by Teddy Atlas
The really funny part is that the cops actually tracked us down the next day and questioned us about it. They didn’t think we did it, but they thought we might know something. They said, “Whoever did it, they were professionals, because they bypassed the wires in the wall without setting off the alarm. That’s why we know it couldn’t be you fuckin’ idiots.” When they left, I said to Billy, “There were wires in the wall? You didn’t tell me there were wires in the wall.” He was dying laughing. “That cop was looking right at your swollen hand saying no way we could possibly have done it—and we’re the fuckin’ idiots?”
ONE NIGHT, BILLY GOT A GUN AND WE DECIDED TO ROB A bar in Stapleton. It wasn’t really as premeditated as that sounds. We were just looking to do something, and that’s what we settled on. I didn’t even know why I was doing this stuff. Billy knew what he was doing. He was robbing a bar. Me? I was just trying to fit in with him. I saw him as someone who cared about me, and I wanted to show him that I was worthy. Anyway, we went to this bar on Bay Street, and we were there for a while, drinking, playing pool in the back room, and plotting our next move. This is what I mean; it wasn’t even a plan. We were just trying to figure out what we were gonna do. We knew we wanted to do something.
“Should we rob this fucking joint or what?”
“It’s still early. Let ’em get a little more cash in the till, make it worth our while.”
While we were discussing it, this guy Robert Holder showed up, picked up a pool cue, and joined us. I knew him a little. His brother Dallas had been involved with wiseguys, got arrested, then flipped and ended up going into the Witness Protection program. This was back in the days when the Witness Protection program wasn’t as full as it is today. Now it’s like the Holiday Inn; you can’t get in. But in those days, it meant something. It was like, wow, the guy fucking disappeared. He ratted out the wiseguys and now he’s gone. Anyway, Billy let this guy Holder know what we were doing, that we had a gun and we were going to rob the place. I don’t know what he was thinking, because this guy, whose brother was a rat, didn’t even particularly like Billy.
When Holder went off to the bathroom, I said, “What the hell are you doing?”
“Ahh, it’s okay,” Billy said. “Don’t worry about it. C’mon, I’ll buy you another drink.”
It was screwed up. If you’re going to rob a place, you should rob it.
Twenty minutes later, we were still bullshitting around when the cops came in. We were in the back room, they were in front, but we could see them checking people out, looking around, moving in our direction.
“That motherfucker,” Billy said. “He gave us up.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Shit! The gun.”
“Give it to me.”
“They’re gonna nail us, Teddy.”
“Give me the gun.” In that moment, Billy looked very weak to me. Just a scared kid. I reached into his waistband and took the gun. I could see he wasn’t going to be able to handle going to jail.
“What are you doing?” he said, but he didn’t try to stop me.
When the cops came into the back room, they frisked me and found the gun. They wound up running us both in and taking pictures, fingerprints, the whole bit. My bail was set at five thousand for the gun charge, but they let Billy out on his own recognizance.
Here’s the crazy thing: My father bailed me out the next day, and two nights later, I was down in Stapleton again, looking for trouble. I mean really looking. I hooked up with another friend of mine this time, a guy named John, who’d been a football player and was a big, tough bastard bent on his own mission of self-destruction. John had been stabbed at a New Year’s party and lost a kidney, and he was poisoning his remaining kidney with as much liquor as he could drink. The basic plan for the night was for us to make some money, but as I say, there were obviously underlying issues driving each of us that we were too disconnected from ourselves to recognize.
We started out in Teckie’s Bar on Gordon Street, across the street from the projects. Teckie’s was one of our regular hangouts, just a small neighborhood drinking bar with a shuffleboard machine and a pool table. There was a friend of mine there, a guy named Nipple, who had a gun, and I just came straight out and told him to give me the gun.
“What are you gonna do?”
“I need it,” I said.
