American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  I WAS only in Texas a few months when my sister’s husband was transferred to Brunswick, Maine. So I moved up there with them. They enrolled me in high school and tried to make me into a good kid. I started to chafe against my brother-in-law. He was this straight-arrow, military guy, and we did not mix well.

  JUDY: My husband had been a star football player in college. He was so all-American, they used his picture in Marine recruiting posters. I saw the tension between Jon and him. But since my husband flew out of a base in Keflavík, Iceland, and was gone weeks at a time, I believed their differences would be manageable.

  J.R.: My brother-in-law flew planes that hunted for Russian submarines, and he thought of himself as a hero. He judged me for who I was. But I judged him, too. I looked down on people who were not on my side of the world. Unfortunately, I was not nice to my brother-in-law.

  He had a silver Corvette that he loved. Before he left for Iceland, he would jack up the car in the garage so the tires would float a half inch above the floor. He explained to me, “This way my tires won’t go square.”

  The first night he left for Iceland, I cranked his car off the jacks and drove into New Brunswick. This was a little shithole town where kids would pass the time by drag racing on the streets. Even though I didn’t have a license, I was a good driver. But I wasn’t experienced with the ice that Maine had in the dead of winter, and the Corvette was a lot more powerful than my Outcast Impala. My first night out, I raced some kids in another car and spun that Corvette into a snowbank.

  My sister flipped. But we found a guy who filled in the mangled fiberglass body on the Corvette with Bondo putty and repainted it. By the time my brother-in-law returned, I had the car back in the garage on jacks looking cherry. The night he came home he went straight to the garage, inspected his car, and pointed to the tires like he was teaching me a lesson. “See. My tires are perfect.”

  The guy could supposedly catch a Russian submarine, but not me wrecking his car. What a moron.

  THE ONLY thing I had connecting me to the world of normal people was basketball. That’s what kept me in school. I fantasized that I would be a professional ballplayer. They put me on the varsity team in Maine, even though I was in ninth grade.

  There was maybe one black kid in the school. His name was Ray Archer, and we got friendly because he was on the basketball team. Ray’s dad was an officer in the military, and Ray had a lot of confidence in himself, even though he was a minority.

  One day Ray got into trouble after school. There was a little café in town, with a couple of pool tables and a soda fountain, where kids hung out. There were townie kids from the high school and college kids from the nearby college, Bowdoin.

  Bowdoin was a weak school in most sports except lacrosse, and the lacrosse players were very arrogant. They would come into our hangout and try to steal the high school girls. One day the Bowdoin kids got into a fight with Ray. They called him a “nigger” and beat him up.

  I wasn’t there for the fight, but when I saw Ray with his busted-up face the next day, I was mad. I don’t care if somebody calls somebody else a “nigger” or a “wop.” What made me angry was how the college kids thought they were better than us townie kids. They were like the fraternity kids in New Jersey looking down their noses at everybody. I decided to show them who’s going to look down on who.

  Ray wanted nothing to do with another fight, so I got another kid from school to help out. Melvin Abruzzi* was an Italian kid originally from Boston, and he was a freak of nature. He was a monster who must’ve weighed three hundred pounds. Once you talked to him, you realized he was a true idiotic moron. He was borderline retarded, but his parents had faked him into the classes for normal kids. Stupid as he was, he was a great guy because he would fight anybody.

  I brought him with me to the hangout in town and waited for the lacrosse fucks to come in. And they did come in, and Melvin and I had a terrible fight. We picked the one day to fight them that they were carrying their lacrosse sticks from practice. They beat us bloody with those sticks. They chased us out of there. When we hit the sidewalk, I said to Melvin, “This is bullshit, man. I’m doing something else.”

  The lacrosse kids lived in a fraternity house by the Bowdoin campus. I waited until my brother-in-law went to Iceland and took his Corvette off the jacks. I filled a glass apple-cider jug with gasoline and drove to the fraternity house. I waited until the lights went off and gave everybody time to get into bed and start dreaming.

