by Bill Mason
My mother looked over to see me crying and assumed it was in grief. That was only partially true. While I struggled beneath an overwhelming sadness, I also felt a helpless, burning anger. I wanted to kill those doctors and nurses, I wanted to kill Uncle Rudy, just like they killed my father. His whole adult life, all my father ever heard about in the family was Rudy this and Rudy that, what a great and prominent man he was, how he healed the sick and got rich in the process. Now the sonofabitch hadn’t even shown up the one time my father needed him.
I wasn’t just angry at him and the hospital staff, I was mad at the whole goddamned world, including myself. I was less than ten feet away from my father and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do for him, couldn’t even persuade the people who might have been able to help him to do so.
I was released that night so I could be with my mother at home. Someone drove us, but I don’t remember who. I was so broken up over losing my father, and over how he had died, that I couldn’t think straight.
My wired jaw hurt like hell. The rage I couldn’t get rid of didn’t help, as I kept tensing the muscles in my face. I sat in stony silence through the funeral, and when I got home, I grabbed a pair of cutting pliers, hobbled over to a mirror, and started to snip the wires holding my jaw together.
A friend grabbed my arm. “You crazy, Mason?”
I shoved his hand away. “I don’t give a shit.” I cut all the wires and never went back to see the doctors.
I’ve thought about this a good deal in later years, and I’m willing to believe that I’ve blown it up in my mind and that my recollections may be harsher than the reality warranted. After all, it’s hard to believe that a bunch of doctors and nurses would stand around and let a patient die just because they were afraid to infringe on a superior’s territory.
But that’s the way I remember it.
A few weeks later I left to join Barbara at Ohio University, but whatever academic goal I had arrived with was quickly short-circuited. I was in a bad frame of mind and didn’t even make a serious attempt to get into college life. My mother wasn’t doing well on her own and needed me, and I felt guilty about not being with her. I hung in until Barbara sat me down one evening.
“You don’t belong here,” she said, point-blank.
That threw me. She was the primary reason I had come there in the first place. “Why would you say that?”
“Doesn’t matter. You know it’s true. You can drag it out a little longer if you want to, but eventually . . .” She shrugged and left the rest unspoken.
She was right. I didn’t belong there, but didn’t want to admit it to myself. And I didn’t want to leave her. Aside from the fact that I didn’t like it when we were apart, I wasn’t about to take the chance of losing her. I think she sensed the cause of my hesitancy.
“It won’t change anything between us,” she assured me. “Stay here, and you’re only going to get more miserable, and that’s the worst thing that could happen to us.”
She was right again—I was to learn, much too late, that she was almost always right—so after one semester I dropped out and returned home, bitter and resentful.
I got a job at a General Electric factory making flashbulbs. It was a union job, paying about seven or eight bucks an hour, which was good money, but even after all the years that have passed since then it remains the worst job I ever had, at least outside of prison. Boring beyond words. All I did was watch four machines, and when something got stuck I unstuck it. I had too much time to think, to dwell on how pissed off I was. I lasted three months and then quit, knowing I never wanted to step foot inside a factory again unless I owned the place. I started doing maintenance work in apartment buildings.
My new situation and my state of mind were a volatile mix. Full of rage over how my father died, I now had no father to keep a tight rein on how I vented that rage. With time I might have gotten over it, calmed down, maybe even gone back to college. Who knows? All I do know is that my recklessness and vulnerability to influence collided with circumstance, and the direction of my life veered off on a severe tangent.
Barbara stayed at the university and I started spending more time with Bob, her older brother. Whether that was because of his outlaw reputation or because it was a way to stay close to Barb’s family, I can’t really say. Bob was a good guy, but by then he’d had a few run-ins with the law—he was actually on probation—and he was exactly the wrong person for me to have resumed a friendship with.
Just before Thanksgiving of the following year, he and I were drinking one night and bullshitting, as moderately inebriated men will. “What we oughta do?” Bob said. “We oughta knock over that Sunoco station down on SOM Center and Miles.”
“Yeah.” I laughed. “Good idea. Maybe a bank on the way home.”
Bob didn’t laugh back. “I know a guy used to work there. Said the boss always leaves money overnight.” When I stopped laughing, he said, “No safe. Just a file cabinet.”
I took a sip of my scotch, whether to buy time to think or just to steady myself, I’m not sure. “You got a plan?”
Now he did laugh. “A plan? Yeah, I got a plan. We go in the back window, grab the cash and get the fuck out.”
He must have seen my face fall or something, because he frowned and shook his head. “It ain’t a big deal. You’re in and out so fast, it don’t matter if the alarms go off.”
He was serious. I asked a few questions; he winged a few answers. We had a few more drinks.
It was a badly conceived, badly planned and amateurish job that sounded a lot better talking about it when we were drunk than it did actually doing it when we were sober. I parked my car about five hundred feet from the gas station. We walked up and broke the rear window, cleared the glass away and climbed through.
