Chapter Thirteen
So the big mean guy, the big tough guy was going into detox again. It was humiliating because there you are coming back for the second time in less than a year. They gave me the bed. I sat up there at Kings County Hospital and I couldn’t urinate for three or four days. I had a blockage and they’re telling me to drink more and more water. One day I finally urinated blood and it was fucking painful. The nurses are sticking me with shots of vitamins in two-inch-long needles, sending that shit in my ass. You can feel it going into your body. I’m sure they gave me Librium because I walked around that fucking place like I was dying.
So I stayed for a thirteen-day detox and came out, I came out and I had a stick of pot with me and $1.70. This guy Panama who was in the detox became my good friend, he was a Panamanian barber. He cut my hair, trimmed my mustache, and shaved me a little bit. I was sick but I looked pretty good. I had thirteen days and they’re going to let me go home but I had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to go back to my girlfriend Sally’s who’s still using and drinking. If I go back there, then I’m gonna fucking pick up again. I gotta get to a safe place. So I headed down to my brother’s house.
First I went to the parkside, sitting on the bench underneath the trellis where I always sat. I looked across the street at the bodega. I had $1.70 and went over and bought a pint of green Ballantine Ale and came back. I stayed there for a little while and thought, “What the fuck is the sense? I ain’t gonna make it.” I had a half a joint that Panama gave me, it wasn’t much. Every time I looked at the ale and every time I looked at the pot I said, “If I do this, I’m gonna fucking die.” I got the message, a message came into my head: “You’re going to die.” I never thought I was going to die. My whole life, my whole thirty-nine years, putting guns to my head, getting beaten, the way I shot drugs, the way I put stuff in my body, I never thought I was going to die. That day something told me I was going to die if I did it again. So I went down to my brother’s house. I left the bottle of ale on the bench, I flipped the joint in the bushes, and I walked away from it.
As I walked away, the beer and the joint, the half a joint, was calling me, “Go back and get it just in case. Come on, pick us up just in case. Come on, get back here!” I got a block away, two blocks away, three blocks away, and it kept calling me. I got so many blocks away until I said, “I can’t walk back, I’m too tired.” And I kept going to my brother’s house. But that fucking bottle of beer was calling me, talking, talking, it talks to you. Drugs talk to you, it’s a disease, they’re the disease of addiction. The Committee, that was The Committee, they’re up there and they’re saying, “Come on, it’s only a bottle of beer, what’s the matter? What the hell? You bought it, you can’t bring it back. Why don’t you just drink it? What the fuck is the matter with you? What are you turning into, a punk?” The voices in the head, the voices in the head. Sick and dying, fucking liver popping out of my side, my pancreas and everything else, I’m ready to die and this Committee is telling me to come and drink this bottle of beer and it’ll be okay. And the little person on my shoulder is saying, “You’re gonna die. You’re gonna die if you do it.” This is the first time I’m hearing this voice.
I never had thoughts that I was gonna die. I thought I was invincible. How could I possibly die, get the fuck out of here? Shoot the dope, shoot the coke—a ton of it—put it in. Shoot ten sets of works, fill them all up, shoot them one after the other, speed-trip. I never thought I would ever die.
As I got three or four blocks away I was really too tired to walk back. I had a couple more miles to walk, I had a heavy shopping bag and I was dragging it. I’d just spent thirteen days in a detox and now I’m wondering where I’m gonna eat because I was eating three times a day. I was on the streets and I don’t want to stay on the streets at night. They let you out of Kings County at nine o’clock in the morning. I got all the way to the Parkside about nine-thirty and stayed there until about eleven, just hanging, talking to myself, mumbling, then I left. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon when I got to my brother’s and I said to him, “Listen, I wanna come in.”
He was sober about a year at this particular time and he said, “All right. If you come in, you have to go to a meeting with me tonight.” I says, “Look, Sal, don’t fucking bother me about these meetings, please. I don’t want to go to the fucking meetings. I tried that with Sally, I tried going to the meetings, they wanted me to go to these fucking AA meetings. I just don’t feel like going.” So he says, “Well, you can’t come in, fuck you.” He wouldn’t let me in. So I sat on the stoop till around six o’clock. He came back out and says to me, “What are you going to do?” And I just sat on the stoop; I didn’t want to sleep out at night. The sun wasn’t down but it was a little darker. I knew in two hours it would be dark. I could sit on the stoop, but I was scared to death to be out at night. I didn’t tell Sally I was out of the detox, but I did tell her the next day that I was staying at my brother’s. My brother let me come in the house because I promised I’d go to the meeting two hours later at eight o’clock.
“Why don’t you get ready for the meeting?” and I says, “Yeah, I’ll go to the meeting tomorrow. I’ll go to the meeting with you tomorrow, not tonight. I just got here, I’m tired, I was in detox and just came out, I don’t feel good and I’m a fight fan and there’s a movie on TV with Jack Dempsey that I want to watch.” He says, “Pack your clothes and get out of here then. You’re not staying here tonight.” I says, “All right, all right, all right.” I thought about it for a couple of minutes, the thought of being on the streets, in the dark, in the night by myself, fucking terrified me. So I went down to the meeting with him.
I never planned on getting clean, I never thought that I could get clean. “Once an addict, always an addict”—I heard this a million times. I never thought there was a way out or knew there was a way out until Narcotics Anonymous. Until I hit those rooms where I heard a guy say one day, “If you don’t pick up, you can’t get high.” That was like God talking to me. Amazing. Now all of a sudden what went through my head was, “If I don’t pick up, I can’t get high. I’m the fucking guy who buys it. I’m the guy who puts it in my arm. I’m the guy who shoots that shit in my vein. So if I don’t go get it, how can I get high?”
