American Desperado Read Online Free PDF Page A

putting furs on her back, getting her the nice car, she never stopped him. Now he was that terrible man, and Arnold Goldfinger was our savior. She told me, “Arnold is going to be your father. He owns a factory, and someday it will be yours.”
    The first time I met Goldfinger, he told me I shouldn’t turn out like my father. God, I hated him. He got rich because he made a special radio tube that had to go in radar machines used by the military. My mother took me to his factory, and he showed me all the people working for him. My mother kept saying, “You see how smart he is? You should be just like him.”
    I looked at Arnold Goldfinger and said, “Who fucking cares about your money?”
    Everybody kissed his ass. I wanted him to know I was never going to like him.
    The feeling was mutual. When my mother told him how much I liked the Harlem Globetrotters, he offered to buy me tickets. But there was a catch. I had to write one thousand times on paper: “Please, Mr. Goldfinger, let me see the Harlem Globetrotters.”
    I wrote it, because I loved the Harlem Globetrotters. But it made me hate his guts even more.
    J UDY : Excuse me for saying this, but when it came to Jon, our stepfather was a prick. He had money up the kazoo. He lived in a mansion. When we moved in, I was given my own bedroom. You know where he made Jon sleep? In a storeroom downstairs, where they had kept dogs.
    J . R .: When they put me in the dog room, that’s when I knew my mother had literally thrown me to the dogs. I decided, “Fuck my mother, fuck everybody.”
    I didn’t talk to my mother. I didn’t look at her anymore. A few weeks after we moved into the house, she and Arnold went to Europe on a honeymoon. Judy had graduated from high school andwas dating a guy, so she was gone most of the time. I was in the house alone with my two older stepsisters. Barbara, the eldest, was nineteen, and she was put in charge of me. She worked in a bank and already had the attitude of a classic ballbusting Jewish broad. Her main rule was that I stay downstairs in my dog room.
    The one bright spot of moving to West Englewood was a girl who lived down the street named Nancy. I was at the age where the stuff was pumping in me. Nancy was a couple years older than me. She was a blond bad girl who was into rock and roll. Her thing was teaching me to play doctor. She let me feel her titties, her ass. She showed me how she liked to be kissed. We were doing this one day, and suddenly it felt like the walls were moving. My pants got wet. I didn’t know what had happened, but it felt good. All she’d done was use her hand, but it gave me an inkling how good a girl could make you feel. I never looked at girls the same way after that. One hand, and they could take you into a different world.
    I still was hanging out with my older friends who’d gotten me the gun. These guys were seventeen and eighteen. They’d come over at night and drink beer in my little dog room. One night one of them said, “Hey, let’s take your stepdad’s car into Manhattan.”
    My stepfather drove a 1961 silver-blue Cadillac. It was a beautiful car. While he and my mom were in Europe, my stepsister Barbara had the keys. I waited until she went to sleep and took them from her purse. I met my friends outside, and I got into the driver’s seat.
    “You don’t know how to drive,” my friends said.
    “Guess I’ll learn real quick.”
    I’d driven around with my father and Mr. Tut for years. Driving was no big deal. Next thing I know, I’m on the highway driving across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. My friends are laughing. “You better let us drive home, because we’re going to get you fucking drunk tonight.”
    Even though I was thirteen years old, my friends knew a shithole on the East Side called the Blue & Gold Tavern * where thebartender didn’t care. I walked in and sat at the bar, and he said, “You want a beer, kid?”
    I had no tolerance. I drank two or three beers,