“How can you even think of bugging your own son?” she said.
George grew impatient. He was spending as much time bickering with his wife these days as he did with his boy.
“Because I think Richie has graduated from just using drugs himself,” answered George. “I think he’s buying and selling them to other kids. I think he’s a pusher.”
The charge brought alarm to Carol’s thin face. She shook her head in disbelief.
“If he is,” George went on quickly, “then I want to stop it before it gets any further. And unless I get some proof, some concrete proof, he wouldn’t listen to me. You know that.”
Carol considered what her husband was saying. The scheme was beyond her imagination. “I still think it’s wrong,” she said sadly.
“Of course it’s wrong,” said George. “But it’s not as wrong as what Richie’s doing. I can’t think of any other way to stop it.”
In an outdoor magazine, George had spotted an ad for “surveillance devices.” He drove to a store on Queens Boulevard in New York City. There, with no more trouble than in buying ammunition for his target pistols, he purchased a bug for his home telephone. It consisted of four special wires. It cost only fifty dollars.
Two of the wires hooked into the telephone wire, anywhere on the line. The other two went, said the instructions, into any home tape recorder. George borrowed Russell’s inexpensive machine and told him that he was taking it to the shop for repairs. He placed the recorder in the basement, inserted a cassette for one hours’s playing time, and tested the apparatus. Everything worked. The instant someone upstairs picked up the telephone receiver, either to answer an incoming call or to make an outgoing one, the recorder snapped on automatically and taped every word. When the telephone receiver was placed back on its cradle, the recorder automatically shut off.
The next morning George went to work with the impatience of a man who has set out a trotline. He could not wait to see if he had snared the big fish. When he reached home that night, he went immediately to the basement. To his dismay, the tape had run out, so that the machine was inoperative. As he rewound the cassette, he thought that there would be nothing recorded. But the moment he pushed the Play button, he heard what he wanted to hear—and what he did not.
No matter where George stopped or started, there was talk of drugs. Ninety percent of Richie’s telephone conversations seemed to deal with pot or hash or downs.
At the beginning, for example, Richie was speaking with a boy whose name was Carlos:
RICHIE:
I had two joints on me the other night, you know? And my father started pulling his usual shit on me. I figured he was gonna call the cops or something to check my room. But instead he goes, “Richard, would you please empty out your pockets?” So I got a little nervous, you know? I say, “No.” He says, “Richard, I told you to please empty your pockets.” I don’t even answer him. I just walk out. So he dropped it. He couldn’t do anything about it.
CARLOS:
So what’d you do with ’em?
RICHIE:
I smoked ’em in school today. There was a nark—I think they got narks in school now, guys who watch to see that you don’t smoke in the parking lot. They seen me doing it. I saw ’em fuckin’ starin’ at me. So I ran out in the football field where I could eat ’em.
CARLOS:
You ATE ’em?
RICHIE:
Yeah. I’m gettin’ good at it. I used to throw up.
Several minutes later on the tape, Mark telephoned Richie. Richie sounded heavily stoned, his speech slurred. Gaps appeared not only between sentences, but between words in sentences. Apparently Peanuts had asked Mark earlier in the day to buy ten dollars’ worth of hash. Mark inquired of Richie if the sale was legitimate—or a rip-off.
MARK:
Where’d Peanuts get the ten bucks?
RICHIE:
Don’t worry about it. He’s here now. He doesn’t have it right this minute, but someone’s buying some grass from him in about ten minutes.
MARK:
Who?
RICHIE:
I said … don’t worry about it.
(Peanuts’ muffled voice is heard in the background.)
He says he has five so far. He’ll have the other five as soon as this kid gets here and pays him.
MARK:
Put him on for a second?
RICHIE:
(Irritated) What for? What difference does it make where and when he gets the money?
MARK:
I don’t wanna walk all the way over there and then he doesn’t want it.
RICHIE:
Don’ be lame, Mark. If you got something to sell, then Peanuts’s got something to buy with.
An unidentified young voice calls Richie. He does not introduce himself, but Richie seems to know him well.
RICHIE:
Brick got some really good grass.
VOICE:
I was there when he bought it.
RICHIE:
You get it for him?
VOICE:
No.
RICHIE:
But you think it’s good?
VOICE:
He paid $130 for a half pound.
RICHIE:
(Incredulously) What? You serious?
VOICE:
Swear to God. And listen to this. There’s about five ounces of twigs in it.
RICHIE:
Five ounces of twigs!
VOICE:
You couldn’t even see green. All you could see was lumber.
RICHIE:
I knew he’d get took. Brick’s so lame. I bought fine stuff. That Colombian grass. Dusted with mescaline, you know? I bought four ounces and had four more fronted to me. They’ll be linin’ up to buy that.
VOICE:
I may ask you to front some for me sometime. Sometimes I haven’t got time to sell it as fast as I need to. You know anybody who wants acid?
