Chapter Eleven
My twenties and thirties were when a lot of things happened.
We were sick. On July 4th we had fun putting cherry bombs in big ash cans underneath the benches in the park, setting off explosions while people were sleeping on the bench, blowing them up from underneath. We knew it was a loud noise, but we had no conscience, we would laugh. If they couldn’t hear for a month, we would laugh.
There was an old man who had one leg, a bookmaker, sitting on a barstool. This other guy in the bar, Jimmy, took an ash can firecracker walking up to the old man and put it in the guy’s jacket pocket—lit. Then Jimmy walked out of the bar and this thing went off. The bookie jumped out of his chair on his one leg screaming all over the place, burnt from his knee right up to his armpit, all burnt.
One time I had a fight in the bar and this guy hit me once and broke my nose. Then one of the big guys hit him and knocked him out. I dragged the guy outside and smashed his face on a Johnny pump, a fire hydrant, while he was unconscious because that’s what they wanted me to do.
So where did we get the ideas to do this stuff? I saw it done from the time we were kids, I saw lots of mean things done. I seen the big guys punch faces in until their teeth fell out of their face. I seen guys get their eyes knocked out. I seen guys get bats over their head until their fucking heads split open. I seen guys get hit on the head with stools and the stools break, and I thought, “Wow, he got him with one shot.”
One night a friend of ours came in the club and said that his daughter, I think she was around twelve or thirteen, got raped by this guy, this Spanish guy. He was somewhere around, I don’t know, maybe thirty, thirty-five years old and we’re in our twenties. So me and Jimmy, who is six-four, two hundred and sixty pounds, decided, well, we’re not doing anything so let’s go see if we can help. We’re high, we’ve been getting high, shooting dope and coke and I’m in the mood to hurt somebody anyway. I used to get that way, get in the mood to just go out and beat the shit out of somebody. We would go to a bar or club or somebody’s house and just beat them up if somebody wanted us to do that.
We had a car but it was never legal, we never had insurance or licenses and shit like that. We just drove. Meanwhile we’ve got the guns in the car. So we started looking in the neighborhood, on the south side and the north side of Williamsburg, going up and down the streets. All of a sudden one of the guys in the car, the girl’s father, spotted this guy and he goes, “There he is! That’s him, that’s the guy, that’s the car.” So on a one-way block Jimmy starts driving the car backwards at about sixty miles an hour down around the Williamsburg Bridge and we jumped out.
The funny part about this is that me and Jimmy dressed up with trench coats on. A lot of these drug addicts thought we were cops, and we did have badges and shit like that because we used to do that when we went into clubs. We’d flash a badge and go into the after-hours clubs. Because Jimmy was so big nobody even questioned him for Christ’s sake, he was so huge. That was a lot of the ways I would get to drink a lot for nothing, too. Not that we just walked and bogarted our way in, a lot of times they thought we were “the man” and we would show a little badge and walk in.
So we get this guy in the car. I handcuff him, I handcuff him from behind and I’ve got him up on the backseat. We put this blindfold on him and we’re driving around for half an hour. Then all of a sudden we just say, “Ah, fuck it. Let’s just beat the guy.” So I start beating the guy, beating him with the shotgun, I’m beating him in the head. I put the gun in his mouth and knocked all his teeth out. Jimmy was beating him too. We were all hitting him. We dragged him out of the car and I broke the gun, the wooden stock, over his head. The guy was so out, unconscious, it wasn’t funny. Then we just left him there.
*
When I was thirty-three we were down on Kings Highway hanging out at the bar. At this time my old friend Pete was in the hospital with some kind of spinal meningitis, fluids to his brain. Pete was my best friend and would have done anything for me. He was a very big bodyguard for me, a protector because I lived with a bunch of tough Italian guys in the neighborhood. So when his wife was all upset telling me that their oldest daughter’s boyfriend, and possible future son-in-law, supposedly had fondled their younger nine-year-old daughter, I went up the stairs to the second floor where this guy was living in an apartment over the bar. I had in my hand the leg of a table, a big wooden leg of a table. I walked in and this guy was sitting at the kitchen table with his girlfriend. I laid the bat against the wall and he didn’t even see it. I told the girl to get up and leave the kitchen, I wanted to talk to the guy. As she left the room I picked up the bat and whacked the guy, I whacked him in the head. His head started bleeding. When you’re walking up to somebody and you hit them, if they don’t retaliate you get this feeling like you’ve got the power now. He’s not swinging back, he’s covering up his head. Now what you want to do is beat him more because now he’s a little punk. I must have hit him five or six more times.
