THE CliffR Project

CHAPTER 1, CHAPTER 4, CHAPTER 26, CHAPTER 34

HOMEPAGE

THE CliffR PROJECT

PART 3 - ‘The Karmic Kar Cycles’

THE KARMIC KAR CYCLES

CHAPTER 34

In the fall of nineteen sixty nine, while I had been living for a while at Rochdale College in Toronto after being fired as manager of the rock band Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck, I had been discussing the expansion of consciousness with someone.

My favorite claim at the time was that my consciousness had gone from here, ‘hand at the waist’, to here, ‘hand at my neck’, as a result of my restrained use of psychedelics during my years with the rock band.

The other party looked hard at me and said, “The consciousness of the whole planet has been going up sky high since the early sixties. Without the drugs, your consciousness would probably have expanded from here, ‘hand at the waist’, to here, ‘hand way over his head’”. In my little heart of hearts I had to know it was true.

Drugs had just gone along for the joy ride and tried to take all the credit. It's the law of entropy. Energy in equals energy out unless you're stoned. Unfortunately drugs also took a lot of good people right out of the picture along with the due credit. Because of this realization and other factors, on February 10th, nineteen seventy, I stopped smoking the good old stuff, down the can, cold turkey, done forever.

After returning to Vancouver in the spring of nineteen seventy, I knocked around for a year. Eventually I took up with the small group of people who eventually evolved into the flower business. Some like me had dropped out of drugs. Along with other groups, we had become local advocates within the hippie scene for dropping out of drugs in general and becoming responsible again.

This was not to disavow hippies in general. Some were very responsible. The true blue yippie, dippy, trippy, hippie, could have used a little sense and sensibilia though for sure.

Some of the fellows in our group were experienced leather craftsmen. That’s how I learned leather crafting a bit, and we shared our knowledge as a way of self reliance. As mentioned some of the girls had set up a flower girl basket route, and the group eventually evolved into our original bar and tavern flower selling enterprise which is now a recognized profession in just about every nook and cranny of North America.

For a while, some of us did voluntary door to door canvassing for charities. Four of us were canvassing down a street one afternoon. Evidently someone had called the police to check us out because suddenly a cruiser appeared around the corner beading straight toward us down the street. He checked out our permits and IDs. Then happily, he left.

About five minutes later I saw the car slowly coming around the corner again, real slowly. Instinctively I said to myself, ”Shit, it's that stupid jay walking ticket”. I hadn't even thought about it for over five years. Sure enough. The car pulled up and the cop asked out of his window. “Which one of you is Moore”. I just turned to the others and said, “See you later”. Then without further ado I climbed into the back seat of the cruiser without even being asked.

Vancouver has a very good pedestrian bylaw. If you step even one foot off the curb on any main thoroughfare in the city, and someone doesn't stop, they get a ticket. If you step even one foot off the curb and it’s a main thoroughfare anywhere in the city and it wasn't at a designated crosswalk, you get a jaywalking ticket. New York it isn't.

In the summer of nineteen sixty six, in my footloose and fancy free hippie days before the rock band, I had been walking west along Nelson Street in Vancouver's West End. Nelson Street is hard adjacent to the downtown core. Nelson was a quiet side street lined with nice thick shade trees. I crossed over in the middle of the block, walked to the next cross street, took it down for a block, then continued west again along the next street over.

Suddenly a motorcycle cop pulled up beside me and said, “You jaywalked in the middle of Nelson Street”. “Nelson's not a main road”, I said. “Nelson is an officially designated taxi route”, he said. “therefore it is subject to the jaywalking bylaw”. Apparently every citizen in the City of Vancouver was supposed to have known that because he forthwith wrote me out a ticket for jaywalking.

I put the ticket in my back pocket and never thought about it again. In those days, worrying about a jay walking ticket was about as relevant to an average hippie's daily curriculum as how much water was in the well on Mars. Now that I was no longer a hippie, I was busted for it five years later. Go figure.

I spent the night in the pokey. I appeared before the judge the next morning. While awaiting my turn, the judge called an ice dude of Inuit persuasion to the stand charged with thirty five counts of jaywalking.

In the stern authoritative voice of all judges pursuant to the majesty of their office, the judge peered down at the fellow and asked, “So what do you have to say for yourself”. The ice dude quietly looked up at him for a minute. Then in a very slow not too sure of himself way, which I'm pretty sure was also pretty deliberate, said, “Red lights, green lights, they're all same to me your honor. You see where I come from, we all travel by dog sled”.

The judge knew he had been had. He couldn't very well come down on the guy for fear of looking like an idiot. So he just fined the fellow time served and admonished him to learn the law.

Fortunately, the incident had served to warm up the judge. When my turn came up he just fined me minimum fine despite my five years on the lam. I thought about it while writing this book. Why had it happened at all. I decided that it definitely had to be an 'outie' in my Karmic Car Cycles.

When memoiring up the material for this book, I had suddenly realized the inordinate number of times I seemed to have inadvertently run afoul of the law for traffic related offenses and hadn't really done anything. At least not in the sense of deliberately trying to break the law or trying to get away with something. Spirit of the law, intent of the law, I never did figure out which one was worse if you broke it.

Whatever the one or the other was at any rate, my point is that it was never by ‘from the heart’, though the authorities always sure seemed to think so.

