Chapter Ten
So I’m out of jail and back with Michelle. I brought all the kids together and we all lived in a one-bedroom apartment down on Kings Highway—we had a living room, dining room, and a bedroom. The two older kids slept in bunk beds inside . . . wow, I think we had all four children in one room, and me and Michelle slept outside on another bed. We were fighting, I was getting drunk before coming home, she was still getting high. She wanted to do her thing, I wanted to do mine. It just didn’t work. It just didn’t work. After six months we had this big fight and I said, “Fucking move out, get out of here.” I was so crazy, I threw her furniture down the stairs and broke everything.
When I came out of jail I drank a lot. I got a job and I wasn’t shooting dope, I wasn’t shooting speed, no sticking a needle in my arm, but I was drinking very heavy. It was a very sad time in my life because I’d always be in the bar. Michelle moved out with Dominick and Keith and I was alone with Carrie and Bob. They would have to come to the bar for me to give them money to eat. I would come home at night, fall asleep, wake up, and go back to work. Pat was in California and outta the picture by this time. She hadn’t gotten in touch or contacted me for five or six years and she was never in touch with the kids until they were teenagers.
I worked at a steam-fitting outfit on Twenty-fifth Street. No matter where I went or what kind of job I worked, I found people that used drugs and I started using again. Everybody there was using or drinking at the time, except for a few of the workers. I was a boss on jobs out in the housing projects and I’d send stoned drug addicts over to Manhattan to get heroin. They’d come back and we’d shoot up. Even though my brother-in-law was the foreman, I would still disappear, get high, and nod out on top of the boilers. They would have to find me.
One day I had these gum sole shoes on and I was sitting up on top of a super heater. They turned the goddamn heater on because they were testing it and me and my shoes melted to the top of the boiler. I could’ve cooked myself nodding out while trying to tighten up a flange. Other times I would be leaning over and fall asleep mixing concrete, just nodding out right on the shovel.
My brother-in-law Herbie, my sister Margie’s husband, always knew what I was doing. Naturally I’d lie to him a hundred times, but he knew. It’s amazing that he gave me so many chances. Herbie always stuck by me. As fucking bad as I was, I always was a very good worker on the job. I would work till I dropped. I worked Saturdays and Sundays. Part of my working was why I was never home.
I was working and bought a car with a loan from the bank. I did all these phony loan papers and got people to cosign for me. So I got a loan, got a car, and I was driving around dealing drugs. While driving I met this girl Sally and her husband who lived in my old neighborhood up by the parkside. I was selling them dope and one night I sold him some dope and he died. Not that I killed him, he just died, and the next day I moved in with Sally. My daughter came with me and my son went to live with this guy Paul who was selling drugs.
Sally was a heroin addict. She was on social security and I was dealing drugs out of her apartment. She was my girlfriend. She had a fourteen-year-old son Leo who hated my guts, didn’t like me at all, hated to even be up in the house where I was. I remember when I was living with her and I started selling heroin in the neighborhood. A lot of people found out and they put a big banner, a sheet with a big picture of a syringe, saying, “Bengie leave town. Get out of here junkie.” And they hung it off the roof. I fucking saw it and I said, “Wow, that’s pretty cool, who put that shit up?” But I never found out who put it there since everyone in the whole neighborhood hated me.
Three of us go down to Ocean Avenue; there’s a card game that goes on there with six or seven guys. You go there and can make yourself five, six thousand dollars. We go down this one night about eleven o’clock. I knock at the street door, a guy opens it and I smack him in the face with the gun, get him on the floor and realize the guy’s about sixty-five years old. He’s going, “Please don’t hit me, please don’t hit me, take what you want.” I say, “All right, all right.” I tie him up, put a belt on him. We start to search the house and I find ten cases of liquor, a couple of hundred in cash, jewelry, and fifty rolls of porno movies that they probably show at the card games. I even take a big ship that’s on his mantelpiece. I empty out the whole apartment. I have the guy tied up on the bed blindfolded and keep telling him to shut up, kick him in the ass once in a while and tap him in the head. Then I put a thing around his mouth and say, “Shut the fuck up.” But I’m afraid to keep things around people’s mouth for fear they can’t breath or can choke to death, and he was old. So I take the hankie out of his mouth and tell the old guy, “Don’t fucking say a word. Just shut up. Never mind what we’re taking.”
