by George Rowe
I’d learn later that in fact Sammy knew everything about that. He’d paid three grand to Shorty for a stolen motorcycle that was never delivered, and ultimately that’s what got that hang-around executed. Turned out Sammy was also in the truck with Rhino and Kilo as they drove toward Landers with poor Shorty rolled in a carpet like a bloody burrito. Sammy never made it, though. On the way to the execution he got cold feet and asked to be dropped off at a biker bar called The Crossroads.
Now here he sat as an unindicted accessory to murder.
Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time, but Sammy sure was fidgeting on his stool like he’d been a naughty boy.
“Yeah, man,” I said after taking another swig of beer. “Think the cops busted Hulk for killing that hang-around in Landers.”
I swear Sammy went white when he heard that.
“Don’t know anything about it,” he answered abruptly. Then he knocked back the rest of his drink and cleared the stool. As I watched Sammy disappear into the packed room, a muffled pop came from somewhere outside the bar.
Apparently everyone else heard it too, because heads snapped to attention like a herd of nervous antelope. All those outlaws, cops and vets knew exactly what that sound was.
A gunshot.
I fell in with the crowd as they funneled through the front door and emerged in the brilliant desert sunlight. I was drawn with the others toward a commotion in the parking lot but found myself blocked by a knot of pissed-off bikers. As I squeezed past them, I saw the reason for their anger—a wounded Vietnam vet lying bloody on the ground, cradled by one of his buddies. Some of the biker cops were surrounding the pair with guns drawn, and a bunch of revenge-minded vets were edging closer.
Rhino, Green Nation’s international sergeant at arms.
I asked the Vago next to me what happened.
“Fuckin’ pig shot him.”
“Why? What’d he do?”
“Not a goddamn thing,” said a vet standing to my left. “The cop was disrespecting our brother, so he went after him. That’s when the cop pulled his fuckin’ gun.”
“Pig gets a gun and a badge and thinks he’s above the law,” groused the Vago.
This was nervous time, man. There were a lot of angry bikers concealing weapons in that parking lot, and those cops were on the verge of reenacting Custer’s Last Stand.
Within minutes there were sirens wailing over the desert. A line of cruisers soon appeared, roaring up the dirt road toward the bar, a cloud of dust boiling in their wake.
These were local police, and when they arrived on the tense scene their instincts were to give their fraternal brothers the benefit of the doubt. They had the biker cops put away their weapons, then cuffed the wounded vet on the ground.
An angry murmur spread through the crowd.
“You cocksuckers!” one outlaw shouted.
“They shit on our Constitution and wipe their friggin’ asses with the Bill of Rights,” grumbled another.
I’d heard that outlaw’s lament before, but now I had it recorded. Special Agent Carr might appreciate that one.
A few days after the desert run, in what would become our weekly Friday ritual, John and I met at the Little Luau Hawaiian BBQ in Beaumont. I asked about the vet who got shot, but John hadn’t heard any news. When lunch was over we headed out to his Expedition to download the recordings and switch out to a fresh device.
Kilo, the San Bernardino chapter officer who assisted in the murder of “Shorty” Daoussis.
“I don’t think there’s much you can use there,” I warned him as we piled into the car.
“You’d be surprised,” said John. “It’s like I told you before, sometimes what you think is meaningless turns out to be the most important thing.”
“Yeah, well, I’m just saying.”
John began setting up the device for download.
“So this guy Sammy was the only Berdoo member you spoke with?”
“There was one other patch, but he didn’t say shit. I got the feeling Sammy knew something but not this other guy.”
“What’s this other guy’s name?”
“Umm . . . don’t remember. Don’t think he ever told me.”
John shot me a look of reproach.
“He’s recorded?”
“Far as I know.”
“Listen, George. It’s critical when you’re undercover to ID the voice. If you’re talking to someone, say the name out loud. Same thing with a license plate. Say it so you’ve got it. If the recorder’s not on, go somewhere and turn it on, then speak the name or the number or whatever. And don’t try to keep it in your head, either. If you wait more than a day, forget it, you’ll never remember.”
“Fuck,” I said, exasperated.
John smiled at this. “Don’t worry, dude. You’ll get the hang of it. Just remember, the case is in the details.”
“Tell me again,” I grumbled.
John ignored this. “Anyway, listen, there’s operational security issues we need to discuss here. What do we do about this Cathedral City cop?”
“Crusher? Hey, man, that’s your call. But he’s goddamn scary. If it was up to me, I’d get rid of him.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” replied John as he finished the download. “I’m going to talk to Stan Henry—he’s the chief out there. I know he’s got a huge interest in fighting gangs in the Coachella Valley. When he learns one of his men is working with the Vagos, he’s gonna shit a brick.”
Cops investigating cops. I was skeptical.
“You really think he’ll go after one of his own?” I asked.
“Henry’s a standup guy,” replied John as he handed me a fresh device. “He’ll get to the bottom of it. We’ve just got to step carefully and keep the source confidential. Last thing we need is your name floating around.”
Couldn’t have agreed more. One slip and George Edgar Rowe would crash and burn like the fuckin’ Hindenburg.