Similarly, I started to see how many times I had been in a vehicle when my hair was raised from some kind of hairy incident, or my feathers ruffled by something straight out of the absurd and the circumstances had been beyond my control.

Some people never get a ticket in their entire life no matter how bad they flagrantly flaunt the law. Like speeding. I never deliberately speed. Similarly, if a traffic light is out, some people always see that as the opportunity they’ve been waiting for all their lives and deliberately pull a quick one. Others like me instantly go into a cautious and courteous mode so as not to get clocked by a dummy from the other side.

In general, in my driving, I always drove in an extra courteous and cautious mode to be on the outlook for the opportunists just specified above. Yet I always seem to be getting into hot water with the law no matter what. Like the Jay walking ticket.

I also looked at all the unseemly and untoward ‘what are the odds’ type things which always seem to be happening to me involving motor vehicles. Like buying a brand new tire and running over a big fat nail twenty minutes later. I finally figured out that it was probably because I had inadvertently set up a Karmic Car Cycle when I was a kid in Kerrisdale in Vancouver.

You know how Karma is supposed to work. You do something bad or nasty in one lifetime. And you come back in the next to make amends. It's like a ledger. The not-so-good stuff you do all goes into the book as 'bad' Karma. In the next lifetime, the good stuff you do is 'good' Karma. If all goes well, and you watch your Ps and Qs carefully enough, eventually the book is balanced, the slate is clean and you're off the hook.

My supposition is that Karmic Car Cycles work in somewhat the same way. The rules are simple though it all happens in the same lifetime. Similarly, instead of the higher spiritual factors, gods of cars are the keepers of the ledger.

Similarly, the bad stuff you do goes in as 'innies. The bad stuff that happens to you comes out as ‘outies’. Similarly the good stuff you do comes out as ‘outies’ because it also helps counterbalance the books against any bad ‘innies’ you may have had going in. 'Innie', 'Outie', “Innie’, kind of sounds like your belly button as you gain and loose weight.

At any rate, so say if I were to break the law, or was instrument in a vehicular situation which was not exactly good form under the circumstance, then it would go into my Karmic Car Cycle ledger as an 'innie'. Similarly, if I got an unfair traffic ticket, or was involved in a vehicular situation that was decidedly an in my face'r under the circumstances, or did something to make the car gods smile favorably, it would come out as an 'outie'.

Just so we’re clear. The Karmic Car Cycles are not the great wheels of Karma which are said to tie you inexorably to the past as a responsibility, they are great wheels of Karma which inexorably tie you to the present according to the things you do in front of cops, or are done to you by others involving a car.

Some people flaunt the system their whole lives and never seem to get caught or have to pay retribution. Others who are a little bit subject to Karmic Car Cycles, get away with the littler things but pay for the bigger things.

Others like me, are so finely tuned to the Karmic Car Cycles that they pay for every little nicky norky thing you could ever possibly imagine.

The car gods are exceptionally good bookkeepers. I therefore concurred that my non-stop montage of unfair tickets and unfriendly like car coincidences over the years was therefore probably on the playback or 'outie' side of the ledger.

This is all tongue in cheek of course. There is no such thing as the great wheel of Karma. Just your complete responsibility to take full responsibility in a next lifetime for the things you did in a previous lifetime. A creator is responsible for their creation as long as the creation exists.

But the idea of a karmic car cycle on the loose was too much fun to ignore. Besides, just about everybody has been there, did it, and won a tee shirt at least once in their life, at least in one way or another, at least some time or other, at least to some degree or so.

One last thing. Since nobody in the universe is keeping the Karmic score as it occurs within this book except you and me, clerical errors are therefore not out and out impossible. So if you see something I record as an 'outie' and you think it should definitely be an 'innie', what can I say.

Similarly, if you are one of these types with a photographic memory and you have to know that of all the things on the planet that I am, the one thing I am not is memoried in a photographic manner, and you see that the slate has gone off track a little, then have a little fun and keep your own slate going and accept my hereby groveling apology for blowing it.

What I'm trying to say is, like the lady said, I'm dancing as fast as I can about the ledger so give me a little slack already.

I've concluded that one of my earliest deeds ever involving the Karmic cycles, had to do with the actual setting up of my Karmic Car Cycle in the first place. In my last year in high school I used to ride around with Ted in his Daddy's car. I inadvertently inputted a ‘innie’ and it was a big one.

During the winter of my last year in high school, circa nineteen fifty seven, my father as an IBM executive in Vancouver, had put us squarely in the pocket of the middle class. Some of the people in our Kerrisdale neighborhood including some of the kids at school, were squarely in the pocket of the upper class.

In fact, Kerrisdale along Marine Drive not far from where we lived, was home to some of the wealthiest families in Canada at the time.

In particular, one of my high school buddies, Ted, was going steady with the daughter of the owner of one of the world's largest forest product companies. In the daughter’s case you could say with absolute certainty that money grew on trees.

Not only was her Daddy worth many many dineros, he was also quite rich. He was also one of the first to see the potential of Hawaii for cold winter relief. He virtually single handedly started the proliferation of high rise holiday resorts along Waikiki Beach during the mid fifties. Eventually surfing the tourists and not the tide.

Kerrisdale also boasted another pioneering parent of a high school chum. His father owned a very large paper box manufacturing company and the family was pretty well off.

