everyone post your cool stories ITT

1/26/2010 2:44:18 PM

this one time i

1/26/2010 2:44:37 PM

cool story, bro

1/26/2010 2:44:39 PM

tww is not a blog

cool story bro

etc., etc....

1/26/2010 2:51:24 PM

1/26/2010 2:51:41 PM

1/26/2010 3:14:46 PM

just stop

1/26/2010 3:25:27 PM

^^^that picture is AWE-to-the-SOME

1/26/2010 3:33:49 PM

Should I start at the beginning? I guess that's a good place to start or so the great films tell me:

I smoked weed for the first time my junior year of high school. A hot lass had invited me over to her house to teach her to play chess after school. Being the nerdy turd I was, I actually believed her and attempted to teach her chess for a good 20 minutes before we ended up in her living room listening to Phish (never liked that band). I had, unfortunately, missed my window. She fondly told me I was "too cute" and how her and her friend discussed how innocent I was. I missed out big on her, she had some monster tits. Regardless, I tasted my first bit of ganja that night when her brother came home. I didn't get high as most don't but it was a sign of things to come.

I met Mrs. Sven on my very first day of university. There was a floor meeting a few hours after I moved into my dorm. I walked in and there she was with a clipboard joking around with her co-RA. Her laugh was infectious and amusing, I remember she laughed a lot then. The second I saw her I knew I wanted her; she was hot as hell. At the time, I still had my girlfriend from high school and she still had her boyfriend from the year before (she was a sophomore RA). So that was that, and I didn’t talk to her much for the first month or two I was there.

After Christmas break, my high school girlfriend and I broke up like all high school couples do. It was a good breakup by any standard – we are still “friends” though because of Mrs. Sven’s jealousy I was forced to cut her out of my life. Mrs. Sven also broke up with her boyfriend due to random factors, not the least of which was her refusal to have sex until marriage. It was at this point that myself, my best friend at university, and her became fast friends. We hung out constantly; often watching Conan or other random shows until 4am or later. At the time I really had no aspirations to date Mrs. Sven. In fact, I was encouraging my friend to date her.

I should talk a little about my friend. He is, in fact, the person who bought my SA account for my birthday years ago. It’s a little ironic that it began with me betraying the very person who introduced me to you fucked up fellows.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Sven did not fall for my friend. She fell for me and when I touched her vagina on that fateful night our fates were sealed. Out of misplaced guilt I asked her to date me, and our relationship began. Nothing hurt more than when I had to tell him what happened.

I made her orgasm on the first night and would repeat this feat every night for the next month. This is not to brag. In fact, this is to open a further chapter in the Sven saga that will further exemplify how fucked up I let things became. For the first three months I received nothing but blue balls. It was only after a very long talk that she finally began to give me the courtesy of a handjob. She was Catholic, no sex until marriage. Foolishly, I agreed. She was hot, so sue me. I believed at the time that eventually she would cave like any sensible person would. I proceeded to receive nothing but handjobs for two years.

Because I’m such an honest guy I’m willing to break this next paragraph to you.

It has been a running thing for E/N posters to ask for my thread. It’s often reported there is no thread. This is not strictly true. It’s in the archives somewhere but I couldn’t find it. However, I’m sure many of you remember it. I am the person who posted the thread that included the information that I had kept a spreadsheet of how many handjobs my girlfriend gave me per month. It didn’t seem weird to me at the time when I posted that. It was only after your responses that I thought, “Yeah, okay that is kind of weird.” Being a scientific individual, I had started keeping track due to the fact that our “intimate moments” were fast declining and I wanted data to confront her with. But yeah, it was creepy as fuck. What can I say, I was a nerdy dude.

Suffice to say I never did confront her and proceeded to eat her shit for a total of four years before marriage.

The second time I smoked weed was my junior summer (high school). After getting drunk, four friends and myself went out in search of food. That is when my friend pulled out his bowl and proceeded to smoke us all out in the middle of the street we were walking down. I was drunk but I’m pretty sure I got high considering I proceeded to steal a bucket from a construction site and wear it into the café.

To better understand my relationship I should probably explain my biggest fault as a human being. That is, of course, my misogynistic attitude. It was ingrained in me at an early age. My mother left when I was two year old. Well, that isn’t exactly true. Child services took me from my mother and gave me to my father. I visited her until I was eight, after that she never tried to see me again. My dad is the single greatest influence on my life and the person I admire the most. Not many people can say that honestly so I feel proud of that. Unfortunately, I emulated him in his affinity for women as well.

My dad married his second wife when I was eight years old. She was ten years younger than him at the time. She would become the second greatest influence on my life. Honestly, it was a very positive experience to start. My favorite hobby (which continues to this day) became reading. Because of her I read a book a day and became an academic success. I considered her my mother in every way and for a time appreciated her more than my father. For eight years I was very happy. It was not to last, when I was sixteen she cheated on my father and left him.

I could have forgiven that, and in fact, did. However, she also took with her my college fund, left my dad with $20k in credit card debt he didn’t know existed, and took his car, which was paid off, and left him with a huge car loan. He also got stuck with the mortgage. Despite this adversity my dad managed to put me through college and I never saw a loan bill. That leads us today with my broken idea of how a woman thinks but with my father’s sense of loyalty.

I got an inkling of how fucked up my wife was on a cold winter night while we were walking back to my campus apartment. I mentioned that I didn’t want kids for at least ten years (I was 19 at the time) and she proceeded to lay down the riot act. Quote, “I don’t know why we’re even dating if you don’t want kids.” Being who I was, I swallowed that and never spoke about kids again.

Despite how I’ve portrayed our relationship, from the three-month mark to a year we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. After that it began to change until I was lucky to get something once a week (no sex obviously, just handjobs). It was around two years in that I made my fated 1.3 handjob spreadsheet post. I was desperate, I loved her so much I was willing to make a total fool of myself to try to find a solution to our relationship problems. So when the only solution that presented itself was sever, why did I stay with her? The answer is distance.



[Edited on January 26, 2010 at 3:36 PM. Reason : ]

1/26/2010 3:35:07 PM

I will never read another one of your posts, God

including that one

1/26/2010 3:36:07 PM

My senior year of university my wife left to get her masters degree. That year I began to smoke weed in earnest. I became truly numb and survived that year thanks to that. Once I graduated I moved out to where she was getting her degree despite severe reservations. There I began to abuse alcohol and adderall.

She hasn't cooked for herself in two years unless forced to because I'm not home that night. If I am home and I refuse to cook, she chooses to go hungry and will guilt-trip me about it.

She likes to go to bed very early, usually around 9pm. She will whine every ten minutes or so from the bedroom for me to come to bed even though I tell her constantly I'm not going to bed that early. She refuses to go to sleep until I come to bed and gets mad if it's late. Don't confuse this with our sex problem, if there's even a hint of sex happening I will go to bed. She uses this to her advantage and will give me blue balls to get me to come to bed and then will do nothing. She gets mad when I get up and leave because I'm not tired and she's just going to sleep.

She will annoy me on purpose. She knows when I am getting aggravated and I will tell her I am getting aggravated but this only encourages her to do it more. She then proceeds to throw a tantrum when I finally tell her to stop and will leave the room in a huff. For example, I wanted the TV remote and she did the thing where you move it around so the other person just misses grabbing it. Okay, that's funny once. Maybe twice. But if you continuously do it for a few minutes it's super annoying. I refused to play the game and she threw the remote down next to me and walked out in a huff because, "I didn't want to play with her."

She gave up on "headaches or I don't feel good" excuse for sex a long time ago. She has gotten super devious. She knows one thing that annoys me more than anything is if we're in the middle of getting intimate and she starts cracking really stupid jokes. She now does this almost every time she thinks we're close to getting intimate so I'll get pissed off and ruin the moment. She will rapid-fire tell retarded jokes that make no sense and laugh in a super high/fake laugh. In the middle she'll say, "Oh, I know you think that's annoying, I'll stop." Then she proceeds to KEEP DOING IT.

I pay all the bills but she flips her shit anytime I buy anything (our bank accounts are separate). One of our biggest arguments ever was when I bought a $50 router. We make a lot of money.

If I don't immediately acknowledge her when she comes in the door at night she will start nagging me about anything she can think of. Here's a typical entrance:

"Why isn't the laundry done? You couldn't dust the bookcase? Did you hang up your towel? Your socks better not be on the floor."

"Hi to you too I guess?"

I cook dinner every night. I also will get up to get her a drink or ask her if she wants anything anytime I go in the kitchen. She NEVER asks and will even get herself a drink and not me while I'm putting dinner on the table. She also will flat out refuse to grab something for me whereas I almost never refuse even though we're sitting on the same damn couch.

Whenever she has any sort of craving I will go out and get it for her. This isn't completely unselfish because it gives me opportunities to smoke. However, the other night I made the mistake of refusing and she threw a tantrum. She wouldn't shut up about it so I finally had to leave the room. Honestly, she can't deal with the fact that I don't want to drive to the store to get her some candy? She can't drive herself? Apparently not.

Don't spoil your SOs, kids.

Well, it may disappoint some of you to know that you can't get a divorce in a week. I gave my best shot at it, however, and I'm well on my way. I spoke to my wife and told her I was no longer happy in the marriage. Cue a few hours of her flipping her shit. At the end I told her we needed to enter counseling and we should probably separate. I'm looking at apartments today and I hope to move out ASAP. My next goal is to find an attorney so if anyone has any suggestions on finding and choosing the right divorce attorney please post.

This is short and sweet but I will be updating as my situation progresses and feel free to ask more questions. I'm very interested in anyone's divorce stories/advice so please share! Let me know the potential bombs I'm going to be hitting; like what do I do when she refuses to sign the papers? Anyway, beers and weed on me as soon as I get a new rocking home base. Cheers!

1/26/2010 3:36:29 PM

A couple of years ago, I was in college. My boyfriend and I wanted to rent a condo and of course, the owner wanted to run credit checks on us.

So I went and got my free credit report online for the year. The year before, my credit score was a little over 700. Which isn't bad. I was completely devastated when I found that there were about 12 credit cards taken out in my name with about $50,000 worth of debt.

My immediate reaction was to click on the large DISPUTE button on the website and so a week later, I received a copy of one of the credit card applications in the mail and was shocked when I saw that the handwriting was my dad's. I called my dad and confronted him about it. He admitted that the credit cards were his and said that he had taken them out to give me "the gift of good credit." This actually a lie though. My dad is unemployed and living off of disability pay and took out credit so he could pay for supplies to open up his own business (which never went through). My dad also claims that someone else stole his identity and stole his entire life savings and that the police won't do anything about it. I don't know if this is true or not.

Some of these credit cards on my report were in 2-month delinquencies. My dad said, "I paid those, but the companies think I didn't and are trying to double-bill me. It's no big deal." But I wouldn't have it. My reaction was, "Get these cards off my account now or I am returning this dispute request back to the credit bureau and telling them that you committed credit card fraud and identity theft." He pleaded with me not to, reminded me of how much he had done for me (put me through college, gave me a car) and promised he would move the debt over to his own cards in his own name and close out the accounts. I agreed to this.

He kept that promise too for the most part, except I noticed 2 accounts were still open, so I called him again, "I resolved anything that I took out." "So you won't have a problem with me disputing these 2 accounts?" "Well, maybe you should wait a while." We got into a huge argument again over how much he's "done for me" (again, with the college and car bit) that put me in tears and eventually ended with me hanging up on him.

It's now been 5 months since I've spoken with him. He's made no attempt to contact me during this time, so obviously he doesn't care about me as his daughter. I tried to e-file my taxes the other day and found out that he is claiming me as a dependent. Which would mean I would owe money to the IRS if this were true. I called the IRS about this and they told me to file my taxes as I normally would and that the IRS would contact each party after a few weeks to sort the matter out. I'm worried though that my dad will somehow pull out some fake document out of his ass that somehow proves I am a dependent even though I'm not (My boyfriend and I split our rent, utilities, and groceries--my half comes entirely from my salary). My dad is very smart and apparently a very good liar and I have no idea how capable he is of doing something even more evil than what he's already done.

Then, I got a phone call from the Student Loan Association notifying me that I am 60 days late on my student loan payment. My dad has always paid for the student loans and I am in no way involved with the loan process. My name is on no loan signatures. I did go to school. I've graduated since, but my dad took care of all of that for me. I had some scholarships, but I had no idea how much of my tuition was covered by them and didn't really care because at the time, I actually trusted my dad and knew that he had saved money for me to go to college. I figured if loans were necessary, he'd tell me. But he didn't and so I found out about them all on my own.

My dad has essentially stolen my identity. My credit score is abysmal. If I report my dad, he may go to jail. And it will be a huge drama bomb and legal clusterfuck. If I don't, he will continue to wreak havoc on my credit report and I will never be able to own a house or anything. I don't have any debt that is technically MINE, just debt that I've accrued thanks to my dad.

What do I do?

I'm employed and I make enough money to cover the student loan payments if I had to, but the question is, should I be paying for a student loan that I was not involved in taking out or even aware of until recently? If I report my dad to the credit bureaus, will I still be held responsible for the student loan debt? I've looked this stuff up on google but it just seems like a total mess to go through. Do I need to call the police? Do I need to change my social security number?

I really can't trust anything my dad says. I've completely cut him out of my life and I hate myself for being so naive for so long. It's embarrassing and I've kept this bottled up inside me for so long in shame--because it seems like every way I turn, everyone else has parents that, although have made mistakes, never like this, so malicious. How do I really get started in sorting this mess out? Am I a giant bitch if I end up sending my dad to jail?

