Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  The first time I robbed someone, I did it just because I wanted to be accepted by the older kids who recruited me to be their lookout. They were mugging people, just running up and taking their money. You didn’t need a weapon; nobody but a fool would demand proof that the bulge in your hoodie pocket was a gun or knife and not your fist. We stayed out of our own neighborhood, and we never robbed a woman—snatching pocketbooks was against our code. I was scared as hell that first time. From what I can remember, we got seven or eight dollars, then rode our bikes fast as we could out of there. We used the money to go get high. I never could rob anybody unless I was high. I’d try to do it normal, then I’d back off it. But you get high, you get bold, and it’s to hell with it, and there you are, stealing.

  AT SIXTEEN, I DROPPED OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL. I don’t know if it was counselors, social services, or the Colemans, but someone gave me another chance, with a spot in an alternative school. I didn’t last even two weeks. I had made my choice about the life I wanted, and I wanted my freedom. The Colemans probably should have just kicked me out, but they didn’t, and I would come and go from the upstairs apartment with my brothers as I pleased, sometimes disappearing for weeks at a time. The apartment was a shambles by then—nothing had ever been maintained or repaired or even really cleaned, with five wild boys living in it. There were holes in the wall, broken-down beds; it was trashed. Downstairs where the family lived, it was middle class, but up where we were kept, it was ghetto. The Colemans didn’t give a shit, and we didn’t, either.

  My first serious brush with the law happened in my teens when I spotted some guy walking along with his stereo box. He looked like a pussy, so I decided to rob him. I stuck my finger in a potato chip bag, told him it was a gun, and walked away with the stereo. Police caught me fifteen minutes later up on Hollis Avenue, where I planned on selling it. I was sauntering up the street with this just-stolen stereo, playing it loud. That’s how high and brazen I was. The cops took me up to the 105th Precinct, then to Central Booking. From there, it was off to Rikers Island and my first time behind bars. It was scary. Rikers was a zoo. A very dangerous human zoo. Right away, my prized black suede Converse 69ers were stolen.

  I yelled out into the cellblock, “Listen, whoever got my sneakers, give me a fair fight!”

  A friendly informant pointed out the thief, and I made plans for a counterattack with what was known as a lock-sock. You could get a lock from the canteen to safeguard your clothes and hygiene items. If you stuffed it into a sock—I planned to add a couple of bars of soap for good measure—you could swing it at someone’s head and bust a nose or even crack a skull. Hit the kneecap hard enough, and you could make a guy buckle. My sneaker revenge was supposed to go down when we were let out for rec, but the guards saw what was about to happen and pulled us apart. The other inmate had a pen. At Sing Sing, I would learn that there’s a way you can turn a simple ballpoint pen into a deadly weapon. Convict 101.

  I ended up in juvenile detention for sixteen months for that robbery, but once I was out, it was back to business as usual.

  One of my favorite ways to kill time as a dropout was to take the subway into Manhattan and spend all day in Times Square. This was when it was a neon jungle of peep shows, dives, and street hustlers. There was a big multiplex movie theater, and I would either buy a ticket if I had the money or sneak in, then spend the entire day watching kung fu and other martial arts films, slipping from one theater to the next. I’d emerge only when I got hungry, around four or five in the afternoon, blinded by the sunlight. If I didn’t have any money on me to buy a hamburger or slice of pizza, I’d look for someone to rob for some quick, easy cash. Gambling spots were an easy target. You knew people had money and could see who was walking away with what. I liked to shoot dice myself, and I could make a hundred, two hundred dollars playing craps in the park. Then I’d go down to Delancey Street, buy fifty pair of underwear, and resell them for quadruple what I’d paid. I liked to run the craps games myself. I could start with a quarter and leave with three hundred dollars at the end of a good day. I used brand-new dice, and I always made sure my dice were legit. I was a kid playing grown-ass men who were thirty, forty, fifty years old. You don’t come in with no damned loaded dice. You wanna die, that’s the quickest way: mess with someone’s money. I was likable. I’d give a store fifty bucks and get beer on tab. I had people trusting me. When I owed, I paid. So my reputation was good. Every now and then, if a guy was arrogant and I didn’t like him, I would go rob him. And I still hadn’t lost my childish temper about being a sore loser: if you won money off me, chances were good that I would come get it back. The kind of people I targeted weren’t the kind who were likely to report it. The streets had their own Darwinian law, and when it came to survival, I had been fit since I was six and my father was throwing me against walls.