Garry was a small wireish Jewish kid whose parents had divorced just at the wrong time so as to not traumatize him the maximum amount as a youngster. Therefore Garry spent all four years of high school trying to define his relevancy to everybody the hard way by constantly being in your face about something.

For awhile he was going to be an actor, constantly in everyone's face about the next school play in which he was the lead. For awhile he was going to be a singer and was constantly in everyone's face about the next high school musical in which he was going to be the lead.

For awhile, he was a hard rock, constantly in everyone's face in a dark blue Bennie overcoat and talking tough. That was kind of funny since he was only about five foot seven and bean pole thin. The year after high school he decided he was going to play the saxophone and was constantly in everyone's face with the horn. Literally.

Greydie as you may remember, had gone into drumming during high school, and just after high school started aspiring to become a professional drummer for serious. Soon enough a band had been whomped together practicing in our garage which I had lined with plasterboard and had painted blazing pink to give it some atmosphere. Shades of Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

A kid down the street thumped on bass, Greydie played drums, I was the manager, and a guy whose name I can't even remember played guitar. Garry was lead singer and saxman. The name of the band was of course, 'The Sasquatches'.

With all due respect, Garry was quite a good singer in the Sammy Davis Jr., mode whom he emulated for a year in everybody's face after seeing him perform one year at Las Vegas.

During the summer of nineteen fifty eight, the number one local Rock and Roll radio station in Vancouver put on a big rock and roll extravaganza at the Kitsilano Showboat outdoor theater. The theater was located at Kitsilano Beach sitting against the ocean which was big time stuff at the time. The featured artist was none other than Jerry Lee Lewis who was at the top of his form at the top of the charts.

Greydie played drums for Jerry Lee who was traveling without an entourage to keep his expenses down. The Sasquatches were the backup band on the show.

At the time, Greydie was a very natty dresser. One day he had gone down to a fabric store and picked out the two most loudly multicolored curtain and upholstery materials he could find and had them made into a pair of sports jackets.

Everybody thought he was nuts but the coats turned out a gas. A little bit like the jackets Quark always wore on Deep Space Nine for any of you who watched it, and which were no doubt cut from the same cloth though Quark wasn’t a musician that I can recall.

Greydie wore the brightest of the jackets for his set with Jerry Lee. When the Sasquatches came on, after some um, discussion, Garry wore the Jacket because he was, after all, the band's lead singer.

Garry as you may also recall was also the band’s sax player. Garry had learned along the way that a tenor sax was louder than an alto sax. So he was a tenor sax player. Garry had also learned along the way that the mouthpiece thing at the top of the sax went into your mouth. So it was in his mouth all the time.

Garry had also learned along the way that if you bit down on the mouth piece real hard, and then blew as hard as you could, a great big hwonk noise would come out. Garry had also learned along the way that if you pressed down on one or another of those funny round silvery key things down the sides of the sax, the pitch would go up or down a notch. Thus Garry was a musician.

The Jerry Lee Lewis part of the show was of course great. The Sasquatches came on after. The Sasquatch part of the show was also going along great. Garry was also making a great performance of it, singing quite decently and adding in all the flair and panache of a legendary rock and roll legend. Then came the sax solo.

Garry leaned into it with everything he had and a relentless barrage of one note hwonks seared across the land in a ferocious assault on the senses. Occasionally the notes would change in pitch whenever it occurred to Garry to press down on one or another of those round silvery little key things down the sides.

Garry wailed around the stage like a man possessed, flailing and hwonking his sax in every direction imaginable. Suddenly, on impulse, he leaped down into the audience and started strutting up and down the aisles and hwonking the sax like a steam calliope in everyone's face. The rest of the band on stage continued to wail on desperately for all they were worth.

By the time Garry climbed back up on the stage the audience had gone ballistic and he was towing a huge throng back to the stage in his wake. They followed him up on stage in a clawing clutching frenzy. In the split of an eye they had stripped Greydie's beautiful new sports jacket clean off Garry's back.

Within seconds the coat was nothing but a thousand tiny shreds with everybody grabbing for any piece they could get their hands on in what could only be described as a feeding frenzy for a souvenir. Garry and his sax were the hit of the show. He had just managed to get back into the dressing room with his underwear still intact.

Sadly the band, if not unforgettable, was short lived. Almost within the shadow of the event, the guitar player took a full time gig with another band which actually paid him some regular money. The bass player went off to prepare for college. We auditioned for a new guitar player for a month but just couldn't find one that was any good and not strictly Country Western. The die was cast.

So Greydie went back into the basement to continue practicing to become a jazz drummer. I continued on in my then job with the telephone company. And Garry decided to take up sax seriously and started tutoring with a proper music teacher. With all due respect, after a year, he was actually able to go on stage at the local jazz club without getting laughed off stage.

Then suddenly, he upped and moved to England to advance his career. Where he forthwith married a lady with six kids. Then we heard through his family that Garry was in Europe as part of the production crew of Darryl Zanuck's award winning movie, ‘The Longest Day'. That's the last we ever heard of Garry.

Not to be outdone by his Son, Garry's father also managed to make his mark on the business scene in his own right. His paper box company eventually invented and patented plastic lined milk cartons to replace the then glass bottles. When the idea was bought out by a large International conglomerate, the idea went world wide.

