American Desperado Read Online Free PDF

and I was history. Hours later I came to in the back of my stepfather’s Cadillac. One of my friends was driving. Route 4 was the road to my stepfather’s house. I was so drunk, when I looked out the window at the sign, I thought it read “Route 44.” I was seeing double.
    I start yelling that it’s my car, I got to drive it. My friend pulls over. “Drive your fucking car.”
    I nearly made it to my stepfather’s house, but when I reached his street, I drove on the sidewalk and hit a telephone pole. The pole broke over across the hood. We crawled out of the car laughing.
    The next morning I woke up in my dog room. My stepsister Barbara was shaking me. “You wrecked my dad’s car!”
    “Come on, I’m thirteen years old. I don’t even know how to start a car. Someone must have stolen it.”
    I tried going back to sleep. Then I heard my stepsister in the next room, calling our parents in Europe. I ran in, grabbed the phone from her hand, and smashed it. She tried fighting me, and I knocked her over. That put some fear in her eyes.
    I told that bitch how it was going to be. “Don’t make aggravation for our parents on their honeymoon. You let the car get stolen. You’re the asshole. You fix the car.”
    For weeks and weeks my stepsister had thought she had the upper hand, that I was a dog living in the storeroom. Those days were done. She paid to repair the car and fix the telephone pole.
    By the time my mother and stepfather returned from Europe, the car looked brand new. My mother was home a few days when she came into my room and said, “I’m going in the hospital tomorrow. I’m going to have an operation.”
    I said nothing. I still was not talking to her.
    J UDY : Our mother had become pregnant by Arnold Goldfinger, and she decided not to keep the baby. In those days doctors would saythey were doing a “hysterectomy,” but it was a euphemism. She went to Fifth and Flower Hospital in Manhattan and had an abortion.
    J . R .: A day after my mom went into the hospital, my stepfather told me, “Your mother’s sick. There were complications. She has peritonitis, blood poisoning, and lobar pneumonia.”
    My stepfather wanted to drive me into the hospital to see her. There was no way I would visit her with that piece of shit. In my group of Italian friends from Teaneck was a guy named Jack Buccino, who offered to drive me.
    Jack had a red Ford Fairlane convertible that I’ll never forget. It was a nice day when we crossed over the bridge into the city. I had a very strange thought, a magical thought. My sister had told me the real reason our mother had gone to the hospital. Driving across the bridge, I thought maybe my mother had the abortion because she didn’t want to be with our stepfather anymore. She was going to leave him. I thought by visiting her now, I was going to change everything. We’d start talking again. Everything would be different. I’d stop going down the path I was on. I’d be a normal kid.
    When the nurse took me into my mother’s room, I didn’t recognize her. There were tubes sticking out of her. Her face was caved in. She was out of it. I didn’t even try to talk. I went to a bar with Jack and got blasted out of my mind on beer.
    A day later my stepfather came up to me. “Good news,” he said. “Your mother made a great improvement. She’s getting better.”
    What I didn’t know—and what my stepfather didn’t know—is that sometimes when somebody is really sick, they give it one last fight, to try to live. My mother did that. Everybody thought she was getting better. Next day she was dead.
    My mother’s death shook me for a long time. The last memory I have of my mother is a woman in the hospital with tubes in her who I could not talk to. That’s the picture of her that stays in my eyes today.
    J UDY : Jon did not shed a tear when our mother died. His reaction was not natural. Instead of going through grief, he filled with more hatred.
    For all the bad things I can say