There was no question, the idea of giving me his gun made him nervous. I made a lot of people nervous at that point in my life, because they knew whatever I did, I would really do. I was dangerous. I wasn’t a bad kid, but I was dangerous because I was righteous about what I was doing. I thought what I was doing had a purpose to it, though I doubt I could have said what it was then—or at least I’d have been wrong.
“Come on, give me the gun.”
“Teddy, I don’t know….”
“Just give me the goddamn gun.”
John had this car, a brown Plymouth Roadrunner that he had totaled seven or eight times and was always hauling into the body shop. After I got the gun from Nipple, we went outside and climbed into John’s car. A bunch of people followed us out, sort of like a send-off; it was clear we were embarking on something. I rolled down the window, and in a moment of drunken bravado I shot the gun into the air. Later on, Nipple told me that as we drove off he remarked to everyone, “Well, they’re not coming back.” It didn’t exactly make him Nostradamus.
For a while we just drove around. It was strange—we wound up on Richmond Terrace, where my father grew up. You think of these things afterward. Did it mean something? Was it a piece of a puzzle? It’s hard to think it was just coincidental. Anyway, there was a bar down there; it was closed. I don’t know what time it was, but it must have been past three in the morning.
“You want to go in?”
“Yeah, let’s go in.”
There was a window shaped like a triangle. I put my sleeve over my hand and punched it in, then crawled through the opening, cutting my chest on one of the jagged edges of broken glass. We were terrible criminals. I mean, total amateurs. John was too big to get through the window, so he stayed outside while I poked around in the dark.
“You find the cash register? Is there any money in there?”
“Yeah, they left a box full of fucking money.”
“At least get us a bottle of scotch.”
I grabbed a bottle of Johnny Walker and crawled back out. John guzzled a quarter of the bottle right there on the curb, then got back behind the wheel of the Roadrunner. We drove around a while more, finally stopping at a Hess gas station.
In those days, they had these cement capsules for the attendants to put the money in, these concrete tubes right on the fuel island, next to the pumps. It was a security thing. They put the money in there, and that way they wouldn’t get robbed. But this was a weekend night; they’d been busy, and the capsule was so full of money that it was almost spilling out of the slot at the top. So we were standing there, the attendant had the hose in his hand, pumping our gas, and I was plucking twenty-dollar bills out of the top of this thing. I wasn’t even trying to hide what I was doing, and John was acting all silly, cracking up because I was so calm and blatant about it. At some point, the kid who was pumping gas noticed. Today, when I think about it, I feel bad for a kid like that, but at the time I was in a different place. I didn’t have those feelings for anybody. Anyway, I just gave this kid a look, you know, a don’t-fuck-with-me look, and he decided not to pursue it, at least not directly. Instead, he headed off into the office, where there was a phone.
“C’mon, Teddy, we gotta blow this place. He’s calling the cops.” John yanked the nozzle out of the gas tank and threw it on the ground while it was still pumping. It snaked around, squirting gas all over the place.
I plucked a couple more bills out of the capsule, then got into the car; John already had it started up. The kid saw us and came running out of the office to stop us. I started getting out of the car to confront him, and he ran back inside. Okay. I shut th
e car door, and we were about to leave again, and again he came running out. It was slapstick stuff. This time I took the gun and aimed it at him. He stopped dead in his tracks and hit the deck like he was already shot. He was scared out of his mind. I raised the gun and shot it into the air. Except he didn’t know; he was facedown and whimpering.
Half an hour later, John had nearly finished off the bottle of Johnny Walker. We were cruising along Victory Boulevard when he picked up a cop car in the rearview mirror. They were a block behind us. He immediately got all panicky.
“We’re fucked, man. We’re fucked, Teddy.”
“Just keep driving.”
“Maybe we should make a run for it.”
“Just keep driving. They don’t have their light on.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
We went a ways like that, maybe a couple of miles, far enough to begin to think maybe it was just a coincidence, because they weren’t doing anything. Then we came over this ridge at the far end of Victory Boulevard, and any idea we had that we were in the clear exploded in a blaze of what felt like a hundred headlights pointing right at us.