Garry's father never owned an ostentatious automobile that I was aware of, but Ted's girlfriend's father was a different matter. Her Daddy owned a large long Cadillac limousine, top of the line. In fact only one of its kind existed in all of Canada at the time, circa nineteen fifty seven.

This was before auto entrepreneurs started stretching Caddies by cutting them in half and adding fourteen feet between front an back seats. In those days a stretch limo meant plush seats in back and lots of leg room. Nowadays it means, not a lie, a bar with bartender and a full disco with Kandye Kane at the controls. Check out some of these ultra long Lincoln Navigators and Ford Excursions running around if you don’t believe me.

By the late winter of nineteen fifty seven, Greydie, Ted, another chum, and myself, all traveled together as a rat pack. By the end of grade eleven in high school in Vancouver, Ted was one of our regular run around buddies and remained so for the following year.

Not a dummy not a brain, not a greaser not a saint, Ted was about as grey zone a teenager as you could get with a slight tendency to get in trouble whenever the opportunity presented itself. But then who hasn’t been there on that one.

Our collective run around habit every weekend was to hit the house parties. Then we would cruise the strip on downtown Granville Street a bit. We would have some burgers at one or another of Vancouver's many drive-ins at the time. Then call it a night. Nice simple Ronnie Howard American Graffiti type stuff.

One evening at supper, Ted called to say he was getting the keys to Daddy's car that evening. He arranged to meet us about eleven thirty that night at one of the scheduled house parties.

Sure enough, just after eleven thirty, Ted showed up cruising in the mile long Caddy. So Greydie, Ted, our other buddy, and myself took off in grand style to cruise around. We did some house parties, went down town to Granville Street for awhile, had some burgers at one of the many drive-ins, and went home. Nice simple Ronnie Howard American Graffiti type stuff.

Daddy's car became a fairly regular occurrence. About every two weeks or so Ted would call at suppertime and cue up the three of us to meet at one of the house parties. He would pick us up. We would drive around, etc. Nice simple Ronnie Howard American Graffiti type stuff.

You have to picture it. We were strictly standard textbook middle of the road type teen age kids. But here we were driving around in what was at the time the biggest black Cadillac stretcho of all time. Our long blue winter Bennie overcoats were turned up at the collar. We looked just like the mob on a hit.

One weekend, we got news that Daddy had just got a brand new Caddie. The latest and greatest off the assembly line and even longer. There were two of its kind in Canada this time as one of the scions of Canada in Eastern Canada had also ordered one. As usual Ted had it for the evening. He picked us up at the usual eleven thirty. We did the same usual parties thing, then headed downtown and drove around Vancouver's main drag Granville Street for a while.

As we were coming back out of down town, just after coming off the south end of the Granville bridge and heading south on Granville Street, a police car pulled up beside us and waved Ted over. Apparently the stolen car report had gone in about eleven fifteen.

Ted pulled over. The police car pulled up beside us, just nudging in to the front of the car. The officer on our side started to step out. He approached the car signaling Ted to roll down his window. To this day I'll never figure out why the police hadn't brought their car right around in front of ours to cut us off. But they hadn't.

Greydie was in the front passenger seat. The other chum and I were in the back. I was on the driver's side. As the officer neared the car, Ted quietly pulled a pair of gloves out of his pocket and slid them on. Then without any prior warning whatsoever, he grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, jammed his foot to the floor, and said to the cops, “See ya later boys”.

The car leapt forward like a rocket sled cut loose from its moorings. The rest of us all started screaming at the top of our lungs. If I remember correctly we were yelling something profoundly deep like, “Ahhhggghhh! What are you doing, what are you doing”.

Ted took the full length Caddie in a complete hundred and eighty degree turn under full power. Then headed back up north on Granville Street and across the bridge back into downtown. The three of us were shrieking in terror like a gas main gone busted.

The car went back over the Granville Bridge in nothing flat. At this point the three of us of had no idea on the planet what was going on. I simply thought Ted had lost it.

By now, between the panic of the speed, the confusion of events, and the general layout of Vancouver's bridges and streets which had never been designed with speed in mind, things were starting to seem like a high speed action flick running at double speed.

The car screamed over the Granville Street Bridge, made a quick right flick onto the very narrow Seymour street turn off, ran full throttle down Seymour Street, then made a hard right hand turn through a red light onto Cambie Street.

The front end of a taxi coming through the intersection took my back door of the Caddie clean off. Then we headed across the Cambie Street Bridge. The three of us were by now screaming bloody murder.

I have to explain that the Cambie street Bridge was one of Vancouver's first bridges. This was back in the old days before anybody had ever seen or even dreamt of an automobile. The bridge was steel girder encased, and had a single set of train tracks running down the middle. A single lane for cars ran down both sides of the tracks, originally intended for horse and carriages.

It used to be that the center span once lifted to let boats through into the inner sanctum of False Creek which it crossed. No one remembers the last time the center span had ever lifted.

There was barely enough room between the girders in each side lane for even just an average sized car driving exactly down the center of the car lane at exactly the posted speed.

We went flying along the Cambie Bridge in the giant Cadillac like the last lap of the Indy 500. I swear the girders flicked by in a blur no more than two inches from my open door. We came off the Cambie Bridge all pistons screaming, and took a hard left at the next corner.

