American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Andy and I stomped and stomped these idiots. One guy was bleeding so much, I nearly fell on my ass. His blood was like grease under my boots. I was so intent on crushing these guys, I didn’t see the cops coming at us from all directions. They grabbed me. They grabbed everybody. One of the wise-mouth hicks lying on the ground lifted his finger and pointed to me. He said, “The shoes. The shoes.”

  The cops shined their lights on my boots.

  “So what? Everybody wears shoes,” I said.

  “But nobody got shoes on like you,” said one cop. He must’ve thought he was Sherlock Holmes. He grabbed my hand to cuff me, and I got uptight.

  “You’re arresting me ’cause of my boots?”

  “Are you wise?” the cop asked me.

  “No, man. I’m not wise. I see you’re a cop who likes shoes. How about I take mine off and put them up your ass?”

  Right away all the cops take out their sticks and start beating me. More of our guys from the door come out. They see me getting hit, and—not thinking—they jump the cops. More cops run in from the street. We have a riot of cops. They arrest everybody.

  We were two days in jail before my uncles could take care of the cops. They dropped every charge. It’s America. They can’t keep you in jail for the shoes you wear.

  WHEN I came home with my face smashed up, stinking of jail, Phyllis nagged me. “Can’t you go anywhere and just have a nice time?” she asked.

  As soon as my face healed, Phyllis twisted my arm into taking her out. She wanted to go to Hippopotamus. My mind was sour when we went in there. We’re standing near the bar waiting for Phyllis’s cocktail, and I hear a guy talking so loud, his voice is louder than the music. I see this loud-talking clown a couple feet away—thinks he’s a player in his safari jacket leisure suit, talking to a couple of stupid-looking broads. He’s one of those people that has to be extra noisy to show off what a big shot he is. When he laughs, he wants everybody to hear what a good time he’s having. He’s really scratching my nerves. I walk over to him and politely ask him to shut the fuck up.

  He turns away and gets real quiet. End of story. I parade Phyllis through the club. She dances a little. We have a few laughs with friends. A couple hours later we’re ready to go. That night we had driven in my green Eldorado, which I parked a couple of blocks up from Hippopotamus on 52nd Street. I leave Phyllis in the club and walk out alone to get my car.

  A half block from my car, I turn and see the jerk in the safari suit coming toward me with a pistol. He’s not saying a word. I see in his eyes he’s going to shoot me. There’s nothing else in his mind.

  In any fight, you always need to analyze the situation. If someone comes at me swinging, I’m not going to run into him and make the force of his punch stronger. I’m going to back away and weaken his punch. You should always think of how to take away the other guy’s advantage.

  This guy is maybe twenty feet from me. When someone comes that close to you with his gun out, your best move is to find cover. But there’s no cover where I’m standing. I don’t have a piece on me at that moment. Even if I did, the guy will shoot me in the time it takes to reach it.

  I know I can’t stay in place. Staying in place will just help him aim better at me. But if I run away, he’ll shoot me in the back. Here’s the truth of the situation: If a guy is a few feet from you with a gun, my belief is your best chance is to run toward him. I know that might sound crazy, but think about it. You run at him, he’s only going to get one shot off before you’re close enough to fight him with your hands. If you run away, he’ll have time to fire every bullet in his gun. I’d rather get shot at one time than many times.

  So I run at this asshole. I assume he’ll hit me once. I’m not Superman. I won’t be able to see the bullet spinning at me and step aside from its path. I just hope he doesn’t shoot me in my heart, or my eye.

  The moron hits my leg—in the meat of my thigh. He’s so stupid, I grab his gun. He doesn’t release it, but I’m able to jam my finger into the trigger guard. On a revolver like he has, if you jam the trigger, the hammer sticks and nobody can fire the gun. Once I have his gun, I get control of the whole situation. This guy doesn’t know how to fight. I knock him down and push his head into the pavement. I take the gun from him and see it’s a little popgun, a .22. I think, I ought to just put it in his mouth and pull the trigger.