1/26/2010 3:37:04 PM

I was arrested at the age of 13 for waving around a gun at a group of guys who had showed up at my door demanding I return a stolen batch of laundry that included, among other things, a lot of Michael Jordan jerseys and shirts. My mom and recently re-married a complete douchebag who hated kids, and what with her having four of them we didn't fare that well with food or other "wants" like, I dunno, clothes. So I got a hard lesson pretty fast-if you're going to steal don't make it something obvious.
Leaving juvie after a nice 5 month stint, I was determined to not just never return to that horrid place, but I was going to leave my home as soon as possible. I didn't care where I went, so long as it wasn't around my step-father. Not only was he a grade-A prick who loved putting locks on the refrigerator and cabinets, he just was a prick who liked to beat up kids. So, probation done, I skipped out. This was just before my 14th birthday.
I stayed with friends here and there, being very careful to be a gracious guest and never burn any bridges. I forged signatures to keep me in school, had my mail sent to one friend's house, and made it my ultimate goal that I would graduate high school. However, none of my friends were that well off I could afford food let alone clothing, so during a night of conversation at one of my friends, we came up with a plan to keep lil' Edgey clothed and fed: steal.

So, what was the plan? Smash and grabs. Easy money, little effort, high returns.
First night out we snagged a AR-15 and about $1000 worth of stereo equipment. Giddy with excitement, we returned to my friend's house and set the goods out, and it was a good feeling.
Over the years we refined our technique to the point we could execute any attempt with militaristic precision. Sometimes we were armed. Most times, we were not.

Our standard method was as follows, and these events are only for story purposes only. I do not condone not endorse using or attempting to emulate anything I may write here.

A typical evening would begin after midnight. Even on a school night, we would never, ever start early. Targets were of opportunity: open garages, unlocked cars, unkempt homes. The only times we took it above those criteria was when it was weighed to be risk/reward heavy, for example a competition-grade car audio setup but alarmed and garaged, but the vast events that took place were from something as simple as a house with a open garage.

For sake of the story, here are a few events worth re-telling.

Typical Friday night. Nothing panned out by 11pm on the female scene, so I drove one of my borrowed cars over to a friend's neighborhood. We broke out the map book, and discussed areas we felt were either worth re-conning or hadn't been hit by us in a good while. We couldn't make up our collective minds on whether to hit a Scottsdale neighborhood or drive out to Gold Canyon (far, far east of Phoenix, a place we had only hit twice due to the drive). I advocated for Scottsdale, nobody else could agree on just where. After the midnight deadline passed, our SOP was the either call it off for further discussion or do "one milers", where we would set off on foot within a mile and recon what was out there. Me and my friend decided to hoof it around local, as we rarely, if ever, hit our own neighborhoods.

So we set out on a walk, jiggling door handles on cars and scoping what was around. It's always dead quiet after midnight, one of the reasons we adhered to and always, always followed the midnight rule: parties you could tell from afar, and the great and grand majority of everyone else is dead asleep by that time. After a bit, it didn't seem like there was going to be jack shit: I got about 2 bucks in quarters from an unlocked car. Meh, them's the bones some nights.
I come up to a car parked in a driveway, and it's unlocked. As soon as the light illuminates the interior, I see a $100 bill on top of some papers in the passenger seat. I immediately call my friend over, and have him scope the surrounding houses. Once he signals clear, I reach in and snag the bills and paperwork. We nonchalantly walk across the street, avoiding the light, and make our way to a grassy area between two houses. I flash the money-there's two more hundreds and a stack of 20's. We immediately decide to hoof it back to our other friend's house.
About halfway there, I'm looking back and I see flashlights. Shit, that's never good. We immediately split up and my friend takes the cash, I take the papers. I end up half a block away and cram myself under a minivan, and seconds later I see two sets of legs running by, flashlights shining all over. As the nearest passes me, his radio goes off. Fucking shit, cops.

My friend had eventually made his way back to his own house, dumping the cash in a backyard when he got danger close to someone with a flashlight. He thought they were neighbors. They weren't. He ended up shimmying up a wall and hiding in the overgrowth of an orange tree. An hour passes, and I meet him back at our other friend's house. We both retell our stories, and I ask where is the money.

"Dude, I threw it over a wall"
"OK...what wall"

So we wait another hour and set off, along with our other friends who were there, to the wall he threw it over. As soon as he takes a leap up, the barking dog makes him change his mind. I poke my head up and over, to see a fucking pitbull barking at me. I land on the ground, and the image finally resonates with me:

"Dude, the fucking dog chewed up the money"

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Everyone takes a turn jumping up and looking over, and we all confirm that yes, that goddamn dog tore up a good chunk of the cash. Seeing as now we've made a lot of noise we head back to our friends and try to decide what we're gonna do.
Hotdogs. Lots of hotdogs.

Oh and mace. Yeah, let's use that too. Who's gonna get the money?

Fuck, me.

So, we head back with hotdogs and me with mace. On the count of 3, hotdogs go over. Another count of 3, I go over and mace the dog down. Weird thing was, the dog was so busy chewing his new treat he never even yelped when I hit him with the mace, he just scurried away and sat in a corner, chewing his hotdogs and growling lightly. I scoop up as many pieces of the torn-up cash as I could, and pocket it all. Run-jump-land-run, and we're back at the house. We ended up having about $750, with none of the $100's torn up, but almost $200 in 20's we taped together.

Funny thing is, that wasn't the most cash from one night. Just the funniest way to get it.

1/26/2010 3:37:36 PM

oh I see what you're doing

sharing your cool story bro

carry on haha

1/26/2010 3:38:05 PM

The events that take place occurred during the years 1992 up until 1996. Car audio systems were pricey and the resale of just a head unit (the CD player) could net $100 real quick. There were several ways to obtain entry to the vehicle, the least liked was an actual smash and grab (real noisy sometimes).

About halfway into my "career" (just as a note: after my 18th birthday we almost entirely stopped.) we had a few guys who would come along just to see what we did. A lot of times we would purposely choose an area that we knew wouldn't have jack shit, and just do dry runs and bug out. It was dick, but the last thing I wanted was to share a big score with some dickhead who was just along for the ride.

So we decided (we being me original crew) that we'd skirt some metro areas. Our cover story was, as it always was loosely, we were looking for a party. We drove around a bit, and inside a apartment complex we actually came on a Nissan truck that was unlocked but had an alarm light flashing. Inside I could see a Pioneer head unit, and what looked like aftermarket kickpanels. Myself, the "guest", and another friend of mine walked the area a few times, then went back to our van to discuss.

The plan was going to be me going under the truck to disable the alarm, while my friend hid in a bush to watch for me. I slide under the truck and work on the alarm, when just as I cut the wire I see feet. Our ridealong had walked up, literally in full fucking view, and was asking if he could open the door. I slide out from under and try to not blow a gasket, he was to stay in the car and not fucking move unless one of us said. He says "it's cool it's cool" and opens the door. My friend comes from out of the bush and we briskly talk shop while crouched down, the passenger door is faced towards the most likely field of view so we'll have to work from the driver's seat only.

I pull our ridealong away from the truck, and it appears he's pocketed a few CDs. I tell him to get back to the van, and as he moves away I pop the bench forward to see a nice set of 12" Fosgate subs. Ridealong steps back to look over my shoulder and sees the RF logo, and that's pretty much when it started.

I tell him again to get back to the van, he steps out into the middle of the fucking access road, in full light, and takes out a slimjim (who gave him the slimjim nobody would say later, he just stuffed it in his pants one of my friends said) waves it over his head and yells "WE GOT PUNCHES!"

Now I'm panicked, my friend gives me this look like "oh fuck" personified. I reach in and disconnect the speakerbox and yank it out, then reach under the seat and find a nice gold RF amp along with another, small RF amp. I have the speakerbox on one side and ridealong goes trotting, again in full view, back to the van with me trying to pull the box and him back to the shadows enroute. I'm saving the lecture for when we evac, as everyone's laughing a bit in the van.

Getting back to the truck alone now, I call my friend over and give him the amps. We both heard the shotgun rack a round at that moment. My friend takes the amps and weaves into the brush by the wall, all the way back to the van while I stay low and near the front driver's side of the truck. I can see a man exiting an apartment with a shotgun in his hands, he's about 150' away, and looking in my direction. I jump for the wall hoping he's not just a poor shot, but praying there's nothing but birdshot loaded if he does.

He fires.

It's a weird audio to describe, kind of like a large swarm of bugs flying by you in the same direction. I go up and over as the shotgun chambers another round and end up face down in someone's backyard. The worst has happened, now I'm on foot, being shot at (in the city too, never thought that would happen) and miles from anyone's house. I begin to jump fences to distance myself, and finally relax in a small park near the freeway. At this time I can hear sirens real close, so I'm trying to calm myself down-I don't know if they're looking for me or more concerned that someone shot off a shotgun at 4am.

I end up finding a nice low spot and cover myself in leaves and set my watch to alarm me awake at 7. Sun will be up, I'll make contact, and try and forget this clusterfuck. I see a patrolcar drive by but he's going too fast to be looking.

I woke up at about 6:50, still covered in leaves and still very much alone. I hoof it down the road to a 7-11 and use the payphone to ring my friend's house, the one with the basement we almost always end up at. He picks up on the first ring, I tell him where I am, and by 8 I'm at his house. Ridealong is there, passed out on a chair holding the gold amp. At this point I'm too tired to beat him, so I wait until I wake up...

So how exactly did I arrive at the conclusion that stealing was ok?

It wasn't much of a conclusion. More of a necessity in my eyes. I was too young to work (legally) and being a step away from homeless drives you to do things. I never wanted to make a career out of it, just do enough to get me to my 18th birthday. All told, not counting cars, I've probably heisted over six figures worth, and that was just my cut.

It wasn't just the stealing that motivated me, it was the being sneaky aspect. Years before, when life was good and my mom was a single mother, I was a Boy Scout. Did the whole camping thing, learned about the outdoors, but everything changed when Dan became our Assistant Scoutmaster.

Dan wasn't a normal guy. In his younger days he was with the 6th Special Forces Group during the Vietnam conflict. Although he never, ever talked about or told us about direct action, he was a well of knowledge. We began learning things beyond your standard Boy Scout tie-a-knot-oh-gee shit. He taught us cover and concealment. He taught us how to survive in the desert, in the forest, in the snow. I could literally ask him anything and he would go on for minutes about the subject, and my brain sponged it all up.

During a Camporee or whatever the thing was called, we had a Capture the Flag game scheduled between us and several other Troops. With his guidance, we captured the opposing team and imprisoned them near our base. Then, we matter-of-factly walked up and took the flag. Three times we did this, until someone up the food chain decided that we were "violating the spirit of the game" and declared no more game. We re-told that story for a long time after that, it was so damn fun.

So when it came to pass later on, I found that I already had instincts, I just had to tune them to the task. I insisted on planning before any night out, and that carried over to a long-running order. We never left without knowing where we were going, what the objectives were, and what to do if we met resistance. These skills, too, became more honed when I joined the Marine Corps in '96.

It wasn't always a good haul, just off the top of my head I think we had about a 1 in 4 chance of coming up empty or close to. I remember one night, we had come across a garage with two deep freezers and a refrigerator chock full of deer meat and goods. I immediately concluded that we should pay more attention, that deer meat=hunter=weapons. And lo and behold, on a bench, were two rifle boxes. Inside, were one .30-06 and a Winchester .308 sans optics. I held on to that .308 for a while, and learned how to shoot it very well.

There was work that had to be done though, and that brings up the delicate subject of how to break glass.

1/26/2010 3:38:49 PM

Smashing a grabbing is exactly what it reads: smash something in the way, and grab what lies beyond. What started out as a last resort to get the last obvious item in the neighborhood before evacing took a lot of practice to hone.

Now, you can use a crowbar. Big heavy iron object always beats glass. But the weight, coupled with the godawful noise it makes if it doesn't work the first time, meant a lot of adrenaline for what turned out to be not a lot of gain. We always came back to our smashes last, after cleaning the surrounding area out, because that would not just pump us back up for the drive home, you pretty much end that area by waking up everyone.

I had known there were special items firefighters had to break glass, but could never really find the name let alone where I could purchase it. So I settled on a pickaxe, a little one with a heavy head and sharpened the tip. Of course, learning the hard way I also started carrying heavy duty gloves. These gloves protected against cuts if your hand went through the glass as well. Those gloves got tossed when I cut up my wrist pretty bad once, and I opted for some welding gauntlets.

The trick I tried to use was to hit the very lower corner of the glass instead of the middle. Try as you might, you never got a break on the first time, every time, and the deflection caused if you aimed dead center would sometimes make more noise than the initial strike. So, aiming for the corner, and with the right flick of the wrist, I could shatter the glass with nothing but a "prrack", and then push the now-broken safety glass in and get at what I desired. As I said, I had been cut before and never really liked having to smash, but it was a necessary evil.

Now, if you've ever seen a Corvette, you may be familiar with their rather large rear window. One night, I came upon a Corvette with the largest Case Logic box in the back window area. Case Logic was about as bad a neon sign for "Money" as there was not just new music to get, but some stores we could trade CDs in for cash. (Case Logic is a brand name for a CD holder/case)

This one, though, I had never seen one so big. This was like a Case Logic backpack. I wanted it!

After unsuccessful attempts with the slimjim, I told my friend we'd have to come back and smash and grab. We returned and finished the area, netting a nice Kenwood head unit and about $40 in cash. So now we drove near the Corvette from earlier, and designated the drive out route and set off on foot the block over to the car to hit.

I glove up, do a last look around, and my friend signals all clear. I step up to the car, prep the pickaxe, swing, and holy mother of fuck it exploded.

It was as if a piece of dynamite had gone off. The glass shattered with the most godawful boom I never had expected or even though possible. My friend said I made this scrunched up face like I had been kicked in the nuts, it totally caught me off guard. I reach in, grab the Case Logic, and we evac.