The front end of a car coming through the intersection took off Ted's front door. Then we headed screaming up the cross street with a whole fleet of police cars in hot pursuit like a Swarzenegger movie.

About six blocks in, the engine suddenly stopped dead in its tracks and the car started slowing down. As we were rolling to a stop in front of a large fenced in empty lot, Ted suddenly leapt out yelling, “Ok everyone, time to bail”. Ted hit the pavement at thirty, me at twenty five with both legs running, the other two at fifteen.

I took off into the empty lot, up a foot wide plank, and over a six foot fence. I kept going until I finally ended up in a lumber stockpile yard about six blocks away. I burrowed under a pile of lumber and stayed there until dawn, heart racing like a broken clock spring unwinding.

When I finally felt brave enough to walk the seventy six odd blocks home, the light of dawn was already coming up. I took only side streets, watching over my shoulder at every step like going through the moors and the hound of the Baskervilles was on the loose. I still didn't have even the slightest clue as to what had just actually happened.

I got home about seven in the morning. Greydie was already home. Apparently he had been unable to make it up the foot wide plank so he had hid underneath. He had watched a cop's flashlight come slowly up the plank on his left side to about half an inch from his face, then stop.

Then it went slowly down the right side of the plank to about a half an inch from his foot, then stopped. Then the cop went away. One of the policemen even kicked the grass around about a foot away from where Greydie's feet were tucked under the board curled up hard as a turtle and a dog is nosing around. Then they left. Greydie must have been sucking himself in like a black hole not to have been noticed behind the foot wide plank.

Greydie later reported he had eventually eased himself out from behind the plank extremely slowly, one inch at a time about an hour later and started to make his way back home.

Around four thirty AM, after walking through every driveway and backyard he could find stealthing his way through the Shaunessy Heights mansion district toward forty first and Granville, he finally reached the Granville Street and forty first Avenue intersection, his last main outpost target for getting home safely.

There sitting on the bus stop intersection, as the first grey lights of dawn were beginning to crack, was Ted, sitting slumped on the bus stop bench like a half empty balloon. He and Greydie conversed briefly, then Greydie decided it was time to continue heading home. But no way Ted was leaving the bus stop bench where he felt safe.

I have to believe that he was so traumatized by what had happened that he was frozen in motion even though he was the cause. At any rate Greydie continue on home alone. Ted eventually phoned our house from his house around nine AM.

Our other chum had also made it safely back home. What had been happening all these weekends you have probably already guessed though we never supected. Ted's girl friend's old man would come home about ten o’clock. He would leave the keys on the fireplace then hit the sack at about ten thirty. Then around about eleven the girl friend would grab the keys.

The three of us had always presumed the keys were being handled out the front door with everyone’s blessings. Actually she had been sliding them out her bedroom window to Ted waiting below with only Ted's blessing.

On this particular evening, her older brother had come home at eleven fifteen and saw that the keys weren't on the fireplace. When he found his father upstairs sleeping, he had called the police to report the car as missing.

A day later, Ted got the follow up story from his girlfriend. The police had clocked us at a hundred and twenty five miles an hour going over the Granville Street Bridge. We did a hundred and five going down Seymour Street, ninety five through the turn onto Cambie, a hundred and fifteen across the narrow Cambie street Bridge, and ninety going around the second corner. If nothing else, you had to admire the way these Caddies could move.

Why the engine eventually stopped so abruptly was that the car was brand new, so the block had cracked. Also, since the two drivers side doors were long gone, her father simply decided to claim it on insurance and got a new one. Fortunately no one had been hurt in the two cars Ted had clipped going by.

Her father also no doubt put two and two together. He must have decided not to press charges though because we never heard anything about it again. Needless to say we never went out in Daddy's car again.

Later that spring, some somewhat less than middle class kids from our school, starting showing up at beach parties in their Daddy's cars. It was eventually determined that they were hot wiring cars from a local auto dealer lot in Kerrisdale. Between the two, that's how I learned early in life that 'Daddy's car' probably meant that Daddy didn't know anything about it.

At any rate, regards the Caddie, since my good sense should have prevailed and I should have realized full well that in no way would Daddy ever likely be giving Ted the keys to his prize new Caddie like that for joyriding, I have to consider the whole affair a full blown 'innie' in a Karmic Car Cycle.

Actually, I had probably set the cycle in motion the year before when we had first moved from Winnipeg to Vancouver in the second week of October in nineteen fifty five. When on the second day at the new high school four of the locals took Greydie and I over to see the one of the other local high schools during lunch.

That night they had also taken us down to the beaches to give us an important tip off. Vancouver had two popular night time spots for parking and sparking. The first was at a lookout on top of Little Mountain, a five hundred foot prominence sitting right up in the middle of Vancouver like a miniature volcano cone. The other was along the ocean beaches to watch the, ahem, submarine races.

Since I never availed myself of the sly promise of adventure with whomever I was with of a dating nature over the prospects of watching supposed submarines supposedly racing hell bent for leather against the tide, I never earned 'innie' points over that one.

Little Mountain was a different matter. The whole point of going to the top of the Mountain was already well out on the table for everyone from about the age of fifteen on, namely trekking to it was the name, necking was the game. If you said, “Lets go to Little Mountain”, and your date said “sure”, then a significant amount of foreplay had just been accomplished, mutually understood. So, no 'innie’ points for that one either.