11
My Love, My Nightmare
Back at the chicken coop, I was doing everything I could to get Jenna straightened out. I bought her a minivan and paid for her to go back to school to become a medical assistant. I also made sure she was clean long enough to pass her drug test with Child Protective Services, clearing the way to get her little girl back from Grandma, who still had custody.
Jenna’s mom wasn’t letting go of that kid without a fight, though. She loved her granddaughter and wanted to protect her, but she was also struggling mightily with demons of her own at the time. Grandma had been hooked on opiates ever since her two-week stay in a hospital burn ward, but there was something else I believe she got addicted to during the time she had custody of Sierra—the checks the state was cutting her for child care. The way I saw it, that woman just couldn’t bear to part with that extra income, so we had to drag her to court.
“Know what one of my first memories of my mom was?” Jenna asked me the night before the first custody hearing. “I was six years old and my dad was driving me and my little sister around Big Bear looking for her because Mom hadn’t come home the night before. He found her car parked in front of his friend’s house and we all walked right into the bedroom and found them naked. My father left us right after that. We had this steep driveway with about two hundred stairs going down to it from the house, and I can still picture my mom standing on the deck and my dad walking down those stairs yelling at her, ‘I’m finished. I am done with this,’ and Mom’s screaming, ‘Please don’t go.’ I hated her for a long time after that.”
“That why you left her?” I asked.
“I didn’t leave because of Mom; I left because of the anal retentive asshole she married after my dad left. When I stopped listening to him he kicked me to the curb. Can’t really blame him, I guess. I would have thrown me out too.”
Jenna’s dad, Battalion Chief Bill Thompson of the Hemet Fire Department.
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen maybe. I called my dad and asked him
to come get me. We ended up driving to Mexico because Mom called the cops and told them I was kidnapped.”
I heard the rest of the story from Jenna’s old man a few weeks later over beers and barbeque. If there was an “other side of the tracks” in Valle Vista, that’s where Bill Thompson lived. The chief had a nice house out on Espirit Circle, where I’d occasionally go to prune trees as a favor. Afterward we’d head to the backyard and spend the hours drinking beer, eating burgers and trying to figure out his mixed-up kid—what some might call an exercise in futility.
Bill told me that after gaining custody of his daughter, he tried hard to make up for the time he’d lost with her. He bought Jenna new clothes, paid her an allowance—gave her just about anything she asked for. And because his little girl was a free spirit with the heart of a rebel, he allowed Jenna the freedom to find her own way.
Unfortunately her way was a total fuckin’ disaster.
Didn’t start out that way, though. Sophomore year in high school Jenna was taking advanced classes and nailing every one of them, getting straight As right down the line and setting herself up for a four-year college scholarship. But when she failed to make the cheer squad and was eliminated from the dance team (“Guess I wasn’t peppy enough,” she once told me) the girl latched on to the punk rock crowd instead.
One night at a party someone told her she could drink all night and never pass out if she just smoked a little meth. Well, that was the beginning of a very long slide. Didn’t help that Daddy’s work schedule was a drug abuser’s dream. The chief was on duty twenty-four hours a day for eight days straight, which left plenty of time for his wild child to get naughty. By her junior year Jenna was heavy into heroin, and Bill Thompson had lost control.
“I was a hateful, selfish bitch who didn’t care about anyone but me,” Jenna once told me. “I didn’t think about the future. I didn’t want to think about the past. I just lived for the moment. And the moment I lived for was getting fucked up.”
With her drug use spiraling out of control, Bill tried shipping Jenna to her mother. Her mother shipped her right back again. The situation at home went from bad to worse when the chief started finding bent spoons in the silverware drawer that his daughter was using to cook heroin. Money and valuables began disappearing from the house. Jenna even tried cutting the lock off Bill’s Dyna Wide Glide, hoping to fence his motorcycle to finance her drug habit.
It all came to a head one day in 1998 when she stood on the second-floor balcony, picked up a potted plant and threw it over the banister, smashing it at her father’s feet.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” he shouted up at her.
“I’m a fucking heroin addict, that’s what’s wrong with me!” she screamed back at him.
That kicked off Jenna’s first stint in rehab, but the girl’s heart was never in it. Some old habits die hard, even for the young, and before long she was right back to using. Through the years that girl has been detoxed seven times, and seven times she’s relapsed into drugs. I watched a friend suffer through that ten-day process once, and it ain’t pretty. About six hours after last use the chills begin. And because heroin plugs up the internal plumbing, once the intestines clear it’s bombs away. The mad shits are followed by nausea, wild temperature swings and intense body aches from head to toe. Hell, Jenna claimed even her hair hurt going through detox.
When she was eighteen years old she once tried detoxing on her own. Things got so bad that she asked her boyfriend, a Mexican drug dealer named Angel, to pack her in a moving box and seal it with tape. Jenna sat inside that box for six hours, curled up in a fetal position and shaking uncontrollably.
After rehab failed, Bill Thompson couldn’t take it anymore. Rather than continue to enable his daughter, he finally put his foot down and kicked her out of the house.
“That ripped my guts out,” he told me over backyard beers. “To watch my child walking down the street not knowing where she was going. That might have been the hardest day of my life.”
