ONE OF MY EARLY BOYHOOD HEROES WAS KEVIN GAINES.

If you haven’t heard of him that’s probably because he was a fourth grader who lived up the street from me.

That was 1973, when I lived in South San Jose and was in the third grade at Blossom Valley Elementary. Kevin went to Blossom Valley too, but I didn’t see him there much because the fourth graders were way on the other side of the school — and since the building was one of those giant flying saucer-shaped things you used to see back then, with all the classes in the same massive structure, the other side of the building was actually pretty far away.

Luckily he only lived four houses down from me.

Probably the main reason I looked up to Kevin was that he drove a race car. That’s right — as a fourth-grade kid he actually raced a motorized vehicle. Which totally amazed me in the way that something you did not even consider remotely possible amazes you.

Granted, it was a “midget sprint car,” all of about 5 feet long, and it probably did no better than 25 miles per hour, downhill — but still.

Oh, and on top of that, Kevin had one of those indoor race car tracks, of the kind that kids in my tax bracket just didn’t own, with the little electric cars that screeched as they went around.

So there was a lot about Kevin to like. But probably one of the cooler things about him was his bravado. Maybe that came from racing, or maybe he got it from his dad, who never seemed to show doubt, no matter how little he knew about a subject (which, upon reflection, I would now attribute to the open can of beer he perpetually had in hand). But wherever he got it, Kevin always seemed sure about what he was doing.

And so, one day after school, when he said he’d show me how to get candy bars for free from the TG&Y store around the corner, I had no reason to doubt the veracity of his claim.

If you recall, TG&Y was the store that had the tagline “Five cents to one dollar,” which was probably a pretty cheap pricing structure, but since my pockets were more for things like rocks and toads and other sundry items it didn’t really matter what the price of something was — I didn’t have the money for it. So when Kevin Gaines spoke of a system for acquiring goods from the store that did not involve producing money from one’s pocket, I was intrigued.

I thought it odd that the system started out with him telling me, in the dirt lot down the road from the store, that if we got split up — or caught — we should meet back in that lot. And if one of us got there first he should wait for the other.

Wait, what? Caught? What do you mean “caught”? I recall asking him. “Well,” he said, “what we’re gonna do is somethin’ we’re not really ‘sposed to do, unnerstan’?” “Yeah,” I said — though I really didn’t understand at all.

Kevin then proceeded to tell me that we were going to skip that part where you pay the money for the thing you want to take from the store. In his version, apparently what you did is select the item you’d like to take with you, and then just walk out the door with it. Totally without going through that whole waiting-in-line-and-giving-money-to-the-lady-at-the-cash-register part.

Wow, I thought, that doesn’t seem quite right. He said it’d be fine. I wondered how, if it was so fine, I’d reached all of eight years of age without ever having heard of such a method. He assuaged my fears by reassuring me that he did it all the time. Well, I thought, if Kevin Gaines does it all the time then it must be OK.

And with that we headed over to the TG&Y, walked in the door, and drew a bee line to the candy aisle. I picked up a Milky Way (I loved Milky Ways) and Kevin grabbed a Snickers, which he put straight into his pocket. He motioned to me that this was the appropriate next step in our plan, so I did the same.

It was at that point we started walking back toward the door.

I have to say now that I was so nervous I actually lost track of my partner. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I do believe I was thinking more about me than I was about him, or even us. And that self-centered behavior resulted in me walking out the front door without my buddy. When I got out the door I stopped, turned around to sort of check in with Kevin to see what our next move was, but he wasn’t there.

I was alone.

Well that’s weird, I said to myself — I thought we were doing this together, maybe I missed a step. My first instinct was to go back into the store to find him — but then I remembered what Kevin said about getting separated. And so I headed to the dirt lot down the road.

I stood there for what seemed like a long time. Then I recalled there was a big old Milky Way in my pocket, so I took it out and ate half. Then I waited some more. When Kevin finally did show up he was at a dead run — he shouted something like “come on, let’s go” — and so I fell in behind him as we ran back toward the neighborhood.

When we got to my house (it was closer to the store than Kevin’s) we sat down on the curb as Kevin proceeded to jam just about that whole Snickers bar in his mouth, even though he was panting and out of breath. It was as though he feared someone was about to burst on the scene and take it away from him. After he’d finished most of it, and caught back most of his breath, I told him I was sorry for not waiting for him and asked him where he went.

With a sullen look on his face that I’d never seen, he told me that just as he was about to go out the door a big man put a hand on his shoulder and spun him around. He said the man told him he saw what he’d done. He said the big man threatened to tell on him. So Kevin ran. First back down the candy aisle — then out the back door — then over the fence — then up and down a bunch of streets — and then to me at the dirt lot.

Wow.

You know, I don’t know what I was more amazed by — the fact that he’d almost been caught stealing, or that things hadn’t gone exactly as Kevin, with all his swagger, had said they would.

Soon after that we moved from San Jose to Morgan Hill. I was about halfway through the third grade, and when I got to my new school there were no kids quite like Kevin. But I was intrigued to find out that the school was only a five-minute walk from a Sprouse Rietz variety store.

Where a big man would one day put a hand on my shoulder.

But that’s a column for another time …

John P. Gavin is the author of “Online Dating Sucks … But It’s How I Fell In Love,” which is available on Amazon and at Bookshop Benicia.