The car for the luncheon junket was a flat black primer painted hot rod, half finished, late forties Chevy or something similar. The front end was jacked as high into the air as shock risers could raise it. The back bumper barely cleared the ground. In the style of the times it was quite the elegant bomb. The engine of course was tiger clawed all the way, meant for top dogging as a hot rodding street dragger.

Vancouver had two world famous street draggers at the time. One was a Volkswagen sporting a big V8, the other was a classy pure white MG sports car with the old styled square front. Which also sported a very big ultra horse powered V8 which apparently took the guy six months to fit in.

Both cars could sit in a single spot with tires screaming and go up through all five gears without moving a single inch. Both these cars used to eat cars like our guy's for breakfast.

On the way back, a cop pulled us over for speeding. “Lets see your brakes”, he said to the cocky owner. The owner's foot went down right to the floor. “Let’s see your lights”. The owner reached under the dash and shorted a couple of wires. “Let’s see the horn”. The owner reached under the dash again and shorted some more wires.

So it went. And, oh yeah, he didn't have a valid driver's license or a registration for the car or insurance. So the cop confiscated the car and we had to take the bus back to school. We arrived an hour and a half late. We all got a week of detentions.

“Didn't take you long”, said the principal to Greydie and I. Great. I wasn't even in school two days and already I was in the Principal's, 'better keep my eye on this guy’s’, little black book. Seems like high school principles and bosses are singularly alike for not understanding the importance of a good excuse.

At any rate, I figure that whole deal is what probably had originally set up the Karmic Car cycle in the first place as an 'innie'. I knew the car was a clunker and should never have been in it. But you know how peer pressure works. I was only a half day old at the school and didn’t want to come off as a suck.

This same time period was source of yet another probable 'innie'. It was of a rather trivial kind, but an ‘innie’ is an ‘innie’ none the less and is cited here to broaden the scope of understanding. We had a chum with a car in our last year of high school.

Bud was our main car guy, driving a nice nineteen fifty four Dodge. We were all over at Bud’s place one afternoon after school when his fourteen year old sister walked casually through the room exclaiming, “Your car's on fire”.

Bud and his younger sister at the time were in the standard brother sister mode of brrzzpppttt to each other so well characterized by most comic strip characters except Bumstead. So Bud just gave the poor girl the standard “beat it, go away, yah yah yah, don't bother me, get lost, brrrzzpppttt”, type response right back at her.

A couple of minutes later she walked through again the other way repeating the message, “Your car’s on fire”. You have to understand that she wasn't any more concerned about whether Bud actually believed her or not than he was in taking her seriously. After all it wasn't her car and Bud was just her stupid brrrzzpppttt older brother.

When she came by a third time with the same message, someone woke up enough to take a quick look out the window.

The drive shaft of Bud's car was red hot and flames were pouring up both sides of the car from underneath. Bud had driven home with the emergency brake on. Since it was the type of brake that gripped the drive shaft, it had caught fire.

I raced to the kitchen for water. Somebody else ran for rags. Bud ran screaming out to the car to try and put the fire out with his bare hands. We had the fire out in no time and fortunately Bud only received second degree burns to his hands.

However, I have to admit that it was to my dying shame that I had participated in Bud's ‘more than demeaning’ attitude to his younger sister of not taking her seriously.

So this was an 'innie', clear and simple and that’s how the rules work. You have to understand how seriously the ‘Car’, and or ‘Abide by the Law’, Gods take this kind of callous indifference. After all it was one of their own which was under flame.

Yet another ‘innie’ occurred in this same relatively short time frame. Stereo hi fi first hit the scene in the very late fifties. I didn't have the money to buy a good stereo amp. I did have enough to buy a good stereo amp kit in the States with the higher Canadian value of the dollar at the time. But I didn't have enough to pay the Customs and Excise.

So I drove down to Seattle Washington, picked up a kit, opened the box, and carefully placed all the parts around under the back seat. Then I drove back across the border sweating no less than someone smuggling a million dollars worth of cocaine in the tires. No doubt about it, I didn't abide by the law and used a poor unwilling morally responsible car to do it. The gods of cars would have definitely noticed so this had to go in as yet another 'innie'.

Similarly, around the same time, four of us were in Blaine Washington one afternoon just tooling around. Blaine is a very small border town sitting exactly on the US side of the US Canadian border.

The two main reasons for its existence were much cheaper cigarettes and much cheaper beer than in Canada, conveniently sitting in very close proximity to Vancouver. If there's a well in the desert, somebody’s sitting in a tent nearby open for business.

One of the guy’s parents had a summer cabin up Bedford Bay in the north arm of Burrard Inlet at the extreme East End of Vancouver. The inlet was about thirty miles from downtown Vancouver. So we picked up a couple of cases of American beer to go up to the cabin for the rest of the day to party.

We pulled out the back seat of the tiny little English Austin my friend was driving and carefully filled the springs with the bottles of beer. When we crossed the border, the two of us in back were sitting so high on the back seat our heads were bowed under the roof of the car.

The border guy looked us over for a minute or two tying to figure just how tall we must have been. Then passed us through. Broke the law again using a poor car as dupe. Cost me another small 'innie'.

