“When it would snow, there would be five hundred boats and nobody else there,” Hayward recalls. “Some of these boats were houses, you know? So, we would just go and raid all the liquor and take whatever we wanted. We had a boat we would always hang out at, and we’d open up the liquor and watch TV.”
Once Johnny and Gary were finished drinking and watching television, they would fill their backpacks with whatever valuables were in sight and stash their haul on a nearby abandoned boat before fleeing. Sometimes they would grab flare guns from belowdecks and run around the docks, firing at each other.
While Johnny and Gary certainly had a lot of fun burglarizing the boats, excitement wasn’t their only motive. Unemployed and craving drugs, the two struck a deal with their dealers—free pot and microdots in exchange for bottles of booze, CB radios, car stereos, or anything else worth a decent buck. Johnny and Gary found this offer hard to resist.
“There were lots of ways to make money,” Hayward says. “Gary and I would pull ‘Midnight Auto’—breaking into cars. We’d call some friends and say, ‘Hey, you want to buy some stereos? Give me three hundred hits of mescaline and I’ll give you five car stereos,’ or ‘How about I give you this CB radio and some walkie-talkies for a half ounce of coke?’ If that didn’t work, I would just go downtown and buy acid from Ricky. If you wanted acid, you went to the Acid King. . . .”
By then Ricky had moved on from the loading docks and set up shop in Cow Harbor Park. There, teenagers like Ricky Kasso and Gary Lauwers often found a mini-Woodstock waiting for them, with circles of nearly a hundred people as young as twelve and as old as sixty, drinking, smoking pot, and dropping acid. Northport Police officers would occasionally walk through but almost never intervened in any illegal activity. The patrolmen were infamous for not saying a word to anyone, as long as their hand wasn’t touching the beer between their legs.
“One time, I was hanging out in the little gazebo in the New Park,” Ricky’s friend Matthew Carpenter recalls. “One of my friends was messed up on drugs, and was just following this woman who was walking her dog. A cop walked by us, and said to us directly, ‘Don’t step on my toes, and I won’t step on yours. . . .’ I mean, the cops would buy weed sometimes. There were no drug tests back then, you know?”
One day a Northport Village police officer decided to take a stroll through the New Park. Johnny Hayward and Ricky Kasso were standing on the south side of the park, tripping on acid. Johnny looked up and saw the officer walking on the sidewalk beyond a row of bushes. A taste for mischief suddenly came over him. Acting quickly, he grabbed Ricky, and with all his might, swung the lanky teenager through the bushes and into the officer, who was knocked to the ground by the impact. The officer immediately leaped to his feet and started screaming at Johnny while Ricky sat on the sidewalk, trying to process what had just happened. As the officer continued his tirade, Ricky noticed the eight-point police cap on the ground and decided to join in on the fun. He quickly scooped up the cap, placed it over his mop of wavy hair, and ran wildly around the park.
“It was fucking hysterical,” Hayward recalls. “The cop said, ‘Knock this shit off!’ and walked on by. He didn’t do anything. You could have a joint burning in your hand in the park and they still would not say anything—they’d just walk on by. So, if you have that kind of environment, all of the dregs of society are going to hang out there.”
One of the New Park “dregs” Ricky Kasso soon became acquainted with was a strange man named Pat Toussaint. While Toussaint was only in his late thirties, his worn face and prematurely gray hair made him appear nearly twice his age.
“We used to call him Father Time,” says Richard Schock. “He was this skinny, scraggly old fuck from the Veterans Affairs hospital who had long, gray hair and always wore a bandanna. Northport had a very bad heroin problem in the 1970s because a lot of veterans were coming home hooked on it.”
Johnny Hayward also recalls Toussaint and his assortment of nicknames.
“We called him Father Time, Ghost of Christmas Past, Grandpa Dirt, and Pagan Pat,” he says.
Toussaint earned the latter nickname due to his interest in metaphysics and the occult—a passion he shared with Ricky. Hayward remembers Toussaint often wearing a silver pentagram necklace while carrying a copy of Anton LaVey’s 1969 bestseller The Satanic Bible. Those who hung out in the New Park recall Toussaint often sharing his insight into the world of Satanism with Ricky.
