Another old cop told me he used to have to deal with violent people suffering from schizophrenia. They were potentially dangerous, to themselves and everyone around them. This one particular guy would go off his medication every once in a while and start screaming and yelling. And his family would call the RCMP, and the guy would come out of the kitchen with a knife and start ranting and raving when they arrived, saying, “Go ahead and shoot me!”
This old cop was not afraid of someone armed with a knife. He knew that he could take the knife away if it came to that. So he would talk to the man calmly. He’d say, “Hey, nice to see you, how is your brother Bob?”
“Bob? He’s at work.”
The guy would totally forget that he was angry. It was just like he had turned off a switch. “Okay, that’s good. Say hello to Bob for me.”
“Okay, Constable, I’ll do that.”
“Do you mind if we come in for a cuppa tea?”
“Tea? Sure, I guess. Come on in.”
He’d come in and sit down at the kitchen table with this guy. The guy would still have that big butcher knife in his hand, and he’d be making tea with his other hand. A constable would say, “Now, Frankie, you haven’t taken your medication, have you?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure you haven’t taken it. Would you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Would you take your pills for me? Could you do it right in front of me here?”
So the guy would get out his pills and they would sit down at the table and have a cup of tea and the guy would take his pills, and after a few minutes he would look at that big knife in his hand like he couldn’t remember why he was carrying it. Today, standard police training would have the cops shoot that guy the minute he waved that knife at them. It happens all the time. The other day, the police went out to this guy’s house, he came down the stairs with a knife in his hand, and they put three friggin’ bullets in his chest. They told him to stop a couple of times and that was it.
So that’s my tirade. It seems that most of the people the police shoot aren’t really criminals, just sick and in need of help.
I remember this one Friday night in 1982, I came out of the Gold Range Hotel and this RCMP officer had a girl handcuffed to the back of my pickup truck. It was an old orange CN truck with a ladder rack on it, and he had her handcuffed to the rack. I guess she had been driving drunk or some darned thing and she was giving him a hard time. I was going to stay out of this kerfuffle, so I went into the Rec Hall bar while this policeman questioned her.
When I came back out, all hell was breaking loose. He had left the police car with the door open and the engine running, and while he was behind the police car with this girl, her friends came staggering out of the bar. One of her friends said, “Oh, there’s my car,” and climbed into the police car.
I don’t know if she realized it was a police car or not, but she just climbed in, slammed the door, threw it into reverse, and floored it. When it started spinning backward, she realized she was going the wrong way and was going to run over her friend and this cop, so she put it in drive and floored it.
She had the gas pedal pinned to the floor, holding the wheel, gritting her teeth, and I was running toward the car to stop her.
Next thing, the policeman emerged from behind the police car. He ran up to the door. Its wheels were spinning on the ice, and he had his hand on the front fender trying to stop it. Obviously he couldn’t stop it that way, so he took out his gun and started shooting—bang, bang, bang, shooting the tire. He had the gun six inches from the tire and he was blasting away trying to disable the car before it could speed up.
Then the car took off and went by me and I thought, Oh, no, because it was heading right for another girl who had fallen on her ass on the road. She was lying in the middle right in its path, but the police car was fishtailing so badly that it wove into the other lane and slid right past her.
This young cop was totally overwhelmed. He stuck the gun back in its holster and the bloody gun went off just as he was putting it away. He had put five bullets into the tire and the sixth one went off and the bullet hit the road right beside his foot. Damn near shot his own foot off.
Well, I mean, this was pretty bad, you know. He’s just unloaded his gun on a tire, he’s got a girl handcuffed on the street and she is almost run over, and he’s totally overwhelmed.
Now all these people from both bars are gathering around this policeman, screaming at him. Her friends are all about the same age as the girl he’s arrested, and they’re all jumping all over him, scratching his face, mauling him. The crowds are cheering them on, and there must be forty or fifty people there. So I run up to the policeman. “What’s your name and unit number? I’ll call for help.”