Turned out, it was a CD holder that held the original CD jewel cases, in all told there was 50 CDs and cases inside. There was also a Rollins Band CD, and that got me into a whole new type of music, but that's a boring story :p

Sometimes, the night was so bad the only thing left to do was piss someone off. I'd smash out a window just to grab a buck in quarters if the night sucked. Sometimes, there'd be a run of a few nights and by the end of the 2nd or 3rd nights we'd just start wrecking cars, knowing full well we'd never return to that neighborhood (we used a map of the metro area in two forms-one was a book with high level detail streets we'd mark down codewords for good/bad and dates, the other was a metro map we had pinned to the back of my friend's closet door, using color coded for good/bad).

1/26/2010 3:39:34 PM

Now, the odd thing about this "profession" is you ended up getting a reputation, no matter how hard you tried to be low key about it. Towards the end, I could command up-front fees from people who wanted car audio equipment on the cheap. I also ran into a few people who went on to try (half assed) their own versions of "Midnight Auto Club", only to fail and get caught. Some people took it further, and went on to very big and bad things (namely running with Sammy the Bull's son and ending up in Federal pound-my-ass prison). I never knew that what we started would end up growing into some freak monster, what with crimes being attributed to a "white power" gang. On one hand, it pissed me off to see guys who were one or two years younger than me taking credit for MY fucking acts. On the other, it meant my hands were and remained clean. Except for that interview I had when NCIS came knocking asking about my relationship with the "Devil Dogs" and certain members who were more associates than friends, I never dealt or did drugs.

The world is a changing place, and what was hard to pull off just 10 years ago is easy now with easier communication methods, cheaper surveillance, and better planning tools available now. If I was the same 14 year old today, I don't know if I'd be running the same game I did back then. It'd be tempting, though.

The best nights were rolling into a half-opened garage and finding a purse or a wallet. People's attitudes towards their garages were pretty much it was another room, just a room they only visited a few times (if that) a day. So people were casual, there were a lot of items I found that I never expected to. Like a double-headed dildo I found along with a ball gag. Or that night I found a briefcase, but inside instead of the standard cash and some watch or something decent, there were photos.

Now, the dilemma we had that night was this: The pictures were of a child, nude, in compromising positions. The neighborhood was predominately upper middle class retirees. How exactly do we tell the police?
Well, we called the local "Silent Witness" the next day from a payphone. We didn't say how, just that we had found the pictures at this address, details of what they were, and left it at that.

Well, not exactly.

We decided that that wasn't enough, and even though we had just hit that neighborhood, we would go back with one intent-destroy his car. So we arrive back at the scene, and proceeded to beat every window broken, and then my buddy comes running up with a gallon of gas. Poured it all over and inside, lit it, and fucking ran off with it burning behind us. The next week, local newspaper announced the arrest of some 70+ year old man for child pornography and lewd acts against minors. In the article, it described an "anonymous tip" that was punctuated by a firebomb on his car. Well, it wasn't a firebomb sillies, it was just a gallon of gas for fuck's sake.

It's a strange mix and conflict of ideals. On one hand, I had to live, had to find a way to pay for my own way. Nobody was stepping up (nor should they have been) to clothe or house me, it was an at-will existence in many cases. Once a friend's mom or dad had enough of me hanging around, it was time to move on. I never was "kicked out" from anyone's home, rather, it was "hey maybe you should find somewhere else to stay for a while" and I respected it. As a guest, I never overstepped my bounds, and paid their parent(s) for me staying. I respected them when I was asked to find somewhere else and never held it against them. I literally had nowhere to call my own until my senior year.

On the other hand, it was taking from others. There's no way to dress that up to make it look better. Although these actions may sound quite Machiavellian, I did my best to not address it too much. This way of life I did give up after I became an adult, as I made a clear distinction that what worked for me as a young man would not work as an adult, namely because there were and are much more legal means to make a living. Does that make me a bad person? In a clear case, it probably does. But I've done many, many, many good and better things in an attempt to balance the scales. I don't know if I will ever truly feel that I've not just corrected my bad habits of my adolescence but made the world a better place for my being in it. I do know in my heart that I've given it my best since, and could leave this world hoping the scales would favor me being more "good" than "bad".

What is "bad"? Yes, destroying property in a wanton fashion isn't good that's for sure. Those times were few and far in between.

There was a place up north where people would park and hike in to go swimming in a natural spring. We'd stop in on the way up to the mountains and check it out, in one afternoon there were a dozen cars and every single one of them were unlocked. CD players, car stereos, money, it was one of the easiest jobs we ever happened on. Only one car had the drivers door locked, but the passenger wasn't. We made out with over a grand total just from rummaging around. There was even a weedbag which I took and dumped out near a tree.

You could say, as I did from time to time, that I was doing the people a favor. Teaching them a hard lesson to always mind your property, to never expect to leave something out in the open and somebody not take it. Rationalization, sure, but it is a point: who drives to the middle of nowhere on the road up to the White Mountains in Arizona and leaves their car not just unlocked, but wallets, keys, money, and expensive car audio equipment out?

The odd part to that story is one of the cars had a little boombox CD player which I held on to for a while. Almost a year later, we went up there again not to steal but hey, it's a spring-we went swimming. Came back a few hours later to find the back sliding glass window of the truck pried open and the CD player stolen. Really couldn't get mad over it.

One of the things that we came across many, many times was food or drink. Sometimes good, sometimes just a little bit. One night we were way on the outskirts of the southeast valley, and I spotted a carport with what looked like a soda machine. We crept up to it, and instead of a soda machine it was a sliding-glass cooler with the Pepsi logo on it. Stacked next to it, was a pallet chock full of soda. You know, like the bulk soda pallets you get at Costco? We spent almost a half hour loading up the back of the minivan with Mountain Dew, Pepsi, and everything else we could carry. The van sagged so low we thought we'd never make it over a bump-we actually bottomed out several times on the way back. That soda haul lasted almost the entire summer for us, we had my friend's basement stacked to the ceiling with every Pepsi product you could think of, hundreds and hundreds of cans of soda.

One neighborhood that never "learned" was up in Fountain Hills-the Arizona equivalent of Beverly Hills. Only much more rural, and hard to traverse. When the nights we chose FH came up, it took a lot of planning and map reading. There was only really two ways in and out, so we had to get it right with little room for error. I'm pretty sure that area accounted for well over half our cash grabs. The only thing we were careful more than anything to do was "overfarm" it. A place that good, consistently, had to be not just planned right but exercise a lot of patience in the weeks between hits.

1/26/2010 3:40:14 PM

Dark streets, rural area, multi-million dollar homes, very small line of sight...it was bank. Some of the items we got we ended up keeping because we didn't have a high-dollar fence to unload on. Many more, though, were quick sales-brand name purses, tons of CD players, sport equipment (namely golf clubs), we could clear a night in triple digits for each of us easy after we sold it.

There was an almost-incident though, and it came after we got greedy. Instead of waiting the 5 to 6 weeks between hits, we went back the very next weekend. This was probably our 7th run through the place in total, and the first time we got cocky and violated our own rules. We learned that night why we would never stray from our rules again.

It was now at the point where I could navigate our target area without maps. I took over driving for my friend who hadn't planned on going out but did so after we talked him into it. We had discussed some of the houses we passed on (places we either called off because of a "feeling" or didn't have time to start.) and there was one home that we came across late in the morning, about 2 hours before dawn, that had at least two golf bags visible. There was a convertible parked inside the open garage as well, but we had decided then that it was too close to dawn to chance it. So that would be one of our first targets that night.

We got up there just after 1am, and slowly made our way up the foothills in the van. We parked and left my friend behind the wheel while me and my friend stood outside about a half block downhill from the first house. It's quiet at night, but in FH it's worse-we had to mind each and every movement to make sure we didn't announce ourselves to anyone out for a random stroll. Which does happen every so often.

As we make our way up the hill, I get a weird feeling that someone's watching us. We pass out of the cone of illumination from a street light, and I stop my friend. We stand for a minute or two, smelling the air and listening. I didn't know just yet if it was nerves from this being the first hit of the night, or something was wrong. I chalked it up to nerves, gave the thumbs up, and we continued up the hill.

Now standing across the street from the house, slightly out of view of the main windows, I stoop down to tie my shoe. My friend stoops down and the feeling came back. It was a real intense, almost knot in my stomach. I ask my friend what he thinks. He says "it looks exactly like it did last week"

I agree. It does. Almost....staged.

There's some high dollar items within direct view, and again a nice drop-top sitting inside the open maw of the garage. There's nothing but slight ambient light, no street light except down the hill at the beginning of the incline. We are kneeling across the street from a dark, open score.

I stand up and my friend fans out to my right so he can get more of a view of the street as well as the house. He picks a good spot to conceal himself, and I start towards the garage. I stop about 10 feet from the pavement of the bottom of the driveway. It's not a good feeling. I start to walk backwards a few steps and stop. I'm standing in the middle of a dark road now, listening to the world.

And the sound of many feet kicking up rocks from the front yard ahead of me snaps me into action. It's an ambush.

I run backwards a few steps and then look over at my friend's spot to see him already up and running. Now it's a race to our rally point (not the van). No shouts from our pursuers, just the sound of feet pounding the asphalt. I edge to the outside of the street to stay out of the streetlight, and my friend is now ahead of me, and we're racing to the empty lot we had chosen to go to if shit went bad. Well, they're still behind us, I only catch a glimpse of two men with bats as we round the corner. We run past our friend in the van, and as soon as he loses sight he starts it up and circles back to the pickup spot.

We come up to the spot and he comes up behind us, with perfect fucking timing. My friend yanks the sliding side door open and leaps in headfirst, I yank onto the handle and yell to my friend to floor it. He's driving with the lights off, and we barrel out of there almost a block before he hits the lights and we call off the entire night.

1/26/2010 3:40:35 PM

The few times I broke into a home was only after determining beyond any shadow of a doubt there wasn't anyone there or would be. I never liked it, it just didn't seem my style, and it-believe it or not-went against my rules. I always prattle on about rules and standards and such, but it was a small way I kept myself sane, that I wasn't just some white-trash mofo out looking for a score.
In the metro area I've been talking about (Phoenix), I never came across those old school type garages. The homes here are by and large cookie cutters, all built fast and on the cheap and all looking no different than the other save for reversed floorplans or one of a whopping 4 designs. The best bet I could hope for would be a garage that was only open a foot or so, that afforded me the cover of the garage proper but still a good method to escape. I never, ever, had a confrontation while inside a garage, it always (the times that did) happened near the house.


One of the hardest nights I had to work was getting inside a gated community, surrounded by a man-made lake. We could see from the road a garage that was wide open, and the neighborhood was upper class. Problem was, the gate had a man, and a single camera at the pedestrian entrance. The only way in, aside from an over fifteen foot wall, was the lake.

Hoo boy.

Imagine this, this cul-de-sac community was in itself, inside another community. So the place overall was all upscale homes, if you looked at it from above it was almost like a circle with a small "C" inside of it. the top of the "C" was on the border of the community as a whole, that's where the 15+ foot wall was. The remaining border of the "C" was all water-every home had a dock for their little paddleboats or caneos or whatever. So, the homes outside this "C" that bordered the lake has a few boats here and there as well. All that seperated them from people like me was a tiny fence that protruded about 2' over the lake.

All it took was finding a home on the edge of the outlying edge of the lake. Which I did. Imagine, if you will, two boys dressed in black paddling across a urban lake at 1am trying our best to not laugh outright at how silly it all was.

We make it across the puddle and shore up the paddleboat in a clump of overgrown greenery. The area to our right was open, it was almost like that part of their backyard was an open park. We're on our own, no heads up from anyone or eyes elsewhere. This was going to be risky(and fun!)

We make it to the front of the home after exiting through a walkway gate. We come around the front of the house only to find a motion-sensing light triggering a illuminated path. We drop and realize nobody can see us unless they're specifically watching and waiting. Which is almost never, ever the case.

Just a quick sidebar, one the the elements we tried our best to maximize was just that-we were going into and around people's homes and cars. The best method was almost always the most direct, as you had to account that the people inside all the homes around you would have to be sleeping with one eye open expecting someone to come on foot when most likely they were just snoozing away.

I finally come around the edge of the motion light, and signal for my friend to follow. We edge into the garage, and it's like Candyland-power tools, two bags of golf clubs, some rollerblades inside their original package, the works. The problem was, we had that damn paddleboat.

So for the next two hours we systematically removed everything and staged it near the place we had landed the paddleboat. Then, either me or my friend would paddle across to an empty lot (a lot further than the house we had "borrowed" the boat from) and then stage our loots there. Two hours later, we leave the pile to get the car, set the boat out on the lake, and load up. A very good haul, I think I took a couple weeks off after that.

Also, just wanted to note I preferred Isotoner gloves. Real close fit, still retained a degree of feel in your fingertips, and gave you a feeling of invincibility. I don't know how to qualify that statement, they just did.
I tried using sapper gloves, but spend a night with those on and your arms just ache. I kept them in whatever car I was riding in, just in case.

The term "honor among thieves" is deceptive, but maybe it's supposed to be. There were conflicts among us, that's for sure. Sometimes someone would call dibs on something, only later to fight over it with someone who stayed back to do lookout. I tried to never make a vested claim on anything because it annoyed me to no end when shit got argued over. Well, maybe I should take this time to introduce the clan:

Me: I did much of the footwork and removal of stereos. I was always outfitted in black on black, with my gray gloves.

"Tom": Was equal to me if not greater on removals. Our biggest difference was I liked to finesse the items out, where he would get to a point and just start tearing it up. I spent the most time out on hits with him. He preferred fingerless gloves for god knows why.