Macabre lectures, however, were far from the only thing Pat shared with Ricky and the other teenagers gathered downtown. Toussaint had been prescribed Librium by his doctors at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Northport. Librium, a habit-forming psychotropic drug with hypnotic and sedating effects, is often prescribed to treat anxiety and alcohol dependency. Toussaint, a longtime alcoholic, often sold his prescriptions for extra cash to supplement his monthly Social Security Insurance checks.
“Pagan Pat would get his Librium prescription from the VA hospital,” Johnny Hayward recalls. “Then he would come into the park and say, ‘Here; have some Librium, man! You won’t have to drink as much beer!’ or ‘I’ll trade you some Librium for some pot! I’ll trade you twenty Libriums for a joint!’ We used to get Librium from him all the time. If it was two in the afternoon and you wanted to get drunk and do some drugs, Pagan Pat was over there. So, we’d go sit down and talk with him for a couple hours while we got fucked up. We’d sit there, laughing at people all day long. We didn’t want to go home. We stayed out all the time, and here was this old man. I mean, he’s living. He’s old. He’s been doing this all his life. So, hell, we figured there was nothing wrong with this.”
“Old Man Pat was a Vietnam veteran who suffered from advanced alcoholism,” says Anthony Zenkus, a friend and peer of the New Park musicians. “He had post-traumatic stress disorder and was pretty out of it. There was trauma in this man’s life. Post-traumatic stress disorder is highly correlated with addiction. The Centers for Disease Control says that adverse traumatic experiences are the single biggest leading causes of addiction—not genetics. PTSD and advanced alcoholism damage the frontal cortex of the brain. Advanced thinking, judgment, and impulse control are all compromised severely. This was a guy who was not capable of much more than scoring his next fix.”
“Toussaint was never playing with a full deck, if you know what I mean,” retired Northport Police Officer Gene Roemer recalls. “He drifted in and out of reality during most of my interactions with him. He had some very accurate moments, but they did not last long. I would say that, during one of his drifting reality periods, he possibly influenced Kasso’s Satanic interests. That would be a good conclusion.”
“Pat was a little stir-crazy,” Dorothy, a friend of Ricky’s, recalls. “He rambled a lot about how people were evil and how the government was evil. He liked to talk about the Vietnam War and death, but Pat was of use to Ricky. He always had money at the beginning of the month. He would get his Social Security check, cash it, and get drunk. Then Ricky, Gary, and Albert would roll him for money. Sometimes they would trip him, and when he was down or his back was turned, they would steal his money. Other times, Ricky would ask Pat for a few bucks, and he would give him a dollar. Ricky would then reach over, take the bundle, and give him back the single.”
While Dorothy seemed to understand their dynamic, Ricky’s friendship with Pagan Pat confused others. Toussaint’s rough appearance made their twenty-three-year age difference seem decades wider. Most of Ricky’s friends understood him wanting to hang out with a fellow drug peddler—after all, he was the Acid King—but their relationship seemed to be rooted in something deeper. Some chalked it up to their shared interest in Satanism, while others had darker suspicions.
“The kids were creeped out by this Father Time guy because he was kind of a lecher,” Richard Shock says. “I think he was hanging around Ricky because he was trying to get young pussy. Maybe he thought Ricky and his friends would look up to him—like he was the leader of their coven or something
. . . .”
“Maybe he and Ricky simply gave themselves friendship, comfort, and some sort of companionship,” Anthony Zenkus counters. “People who are damaged do gravitate toward each other.”
Wherever the true strength of their bond was, Ricky felt emboldened by the gained knowledge that came with his uncanny friendship with Pat Toussaint. He often spent his days hanging out in the roundhouse, preaching to his peers about the devil. If a friend showed up to the New Park wearing a crucifix, he would tell them, “It should be upside down!” If someone mentioned God, Ricky would focus his bright blue eyes on them, calmly chanting, “Satan . . . Satan . . . Satan . . .”