And being mean, I empty out his whole house into the car. I keep loading stuff. Everybody in the car is yelling at me, “That’s enough! That’s enough!” I’m saying, “Shut up” and I keep going back, taking chances. Then I go over to this big refrigerator. He was only one guy and I say, “What the fuck?” I know they feed people at card games, so I open up the freezer part and see fifty steaks. I take all the steaks and put them in a bag, clean out his whole freezer. I go to the bar where I hang out and sell the liquor one, two, three, and then go buy bundles of dope. We all get high.
I remember Sally cooking up the steaks. We’re all eating steaks, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and watching TV. We’re talking about how much fun it was and that everybody should keep their fucking mouths shut, and what I will do if anybody comes and tells me that I pulled a score. We did it, that’s what we do to make money, and it stays here. And it did. But you still have to tell everybody that. I had no trust in people. At the end I did think about that old man. ’Cause he was old and I didn’t want to hurt him, and I didn’t.
I was with Sally for a number of years and that was a pretty hard thing. Sally would go out and make money any way she knew how and I would go out and make money any way I knew how. We’d come back, we’d shoot dope, we would cheat and lie to each other. By this time I had about $200,000 worth of antiques in the house. One by one I sold them until it was all gone and we were living in an apartment that had no electricity, just an extension cord coming out of somebody else’s window. All that was in the refrigerator was green mold and a bottle of water. The apartment turned into a real ghetto-ass apartment. I had sold everything. I even took the mattress off the bed because the frame was brass so I sold that too. This was all to keep our habits going. In that apartment I was with Sally and it was all coming to an end.
I started hanging out on Prospect Avenue with the drug addicts back in my old neighborhood, which was probably the worst thing I ever could have done. I was down on Kings Highway and I moved back to the parkside where I got in more trouble than I ever had in my life. Well the trouble was good because I just kept going down and down and down until I lost the steamfitters job. Then I had to collect unemployment and while I was collecting unemployment I went into a detox. Pete, the plumber, helped me get into my first detox at Long Island College Hospital.
I stayed clean for about two weeks. Then I started drinking some beer and doing some Valium, thinking it was okay, that it’s only beer, it’s only Valium. No big deal, it’s not heroin. It was a very sad time with Sally because Sally was a heroin addict and she did go out and prostitute. And I went out and prostituted myself in different ways. Now I’m getting older and older, I’m almost forty years old and just wanted to get clean. I had gone in and out of detox, did thirty days at Kings County Hospital. But they didn’t have a rehab then. I just came out.
So living with Sally was very very painful because there were a lot of people in the neighborhood who liked her and her son, and all they did was put me down. I was the guy that was fucking them up, Sally and Leo. I was the guy who was bringing people up to the apartment. There were big guys that didn’t like me and I caught a couple of beatings from them. It just turned so bad in the neighborhood. I got my arm broken. Me and Sally owed the landlord a couple of thousand dollars’ rent and he was throwing us out.
Then Sally moved over to her mother’s building. She got an apartment around the corner on Reeves Place and it was kind of terrible, really bad living in the same building with her mother on the ground floor. Her window faced the stoop and she could see me come and go all the time. She would shake her head, “No! I don’t want you in there!” I used to have to sneak in and out. At this time me and Sally were winos and it became worse. Her son Leo just did not like me and I couldn’t blame him. If my mother was living with some fucking drunken drug addict who everybody in the neighborhood hated, why shouldn’t this kid? He just lost his father, who wasn’t really his father, now he’s got another guy who’s not his father.
The bottom was coming. I had lost my job and I couldn’t even get another one. I was on public assistance. I was so bad, I kept going into detox. I couldn’t see what was going on; couldn’t figure out what was happening. I think being with Sally at the end was probably the most painful time in my life because I suffered a lot of humiliation. It was a vicious cycle, a vicious cycle. I bounced from the frying pan to the fire, from Michelle to Sally. Although Sally was a really nice person and she did like me a lot. The only thing was, it was a very very painful time in my life.
When I was living with Sally, my sisters and all them didn’t even see me, and I only lived two blocks away for about two years. They knew I was on Prospect Avenue and they were on East Third Street, but nobody could find me. They knew my life, they heard stories about me, but they didn’t see me.