  BACK AT 208TH AND MURDOCK, I got into a fight one day with a boy around my age named Stanley Jackson. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I got the best of him, right there in the middle of the street. Word got around. The old guy who ran the store looked at me and said knowingly, “Oh, you the guy who beat up on Stanley.” Stanley had two black eyes and a busted lip. I was good with nothing but a couple of scrapes. “Yeah,” I told the storekeeper, “that was me.”

  Stanley was no punk. He was a stickup guy who hung out with a Rastafarian named Barney. Not long after the beat-down, Stanley and Barney rode past me on a bike, and Barney pointed a rifle at me. I looked at him, looked at the rifle, and wondered for a heartbeat if I was about to be gunned down. Stanley and Barney just drove past and kept going.

  The following night, there was a dance party at Andrew Jackson High School. I was somewhere else, out doing my thing, but my brother Ernie, the music-loving guitar player, went to the dance. When he came out, Barney and Stanley were waiting for him. Stanley jumped him and stabbed Ernie through the heart with a butcher knife. I came home that night, and the whole house was quiet and still. Pops was in his usual chair in the basement. He told me my brother had been murdered, then picked up his knife and stabbed his block of ice.

  “Dewey, I know if you was there, that would never have happened,” he said. He was crying.

  It was the first time in all those years that he had shown any goddamn love for me and my brothers, and it took death for him to do it.

  Everyone who knew me thought I was going to kill Stanley Jackson, given the chance.

  I knew it, too.

  Murder had redefined me again.

  3

  WHEN I LOST ERNIE, I LOST MORE OF MYSELF. You can make yourself a stone, but life can still chisel away at you, and this blow splintered me into too many sharp pieces to sweep up and put together again. Ernie’s death made me realize how much I loved my younger brothers, and what lengths I would go to in order to keep that childhood promise I had made to my mother to always take care of them. Stanley Jackson had been sentenced to juvenile detention for Ernie’s murder and would be out in sixteen months. Once he was free, he would be lucky to live sixteen minutes. I had every intention of avenging my brother’s death. I wouldn’t need any knife or a gun, and I wouldn’t be sneaking up behind Stanley either. He could look me in the eye while he died like the coward he was. They could lock me up for the rest of my life, and I would consider it a fair price to pay. I was hurting so bad, I couldn’t even think straight. Nothing felt right anymore.

  I stopped hanging out with my friends and just kept to myself, letting the streets wash over me and swallow me up like the tide. I would disappear from the Colemans’ for days or even a week or two at a time. I didn’t want to stay still anywhere for long and would sleep out on the streets even when I knew I had a warm bed to go home to. I’d hole up in abandoned buildings along with the junkies and winos and crazies. When I got too scared or lonely for that life, I would find a woman with a place of her own and the need of some company; I always looked and carried myself older than I was, and most of the women I picked up in bars had no idea I was
only a teenager. Nobody could tell me what to do anymore, and the Colemans didn’t even pretend. As far as I was concerned, the streets treated me better than my supposed family did: If I was hungry, I didn’t have to wait for someone to give me permission to eat and say how much I could have. If I wanted nice clothes, I could buy them myself. I loved the feeling of going out without a dime in my pocket and having four or five hundred dollars by the next afternoon, just by sitting on my ass shooting dice. Larceny was my backup career, and I was damned good at that, too. If a guy was walking down the street in the garment district with hundreds of dresses and he turned his back, I could steal a whole rack before he knew it. When you’re bold and you act like it’s yours, you’re good. Every now and then, I’d go to a museum or art gallery where they have those jars sitting out for donations. I’d throw my coat over the jar and walk out with it. It’s not as easy as it sounds when your brain is telling your face to look casual and your feet to run like hell. Guess it’s a good thing my taste still ran to martial arts posters, or I might have passed up the donation jar and graduated to art thief, instead. Stealing made me feel superior: I didn’t need to work some crap job at McDonald’s six days a week for a puny paycheck like the other high school dropouts; I was clever enough to rake in a lot more cash, pay no taxes, and keep my own hours. If someone was stupid enough to leave a jar full of cash out in the open, or go strutting down Hollis Avenue with a brand-new boom box, well then, they got what was coming. And what was coming was me. Dewey Bozella, career criminal in the making.

  Where I drew the line was dealing drugs. That game is kill or be killed. You gotta be too cold-blooded, and I knew I didn’t have that in me. Some dude comes up to you begging—I need it, I need it, I need it—you have to kick his ass across the street. Some broken-down woman comes up offering to do you for drugs, you have to push her away. You have to be suspicious 24/7, even with your supposed friends. You don’t know who to trust, who’s going to snitch on you. I knew that sooner or later, you had to kill somebody to make an example. That wasn’t me, and even in my worst times, I held myself apart from that whole ugly scene.