He’s helpless. He doesn’t have his radio. He doesn’t even have any bullets for his gun. He’s on his hands and knees holding this girl, and these other girls are jumping on him, and he looks up at me and I have never seen a more thankfullooking face in my life. He tells me his name and unit number and I run into the restaurant, where I call the police station and tell them this crowd is going to beat the hell out of one of their officers if they don’t get reinforcements over here.
Right away they start asking me my name and birth date, the color of my eyes, the length of my pecker, and what have you. After a minute or so of this nonsense I say, “Look, I’m going out there to help him fight this mob, or he’s not going to survive. Goodbye.”
Within minutes there’s policemen coming from all directions. Cop cars squealing up from all over the place, and some people I never even knew were policemen. There were guys in their pajamas, guys jumping over fences, guys in rusty old trucks. They all heard the call go out on the radio. “Officer needs assistance. Shots fired.”
I didn’t know these were all police people, but boy, they were coming out of the cracks, and in minutes it all got straightened out.
The funny thing was, I could not believe that the dispatcher kept me on the phone for all that time asking me stupid questions. I mean really stupid questions. A couple of days later I ended up talking to two young policemen who were out on the town and I asked them about that. They said that the cops would often play jokes on each other and phone into the dispatcher with crank calls, so maybe the dispatcher wanted to make sure that I wasn’t just another cop pulling her leg.
After that, I would be listening to the scanner in the middle of the night and I began to realize that the cops were using all these fancy numbers and codes just to kid with each other. They made it sound like they were following a major case, but in fact they were stopping by the hotel to pick up a newspaper.
The cops are joking with each other on the radio all the time, but it has a serious side to it. If one of them gets into a jam, the other guys will show up in a jiffy and swarm anyone who puts up resistance. It’s safety in numbers.
In the old days the Texas Rangers had a slogan that expressed their philosophy of policing: “One riot, one Ranger.”
Those days are gone.
On the other hand, these policemen and women do look after our well-being and should have our individual support, through thick and thin. Any weakness in the system is not their fault. It is, in fact, the fault of the federal government and their preoccupation with political correctness.
What I Learned About Fighting
Lesson one from all the professionals: Avoid fighting if you can.
Experienced fighters don’t tend to fight. They’re reasonable. They don’t fly off the handle. If a man is experienced and knows how to fight, he feels comfortable and confident and capable of handling most situations. He’ll probably talk, and say, “Look, I don’t want to fight with you because we’ll hurt our hands and our faces and potentially get in trouble with the law.” So if you’re dealing with someone who’s keen to start something, it’s a good sign that the guy doesn’t know how to fight.
The mor
e fighting one’s been in, especially sober, you’re going to be better at reading the situation and the guy you’re up against.
Quite often when people want to fight, they’re under the influence and suffering from some threat to their self-worth. If you want to handle them without fighting them, you let them have their dignity. Some guys, they’ve lost their wife, their job, their kids, and whatever. And they’ll attack somebody over a minor remark. It might seem like a small thing to a normal person, but to that guy it’s the only thing he has. He will fight to the death over it, so let him have his little moment of pride and he’ll settle down.
The main thing to know about fighting is, take some training. Take some martial arts, especially if you’re younger. It’s good exercise, and there’s a lot of stretching. And the beauty of martial arts is balance, so even older people should take martial arts because they’ll find they walk better. They don’t tend to trip and fall down as much. I took some martial arts for a couple of years. And although I never got a belt, I found that I had more confidence and better balance. Even if you’re climbing up on a truck or a ladder and you do fall, you don’t hurt yourself because you fall properly.
And training in the martial arts will teach you how to hit somebody.
