Oh, well, fuck school. I bounce around a lot, but at the end of each day, wherever I end up, I smoke until I’m ready to fall asleep. Wherever I go, it’s never long before I’m back in the Russo embrace. It’s there that I feel at home and wanted.
I don’t know what to make of my life anymore. On one hand, I’m pretty sure people think I’m cool, that I’m somebody who doesn’t care much for authority and lives by his own rules, on the edge, and these things matter to me. But there is also the heaviness. Deep down, below the façade of the fun-loving party boy, there’s sadness and depression. Getting high allows me to forget the paradox I’m living in, and it helps me put up a front. I want to seem above it all.
Through Gavin, Giovanni and I are introduced to an inner city gang named the Gangster Disciples, or the GDs. The GDs are a black gang who originated in Chicago and migrated to our area, and are primarily involved in the sale of crack cocaine and ecstasy pills. Soon a ritual is established: Gav picks us up in one of his dad’s trucks and drives us to see them. Sometimes they’re already with Gavin when we get picked up. Giovanni usually carries the drugs we’ll sell them, and I’m along for the ride. Sometimes we’re the ones buying.
Man, what a rush it is, picking up thugs who all have Glocks and who for whatever reason take to us. I’ve shot small rifles in the country plenty of times before, but this is a different level altogether. It’s funny to them that we young white boys don’t flinch around them. I think they respect us because we are doing the same thing at our age that they had been doing: fooling around in the drug game. They even teach us their handshake and how to flash their sign, and say we can call them if we ever need protection. “Anybody fuck with you playboys, we’ll stab them up.” One time, one of them gets a call that his home in Cincinnati was shot up. He is irate and has to be physically restrained from pulling out his pistol and using it to shoot out of the car at any unlucky passersby.
After his parents’ divorce, and after selling a large amount of ecstasy to the GDs, Gav and his dad move to the inner city. It’s there, at Gav’s small inner city home, where his father is rarely around, that the gang starts cooking cocaine, turning it into crack. They even use the house as a location to sell it. One day, after partying the entire night before, we find a parked police car in front of the home and it is clear that it’s under surveillance. Gav tells the GDs, and they immediately make an inquiry into getting as much cocaine as possible from us to stock up. Giovanni and I sell the drugs to Gav, who is promptly robbed by the gang a few days before having his home raided by police. The police don’t find anything, but the home is condemned and Gav and his father are forced to move away.
We rarely see Gav after this. One time he stops by the Russo house and Giovanni and he get into a fistfight. I’m not sure why, all I know is that he is here to see Giovanni. It could be that he suspects Giovanni was in on the robbery, or something totally unrelated. I’m much bigger than both of them, but I still can’t restrain them from going at it. Gav bloodies Giovanni’s mouth and Giovanni responds by going after Gav’s crotch and abdomen so viciously that I have to notify Francesco, who tells me to leave them alone and let them go at it. After it’s over, Gav leaves the house on foot and that’s it; another old friend lost.
Throughout all this, I’ve been well aware that we could have been killed if we weren’t careful. Gav was robbed of everything at gunpoint, even his Jordan shoe collection, and I know that easily could have been us. I figure out pretty quickly that in order to succeed in this way of life, or even stay alive and out of jail, you have to be incredibly cautious. One wrong move means game over in an instant. Thinking two steps ahead is an absolute must and every base has to be covered.
When Gav got robbed a bad feeling swelled in the pit of my stomach, notifying me that I might not be cut out for this way of life. I’m much more of a live-and-let-live type of guy—consulting my third eye and seeking counsel from elders about making moves is way out of my league. I hate any and all forms of authority, and I know I can’t just change that about myself. All I can do is play along and try not to do anything too stupid. I suspect Francesco and Greta, and certainly Giovanni, can tell that I’m not so serious about certain aspects of this Cosa Nostra way of life, but they tolerate me well enough because I am fiercely loyal to them. I can also be physically intimidating, so I can be an enforcer when it comes to providing security on the streets for Giovanni. On top of that, I’m not afraid of anyone and can find fun in high-stakes situations.
In March, not long after everything went down with Gav, Francesco and Greta decide to head to India to celebrate Holi, which I’m pretty sure is some sort of festival or holiday where people get really high and splash each other with colored water. With the house to ourselves, Giovanni, Adriana, and I have friends stay with us every night. Our buddy E-money, a kid who lives in the neighborhood and Giovanni and I know well, hooks us up. He contacts us every day after school and says something along the lines of, “’Sup, dude? . . . Some girls? . . . How long? . . . Yeah, we’ll be chillin.’”
Close friends drop by after dinner to play music and jam, and we rock out for a few hours, drinking and smoking, getting high. E-money and the girls stop over later in the evening and sometimes stay through the night, but typically leave around the early morning hours. Strip pool is inevitable. This is a time of fun and freedom and I will always remember it with a smile.