RICHIE:
Nah. Not me. It flips me out.
VOICE:
Well, I got like five hundred tabs.
RICHIE:
I’ll ask around.
Just before they hang up, Richie and the caller make an appointment to meet the next afternoon in the teachers’ parking lot at East Meadow High to discuss the sale of a quarter pound of hashish.
George played the tape twice, before and after dinner. He made several pages of notes, then took them to bed to read them. Carol said that she had no interest in either the tape or the notes.
The next day George sat Richie down in the living room, brought out the tape recorder, and played a portion of the tape for him. When it was done, when Richie was still sputtering and professing profane outrage that his father would do such a thing, George issued an icy directive. “Assemble those friends of yours,” he said. “Get them over here fast.”
Brick, Mark, and Peanuts, warned by Richie of what they were about to hear, entered the Diener house with none of the bravado of the street and the school corridor. Suddenly they were three extremely worried boys, one only fourteen, one fifteen, one nineteen, none over five feet eight, all with faces the color of ash. George had earlier told Richie that the bug had been on the family telephone for an entire week, that he now possessed numerous cassettes of damning conversation.
In reality, George had but one. He would have to play his bluff carefully. He did not relish the coming scene, but then, on the other hand, neither did he dread it. Into an ordinary life a splash of color and excitement had fallen. The heroics he had pursued in vain across the seas of the world were in, of all places, his living room. There was a moral purpose to the coming confrontation, but there was more. In George’s fantasy, he was no longer just a salesman and part-time moonlighting security guard. He was a crack detective. He had the evidence. The enemy was in his grasp.
Draining his voice of color and passion, trying to keep it as crisp and professional as a plainclothesman would, George made a brief accusatory speec
h in which he charged that his own son and three accomplices were actively engaged not only in using illegal drugs, but in buying and selling them to others.
“Let’s hear the proof,” challenged Mark. George found him to be the “snottiest” one of the four.
As he spoke, George held several cassettes in his hand. He selected one, seemingly at random. The others were fresh and blank. He placed the tape on the machine and pushed the button to let the hour of incriminating talk spin its course. When it was done, an uncomfortable silence enveloped the room. Carol, sitting at the dining-room table, rose and went to the kitchen on an imaginary errand.
Suddenly Peanuts spoke up. “What are you gonna do with them?”
“I should give them to the police and stop this business right away,” said George, pausing for effect. Brick shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. He was on probation for drug possession already—and George knew it.
“But …” George hesitated. “I’ve decided to call your parents instead and play them these interesting little dramas.”
Peanuts stood up in alarm. “Oh, Jesus, don’t tell my parents. They have enough problems already.”
Carol, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, spoke for the first time. “If they have enough problems,” she said, “what are you doing this for?” She pointed toward the tape recorder.
Peanuts and Mark and Brick now focused on Richie, who had remained silent for the painful hour. They expected him to come to their defense, to disabuse his father of the plan. But Richie appeared almost amused by the situation, as if—for the moment at least—he rather enjoyed the whole affair, as if he relished being found out, like a man who carries around a painful secret that finally is revealed.
Not Mark, however. He elected to challenge George’s invasion of his privacy. “Go ahead,” he said. “My parents know already. They let me smoke pot in front of them.”
Carol shook her head in disbelief. “I doubt if that’s true,” she said.
“Is it, Mark?” demanded George.
Mark dropped his eyes, backing off.
Brick cleared his throat. It was difficult for him to speak, not only because he was slightly stoned from a pre-dinner joint, but because he pictured himself being sent that very night to the Nassau County jail.
“What if we all promised to stop doing … that,” said Brick.
“I would,” put in Peanuts, eagerly.
Mark bounced his head in affirmation.
George balanced the taped evidence gingerly in his open hand. He stretched the suspense for all it was worth. Finally he spoke. “I don’t believe you,” he said, “and it’s against my better judgment. But I’m going to give you a chance. For the time being, I won’t call the police. And … I won’t call your parents.”
His side of the bargain, George said, was his decision not to tape any more telephone calls.
Once more a fragile peace settled on the Diener household. It held, however, only a few days. Richie skipped dinner a week later and emerged from his room obviously stoned, on his way out the front door. George remarked that the vow Richie had presumably taken with his compatriots had not lasted long.
Richie responded that it was none of his father’s business.
Then it could become police business, or court business, shot back George. He rose to intercept his son. Richie raised his fist.
“All right, son,” said George. “You believe in the law of the streets. You believe strong is best. Put up your dukes.” George raised his fists and crouched as if in the ring.
Richie, seemingly prepared for an encounter, patted a noticeable bulge in his jacket pocket. It was a razor, he said, and if his father pushed him too far, he was ready to use it. George, his temper once again full out, seized a piece of bicycle chain to defend himself. In an earlier quarrel, Richie had produced the chain as a weapon. George had taken it away from him. Now, for a few moments of paralysis, father and son glared at one another; then they circled slowly in the living room while the television set delivered canned laughter in accompaniment.