Before I took martial arts, I was always off-target. I’d swing and miss the guy’s jaw maybe two or three times before hitting him. If I did hit him, I’d throw him across the room, and yes, it looked spectacular. I’d hit the guy and he’d fly right across the room and then he’d jump up and come racing right back at me. But that’s not what you want. When you hit a guy he’s not supposed to move. The force is supposed to be disseminated throughout his body. When you throw him across the room, you don’t hurt him. When you hit him and he drops, that’s when you’ve hurt him.
You don’t want the fight to go on and on, like it does in the movies. Guys smashing furniture, guys knocking each other across the room, that’s all stupid. It doesn’t work like that. You’re not doing it for fun. In a long brawl, people start picking sides and jumping you from behind. You want it to be over in a few seconds.
So number one, you learn how to be on target with your fist or your foot. Number two, you learn to walk better, with better balance. And number three, you develop a distinctive sense of confidence, which other guys sense. And if they are really tough guys—guys with experience in fighting—they can sense that you know how to handle yourself. So they don’t take liberties. The thing about fighting is, the better you get at it, the less likely you’ll ever have to fight.
Once my friends realized that I was a good fighter, they would often try to stir things up just so they could watch the entertainment. But it was more entertaining for them than it was for me. I was once at this party and these drunk friends of mine were in the kitchen. They gave a guy a knife and told him to go out into the party and stab me. I can hardly believe that they did that, but there’s no limit to the stupid things that people do when they’re drinking. They knew that this guy was not going to be able to do me any harm with a knife. They just wanted to see the action. So this dumb idiot comes out of the kitchen and tries to stab me.
I did what you are supposed to do. I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and punched him with my right hand. The blade hit me in the hand and I hit him between the eyes. I got stabbed in the hand, but he went down like a sack of manure. If it weren’t for my training I could’ve been in real trouble.
5
A DRIVEN MAN
“There’s no limit to how far a man can go in life if he doesn’t ask permission.”
By the time I was twenty-three or twenty-four years old I was working like a madman, just trying to get ahead. The partying and the wild times with my buddies were fading away. I wanted to be a success. I was determined to be somebody.
I’d like to say it was my own decision to buckle down and work hard, but it was how we were raised. When I was a kid in school I was driven for high marks. My mum expected them and my dad expected them. After a while it got so I expected them, too. I didn’t always get high marks, but I was never satisfied with poor marks.
In our family, you were expected to go hard and accomplish things. My dad made it as a paratrooper, and my aunts and uncles risked their lives fighting for freedom in the Polish underground. My mum would talk to me about the people she admired, and they were always successful people. This one was a poet, this one was a writer. This one was a doctor and this one was a priest. She drilled into our heads that it was our job to go out and do something. So I always felt driven to succeed. So within my first year of arriving in Yellowknife I was basically working twenty-four hours a day.
I was driving a CAT in the daytime, bouncing at the Snowshoe in the evening, and working as a security guard at the Yellowknife Inn from midnight until eight in the morning. I also drove a taxi. At one point I was working four jobs seven days a week. I would sleep for half an hour behind the wheel if there were no taxi calls coming in, but basically I was just running on coffee and adrenaline and a couple of hours’ sleep here and there. My bouncing job technically went until one or two in the morning, but nobody at the Inn got fussed up if I showed up a bit late for work, and even though I was only working about six hours they were still paying me for an eight-hour shift. They knew I was trying to dig my way out of debt, and in my experience everybody will get behind you if they can see that you are giving it your best shot.
So I was working, working, working, and the months were going by. In 1977, after a year in Yellowknife, I had cleared off all my debts and bought a mobile home. Louise had come up to join me at this point and our family was growing, with two small kids now—Shielo and Curtis. (We eventually would have eleven kids in all—Shielo, Curtis, Alex Jr., Nelson, Andrew, Dominic, Amelia, Julaine, Zeke, Ben, and Gianna.) One year later I sold that first mobile home and bought a brand-new one. Then I started buying older mobile homes and putting them on rental lots. I’d buy them for five thousand dollars, move them onto the lot, block them and level them, put porches on them, make the front of them look nice, maybe put some brick on them or some wood siding for decoration, clean up the interiors, make sure they were working good, and sell them.
