If you've read any of the other short stories you've probably already figured out we used to love to play hide-and-seek. We were up on Sandy Hill playing our favorite game one night after darkness had already fallen. At one end of the hill there are the backyards of houses that face Castle Frank Road, a rather ritzy area of Toronto. Now the top of that hill is really pretty small so we'd tie our shoelaces together to make it a bit more difficult to get around. We were well into the game and having lots of fun when all of a sudden we heard someone coming and turned around to see two rather large uniformed guys coming towards us. We took off but were hampered by our shoelaces being tied together. We all made it to the edge of the hill and started rolling down except Ricky, who was grabbed by one of these guys and tossed about 20 feet down the hill before hitting the ground. We never found out if they were cops or security guards. But we kind of figured somebody in one of the houses had called them in, probably because we were making too much noise.
We managed to get into the abandonned Lake Simcoe Ice building on Gerrard Street. It was well boarded up which made it pretty dark in there. There were lots of nooks and cranies so we decided to get a game of hide-and-seek going. Things were going great for a while until we heard this giant crash and somebody screaming in terror. Needless to say, this scared the hell out of us. Then all of a sudden we hear Gordie yelling out "Hey you guys, help me, I fell down the elevator shaft". We had seen the shaft when we originally entered and stayed away from it to avoid just this from happening. So we all went running over there but couldn't see anything. Someone asked him how far he had fallen and his reply was "About two floors". Jimmy had some matches and lit one as we peered down into the darkness. As the match flared up, there was Gordie about three feet down. He stood up and boosted himself back out as we all stood around laughing our heads off much to poor Gordie's embarrassment. He was okay, but his knee had hit him in the mouth and gave him a fat lip. He was too scared to tell his father what happened to his lip so he said he had been in a fight. That kept us laughing for years.
