Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  “That shithead made me so mad I ate two downs,” said Richie. “Oh, and by the way, whenever you call me at home, use the code nome Tommy in case one of my parents answers. Tell Mark and Peanuts not to call for a while.”

  Brick nodded. He said he had problems with his father, too.

  “Not like my old man,” said Richie. “I’m gonna fix him some day.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  After writing two paragraphs of a history composition in his junior year of high school, Richie broke off his train of thought, took a red felt-tip pen, and angrily drew large X’s across his work. Flipping the paper over, he drew three long, precise columns. Under the heading “People I like,” he listed eleven names, led by a boy named Bob Simmons, a clean-cut, popular youngster who was well into his senior year at East Meadow High, preparing to attend college and medical school. In the next column, entitled “Chicks,” Richie made three entries, leading off with Sheila. Under her name, in parentheses, he printed in capital letters, “SOMETIMES.”

  In column three, under the title “People I Can Count On,” he listed three again—Brick Pavall, Mark Epstein, and David (Peanuts) Coleson. Then he crumpled the paper into a ball. Later he attempted to smooth the wrinkles away by slipping it into his history workbook to keep. Obviously it was important to him, this document of friends and their rankings in his young life.

  Between Richie, Brick, Mark, and Peanuts was a powerful relationship, one that endured spats, three against one, two against two, bitter denunciations, accusations of thefts and conspiracy against one another, and adventures that brushed them perilously close to the outstretched fingertips of the law. But they held together, glued not by their smallish size—all five feet seven more or less—or their lonely childhoods, or their poor marks in school, or, except for Brick, their high intelligence and natural aptitude, or even their parents—men and women from the same working-class mold who fled New York City to establish respectable homes a few hundred yards from one another in East Meadow where their flowers and children would bloom.

  In their middle teens, the four young men built no rafts to float down a river of exploration, found no tree limbs to hang from and warm their bodies in an August sun, marched in no parades to save the earth, possessed no vision of who they would be or where they would go when the world proclaimed them adult. They held but minor interest in cars, none at all in sports, and little more than peripheral curiosity, embellished by bravado talk, in girls.

  As George suspected, and as he would one day confirm through some curious albeit laggard detective work of his own, the weld was drugs. What Is Available? How Much Will It Cost? Where Can We Get Off? And, for days thereafter, What We Did When We Were Stoned! The actual consumption of the drug was perhaps not as rich in experience for the four as anticipation and post-mortem discussion. “It’s our thing,” Richie once explained to. Sheila in defense of a drug escapade so filled with intrigue and violence that it alarmed her. “This is what we do.”

  The growing turbulence in George and Carol’s home was not unique. Had they not elected to try and work out their crises alone—they would not seek outside help until the situation deteriorated much further—they could have perhaps gained strength or at least solace, in learning that the same angers raged in each of the houses that Richie telephoned each day.

  Brick Pavall telephoned his mother from the car wash where he had a part-time job wiping windshields clean.

  “I’m sick, Ma,” he said. “Can you come and get me?”

  Mrs. Pavall hurried there and saw her son jump down from an elevated place to meet her. Pale and trembling, he said, “I must have a virus.” He walked unsteadily, like, thought Mrs. Pavall, a drunk.

  “You look awful,” she said on the way home.

  “You would, too, if you’d been throwing up as much as I have,” answered Brick.

  At home, putting her son to bed, Mrs. Pavall brought up a question with studied casualness. Had Brick been smoking pot? In the morning? Brick shook his head quickly. “Nah,” he said. “I took some pills.” He felt so ill, his body was so convulsed with retching that he needed to make confession.

  “What kind of pills?” Mrs. Pavall was alarmed.

  “Downs. Seconals.”

  “How many?”

  “I dunno. Three. Four maybe.”

  Mrs. Pavall grabbed her son’s wrist to feel his pulse. She could not find it. His face was white and doughy. My God, she yelled to herself. He’s going to die right before my eyes. He’s OD’ed himself.