Lined up in a phalanx on the street, maybe three hundred yards ahead, was a roadblock of ten police cars.
“Holy shit!” John said in this high, terrified voice. “Oh fuck!”
“Shut up.”
The cops had their doors winged open, and they were crouched down with guns and rifles drawn. Over the PA they were shouting, “Stop the vehicle!”
John slammed on the brakes. We skidded to a stop, the car fishtailing. By now there were cop cars behind us, too, the one that had been following us and some others.
“Don’t move! Put your hands where we can see them!”
It was strange. I felt very calm. My thoughts were clear. I should have been like John, scared and shaky, but I wasn’t. I had the gun in my waistband, and I knew what was going to happen. I started to think of where to put the gun, where to hide it. These were seemingly rational thoughts, though in reality, given the danger, they were not. At first I thought I’d put the gun in the visor. I started to raise it, but I could actually hear the rustle of the cops’ guns and their uniforms; I could hear their nerves like strings being wound on a guitar. Over the PA, one of them shouted, “Don’t fucking move! We will shoot if you move!” I must not have listened at first, because they kept screaming, “Do not move! We will shoot!” John was saying, “Teddy, listen to them, for Chrissakes! Listen to them!” Something penetrated, because I stopped moving my hands up. Instead, I bent forward and threw the gun under the seat, and again heard that rustle of movement and nervousness. It’s amazing that they didn’t shoot. I always tell the fighters I train that motion relieves tension. If you don’t move, you go to this place where your muscles control you, instead of the other way around. And that’s what I was hearing. All this motion. The sound of these cops trying not to go to that place.
In the next moment, they rushed the car. Hands reached in and pulled us out, throwing us to the ground. One of them cracked me on the head with his fist. Another one said, “Where is it?”
I didn’t answer, so they started taking the car apart, yelling, “Where the fuck is the gun?” They took the seats out and put them on the sidewalk. They still couldn’t find it. I was just lying there, hoping against hope they wouldn’t find it but knowing they would.
It must have been a good five minutes before I heard one of them shout, “I’ve got it!” It turned out the trigger of the gun had hooked on a spring under the car seat. It was hanging from the bottom of the seat. The miracle was that when the spring caught the trigger, the gun didn’t go off. If that had happened, well, that probably would have been the end of this story.
AS IF GETTING ARRESTED FOR A SECOND FELONY IN TWO days wasn’t bad enough, I was also being charged with attempted murder because of that shot I’d fired into the air at the Hess station. It was crazy. I hadn’t been shooting at that kid. But that was the charge.
At the station house, the cops took me into a back room and began working on me. “A kid like you from a good family, going off to prison, it’s a real shame.”
As far as they were concerned, there was only one hope for me. If I could supply them with some info on a gun ring they were investigating, maybe the judge would go easy on me. In the space of a couple of days they’d twice nailed me with guns, so they thought I must know something. In fact, I did. I knew the names of some of the wiseguys who were involved in the ring, just from hanging around the kinds of people I was hanging around with. I said, “Are the guns you’re interested in thirty-eights?” And when I said that, all the detectives perked up and drew their chairs closer.
“What did I tell you?” one of them said to the rest.
“No, the reason I’m asking,” I said, “is because I don’t know anyone selling thirty-eights.”
It was a stupid show of smart-ass bravado, and they didn’t appreciate it. One of them hit me so hard he knocked me off my chair. “You think you’re funny? You’re a tough guy?”
Later on, they shoved a piece of paper in front of me. It was a signed statement they’d gotten from John. And another one from Billy, from two days earlier. “Your pals put everything on you. They said it was all your idea, that you got the guns and decided what to rob. Nice friends you got.” At first I refused to look at the statements, but they were smart, they kept moving away, turning their backs, and I would take a peek, and see the signatures. They kept working on me, trying to use it. They let me know they were releasing John, that he’d made bail. (His bail was much lower than mine because he didn’t have the prior arrest like I did.) “He’s going home, and you’re going to Rikers, where you’re gonna get fucked up the ass by niggers. That doesn’t piss you off? You want to just let him get out this way? This guy who was supposed to be your friend?”