Yet again, in nineteen fifty eight, seven of us went to a drive in movie. We only had enough money for three tickets so four of us went crammed into the trunk.

The gate guy noticed that both back tires looked half flat from our weight. He actually kicked one just to see if it was ok but he never twigged onto the loaded trunk.

Our reason for this the little caper was not to intentionally defraud the drive in per se’ you understand, just the minor little fact that we were exactly four tickets short on funds. That's as classic a Grey zone crime denial as it gets. At any rate, no matter how I try to slice it I was one of the guys in the trunk breaking the law. Make it another small 'innie'.

Similarly, a sizable mansion not far from our house had a very large deluxo heated swimming pool. Word was out that the owners were always away Friday nights. A few of us brazened up and thought why not. About nine in the evening we snuck in over the fence, dropped our duds in the bushes alongside the pool and cavorted around in the pool for about twenty minutes.

I hoped out of the pool, headed back into the shrubs buck naked, bent over to pick up my cloths and saw a big black boot standing on my stuff. I looked up into the instant snap on of a heavy duty flashlight. Jiggers it was the cops, the jig was up.

The owners had apparently become tired of the word being out. So they had cued up a regular Friday night checkup by the cops. Just our luck to be there for our first time on their first time for checking it out.

The gendarmes escorted me home into the hands of my patiently listening parents. My parents did what any self respecting parents would do at a time like this, and laughed and cried and laughed and cried, then cut off my social life for the next two weeks.

Even though the Cops and Car Gods have a close working relationship with each other, no 'innie' on this one. I paid for it cash and carry.

So that's about it for how the rules for 'innies' work just in case you ever decide to check out your own karmic car accumulations for awhile. But you’ll notice how quickly I already had inadvertently accumulated a considerable bit of ‘innie’ Karmic Car cycle karma and I still wasn't even out of high school yet.

If I had been a lot more alive and alert during the time of my big Daddy's Car 'innie', I might have already anticipated something like a Karmic Car Cycle going on. If only because the very next year I was passenger in a friend's car when he got the dumbest speeding ticket I ever heard of. At the time it was quite a mystery why.

We were driving up Granville street well out of the down town core. He was doing exactly thirty one miles an hour. The speed limit was exactly thirty. A cop pulled him over and said he was speeding. The car was a hot rod sure enough.

Unlike the original hot rod Greydie and I had been riding in during our second day in town though, this car was properly painted, properly working, properly licensed, and properly insured. My friend was also duly cordial and totally un-snotty to the cop, and to boot he was a middle class kid not a greaser. In fact everything was proper about the whole thing except he got the ticket.

I remember thinking about the cop to myself at the time, “what a dink”. But the Cop's dinkiness wasn't the problem at all. I of course now realize that it happened to my friend solely because I was in the car at the time and was already carrying a wholloping load of 'innies' in my Karmic Car Cycles.

The Karmic Car gods were sending the cop a signal and the cop was just doing what he had to. My poor buddy never had a chance. It was in the books. It was a little 'outie' coming back out of my cycles at my poor chum’s expense.

One of the most memorable hair raising experiences in my life occurred in the spring of nineteen fifty seven in Vancouver. I had finally obtained my driver's license about a month after the ‘Daddy's’ car episode.

My first time behind the wheel of a car was in nineteen fifty five in Winnipeg. I was fifteen. A friend from high school owned a car and let me drive one day. I couldn't keep the thing pointed straight and kept running into the curb.

My dad officially started to teach Greydie and me to drive the next fall after we moved to Vancouver. Our family car was a nineteen fifty six station wagon, stick shift. It was not that hard to drive relative to any other car of that era, just a little bigger.

Before long I could drive ok, except for the curious desire to drive in the left hand lane all the time. I had to fight the urge to cross over the yellow centerline with every fiber of my being for almost half a year. I figured I had to have been an incarnated Englishman or something. By the spring of nineteen fifty seven I was over the tendency and driving fine.

The Vancouver area is blessed with nice seaside beaches. All of the beaches are excellent for weekend beach parties for which Vancouver is world famous if you live there. Crescent Beach was one of the better beaches.

Crescent Beach was a long clean stretch of sand on the shore of Boundary Bay about twenty five miles south of Vancouver, and not too far from the American border and ideal for night time beach parties.

In the spring of nineteen fifty seven it was the popular fad at our high school to have a beach party at Crescent Beach every Friday night.

The big wheels at school with their own cars formed the main body of party goers, counting in their buddies and buddyeses who went along for the ride. Comprising the second wave were those who were lucky enough to score the family car for the evening. Like Greydie and myself from time to time.

The third body came down in, sic, 'Daddy's car'. Which we eventually of course learned was an euphemism for, sic, 'stole it from a local car lot for the evening'.

The neat thing about these beach parties was that they were completely impromptu. The first ones to the beach would find a likely spot, set out their blankets, and start a fire. The next ones in would simply check around until they found the first ones.

Since anybody from anywhere in the lower mainland Vancouver area could set up a party, the trick was to just keep checking around the campfires until you found one with somebody you recognized.

Greydie and I took turns getting the car and it was now my turn for the night. Greydie, plus our one year younger brother Ron, plus one of his chum's from high school were at one of our school's Crescent Beach parties.

We had been at the party for a couple of hours and got word that an even bigger party from our school had formed about a mile up the beach. We decided to check it out.

