By early 1971, the four boys were, to use Richie’s word, “together.” After several disastrous blunders Richie evolved into the natural leader, perhaps “chairman of the telephone” would be a better term, for he presided over where the group would meet and when, what they would do, and who was in favor at the moment. His were the talents of organization, usual good humor, and a bull-headed willingness to attempt anything. He was also the best-looking, a factor that, among the young, contributes to leadership. Brick brought a car and the veneer of a tough guy, which was valuable particularly with strangers who were persuaded by his heft, tattoos, and beard. Peanuts was the element of reserve, of wait-a-minute-and-think-this-over, coupled with a cold meanness when necessary and a sister usually so stoned that she could be ripped off when no other drugs were available. Mark was fancy, imagination, charm, and experience. “You act high when you’re not even stoned,” said Brick in summation of Mark’s character. Peanuts estimated that if Mark did only one half the things he bragged he did, “You’re still the biggest and youngest gangster on Long Island.”
The year to follow, as Mark would often describe it, was “everything a kid would want it to be, a new adventure every fucking day.”
Typical was one that came early in the quartet’s being. One Saturday the four sat around Richie’s room listening to music, debating how best to pass the rest of the day. Richie wanted to go to Roosevelt Field, the massive shopping center a few miles from East Meadow. Mark wanted to smoke pot and go look at the breakers crashing against the South Shore of Long Island. Peanuts didn’t care. Brick, at eighteen the only one old enough to drive legally and the only one who owned a car, made the decision.
“Let’s drive into the city and look around,” he said, looking at Richie for confirmation. Richie nodded. Pleased, Brick produced a small wad of aluminum foil from his pocket and opened it carefully. There were downs for everybody. Richie went into the nearby kitchen and got a large class of communal milk to wash down the pills.
Within ten minutes, Brick was driving on both sides of the street, careening within a hair of cars parked at the curb. The boys found it amusing at first, Mark crying, “It’s bumper cars!” Then Richie cut into the laughter.
“Can you see, Pavall?” he demanded. Brick’s eyes were half-closed and fire red.
“I’m blind,” answered Brick. “But I’m driving. Shut the fuck up, Diener.”
In the back seat, Mark produced a hash pipe and worked to keep it lit. Quickly he passed it around, Brick lifting both hands from the wheel to take a deeply contented draw. With that, the car lurched toward a parked automobile. Richie grabbed the steering wheel and prevented at least a sideswipe.
Suddenly the quiet voice of Peanuts came from the rear. “Fuzz,” he said. Brick’s drooping eyes flew to the rearview mirror. A police car was behind him.
Richie hissed, “Put out that pipe!” He opened the windows to let out the hash smoke.
“Oh, shit,” said Brick.
“Beat his ass,” encouraged Mark, making a suggestion Brick found hilarious. “In this?” he answered, starting to giggle, picturing his ’62 clunker pitted against a 1971 police car.
The police car—sirens on and lights flashing—forced Brick over. He shook his head vigorously in a futile attempt to clear it.
Richie was on the floorboard, trying to hide a small piece of hashish.
Brick jumped out of the car and walked unsteadily to the policeman, a young officer who greeted him.
“Hello, Brick,” he said.
Brick looked at the patrolman. He had been stopped by him before. “Something’s wrong with the steering mechanism,” alibied Brick. Strolling to the car, the officer looked down at the three boys cowering within. Had he stuck his head inside he would have smelled hash smoke.
Finally the officer spoke again. “Better get that ‘steering mechanism’ fixed,” he said. Brick nodded hurriedly, edging back to his car.
“One more thing,” he said, stopping the boy in his retreat. “I’m letting you go this time, but I want a few favors. I’ll be collecting, Brick. Understand?”
Nodding quickly, understanding that he owed the cop a due bill good for names or information later, Brick got into his car, thunderstruck at his good fortune. He could never predict how a cop was going to act. “He’s cool,” said Brick starting the car and attempting to drive a straight line down the broad avenue.