  Then I carried my cider-jug Molotov cocktail up the lawn to the house. There was a nice big window in front. I lit the rag and tossed it. The jug was flaming before it even hit the window. It crashed in, and boom, the house lit up. Shit was flying everywhere. Those arrogant asshole college kids were running out in their undershorts yelling and screaming. By the time I got back to my brother-in-law’s car, I was laughing my balls off.

  There were no witnesses, but everybody seemed to think I did it. The cops picked me up at my sister’s house. They took me down to the station. But they were small-town cops. They had no evidence. I played dumb. They let me go.*

  JUDY: Jon had only been with us a short while when the incident occurred at the fraternity house. I was so mad at Jon. But when I confronted him, he told me that the boys in the fraternity house had called his friend a “nigger.” Jon’s explanation did not make it okay that he possibly had been involved in the firebombing, but it was more understandable. Jon was sticking up for his friend.

  J.R.: I knew my sister would take my side if I played up the racial angle. I would have gone after those college kids, excuse or no excuse. I was sick of that town.

  I realized one day I would never be a professional basketball player. It hit me that pro basketball was a fantasy, and I lost my only reason to stay in school. Since I was such a hairy kid, my beard grew thick and heavy. One weekend I grew a goatee and came into school with it. That was against the regulations. They sent me down to the vice principal’s office. He told me, “You’ve got to shave the beard.”

  I let my beard grow all over my face. I came into school looking like I’d just climbed off a mountain. The vice principal called me into his office again. He said, “You can’t play on the basketball team with a beard.”

  I grabbed a chair. The vice principal started yelling. I wasn’t thinking. I smashed the chair over his desk. People ran in, screaming. That was my last day of school. They didn’t press charges as long as I agreed never to set foot on the grounds again. That was fine with me.

  JUDY: I felt sorry for Jon. In many ways, he was a normal teenage boy, trying to fit in. I could look in his eyes and see how alone he was. But Jon didn’t let his setbacks slow him down. He was a hard worker, and he took several jobs.

  J.R.: I pumped gas at a filling station, I painted houses, then I got a job on a lobster boat. I worked for a man named Dave Clemens, an old Maine guy with no teeth. We’d go out before dawn and haul in the traps, take the lobsters, and bait the traps. After a few weeks I proved myself, and he’d send me out alone. I enjoyed being on the water, away from everybody.

  Off the coast was a place where rich people lived, called the Point. One day I was going past in my little lobster boat and I saw a beautiful girl swimming there. She had dark skin and blond hair. She looked like she’d dropped from outer space. I drifted my boat near her, and we started talking. Her name was Farah Aboud. Her father was from Lebanon and her mom was American, which is why she looked so unusual. She was beautiful, and I decided the first day I saw her that she was mine.

  JUDY: Jon’s relationship with Farah was a positive in his life. I had waited and hoped for Jon’s first crush, because I believed that caring about another person would change him.

  Farah had so much going for her. She was the sweetest girl. Her father was a respected college professor. Her mother was lovely. They were a gracious family. They invited me and Jon to the house for international dinners where they cooked Middle Eastern food. These were such good times. When Jon lo
oked at Farah, his eyes would light up. I hadn’t seen eyes like this since he was a little boy. He truly loved her.

  J.R.: Farah gave me blue balls as big as the ocean. I could not get anywhere with her. We’d lie on the couch in the living room after her parents would go to sleep, and she’d get very aggressive, then she’d stop. Even though Farah was two years older than me, she wanted to stay a virgin. She was focused on going to college.

  The Abouds had a forty-two-foot sailboat, and at the end of summer the family took a trip on it. Farah’s father invited me to come. Our first few days on the boat, everybody had a good time, slipping into little islands, swimming, looking at the stars at night.

  Near Kennebunkport there was a storm. Mrs. Aboud got sick, so we docked the boat, and Professor Aboud took his wife to a hotel in town. He stepped off the boat and said, “I’ll see you guys in the morning.”