"Dick": Almost always the eyes, and our biggest planner. Would come up with some of the more ingenious ideas for getting something. I worked the most with him on the planning stages, where when it came to execution he preferred to not get his hands dirty.

"Harry": Our driver and second eyes. Was about the most nonchalant about the entire process-as long as we bought him a Slurpee and made sure the van had gas, he was just there for his cut.

"Stan": Harry's younger brother. Was our expert on low voltage systems, and could almost tell what type of alarm (and then how to disable it) from a quick eyeball. Also would research missing parts and get a list of what would be needed to be bought if, say, a control cable was cut during a hit.

Some of the part-timers:

"Frank": Our backup driver, mostly interested in firearms and bigger speakers. Mostly firearms. Had a lot of older brothers who helped pass on items that were harder to sell.

"Steve": "Frank's" younger brother. Was active during the early stages but felt he was too good to get a low cut. Beleived our sliding scale of cut was bullshit, in his eyes everyone should get an equal cut even if, like he did, they fucking did nothing but slept in the van.

"Tim": A rare driver, mostly came along just for the thrill. Quick learner, he was actually one of the fastest I've ever seen with a slimjim. Worked as a lot attendant through high school, and was, by far, from the richest family I knew.

"Nate": I'm not going to bother changing this dickhead's name, he's the guy from a previous post who went in the road yelling "WE GOT PUNCHES!". He was "Dick's" friend, and consequently I blamed "Dick" for every time he fucked up. About midway through all this he moved and never had to deal with his stupid shit again.

There were a lot more even less frequent guys, but that's about the core cast.

1/26/2010 3:41:23 PM

You know, looking back over some of those times, especially the nights where something fucked up and it was too close for comfort, I can say with no doubt I never was the one who asked to bring anyone. It was always someone was over, or hanging out earlier in the night, and would hang around and someone in the group would say "fuck it, let him come". Some of the guys in my group waxed and waned on how interested they were over time, I couldn't. So it ended up me always coming off as "selfish" when I was the first one saying "fuck no" to anyone new. Sometimes, we didn't have a driver. Sometimes we didn't have any eyes. And sometimes I would go a couple weeks without making anything and get desperate, and that would mean hitting up people to come and trying to do a cram session on Smash & Grab 101 and Garage Burglarizing 102. I had to be flexible and weigh the risk against the reward, and those were the times where it seemed to be all risk. But I had to, it wasn't always neat :]


The odd thing was, is that over time I lived with everyone at one point or another. It got to be that we all acted and felt like family-it didn't hurt we had two pairs of brothers in on this, and the one brother set "Harry" and "Stan" stuck with it the longest.

I don't think it would have worked any other way. To this day I'm still friends with the first list, going on 18? years with "Dick". If we didn't have that camaraderie, that literal feeling that we were family, it never would have made it. We never sold each other out. Hell, the closest time that tested this friendship and what sent it over to brotherhood was a night we got busted for stealing a car.

Well, it was actually me driving it. The got pulled over with a car full of loot.

This happened during the early months, and again was a driving force in what would forge the groundwork on how to do it right. How's the best way to learn that? Do it wrong once. Boy we did a lot of wrong things before we started getting it right, and stuck to it. Did we leverage our age to our favor? Without question.

We had puttered around in "Dick's" car, a piece of shit 1988 Chevy Malibu I think. The one that looks like a four-door Geo. We were in a rural part of the valley and the neo-ranch homes were a bit bigger than just a mile up the block. We spotted a garage, and as this was early in our "program" split into two teams, one to work the cars and one to work the garage.

It turned out the garage was full of model airplanes, gas and electric R/C cars and planes, a full blown hobbyist's garage. I found a '92 Z28 that I opened the door and..
wait a sec..
it's beeping.

Oh shit the keys are in the ignition!

I help haul all the R/C shit and toolboxes back to the car, and we discuss quickly what was going to happen. Someone said they'd get a good deal from the wheels and engine, and then somehow, me-the shortest and youngest of the group-got chosen to drive it.

I think I was 14 and a half.

So, prepped and ready, we push the car in neutral out and down the street. Putting it in park, I turn the key and holy fuck it's loud. Like real fucking loud.

I roll the window down and tell 'em I'll meet them at "Harry's" house after I find a spot to hide it. I drive, normal as I could imagine I should, down the road.

It was a few minutes after 1am on a Monday morning in March.

Approximately 4 minutes later I pass a police officer doing 45mph in a 45mph zone.

He gets behind me.

I begin to shake a bit.

I come up to a red light and signal to turn left. He follows me into the turn lane. The light turns green, and I gently nudge the car down the road.

Another red light, I signal to turn left again. He follows. My hands are now sweating, I'm feeling dizzy.

The light turns green, I make the turn, and the lights go on-flashing red and blue along with the spotlight blinds me. I pull over and put the car in park.

The officer comes up. I'm wondering how the hell it happened so fast, was this a trick? A prank?

He asks me what am I doing out so late. I say I'm just going home. He asks me if my mom or dad know I have the car. I say I don't know, I hope not.
Well, he says, let me see your liscense and registration.

I don't have one, I say.

OK, he responds, what the name on the registration.

I have no idea.

Alright, who owns this car?, the officer asks.

I don't know.

Who usually drives it?

I don't know.

What's your parents names?

They're not on the registration.

Well, why not?

Because the car is stolen officer.

Whoa...ok, take the key out of the ignition and hand them to me, keep your hands where I can see them, etc..

Now I'm in the back of the squadcar. As I'm sitting there, I see "Dick" drive by and promptly get pulled over himself. The cops spend almost an hour grilling me and the other car, trying to figure out who is or isn't with who and what is all this stuff.

Nobody said anything. I didn't, and neither did my friends.

Now, why did I get pulled over in the first place? Seems the owner put his Suburban's plate on the Z28. They weren't able to match to who the owner was for over a day.
The R/C shit? Didn't get reported, and no officer wrote down the contents of "Dick's" car. Since we clammed up, everyone but me got slapped with misdemeanor curfew and their parents came to pick them up.

That was a problem for me though. Only when I did see my mother, it was 3 weeks later. She stood there, silent, while my step-father condemned me and everything about me and I was evil-for fuck's sake I hadn't seen him in over a year let alone talked to anyone, where the hell was this coming from? I'll tell someday the story of how it all came back to bite him on the ass later. Patience is a virtue, indeed (my brother was removed to a foster home just a couple weeks after I got arrested).

In the end, I was offered a reduced sentence if I could name who helped me. I didn't. My friend's father did a lot of calling to my public defender, though, and my charges were reduced to "Attempted Theft of a Vehicle".

I lost the remainder of the school year sitting in juvie, again. I got out with about 2 weeks to go of the school year and a chip on my shoulder the size of Delaware. That's when it got serious, and I ultimately decided to do more with my life than just steal-I was going to be a jock!

But that night flipped us from being friends to brothers. You only get one of those kind of situations. Really, looking back if it had happened again I don't know if the outcome would have been something to get nostalgic about, but that's what we had and I was fortunate for it.

1/26/2010 3:41:47 PM

I was underage and it's now been 12 years. I also think I'd have to be more exact about details and items stolen-which I try to purposefully be vague about just in case.

There really isn't a magic fix to make sure you're 100% safe from being hit. It has to be a habit you have to always not just secure your property, but be aware of what it is thieves are looking for. I also thought about it before posting this whole talk about the bad things I've done, that it would catch someone off guard. That would make them re-evaluate their perspective, and hopefully that would stick in their brain housing group that there is and are people out there looking to take what isn't theirs.

Complacency doesn't just kill, it can cost you. The trick of setting off and continually setting off a car's alarm until the owner turns it off without investigating. Hearing loud crashing or something shattering and passing it off as the neighbors problem. In many cases, using people's laziness and complacency made my job just that much easier, and I pocketed the difference from their indifference.

Neat, I made a cliche up!

There is one event that I do wish I could undo. It was Christmastime, and all wasn't well with me. I had survived the previous year through some serious ups and downs, and had gone months without hearing anything from my brother or sisters. Turned out, they had moved out of state (well, my brother remained in foster care). Christmas was approaching and one by one my friend's families politely let me know that it wasn't that I wasn't welcome, just to drop by after the holidays were done.

With no family in the area, it was going to be a rough time, no doubt.

I had discussed this with an older friend of mine who came up with an idea-since I'd be out of school for a couple weeks, why not just rent a hotel room? As long as I pre-paid him, since he was 18 it wouldn't be a problem. At least I'd have a place to sleep and be able to mind my own business for the duration.

So he found a place, I think it was a Red Roof Inn. Was going to cost several hundred bucks, plus more since he didn't have a credit card for a deposit. Not a problem, I took the situation to that Friday night's meeting and laid it out for everyone-I needed a bigger cut from the next couple hits so I could have a place to stay for the holidays. Everyone immediately gave up their cut entirely. I was 100% and ready to go.

We chose a good neighborhood we hadn't been to in literally months. There was some notes about a couple blocks that we had skipped due to "Harry" getting spooked by a rent-a-cop in a car. So we greenlighted the plans, and the 5 of us set out that night. Here's the part that still bothers me...

One of the very first houses we hit had a car in the garage. Inside the trunk were presents-lots of them. I couldn't tell from the wrapping who the intended recipiants were, and it wasn't in my thoughts until we were heading home with a trunk full of presents, a purse, and a stack of credit cards and cash. I had lucked the hell out, instead of searching for nights for the cash for a hotel, I hit a damn good score.

Then we got back to "Harry's" house and we started going though the packages.

A new Playstation. A shitload of games. A telescope, a real fucking nice one. Clothes.

I just ruined Christmas.


This was a story I had originally wanted to post in the first few batches but held off on. Someone had asked or stated that I didn't feel sorry for any of this, and by and large that is true-I really tried not to but instead focused on the here and now not the maybe's or what-if's. I held it in for a while, but sitting in my room alone that Christmas Eve I let myself finally deal with it. I'm not ashamed to admit I cried, and for a long time. At first, all I could think of was the sadness, a family had poured a lot into some little boy's presents and I took that from him. That was the first inkling I had that what I was doing was upsetting lives, but no Christmas for someone made it worse. It was bad enough I didn't get to share holidays with family, and I then tried to tell myself that at least this unknown boy had that one thing, a family that loved him.

Only that made it worse. Thank god I didn't drink at the time.

The Playstation incident really ripped the facade off all the bullshit I built up for once. It was my choice, no going back, and to this day it is the one thing I would own up to if asked. As bad as I had it, it just drove me down that I felt I was right to share my misery with someone who didn't deserve it.

It's a complex item to explain, and near impossible to try and justify it. As I posted up a bit, I've wanted a better catharsis. I simply made a choice to take instead of go without-and maybe I should have gone without. I had cultivated a lifetime's worth of anger and frustration, but in letting it out I ended up making it worse. That really is the crux of it all I guess. Wanting to murder the world, not knowing who to take it out on, and finding that just about anyone would do.

It's issues I still deal with today. Anger, betrayal, hate. The emotional tide has fallen over the years as I've tried-many times, unsuccessfully-to deal with my personal life. Learning to trust people after I literally lived off the backs of others' works doesn't just happen overnight when you say "I'm done". It's a constant reminder, almost a nagging thought, that "if only knew how much of a hypocrite I am" or "who am I to even have a say in what is or isn't loyalty?"

You end up burying what you can't deal with, and at times it seeps out (much like writing this e/n post is doing) and all you can do is set your jaw and commit yourself to never letting those mistakes repeat themselves. Even today, if I was to lose everything I had, have my livelihood denied, there is no way I could ever go back to being that person who stole for a living.

Ever.

1/26/2010 3:42:15 PM

I had to go visit my grandmother, who lived about an hour north of Phoenix. The area (at that time) was literally the middle of nowhere, Arizona. I asked and two of my friends "Tom" and "Dick" decided to come with me and make a weekend of it.

So Friday night we set out at dusk for the drive up. I advise them that hey, this is a family visit but *wink wink* along the way we can check out some new places, see if the bumblefuck parts of north Phoenix and beyond had anything neat.

So it's now dark, and we're taking the old Pima road route through north Scottsdale on the way to Cave Creek and then beyond. Some of the homes out there are real, real expensive, but spread so far out it'd take a dedicated assault team 15min to make it from a gate to the home proper. We didn't really see much promise, but something made my friend "Tom" say

"Let's check the mailboxes"

Now, this was before the whole central-mailbox thing got popular. These were rows and rows, long lines of breadbox-sized mailboxes. Hearkening to a time when the mail was delivered by dedicated (and out here, hardcore) postal workers who drove and trudged back and forth long dusty backroads and suffered through the aforementioned rows of mailboxes.

The mailboxes themselves were always something to consider. Big ones, small ones, custom ones, mostly plain metal colored but always with something personal affixed to them, be it a simple number or a last name. Sometimes there were designer ones, people who had taken the receipt of mail to the next level and forged their steel receptacles into cows, ducks, sheep, windmills (yup, windmill mailboxes). And there they would sit, lined up in the night, like a metal caterpillar that was resting on it's side and bunched up it odd spots.

Well, we check the first massive row we come upon. I guess checking your mail wasn't that frequent a task for many, because there was lots of it. What, pray tell, would be inside the envelopes?

Credit cards. A whole new field of mistakes to be made..I mean, money to make!

I'm just joking about the mistakes, although for as over the top we got with taking and using them I do not know how it never bit us on the ass. We ran it as a sidebar to our midnight runs, mostly because the only areas that afforded us access to mail in that fashion were the far outlying areas. The risk of messing with a home in those areas with a gun-toting owner was too much in my eyes, but mailboxes were always set out like forgotten birthday cake :]

As for my grandmother, we showed up at a little before midnight giggling a bit. We burned everything we had taken not credit card related, and then on Monday tossed the cards. I'm purposely not going to detail how it worked or what we came up with, as it's more relevant to something that could be done with ease today as it was then.