“I wonder if he ever saw four heads stoned at eleven in the morning before,” said Peanuts, who had found the whole scene funny.
“To think I almost tried to eat this,” said Richie, retrieving the piece of hash from its hiding place under the floor mat.
“You’d’ve thrown up if you were lucky,” said Mark, the expert on everything. “Else you’d be dead.”
Chapter Fourteen
After the initial commitment is made to drugs, the second decision to be faced is an economic one. For a few months Richie lived off the charity of Brick and Mark, who usually had a few dollars in their pockets, or a joint of grass to share, or a few pills to lend that had to be paid back promptly.
Richie’s only dependable source of income was the fifty cents Carol gave him every day to buy a hot lunch at school. He often used this instead to buy drugs. There was always a girl who would share her sandwiches, or a cafeteria lady who knew Carol and could be counted on to slip Richie something to eat when he said he had lost or forgotten his lunch money.
But $2.50 a week would hardly buy a solid Saturday night trip, much less the other six nights and days during which Richie increasingly wanted a joint or some downs. By the spring of 1971, as he neared seventeen, Richie’s dependence on barbiturates was growing. He told Peanuts that he would take one or two a day if he had the money. “Who wouldn’t?” agreed his quietest friend with a solemn shake of his head. Richie was not yet at the stage where he actually needed the pills to function, but he found the dry stretches of days or weeks when he had no money and thus no drugs increasingly difficult to get through. It did not occur to him that both physically and psychologically his need was building. None of Richie’s group believed downs were addictive.
Richie argued with Carol to restore his allowance, but she refused. However, as George predicted, his wife often softened when Richie insisted he had to have five dollars for a date with Sheila. When four or five days of relative tranquillity went by in the Diener house, Richie was smart enough to learn, then his chances of getting money out of his mother were good.
George noticed Carol giving the boy a five-dollar bill one Saturday evening. As soon as Richie left the house, he took issue with his wife. “Richie has absolutely no financial responsibility,” he said. His voice was sharp, a tone he never used with Carol. “He’s probably going to use that five dollars to buy marijuana.”
“He has a date,” said Carol. “Seventeen-year-old boys do go out with girls, you know. Besides, I think he’s doing better.”
George shook his head in exasperation. How could he convince Carol that, to his way of thinking, the only way to deal with an errant son is to maintain a united position of parental firmness, an unbroken hard line until months—not days—of improvement could be experienced.
“You’re a very good person, Carol,” he said. “You’re the kind of person who thinks that giving a child everything he wants is the way to show love. I say that’s the worst possible thing. We can’t reward Richie just because he behaves himself for half a week. If he needs money, let him get a job. He’s old enough. Other kids his age are working. If he can’t find a job, then there are chores to be done around here.”
Carol nodded, not so much in agreement as in termination of the discussion. She wanted peace with her husband, too. Life to her was not a continuing thread, but bits and pieces, a day to be gotten through, a meal to be cooked, clothes to be washed, a meeting to be attended, a letter to be written. She did not often look forward or backward as George did. There were no dreams, no fantasies in her life; she sought only calm. S
he was tired enough without disturbing fantasies when she got into bed each night. Above all, she sought calm. If she did not make trouble, then there would be no trouble. If she could buy five days of sun with five dollars, it was a small price to pay. And there were always memories of her own childhood, of how grateful she was to her mother when Mrs. Ring tried to soften the unrelenting sternness of her father. If a father is steel, believed Carol, then a mother must be velvet.
Carol did agree with George on one issue: Richie should have a job. She read the classified ads of the Long Island newspaper, Newsday, and she kept her ears open for possible employment in East Meadow. Hearing one day that a large discount house was hiring, she telephoned and received confirmation that young people were being seen for stock-room jobs.
Richie was pleased with his mother’s piece of news. Together they planned what Richie should wear for his interview and how he should respond to the employment manager’s questions. “You’ll have to tell him that you don’t have any experience,” said Carol, “but that you’re willing to work and that you want the job.”
