My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  “No, I gotta get paid. You’re short,” Hollywood said. “You took it upon yourself.”

  “That’s all I got. I’m not selling them.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Ben wasn’t kidding. The amount still owed was twelve hundred dollars. Ben tried to give Hollywood the remainder of the fake pills.

  “Go fuck yourself. Pay me the money,” Hollywood said.

  Ben waved him off and walked out.

  Hollywood’s expenses were not that of a normal nineteen-year-old. He owned his own three-bedroom stucco home in West Hills, drove a black Mercedes and a blue sports car with two-thousand-dollar speakers, and was about to pay for his girlfriend Michelle’s boob job. She already had a tattoo just above her backside that said “Jesse James.”

  To explain why his son could afford a forty-five-thousand-dollar cash down payment on his own home before he was even out of his teens, Jack Hollywood would later say it came from insurance money from an accident where his son had hurt his shoulder. And OK, fine, maybe his son sold “a little weed.”

  It was no great secret that the Hollywoods—both Jack and Jesse James—were drug dealers. For a couple of years in the early 1990s, it seemed that Jack Hollywood tried to go legit; he moved his family out to Colorado Springs and started a sports bar and restaurant, saying he wanted to get his kids away from gangs and drugs. Ironically, though, Jesse James would later say that it was in Colorado that he began selling drugs, during his early teen years. When the sports bar failed, the Hollywoods moved back to California.

  Now, Jesse James Hollywood’s neighbors noticed all the kids who stopped by for just a few minutes, then sped off. They saw Hollywood smoking with his friends out front, all of them in tank tops and jeans, many with tattoos. They saw the two pit bulls kept tied to a tree in the backyard and the expensive tricked-out cars—one of which actually landed in Lowrider Euro magazine because Hollywood had mailed photos of it to an editor there. He used to carry the magazine around to show it off to people. And Hollywood had no real job aside from sporadic work as a carpenter. So, how did this teenager afford this lifestyle? It added up to a pretty clear portrait of a young drug dealer, but no one ever reported suspicious activity to the police. Nobody wanted to mess with the Hollywoods.

  Nobody but Ben.

  At that point, even though they were arguing about the money, Ben still considered Hollywood a friend. The tough-guy talk was just his way, Ben figured. They’d get over it. Several months went by, with him not seeing much of Hollywood because Ben had decided to straighten out and work with his dad. That meant, however, that he was making less money than he had as a drug dealer. He accepted that he still owed the twelve hundred dollars, but he wasn’t making any more payments yet, and Hollywood wasn’t bothering him about it. The two still acted fine with one another when they did see each other.

  During this time, Ben proposed to his girlfriend using an emerald and diamond ring I gave him to use.

  Then came the fire starter. Hollywood and his girlfriend, Michelle Lasher, ate and drank at a brewery where Ben’s fiancée worked as a waitress. At the end of their meal, they skipped out on the fifty-dollar tab, writing a note on a napkin, “Take this off Ben’s debt.”

  His fiancée had to cover the tab, which Ben repaid to her—but he was furious. Where had that come from? After months, why had Hollywood chosen that way to get his debt repaid? Was it to humiliate Ben’s fiancée? Was it because he was upset that Ben was “going straight” and not hanging around anymore?

  It didn’t matter—Ben had been disrespected, and that was never OK. Ben wasn’t the kind who could ever let things slide.

  “You’re a little fucking punk and you’re not going to get a dime from me,” Ben yelled into Hollywood’s voice mail. “The next time we see each other, we’re going to handle business.”

  Ben kicked things up a notch the following day by alerting an insurance company to a scam that Jesse James Hollywood was running. Hollywood had reported his customized Honda stolen, in an attempt to collect thirty-five thousand dollars. Meanwhile, he had chopped it up and sold the parts and then had his cousin smash the car. Ben had gone with Hollywood when he first had the car insured, so he knew which company to call. Because of that call, Hollywood wasn’t able to collect the insurance money.