He knows what he did to this little girl, so, “Why can’t you be a fucking tough guy now? Why don’t you be a tough guy now, you bastard?” So as I go with that through my head, as I keep saying that, I think of doing something worse to him. I’ll kick him in the balls, I’ll kick him in the face, I’ll mash his face up, I’ll try to break his ankles, his feet. This is as you go along, and when I see nothing is working I say, “I’d like to cut your fucking head off. You need something to remember, because we’ll remember what you’ve done to this little girl.” So that’s when I took out the knife and just started hacking away at his hand. I put his hand on the table and I cut his fingers off, two fingers, all the way at the top of the fingers, and the blood just started shooting out, it was all over the place. His girlfriend was screaming like hell and I told her to shut up or I’d knock her teeth out too.
The guy was fat, a short fat guy. I was trying to throw him out the second-floor window but he was so fat, he was probably about 180 pounds and I was 120. I kept trying to get this fat bastard up to the window, and every time I’d get him halfway to the ledge, which was only a couple feet off the floor, I couldn’t lift him up. He was like dead weight, half-unconscious. So what I did was drag him over to the hallway door where there was a flight of stairs that were made of worn linoleum with those old metal rims. He was lying there, so I took his legs and pulled him over until he just went rolling down the whole flight of stairs. The amazing part is he jumped up when he hit the bottom, in shock, his blood squirting out of his hand, and he took off, he ran.
He’s lucky he didn’t die that day. I was going to cut his head off. His hand was bleeding like hell. I don’t even know if the fingers totally came off but I know I had the whole hand on the table. He never came back. He never came back to Brooklyn. He knew what he did because he admitted it, and then he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it.” He had fondled this little nine-year-old kid when he was in the house alone with her and he almost raped her. The kid was in shock, so I just thought I would fucking put him in shock. I never seemed to have a problem doing something like that—taking somebody and cutting their finger off or some shit like that. Oh yeah, Pete’s still alive today, but we don’t see too much of each other.
*
I had gotten a dog for my son and daughter, and my son named him Rocky. He was a black-and-white mutt, but he was huge, a big huge dog. From a little tiny puppy he got bigger and bigger. I really loved him. He used to run and jump and pay attention to me, but later he would run and hide under the bed when I came yelling, he’d go under the bed and flatten out. He was so huge, but I intimidated the poor dog.
At the end of my addiction we were getting thrown out of the apartment house and I couldn’t take the dog with me. I didn’t know what to do with it. Once somebody on Staten Island took him but then they brought him back to me and said they couldn’t keep him. So I went to Pete and said, “What are we going to do? I don’t know what I’m going to do with the fucking dog.” He says, “Well, let’s fucking shoot him,” so we took him over to Cropsey Avenue and we put five bullets in the dog’s head. We killed the dog.
I never forgot that, it kept me awake for months. I told the kids I gave the dog away. My daughter always said, “It’s a good thing you gave Rocky to the people,” and my son, he still doesn’t know, he thinks I gave it away too. I would have had a real hard time telling him I killed the dog because he already thought I was bad enough, so how could I tell him I fucking killed the dog? I loved this dog.
When I came out of jail on Rikers Island I went back to work with Herbie, my brother-in-law. Our first job was at the Bronx House of Detention. Pretty funny. One of the firemen had some kittens and asked me if I wanted one. I said, “Yeah, give me the red and white calico kitten.” I called him Red. When I left Kings Highway I brought him with me to Sally’s house. She had two cats and they started fighting all the time but then they gave up. I was using a lot of cocaine and shooting coke and dope and I was nuts one day. I get in the house and my cat, who was three or four years old and big, wouldn’t let me in the bathroom. He was growling at me like a fucking dog. I couldn’t believe what was going on, I needed to get this fucking dope in my body. I was so sick, I needed to get in. I took a piece of rope and taped it on a stick and made a hangman’s noose—the same thing the dogcatcher has. I got the cat by the fucking neck and just shook him. I tightened the loop up on his neck, then went over and opened the window. We lived on the third floor and I just flung the cat right out the fucking window and he landed in the back of the yard. He always wore a red collar with a bell on it. I really loved the cat, but he wouldn’t let me in the bathroom and I was very sick, so I killed him.