  But this asshole doesn’t even deserve to get shot. I take his little gun, and I beat his brains in with it.

  The important thing when you beat somebody with a gun is, always lock your finger under the trigger or under the hammer to make sure you don’t accidentally shoot yourself by force of smacking the gun on the other person’s body. Once you secure the trigger, always beat down with the butt of the gun on the other person’s skull or teeth or whatever you’re trying to break. Never hit with the barrel. Some of these guns on the street are pieces of shit. You beat somebody with the barrel, and it might fly off and hit you in the face. The other point of hitting from the underside of the gun is, most trigger guards have sharp edges, and they’ll slice up the jerk’s face while the gun butt is breaking his bones.

  This guy in the safari suit—I would not admit to you that I beat him to death—but by the time I finished, half his brains were in the gutter.

  When I finally got in my car to pick up Phyllis, I was a mess. I got pieces of the guy’s brains all over my shirt. My leg was bleeding. When you get shot, it burns. By the time we got home, I felt like my leg was on fire.

  Obviously, with that guy’s head split open on the street, I could not go to a hospital and have people ask me how I got shot. Phyllis had a level head, and she helped fix my leg up at our place. The bullet missed the artery at the top of the thigh and circled around the bone. But I will tell you I screamed bloody murder that night. We had to cut a hole on the other side of my leg to get the bullet out.

  Phyllis bitched at me for days, “I told you you’d get shot. Wild Indians get shot. Now maybe you’ll listen.”

  But I never listened. The truth was, as bad as Phyllis thought I was, she didn’t know the half of it.

  * Still located at 225 East 60th Street, Serendipity 3 is known for some of the most extravagant ice cream sundaes sold in Manhattan.

  * Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and Jacqueline Onassis were all Serendipity regulars at different periods.

  * A former Harlem Globetrotter, Chamberlain was an NBA champ who played for the Lakers in the early 1970s. Later, he became known for his claim of having hooked up with more than ten thousand women during his career.

  † The woman Jon is speaking of, whose name has been removed from this book at her request, was famous as a model, then as an actress.

  † Frazier was an NBA Hall of Fame inductee who led the Knicks to two championships, in 1970 and 1973, and was famous for arriving at games in his custom Rolls-Royce.

  21

  JULY 2009—HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA

  E.W.: While sleeping in the guest room at Jon Roberts’s house, I awaken at sunrise to what sounds like a gunshot. I sit up and listen for other ominous sounds but hear only the routine morning noises of the house—Jon calling his dogs, his son Julian tramping down the stairs. I go back to sleep.

  At eight o’clock I find Jon in the kitchen preparing French toast with cream cheese—just like they made it at Serendipity. After he serves the French toast, Jon curses and massages his right hand. Jon’s doctor has told him that the metal plate in his head is pressing on a nerve that sometimes causes his right hand to spasm and clamp into a fist—as it is doing now. Jon uses his left hand to pry open the fingers on his right hand. I have seen this scene before. In Blade Runner, when the combat replicant played by Rutger Hauer starts to die, his hand clamps shut, and he forces the fingers open by jamming a nail into his palm, Christ-like. Jon pulls his fingers open without stigmata, but he follows my eyes to his hand and guesses what I’m thinking.

  J.R.: Yeah, I saw this in Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer’s hand gets fucked
up. Julian pointed out to me that my hand has the same problem. This is the pain I get for what I did to people all those years. See, for God or the Superior Being, this is His way of punishing me for what I did in life. I accept it. I’m going to lose this hand, and then the other, and then other parts of my body. Eventually, I’m going to lose everything. It’s divine retribution.

  E.W.: What was that loud noise this morning?

  J.R.: You heard that?

  E.W.: It sounded like a gunshot.

  J.R.: I was on the deck this morning, cleaning a rug, and I looked up, and there must have been a thousand birds flying over the house. They were everywhere, like flies. One of them shit on my head.

  You know it would be very bad for me to be caught firing a gun in this neighborhood.* But let’s say, hypothetically, that the sound you heard was me shooting at the birds after I got angry at the one who shit on my head.

