Blog #157 December 4th
I entered a writing contest in our local paper recently, the rules were to submit a short story that included the line "They thought the beef jerky would sink". I wrote the following and submitted, but didn't win - I personally love the story as did many people who read it so I thought I would share it here - this story is fiction, although the protagonist was inspired by my father. I hope you enjoy it, and please feel free to let me know what you think.
Dad’s Big Caper
My father has been dead for years, so long that I rarely think about him now. He was a hard drinking, chain smoking, truck driving kind of guy who burned out young and was gone at forty-three.
He got my mother pregnant when they were both seventeen, back in the Fifties so of course they had to get married. Four kids by the time they were both twenty-five. Can you imagine? And my father never held a job for more the twenty minutes – gas jockey, used car salesman, handyman, roofer, truck driver, window washer, Fuller Brush door-to-door salesman – you name it, he tried it. You see, people loved him, so if he lost one job, there was always another one - he was good looking and charming, a great combination for somebody who didn’t really want to work.
Of course, we loved him madly (at least when we were kids). When he was around, the house was alive – it felt like anything could happen, every day was an adventure. He would cook elaborate meals using every pot in the house, while country music played on the record player (only the real thing… Conway Twitty or Hank Snow) drinking rye and coke until the bottle was gone. We never ate before twelve those nights as he spun out his stories along with his rye. Man oh man how we loved those evenings with him.
We would go for long drives on Sundays, his coffee cup full of something that made my mother nervous. He would challenge boys in muscle cars to drag race while my mother begged him to slow down and we four kids were tossed around the back seat like marbles, screaming with excitement and fear.
But then there would be long periods when he was gone and my mother just got quieter and quieter as the bills piled up. She would have to go to her rich parents to bail us out and sometimes we had to move in with them temporarily. But he always turned up with a new scheme and she always took him back. As far as money went, Dad’s plan was “When it’s all gone Peggy, we’ll get some more”. For years, we believed him, that getting money was as easy as simply wanting more.
None of us understood why she stayed with him, my dad hadn’t held down a real job for years (my mother finally recognized that if any money was coming in, she was going to have to earn it) so while my mom got a job and ran the household, Dad worked odd jobs for beer money.
He and his friend Mel used to like to drink in some of the seedier bars in downtown Vancouver. He said he liked those places because the beer was cheap and his fellow patrons were people who didn’t judge him, or each other. He and Mel spent their time coming up with big ideas and get rich quick schemes that they could never quite pull off.
Until Dad’s big caper.
It seemed fool proof (at least in their minds) you see, bars in the downtown eastside of Vancouver have a reputation for being a place you could buy almost anything at a great price - from cheese to chandeliers - all of which just happened to “fall off a truck.”
My dad and Mel had managed to get their hands on some individually wrapped packages of beef jerky, the kind you see for sale by the till in convenience stores. A lot of them. Apparently they fell off the back of the proverbial truck. Ahem. So the plan was they would sell these bar to bar, table to table for a fraction of what they cost retail….and make a killing. Their thinking was, who doesn’t love beef jerky, and here it was at a discount, they were practically doing community service!
So they started at one end of the downtown strip and worked their way through several bars, talking up their merchandise, which sold like, well, cheap beef jerky in a seedy bar, drinking more than the occasional beer and ducking out the back door at the first sign of the cops.
To no one’s surprise, it turned out the beef jerky had not been obtained legally or even accidentally. The real owners (a low-end meat processing plant at the bottom of Commercial Drive) suspected where their jerky had gone, and were on the look-out. Luckily they were several bars behind the jerky thieves, who, alerted by a roving bar patron, made a mad dash for freedom, taking their ill gotten meat with them.
Holed up in Mel’s basement suite, they spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to get rid of the hundreds of individually wrapped packages of delicious beef jerky. They did this planning over the numerous beers they purchased with the profits from their operation. And therein lay the problem. Rather than pitch it over a cliff, or drop at the dump or even just abandon it in an alley, in their drunken wisdom they decided to throw it into the ocean. They thought the beef jerky would sink.
Stumbling onto the street, loaded up with bags of jerky, some liquid refreshment and their few remaining bucks, they grabbed a cab and headed down to Jericho beach (where my dad knew a guy who knew a guy who had a boat). They figured they could borrow his boat, paddle out to sea and dump their problem in the water.
Well, they couldn’t find “the guy” or any guy who would loan them, rent them or give them access to a boat. Having run out of ideas they walked to the end of the pier, chucked the whole lot into the ocean and returned to the beach where they proceeded to enjoy their drinks over the re-telling of their beef jerky caper.
Of course all those hundreds of plastic wrapped packages didn’t sink, but instead washed up on the beach, lapping at the feet of not only the police (called to the crime scene by angry beach users) but the passed-out figures of my father and Mel who, after all the excitement, had lay down on the sand to sleep it off.
The police hauled them in, charged them and threw them in jail. It was all too much for my mother. Apparently she could live with alcoholism and chronic unemployment but not criminal activity and jail time. So the “jerky caper” as we fondly referred to it over the years, was the last straw and she threw him out.
We were all grown up and mostly gone by then. My brother bailed him out of jail, we packed up a few of his things and got him settled in a nice little room close to his favourite hang-outs and kept an eye on him. I think he really enjoyed the time he had left, he found a place where he was comfortable and an audience who never tired of hearing (or at least never remembered) his stories.
My mom carried on after he was gone. She kept busy and even dated occasionally, but I know she loved my dad best right to the end. She would confess to me, usually after a few drinks at big family events when we were alone in the kitchen (like she was revealing a deep dark secret) that he had been the love of her life and she had never gotten over him.
I’ve been thinking about all this lately because my mom died last year and after much discussion, we decided to bury her ashes in with my dad. I stopped by their grave recently to leave some flowers and there, carefully placed on his headstone, was a package of beef jerky.
My brothers insist they didn’t do it and all my dad’s drinking buddies are long gone, so I really have no idea how it arrived. But knowing my dad, I wonder if he put that beef jerky package there as a little reminder that even in death, he is larger than life.
story by Susan Evans
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