  That’s when Hollywood vowed revenge, and he let everyone in his little gang know it. They were going to find Ben, and they were going to—well, they didn’t know exactly what they were going to do, but they were going to make him pay. The two exchanged more threatening voice mails, and one day Ben drove up to his apartment and saw Hollywood and Ryan Hoyt standing outside. He hadn’t told Hollywood where he was living, but the night before, he had been at a bar with their mutual friend Casey Sheehan, and he had given him the address. Ben knew Hollywood was there to intimidate him. Rather than get into a fight that night, he just kept driving. When he came back a few hours later, they were gone.

  “Yeah, you know where I live . . . but I know where you live, too, motherfucker. And I know where your family lives, too,” Ben said on Hollywood’s voice mail.

  Ben moved out of the apartment the next day, and he bought a .25 caliber pistol from one of Jeff’s employees. The timing coincided with breaking up with his fiancée; he ended up living with roommates in his next apartment. And he had decided to do construction work with his uncle instead of continuing with Jeff at the aerospace machine shop, work he considered mind-numbingly boring. It was a lot of button-pushing and computer-automated processes, because they manufactured components for commercial and military equipment.

  On the other hand, fifteen-year-old Nick had just started working with his dad. It was his first summer job. Every day, he rode to work with Jeff, then took the bus home while Jeff stayed later.

  As usual, Ben became nomadic. There was no shortage of people who were angry with him, that’s for sure. At the end of July, Ben and a friend walked into a T. G. I. Friday restaurant and straight into the sights of a different local marijuana dealer whom Ben had stiffed—this one, to the tune of thirty thousand dollars. The dealer and his friends weren’t happy with Ben and his friend, and a fight ensued. It was five against two, and it ended only because Ben’s friend managed to slip out and pull the car around so they could escape.

  Around that same time, Hollywood and his girlfriend came back to his house to find one of his two pit bulls dead. Neighbors said they hadn’t seen anything, but Hollywood decided that Ben must have poisoned his dog. That was about when Hollywood started talking about leaving West Hills. What seemed to have sealed the deal was when Ben and a friend broke Hollywood’s front windows using aluminum tubing. Hollywood told people that right afterward, he’d gotten a phone call from someone impersonating a Mexican accent.

  “This is Little Shooter. How do you like the window job? This is just the beginning, you little midget.”

  Hollywood rented a storage unit and began boxing up his possessions, moving them into the unit while he decided where to go next. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going to move, but he borrowed his father’s friend’s cargo van the first week of August. When a girl he’d slept with asked what he was up to, Hollywood told her he was moving.

  “Too many people know where I live,” he said.

  On a Sunday morning, three of his friends were at his house: Jesse Rugge, William Skidmore, and Ryan Hoyt. Jesse Rugge was one of Hollywood’s pot dealers, and William was a prison-tattooed Spanish guy whose nickname was “Vato Loco” (crazy dude). As Ben later put it, William was the kind of guy who would sell your stuff and then tell you he got “jacked.” Even Hollywood didn’t trust him enough to deal drugs with him, but he kept him around for entertainment and muscle anyway. William was tall and lean, solid as a brick and intimidating.

  I knew William’s mother, Florinda. A close girlfriend of mine lived up the street from her, and Florinda was her housecleaner and friend. Many times, William’s little brother would go swimming in my friend�
��s pool, along with Nick. I’d see Florinda in Costco, and she’d ask how Ben and Nick were, and I’d ask how her kids were. She always seemed nice.

  Around 1995, she’d tried to avert disaster by moving her family to a different subdivision to get away from William’s West Hills friends, who she knew were no good. She even resorted to padlocking the pantry because the boys were always taking her food. But unfortunately, William stayed tight with his friends and stayed in trouble. When he was arrested and kept in a Simi Valley holding cell in early 2000, he etched the name of a Filipino gang onto the door and told officers his gang name was “Capone.”