  E.W.: That was a hypothetical gunshot I heard?

  J.R.: Exactly correct. Now, this is the crazy part. After I hypothetically shot into the sky, a white bird fell at my feet. Would that not be a sign?

  E.W.: What would it mean?

  J.R.: A dead innocent white bird. That would be Satan throwing me a sign. That would be Him saying, “Hey, bro. This is to remind you I got my eye on you. You’ll be mine soon.”

  Obviously, I’ve chosen the side of evil my whole life. Nobody could’ve convinced me to do things differently. I don’t care if God had appeared on the highway and said to me, “Hey, Jon. I’m God. Drop your evil shit, and I’ll take care of you.” It was never going to happen. I’ve always been too loyal to Satan.

  If there is a heaven and hell, I know where I’m going. But I’m not worried. They say God takes care of his people. I expect Satan will take good care of me. I’ve worked for Satan my whole life. I’ve got to be one of His best representatives.

  I don’t expect hell to be any different than my life on earth. I’m going to get a nice smooth job, a nice smooth bed. People think hell is filled with the whores who walked the earth. But if Satan is as nasty as they say, He wants the good girls to come to hell. Girls that have never been laid, what do you call them?

  E.W.: Virgins.

  J.R.: Virgins. Those are the girls Satan wants to bring into hell. When I go to hell, I bet Satan’s going to put me back on the job. He’s going to send me to go find virgins so I can convert them. That’s how His game works. He’s the same as God. He’s always got to be recruiting. Who better than me to serve Him? Satan’s not going to give me bad shit in hell. Please, I’m His man.

  But I anticipate that here on earth I will not have a pleasant time dying. I’m going to suffer because of what I’ve done to people in life. Why would whoever controls the universe let me die peacefully in bed? I’m going to have a horrible, horrible death. God will give me a good beating, His way, before I get my reward from Satan.

  E.W.: Do you really believe that?

  J.R.: Only the part about me having a bad death. You know me, I don’t believe in nothing. Do you want some more jam for your French toast? I know you like apricot, but I swear to you, the taste is much sharper with grape.

  * As a convicted felon, Jon cannot legally own a firearm.

  22

  J.R.: For my father evil was a tool. In the early 1970s I realized I was different than him. Evil for me was not just a tool. I liked doing the evil thing. When Phyllis used to say I was a wild Indian, she didn’t have a clue what I was really doing. Forget about chasing women, or my little schemes with credit cards and fake diamonds. What I liked more than anything was to rob people, just like when I was a kid.

  I was crazy about rip-offs. It made no sense. There was more money in the clubs. The robberies always had the potential to get me into a lot of trouble. As far as my uncles went, I had to keep this a secret. I had to lead a double life. But I was addicted to robberies, the same as Petey was addicted to heroin.

  I liked the trick of robberies—winning people over and then turning everything upside down on them. I liked putting a gun in people’s faces. I liked seeing the surprise in their eyes. When I robbed somebody, the best way I can explain it to you is like this: it’s like getting your rocks off fucking a girl. Robbing somebody is the same, but it’s a different tone. It’s like having an orgasm in your brain.

  I never set up people I met in my clubs. I’d go to somebody else’s club or a restaurant, and I’d look for people who seemed hip. We’d get friendly, smoke a joint together. I’d find out if this person wanted to buy something, or sell something. It didn’t matter to me. I’d rip off money or drugs.

  Part of my thrill was, I never knew how a robbery would go down—how people would react when I took my gun out. One time I went into an apartment with some kids who believed they were going to sell me some hash. I pulled out my gun, and one of the idiots I was robbing put his finger in the barrel.

  “Now what are you going to do?” he says.

  “What am I going to do?”

  Boom. I pull the trigger. Instead of the bullet cutting off his finger, like I expected, the bullet fragments and goes into his hand. His whole knuckle explodes. There’s shit from his hand everywhere. He goes down screaming. Everybody in the room is in shock. I start laughing my ass off.