Looking around in the gloomy interior, we couldn’t see a file cabinet right off and began rooting around for it. There were piles of tires and discarded parts everywhere, along with scattered tools and other gear.
Suddenly Bob grabbed my arm, and as he did so I noticed a light climbing along the far wall. It was coming from a car outside. I stepped into a shadow and looked out into the front counter area and through the large plate glass window. A police car was cruising slowly by. I saw its brake lights come on as it slowed but didn’t quite stop, as if the driver was trying to make a decision.
“You think he knows something?” I asked.
Bob shrugged. “Doubt it. Probably just—”
The brake lights went off and the squad car turned in to the gas station. It was still moving very slowly. I didn’t see how the cop could have known there were people inside, but something had made him turn in.
I headed for the rear window and climbed out, slowly and with no noise. I wanted to get away, just in case, but there was no sense announcing ourselves if the cop was just checking things out as part of his routine. I dropped to the ground and sprinted away, Bob close behind.
Instinctively, I ran away from my car. If the cop caught on to us, we were much better off on foot, for a lot of reasons. Whether or not we could outrace him in the car was irrelevant, because he’d make the vehicle and track us down eventually. Aside from that, though, it’s much easier for a person to lose himself than to lose himself plus a vehicle.
All this was so obvious to me that I lost a second or two while my mind tried to process the fact that Bob was heading straight for my car. Not only was that a dumb idea, but he had to cross a lighted street to do it. When I could no longer see him, I dove into some shrubbery and scrabbled my way through it, reached a lightly wooded area just beyond and kept running.
About ten minutes later I sank down against a tree to catch my breath and gather my thoughts.
Now that I was safe, I began to worry about Bob. I got up, found a pay phone and called Barbara’s younger brother, Augie, to see if he’d heard from him. He hadn’t, and I told him what had happened.
“What do we do?” he asked.
Good question. It was pr
obably not a good idea to phone the police station and ask if they had a Robert Benz in custody. “Maybe we’d better look for him,” I suggested.
Augie picked me up and we drove around trying to find Bob. Keeping safely within the speed limit, we headed down to the corner of SOM Center and Miles. “That’s where my car was parked,” I said to Augie, pointing to an empty spot.
“You think maybe he took it and got away?”
There was no way to know, so we decided to keep driving around. About two blocks later blinking red lights suddenly appeared behind us, lighting up the whole inside of the car.
“License and registration,” the policeman said to Augie after we’d pulled over and he’d walked up next to the window. As Augie handed them over, the cop leaned down, looked at me and said, “You, too.”
He glanced only briefly at my license before waving to his partner, who came out and walked up to the passenger side. He opened my door and said, “Out.”
Less than a minute later Augie and I were in the rear seat of the squad car, handcuffed.
The cop at the gas station had driven around back and seen the broken glass. He’d nailed Bob before Bob had even gotten to my car. There were other cars parked on the street, but somehow the cop pegged mine. I don’t know if he had guessed which car Bob was aiming for or if Bob had talked, but it only took a quick call into the station house with the plate numbers and he had my name, which had then been broadcast to every squad car in the area. (Bob never told me whether he’d given me up, and I never asked.)
They let Augie go after a few hours, but I spent the night in jail. Bob and I were charged with burglary the next morning, and both of us pleaded innocent at the arraignment. My mother came down and bailed me out (she was furious, and made me pay her back later), but there was no bail set for Bob. Because of the trouble he’d been in before, they kept him locked up.
I hired a private lawyer, and for two months we met and planned how we were going to handle the case at trial. He thought I was in good shape, that the evidence was skimpy and circumstantial, and that I had little to worry about. He even speculated that the state would drop the matter prior to the trial, as the weakness of the case against me would only make the assistant district attorney look like an idiot in front of the judge.
Bob was kept locked up the entire time. Because he’d been on parole at the time we hit the gas station, he was already under a prison sentence, and the state had the right to put him back in custody pretty much whenever it felt like it. I visited him often and assured him he’d be out a day or two after the trial started.
Sure enough, the day before the trial I got a call from my lawyer. “Assistant D.A. wants to meet with us.” He practically snickered.
I was elated and hurried down to the court. The lawyer, the ADA and I sat down in a small meeting room, and the ADA wasted no time getting right to the point.
“If you plead guilty,” he said to me, “you do thirty days, two years’ probation, and we’ll drop the charges against your buddy Benz. Guy’s done two months already. . . . That’s enough.”
In light of my expectations it was a body blow, and I found myself unable to respond right away. My lawyer, who was well used to this stuff, said, “What kind of deal is that? You got no case here. You can’t win at trial and you know it. Hell, the judge’ll probably throw it out on day one.”
The ADA replied, “You’re right. Your client will probably walk.” Then he turned to me. “Thing is, if you take this to trial, win or lose, we’re going to violate your buddy’s parole. That means he goes back up the river.” He actually said that: “up the river.”
“Hey, wait a minute!” my lawyer exclaimed angrily.
