Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  “First” repeated Mark once more, “we make sure this chick is working today in the record shop.” His reference was to a girl he knew who “looked the other way” when Mark walked out of the department with a bulge under his jacket. “If my connection isn’t there,” said Mark, “we just look around and leave—without taking anything.”

  Richie nodded, impatiently. He was getting bored with Mark’s battle plan.

  “Wait,” said Mark. “Remember, you walk around casually, like you were browsing. You pick out a record, you go into the listening booth. Maybe you pretend you don’t like it, and you put it back neatly. After a while you start selecting the ones you want to rip off. You keep them under your arm. The most I ever ripped off was thirty, but don’t take more than you can fit into the crook of your arm.”

  Mark demonstrated how to slip the stolen records under the left arm. “Then you slip your jacket over your shoulder. Don’t try to put it on, because it won’t work.”

  “I know … I know.”

  “Most important,” instructed Mark. “Don’t take all the records out of one slot, like all of the Stones. Don’t, repeat, don’t take the whole category. You’ve gotta be cool—or you’ll blow this girl for everybody.”

  Strolling into the record department together, Mark and Richie split by plan and began browsing. In less tha fifteen minutes, Mark glanced up and saw Richie almost bulling his way out of the store, exiting in a hurry with a huge bulge beneath his jacket.

  Mark’s eyes quickly swept the counter where Richie had been “shopping.” Two full categories—Led Zeppelin and Paul McCartney—were gone. Only the dividing partitions with the artists’ names remained in the rack.

  Outside the store, at their prearranged meeting place, Richie waited eagerly for Mark, who approached with noticeable anger. With pride, Richie displayed the twenty records under his jacket. Mark looked at them with disdain. “I told you not to rip off whole categories,” he said. “The manager’s bound to notice, and if that girl gets fired, the whole thing is blown forever.”

  Richie was dismayed. He had expected congratulations from his captain. “I got nervous,” he said. “I saw this guy in a suit watching some other kids.”

  Later that day Mark took the records to his fence, a nineteen-year-old East Meadow boy of rich parentage who paid $2.50 for each new album, provided he liked them and provided the cellophane wrapper was still intact. Sometimes he even gave Mark shopping lists of music he desired. When the youth rejected albums, Mark offered them to Cantrell in exchange for marijuana, or, failing that, peddled them to youngsters in his neighborhood for fifty cents, a quarter, anything they would bring.

  Despite Richie’s gaffe, his share of the escapade earned him eleven dollars, which he used to buy a quarter ounce of marijuana and a handful of downs. Within days he exhorted Mark to try again. Richie lacked the courage to attempt the job by himself, and he did not yet know the all-important girl clerk who would “look the other way.”

  Mark agreed to give his friend one more chance. A few Saturday afternoons later, they entered the record department. The shop was crowded with young people, which pleased Mark because this would make his exit more graceful. He tried to keep one eye on Richie’s meanderings, another on the shop manager, and at the same time browse nonchalantly. Suddenly Mark saw Richie taking advantage of a crowd of people at the cash register, using them as cover to sneak out with records under his jacket. Only a few minutes had passed, not enough for Richie to conduct a leisurely shopping tour. Irked once more, Mark left the record department without taking anything and caught up with Richie at the elevator. Richie unzipped his jacket enough for Mark to glance quickly at the albums inside.

  Once again Richie had taken an entire category—every Jefferson Airplane album on the display counter. Mark anxiously looked back toward the record department. Two men in business suits were pointing toward the elevator, pointing at them.

  “Shit,” snapped Mark. “Now you’ve done it.” Fortunately the elevator doors opened, and the two boys leaped inside. Mark hammered on the Close button to make the doors shut. Directly before him, the two men approached purposefully. When they were only twenty feet away, when Mark was trembling and a very frightened little boy, the doors glided together. On the next floor up, Richie took his stolen records and shoved them under a pile of remnants on a sale table.

