Long Island Noir (12 page)
J-Zig repeated the question again: “What are the charges?”
“Okay, rocket scientist, let me give you a clue. My name is Detective Robert Ferraro and we’re from the Suffolk County PD Auto Crime Task Force. You think maybe now you can figure it out, or do I have to draw you a picture with crayons?”
J-Zig heard someone laughing. It took a second or two until he realized it was himself.
“Mick, can you believe this guy? He’s facing like a ten spot in prison and he’s laughing his head off. Hey, shithead, what’s so funny?” asked Ferraro.
“I am,” said J-Zig.
“You wanna let us in on the joke?” Ferraro asked.
“The punch line won’t be as funny to you if I just tell you, but you’ll find out soon enough.”
“Whatever. Mick, get this moron outta here.”
Later that afternoon, when J-Zig’s impounded car had been towed to the 6th Precinct, Mick and Ferraro searched it for more stolen parts. Nobody at the precinct paid the two auto crime task force detectives much mind. Who gave a fuck about some dumb-ass skell who was selling car parts to a police sting operation? They were too busy looking for the guy who jerked around half the first responders in Suffolk County, ripped off Island World Gold and Jewelry Exchange, and then disappeared into thin air. After a minute or two, Ferraro found the gym bag with the money, the jewelry, the gloves, and the Obama mask.
“Holy fuck, Mick!”
“What is it?”
“The punch line.”
When J-Zig was arraigned the next morning at the courthouse in Central Islip, he seemed utterly calm. He turned and smiled at the crush of media squeezed into the courtroom. After the long list of charges were read, the judge asked for J-Zig’s plea.
“Tell Avi Ben-Levi to go fuck himself!” is what he answered.
J-Zig knew it really didn’t matter what he said. He was going to spend a lot of his now somewhat less miserable life in prison.
I
was born on July 11 and have therefore assumed that I had no choice but to be a gambler. Although none of us asks to be born, and certainly not when or where, I believe my fate was further cemented by the fact that I was born in 1976, the year that gaming was legalized in Atlantic City. Within a year of my birth, which occurred in Queens, a bus to Resorts International began stopping daily at our corner gas station. Back then the fare was ten dollars round trip, and upon arrival passengers were presented with a roll of quarters, making it a free ride. The quarters, of course, never left the boardwalk. My father enjoyed the slots, and my mother loved the beach, so I grew up in the literal shadow of casinos. Sometimes these decisions are made for you.
Predetermination, superstition, and fate dictate the gambler’s choices, and I am no exception. I’m not a stupid man, and am fully aware of the perception of foolishness attributed to an emotional investment in games, but in the larger picture, don’t we all celebrate the random nature of the universe? We fear hurricanes and heart attacks, and revel in unexpected pregnancies and promotions. I’m everyman, but more so. I am simply honest about my reliance on the vagaries of chance.
I might have been the CEO of a huge corporate empire if the winds of luck had blown my way. They did not, and that is why, at present, I am homeless, and contemplating the robbery of an armed and somewhat vicious man. I have been standing in the parking lot of the Wantagh station, across the street from his bar, for some time now, and I weigh the odds of my success every few minutes. They are not good.
Wantagh has, to my way of thinking, always been a place where people go to die. Its population has grown dramatically in my lifetime, and Jones Beach has gone from bucolic to nightmarish, but it is still essentially the elephant’s graveyard of the lower middle class. When I was a child my family referred reverentially to the enclaves of Nassau County. These were the towns to which my parents’ childhood friends from years past had fled, abandoning New York’s outer boroughs and scattering to the suburban winds in the white flight of the 1960s. It wasn’t until decades later that my mother and father left their deteriorating neighborhood and joined them, everyone reuniting in geriatric, single-level bliss.
My father died before my mother, and that occasioned my first visit as an adult. My parents had been living in Wantagh for six years at that point, but I’d gone to college in California, and decided to settle on the West Coast. I hadn’t been back for a while.