When I was three months clean, I got my first public assistance check and went down to cash it. I was walking up Ninth Street and Diane and Susan and a whole bunch of other girls I used to get high with are hanging out the windows calling me to come upstairs. Now I’m clean three months, got me ninety days. I’m feeling good, I’m healthy, and I’m looking good. I go upstairs to their house thinking I’m getting laid, this is good, “sex, drugs, rock n’ roll.” I get in there and they’re all in their panties and bras and the coke is on the table and my fucking body starts shaking. Boomboomboomboom. They had a huge pile of coke, dope on the table, money all over the place, and they were sitting there arguing. “Oh Bobby, stay, Bengie, c’mon honey, let’s get high. You want some?” They’re flashing me and I’m saying, “No, no, no, I really ain’t doing it, I’m clean ninety days.” My fucking wheels are turning in my head. They were arguing over five dollars. I spotted the argument and remembered what they told me in the rooms: listen to the insanity behind the drugs. We could have a kilo of dope and argue over a little tiny bit that was left on the table. We could have a pound and fight with each other, wanna kill each other, because that’s the addiction. I was watching the girls fight over this five dollars and I said, “What? I gotta go. I’m fucking out of here.” I went down the stairs, took off and got on the train. I knew there was an AA meeting on Kings Highway and I went right away but I didn’t share ’cause I wasn’t talking yet. I did speak with a guy I knew there, an old dope fiend, about what just took place. And he said, “Wow, that’s good.”
For my whole first year I didn’t really want to get clean. What I hear in the rooms is that if you repeat the same behavior you’ll get the same results. So being clean I can’t do no robberies. But I do. The program teaches you that if you make all this money you’re going to shoot dope. Well, when I have the money it was pretty tempting to go get high. But I don’t. When I’m six months clean some guy wants me to pick up fifty thousand dollars for him. The reason I do this, they’re giving me a thousand bucks. I don’t have any clothes, I need clothes: this is my rationalization.
So I’m in the car with this other guy, the driver, out in Long Island in this suburban area and we’re picking up fifty thousand dollars for these two Jewish high school teachers who are the bookmakers. I can’t believe it. They run their little gambling thing out of Seagate, in this big house right in Coney Island. You’d never know it if you were to look at them, two nice Jewish boys. This is their thing and we’re picking up the money for them.
When the cars get to Long Island, the two guys in the front car will go pick up the money and the backup car, which is me, will stay a couple feet away. If anybody comes after the front car, it’s my job to intercept them. They think somebody is gonna rip them off that night. The guy who’s driving says to me, “What kind of gun do you want?” “What do you got?” He has a .22 with a twelve-shot clip. “I’ll take that,” ’cause it fires twelve shots in a clip. The first car pulls up to the house, I pull up way in back of him. My friend Pete goes in the house and comes walking out down the driveway with this shopping bag full of money. All of a sudden a car pulls up in back of our first car. The guy that I’m with is saying, “Get them, get them, get them.” So I aim the gun out the window ’cause I’m ready to shoot these people. And he’s going to me, “Shoot them!” and I’m saying, “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” Then I see two women step out of the car and go into the house next door. Pete just gets into his car and we put on our lights and roll away. I look at this guy and I say, “You’re a fucking dope, you almost made me shoot two women.”
When I got the fifty thousand dollars I said, “Fuck them two guys. This is fifty thousand dollars! They’re two schoolteachers. What’re they gonna do, say we robbed their money? Who the fuck is behind them? We’re behind them. We’re the ones that they hired. They ain’t got nobody else. Let’s just take this fucking money and forget it.” And the driver, who was a bookmaker himself, didn’t want to do it because he was involved with other guys that knew he hired us and we would’ve gotten in trouble. But let me tell you, I wanted to take this fucking money and say, “Fuck them guys.” I would’ve went right up, right up to their house, and said, “Twenty thousand dollars is better than a thousand. That’s what we’re taking, so here’s your thirty grand. We’re taking twenty and I don’t want to hear a word.” But they didn’t want to do anything like that. Six months clean and still I wanted to be a tough guy. I took the thousand bucks and bought some clothes. When I went to meetings, people said, “Wow! Where’d you get the new clothes?” “I did a little thing, a little score, ba-ba, ba-ba.”
I also tested myself later when I went down to the bar I used to hang out at on Kings Highway. We were bullshitting and talking for a couple of hours. Now I’m clean and sober nine months. “C’mon, have a beer, you can have a beer, you can have a drink,” and this guy runs a line of coke on the table and I said, “What? I gotta go, I gotta go.” It was okay the first hour I was there, but as soon as a couple of people started to get drunk two hours later, it started to get very tempting to me. The club soda started tasting like a rum and Coke.
I knew what they said in the meetings. “You’re an alcoholic, you don’t belong in a bar. If you’re a drug addict you don’t belong in a shooting gallery.” I knew I was both so I didn’t belong there. I heard guys say, “If you sit in a barbershop long enough you get a haircut.” I says, “I gotta get the fuck out of here.” Right over to the meeting two blocks away. I said, “Yeah, I was in the bar” and some of the old-timers in AA told me, “Hey, kid, you don’t belong in a bar. You’re an alcoholic, you got a drinking problem, stay out of the fucking bars.” “But my friends hang out in there.” “They’re not your friends if they’re in the bar. You wanna see them at the house, you wanna call them up, you wanna talk to them, fine. But you don’t go in the bar to hang out with them.” That’s what they told me, and that’s how they said it to me. “Yeah, all right. You’re right, you’re right.” The guy says, “How’d you feel there?” I says, “I was fucked up.” “You like fucked-up feelings?” “No!” “Then stay out of the bar.”