  Her family doctor suggested on the telephone that Brick be taken to Meadowbrook Hospital, a large county health institution in East Meadow. Brick was kept there under observation in the emergency room for the rest of the day. While this was going on, Mrs. Pavall prowled the corridors and offices of the giant hospital, saying, “What do I do now? Where do I go from here?”

  Spotting an intern writing medication, she rushed over and blurted out her story. “What can I do about my boy?” she begged. “He’s taking pills.”

  The young doctor looked at the distraught mother with frank boredom. “They’re all doing it,” he said. “Your boy’s nothing special.” He returned to his writing.

  Mrs. Pavall was not to be denied. She had seen the serpent in her garden and she was going to kill it. That the serpent had lived there for more than a year was something she did not know.

  By collaring “everybody in the hospital,” as she told her husband that night, Mrs. Pavall discovered the existence of the Nassau County Drug Abuse Council, which was less than ten minutes from her home. She ordered Brick there, despite his protestations that he could stop taking pills, stop smoking pot, that he could do anything she suggested if she would only leave him alone.

  “If you don’t go to Drug Abuse,” she said with an authority Brick understood, “I will take you before Family Court and get an order forcing you.”

  Mrs. Pavall even persuaded her husband to attend. “There must be a reason why Brick uses drugs,” she insisted. “Maybe we are factors.” For more than a year, the parents attended weekly group sessions in which other mothers and fathers spilled out the problems of their homes and lives. Brick dutifully went for two years, with results that were at best mixed. Principally, there were fewer shouting matches between Brick and his father, not due so much to therapy but to the fact that the older man, a warehouse foreman, arranged his work schedule so that he would not arrive home until well past his son’s dinner hour, and by then Brick was usually out with Richie and the others. This meant Mrs. Pavall had to set two tables, but it was a small price to pay for quiet in the house.

  Brick told his mother that the two-year attendance at Drug Abuse did help his confidence. “I can talk to people now,” he said. “I express myself better.” That pleased Mrs. Pavall. She always felt Brick’s lack of confidence was the root of all his evil.

  But Brick told Richie that the therapy sessions were “a farce.” He went to them, he said, because “it’s a good place to cop,” meaning a place to buy drugs. “When you get that many heads together in one place,” said Brick, “the parking lot’s a fucking dope bazaar.”

  David Coleson, who as a baby possessed a large round head, a wisp of hair, and a look of world-weariness, drew the nickname Peanuts, after the comic strip. He could not shake it when he entered adolescence. By then he wore a look of solemnity, of wiseness, that would have suggested—falsely—that he was a scholar. Of the four, Peanuts was the quiet one, living in a land of silences. Richie would telephone Peanuts and ask, “What are you doing?” for that was the invariable opening line of every conversation, and there would always be a pause, a period of time that stretched so long that Richie would get annoyed and bark, “Shit, Peanuts, you asleep?”

  Once, in fact, he was. He had taken four downs before the phone rang, and he dozed off with the telephone in his hand. Richie hardly noticed, for he, too, was afloat in secobarbital.

  Peanuts was the only son of a cabinetmaker, whose home was a
warm, beautiful place of color and rich paneling, bookcases, hand-crafted furniture. He dated his first experience with drugs exactly one week after Richie initially turned on, the night of the spring thunder.

  Somehow in that first week when Richie, then only fourteen, originally turned on, he came into possession of a tiny piece of hashish. He urged Peanuts, almost thirteen, to join him. It took little persuasion because Peanuts had been exposed to the drug culture at home. His older sister, Vivian, then sixteen, was so deeply committed that she not only smoked whatever she could get, she eagerly put any kind of pill into her mouth, any kind of needle into her arm, any kind of powder into her nostrils. Richie called Vivian “super head” and, when Peanuts was not at home to take his call, engaged the girl in long, meticulous conversations as to the merits and demerits of various drugs. Vivian was a principal contributor to Richie’s drug education, although he rarely even saw her.