I worked in the world of finance then, but repeated the same unfortunate scenario in every firm at which I was employed. I always exhibited great promise and remarkable early success, but my investment strategies would become increasingly volatile, and finally, when the risks had become enormous, some decision would not pay off, with dire consequences for the firm, and I would be let go. After three such incidents, I was barred from working in the industry.
Now it is my mother’s death that has brought me back, though I would have been better served following my instincts and remaining in San Diego, where the climate is reasonably suited to outdoor living. But I knew my mother had a will, and as my sister had been killed in an automobile accident when I was still an infant, I was the sole heir. Or so I’d assumed. There was certainly no estate to speak of, but my parents’ meager ranch on White Birch Lane would sell quickly and generate enough income that I might have a comfortable winter. And if I could double or even triple it quickly, who knew where it might lead?
I had not counted on my mother’s increased devotion to Catholicism following my father’s death. That, and the fact that I’d only contacted her once in the past four years—and then to request money—led her to bequeath the house and her modest savings to Saint Francis de Chantal Church. So here I stand.
I was married once, and had a son. That was probably my grandest effort at integrating myself into mainstream life, but it was ultimately futile. I could not maintain with any regularity the mundane jobs necessary to support a family; and sex, with women or men, was really only a pale distraction from gambling.
My wife remarried, after our divorce, a large, stupid man with a quick temper. He sold quantities of steel pipe to other large, stupid men. One night he got more drunk than usual and began beating my wife with a piece of pipe that he carried in his sales kit. When my son—who was six years old— attempted to protect his mother, her husband struck him in the face with the pipe, killing him. The director of the funeral home apologized to me for not being able to make his body presentable enough for an open-casket viewing.
My wife’s husband was sentenced to fifteen years, and it seems that he will have to serve eight. He has been in prison for four years now. When he is released, if I’m still alive, I will kill him.
Since our son’s death my wife has sustained herself with marijuana and wine. I attempted to do the same, but have found that neither drugs nor alcohol can cut through guilt and grief with the laser precision of gambling. It is only in those moments of action that I can still lose myself. That I can exist outside myself, in a world where my son is still alive, because my wife did not marry a brutal drunk, because she did not leave me, because I have no gambling problem.
This Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday, and for the first time in more years than I care to remember, I will be a winner. I will be a winner because I have an edge. Not an edge in the traditional sense, like receiving a beneficial point spread. This is more like inside information. It’s like knowing that a key player has an undisclosed injury.
Suffice to say, my only interest in sports is a sporting one. That could broadly be said about my interest in almost everything, but with sports it defines a love/hate relationship. I find physical competition, between humans or animals, a pointless exercise unless the element of chance and risk of one’s capital is inserted into the equation. There is no particular reason why any sane person should care, for example, who the fastest human being on the planet might be. If it were about traveling from one place to another as quickly as possible, wouldn’t you simply take a taxi? Yet I have, on two different occasions, won five thousand, and lost fifteen thousand dollars, because of the results of competitions to determine that very fact on a given day.
My addiction requires that I process an endless flow of information, from medical reports to pop culture gossip, about people whose lives mean nothing to me and with whom I have no more interest in interacting socially than I would the horses on which I wager. I am like a Roman general preparing for a great battle. Every available scrap of knowledge is digested and analyzed, and at the last hour the most momentous, potentially devastating decisions are based on the reading of a bird’s entrails. My life, and my decisions, have to this point been premised in almost as foolish a manner; intelligence perennially trumped by compulsion driven by blind faith. Until now. Now I have an edge.
My edge is this: I recently learned that the bar across the street is owned by one of the largest bookmakers in Wantagh, and that wagering this year—when the Giants are in contention— has been extraordinary. I have learned something else. The police will raid this establishment today, and they will arrest the bookmaker and all his employees. They will seize his gambling records and, of course, his cash. Unless I arrive first.
