Busted in LeMars for the first time

After I'd lived in LeMars for awhile I had a few friends and knew the best places to go to shoplift, etc. I mostly hung out at the pool hall/restaurant I worked at on Sunday mornings or the truck stop.

One day I learned that you could take pennies and grind the edge off of them and vending machines and pinball machines would take them as dimes. I haven't tried that since then but I wouldn't be surprised if it still works. Lol, don't do it tho.

Cigarettes used to cost 17 cents per pack from the gas station and I would grind down two pennies and use them to get a pack of cigs. Nice thing was the vending machine gave you three pennies back in change so I not only got two cent a pack cigs I also showed a profit. ;)

Then I'd take those three back to the truck stop and grind them off and head for the bowling alley. At the bowling alley a lot of kids hung out because they had 5 pinball machines and they were hidden in an out of the way spot.

I use the ground down pennies in them and win a bunch of free games and then sell the free games to other kids at about half price. Then I'd save that money and use it to play pool for money. Yep, among many other things I was also a pool hustler.

If you read the previous posts you know I was hustling pool since I was about 5 or 6 years old. I hustled pool all my life, until my eyes got so bad I couldn't see the other end of the pool table well enough to be assured of making a shot. Nope, can't play worth a damn with my glasses on.

I'm still good enough, some days, to hustle pool hustlers but those days are now pretty rare. Can't see or concentrate on the game well enough anymore to be guaranteed a win. I've also played enough pool to know what I'm doing wrong when I'm having a bad day, and, how to fix it.

Eventually, 5-6 months after I started the penny thing, I got caught doing it at the bowling alley. They called the cops and I got arrested and taken to the jail where they tried to scare me. I'll bet they thought I was retarded or something because they weren't saying or doing anything that scared me.

I wasn't the typical 'nice kid' that got arrested and cried and begged to be let go. Lol, they busted me fair and square so stand up and take the punishment like a man and don't whine about it just because you're a kid.

Nothing ever really happened about it. Something ridiculous like a months probation or some damn thing. Nothing big enough to remember or make an impression. Plus, as usual, I got the usual beating when I got home. Fists and feet. Nothing unusual.

So I'd gotten caught and nothing worth remembering had happened to me. Naturally I didn't change my ways. You see, each time I got caught at something I'd go back and analyze what I did wrong so I didn't make that mistake again.

Turns out, in the end, getting caught made me a better thief or better at whatever I was doing that wasn't quite legal. There was more to this story than that but the rest of it's for another day because things took what was, to me, a surprising twist.