As a matter of fact, I don't know if I really should go into more detail about the mailbox stuff. It didn't last long, maybe a few months, and eventually we started seeing the pillar-type central lockbox mailboxes replacing the rows.

[Edited on January 26, 2010 at 3:43 PM. Reason : ]

1/26/2010 3:43:03 PM

I was about to change schools so as to better suit my need to be in better contact with my guys. They lived in one city, and I was going to school in another, and it was quite an annoying haul when I had to bounce around from one end of the valley to another, and the entire time get to school on time. So, for example, I would be staying with "Dick's" family, but still had to get myself 9 miles west every morning to get to my enrolled high school. I never, ever got a ride from them or their parents as it was already enough I was someone's guest-expecting them to get me to a school in another city was too much. I simplified the process by forging a withdrawal request finally, and enrolled in the same high school as my friends. The week before, I had snagged a nicer ride: a 90? Integra.

Oh course I was "borrowing" it if anyone asked.

Now, stealing cars is a very delicate process. Well, actually keeping them and driving them is a delicate process. More than a day or two is pushing your luck.

I kept the Acura for over a week. Yeah I know, it's either ballsy or stupid. I've got a pair so I'm voting for the former, just so you know.

I mainly didn't want to have to steal another one. I drove it like I owned it, never used it on night ops, and it was finally a great feeling to not have to depend on my feet or someone's passenger seat for transportation. I was able to visit many of the places I had stayed and give them another "thanks for helping" face-to-face. I never burned any bridges (that I know of) and the people who gave me a place to stay, for a night or a month, I was always grateful to know.

So I got a lot done, and it's time to get myself settled in to the new school. I knew everyone just about, so all I had to worry about was bringing up my GPA and making enough to pay "Dick's" parents some cash for their generous offer that I could remain through the end of school and the summer (everyone was graduating but me, I had missed so much school from being in juvi I had a semester and change to make up) since I was still 17. All they asked is I look for a place by summer's end, chip in some money for food, and mind their rules.

Never, ever a problem with me. :] As our operations were scaling back due to the group transitioning to adulthood, and now I had a place to stay with a definite start and end date, the pressure to go out every night let up quite a bit. Me and "Tom" and "Stan" were still minors under the law, although "Dick" and "Harry" would still come out it my just us "kids" the majority of the time.

I'm getting off track here, let's get back to the car.

So I still had the stolen car, and we had a talk about what to do with it. We usually stripped whatever parts were easy to get off and took them to a guy out in Apache Junction who would buy them for a decent amount. Usually the entire stereo system, seats, lights, whatever could be yoinked off, was. Whatever was left got driven to a spot in the desert until it got stuck and set on fire.

As I felt that I could take a break for a while, I wanted to get rid of the car soon as I didn't need it any more. I actually just wanted to dump it, but "Dick" wanted to get us all together and fuck stripping it, just torch the thing whole. I figured hell, why not (dump-offs got done with only two of us at a time usually, a lead and follow driver) it's not like anything will happen on the way. Never seen cops out where we go, and with the dump-offs being so random it literally just had to be an empty spot in the desert. Lots to choose from.

Well, you should never take things for granted. We picked a spot way out east this time, actually a bit north of another incident I'll write later happened.

So, off we go on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. After driving for a good half hour east, we start to look for a good, empty spot with maybe a wash or brush to hide behind. At least long enough to have a good time destroying the car and getting away! I round a bend on a small road as I see another set of lights in the rearview. I'm riding alone, with everyone else piled into the van behind, and literally near nowhere, so I accelerate a bit. The car is hanging back a ways, I don't get too worried and raise the speed to about 10 over the limit. I think there was a limit. Another bend takes us back north, and not towards where I want to end up. A solid two minutes down the road now, I see the lights round the bend behind us. Good, whomever it is has dropped too far back to care.

I come to a four way stop and turn left, gunning the lil Acura back up to speed. The van keeps a decent pace behind me without seeming too obvious, when I notice he's flipping his high beams and blinking right. I hit the first right and gun it to 60 or so, with the van quick behind me. At the next stop sign we both blow it, I go left, he goes straight. It's so dark I can see the headlights far behind from someone else, so I floor it and take it up to 80.

Now, these are streets in an area that's dotted with a house about every mile or so. This is total backroads county area, and not the place to get the signal that there's a cop inbound. I push 100 on the single-lane, then see a street light up ahead and blow through another stop sign at about 45mph.

Before I gun it back up, in a quick instance I see the green of a road coming up on my right, and I slam the car hard to the right and swerve around a car parked on the right, and wrench the shifter into Park.

The car makes this whirrrrRRRRRRRRCLACKCLACKCLACKCLACKErrp! I recline the seat back and take off my seat belt, looking through the bottom edge of the back window.

Seconds later, a Sheriff's SUV goes whizzing by on the main road I had just cut that hard right from.

I wait until the adrenaline wears down and the shakes are controllable, which takes about 20 minutes. No other car drove by in any direction.

Ok, so what to do now? Alright, we got caught up in going to have "fun" and went with a loose plan. The rally point if we got separated was about 5..fuck, maybe 10 miles away. And I didn't know the status of my guys in the van (Damn you 90's for not having cell phones!! )

It's after 2am now, and I begin trying to weave my way in the most indirect route back to the Circle K we agreed on. About 5 minutes of driving, I'm coming up to a stop and another car comes up to my left..wait, nope, that's a van, and goddammit if it's not them!

We briefly chat about what happened but since it appeared we were good to get to another site (we abandoned going back to the first one we picked) we drove another 20 minutes to it. I let the van go ahead and recon, they pull back up and report it's empty. Hell, it's going on 3am on a Sunday, even God's asleep right now :p

So I pull forward to the small berm separating the cracked, old asphalt from the empty desert ahead. The lights danced up and down as I nudged forward, when all of a sudden the rear window and windshield explode into flames! I had the window down still and I yell out what th...

Smash/crack a rock lands in the back seat. Now I get the smell of gas in my nose, one of those cocksuckers tossed a Molotov Cocktail on the roof while I was still fucking driving.

I leave the car in drive and aim it at a Palo Verde, kill the lights, and bail out. Car's only going like 3mph and I get a face full of dirt anyway, only to hear nothing but the sound of laughing. The guys come up and help me get on my feet, laughing at how shrill I sounded. "Harry" says I must have thought I was being roasted while inside the car, I sounded like a bitch.

Well, of course I did. The fucking car was on fire while I was still in it you cocksuckers! I yelled, and laughed my ass off as the car hit the tree.

FUCK CAN YOU LET ME GET OUT FIRST

1/26/2010 3:43:50 PM

About a week after my mom served him with divorce papers, he went and duct taped a dozen cheap vibrators and dildos to her car, and slashed her tires. By the next weekend I found where he was staying, and on Sunday afternoon myself and two of my friends raided his home. We removed cash, multiple credit cards, and a few firearms. We immediately got in contact with as many people as we could, and met at a gas station out in east Mesa and hooked everyone who showed in about a 45 minute to one hour window a full tank of gas, then bought a shitton of groceries ~$500 or so, at about $75 bucks a pop all the way back. I took off from school the hour before lunch and bought a new pair of shoes and some socks, and then hit an ATM and took a max $400 out (his PIN was on a Post-It taped under his keyboard in his house). I then got a money order with the cash, and contacted my grandmother to drop off the MO for my mom.

Then, Monday night we rolled back out to his house and I took his alarm out while "Tom" removed the JL box behind his cab, and I took the Eclipse head unit. Once we had it all securely back in the van, I poured two gallons of gas inside the cab and popped the hood, pouring the rest on the engine. I actually wanted him to come out, maybe, just maybe.

So I torched the truck, and from the van I could see the flames flickering just over the wall. Sirens started to sound in the distance and we pulled out and drove home.

This was one of the few times I did something before midnight, even on a school night. The guns were easy; sometime mid-week I took them to a friend who worked after school at a machine shop and had him use a torch to cut the barrels and sludge the remainder. I didn't want any money off of them, they were dookie revolvers and a lousy 10/22.

There is an epilogue to that story, and those events take place shortly after my brother got released back to my mother's custody. I had heard they planned on moving to Las Vegas through family members, so I asked and got my mom's number. I hadn't spoken to her in years at this point. One of the last times I saw her was when I was released from juvi after getting busted with the Z28. Soon as I got "home" I ducked out.
Now I was on the phone, and hearing from my brother first-hand what he had gone through. My step-father, when I was still living there, had come in and basically said the kids eat too much. And then installed locks on everything-the cabinets, the refrigerator, the cupboards. Then it escalated to we didn't "deserve" new clothes for one transgression or another-that eventually knocked that off the list completely. Then, we made too much noise, so he'd put us in timeouts in the closet.
After I had put up with my father's schizophrenia until almost 9, I had fucking had it with dickhead "fathers". And had enough putting up with my mom always copping out to some dick and his wants over her own flesh and bloods' needs. I had alluded to this in one of my first posts, and don't want to delve too far into it because try as I may it fouls my mood still.
My brother told me how he had been locked in a bathroom while our mom and step-dad went out to dinner with our two sisters, and since he fell asleep they didn't let him out until the morning. He had tried to pull the handle off unsuccessfully and our step-dad beat him, bad.
After that, he would get beat on for everything, seeing as our mom didn't say or do shit. He finally went to school with a black eye and a teacher asked him what was going on. My brother said he started crying and that he wanted a police officer to protect him, and the school got one to come out and talk to him. That's how he ended up getting put into foster care, he just couldn't take being picked on and beat by the "man" my mother married. He also teased him, made fun of him, and basically treated my brother like his own life-sized stress ball.
I went over to my brother that evening and hugged him and I felt him cry so hard it still bothers me to even type it out.

He was such an innocent kid, you know? I always remembered him as non-stop energy, always giggling, always playing, always being a little daredevil. I see a lot of my brother in my son...
But hurt him? For what, being a kid? No reason was ever given except poor Dave, the step-dad in question here, was an only child and never knew how to "handle" kids. My mom was prattling on in the background about how sorry she was and didn't think it was that bad...I tuned her out completely during me and my brother's visit. Dave wasn't a good guy, period. Yeah he picked on the kids like he was some adolescent himself, making fun of my sisters for being ugly, stupid, etc. But it was my brother he had got physical on. I remember all that bullshit he had said in court with me, like he even knew me or who I was, lying through his teeth to get rid of me and lock me up. Then my brother...
I had already done what I had thought at the time was the best I could do, and that was steal his shit and fuck up the rest. I didn't know what happened to my siblings after I left. I was too young to really do anything about it. The last time my Dave had seen me, I was a little kid. There's no nice way, not even a plausible method I could sit here and try and make up a nice ending to his story with a straight face (or without getting mad again, even though I work to keep it under a deep facade, some things can rise to the top and work their disharmony on me. This is one of those things.) but I don't want to delve into it any more than I already have. I've read up on the statute of limitations, and for this case even if I went up to him today and told him to his face I'm the man who broke you, I don't think I'd get in trouble as it's been over 12 years. Again, I'm just trying to end this story at this point because all it becomes is violence. I could have ghosted him, being the complete and total waste of human space he is. I looked his name up after my first draft and saw he's been arrested a few times since the divorce. Kiting checks, meth, meth again, and weed. But he has a few scars from me I hope remind him to the end of his pathetic life of nothing but pain. I wish now, especially after putting this out there, I could just go kick him in the head one more time for good measure.

1/26/2010 3:44:22 PM

no idea what Ice-T has to do with Diet Coke, but oh well

1/26/2010 3:44:34 PM

LOL @ God

1/26/2010 3:44:47 PM

We had been out at a party in Queen Creek, and coming back there was talk about what we should do later. We came upon a four-way stop and saw a car off to the right on the eastbound lane. I asked to be let out down the road a bit, and me and "Tom" jogged back to the car, a nice Lexus, parked in BFE. Should be interesting...
So we flank the car, and since it's the dead of night any lights we'd see for miles away. I go around the car to the passenger side and jiggle the handle and the car opens. I scan inside, nothing of note, nothing in the back seat. Pop the trunk, nothing. Glovebox, nothing. Check under the seats and there's a small Case Logic with some crap music in it. Oh well, it's a CD holder. I get a signal from "Tom" and close the door and duck back down. He whisper/shouts to get back over, so I come across and see two of our other friends from the van are in the bushes there. One of them..let's see, I'll call him "Brian", was a guy who only loved what we did for the breaking shit aspect. He loved to break anything. So I tell them nothing in the car but the CD case, and "Brian" goes and suggests we shoot it up.
OK, so we're miles from anywhere. I say fine, get the guns, and he takes off. In a few minutes he's back with a .38 and a .40, and rarin' to just shoot shit. We set up one nearer to the four-way, I'm in the bushes looking north towards where the van is (I can see south too) and "Tom" is directly across the street from the Lexus. "Brian" goes over and opens the car door and rummages around-so much for listening to me-and then closes the door. I hear some muffled shouting, then "get down" so I squeeze into the bushes as a car light shines coming from the east. IT blows thru the sign and continues on. A half a minute goes by, and then I hear more muffled shouting, and "get the fuck down". A car is coming now from the west. IT comes to the sign, and turns to the south and is gone.
Now I see a car from the north, but as I go to say something it appears to make a U-turn and all I see is tailights and then nothing.
OK, now a few minutes go by. Why the hell won't he just do it and we can get the fuck on? I get up and walk back over and whisper his name. He stands up from the bushes and goes "I'm waiting for the right time"
Jesus christ just do it I say. We don't have all night for fuck's sake. He stands up and points at the car, then we hear "get down" again. Fucking shit.
This time the car comes from the south and slows down and keeps rolling north.
OK, I say, shoot the fucking car so we can lea... POP POP POP POP
Almost as soon as my ears are ringing I hear someone say something and "Tom" grabs me back into the bush. Car is coming from the west again, and it comes up to the sign and...creeps across to behind the Lexus.
Shiiiit. There's another car behind it, and within a minute there's two cars parked now behind and slightly to the side of the Lexus. A woman gets out, walks up to the Lexus, and exclaims "SON OF A.....BIIIITCH"
"SOOON OFFFF A BIIIIITCH"
"SON OF A....................BIIIIITCH"
A man gets out and they inspect the car. I can see the holes in the windows from the side, it looks like he shot both driver's side windows out and maybe the other side too. Back window and front are untouched. We are crouched literally feet away from a car my friend had just shot, but in the bushes. I don't know "Brian" that well but I peg him as the type that would shoot them if they walked across the street towards us. Not a good spot to be in.
About 15 minutes go by, the woman's swearing up a storm and finally one of the guys with her gets in the car after wiping out some glass, and starts it up. They drive off and we sit there for a while, quietly talking about how stupid the whole idea was. "Brian" keeps saying "naw man, that shit was worth it man"