  “Don’t look back,” said Mark. “Take your jacket off like you were hot and sort of carry it.” Richie did as he was told. The two boys managed to leave the store and disappear into the afternoon shopping throng outside without being stopped.

  “That’s it,” said Mark. “You’re a hopeless robber, Diener.”

  By the end of the day, Mark had told Brick and Peanuts how Richie bungled the rip-off. He expected a point or two of status to come his way, he being the master thief trying to manage the incompetent apprentice. But Mark was the weakest member of the quartet, and his disapproval of anybody was worth little.

  Richie remained silent a few days in face of Mark’s criticism. He refused to discuss the matter with Brick or Peanuts, either. But one night, late, he telephoned Mark and came icily to the subject.

  “I hear you’ve been talking about me,” Richie said. His voice was flat. Mark knew he was stoned because there was a floating, disconnected tempo from Richie. But he had never felt his friend’s wrath before. “I may not do things your way,” said Richie. “But that ain’t necessarily the best way.” He hung up.

  When several more days passed without a phone call from Richie, when even Brick and Peanuts ducked his calls, Mark’s insecurity chewed holes in him. He called Richie up and mumbled an apology. Perhaps, he suggested, they could steal albums at another East Meadow store, a large discount house named Modell’s.

  “Can’t,” said Richie. “I’m just leaving for Roosevelt Field.”

  “You gonna rip something off there?” asked Mark, anxious to be invited along.

  “Nah. My mother gave me money to buy a shirt.”

  “Why don’t you just rip off the shirt and keep the money? I could help you.”

  “I may. I may not. I can manage.”

  Mark swallowed all the humble pie. “Can I come with you?” he almost begged.

  “My mother’s dropping me off. You’ll have to meet me there.”

  Mark agreed, gratefully.

  Making their way across the store, something caught Mark’s attention and he told Richie he would meet him at the shirt counter. A few minutes later, Mark appeared there with cream on his whiskers. Richie held a package in his hands.

  “You bought the shirt?” Mark asked incredulously.

  “I bought one,” said Richie, “and I borrowed one.” He patted the package. “What’d you do?”

  Smiling enigmatically, Mark started walking out. Richie kept pace with him. “It’s very difficult for me to get through this store without ripping something off,” said Mark quietly.

  Richie glanced at his friend. He had no bulges of betrayal. “What’d you take?” he asked.

  Mark fingered the cut of his blue pilot’s jacket.

  “You already had that on when you came here,” scoffed Richie.

  “Wrong,” said Mark proudly. “I had one just like it—only cheaper and with no lining.” Mark opened his stolen coat to flash a bright orange interior. “I saw a big rack of these and I just sort of switched,” he said. “Then I put my cigarettes and some tobacco crumbs in the pocket of this one so it would look like I already had it on.”

  Richie nodded. He was impressed.

  At the counter of watches and pendants, Richie stopped to look. Mark nudged him with a worried elbow. “There’re two guys in suits following us,” he whispered. “Every time we stop, they stop.” He gestured with his eyes to a pair of obvious store detectives some fifty feet away.

  “Walk out casually,” said Richie, suddenly in command. “Whatever you do, don’t look back.”

  But Mark could not resist a glance to the rear. The two
detectives were but a few feet behind, within earshot.

  Richie, keeping his eyes straight ahead, spoke in a strong voice that carried well behind him. “I’m sick and tired of being hassled by fuzz for things I didn’t do,” he said. Richie reached into his jacket and pulled out a small piece of rubber hose—probably the one George had cut as a weapon of discipline. Thumping it with one hand into the palm of the other, Richie went on, loudly, “If any motherfuckin’ dicks try to hassle me, I’m gonna hit ’em with this. I’m fed up with taking the blame for what other kids do.”

  Whether Richie’s remarks frightened the detectives, or whether they merely sought to avoid a nasty scene in the crowded store, the two men took an abrupt right turn and permitted the two boys to leave the store.

  As the two youngsters waited beside Carol’s car for her return from shopping, Mark thanked Richie. “I’m on probation,” he said, “and I’d kill before I’d go back to the Children’s Shelter.”