I knew they were trying to manipulate me, but at the same time what they were telling me was true. It made me realize how weak people are, and how you can’t assume that someone is your friend. Everyone has to be tested. That didn’t mean I was going to give up any information to them. From my perspective, that wasn’t an option. It didn’t mean that I was stronger than John or Billy. It was just that if you didn’t think there was a choice, then there wasn’t any temptation.
In a way, I had learned about accountability from my father. The most vivid lesson had come after a fight I’d gotten into where my head was split open with a tire iron. I’d gone to his office, and there were twenty people waiting outside. When the nurse saw me, she took me right in to see him. My father looked at me and said, “He can wait with everyone else.” It was three hours before I got in to see him; I bled all over the waiting room floor. The nurse offered to administer novocaine, but my father said, “No, he doesn’t want that. If he’s going to live like this, he should know the way this kind of life feels.” He put fifteen stitches in my head without using painkillers.
What I’m trying to say is that in my way of looking at the world, which came in large part from him, it was better to do without the thing that eased your pain, without the novocaine, or signing a statement, or whatever it was. If you were going to do something, you went in understanding the ground rules. I didn’t understand something in which there was a buckling rule.
The next morning, John got released and I got sent to Rikers. They set my bail at forty thousand dollars. The news of the arrest was all over the front page of the Staten Island paper. I guess it goes without saying that it was a major embarrassment for my father. I’d finally gotten his attention, but not in a good way. He was furious and refused to pay my bail. My mother wasn’t happy either. All the same, she didn’t want her son in jail. So she did what a mother does. She said to my father, “Either you put up the house as collateral for his bail or I’m leaving you.”
In the meantime, I got sent off to Rikers Island.
GREEN ACRES,
HERE I COME
THE OLD BLUE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS BUS rumbled
through the streets of Queens, bumping over potholes. I was handcuffed to a kid who had an Afro the size of a beach ball. Every time we stopped for a red light, the other prisoners on the bus would yell out the windows at girls walking by. “Yo, mama! You looking fine, baby. You wanna gimme some of that?” It was amazing to me that some of the girls actually responded. This wasn’t a city bus or a sightseeing bus. It was a prison vehicle full of rough-looking thugs and criminals on their way to jail.
At one point we passed in front of a Chinese restaurant on Eighteenth Avenue. A delivery boy was locking his bicycle to a parking meter.
“Fuck, look at this mothafucka,” the kid next to me said. “That’s the mothafucka who got me locked up.” Suddenly he was yelling out the window, the veins in his neck popping. “Yo, Wuk Du, you mothafucka! I’m gonna come back and fuck you up! I’m gonna kill you and bury your ass in a bowl of rice!”
Everyone on the bus cracked up. I thought, These are the people I’m going to have to live with now.
The thing about being on that bus was that you knew it was just a prelude to something worse—that it wasn’t going to be just a bus full of these guys once you got to Rikers; it was going to be a whole world of them.
I began daydreaming that I was a kid again, going out on house calls with my father. I remembered the way, when it was real cold out sometimes, he’d leave me out in the car waiting for him, and say, “If it begins to get too cold in here, you can start the engine up,” even though I knew he didn’t really mean it. He was eccentric about some things—like he’d shut the engine off and coast down hills just to save gas—so I was reluctant to take advantage of his offer. I’d be freezing my ass off and afraid to turn the key, thinking, Is it cold enough? Am I cold enough?
I guess I thought about a lot of things on that bus ride to Rikers. I knew my father was a proud man. He wasn’t going to show that he was bothered by what I was going through. In his eyes, I had done what I had done and should be accountable. On some level, even though I was only eighteen years old, I understood that. Still, it was nearly impossible not to wish that I had a family that loved me the way I’d seen families love each other in the movies. I had to keep reminding myself that I didn’t have that. Not because I was on this bus going to Rikers, but because I didn’t have it, period.