1/26/2010 3:45:21 PM

There was a guy we knew that had a very nice, tricked out Isuzu Rodeo. Orion amps, JL subs, Kenwood deck, and an alarm. We tried 4 times to hit his truck over a period of almost a year before we finally pulled it off. The problem started with where he lived.
It was a quasi-ranch neighborhood just on the edge of a city in the southeast valley. The houses sat back about a hundred feet from the road, and the homes themselves sat on about an acre of land each. Motion sensing lights, dogs, noisy fences, everything about the neighborhood made it one of the hardest to work in. The only reason we ever went in there was for his truck, everywhere else in there wasn't worth the risk. He had thousands of dollars in equipment though, and it sitting inside a Rodeo made me drool.
The first night we rolled out, we had only recon'd the place by day. I didn't even factor in the streetlight placement, and when we showed up that night it was apparent that a simple rolling plan wasn't going to suffice. We tried anyways, and the alarm couldn't be defeated and I ended up setting it off.
A month later we returned, with a better plan that took me and two others on foot along a dark edge from the back. As we came to the corner of the house, with the Rodeo in front of us, a motion light tripped and the entire front yard light up like daylight. We waited for almost five minutes for them to turn off, and when the finally did as soon as we moved everything lit back up. We called it off and booked it back the way we came.
It was a few months before we came back, we figured a) time would make them complacent again and b) we'd try coming from the south side of the house. We rolled out with a full carload of 6 that night, something I wasn't too pleased with. Trying to remember where the lights were, we threaded our way again to the house, and lowcrawled it to the truck. Working in almost total darkness, I got up under the engine and managed to get at a lone wire coming off the battery. Arms totally inside the truck, hands wrenched in odd angles, I clipped the wire and promptly set off the alarm. Either it was a backup, or a low voltage detector, either way I had to unhook myself from the underside of the Rodeo and evac to our rally point. At a last turn before ducking out of sight of the house, I saw the owner or family in the yard. Pretty damn quick react time.
So I skipped some steps purposely, but with 5 others riding along and only two of us actually doing more than "lookout" I clipped the power wire instead of the more directly effective cut the horn trick. That's how it worked some nights, and it may seem selfish but that's how I kept looking out for myself. Some scores had to wait, and although the other guys were my friends for the most part, it almost always boiled down to me doing all the work and the risk while they just sat and collected.
Not all the time, but enough that I remember some of the more obvious "skips". I know "Dick" was a great planner but a lousy hands-on thief. I know "Harry" was our primary driver. Everyone had their role, but when everyone brought a friend or we rode with a full van, me saying "hey guys remember why I'm doing this" would get met with "psssh" and "don't be a pussy". It made me seethe at times that they had homes to go to, beds in rooms they could lie in, and parents who fronted them money, food, clothes; I didn't have that, period. But I couldn't do it alone, so that's the necessary evil I had to deal with night after night.

It was a cold night when we came back to planning the Rodeo again, and our pass through the night before was good news to us-the street light in front of the target was out. Sitting in the van the next night was me, "Tom", "Stan", and "Harry". "Stan" needed to see the horn and what he could of the alarm from the vantage point I had last time an attempt was made, he could guide me to defeat the rest in seconds after that. We brought throwaway wire cutters for the small wires, and a pair of beat up wire cutters for the battery proper. So, again, we lowcrawled from around the side and came down the front of the yard, to right under the truck. "Tom" took to being our eyes behind us while me and "Stan" scooched under. I was right about sandbagging this hit, nobody but what I needed were at their stations.
Now I don't remember what alarm it was-think Python or Viper-but "Stan" agreed we'd be best off cutting the horn and not the alarm power. One small horn was mounted facing downwards at us, with another mounted almost directly on top of it, only smaller, and facing towards the front of the vehicle. This was before pager alarms were widely used, although they were on the market and a real threat in this situation, it was a gamble we were taking. The alarm would still disable the Rodeo, but we obviously weren't taking the car, just every damn thing inside.
The wires are wedged into view carefully and cut in quick succession. I don't know if the cut or the nudging set it off, but the headlights were blinking on and off for a few seconds until I cut the battery cable. We now had the Rodeo, alarm blaring silently, where we wanted it.
We egressed to where "Tom" was and waited to see if anybody came out to investigate. From the perspective of a person inside, it might have looked like someone was flashing their high beams briefly, and to a neighbor it would have looked like someone fidgeting with their car. Nothing out of the ordinary (we hoped) so after several minutes of eternal waiting, I move to the passenger door and find it unlocked. No slimjim needed, fuckin' A.
The car is totally dark, no light from any source outside or within. We remove the speaker box after finding it being held down by two brackets, I'm guessing to keep it in place. I can't use the power locks to try and get the back tailgate unlocked, so I wedge the middle seat down and quickly find that there's no way we're getting the box out. So I tear into the carpet it's wrapped in, and begin to unscrew the speakers. A minute or so and one, then two 12" JL subs are taken out. There was a crossover mounted to the back that came off, and a good amount of heavy duty wire. I hand it off to "Stan" who then takes it carefully to where "Tom" is on lookout, and by the time he gets back I had already got the disc changer unmounted and handed it to him. The control cable was relatively easy as he ran it down the driver's side just under his mats, and then, into the middle console.
The deck was a removable chassis, still sitting in the dash. Before removable faceplates, you used to push a button and pop a handle out, and remove the entire deck. Problem with this, and why I liked them so much, was nobody wants to lug around a couple pounds of car stereo. So they usually sat, mounted, for me to take. It negated having to use the keys too, as once the deck was slid out I could unmount the dash chassis mount almost instantly, and reach in for any cables and unplug them.
Handing the deck off, I find the middle console is locked. Not a problem, a flathead jammed in the keyhole usually works and in the case it did too. Inside was two Case Logics and the remote control for the Kenwood deck/CD changer, along with a nice equalizer. All of it comes out with a few twists, and after patting down and around I find the amplifier under the passenger seat. A very nice hipow Orion amp, but it wasn't big enough to drive those 12's. "Stan" takes another handful and I climb back into the rear of the truck looking for the subwoofer amp(s).
I find what I thought mistakenly was the truck's toolbox/jackstand access, open it to see a beautiful, large, Orion amp squeezed in to the very side of the truck. It turned out, and I wish I could draw a picture of how he did it, that the sides of the very rear of the truck were facades, just enough that looking at it you wouldn't think twice but now with two over 1000W Orions made sense. He just used a few inches from each side of the truck to build in and carpet match these little enclosures for his $$$$$$$$ amps. I put them in the seat, crawl over, and tell "Stan" to get ready to shit himself. Reaching back, I pull one of the dark, sleek Orions into my hands and I can see that shit-eating grin. All I say is "two" and he mutters "holyshitholyshitholyshit". Handing him the one in my hands, I reach back, grab the other, and we careful half-close the door and begin our evac.
The crossover, some wires, and the cap and deck got left while we all took the first haul back to the van. I went back myself, alone, and grabbed up the rest. By the time I got back to the van everyone looked like it was Christmastime, so damn happy and so damn proud.
I know that "Stan" ended up buying out everyone's cut for one of the Orion amps, and we all ended up with almost a grand each when the last item sold a few weeks later. Those amps were almost $1200 a pop, but obviously we were lucky to get half price.
A lot of persistence and planning went into it, and I remember "Dick" fuming that he didn't get to go. Since it was him who originally found the Rodeo to hit, he bugged me and only me for a cut. Eventually "Harry" gave him $50 to shut the fuck up about it already. "Dick" had even asked before taking the cash if I had given the $50 to "Harry" to give to me and was pissed to find out it was coming from "Harry's" cut and not mine. He literally was a dick about everything, I swear.

1/26/2010 3:45:59 PM

There were many nights, as I've alluded to, that came up empty or near-empty. This was part and parcel to how the who thing worked, you had to take the bad with the good. Many times, frustration would kick in and decisions would be hastened or risks taken that should have been. You could look at it as a way of spicing things up, but I never liked taking any more risk than needed. Sometimes though, you just had to go with your gut and take whatever came from it.

One of the more lousy adventures I had was in the city proper-I preferred to work the outskirts and suburbs for many reasons, of which population density was always a key factor. Less people equals less risk, and once you remove yourself from the cookie-cutter home market here you got better cover, less lighting, and more margin of error when making accidental noise. You always made some sort of noise, that was a given, but it literally took dozens of times to get used to the noise. At times it would seem as if the bag you just knocked in to, crashing to the ground was akin to the end of the world heralding in on trumpets of doom. In reality, the sound wouldn't carry past the garage. You never assumed that, and it was an element that forever kept you on your toes.

The city, though, was an eventual destination as sometimes you just played out your good areas. The cover story had to be better, your backup plans had to be better, overall, everything had to be better as it just could go much more wrong much faster. There would be times I'd be scoping a house and see someone round a corner out walking their dog. At 2 friggin' AM. Or you'd work your way in what shadows you could, just to get a glimpse of someone still up watching television inside the house you had targeted. It just happened, and you worked around it.

It ended up I had found a nice Ford Mustang convertible, replete with a Kenwood deck and some nice power tools in a garage. The car's top was down, and the garage was only cracked open enough to do a drop roll inside. As I may have said before, these were the best to work in-view from the outside was all but blocked, and the owners tended to think that the garage was closed all the way enough that they never double checked.

I was inside, alone, taking inventory. There was a set of golf clubs, a couple boxes of Makita power tools, some random camping shit, and the car. I staged the clubs and the power tools near the edge of the garage door, and hopped inside the car to see what else I could manage. The deck looked like all there was to the car's system, so I made the call to drag what I had now out and discuss it with the others as to getting the deck (it was a decent, regular in-dash model, no frills). After loading the goods in the van, it was decided that "Harry" would re-position the van more out of sight, and "Tom" would remain in the van to minimize exposure. He crawled to the back seat so he could see around the corner down the street to the house I was at, and I left and re-approached the house.

Rolling under the garage door, I took a few seconds to let my eyes adjust, and then climbed into the car again. As I got the deck ready to pull out, I started to eek it out towards me so that I could disconnect the wire harness when I hit the shift knob. Now, I didn't think anything of it until the car smashed into the garage door. Apparently, the dude had parked his car in the garage and left it in 1st gear, without the parking brake on. The sound the car made hitting that door was like four thunderstorms booming at once, and I immediately hopped up and out, rolling under the door, leaving the deck hanging from wires behind me.

There is one thing to be said here, I would wear from time to time wrestling shoes. They were awesome, fit perfect, and kept good support on the ankles. However, running down a street with them is almost exactly like running barefoot-there's no arch support. I ran so goddamn hard I almost twisted my foot jumping into the van. Although we had got a minimal of goods, my feet were so goddamn sore I think we ended the night there.

1/26/2010 3:46:51 PM

One of the complicating factors to my success at doing this was other, what we called ameteur, competition. It was inevitable that word would get around about me and my guys' hijinx, although nobody in the group ever 'fessed up to it, someone had to have talked here and there enough that word would get back to me that so-and-so had or would be doing the same. Early on it wouldn't have been as much a problem as we were still discovering areas and still learning how to do things. Later, though, myself and the "crew" felt we had done enough jobs and honed our techniques enough that anyone trying to come along and edge into our territory would not just fail, but fail badly. I hated hearing about others taking credit for some of the bigger scores-yes, we made the paper a few times here and there-and some douchbag would start a rumor the he or his friends had pulled it off. Nothing I could do about, though, and I tried to keep it in mind that being a big mouth would screw them over more than any hurt feelings I might have.

That's the weird thing about telling this, is that you literally had to live it for it to work. You had to have rules, you had to have an ethos, and you had to be "normal" as you could to not raise any more eyebrows than needed. That meant, on my part, having to go to church, attend seminary (oh yeah, I did), and keep your night life seperate from your day. The rules, really, were simple:

1. Do not steal from someone you know
2. Do not talk or brag about what we do
3. Do not rat out anyone
4. Bros before hos

That number one rule was a no-brainer to us, but to your average thief it makes no sense. That's why they're average, and get caught more times than not. You don't steal from anyone you see, know, live with, or have any sort of relationship with.
Not talking was more of a challenge than it should have been. Of course some of the guys would talk shit or brag when we were out, but only with one another. Taking our deeds outside the circle was inviting trouble, which "Tom" found out when he was dating this girl. Her dad happened to be a cop in another city, one we rarely visited, but one day he said something and next thing I know, "Tom" is telling me her dad grilled him about theiving and what he did. He denied it, but it was enough of a slap awake that we all reaffirmed out stance on it. You don't talk, period.