Carol drove her son to the store and parked the car in front. She looked over at Richie to give him a smile of confidence and a motherly pat, but the boy was suddenly frozen in his seat, his hand locked white and trembling on the door handle.
“What’s the matter?” asked Carol.
Richie took several moments to respond. “I … I just can’t go through with it,” he finally said. “What if they don’t take me?”
“You’ll never know unless you go in there and apply,” said Carol, worried that the old insecurity was flaring again.
Richie sat for several more pained moments. Then he shook his head. “I can’t. Mother, I’m sorry, but I just can’t. Maybe tomorrow.”
That night, when Carol told the story to George, she fretted over their son’s inability to go through with a simple job interview. “He has so little confidence in himself,” she said. George did not agree. “He has plenty of confidence when he needs it,” groused the father, “like when he talks on the phone all day long to those wonderful friends of his.”
Inspired by Mark’s sagas of easy crime, Richie tried burglary twice in the spring of 1971. His first attempt was on a house in East Meadow whose owners appeared to be away on a long trip. The lawn was overgrown, the shutters closed, yellowed newspapers clustered on the front porch. Following Mark’s instructions, Richie taped up a rear window, hit a pane firmly with a rock, and reached inside to unlock the catch. Gaining entrance, Richie found the house, as expected, dark, gloomy, and musty. But to the fledgling intruder’s shock, the house was not unoccupied. An aged old man suddenly appeared, ghostlike, from a back room. In a panic, Richie seized a broom and swung wildly at the ancient resident. He missed, and the old man kept coming at him with no sign of fear whatsoever. Searching desperately for an exit, Richie found the front door locked. He ran wildly about the house, the man shrieking curses at him. Finally a rear door appeared in Richie’s path and he charged through it, crashing against a window pane as he burst outdoors. A block down the street, running as fast as he could, Richie saw drops of blood on the sidewalk. He had cut his hand on the pane. The cut was not serious, but the experience dampened his enthusiasm for burglary.
“You’re really lame, Diener,” said Mark, when Richie told him the news.
In the first place, explained Mark, the seasoned young thief with the choirboy voice, you do not break into a house just because it looks deserted. A lot of families in East Meadow have aged relatives tucked away in upstairs bedrooms. It was true. An elderly aunt lived in Brick’s house, and Peanuts’ grandmother was the character of his home. After you find a likely house, instructed Mark, you get the name off the mailbox, look up the telephone number, and call. If there is no answer, then you go to the house and ring the front doorbell.
“What if some old man answers?” asked Richie.
“Then you say you’re collecting waste paper for the ecology drive, or selling cookies, or that you’ve got the wrong house. Shit, Diener, don’t you know anything?”
The second house fitted all of Mark’s specifications. Only when Richie gained entry, he couldn’t find anything worth stealing. Even the television set was chained to the wall. About to give up, he noticed a cigar box on a bookcase. Inside the box were twenty silver dollars, which Richie happily took. He expected to be able to sell the dollars for marijuana, but he discovered that none of his sources would take the money. “They’re hard to get rid of,” he told Brick. Finally Richie sold them to a small boy in his neighborhood for two dollars in bills. With that he swore off conventional burglary.
One night in Richie’s room, the four boys got off on downs. As he usually did, Richie underwent a burst of energy for half an hour or so before he faded under the power of the barbiturates. During his spree, he danced alone to the rock music coming from his record player. Then, seizing an imaginary guitar, he pantomimed the lead singer. Now he became Jackie Gleason, sagging his body, making it heavy, flapping his arms like an insane penguin swooping about the room. A remarkable mimic, particularly when stoned, Richie had the gift of evoking laughter in others, holding his three friends enthralled until the juices ebbed. He sat down in a corner and withdrew into himself.
An hour later, perhaps more, perhaps less, for the passage of time is tricky when deep sedation blankets the mind, Richie announced that to his thinking these downs were particularly good. They were not Seconals, for the “Lilly” trademark was missing. Nor could Brick vouch for their parentage, only getting assurance from his dealer that they were “respectable” downs.