  I wasn’t happy with my life, but I can’t say I was deeply troubled by it at that age either. Breaking away from the streets is harder than it probably sounds to people who’ve never been there: the ones who ask why the juvenile delinquent didn’t just choose to stay in school, or why the battered wife didn’t just choose to leave, or why the panhandler on the subway didn’t just get a job. Your mind-set can follow you no matter how far you run. When I was around seventeen, I remember I decided to go to Washington, D.C., for no particular reason at all. I bought a ticket, boarded a bus, and was looking at the Capitol dome a few hours later. I ended up staying in D.C. for a week, just living on the streets same as I did in New York, not even pretending to go see the sights or be a different type of person. Then I got on a bus and headed back north. I didn’t have any plans for my future—not even a rough sketch, let alone a blueprint—and I assumed that tomorrow would always look just like today. I couldn’t have cared less. People use that term all the time, but after burying Ernie, it became my reality. It would have been impossible for me to care less about anything and everything else.

  AFTER ABOUT THREE OR FOUR MONTHS OF BUMPING ALONG LIKE THIS, my older brother, Tony, approached me again. Tony had seen plenty of at-risk kids like me in his counseling job with the Division of Youth, and he knew someone had to care enough to grab them by the scruff and jerk them back to keep them from going over the edge. With no one else willing to fill the role in my life, he volunteered for the part. He knew that he had to get me out of the city if I was going to have any chance at all to turn my life around.

  “Hey, man, why don’t you just come upstate and live with me?” Tony suggested.

  Beacon was no Mayberry—it had its own problems, and they were getting worse by the day—but its ugly side was nothing compared to New York City’s. The idea grew on me, and I agreed to relocate.

  The ride up the Hudson River was only an hour or so by train, but it was distant enough to feel like a fresh start. And maybe I would stop dwelling on Ernie’s death if I weren’t living in the same house he had lived in, walking the same streets he had walked, seeing the same people from the neighborhood he had known. Tony thought I could find a job, maybe learn a trade, get my GED. I admit I was slow to follow through, though. Twenty miles to the north, Poughkeepsie had a more urban feel than sleepy Beacon, and there was a bus that dropped me off right by Mansion Square Park, where the town troublemakers and lowlifes hung out. It was a whole lot easier to cling to my old slickster ways than it was to focus on straightening up the small mess I’d already made of my life. I didn’t make any real friends—the homies didn’t like my light skin or my big-city attitude—but if nothing else, I at least felt I was in my element. Just how badly I misread their animosity, and just how alone I truly was, didn’t become clear until I was sitting trial for murder.

  MY ARREST IN THE CRAPSER SLAYING IN 1977 WAS ALL OVER TV AND THE PAPERS—the case had been front-page news—and to this day, I don’t know whether it was the publicity that made Tony nervous or whether my brother actually doubted my innocence. If my own flesh and blood thought I was the kind of monster who could do something like that to someone’s grandmother, then I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t ask when he kicked me to the curb after I was released without charge. It was no big deal: I was used to disappointing people and having them disappoint me. A woman I’d been seeing named Viola was more than happy to take me right in. Viola was thirty-five and had three kids. Her husband had been abusive and got sent away after he shot her in the stomach. I met Viola through her brother, and we just hit it off. Flirting with older women was such a natural reflex for me, I was more surprised when I didn’t score than when I did. One time, I picked up a clerk working behind the desk when I went to file for unemployment. When it came to the part where you’re supposed to list your skills and say what kind of job you’re looking for, I turned on the charm.

  “I’m going to tell you, I’m straight street,” I boasted, then asked her out for a cup of coffee.

  “You got a lotta nerve for your little ass,” she shot back.

  We ended up kicking it for a while, then I moved on.