When I got busted for stealing the Z28, I could have dropped dimes but I didn't. I was the only one in the group who got taken down for anything, and when I got out of juvie was pretty much when "Dick" stopped running it and I stepped up and led. It wasn't anything about being hardcore, it was a simple declaration that I was dedicated to this, and them, at all costs.

Now that last rule got bent a lot, but really we tried to be that way. Some nights, as I've mentioned before, I'd be on my own as everyone else would push and pull and get out of going to try and get some. My girlfriend off and on during highschool had strict parents, so I only got to see her once after 10pm. I don't think we ever really "enforced" the rule anyways.


Now, the rumor mill would spit out some shit now and then about so-and-so and co. are out smashing and grabbing. And from time to time, I'd be talking to someone about them buying a deck and they'd tell me they had talked to aformentioned so-and-so about buying a deck for a cheaper price. That'd always get me pissed, because the guys we were competing against, if you even want to call it that, were just like my friends: upper middle class white kids with nothing better to do. I'd poke around a little, and find out that they'd go out in their own cars and just do small time shit, a deck here and there and smash and grabs. One particular group of 4, each in his own car, would hit a neighborhood from each end and then meet back at one of their homes to divvy up the loot.

To hear the stories, they were "good", because for a time there I couldn't get a buyer for jack shit since they were all over. Now, the way I looked at it, they were competition, not anyone I knew or even in my social circle. So one morning at school I excused myself for the bathroom and went down to the shop area to talk with a guy I knew was part of these guys.

Now, the funny thing is as soon as he saw me in the car bay (this was auto shop), he comes over and is all smiles and shit. I got straight to the point, dude, what is up with you guys doing jobs on my time?

He said he didn't know what I was talking about, and I pointedly told him I do the same thing you and your clique do, and you're stepping on my toes on this shit.
He looks at me a bit weird, and confirms that yeah, we do go out. But he didn't know anything about there being rules or whatever, we just try to have a good time and make some money.

Well, I respond, your money is coming out of my pocket. I suggest we agree to stay out of each other's hair, or shit will hit the fan.

Oh is that right, and he tells me the name of the guy who "runs" his clique. Go talk to him about it, I just yank decks for fun. He laughs and holds out his hand, to which I walk back out of the shop.

I met the guy after school and we talked about, well, what we do. I stay discreet, not naming any names or anything specific while he goes on and on about how he had heard there was some guys that were making money stealing, so he figured he'd get in on it. It didn't make much money at first, but they found some things that worked-he even used the line "trade secret" so he couldn't tell me some things-but at the end he said he'd make sure we didn't run into each other. I agreed, and told him we'll be careful. I came away from the chat with the names of everyone he was running with.

Now, there is one thing for good or bad that I have massive quantities of, and that is patience. I can wait. I set a date about 3 months out in my head, and didn't tell my guys what I was thinking until about a few weeks away from it. There was a party that weekend, and I knew one of the guys would be there. Not sure about the rest of that guy's friends, I laid out a quick plan to my guys on not just how we'd take care of these fuckers, but make it so we'd profit.

Simple plan, first guy: go to the party, make sure he was drinking, leave, take the plate off his car. Enter the party, yap for a bit, then go up to him and say hey dude, I'll pay you 40 bucks to get some Southern Comfort. He takes the bait but says he's a little drunk and can't drive. I convince him that naw, chew some Big Red gum, and "hey dude" it down at the Safeway. About 5 minutes after he leaves, me and "Tom" jet to a payphone and drop a call to 911 about a drunk driver with a description of his mini-truck and the fact it has no plates, and it was heading towards the supermarket. Wait a few, then drive to the Arby's which is adjacent to Safeway, and wouldn't you know it? Red and blues. Go through the Arby's drive through, and wouldn't you know it again? Flat bed tow truck. One of the crew gone.


Second part came the next week, I actually think it was two weeks. The guy I had talked to in the auto shop had a primer'd up Chevy truck, early 80's model. He liked to hang out at the Taco Bell a bit away, it was more of a hangout for another high school. I spot his truck and a group of kids I don't recognize, and we go park over by the Subway shop. About an hour of waiting, he starts up his truck and begins to drive away, and we catch up with him heading towards what I'm hoping is his house. Trying our best to not look obvious, we follow him into his neighborhood and let him go park, then circle back and try and find where his truck is.

We pass the truck still parked in front of the house, and cross a side street and park about two blocks away. I walk nonchalantly down the street and slow down when I get to his house. The truck is still making ticking sounds as it cools down, and again, as nonchalantly as I can, I go to the drivers side and slimjim the door open. I slide a .32 under his seat, and a small bag of weed I cram into the bench seat with just a little bit of wrapping showing. We drive back to the Taco Bell, and from the payphone there I call 911 to tell them a guy in a primered truck just threatened to shoot me, he pointed a pistol at me, and drove off. When they asked me if I knew him, I said yeah, I think he lives on Ironwood street and 99th. When she asked me to describe him, I did, but when she asked my name I hung up and we bolted.

I didn't personally drive down to find out what happened to him, only know what happened from the next week at school. He got busted for possession, the weapon didn't get him in trouble but led the cops to arrest him on the spot. Not sure how much time he got but he was 18, that I know-the other guy was a juvenile so not sure how it impacted him.

There was another group a little over a year before all of this, but that was handled physically.

1/26/2010 3:47:30 PM

This one was from back in the early days, one of our first sojourns out into the dark. We were definitely not refined, didn't have much of a gameplan except a cursory talk about what neighborhood(s) were worth visiting. This night, we decided to drive up to north Scottsdale, almost to Fountain Hills. At this time, was about '93?, there was a lot of open space in this particular part of the city, and a lot of cover and concealment. We rolled out with "Frank" and "Steve" that night, along with "Tom" and "Dick", and all of us were piled in "Frank's" other brother's Suburban.
It was an odd circumstance how I ended up meeting "Frank" and "Steve", but their older brother was a football player who got traded from the then-Phoenix Cardinals to Kansas City, leaving his house and all his belongings of his second home in trust of "Frank". This was actually a spot in time I had totally forgotten (I still have a few of these missing spots to patch up) when I was first bouncing around from place to place, and "Frank" was nice enough to let me crash there many a night. I gotta say, Hawaiians are awesome people.
So we're out in this part of Scottsdale, still working out kinks on how to do things the right way. Much of what got me pointed in the direction of "major" theft was from some long talks I had with "Frank", and about how exactly I could make it to graduation with no parental or adult support. Too young to work, too good to sell drugs, it just seemed something worth trying. After the first few nights out netted a great take, even after splitting it six or seven ways, and it was almost as if I couldn't see past my own angst at the time that it was a bad thing.
Ok, Scottsdale. This is Arizona's version of Orange County, Beverly Hills, and whatever other cliche place where rich people live in gated communities, enveloped in palatial estates with not just too much time on their hands, but too much money to spend. And right off the bat, it was almost a walk in the park. Open garages, open cars, keys left in ignitions. We were too green to try cars at this point, but I remember the first wallet I found.

It was a brand new GMC or Chevy Suburban, full leather interior. We had parked near a pond on the edge of this neighborhood, and me and "Tom" and "Steve" walked in opposite directions, coming back in fifteen minutes to report what we found. I had eyed this SUV as soon as I walked into the cul-de-sac, it was almost pitch black, no streetlights. I remember casually walking up the sidewalk, and as I came to the passenger side, I lifted the handle ever-so-slightly and it made that "click" sound that gave me butterflies in the stomach. I continued up the driveway, where another SUV sat, and it too made the "click" when I checked the handle. Circling back I walked to the street, where instead of the corner turning into another road, it was another dark cul-de-sac. Only I had to walk the sidewalk next to a wall before getting to the next group of houses. One porchlight shone on the left, almost hidden by the overhang of a tree, and I counted three of the four homes with wide-open garages.

I didn't even scope out those houses, I turned and walked right back to the 'burban. "Steve" was already there, and as I was jabbering about the potential goldmine, "Tom" came up. "Steve" had found one open garage, no cars, and "Tom" found squat. I explained that the road I had taken was a dead-end double cul-de-sac, with at least two open trucks and three friggin' open garages, out of sight of the main entry, in almost total darkness.

Giggling like little kids, we punched each other and basically celebrated before we'd done anything. That's kinda how it was in the beginning, we were all out having fun, even though "Frank" had volunteered his cut to me. Well, unless we scored an AK- or something neato, that's all he wanted if we got firearms was first dibs on it.

So me, "Steve" and "Tom" get our game faces on, tell "Frank" where we'd meet him if shit hit the fan, and begin the walk back the way I'd come from. We all wanted to get our hands on the first set of trucks, and it was almost a shoving match between me and "Steve" to get in the car and get the door closed, thus killing the light. As soon as I opened the first door, the very SUV I had been drawn to, I saw it.

A nice, neatly folded, but very fat brown leather wallet sitting on the middle console.

I close the door behind me, and "Steve" jumps in the driver side, and briefly I'm blinded and back to getting my night vision. Sitting there, breathing hard, heart racing, I felt like I was going to hyperventilate. "Steve" says to check the seat, and I reach over to where I still had it in my eyes the wallet was, and snatch it back to my body.

Oh yeah, I wasn't going to share this one, my first wallet! I waited a split second before bending over to check under the seat, as "Steve" opened and rummaged around the middle console. He grabbed a pair of Serengeti sunglasses, and not much else except some shitty CD's. We counted to three to open/shut the doors on the way out to the next truck, when as I'm turning I see a jacket hanging on the back of the passenger seat. I grab it, closing the door on it. "Steve" whisper/yells what the fuck are you doing? as I click the door open and shut again to free the jacket. It's black, or dark at least, and feels like nice material. Real thick. We hurry up to the next truck in the driveway, where after sitting inside for a moment rummage around and find a couple $10's. I still have the wallet, sitting now in my own back pocket (I didn't carry my own wallet at the time), and every time I move I feel like the damn thing is going to fall out, and I'm going to get caught trying to take something without letting the other guys know.

By the time we get to the garages, we've been back and forth to a dump point with a couple sets of Pings and a few duffel bags of sports gear. All told, it was a good night, with the last garage yielding more Makita power tools than we knew what to do with (still in the blue boxes!). We load all the shit in the back of the 'burban, and decide to call it right then.

Now, my friends at this time basically treated me like shit at times, and one of the things I was relegated to was sitting in either the trunk of someone's car, or the most uncomfortable spot in the vehicle. I'm sure to go into more about that later, but on one hand I was physically very small: about 5'3" and maybe 125lbs up until I was 16. So even though I was the "homeless kid" everyone put up with, and let stay here and there, I was the low guy on the pole at the beginning. So, the ride home that night I'm sitting back behind the third row bench, while everyone is chatting and trying to not go and pull shit out in the open to look at, I'm snatching looks at the two things I had staked as my own: a black jacket, and a wallet. I decide to hold off on examining the wallet after, in a brief flash of passing streetlight, I see more $20 bills than I ever had before. I'm telling you, at this point now I was more worried for getting my ass beat by my friends than anything, so I stuffed the wallet in my front pocket and tried to, in the same passing lights, see what this jacket is.

We pull into "Frank"s house, and I finally get out in the driveway when I, and everyone else see the it: a full, black on black, leather Chicago Bulls jacket. About 4 sizes too big :] The back had the Bulls logo in black suede, and it overall was a nice, heavy duty jacket. "Steve" then tried calling dibs and we fought back and forth over it, and we agreed that he'd wear it first and since I was staying there anyway, I could borrow it if he didn't want to wear it. I agreed, although I was going to wear it the rest of the day, and we agreed (finally).

I excused myself to the bathroom, lock the door, and whip out the wallet. AmEx card, a couple Visas, a driver's license, and $540 in cash. When I finally stopped shaking, I took the cash and rolled it into my sock, and then fish around the jacket, finding the pocket on the inside, and shove the now-cashless wallet in it. I come out of the bathroom, yelling for "Frank" and everyone to come to the back of the house, where I conveniently pull the wallet from the jacket and hand over the credit cards.

No cash, awww too bad, but I got ribbed for not noticing it before. "Steve" chimed in that's why I shouldn't keep it, because the goddamn thing was way to big for my small ass, and that was that. Wallet was introduced into full view, I got laughed at for being small, and I kept $540 to myself (which went a long way at the time, I remember spending money after that like a miser).

1/26/2010 3:48:31 PM

My apologies, but I've almost dreaded this next chapter. I have to face it down, and whatever fallout comes of it.

I've alluded to the almost double life I led, and nothing would exemplify this more than how I handled the day to day school week. I never, ever considered dropping out. On the other hand, I took risks that put me in positions of losing what little freedom I had. It wasn't really a cognitive decision, more of one I made just as the situation presented itself.

I became friends with "Dick" shortly after the beatdown I got. I wasn't really a social person at the time, and although I did have friends here and there, I never really sought out the "popular" clique. I wouldn't have fit in much at the time, I was just a unrefined ball of anger and contempt. Being that my own path to puberty came later than most, I really did miss the boat on establishing good relationships once I moved to Gilbert (Arizona). I was the quiet kid who kept to himself, and it seemed like I was forever stuck at being short (I was maybe 5'1" or so by my Freshman year) and skinny.