  During one conversation, Vivian hurriedly broke off because she could see from her window policemen coming up the front walk. Frantically she ran to where she hid her hypodermic needles, pills, and assorted drugs, only to find that her eighty-three-year-old grandmother had beaten her to them. The elderly woman snatched up the cellophane bags and equipment, secreting them carefully in her musty room, amid shawls and needlework and family pictures in swirling gold frames. Only then did she open the door for the law, berating them with the crustiness allowed the very old, indignant at the suggestion of drugs in her house.

  Richie and Peanuts and a boy named Karl, who would soon fall from favor in the group and be pronounced hopelessly “lame” (the prevailing adolescent term in East Meadow to denote stupidity and unawareness), began spending the precious hours after school hanging around a supermarket. George and Carol Diener had spent their Brooklyn childhood in and about a candy store only ten feet wide. Their son—as did his friends—filled his languid time within the grounds of huge shopping centers.

  The most remarkable change in Richie was the quickness with which he gained influence over people. For someone who had hidden from social contact during his childhood, he burst forth in adolescence to make his will known. Some of it was bluster.

  He took to sending Peanuts and Karl into an Associated Food Store on what he called “errands.” At first the errands were to steal fruit, or candy, followed by more detailed shopping expeditions to obtain, say, a certain color of fluorescent paint to decorate his room.

  “Richie had considerable influence over Karl,” remembered Peanuts, speaking with a dry wit to match his solemn face. “He persuaded Karl to steal some albums for him. He did this by hitting him with a brick. Karl quickly agreed.”

  Peanuts did not think Karl was shrewd enough to steal a paper clip, so he accompanied the tyro thief to a department store while Richie acted as “lookout” from another part of the floor. “I still don’t remember how Richie managed to persuade us to take the risk while he was going to own the albums,” said Peanuts, “but we did.”

  A security guard saw the two boys stuffing albums under their shirts and arrested both. Karl said a “redheaded kid made” him do it. While the two boys stewed in a locked office, guards searched the massive store and found Richie, furtively making his way to the exit.

  Richie was taken to security headquarters, squirming all the way, shouting curses at the officers. He figured he could beat any charge of record theft, but in his pocket was a half-ounce of hashish, cut up into dimes (ten-dollar chunks). As the officer began to question Richie, he was called away for a telephone call. In his absence, Richie hurriedly hid the hashish behind a shelf of books.

  All three boys’ names were taken, and three sets of parents were informed. Rather than face his father, Richie ran away—but only to Peanuts’ house. He stayed there a few hours until Carol called. And he went, gratefully, home.

  During his hours at Peanuts’ home, Mr. Coleson happened into his son’s room and met Richie for the first time. “Nice boy,” he told his son later. “He’s polite.”

  Peanuts nodded in agreement. It did not seem appropriate to tell his father that at the very moment Mr. Coleson entered the room, Richie had broken off discussion of a scheme to somehow get back into the security office of the department store, find the bookshelf, and regain the hidden hashish.

  Mark Epstein was the youngest, the smallest, the loudest, the most coarse, and somehow the most appealing of the four. Frail, with a rib cage barely concealed beneath almost translucent skin, girlish-looking with long hair falling to his shoulders, he could almost be called beautiful—except when he talked, which was most of the time. Talk poured from his lips in torrents: profane, imaginative chatter so swathed in fanciful deeds and plots that it was difficult for Richie and the others to know when Mark was on the level, if ever. Because he spoke in a choirboy’s soprano voice even at fifteen, and because he possessed a remarkable gift of imagery in his language, it gave an incredible tone to the dark sides of his life.

  One thing was certain. Mark had more drug experience than Richie, Brick, and Peanuts put together. And he wore it as a badge of elusive manhood. With no beard on his baby-smooth face and no more than 110 pounds on his stringy frame, when Mark talked drugs he was basso profundo and a heavyweight belter.

  Mark entered Richie’s circle during the Blackstone Summer, though the two youngsters had spent previous months scowling at one another in the neighborhood tradition. Immediately Mark presented his credentials to Richie. The stocky redhead sat spellbound as the skinny boy rolled out his history.