  While Ben and Hollywood were fighting, William left long, rambling messages for Ben in the middle of the night, sometimes pretending to be Hollywood and wanting to “work it out,” or asking why he wasn’t “kickin’ it” anymore. Maybe he was trying to lure Ben over to Hollywood’s house unsuspectingly, so that they could beat him up. But Ben knew Hollywood needed others to do his dirty work for him, and the rest of them were just a big group of loud-mouthed potheads, anyway. They could talk a big game, but when it came down to it, they had never delivered.

  Ben ignored the messages, but he ended up speaking to William on the phone on several occasions. It escalated to threats, where William would say things like, “Don’t make me have my boys come down there and handle it another way.”

  William’s “boys” were the Long Beach gang Satanas, and he had the gang name tattooed across his chest. Actually, he was so tattooed that the entire rest of his chest was inked, with “Satanas” left in the negative space.

  Ben would yell and threaten right back, but nothing came of those threats until Sunday morning, August 6, 2000.

  At about 10:00 a.m., Hollywood called another friend and told him to be ready—they were going to pick him up that afternoon and go out partying in Santa Barbara, one hundred miles up the California coast from Los Angeles.

  Which they did, of course. It’s just what happened in between that complicated matters a bit.

  CHAPTER 6

  LATE FOR BREAKFAST

  We had him cornered—or so I thought. My fifteen-year-old son, Nick, had just come home a full hour before his curfew. That happened roughly once in every . . . never. I was impressed for a few seconds; then I saw that he brushed past his beloved niece. That also never happened. Normally, he’d be overjoyed to see Leah, Ian, and their baby daughter. But tonight he was distracted and clearly trying to sneak past unnoticed as I snapped one more picture of the happy family.

  “Nick, look who’s here,” I said. “It’s your favorite niece. I mean, your only niece.”

  And that’s when I caught on: Nick had the unmistakable glaze of drugs in his eyes and a strange bulge in his jeans pocket.

  “He’s stoned!” said Leah. She was exasperated; for the past couple of months, she had been ratting him out to us every time she saw her brother’s bloodshot eyes. Nick was angry with her for doing it, but it wasn’t like she was playing high-and-mighty—Leah had done more than her share of drugs in high school. But she had also done some growing up, and she wanted Nick to do the same.

  He shot her a dirty look and tried to keep walking. I motioned for his father to get up and stop Nick from continuing to walk past us.

  “What’s in your pocket?” I asked, as Jeff and I both advanced on him.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Let us see what’s in your pocket, now!”

  “Leave me alone!” He bolted past us, straight out the door.

  Although I ran after him, by the time I got to the door, he was already across the street. I lost sight of him in the darkness almost immediately and knew it was pointless to try to chase him.

  My beautiful son. He was pushing his teenage boundaries, that’s for sure. A few months earlier, he had been caught smoking a cigarette off school grounds, and the vice principal searched his pockets before letting him back into the school. The vice principal found a small bag that had the residue of a marijuana joint in it and called the police. Nick was arrested and fingerprinted.

  It was probably best that he chose to call his dad from the police station that day instead of me. He knew I’d be devastated. Jeff let him stew at the station for a while, then went to pick him up.

  “We can’t go through this again,” Jeff told Nick. What we’d been through with Ben was too much for any parent to deal with. The drugs, the fights, the guns. But Nick wasn’t like that. Loving and funny and loyal and sensitive, he was my boy. My sweet son.

  He looked remorsefully at the ground and accepted his lecture and his grounded weekends without complaint. I hoped and believed it would be the last time he’d ever need that kind of punishment.

  All teenagers need a little room to grow, to learn who they are and test their freedom. I had given him just a little of that room, but I hadn’t expected him to get caught with drugs. What I really expected was more like the last little surprise he’d given me: he shaved off his widow’s peak. I always thought it was cute, but he was self-conscious about the way his hairline looked. He didn’t want me to see what he’d done, so he began wearing a hat every day. One of my hats, actually—a plaid Scottish one that he liked to wear backward. Finally, I asked him, “How come you’re wearing that hat all the time now?”

