a big convertible winked at me and gave me a big smile. I thought he was some pervert but I remembered that I looked like a woman.

A woman with a .303 rifle in a shopping bag on her way to rob a bank. So I kinda smiled at him.

My heart was pounding furiously but I just put one foot in front of the other and then there I was. It was Show Time.

My heart would beat even harder later when the police surrounded the building we were in. Then they too had these big guns. And there would be a lot of police everywhere.

Anyway it was ShowTime at the bank and with a deep breath I walked into the building. John was walking down the hall and walked in right after me. I had the stopwatch and when fifty-eight seconds were up we had to be out of the bank. I would pull the rifle from the bag and announce that it was a bank robbery and tell everyone to get down on the floor. John would leap over the counter and get the money bags from the vault.

But when we walked in Ken had already started the robbery and he was swinging his gun at the teller. She was a spunky pretty little thing who kept trying to reach the alarm button. Then Ken would take a swing at her and she would back up. The bank Manager's head would pop up from behind the counter and Ken would point the gun at the Manager's head and away it would go again. It was a crazy surreal scene and everything was going very wrong.

Money was flying around everywhere and Ken was stuffing it in my shopping bag saying we should 'bolt'.

Well I didn't need any convincing, I was out of there like a shot with twenty dollar bills flying in the air.

I ran by a delivery man on my way out and later at the trial, he would testify that I was a man. That was because each step I took was about six feet in distance, and well, women just don't run that way.

Across the parking lot, through a yard on to the next street where John took of his mask, got on a bicycle and rode right out of there through all the arriving police cars.

Ken and I went on to this high rise at the end of the complex. They were all high rises around there. We would just disappear in one of those thousands of apartments. The Police would never search every one of those thousands of apartments.

Wrong-o....

Ken and I went directly to a hooker's apartment. In the stairwell of the building Rosa, the hooker, had placed my change of clothes and some face cream to remove the make-up.

In two minutes I was back to my regular self, and that is when I made a fatal error. Like John, I should have just walked away. But Ken said I should duck into the apartment until the heat blew over. It was against my better judgement to be in any place where the guns and the money was, but I followed his advice and entered that apartment on the sixth floor of the building.

Looking down through the sheer curtains I could see swarms of police covering the ground below. And they all had big guns,

and they were looking for me.

A half hour went by, and you could hear all their radios in unison giving our descriptions and all the details while even more police cars were arriving.

My heart skipped a beat when I realized that they were doing an apartment to apartment search. I could hear them in the floors below us knocking on the doors saying, "Winnipeg Police..!! "

Moments later they were on our floor. I told the hooker to answer the door naked and pretend that she was sleeping and being disturbed. If she could make it awkward for the police they would be in and out of there in a hurry.

'Knock Knock !!' went the door,"Winnipeg Police."

We could have hid under the bed because they never looked there. But I went into the closet, pulled a bunch of her clothes down on me and laid on the floor. In seconds the policeman was in my closet. He reached down into the clothes right between my legs, once, then he reached down into the clothes and barely touched my stomach the second time, and he hardly reached into the clothes the third time. Then he was gone. I could hardly believe that I had gotten away with it but I did.

In the next bedroom, unfortunately Ken had decided to just duck in the closet and not cover himself up. When the policeman opened the closet door, he looked at Ken face to face. There was a bit of shouting, a brief struggle, and my closet door opened again. The clothes were pushed aside and there I was, looking into the barrel of the biggest shaky hand gun I had ever seen. Everything was over except the time.

Six years, the judge said at the end of the trial, and another six years for possession of a weapon. I rocked in disbelief. My head was swimming and all sound disappeared as they took me away.

I remember thinking, " What about Christmas..? Surely I will not be spending Christmas locked up in prison.."

Actually I spent a couple of Christmases locked up and all that was a different planet as well.

That was where I was introduced to drugs. And that was where my Life would take on a new dimension. Drugs would play a very heavy part of my Life after that, and I will tell you about some of that next.