Crescent Beach stretched for a couple of miles along the shore of Boundary Bay. So did the Great Northern Railway which ran a busy schedule between Vancouver and Seattle Washington about a hundred and twenty miles south of the border. The railway hugged the ocean shoreline like a thin ribbon of steel nearly the whole distance between the Seattle and Vancouver. Quite the ride actually from a sight seeing point of view.

Along Boundary Bay through the Crescent beach area, the rail bed comprised a sharp rise along the top of the beaches to keep the track on even keel through the stretch. The Great Northerns barreled assed like behemoths along the Crescent Beach stretch of the shoreline.

Because of the distance to the other beach party we decided to take the car. We piled in and headed out. We were still on the beach side of the train tracks. The feeder road I needed for going any distance up or down the beach was on the land side of the tracks. So I drove slowly along for a bit until I found a small crossroad cutting back up over the rail line.

It was absolutely pitch black out. About five hundred yards down the tracks from where the road crossed, the tracks made a sharp bend to the left around the shoreline. The track at the end of the stretch disappeared completely from view behind high deep brush sitting above the sand line at the turn.

On the crossroad, the track was raised so high the rail bed almost seemed like a long two by six board on end. I slowly started inching the family wagon up over the tracks. My headlights hit nothing ahead but the tops of the trees on the land side of the tracks. Because I couldn't see anything ahead on the ground in front of the car, I went at a snails pace.

I managed to get the car up and straddling the tracks on top, literally stomach balancing like a gymnast on a cross bar. The headlights looked straight ahead at nothing but branches part way up the trees straight ahead.

I didn't want to drop suddenly down the other side of the railway because I had no idea at that moment what was down in front of me. Indeed, at this point, we were raised so high that I didn't even have a guarantee that there was a road on the other side. You know the feeling, some things you just have to take on faith.

I had been going over the tracks only an inch at a time. Suddenly a Great Northern came boom busting around the bend at eighty miles an hour. The engineer saw me sitting broadside on the top of the track like a sitting duck as soon as he rounded the bend and started leaning on the air horn like a blaring claxon.

So there we were, sitting flat out frozen broadside to the oncoming holocaust like crash test dummies. The claxon horn was blaring a non stop trumpet of doom. Everyone else started screaming their heads off for murder. So I did what any self respecting novice driver would do at a time like that and stalled the engine.

The train bore down on us like an unleashed jaggernaught. I had the ignition key turned hard over and was pumping on the gas giving it all she was worth. As any self respecting experienced driver knows, that is exactly the wrong way to start a flooded engine.

The train was all but upon us when at the last second I suddenly had enough presence of mind to take my foot off the clutch and let the starting motor pull us off the tracks.

The motor pulled us over the tracks a grunt at a time. At the last bare second the car suddenly dropped over the track and down the other side. The wind from the train going by blew the back of the car sidways three feet.

I consider this incident decidedly ‘in my face’. My first official big big 'outie'. If I had arrived at the track a few minutes before, or after, then it wouldn't have been a matter of consequence in the slightest. If I hadn’t had the presence of mind to use the starting motor, it wouldn’t have mattered at all.

They say that shit happens. Maybe that's all it was. I know for sure though that if I live to be a hundred and one, I would have lived to be a hundred and two if this particular event had never happened. So for the sake of that alone, 'outie' it is fair and square. Nothing like earning your first real 'outie' at a flat out three hundred and fifty miles an hour.

When we returned home that night, I told my parents about the incident. Mom said she had been in a similar incident when she was a kid in Moose Jaw Saskatchewan in nineteen thirty six.

Granddad was one of the town's top lawyers. The family was therefore relatively well off at the time despite the depression. The family had a grand Packard touring car. Granddad used to take the family out for a drive every Sunday.

The family comprised six kids nicely split, three girls, three boys. Everyone would pack into the car and Granddad would head out somewhere for the day. Granddad was a bit of an imperialistic pomp in the grand old Victorian style and drove like the Lord of Toad Manor.

Granddad had one bad habit though. He was a very impatient driver. Whenever they stopped at a railway crossing, as soon as the caboose went by Granddad would goose the car in exasperation, totally unconcerned about the possibility of a train coming the other way.

Because he was also the somewhat of an imperialistic sort in the grand old Victorian style, trying to say anything to him about stuff like that was a little bit like trying to point out to the Queen that she had a zit on her nose. In this family you didn't speak unless spoken to.

So every Sunday saw the family touring the countryside. Everyone would sit white knuckled every time they came to a train crossing with a train passing by. Except for Granddad because he was the man in charge.

One day, they had been sitting for a particularly long time at a crossing. Because the prairies were flat some of the trains could be very long. This train had been a very long freight and going very slow. As soon as the caboose cleared the front of the car, Granddad goosed it for all it was worth. The fast freight coming the other way took off the back bumper.

As Mom explained it, Granddad just quietly pulled over to the side of the road and sat regally still, slowly regaining his composure. No one said a peep. After about twenty minutes of quietly reconstituting his dignity, he slowly put the car in gear and continued on driving as though absolutely nothing whatsoever had happened. But the lesson had been well taken. Granddad never goosed it at crossings again.

CHAPTER 1, CHAPTER 4, CHAPTER 26, CHAPTER 34