  Richie accepted his friend’s due bill.

  This escapade quickly went the rounds of the group. All who heard it nodded in admiration of Richie’s show of strength. Mark told Peanuts, “Diener’s weird sometimes, he has a fucked-up attitude, but when it counts he gets his head together good.”

  Carol read Richie’s next-to-last report card toward the end of the school year in spring, 1971, and put her head in her hands. In his junior hear, Richie was failing algebra, failing typing, barely passing history and English, making a very low 72 in Earth science.

  When George came in she showed him the dismal list.

  “How can he make grades like these,” she said, “when he did so well on his college boards?” On that test, Richie had scored 480 verbal, 520 math, “enough,” the counselor at school said “for Richie to get in most colleges anywhere, any one except the Ivy League.”

  “I don’t find it surprising at all,” said George. “He doesn’t study, he won’t even stay home when I tell him to. Might be the best thing that could happen to him if he got kicked out of school.”

  Carol shook her head. This was not what she wanted. “Why don’t you talk to him?” she said.

  George snorted at her idea. “We don’t speak. Haven’t you noticed? If I don’t talk to him, he doesn’t yell at me, and if he doesn’t yell at me then there’s quiet around the house.”

  With a sigh, Carol wondered if she ever did anything right. More and more she found herself not as buffer, but as victim, damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. “You act like you’ve given up on him,” said Carol.

  George measured his response. Now seemed as good a time as any to let his wife know exactly how he felt. “I’ve been thinking,” he said candidly, “that if we can just raise him up to eighteen, then maybe he’ll leave, or go into the army, or get out on his own.”

  “You mean put him out, don’t you?” said Carol, alarmed.

  “I didn’t say that,” answered George. But Carol worried that what he said and what he meant were two different things.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On a fine early spring day in 1971, two years after Richie became a user of first pot, then pills, George Diener stole three hours from his grocery route. He was sitting instead on a bench in a crowded hallway of despair in the Family Court building of Nassau County. When his name was finally called, he told the harried young woman at the information desk, “My name is George Diener, and I want to file a wayward conduct petition against my son, Richard.” He pronounced the ominous legal term with authority. He had learned of its existence from his policeman neighbor.

  Even though Richie was almost seventeen, and liable under the law to be judged as an adult for any crimes that he might commit, the boy could still be brought under the arm of Family Court as a delinquent juvenile until he was twenty-one.

  Told he would have to wait his turn for a caseworker, George obediently returned to the bench and tried to keep from responding to the sad and solemn faces about him. He did not fit here, he reassured himself, not alongside the black women rocking tearful children whose fathers had run away, not with the Puerto Rican men who sat with stoic dignity and steel backs while their mustachioed sons slumped beside them, surly and impatient and, thought George, probably dangerous. Occasionally one of the black or brown people looked at George as if he were a member of their fraternity of domestic grief and pain.

  It had taken an enormous act of will and a night of quarreling with Carol to bring himself to this place. And now that he was here, George wanted nothing more than to flee, to bolt down the stairs and out into the spring morning and be about his business of selling pepper flakes and bay leaves. No immediate cause had brought him to the court, no new straw had broken his resolution to handle his son at home by his own means. George acted only out of a feeling of despair. Deep within him, unspoken even to Carol, was the hope that the authority of the law could reinforce his waning role as father. Richie’s truculence and insubordination were more than troublesome; they were a stinging slap across George’s image of himself. The one thing he had done well in life, or so he imagined until Richie’s irksome adolescence began, was sire and rear this son. He could not accept failure now—at forty-two—in that corner of his being. There were so many others.

  But he was acting without Carol’s support. Until past midnight he had tried to win her over, but she went to bed with tears, and although she rose as she always did at six and made coffee and got the boys off to school, she was noticeably chilly with her husband.

  All this means, George had told her when he initiated the subject of a “wayward conduct petition,” is that the juvenile authorities would keep an eye on Richie, and if he really went off the deep end, then he would have to answer to the law.