  That surprised me. He was an intelligent man. I could not understand why he would leave me alone on the boat with his daughter. That night Farah and me started fooling around like we always did. This time, when she reached the point where she would normally stop me, I did not stop. I was forceful, but she did not put up a fight. We had sex all night long.

  The next morning she did not talk to me. She didn’t talk when her parents came back on the boat. Everybody looked at me. Finally, I reasoned it out. Farah was getting ready to go off to college, and she knew I was no college boy. She liked me enough to fool around, but she was mad I had taken her virginity because in her eyes I wasn’t good enough.

  It was very tense those three days until we made it back to Brunswick. As soon as we hit the dock, Farah and her mother left. Professor Aboud came up to me and said, “Jon, there’s something very strong in the air here. What happened?”

  I said, “Why don’t you ask your daughter.”

  He started to give me some attitude, and I said, “I’m not the moron who left my daughter alone on the boat.”

  Professor Aboud said a thing to me that made no sense. “I’m sorry, Jon. I thought of you like a son. I wish we could talk.”

  I realize now that maybe he did view me as a son. But I was so crazed then that his reaching out just made me angrier. I was too far gone for some do-good asshole to try to treat me like his son.

  I had a terrible fight with my brother-in-law after the boat trip with the Abouds. It started over some grass clippings I had left piled in the yard. My brother-in-law came in the kitchen yelling for me to pick them up.

  “Not now.” I tried pushing past him.

  He shoved me. The guy was a lot bigger than me, so I grabbed a frying pan and hit him on the head. He went down like a sack of shit. I leaned over him and said, “You think the frying pan hurts? I’m gonna make your insides hurt even more.”

  He looked at me like I was going to beat his brains out. I laughed and told him how I’d wrecked his Corvette, that it was plastered together with Bondo but he was too dumb to notice. Then I walked out of there for the last time.

  I broke into the Abouds’ boathouse and robbed it. I took Professor Aboud’s tool kit, his outboard motors, and a couple of chain saws, and I sold it all at a shop for $400. I used the money to buy a bus ticket to New York.

  I’d had my fun in Maine.

  * Captain Maddox is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s former employer.

  * When Jon is fond of someone, he often begins sentences with the improper grammatical construction “me and …” I preserve this when he introduces it with a particular friend, but generally correct it in subsequent uses with a given friend.

  * Melvin Abruzzi is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s friend.

  * Jon’s tale of townie-on-frat-boy arson struck me as potentially apocryphal; however, a source I interviewed who knew Jon in Brunswick confirmed it. This source added the intriguing detail that several parents in the town “thought highly of Jon and felt sorry about his being an orphan” and arranged to hire an attorney for him when it appeared he might face criminal charges for setting the fire.

  7

  J.R.: When I left Maine in the summer of 1964, I was sixteen—old enough to start working for my uncle Sam Riccobono. He put loans on the street that needed collecting when people fell behind. To be clear, this was not a job that meant I was in the Mafia. It was more like pickup work.

  I took a percentage of the collections and got other benefits, too. One guy who owed my uncle money turned me on to a nice studio apartment by the mayor’s mansion. It was a fifth-floor walk-up, rent controlled for eighty dollars a month. I hooked up with my Outcast friends and gave them work helping me collect from the deadbeats.

  The world was changing in 1964. A couple years earlier only street people were involved in drugs. Now it was college kids. They were coming into Greenwich Village to score weed. Me and Jack Buccino did a couple of rip-offs in the Village just for fun, and we got the idea, why not go on to college campuses? To my thinking, it seemed smarter to go after college kids than poor people. That was the problem with my dad’s business. It was based on poor people. I’d go after rich kids.

  In Jersey there was a school called Fairleigh Dickinson University. Jack and I went there to do our first college rip-off. It was very easy. Jack, who wanted to be an actor, started acting. We were standing around some vending machines by a lounge, and Jack told these kids I’d won a basketball scholarship and was thinking of coming, but I wanted to know about the campus social life. That was all it took for some kids to take us to a party. We saw who was passing joints around and asked where they got them, and they introduced us to the dealer kids. The first few rip-offs, Jack and I went into the dealer kids’ dorm rooms and took their money with our hands. As long as they didn’t have lacrosse sticks, I could beat up college kids in my sleep.