Through his newfound devotion to Lucifer, Ricky Kasso had finally gained a sense of power in his life. If someone hurt, challenged, or annoyed him, he could strike back at them through intimidation by professing his love for the devil.
One Sunday morning, while mass was letting out at St. Philip Neri Roman Catholic Church, parishioners were shocked to find Ricky and Jimmy—both high on LSD—shouting at them about Satan from across the street. Ricky proudly displayed his upside-down cross necklace as the crowd made their way back to their cars, trying to ignore him. Sometime later, the two walked farther down Main Street and saw the sidewalk facing St. Paul’s United Methodist Church being replaced. As the wet concrete was drying, Ricky grabbed a stick and wrote, SETH IS SATIN, leaving a devilish in-joke about a friend to dry in the sidewalk.
The inscription still survives.
Other Northport residents recall Ricky often walking around downtown, speaking what sounded to them like Latin. Ricky’s chants may have, in fact, been a series of mantras detailed in The Satanic Bible called the Enochian Keys. The Enochian language, purported to be the language of angels, was first popularized in the sixteenth century by John Dee, an English mathematician and occult philosopher, and Edward Kelly, a self-described “spiritual medium.” Another possibility is that Ricky was training himself to speak backward, a practice advocated by Aleister Crowley in his 1929 book Magick in Theory and Practice. Incidentally, one of Ricky’s favorite musicians, Ozzy Osbourne, sang of the occultist in his 1980 song “Mr. Crowley.”
Again, this sort of behavior displayed by Ricky went largely ignored. To most people in Northport, Ricky was just another stoned teen rebelling through fear and intimidation. However, one of Ricky’s later boasts frightened and disturbed his peers far more than his previous ones ever had.
“He bragged about sacrificing animals to Satan or something, but we didn’t know if it was bullshit or not,” Glen Wolf recalls. “We never confirmed or saw anything, and it wasn’t like we’d go check on it. It was just more bullshit coming out of his mouth. We would just move to another part of the park if Kasso was around and pulling that stuff.”
Others believe Ricky’s tales of killing animals were heavily exaggerated.
“Ricky was never mean to me,” Jean Wells says, “but he did some fucked-up things like putting cats in the water so he could watch them freak out. Stupid shit like that bothered me.”
While friends like Jean and Glen were incensed by Ricky’s rants and deeds, others insist they could see through them.
“Ricky played Satan jokingly,” Johnny Hayward says. “We’d all be tripping out and he’d be running through the park like a crazy person, throwing his arms in the air, screaming, ‘I AM SATAN!’ ”
Still, between the increasing obsession with the occult and his constant homelessness, some of Ricky’s friends sincerely believed he needed professional help. At first Ricky resisted, citing his experiences with the private psychiatrist and Tom Fazio at the Place. Ricky’s friends couldn’t speak for the private psychiatrist, but Dave Johnson recommended giving the Place another chance, this time with a different counselor. Ricky’s friends told him to “go see the guy with the ponytail”—Tony Ruggi.
Ruggi’s good reputation was well-earned. Unlike many other traditional social workers, Ruggi would go out of his way to check in on Northport’s troubled teenagers. If he had a free afternoon, Ruggi would grab one of his acoustic guitars and head down to the two parks at the end of Main Street to jam with the kids, asking how they were doing between songs. His approach was sincere and the connections he made were strong.
One afternoon Ricky finally swallowed his pride and walked over to the Place. Stepping inside the small white house at 324 Main Street, he asked to speak with “the counselor with the ponytail.” Ruggi was free and invited Ricky upstairs to one of the individual counseling rooms on the second floor. Cautious and guarded, Ricky sat on a couch and broke the ice by politely asking Ruggi several questions about his background. The thirty-three-year-old counselor discussed his two master’s degrees—one in creative arts therapy and the other in social work—but also spoke of his love of listening to music and playing guitar. This immediately grabbed Ricky’s attention. A therapist who wasn’t ashamed to admit to loving rock music and even played guitar? The idea seemed ludicrous—yet here was Tony.