  “Is anybody else going to do something stupid here?” I say.

  His friends got very quiet. They emptied their pockets without giving me any more aggravation.

  A FEW months later I’m robbing some stockbrokers. These are young Wall Street kids who think they can dabble in dope dealing. We meet in an office after closing. These guys actually show up in suits and white shirts. I pull out my gun. One of them says, “That’s not a real gun.”

  I act like I believe him. “Wow. You’re sure about that?” I say.

  “I’ve seen a lot of guns. That’s a fake gun.”

  “Okay. You caught me.”

  He starts to come toward me, and I shoot him in the foot. He goes down screaming his guts out.

  I look at him and his friends, pissing in their suits now, and play with them. “You know what?” I say. “I thought this was a fake gun, too. I should get my money back from the guy who sold it to me.”

  I never ceased to be amazed. The smartest people often did the dumbest things.

  SOMETIMES I was the one who fucked up. I was friends with a black guy named Herbie. Herbie was into the back-to-Africa movement. He had an Afro and dressed in African muumuus and sandals. He was a big-time hash dealer. But he came to me to set up a bunch of rich white hippies. They were college students at NYU who planned to use their college money to get into dealing. Herbie didn’t want the competition. So he pretended like he was going to help them get get started in order to rip them off. He asked me to do the robbery. It had to look like Herbie was the victim in this so he could keep their trust and still do business with them.

  The main hippie kid lived in an apartment near West Broadway. Herbie told the kids I would sell them hash. What I used to do was carry a suitcase that I’d fill with phone books. I’d put my gun inside the suitcase. That way, if anybody frisked me when I came in, I’d be clean. I’d take my gun out and rob them when I opened my suitcase to allegedly show them the drugs.

  The minute I came in the apartment, I saw this rip-off was going to be a problem. It was a long, narrow railroad apartment. There must have been ten kids jammed in the front room. They were packed in like Puerto Ricans, sitting on cushions and crates. Herbie was sitting by the door. One of the hippie kids says, “Let’s see the hash, man.”

  I say, “Hey, man. I don’t want to be robbed. Show me the money first.”

  Another kid pulls a stack of money from under a pillow and holds it up. I open the suitcase and pull out my gun. I say, “Everybody stay down. I just want the money.”

  Out of nowhere, two guys in that room rush me. I guess they wanted to show off what great athletes they were. I didn’t want to shoot anybody and turn a simple robbery into a homicide, so I tried fighting t
hem. I hit the first kid on his head with my gun. He goes down. The other kid tries to grab my gun.

  If you ever need to take somebody’s gun, the first thing you should do is grab the barrel and push it back, point it at the guy who’s holding it. Only when you got it pointed away from you do you then try to block the trigger or try to break it from his grip.

  The kid trying to take my gun is a moron. He points my gun at his own leg and tries punching, like we’re in a boxing match. He’s such an idiot, he squeezes my hand and fires the gun into his own leg.

  After the gunshot, it was panicsville in there. The hippie girls were screaming. Everybody started jumping around. I couldn’t see where the money was anymore. I got very uptight. I worried these kids might all try to rush me.

  I decide the best way to take control of the situation is to shoot another hippie. When I’m shooting somebody just to make a point, I always aim for a leg. I shot the closest hippie to me, but I was so uptight, I fired a couple of times. I ended up hitting one guy in the ass and a girl in the foot. I remember this poor girl had on white go-go boots, she was crawling around screaming. I really did not intend to hit the girl. But it’s unpredictable what happens when you fire a gun.

  I did get everybody’s attention. I yelled, “Stop. All I came for was the money.”

  Finally, everybody froze. I pointed my gun at Herbie and told him to find the money. He got it from a kid and brought it to me. I didn’t want to leave Herbie in there now that I’d shot three people. Even if they didn’t guess we were in on it together, they might get mad that he brought me here. So I grabbed Herbie by the Afro and said, “The nigger’s coming with me. Anybody calls the police, I’m killing him.”