I stole a pack of smokes in1971. The caper was brazenly daring and flawlessly executed.

I stole a pack of cigarettes once. I was 15 years old. It was on the last day of a summer trip to Montreal. I wasn’t the best kid growing up, but I understood right from wrong and I understood consequences — good and bad. The cigarette caper — brazenly daring, flawlessly executed — was well beyond any petty crime I’d committed in the past.

A year earlier, I’d left Montreal and moved with my family to Vancouver. The move was a seminal event in my life. Gone was the three-bedroom apartment my family of five called home. Also gone was my gang of friends with whom I’d shared the wonders of being 14. Home, now, was an actual house — a beautiful house in upper Point Grey with a view of the mountains, the ocean and a backyard. As for friends, well, new friends, in time, presented themselves.

The summer after the move, my mother, sensing my broken heart had not fully healed, paid for a train trip to Montreal to visit the mates I once loved and the girls I once kissed. The trip was three days in coach. I travelled alone.

It was during this visit to Montreal I’d learned to inhale a cigarette. Until the moment when I figured out how to draw the smoke directly into the lungs, my process was awkward — pulling the puff into my mouth then frantically trying to swallow as much as I could without revealing to anyone that I had no idea what I was doing. When it magically happened, when, for the first time, the draw went from my lips to my lungs, the awareness that I’d cracked the code, that I’d mastered the seemingly unmasterable was exhilarating. Like riding a bike for first time. No longer restrained by the shame of not having a clue how to smoke, I smoked a lot on that trip. In fact, I’d smoked so much, that when it came time for the three-day train ride back to Vancouver, I had no money left to buy cigarettes.

Larry was my best friend. I’d stayed with his family for the full two weeks of the adventure. The day I was leaving, I revealed this simple plan for solving my cigarette problem. I’d go into a familiar corner store on Sherbrooke Street, order a pack of Export A, then, when the clerk put them on the counter, I’d grab them and run. It seemed seamless. I was going back to Vancouver. No one would ever see me again.

I was standing outside the corner store in the middle of the afternoon casing the joint. There were five cement stairs up to the doorway. Larry was a half a block away: Close enough to be a witness; far enough to not be an accomplice. I walked up the stairs when the store was empty and ordered my cigarettes from an old fellow working the counter. My memory puts him at 80, but, in 1975, everyone over 60 looked 80 to a 15-year-old. When he laid the pack on the counter, he did the one thing I hadn’t considered in the blueprints of my brain. He kept his hand on the cigarettes.

As I bolted breathlessly across Sherbrooke, I could hear only one thing: the sound of an octogenarian yelling, “Come back here, you bitch.”

Without thinking, and like petty theft was in my DNA, I grabbed his feeble wrist, lifted his hand off the smokes, snagged the goods and ran out the door, taking the five cement steps in one magnificent leap. As I bolted breathlessly across Sherbrooke, I could hear only one thing: the sound of an octogenarian yelling, “Come back here, you bitch.”

Oh, how fast I ran.

Some five years later, I was outside Fruitvale, British Columbia, jogging along the highway when I encountered a bear. Yes, I know, “brown lay down; black step back.” But, in that moment, in the moment of startling the bear as deeply as the bear startled me, I neither laid down nor stepped back. I ran. I just freaking ran. Boxing legend Mike Tyson once famously said “everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.” I had a bear plan until I actually met a bear. That remains, to this day, the fastest I’d ever moved without the assistance of machinery.

Second fastest was the day I was a bitch.

That night, I got on the train leaving Montreal with a few homemade sandwiches, a fresh pack of smokes and not a penny to my name. By the time the train pulled into The Soo, some 18 hours later, the sandwiches were gone, the smokes were half smoked and my name remained as penniless as the day I climbed aboard.

As I considered my dire and impoverished state, that name, the one without a penny attached to it, was suddenly thundered in the coach car. “Wayne Moriarty,” the conductor fulminated. “Is there a Wayne Moriarty on this coach car.”

Coach travel in those days was not assigned seating, so the only way they could identify me was for me to identify myself. I didn’t have anything, so I didn’t lose anything. Why, then, was the conductor looking for me?

Boom. It hit me. The cigarette caper. Larry must have blabbed and now I’m going to do two in juvie for pinching a deck of buddies from Father Time working the corner store.

I stuck up my hand and waved at the conductor who came over and handed me an envelope. Inside was a money order for $20 from Larry’s dad, Ben. Later I learned Larry got right hell for not telling his dad I was broke. I ate large the rest of the way home. Even bought myself some more rockets.