ON THE NEWS THEY’RE calling my son an animal. “Teenage thrill killer,” the District Attorney called him. But the thing that really got me was when they had some psychologist on, saying what can you expect. The kind of homes these kids came from. And how they weren’t raised with any values or morals. “I mean, these boys aren’t exactly Vanderbilts,” he says. “The kind of homes they come from, they didn’t even have indoor plumbing.” Like there’s some connection between having a flush on your toilet and getting into Heaven.
I did the best I could with my son Jimmy. Just because a person doesn’t have some big bank roll don’t mean she doesn’t love her kid.
He was always a good boy too. Never complained if I couldn’t buy him a toy. Never cried. Never asked for much. Give him a pile of dirt and a spoon to dig and he was happy, just making mud. Just tell him not to expect much and he’ll never be disappointed, I figured. If you start building up their hopes to get some good job or go to trade school or something, all that happens is they’re mad when it doesn’t come true.
So my way was, never pretend something great is coming. Just because you blow out all the candles on your cake doesn’t mean your wish comes true. Jimmy grew up knowing those toys they advertised on TV weren’t for him, and neither were those beautiful girls they show in the magazines. A person has to be realistic. You try for too much, you just have further to fall.
It’s not like now’s the first time I heard people talking about what kind of home my kid comes from. All his life people have been telling him, one way or another, he got born with the wrong setup for anything good to ever happen in his life. It’s a free country? The sky’s the limit? Don’t make me laugh. This was a boy that you could’ve told his life story by the time he was six years old. Like that psychologist said, the kind of home he comes from, he was bound to get into trouble. And the ones that make it come true are the ones who keep saying that.
Basically, the only surprise ever came along in my boy’s life was this Suzanne Maretto woman taking an interest in him. To my boy it was like she was some fairy princess that comes sparkling down from the sky and touches his head with a fucking magic wand. Out of all the dumb kids in the entire world, she picked my boy Jimmy to screw with. You better believe he fell all over himself to please her. She was the first person he ever met that told him he might amount to something. Only trouble was, she was just handing him a line. She wasn’t just getting his dick up. It was his hopes.
Which only proves my point. Tell a boy like Jimmy that he’s got a shot at something good—I don’t care if it’s a goddam college education or a pretty blonde between the sheets—and you’re setting him up to get his heart broken. Which is what happened all right. It was like she took him into this candy store, showed him all the treats, let him taste a few, then locked him out, with his face pressed against the glass. He never knew what he was missing until he got it. Then it drove him crazy.
So now he’s locked away for life. He doesn’t even get a chance to have a skinny kid of his own, to mess up that kid’s life like I supposedly messed up his. But let me tell you this. Just because I don’t live in a big house, just because I don’t pull up to the state prison in a limousine. You think my heart aches any less?