See, the money is gone, lost, though the bookmaker doesn’t yet know it. So the question is, what becomes of it? The police will confiscate it and, after endless legal entanglements and court appearances, it will be forfeited by the bookmaker and dumped into the public coffers, where it will make barely a ripple. Or it will be pilfered by corrupt officers involved in the raid.
Or I will enter the bar in the next twenty minutes, and I will take it.
I tend to be quiet around the police. No good can come from conversing with them at any length, and you inevitably give away more than you get. It’s the nature of the interrogator, always taking it all in. I’ve been arrested over a dozen times, and though I’ve never gone to prison I have spent more than a few nights in a precinct cell or backwater lockup. Mostly I pretend to be drunk. Police officers are used to people trying to deny that they are intoxicated, but rarely question your motives if you openly confess to being impaired. Since my arrests have generally been for gambling, or gambling-related offenses, being drunk in no way added to my potential punishment, and the ruse has often saved me from tedious and pointless questioning.
I have, as a side benefit, numerous times enjoyed the voyeuristic pleasures of being the proverbial fly on the wall. I’ve always marveled at the intimacies cops casually share with their partners, but this last arrest was the only time I’d ever gleaned information that I could genuinely characterize as valuable.
Like any degenerate gambler worthy of the moniker, I’ve got a pocketful of gutter-to-penthouse-and-back-again stories for most of the places I’ve drifted through, but in Wantagh I knew almost no one. That meant no one to vouch for me if I were to try to peddle my information to the target of the raid, or his confederates, or, for that matter, his enemies.
Besides, the police had spoken about this raid with an enthusiasm for the project rarely seen in law enforcement outside of film or television. It was to be huge for this town, huge enough to engender excitement in civil servants, and I found that excitement contagious.
I’ve never taken anything in my life by force, be it money, property, or sex, but I realized that even if I had the contacts to initiate an exchange with the bookmaker, my remuneration would be, in the scheme of things, paltry. It would change my circumstances, of course, but for how long? All my life I’ve dreamt of the big hit, every gambler’s white whale. Perhaps I never realized the form it would have to take.
I began to obsess about the robbery the way I usually fixate on a big game or race. It builds over time and you find yourself doing things to insure your participation in the event while still telling yourself you probably won’t follow through. In the weeks preceding the event you squirrel away funds, or borrow them, or sell your wife’s jewelry, or refinance your home, just to be ready. You probably won’t do anything, but you have to be ready. And then on the eve of the game there comes a sign, an undeniable omen that moves you forward and places the bet. Sometimes these decisions are made for you.
This idea, this robbery, has taken on that feel. I have been moving about in a bubble, voices around me indistinct and muffled. I have convinced a social worker at SNG on Park Avenue that I’m a recovering heroin addict from New York, and she has enrolled me in a daily methadone maintenance program. I have been selling the methadone to supplement the money I’ve earned by cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms of a café in the Cherrywood Shopping Center. Sometimes they feed me, though they are not as generous as one might hope.
It took me only three weeks to accumulate the funds to buy the gun. Three weeks of living single-mindedly, obsessively, telling myself the whole time that I almost certainly won’t do this. I won’t commit this robbery in a town where no one left alive knows me. Where I gave the police a false name, and the charge was too insignificant to warrant fingerprinting. A town from which I can virtually vanish. I probably won’t do this.
As in any high-stakes game the clock dictates the risk level, and my situation proves the rule. I had been staying in my parents’ house until last week, when the church engaged a real estate agency to sell the property. They did not respond to being passively ignored with the same patience granted me by the clergy, and they changed the locks while I was out. Since winter has been thus far fortuitously mild and I still had access to the garage, I was able to sleep in an enclosed space and continue using my mother’s lumbering Crown Victoria, so long as I kept out of sight and maintained the odd hours that, frankly, have always suited me. When I returned last night from my trip to New York to acquire the firearm, my mother’s car was missing from the parking lot of the railroad station.