Ruggi kept two acoustic guitars at the Place, a Yamaha acoustic and an Angelica twelve-string, and invited Ricky to have a look at them. They were not top-end instruments by any means, but once Ruggi opened the cases, Ricky marveled at the guitars lying inside.
“I’d like to get one like yours one day,” Ricky told Ruggi.
By the time the guitar cases were closed, Ricky had decided that he trusted Ruggi. He sat back on the couch and vented about his problems at home and school. Ricky complained about his parents blaming him “for everything,” and how this often led to him being kicked out. He told Ruggi about having to sleep on the streets when he couldn’t find a friend’s car or garage to crash in, and how others would sometimes sneak him into their parents’ homes so he could take a shower and have something to eat. Ricky was particularly upset by how some of these parents said they did not want someone like himself in their house, despite knowing he was homeless.
Hearing Ricky’s stories left Ruggi frustrated. Here was a polite, articulate, and likeable young man who, as far as he was concerned, couldn’t catch a break. Granted, Ricky was sugarcoating a lot of his own issues, but that was typical of many teenagers. The kind and considerate kid sitting across from him was a far cry from the Acid King who wandered the streets of downtown Northport, peddling drugs and shouting praises to Satan. Still, Ruggi felt determined to help make a difference in Ricky’s life.
As the impromptu session came to an end, Ricky stood and said, “You know, you’re different from the other therapists.”
“Well, there are a lot of different ways to do therapy,” Ruggi replied. “This is the way that I do it, but if you’re looking for something else, I can give you a referral.”
“No,” Ricky said. “I liked talking to you. Can I stop by again?”
Ruggi told him he could, and for the first time in months, Ricky Kasso walked back onto the streets of Northport with something to look forward to.
Chapter 13
DURING THE EARLY MONTHS OF 1983, Ricky Kasso began showing up at the Place nearly every day. While never an official client of Tony Ruggi’s, Ricky still stopped in to talk, usually in the evenings. Sometimes he would bring his guitar and ask Ruggi to show him some chords. Ruggi eventually taught Ricky how to play “Stairway to Heaven” along with a few Doors songs. Once the guitars were put away, the two often talked over coffee.
One of the other people at the Place whom Ricky developed a relationship with was Ruggi’s coworker Suzi Strakhov. Strakhov was an involved parent and a popular substitute teacher in the Northport–East Northport Union Free School District who attracted attention and admiration for the grace with which she moved—almost certainly a holdover from her younger days as a dancer. While Strakhov was Irish, she had totally immersed herself in the Russian heritage of her late husband, Dmitri, often demonstrating Russian folk and Cossack dances to fellow counselors at the Place.
It was Strakhov’s mind, however, that won the most respect.
“Suzi had a mas
ter’s degree in pastoral counseling, but her knowledge in the field of psychology was vast,” Ruggi recalls. “She was always reading the latest books and articles. I think that’s part of what made it easy for a lot of kids to talk to us—not only did we have knowledge of a lot of what they were talking about, but we were truly interested in learning more and hearing what they had to say.”
Ricky Kasso may not have been initially interested in Suzi Strakhov and how she approached therapy—he had only seen her around the agency and had never actually spoken with her—but this soon changed. One day Ricky stopped by the Place to speak with Tony, but found he was busy with another client. Suzi, however, was free and struck up a conversation with Ricky. Once Tony Ruggi was finished with his session, he went downstairs and found the two engaged in a full-on therapy session.
Ricky noticed Tony and happily said, “I like Suzi. She’s just like you.”
Ruggi was pleased with Ricky’s enthusiasm.
“Suzi’s not just my coworker, Ricky,” he told the boy. “She’s also my friend. I trust her one hundred percent. If I’m not around and you need someone to talk to, you can talk to her.”
Ricky now had two people in his life who seemed to genuinely care about him. After all, Tony and Suzi certainly weren’t hanging around because they wanted drugs from him. They seemed to understand him. They commiserated with him as he spoke of his growing alienation and troubles at home and school. They laughed at his jokes and helped his guitar playing. Most importantly, though, they spoke to him like a real human being who deserved care and dignity.
The Acid King Page 7