  The next school we tried was Princeton. This was a very hoity-toity school. Some of the kids wore suits with bow ties. When we tried our story out—of me attending Princeton on a basketball scholarship—I felt like I was becoming an actor in a film. I had to work at gaining their trust and concentrate on being the opposite of who I was.

  At Princeton they had fraternities called eating clubs. I played basketball with some kids, and they invited me to their eating club. I went alone and had a dinner, and when the kids asked about my family, I told them my father was a professor in Maine. I talked about our house on the Point and our forty-two-foot sailboat. It was easy to fit in. Finally I ended up in a room someplace smoking weed with Princeton kids. Bingo. They told me about a kid who lived off campus and was their dealer.

  Jack and I came up with an idea that would make more money than just robbing the dealer alone. We would tie him up, beat him, and make him call his friends. He’d tell them to bring their money because he was going to give them a great deal on drugs. This way we’d grab rich kids coming through the door like it was Christmas.

  The first time we did this, it was hilarious. My friend from the eating club took me over to the off-campus dope dealer. As we got to the front door, Jack, Petey, and Rocco drove up in another car.

  “Who are these guys?” my friend asked.

  “Shut the fuck up.” I was no longer the kid coming to school on a scholarship. I was myself now. I enjoyed this part even more than acting.

  We forced this kid into the house with the dealer. I liked seeing the surprise in these kids’ faces when we came in and tied them up. We ended up doing this several times at Princeton and at a couple other schools.

  When we first showed our true selves, the college kids always said the same thing. “I thought we were friends.”

  They didn’t understand that once they got into the drug-dealing business, they were in our world. Our rules applied, not theirs.

  We wouldn’t tell them what we wanted at first. We’d beat them. We’d scare them. Rocco would practice his professional boxing on these kids if they gave any attitude. They’d always become willing to follow our scheme. These kids had no loyalty. They’d call every friend the
y had and tell them to bring all their money because they were going to sell them the best pot in the world. We’d grab every moron college kid that came through the door. We tied up so many in one house, we ran out of electrical cords.

  We knew these kids would be too scared to call the cops after we left. They couldn’t. They were doing an illegal thing. If any of these kids wanted to be tough, they’d never seen animals like us before.

  At sixteen or seventeen I was now a very bad person. My friends were the same. Our attitude was, You want to fight? We will break your hands, bite your ears off, whatever we need to do to make our point. We have no feelings. We are from the street. Half the Outcasts were junkies at this point. When they saw money in front of them, their eyes blinked like pinball machines. I introduced these college kids to my way of thinking. Evil is stronger than good. When I am alone in your house with you, you will learn this, too.

  I’m not proud of the way I acted, but I can’t take it back. I did this.

  A few kids tried to be brave. One kid told us he was a fifth-degree black belt in karate. Dominic, the best fighter in the Outcasts, said, “Okay. I’m going to give you the best shot you got. After that I’m going to fuck you up.”

  We had guns, so we knew if the kid by some miracle actually knew karate and hurt Dominic, we’d shoot him. We let the kid loose. He asked if he could warm up. We sat back and watched as he did some kicks and stretches, like he’s giving a class in Princeton karate. Finally Dominic walks up to him and says, “Okay.”

  The kid gives Dominic his best kick to the chin and misses.

  “That’s your Princeton karate?” Dominic asks.

  Dominic gives him some Jersey karate—he kicks him in the balls. He throws the kid through a door, beats him down, stomps him. I’m laughing my ass off when I feel my shoe crunch on the floor. Dominic had knocked the kid’s teeth out of his head. Dominic got so crazed with beating him, he broke the kid’s arms, his legs. He fucked him up to the point where I’m sure he never told anybody ever again he was a fifth degree in anything.