At the week’s end, we decide to throw a crazy ass party to celebrate the end of the school year—totally acceptable behavior by everyone’s account. At sixteen, this makes us the coolest motherfuckers in town. On Friday night, more than fifty cars line both sides of the street. Inside, the party is raging. At one point I notice a girl stumbling and falling into people. She’s very drunk, and alone, so I ask a guy I’ve known since elementary school, and trust, to take care of her and help lie her down upstairs. He does so, and then comes back downstairs with a bag full of SweeTarts, each with an acid drop on it.
“She’s really sorry, man. She feels really bad about puking upstairs and wants you guys to have these.”
“Well, shit, man, how bad is it?”
“I cleaned it up. She’s passed out. I’ll keep checking on her.” He sighs
When I tell Giovanni what happened, he’s more interested in the SweeTarts than the girl or the house. He pops two candies in his mouth and I follow suit without a pause even though I haven’t had much of it before. The next logical step is for us to start jamming out. I drum and he plays his electric guitar, and the house full of people goes absolutely wild, loving every second of it. Eventually, the furniture in the room starts to float and I can’t keep a beat very well, so we stop and head upstairs to check out the party on the main floor.
There we find a makeshift bar in the kitchen. There’s a cooler full of fruit, Hawaiian Punch, and four bottles of Everclear; there’s also a giant keg. A guy with a huge scar running down the side of his cheek credits himself with the idea for the Everclear-punch drink, or “whop” as he calls it, and starts mixing two for us. While he’s making it, we ask him what the hell happened to his face. “House fire,” he says. He gives us the drinks, shakes our hands, and walks away. He seems like a good guy, but man does he look like Freddy Krueger.
By now, the acid is really taking us for a ride, and people from school seem to float up to us, congratulate us on the best party ever, and fly away as though they are angels from above. We thoroughly relish the fame of the day and walk around checking out different groups of people. There are black kids, white kids, Native American kids, Asian kids, and a few Latinos. There are kids from practically every high school in the city. People are meeting one another for the first time, connecting in such a friendly manner that they soon start going around high-fiving each other in a massive five line, while laughing hysterically and turning the five line into a conga line. Meanwhile, the smokers are out on the deck starting a bonfire in the firepit.
Guests come and go all weekend. At some point Giovanni begins to come down from the acid we’re consistently taking and tells everyone we are headed to the mall, and to leave and come back in a bit. Instead, we head to our rooms and pass out.
When Francesco and Greta come home they find the party still more or less in full swing. We didn’t intend for this to happen, we just lost track of time completely. They kick everyone out, but aren’t really angry that we hosted a party. “Boys will be boys,” Francesco says gruffly. Then, “Clean up this mess.”
We clean up and when we finish, Francesco demands to know who was responsible for inviting the guys who stole from them. They can’t believe how much stuff is missing from their home. Adriana’s cash stash of around five hundred dollars is gone, as are all of their tools and equipment from the gardening shed; even the pool balls and pool cues are gone. The list goes on and on; when it finally stops, we conclude that some hopeless dope fiend made a score in order to sell the stuff to a pawnshop—somebody we no doubt have never met. We figure it likely happened when we passed out after our acid trip.
“If I make one phone call to Chicago and tell them a name, the thief will be dead within twenty-four hours,” says Francesco. We don’t know who the culprit is, but we fess up that we probably know who invited him. Francesco makes us give him a name, but then Giovanni gets to work trying to talk his dad down, basically explaining that we won’t be able to pinpoint exactly who was responsible. He says we’d have to basically interrogate a kid who is sixteen or seventeen and may not give accurate information. Francesco backs down but says no more parties. Normally, we’re good at handling our parties and they’re cool with our throwing them, but with both of us on acid, it just got out of hand. We feel kind of stupid.
Gene, a twenty-one-year-old guy who stuck around after high school, is someone I know pretty well. His younger brother, Matt, is one of our high school friends and lives in the neighborhood with his mom. Gene is a bit like an older brother to me. I used to play sports with him and I now hang out with him pretty regularly during the week, smoking weed and chilling in his inner city basement. Giovanni and I sell a lot of drugs to the high school kids, but are still pretty small time when it comes to selling outside this market, particularly for harder drugs. We’re just sixteen and I’ve only recently gotten my driver’s license (after three tries). So Gene, who frequents bars on most nights, becomes our middleman and sells to high school grads and other older people.
One evening, I get a call from Gene and proudly drive the short distance over to Matt’s house in my brand-new black Chrysler 300 with a custom grille, the one that looks like a Bentley.
My grandfather has a family tradition of giving each grandchild a car when we turn sixteen, and I was lucky enough to get included in the group even though I’m not very close to him. I’ve actually never really been close to either set of grandparents. One set lives close enough that I’m there to pose with them for the camera come most holidays, and I play along even though it’s no secret that I’m the black sheep, but the other set lives far away, and my mother doesn’t really get along with them anyway.
Anyway, Gene is in the neighborhood visiting his mom and brother and when he sees me roll in, I can tell how impressed he is. I admire him, so this feels great, but I shun all flattery and simply deliver the eight ball of coke he asked for and then head back to the Russo house.