  Like Richie, Mark was born in New York City, son of a father who moved through several speculative businesses—discount jewelry, “ranchettes” in New Mexico—before settling into becoming an exporter’s representative. Mark was not exactly sure what the job entailed, only that it seemed to bring in money. “My old man makes bucks,” said Mark in describing his father’s occupation. “He paid $52,000 cash for our house in East Meadow, I saw him write out the check, and now he’s going into condominiums in Nassau. He’s religious, too. I go along with it—up to a point. I got $1,600 in checks for being a good bar mitzvah boy.”

  Thus establishing his family’s financial position, Mark asked if Richie turned on. Getting an affirmative nod, Mark continued in breakneck fashion. “I must have been about nine when I first tried grass. Dug it! All those dudes who lived in Brooklyn near me hung together and we used to chip in and buy a nickel [five dollars’ worth]. Then I had this uncle move in with us—he’s twenty-two now and pretends he’s clean, but I know better—but back then he was into everything. I used to sneak downstairs, find his stash and snort it or smoke it. He was so stoned he couldn’t catch his breath, much less me.”

  At thirteen, Mark said, which was a year and a half prior to his meeting Richie, he moved to East Meadow. “I didn’t like the neighborhood,” he said, “so I went into the crime business.”

  Systematically he began to rob every house on his block. He explained: “It’s so fuckin’ easy, Diener. You find a window at the back, and you tape it up, and you smash it and you crawl in. You look for things that are easy to fence. Like mink stoles, diamond rings, cash, of course, checkbooks, credit cards, savings passbooks, small TV’s.”

  But Richie wanted to know, how do you get rid of it?

  “For a while my fence was the ice-cream man,” said Mark. “He deals dope, too. Cool guy named Monk. It’s important to have a fence you can trust. I know this kid who stole two diamond rings worth $29,000, and he sold ’em to a nothing fence for only forty bucks, and he got caught. With a score that big, he should have found Monk.”

  Since Richie had never possessed more than ten dollars at any one point in his life—that sum either as gift money from relatives or for helping his mother set up tables at one of the retarded children’s charity affairs—his mind leaped at the sums.

  Robbing, explained Mark, was how he met Cantrell.

  “Who’s Cantrell?” asked Richie.

  “Only the biggest and best dealer on Long
Island,” said Mark.

  Cantrell was a Vietnam veteran in his mid-twenties, short, wiry, and a karate expert. “He can destroy people with just his feet,” said Mark. “I saw him attack a guy once and his feet were flying all over the place, like propellers.” Cantrell kept his wife, his baby son, and a large, variable supply of drugs in an expensive home on the North Shore of Long Island.

  “I was there once and he had like 25,000 fucking Seconals,” said Mark, who had quickly learned from Richie the name of his drug of choice.

  “How did you meet him?” asked Richie.

  “That’s weird, too,” said Mark. “I was standing on a corner looking at this row of houses and studying them so I could rob every one of them, when I see this guy. He says his name is Cantrell and he asks me what I do and I say I am a robber. He says that’s a coincidence, because he wants a color TV. I say, ‘Wait here a minute,’ and half an hour later, I had him a Zenith portable, which he buys from me for seventy-five dollars.”

  After that, a relationship was forged in which Cantrell would accept Mark’s stolen goods in exchange for drugs. “He’s really a cool guy,” insisted Mark. “Anytime I need anything, I go to Cantrell. He has everything a head would want—everything but heroin. But you have to know him before he’ll deal to you. In fact, he has to like you.”

  Briefly into their friendship, Mark asked Richie to meet him on the corner of Blackstone Avenue. Maybe they would encounter Cantrell somewhere in the village. Richie said he wanted very much to meet Cantrell, but on this particular evening he was grounded. “My old man and me don’t get along,” said Richie.

  Mark nodded sympathetically. “I can dig that,” he said. “I stole a book of blank checks from my father and managed to forge $1,500 worth of little ones. Then I made a big mistake. I forgot to intercept the bank statement in the mail one month and he caught on. You think you and your old man don’t get along.”