The ADA stood up and headed for the door. “That’s the deal. Once the trial starts, it’s off the table.”
My lawyer was outraged, of course. Here were men charged with the public trust who were unmercifully preying upon a suspect, making him personally responsible for the incarceration or freedom of his friend, knowing full well that, innocent or guilty, someone with any conscience at all wouldn’t make a decision to save his own ass by getting his friend thrown into prison. Where was the justice here? What did that shitty deal have to do with my guilt or innocence? Why didn’t they just go pick up one of Bob Benz’s friends at random and offer him the same deal!
After my lawyer finished fuming, I told him to take the offer. I wasn’t happy about it, but the fact was, I did try to knock over a gas station. I knew it, the cops knew it, and even though the way they handled it might have violated a half-dozen basic civil liberties precepts, we could hardly make the argument that justice wasn’t served. Besides, there was no way I was going to be responsible for Bob’s going back to prison.
I did the thirty days, in an old Cuyahoga County shit hole that I’m glad I didn’t know about before I’d made the decision. It was dirty, scary and despicable, a terrible place in which to be kept apart from friends and family for the first time in my life, and I hated it. The thought of ever repeating that experience—and it was only thirty days—would keep me cautious for the rest of my life.
Afterward, I was so well behaved for the first year of probation that they formally waived the second half, proclaiming me a law-abiding citizen who’d just made a silly mistake, who’d learned his lesson and who was ready to take up his rightful and productive place in society once more.
I’d learned my lesson, all right: Never use a partner.
3
First Score
ASTONISHINGLY, BARBARA stuck with me after that harrowing and acutely embarrassing experience, and I don’t think it had anything to do with my standing up for her brother.
We hated being away from each other and spent more and more time together. We’d ride around affluent neighborhoods searching out “For Sale” signs and then pretend we were newlyweds as we checked the places out, making sure there were enough bedrooms for all the kids we were going to have. Pretty soon the joking around about being married shifted subtly, until we were no longer sure of the difference between fantasy and planning. It kept getting harder to say good-bye so often, and somehow we both started to get the notion that everything would be easier and less wrenching if we were really married. Soon our conversations turned to when and how.
We didn’t want to make a big deal about it or even tell too many people. With her staying in college and me at home, it would have been awkward. We finally did the deed at a small church halfway between Cleveland and Akron, with only our mothers in attendance, Barb’s father having passed away the year before. Our honeymoon consisted of two nights in a motel, then she went back to college and I went back home.
Helluva two nights, though: Barely a month later Barb found out she was pregnant. She dropped out of school and we rented a small apartment in Cleveland. This was a year after I got out of jail.
As much of a fuckup as I’d been in high school, it’s hard to believe how responsible I got in such a short time. One of the benefits of caring for a family, I suppose. The next year I’m twenty-two years old, living in a small but comfortable apartment with my wife and Suzanne, our daughter, and spending three nights a week earning my real estate license at Case Western Reserve, a short drive away. I’ve got a good job managing an apartment complex, earning a hundred dollars a week, which isn’t too bad for 1962 but a far cry from where I hoped to be in the next few years.
I had a lot of ideas about where that was but not too many about how to actually get there. The old saw about it taking money to make money was nowhere as true as in the real estate business, where you needed some minimum threshold amount of ready cash to even think about getting into the game. I didn’t know exactly what that amount was, but I knew for damned sure it was more than I had, and more than I was likely to get anytime soon with just my salary and a new family to support. I put some thought into how much we’d have to set aside on a regular basis to get into some small investments, and how long it was likely for them to take to mature to the p
oint where we could roll the cash into some larger ones so we could do it all over again and again. In my mind’s eye I saw my future as a very long, very slow road with a goal so distant, I could barely make it out.
Then I suddenly developed a passion for miniature golf.
One night after classes I was having a drink with a buddy, Sam Schneerman. I knew him in high school as this goody-two-shoes kid who never got into a lick of trouble, but I liked him anyway. He was starting his third drink before I’d finished my first, and looked as though he’d been up against it all day.
“What the hell, Sam,” I kidded him, “too much pressure at work?”
He took a deep drag off his cigarette and nodded morosely. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
I felt my smile devolving into a gape. Was he kidding me back? “You work at a miniature golf course, for chrissakes!”
“Yeah. You try it for a day. Screaming kids, screaming parents . . .” He tried to wave the memory of his day away. “Some living. At least it’s got a driving range. I take out my frustration on helpless golf balls.”
“So why do you do it?”
“Pay’s good.” He signaled for another drink, even though he hadn’t yet finished the one in front of him.
I laughed at that. “Yeah, right. Kiddie golf.”
“I’m not kidding. The boss rakes it in hand over fist; he owns the building and has practically no expenses except me and the electricity. Regular gold mine.”
I could see his point. “And all cash, too.”
Sam nodded. “IRS thinks he’s barely breaking even, and meanwhile he’s stuffing money in his safe.”