Bill lost track of Jenna after that. She vanished into Southern California’s underground drug scene. Before I entered the picture, he used to drive around the city in the dead of night, wondering whether his child was still alive. It was only after Jenna moved in with me that he quit those late-night rambles.
He said I let him sleep again.
“My daughter and I have this classic love-hate thing going on,” Bill told me one afternoon. “I used to have to remind myself there were two Jennas. There was the free spirit with a kind heart that I just loved and adored, and then there was this other person that I absolutely hated.”
“Yeah, I’ve met Satan’s child a few times myself,” I told him. “Especially first thing in the morning.”
The chief laughed. “When we lived together I had a second phone line installed in her room just so I wouldn’t have to go in there. I used to call to wake her up. It was safer that way.”
“I hear you, man.”
“That’s pretty common with addicts,” said Bill. “It’s all part of protecting addictive behavior. Forces people to leave them alone so they can do whatever they want.”
“Well, it sure works with me.” I grinned.
Bill got quiet and sipped his beer. After a long moment he said, “Think I created a monster, George.”
“Naw. It’s not your fault, man. You’ve done your best. It’s up to Jenna to help herself.”
“Not sure she’s capable,” he replied. “I’m hoping maybe you can get through to her.”
I smiled and shook my head. “I do what I can. But nobody controls Jenna but Jenna.”
“You know what’s sad?” said Bill. “I really believe my little girl could do just about anything she wants to in this life. She’s that intelligent. But every time something good happens for her she seems to sabotage it. It’s like she doesn’t think she deserves happiness. I just don’t get it.”
With Jenna certified clean and sober by the state of California, regaining custody of Sierra from Grandma was just a formality. At the hearing, the judge awarded legal custody to the mother, and I had myself one more piece of Samsonite to add to my growing collection.
Man, if I could buy a ticket on the Wayback Machine and travel back in time, I’d bend over and boot myself in the ass. I mean, what the hell was I thinking? Here I was trying to infiltrate one of the most violent motorcycle gangs on the planet and I was wet-nursing a dope addict twenty-two years my junior and changing poopie diapers on a two-year-old.
While Jenna attended school, the job of minding Sierra fell to me and Old Joe. My buddy had had kids of his own and basically knew what to do, but I didn’t have a fucking clue. When it came to diapers I was okay with pee, but whenever it shot out the other end my head went straight into the toilet. Got to the point where I couldn’t pay the prostitute next door enough to come over and clean up the kid’s messes.
So now it was “Three’s Fuckin’ Company” inside that shack at Valle Vista, with Old Joe stewing in the trailer outside, completely disgusted with the whole turn of events. My buddy loved little Sierra, but he was no fan of her mother, and Jenna wasn’t thrilled with having him around either. I overheard the two of them arguing over me once—although Old Joe is so damn mellow it’s a bit like quarreling with a fence post.
“I’m sticking by George no matter what,” he was telling her. “We’re partners.”
“I’m the only partner George needs,” Jenna fired back. “You need to move. Why don’t you man up and go home to your kids and say I’m sorry I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.”
“Well, Buttercup,” said Joe slowly, “I ain’t exactly proud of where I’m at. But I can tell you this much. I’ve been through George’s girlfriends before you, and I’ll be here when you’re gone.”
That shut her up.
So now we were a family. A somewhat dysfunctional family, to be sure, but a family nonetheless. The all-too-infrequent stretches when Jenna was clean and feeling good about having her d
aughter back were a pleasure. But one or two pills would drive her right back over the edge again—a reality that weighed heavily on both of us.
“I know how I think of my mom and what her addiction has done to me,” Jenna said to me as she was putting Sierra to bed one night. “And I think of how my little sister should look up to me but doesn’t. I want to break that chain with my little girl. I don’t want her doing to me what I did to my mom. I don’t think I could bear it.”
“Hey, it’s a choice,” I said. “I chose to stop. So can you.”
She shook her head. “That might have worked for you, George, but that’s not who I am. I’ll always be an addict. If I touch heroin once I’ll be strung out for three days. If I do it once today I’ll do it twice tomorrow. I could get addicted to soap if I liked it enough.”
“That’s a cop-out,” I told her.
She sat heavily on the couch beside me, looking much older than her twenty-two years. “I should be dead, you know.”
“Join the club.”
“I’m serious,” she said in earnest. “I’ve lost five really close friends. We all made it out of our teen years, but heroin killed them right after that. So why am I still here? I’ve done just as much shit as they did. Maybe even more. I’ve tried overdosing a bunch of times and didn’t care if I ever came back.”
“You tried to commit suicide?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t like I wanted to die, but I really didn’t care if that’s how it ended, you understand? I never said I better not do too much because it might kill me. It was always, give me more . . . give me more.”
12
Aspirin, a Tampon and a Gun
The story goes that back in the early 1980s the P of the Venice Beach Vagos, a one percenter named Crazy Johnny, was riding down Mexico way looking to get laid when he came across a bunch of Chicanos wearing handmade Vagos patches. When Johnny reported the news back to national, a fact-finding delegation was dispatched to find out just what the hell was going on south of the border.