Brick was pleased that Richie had gotten off so well on the dubious downs. “You’re really enjoying your head,” he said.
Richie nodded. If he could have one wish, he said, it would be for a large grocery sack full of Seconals.
Talk turned, as it so often did, to the dealers that the boys used as sources of supply. Tales of their rapid wealth were legend in the East Meadow drug culture.
There was, for example, a seventeen-year-old boy named Fritz who took orders for drugs on the telephone and then delivered them on his bicycle. After a few months, he moved up to a sports car and had enough money for tuition at Columbia University.
Another well-known dealer got a job at a large Long Island distributor of pharmaceutical products. As the story went, he stole a quantity of morphine powder, sold it at five dollars a hit, and earned enough in one week for a Kharman-Ghia automobile, a vacation in Florida, and a lavish wardrobe. While on holiday he met a beautiful girl and married her, still on the proceeds of his one week’s drug sales. “He has a kid now and is totally straight,” said Brick.
Mark’s friend Cantrell, the Vietnam veteran with the karate chop, remained the most dependable source of marijuana and pills, but—as Mark frequently pointed out—Richie almost ruined the connection. Richie had never met the famous dealer, but Mark had once pointed him out on the street. Later, Richie went up to Cantrell and asked if he could buy downs.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” hissed Cantrell. Richie backed off quickly, fearful of the karate feet. “Get away from me, shithead,” shouted Cantrell.
It took Mark several days to pacify his dealer, and he scolded Richie for having tampered with him. “I told you that Cantrell doesn’t sell to just anybody,” repeated Mark with annoyance. “I told you he has to like you.”
The very downs that affected Richie as he sat in the corner of his room, with his friends stoned and scattered about him, had come from Cantrell. Mark had been “fronted” with one hundred dollars’ worth of Seconals by the dealer, which meant that Cantrell trusted the youngster enough to let him have the drugs on consignment. When Mark sold them, he paid Cantrell the asking price, pocketed a small profit, and had enough pills to use himself, and to give to his friends as he had done.
Richie had a question. From where did Cantrell get his merchandise?
Mark did not know for sure, but he suspected
the next step up the ladder was another young man, about twenty-three, who was often seen around East Meadow in a beat-up, nondescript Dodge. “I saw him once at Cantrell’s,” said Mark, “a real bum-looking guy, but he had like fifty pounds of hash in the trunk of his car. It was all in fertilizer bags stamped IMPORTED FROM LEBANON.”
Beyond him? “It’s somebody big in New York,” speculated Mark, “somebody rich and quiet and unknown.”
Brick perked up. It was difficult for him to talk when stoned because his words slurred together in a guttural groan. Usually he would lose track of what he was saying in the middle of his anecdote, and the others would have to remind him where he left off. Once, Brick said, he had been taken by a friend to a large and rambling house in the fashionable Westbury area of Long Island. “This older guy owned it, about forty-five,” said Brick. “He took us to this back room and there was a secret wall. Like in the movies. Behind it were garbage cans full of dope—pot, pills, whatever you’d want. Like thousands, man, like tens of thousands of everything!”
“What’d you do?” asked Richie excitedly.
“I got sick just thinking about it.”
“Why don’t we rip him off?” said Richie.
Brick looked blank. For the moment he could not figure out who Richie was speaking of. “Who do you mean?” slurred Brick.
“That dude. The one with the garbage cans full of dope.”
Brick frowned. He was back in focus. “You’d get dead very quick if you messed with this guy.”
The two boys ambled through the sprawling covered Roosevelt Field shopping center, a few miles from East Meadow, stopping in front of a boutique where teen-age girls danced in and out, to the tempo of rock music blaring from speakers. In youthful lettering, the store’s name was “Ups ’n Downs,” which on one level meant pants and tops. But both Richie and Mark smiled at the double entendre. “I may open a shop called ‘Reds for Heads,’” said Richie.
At the department store that was their destination, Mark hesitated before going in. He had briefed Richie several times, but he wanted to make sure, as commanding officer, that his instructions had been absorbed.
Richie Page 14