Carol came into the room and broke the spell. “Stop it!” she cried to George. And, to Richie: “If you hate us so much, if you don’t like our way of life, the things we believe, then why don’t you just leave? Why don’t you go away and …” She faltered. She wanted to swallow the words that had come rushing out at the sight of her husband and her son.
George put down the chain. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, to Carol, not to Richie. Richie looked first at his mother, then at his father. With eyes reddened from grass, or pills, or possibly even tears, he ran out of the house.
George found a new place that night, under his desk, to hide the tape recorder. He also called the police department and, when an officer appeared at the yellow house, told him of the razor incident. George gave him the cassette containing the drug talk. The officer promised to listen to it, but, in the meantime, he suggested that George seek the counsel of Family Court.
“Your honor,” wrote George in a letter to Judge Burstein of Family Court, “we need help. It seems my son hates me and I don’t know why, because I can’t talk to him, every time I try he gets nasty and we get into a fight and I end up calling the police. He says he loves his mother but he is killing her with the crazy things he is doing to get even with me, like having my wife called to pick him up at school because he was high on some drug and causing trouble in class. If I try to exert any parental authority, he threatens me with retaliation, he has threatened to have a bunch of his friends beat me to a pulp, he has threatened to take my possessions while I am at work and destroy or sell them, in fact he has taken some of my things and sold them. We have not had much trouble since the last time I called the police because I haven’t been talking to him, I let him go where and when and with whom he pleases, because this is the only way there can be any peace in my house. This is the way he likes it, he has since returned to hanging around with the group I told him to stay away from and with whom he was involved with drugs. I must admit I am at the end of my rope, I just do not know what to do and I sincerely hope you can help us.”
The letter, which took George the better part of an evening first to wrench from himself, then to translate to paper in his hunt-and-peck method of typing, was presented to the same caseworker, Morton Ozur, who had dealt with the Dieners six months earlier. George declared that he wished to file a “family offense” charge against his son. He also asked for an “order of protection” against the boy.
Caseworker Ozur read the letter and questioned George. Did Mr. Diener realize that an “order of protection” was an extremely rare tool, decreed by a judge only in the most drastic of domestic circumstances? Judges are very loath to issue such an order because it is a powerful weapon for a parent. It lays down a bill of particulars for the youngster: no drugs, for example, rigid curfew, no confrontations with a parent. “If a kid breaks such an order,” pointed out Ozur, “the police make an automatic arrest and the kid usually goes to jail for six months.”
George nodded. This was what he wanted. He had done a little homework on juvenile law, and it seemed to him that this was the only way to solve the problem of Richie. “I’ve tried to work things out with him,” said George, “but nothing I try seems to last very long. If he starts up another one of these awful fights, then I want to be able to call the police and have him arrested and let them cool him off.”
George ticked off his reasons. Most immediate was the chilling scene with Richie patting the razor in his pocket and George picking up the chain to defend himself. But there had been other evenings as forbidding as this one, he hastened to add. George also told of putting the tap on the family telephone for one twenty-four-hour period, of removing it and of putting it back on secretly. It was still there, George said, whirring away every time the phone rang. George had full particulars of the opium rip-off from Beaver, the Solly Greene violence, the daily and nightly conversational wanderings through the puzzling world of drugs.
Ozur n
oted that several months earlier George had haled Richie before the court, only to withdraw the charge because the boy had made a “miraculous recovery.” He further pointed out that at the time, the court had strongly recommended family counseling at the Drug Abuse Clinic.
Had this been done?
George shook his head.
Why not?
George shrugged. “He refuses to go,” he said.
The caseworker cautioned George that the possibility existed of doing Richie more harm than good by bringing him before the court again and again, only to withdraw the charges.
But George persisted. He did not consider himself a man who owned a balky animal and, in an attempt to make it behave, ran it by the rendering plant now and then.
A hearing was set for December 16, 1971, and George brought Richie to court. They drove there in silence. Once more they stood before Judge Burstein. She advised Richie of his right to counsel and explained what that meant. He waived the right and said he could speak for himself.
Immediately the judge asked for an explanation of the razor incident. Richie said that he did not threaten or intimidate his father. George attempted to interrupt, but the judge shushed him, saying he would have his turn.
Judge Burstein steered the conversation, for it was only an informal hearing at this point, to drugs. Here she instructed the court stenographer to go off the record and told Richie he could speak candidly, without fear of his words finding their way into a permanent file.
Richie admitted smoking pot and taking barbiturates. Judge Burstein nodded gently. As a lawyer, she had represented her first drug client in Nassau County in 1952, before suburbia had such problems. “I have a particular empathy for any child who comes into my court on a drug charge,” she said. “I am going to recommend immediate family counseling before this court does anything.”
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