The next morning while walking to the high school from the parking lot, I see a guy from my varsity football team in tears. When he sees me, he walks over, hugs me, and bawls, repeating, “He’s dead, he’s dead . . .” over and over again. Apparently very early in the morning, after going out the night before, Gene was shot in a bar parking lot and died at the scene. The shooter was arrested after fleeing on foot. No one knows any other details. It feels like a punch in the gut. I try to not blame myself, and to hide behind my macho demeanor, but deep down I grieve the death of my friend as I witness a family ruined. Months later the shooter will confess and be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
By now, I’m smoking weed constantly; I’m basically high all the time. I don’t know if I could stop even if I wanted to. My football teammates know I sneak a smoke every afternoon before practice and a few of the guys decide to rat me out—so, sure enough, one afternoon the coaches call me into a field office and threaten to drug test me. I know it’s that straightedge Bible freak Andy who is the main guy behind this. He’s my backup and probably wants to steal my starting position as guard. I tell the coaches straight up that if they test me, I will fail. After some pause, they offer a deal. Since I am an invaluable player, they will not test me if I agree to stop smoking. I love playing sports, so I agree to give it my best shot. I try to stop smoking before practice, interpreting their instructions hyper-literally, and breathe a sigh of relief at having dodged a bullet, but this doesn’t stop me from smoking pretty any other time that I can.
Truth be told, it’s not even just smoking weed anymore. Sometimes I luck out and score a high dose of Adderall or a few hits of acid. I’m pretty much always on the prowl for drugs since, aside from weed, I generally can’t get anything from Giovanni. He knows my appetite all too well and gets visibly frustrated when I blow through something he gives me too quickly.
One day I pop a hit of acid immediately before first period. As the day wears on I get increasingly buzzed. I try to act normal as the teacher speaks in slow motion and a strobe light flashes on and off at full speed. Meandering through the hallways during study hall, I bump into various emo kids whom I often get high with. These friends of mine have keys to all the vending machines in the school since Giovanni stole the master key from the janitor’s office and had copies made, selling them for a pretty penny. I’m not sure how much, Giovanni wouldn’t have told me even if I’d asked, but I know he wouldn’t have given them access unless the price matched what he thought it was worth. These guys and I like to partner up and cover the entire school during study hall or our lunch break, one of us acting as lookout and the other opening the machine and stealing the stack of singles and handfuls of quarters. We’ve made as much as $150 in one go and we’ve never been caught—not even when one of us cleaned out the cash register in the school store, taking more than $1,000.
When rugby practice starts at the end of the day, I’m fully blown and peaking on acid, but I still have four or five more hits that will last me through the weekend. Playing a violent contact sport, such as rugby, when superbly high on drugs is invigorating. I’m invincible, tackling guys at full speed and crashing into them while I’m carrying the ball, unable to feel any pain. At one point I offload the ball to a teammate and he breaks free for a long run and scores. I watch amazed as lightning and thunder clap the ground around his feet even though the weather is mild.
After practice, I head out and dive headlong into a weekend of partying and anything else I want to do, which never includes doing homework or working a job. I don’t really consider myself a drug dealer; I’m more of a connected guy—actually, a super-connected guy.
I don’t really handle profits or mastermind numbers. More often than not, my job is that of middleman, connecting the people wanting drugs to the drugs, that now almost always come from Giovanni, and acting as his bodyguard. I handle cash without skimming off the top and can run drugs ten out of ten times with no mistakes, all while keeping my source a complete and total secret. I need the Russos and they trust me, whether to give rides to Adriana and her friends and be their chauffeur for the evening, or to make an all-night run to Chicago from Green Bay and back safely. When I do this, I’m always sent to pick up a person who is carrying drugs and bring them to Green Bay; I’m never told to be the sole guardian of them.
How do I get away with this? Well, I don’t. I’m constantly kicked out of classes or sent to the principal’s office, but it never really bothers me. Maybe the weed helps, but I also have that grand position of star athlete and a scholarship
that was given to me at the end of sophomore year and confirmed at the beginning of my junior year. My school does drug test me from time to time, for any number of reasons, including when my Spanish teacher noticed my dilated pupils and overheard me tell my buddy that I was totally tripping on shrooms, but I still get by.
When told to report to the health office after school for a drug test, I’m able to get clean piss from a guy who keeps about ten bottles of it and sells it out of his locker. As disgusting as that may seem, it’s how I pass the unsupervised test time and again. My high school is consistently considered among the top 3 percent in the country, but it clearly has a drug scene and a mass of undesirables who don’t do much else but party.
Meanwhile, I have learned to unconditionally embrace the rules and guidance of Francesco and Greta, who make it clear that it is important to have a legitimate and steady form of income from a real job, even if it’s just a front, and that, even though I’m living under their roof, I have to keep in touch with my parents. Francesco knows my father is a hothead capable of stabbing someone in the back, which is why he thinks it’s a good idea to keep my parents happy, or at least that’s what he tells me.
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