  Coming up through the foster-care system taught me how to handle myself around social services if nothing else, and I was a smooth operator when it came to manipulating the system. I could walk inside, drop my voice low and dejected, say “I’m living on the streets and things are not going well,” and walk back out with $315 for a room and $100 in food stamps. Same drill with collecting unemployment checks: I just filled out the paperwork and waited for it to kick in. It was all the same untended donation jar to me. Accountability was a joke, and I laughed all the way to Mansion Square Park where I spent shiftless hours gambling and smoking reefer. The difference was that now I had a big fat target on my back. As far as the Poughkeepsie cops were concerned, I was a killer who had gotten away with murdering a defenseless old lady. They made a point of hassling me at every turn. They arrested me for peeing in public twice on the same day. Another time, I was fixing a bicycle and had a screwdriver and pair of pliers in my pocket. Police rolled by me, jumped out, and told me to get up against the wall. “You’re under arrest for burglary,” I was told that time. The harassment was blatant and irritating, but if the purpose was to run me out of town, it wasn’t working. Over and over we’d go through the same drill: they’d cuff me, book me, then release me when they didn’t have enough to charge me. Not that I was always innocent. Or smart. I once got into a scuffle with a guy who turned out to be an undercover cop. Then there was the shopkeeper on the pedestrian Main Mall in downtown Poughkeepsie who ordered me to “get outta my store, you nigger” and got his front window kicked in as a result.

  In the early 1980s, Poughkeepsie was on the downslide, like a pretty young heiress gone to rot. Look it up in the history books, and you’ll see that it was once considere
d the “Queen City of the Hudson River,” where rich New York families like the Vanderbilts and Astors built their weekend mansions. There were famous factories, like IBM, Smith Brothers cough drops, and the printing company that made Little Golden Books for kids. Poughkeepsie was also home to Vassar College for Ivy League women. The downtown area was known for its fancy soda fountains and fine shops, and up until the end of World War II, the waterfront was thriving with industry. But when suburbs started becoming popular in the 1950s, Poughkeepsie began to lose its shine. The downtown shops couldn’t compete with the malls outside of town where there was plenty of free parking, and the federal money that poured in for “urban renewal” ended up creating crime-riddled projects. When the laws changed about keeping mental patients locked up, the Main Mall that was supposed to revive downtown became a magnet instead for the now-homeless crazy people who’d been released from the state hospital in town. Crime was increasing, and so were racial tensions. People—mostly white—were fleeing the city at a record pace. In 1950, you would have found around forty-one thousand folks living in Poughkeepsie; by 1980, there weren’t even thirty thousand. There were still some old mansions down by the riverfront, but they were crumbling and boarded up, the ballrooms taken over by squatters and crackheads. Downtown was considered dangerous. In the neighborhoods surrounding places like Mansion Square Park, there was an uneasy mix of white old-timers and minority newcomers. I still toggled back and forth between Manhattan and Poughkeepsie, and, despite the cold welcome, Dutchess County was starting to take root as my home base.

  Not long after the Crapser case was dismissed, I got busted for robbery, pleaded guilty, and got locked up in state prison in Fishkill for two years. I hated prison, and the lifestyle that used to make me feel so cocky was wearing on me. Doing it when you were in your twenties was one thing, but I’d seen enough guys still hustling in their forties, their fifties, and even their sixties to know that wasn’t where I wanted to end up. I came out of Fishkill determined to turn myself around once and for all, to make a serious attempt at going straight. I had grandiose dreams—childhood fantasies, really—of making it in Hollywood. I’d always wanted to be an actor and just felt like I had it in me. I admired the cool, sophisticated stars of my childhood, like Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby in I Spy, and Roger Moore as James Bond. I loved the hell out of James Cagney and John Wayne and Jerry Lewis. My favorite actor was Steve McQueen in Bullitt. I used to try to imitate them all. I was the kid who would see Spider-Man, then go outside and try to climb a building. I didn’t want to just watch a great performance, I wanted to be inside it. People always found that strange about me, how by myself I was. I even liked opera. I doubt there were any other dudes like me out there boosting stereos and then listening to Pavarotti. It was as if I had one self that belonged just to me, and the other one who lived on the outside. Changing my life meant learning how to finally give that inner self his say. In 1983, I decided to follow my heart as well as my impulses for once, and I set off for California intent on becoming a movie star. I’m not sure whether I was that naive, or that arrogant, but after a forgettable bus trip across the country and a few frustrating months in Los Angeles, I knew that I was East Coast through and through and got back on the bus heading the other way. The thing about Hollywood is if you ain’t in, you ain’t getting in. It takes connections. Even in modeling it takes money to make money. I didn’t have the five hundred bucks I needed to get a portfolio done. So I lived in a fleabag room near the bus station and did what I knew: I went on welfare and spent hours gambling and shooting baskets in the park. My only brushes with fame were spotting some guy from the movie Fame and glimpsing Sylvester Stallone while I was working in a restaurant. I thought my chance had come for sure when I came across a film shoot on a downtown sidewalk one afternoon. The actor-director Tim Reid was shooting a scene where he was a homicide detective investigating a holdup at a liquor store. During a break in filming, I approached him, hoping to become an extra.