Back in the late '80s my buddy Kipling went a quarter million in debt to buy a brick rig. That's a heavy-duty tractor-trailer with a crane attached just behind the cab. He had a contract with Canada Brick out of Brampton to deliver bricks all over south Ontario and Michigan.
Business was good. It was the housing boom before the last housing boom. Bricks were in demand. He bought an extra set of trailers so that one set could be loaded while he was delivering the other load. Another 75 thou of debt.
Kipling has always been a bit of an operator. One of his short run missions was to deliver brick that failed quality control to the Canada Brick recycling plant. Book-keeping at the recycling plant was a little sketchy. Kipling figured out that if he delivered the sub-par brick to a job site instead of the recycling plant, his next load was free! All he had to do was find people who could pay cash for a load of good bricks. Me and a lot of other folks got a great deal on the bricks. They made damn fine pave stones for your driveway.
So one day Kip is heading down the 401 highway, on his way to Flint. Traffic grinds to a halt. Miles of gridlock in front of him. Every now and again a cop car comes screaming by on the shoulder of the highway. Obviously a bad accident somewhere up ahead.
Sitting in traffic for half an hour. Suddenly there's a cop car tearing back on the same shoulder. Kipling just burned one and he's feeling no pain. Cop stops right beside his rig.
We need a crane up there. Follow me.
So Kipling pulls onto the shoulder and heads up the 401 with a cop escort, stoned to the bone. The brick rig is a little wide for the shoulder, so when they get to fence-posts and guardrails and such, he just keeps going. Ping ping ping, the posts for the guardrails are just a-flying into the ditch, and Kipling doesn't even have to care because he's got a police escort.
Gets to the front ot the traffic jam, and there's the accident. A mess. But there's a van upside down in the median. The guy in it is still alive, trapped under the van's engine and transmission. Kipling hooks up his brick crane, flips the van, the paramedics pull the guy out. He lived.
Three months later Kipling gets a phone call. Paki. You can tell right away. "Hello, you saved my life. May I buy you a dinner?" They're still friends to this day.
Meanwhile, that housing bubble busts. Kipling goes from making two grand a day to making nothing. His payments on the brick rig stay the same.Couple of months later, it's tits up for Kipling. Bankrupt.
In the meantime Kipling gets some sort of hero citation from the OPP. Took a lot of flack from his red-neck buddies. "Oh great, you got an award for saving a Paki."
But when he found that Glasgow cabbie in a turban last month, he knew the wheel of Karma had come around.
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