  “Because I did something stupid,” he said, slowly taking it off to show me. It was in a funny state of stubble. He told me how he had to shave it every day now or it looked ridiculous, so he wanted to grow it back in—but he didn’t know how, without looking awkward for weeks.

  I suggested that I’d shave the rest of his hair shorter so it would blend in better when it was growing back in. Heck, I’d shaved the dog before . . . how different could it be? Very, it turned out. My haircutting skills left his hair uneven and patchy, and a friend of his had to buzz it even shorter to get it to look reasonable. It made him look like a tough guy. Too bad. I loved his longer hair, always nicely combed back.

  Couldn’t we just stick to those sorts of acts of teenage independence? I could handle weird hair experiments. I could even handle the fact that the condoms I’d bought for Nick “just in case” were disappearing so fast that I thought he must have been handing them out to his friends in school, or maybe making balloon-art sculptures with them. Not drugs. Anything but drugs. Nick had always been upset by the path his half brother was on, and he told me he wished that Ben would make better choices. It was hard for me to accept that my son had taken a step on that same path he had always reviled.

  Yet here we were. My husband was blissfully innocent when it came to recognizing that his kids were high. I was more aware of the signs: the half-closed eyes, the delayed reactions. So it was up to me to be the watchdog—a role I hated but took seriously. Nick was my only child, and I sure wasn’t going to let him lose himself to drugs.

  It seemed that was becoming a literal reality, however: now that he’d run off down the street, where had he disappeared to? That one time, Nick had run away and gone to Ben’s house. He had sworn to me he’d never do that again, just as Ben swore he wouldn’t take him in again. But as the minutes ticked by, I grew more frantic that Nick had slipped off to his brother’s again. A life without curfews, without supervision, without boundaries could sure look tempting to an adolescent—but Ben’s house was about the last place I’d want any child to be, particularly my own. Wherever Ben went, serious trouble followed.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll be back,” Jeff assured me.

  Soon after, Leah and her family took off and left me to my vigil. I stared out that front window, waiting to catch a glimpse of Nick.

  A few blocks away, Leah spotted her half brother walking along the road.

  “Let me come back to your house tonight?” he asked her.

  “Hell, no. You get back in there and face the music,” she told him.

  After twenty minutes, just before I lost my mind with worry, Nick walked back in. I didn’t know whether to be angry or thrilled, so I was both at the same time
.

  “Don’t you ever run off on me again!” I said. “You promise me. I can’t take that again.”

  “I promise, Mom. I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I love you, and I need a hug.”

  He hugged me tight and told me he loved me, too. Had I known then what I know now, I would never have let him go.

  “Why did you run off like that?” I asked.

  “I just don’t like it when you bug me about having cigarettes.”

  Yeah, right. I knew he smoked cigarettes. I knew what they looked like in his pockets, too, considering I went through his pockets daily. Whatever had been in his pocket this time wasn’t a cigarette. It was a bag of something—but this was going to have to be a conversation for later.

  This isn’t marijuana, I thought. Nick seemed sped up instead of slowed down, edgy and jumpy rather than mellow. I wondered what he could have taken, and where he got it, but it wasn’t the time to grill him just yet.

  “We can’t talk when he’s high,” I said to Jeff. “We’ll talk to him about it in the morning.”

  I made Nick a bowl of cereal, and he sat on the couch watching South Park with his dad until he got tired enough to sleep. As disappointed as I was, I was also relieved he was safe in our home again. I’d get through to him. This rebellious patch was bound to end its course soon.

  Early the next morning, my mother-in-law called; Nick’s friend’s father had painted their house, and she had misplaced his phone number. I woke Nick to ask him for the number, but he told me his friend had moved and hadn’t given him the new number yet. Jeff was about to leave for morning tennis, so he went to Nick’s room and kissed him good morning—and, without knowing, good-bye.