Over the next three years I probably bought and sold sixteen of these mobile homes. My wife and kids moved up to Yellowknife and I made us a nice little home. I wasn’t getting rich, but for the first time in my life I was holding both ends together, even if I couldn’t quite get them tied.
The town was booming and I was making good money in the real estate business, so I probably should have stuck to it. But I get bored kind of easily, so I’m always trying something new, looking around for different ways to make money. I decided I would get into the livestock business. Why not? I was always going back and forth to Alberta and it seemed like a good idea to pick up some livestock while I was down there and bring it back to Yellowknife. People were always looking for fresh produce and fresh meat in these northern towns, so it seemed like a great idea.
So I brought chickens and ducks and roosters. I bought every big rooster I could get my hands on, and was getting fifteen bucks each for them. You could buy a chicken for a buck or two down south and sell them for ten bucks right away up here. Over time the city started jumping on us because these roosters crowed twenty-four hours a day, since it was daylight all the time. These poor things couldn’t figure out when to start crowing and when to stop. The city wanted me to keep them in boxes and this and that. It got ridiculous, so we got rid of them and that was the end of that.
So I tried something else. My friend Danny the carpenter and a well-known lawyer named John Bailey and Harvey Selzer the electrician kept bugging me to bring up some pork on the hoof. “Why don’t you bring us some pigs from the Peace River country when you go there?”
Okay, I’ll go into the livestock business.
For pigs I needed a proper truck. There was this local guy by the name of Ed Gaukle. He was a contractor, wrote a children’s book, and eventually commit
ted suicide. Nice guy. I bought his truck—a ’74 Ford one-ton. A nice-looking blue truck with an eight-foot deck on it. I put sides on it and went to Peace River and brought all these pigs back. Just little pigs, about twenty-five pounds. They’re called wieners. I’d pay five or ten dollars for them down in Peace River and sell them for thirty-five in Yellowknife.
I didn’t have to work at all to get rid of them. I’d be unloading these pigs behind Danny’s carpentry shop and some guy would drive by with his pickup and say, “Hey, I’ll take two of those.”
So I sold him these pigs and fifteen minutes later he’s back, saying, “Did my pigs come back?”
“What do you mean, ‘Did your pigs come back?’”
“They jumped out of the back of the pickup as I was going down the street.”
“Oh, shit. I never even thought of it.”
He’d just thrown them in the back of the pickup and drove away, and the pigs just bailed out.
I said to him, “Pigs aren’t like dogs. They don’t come back. These pigs have never been here before. They may show up in a month in Peace River.”
I brought up bales of straw and pig feed to keep them, but as it turned out I didn’t have to worry about food because most of my pig food came from restaurants. You wouldn’t believe the perfectly good food that restaurants throw out every day. I could have easily raised a hundred pigs just on restaurant garbage. Every city should have a pig farm and all those scraps should be going to the pigs. What a way to recycle!
I gave the cook at the hotel a bottle of whiskey, asking him to keep the food separated from the garbage, the cardboard and milk cartons and plastic wrappers and stuff because I just wanted the food for the pigs. So he did that for me. It worked out very well. One time there was a Black Forest cake at the top of the garbage can with a few slices out of it. I looked around to see if anybody was watching, took out my Leatherman, cut a chunk off, and had me a nice slice of Black Forest cake. Another time, there was this huge arctic char. They’d had a banquet, ate half the char, and the rest of it they threw in the garbage. Nothing wrong with it. So I’m standing there by the garbage can eating a nice big chunk of this arctic char. I was kind of hoping that nobody was watching, but somebody fired a rock at me with a slingshot. It bounced around inside that shed where they keep the garbage. I guess these bums were watching me come and sift through the garbage every day, and they weren’t too happy because I was competing with them for food. That was their main food supply. They were eating like kings, and then along comes this big Polack and starts eating their cake.
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