  Carol would have none of it. It was a terrible idea, she said. She pleaded with George not to do it. Call it shame, call it admission of failure on her part, call it fear of her family and the neighbors finding out, call it anything you want, said Carol. But let’s wait before we take our son and throw him into Family Court.

  George was adamant. “His name is already on file there,” he reminded Carol. “It’s not like he was a lily-white angel and about to be blackened for the first time. And besides, it isn’t the police. He won’t get a criminal record. I’m trying to keep him from getting a criminal record. Everything’s strictly confidential in Family Court.”

  Well, we might as well take an ad out in the newspaper and tell everybody, said Carol. And she left the room. All of this came back to George as he sat on the bench and listened to the crying babies. Just when he was about to weaken and find the steps, his name was called.

  In a small office he shook hands with a serious-looking caseworker named Morton Ozur. George blurted out his business. “I have reason to believe my son Richard is using marijuana, LSD, mescaline, and possibly other drugs,” he said. “The situation is terrible around our house. I can’t control him anymore. I can’t even talk to him. In other words, we don’t speak.”

  Caseworker Ozur, who specialized in drug matters, listened impassively. He questioned George briefly, then made an appointment for the father to bring his son in for a joint meeting two weeks hence. There are many avenues open in a matter like this, said Ozur. “But the best beginning is to start talking with each other.”

  That night, Richie received the news from his father with a blank expression. He spoke not a word when George revealed that he was filing a “wayward conduct petition” against him. Probably Richie did not understand its weight. He left the dinner table and hurriedly telephoned his circle of friends to reveal the news.

  “My old man just filed a delinquency charge against me,” he told Mark, trying to sound as if the development was no more serious than a fly on his arm to be shooed away.

  “Jesus,” said Mark. “You better hope they don’t send you to the shelter.” Mark often talked of his stay in the county juvenile facility. A year before, he had given a thirteen-year-old girl an LSD wafer, and she suffered violent reaction. He
r boyfriend went after Mark with a shotgun, and with good cause Mark elected to run away with a friend to Pennsylvania.

  The two boys stole food from supermarkets and blankets from discount houses to survive during the freezing winter flight. Once, Mark said, they used up two boxes of stolen kitchen matches to heat up bricks for warmth in a farmer’s field. After a few days in Pennsylvania, the pair returned to East Meadow, whereupon Mark was hauled before Family Court. The prodigal son was furious. He thought he would be praised for coming home.

  “They’re not gonna send me to any shelter,” said Richie, his voice not quite as steady.

  “The judge said to me, ‘I have to remand you,’ and I stayed there a month,” said Mark. “Anything I am now, the shelter made me. It’s hell. It made me develope ‘attitudes’ against everybody.” Attitudes was one of Mark’s favorite words. He summed up people as having good attitudes, or bad attitudes. Richie, he decided shortly after they met, had the most unpredictable “attitudes” of anyone he had ever met.

  “What makes ’em decide to send you there?” questioned Richie.

  “Whatever they fuckin’ well want to do against kids, they fuckin’ well can do,” said Mark. “I had hair down to my shoulders and they told me I’d have to get a ‘baldie’ every Wednesday. I fought ’em when they came for me, I fought ’em every day. I bet they fuckin’ well remember old Mark at that fuckin’ shelter. They used to lock me in my room a week at a time to punish me.”

  “I’d run away first,” said Richie. “I’d join the marines.”

  “They’d find you,” said Mark. “Everybody’s hooked into a computer and they can find you no matter where you run to.”

  To her frank surprise, Carol noticed immediate improvement in Richie’s behavior. He stayed home weeknights, he came to dinner on time and even conversed a little, he listened attentively when Carol suggested he go to the Drug Abuse Council—voluntarily—and talk about drugs. Only at that did he balk. Mark and Brick had both been in long attendance there, he told his mother, and it did not seem to be working for either of them. Besides, insisted Richie, smoking a little grass now and then is hardly reason to go to a shrink.