We lived there for two years after that. I remember the summer passing, the winter passing. In the winter all the leaves blew away, and there he was, his body. A skeleton body, with a red collar on it. Every time I got high and looked out this fucking window, I felt so bad, but if somebody walked into the house, I said, “Hey, look what I did to the cat.” I couldn’t say how bad I felt about killing this cat.
I made things love me and then I fucking destroyed them. There wasn’t nothing that you couldn’t do with the disease of addiction. It’s a lifetime of anger, a lifetime of hating people, and people hating me. When I was mean, I was very very mean and all my life I never wanted to be mean. Everything I ever did, two, three hours later or a day later, I regretted, but I would never tell anybody because that was a sign of weakness. If I shot the dog I’d walk around bragging about it, “Don’t say nothing to the kids but I put five fucking bullets in his head.” I remember when I shot the dog, or I should say when Pete shot the dog, I was holding him and he was fighting back. I remember this fucking dog looking at me saying with his eyes, “What are you doing? What are you doing this for? Just let me go.” And I couldn’t let the dog go in the street, which I should’ve, just let him go. I thought it would be better, like playing God. One reason I did this is because the dog used to eat thirty dollars’ worth of food a week and I couldn’t feed him. I couldn’t feed the dog, the kids, and my addiction.
*
A girl Carol robbed me one time. I brought her to the house and gave her some speed and some acid and I fucked up her head. I kept her on speed. I had this guy Eddie with me in the house and I left him with her for a whole night. It was like holding a hostage, she was a hostage. I drove her so fucking nuts that she wound up in a mental institution a couple days later. That was my goal, to drive her totally out of her fucking mind for what she did. So I just pumped a lot of drugs into her and had her crawling on all fours, doing all kinds of crazy things and going nuts from the drugs. She did not leave the house. It was very sick stuff.
*
I worked with Johnny, a great burglar, a real expert who could get into any damn place. Johnny probably spent more of his life in prison than outside. We did lots of things together. We even looked a lot alike and he used to get locked up for me and I used to get locked up for him. We would burglarize houses of rich people all over, summer and winter, sort of like collecting their stuff.
One night we robbed this house on Staten Island; it was a cop’s house, there was a picture of him in his uniform on the table by the bed. Little did we know there was somebody sleeping in the other room. They got up and we had to run out of the house. We took the cop’s uniform and his gun and whatever we could hold in our hands. The snow was about a foot deep. We tracked through this snow, got in our car and drove up a one-way block, then crossed the expressway the wrong way. We thought we were fucking Bonnie and Clyde.
Another night with Johnny, we robbed a bookie’s house on Ocean Parkway. It was New Year’s Eve and we were all dressed up in our suits. I put a .22 in my holster. We thought if we were all dressed up it would be the best way to do this thing. We knew about the house we were robbing, we knew the money was downstairs in the basement behind the dryer because the guy made loans to drug dealers. He’d lend them $20,000 and they’d give him $22,000 back in three days. So we got in the front door and we were going down to the basement of the two-family house, walking through with little flashlights. I got the gun out, Johnny and I went down to the basement and all of a sudden we hear somebody upstairs. There’s supposed to be nobody home. We rang and rang the bell before we came in and nobody answered. We ran up the stairs and Johnny bolted out the door, got in the car and drove around to the front. I ran out the front door. I didn’t want to turn around because if I turned and saw somebody chasing me, I’d shoot them.
There was a stoop with four steps covered with ice and I went flying out the door, landing on my face, cracking my whole eye open. I got up, ran for the Cadillac and dived in the back window with the gun in my hand. Now I want Johnny to stop the car so I can go back to shoot the guy that came out of the house because I cracked my fucking eye open. I have this massive blood coming down my brand-new suit. I had to go to the hospital and get these big stitches right into my eyebrow—about seven. I’ll never forget it. We didn’t even get anything.