I treated school like it was my only ticket to somewhere. I didn't exactly know where, but I knew that afterward would have to come the Marines. It was as if I just knew that was my destiny, the only way I'd ever prove to myself and anyone paying attention that I was worth a shit. I had reached out to family over time, and the sad fact of the matter was nobody had the time or wanted to take the trouble of taking me in. I share the same name as my father, so that wasn't working well in my favor on his side of the family. A lot of my cousins I'd talk to over time would tell me that my aunt or uncle would say they were worried I was going to end up like him. They didn't want to "risk" that chance. As if schizophrenia is something you catch when in proximity to one who does have it. That pushed me more into the red zone, because here I am begging for someone to give me a home and it turns out my family was that stupid to think I was a carbon copy of my dad.
Regardless of my juvenile record at the time, anyone who spent more than 5 minutes with me would be able to tell I was articulate, well mannered, and very polite. I never treated anybody with contempt, and never once took for granted the people who did offer me a place to stay over the years. Never once. I was so wrapped up with worrying about where I'd stay each and every night that I couldn't afford to piss off my hosts. That they'd eventually ask me to leave was an entirely different matter-I'm sure it made them uncomfortable to have what basically looked like a runaway under their roof. No matter how I tried to paint it, that's what the situation was, and I never held a grudge against my friends' families for letting me stay, then asking me to leave. I just had to adapt.

There were days though, as I grew older, that I'd have to get physical. At first, the fights were about silly, stupid high school type of stuff. Most of them were against guys and for reasons that I can't even think of right now. And almost all of them were shoving matches, with some expletives and a hit or two. I never mouthed off to people before I went to juvie, but a combination of things happened after I was released that changed all of that.

The first was (finally) puberty. I went into custody weighing 130lbs and standing about 5'4". In just those few months there, I gained almost 40lbs and 3 inches. The first place I ended up staying was with "Dick" and his family, and right after that "Jim". "Jim" was a real quirky guy, he had just started training at Fairtex Muay Thai in Chandler, and I started going with him. Then I started training. Our trainer, Sem, was just about the best damn fighter in the world for his wieght. And here he was, teaching the best stand-up fighting style in the world to a kid with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Grand Canyon. He never took a high road approach about it with us, but would matter-of-factly tell us to not talk shit. I learned so much from him, but not all for the best reasons.

My first fight after a few months of Muay Thai was in the locker room at Dobson. I was trying out for the football team, something I had never done before, and during the practices I got moved from cornerback to linebacker. This was still the summer before school started, and the coach I knew from church. He had asked me to come out to practice one Sunday, and I showed up as asked, and found it a perfect fit for me. I ended up being a bit too slow for playing DB, but the move to linebacker pissed off more than a few players.
Here I was, a guy nobody knew, who had never played competitive sports before, walking on to one of the best programs in the East Valley. And already my defensive coach was slotting me for 2nd string. I remember buying my own neckroll that night, and feeling like this was what I was meant to do. I scaled back my weekend "activities" and concentrated on the upcoming season, the practices, and forging a few parental signatures here and there.
About a week or so before school started, we were coming in from practice and a couple guys were talking shit about me just out of sight. We had done a long set of "Oklahoma Drills" at the end, and I put some real nice hits on some of these guys. A "Oklahoma Drill" is basically two lineman facing each other, a linebacker, and a running back. Running back tries to get past the lineman and then the linebacker. We'd alternate linebackers as running backs and so on, and even though the coach would say "50% speed" I was hitting full force. Fuck 'em.
So I'm getting dressed, and this other linebacker and his buddy come up to me and pushed me into the lockers. I immediately grab up to his neck and knee him a couple times, then kick and then elbow him into the ground. I remember standing over him, screaming at him everything that I could think of, to get back up and let me finish beating his dumb ass. His buddy starts to edge in on me, and I shin kick him. I know, this sounds like a total jock moment, but I wasn't letting anyone fuck with me anymore. I didn't care if they played Pop Warner since they were 8, I didn't care how much they had their parents spend on camps and clubs, I didn't give a fuck about anything about them. I was going to earn this on my own back, and anyone that stepped up would get beat the fuck down if they were in my way.
The fighting tapered off at school, but picked up at parties and going to Mill Ave. (where Arizona State University is). I began to really get cocky, and found that my body was growing more and more. I went to a Nine Inch Nails concert, and picked a fight with two humongous Indian guys. I got some good hits in on one, but the other guy at some point either hit me or I hit him bad, and I fucked my right knee up. Ended up having to leave the concert early and go to the ER, I had a sever soft tissue injury and missed the game against Red Mountain HS. I did everything I could to get better, and got back in the next week. I ended up starting against Mesa HS, where our slim lead in the 4th quarter was in jeopardy as they drove to the goal line. I called a timeout, and our defensive coach had me and the defensive end swap for the next down. The quarterback rolled to his right and I beat the fatass lineman and promptly sacked his ass. By the end of the season, I was 5'10 and pushing 210lbs.

I started going back to Fairtex more than once a week, and going back out on the weekends more. I began to pick fights for no reason, some nights just to prove I could beat someone. The months following my football season was when it really got bad, if not the worst that it could get. I was angry, cocky, and knew how to fight. At the same time my grades were the best they'd ever been, and my attendance was near perfect. I stopped feeling sorry for myself, and in its place I found a new sense of being. The arrogance I carried did wear on my friends, however, and our schedule for going out ran into a few hiccups. First, I thought it was just nerves. Maybe the guys, after going so many months only out two or three times a month, were scared of picking back up the pace we had before I found football. Then, it started to feel like they were making excuses. I got impatient a few weekends and stole cars in an attempt to do it myself. Not the best of ideas, but as I said the arrogance..

After the first month of the year passed, my money situation began to tighten. It was also looking like "Jim" and his family were going to ask me to leave soon. Now I was in a bad situation-I had gotten used to one place living there for so long, that I neglected to keep a "Plan B". My arrogance couldn't overshadow the fear of being back on the street. I had felt normal for so long, that it was a complete shock that I had nowhere to go. I felt backed into a corner again, and began to come up with ways and means I'd never even considered before to make up for the gap.

This was when the idea of "raiding" drug dealers came.

1/26/2010 3:49:18 PM

Some nights I'd sit on a back porch of a friend's house, and just sit and think about how lousy it all was. Yeah, it was a pity party thrown by yours truly. The odd thing was, I'd not just try and justify it all, but almost put a hierarchy on the whole mess. Like, I was better than just a regular thief, I was better than a nickle bag seller, I was better than some junkie. I had to find (and successfully did after enough thinking) enough things I wasn't, as if that way I could say I wasn't just a crook or a liar or a thief. Nope, I had to put a place for myself to fit. Somehow, it worked though. I could look myself in the mirror and not hate what looked back at me, because I convinced myself so many times that "At least you're not ....", and it worked for the longest time. In that twisted way of thinking is where the entire idea of doing something "good" while still doing something bad was borne out of.

Nothing about my thought process then makes much if at all sense to me today. My entire life is in a different place now, far removed from there, but I've had a hard time even asking myself today just how the hell I thought I could get away with what I did, and even try to justify it. But that's exactly what I did. After a couple years, it started to chip away at my facade of being that I had to do something more than just wait for my 18th birthday. Although I drank a lot then, the one thing I never did was drug use. I saw it then, and with a total blanket effect, as something weak people did. I have to interject here that today, my tolerance of what people do with their own lives is their own business, and I could care less what people smoke or drink or inject so long as it never affects me or my family's safety. Back then, though, I couldn't stand people who used. There was a direct correlation to seeing my own parent's drug use as a major factor in to why they gave up being parents, and that just fed the hate machine that churned inside my brain. The day the idea of trying to do "good" came, the first response I had was "let's take out some dealer".

I didn't know what I was getting in to. My head was full of "Cops" episodes, that painting of DEA agents swinging a heavy door buster into a suspect's front door. How hard could it be to take money from people that were high?

What we didn't have was ballistic armor for starters. But just like the cops on television, we'd have the element of surprise. And big fucking guns. If we picked the right person and place, we could make a small fortune, and do something good for a change.

Fuck, nothing about this even sounds right trying to re-tell it. I've risked my life so many times for stupid, and sometimes no, reason. This was definitely one of the stupidest choices I ever made, and thinking about just how much I and the guys overlooked or just ignored in going into this was almost fatal. Sure, today with the real skills I have and training it would be a different story. But here we were, a bunch of teenagers, with a string of burglaries and GTA and some ring time at the Muay Thai gym, acting like we were the goddamn Untouchables. God this whole thing was just stupid.

It was a Saturday night. A friend of a friend of a friend had disclosed the location of a trailer in north Mesa where a middle-grade dealer lived. He dealt speed and weed, lived with his girlfriend and one other guy, and the rumor was he had about $5k at any given time. The house itself was just north of Brown Road, where the actual "mesa" part of Mesa slopes down to the Salt River bed. We scoped the place out for two weeks prior, and found that it was not just a lousy neighborhood, but very limited in escape routes. Today, there's a major freeway less than a mile from it. Then, however, there was shit but the few "major" roads in north Mesa. In all the time we spent watching the place, we never saw a police car, even though Mesa PD was just a couple miles away.

It was a simple trailer, the long end going east-west, with the west side facing the street. We decided that we would go in two in the front and two in the back. We had at that time two SKS's, a Czech .32 I think, and a .40 the maker I forget. I had the Czech .32.

It was very dark that night, and the street had only one working street light at the far north end. The Salt River was the far north boundary, and we only had planned escape routes leading south. Going north across the Salt would just land us on a Indian reservation, along with having to hoof it through brush and bullshit, so we gambled on anything that would get us south and out of there.

The scene is still frozen in my head: I had just kicked in the front door and had my gun on a man sitting in a recliner. His girlfriend was sleeping on a couch to the left, and as my two friends came in the back door, the only light in the whole place was the kitchen. We caught him watching television, and he just sat there and didn't move. I'm not naming names here, if you can understand why then thank you for that. One friend checked the rooms and nothing was there, and I asked him where the money was. His reply was that it was under his chair. I waved him away and in to the kitchen, whereupon I flipped the chair up and after looking, found nothing. A solid smack in the head with a blackjack, and he cried out that it was in a panel in the wall.

We found almost $3,000 and a huge bag of weed. One of my friends said we could make a ton selling it, but I didn't want to take it. Two of them dragged him into the bathroom, and made him flush this huge bag of weed down the toilet, flush after flush after flush.

I came into the bathroom and beat him unconscious and left him slumped against the toilet. I got a fleeting pang of worry when he went limp; maybe I had killed him? He was still breathing though, so we checked around fast for anything of value to carry (nothing) and left via the back door. We hurried back to the car, and on the way home stopped and tossed the ski masks into a garbage bin behind a grocery store.

1/26/2010 3:50:04 PM

I've never been much for talking shit, unless it was a last resort situation. A lot of people who knew me back then would say I was a quiet guy. Not in the creepy sense that I never spoke, but I always choose my words well before I utter them. I'm still that way today. As I said, however, there were times I'd fly off the handle in a fit of rage and spew every sort of curse and epithet you could imagine in order to garner a reaction.

I'll skip going on about concerts, and how they came to be the best free-for-all for just a few bucks. There were some wild times, moshing it up and beating the fuck out of some random person for fuck knows why.

Where my regret begins are the times, egged on by frustration or a bad mood, I would jump on the first random person I found and almost beat the life out of them. Back before they started enforcing the "no crusing" policy on Mill Avenue in Tempe, we'd go up there, and talk shit until someone talked back. Then we'd park (or just pull over) and set on them like a mass of ants. That the Tempe Police HQ was just a block away never stopped us, we just rode around at times looking for something to hurt.

There was a night that started out funny, and ended up crossing a few lines. We had gone to some resturant and got to-go bags, which we then started tossing out the window at random persons. When we ran out of food, I got the brilliant idea to grab some river rocks. The first guy on a bicycle we found, I tossed it and hit him full in the back, causing him to collapse in the road in a heap. I laughed so hard I had to do it again. A man standing at a bus stop caught the next rock in the upper chest, yelling out this sickening rattle that I can still hear in my mind. At the time, I was too busy laughing to care.

The worst night was when I graduated. All of my friends and I went and crashed every party we could find, ending up in Chandler somewhere where we didn't know anyone. There were a lot of Hispanics, and when we rolled into the backyard we knew right away we were at the wrong house. The music stopped, and a couple of them came up to me and my friends and told us to leave. I don't know exactly who threw the first punch, but I threw a guy into the sliding glass door and we all began to beat the fuck out of damn near anyone. As we're fighting our way to the front of the house, one guy comes around the corner with a pistol in his hands, pointing it off to my right and shooting one round. I saw one of my friends (I can't remember the code names right now, but he was one of the big guys) lunge at him from behind, and I ran over to grab the gun in the street. I look up and see another guy slamming a baseball bat over my friend's back, and he turns, grabbing the bat and then proceeds to beat the fuck out of him on the side of a car.

I have a 9mm Ruger in my hands that still smells of cordite, and as we're running to our cars I hear someone say "he's got a AK-47!". We get in and take off down the street with no lights on, hitting the main road and gunning it back to Gilbert.

A couple weeks went by, and I heard that it was some "Chandler Vato Loco" types who we crashed the party on. These were the same guys who we, almost a year prior, had ourselves a nice and proper fistfight at Crossroads park. Until one of their "G's" whipped out a gun and started to shoot in the air.


I'm still dancing around the real subject here. It's hard trying to face it down and put it into words. It's almost as if I can't let myself admit just how bad I was, how terrible and bottom of the barrel I had become. I almost am afraid of what will happen once I admit to everything.

1/26/2010 3:50:37 PM

The year is 1996.

I arrive at MCRD San Diego with total apprehension and fear. I've played off the last few months in the DEP (Delayed Entry Program) learning as much as I can about my upcoming new path in life, with not much thought into how it will actually happen. I've detailed already earlier in this thread how I almost derailed the entire plan by beating the shit out of a man who thought it a good idea to beat his own daughter in front of me. Barely getting to my ship date, with a handful of Commanding General waivers, wasn't exactly the smartest course of action. I did, however, finally make it.

Standing on the infamous yellow footsteps, I remember almost exactly the moment I stopped thinking and began reacting. They keep you so busy in bootcamp, you hardly have time to contemplate the machinations in place around you that are molding your very being into a greater, better version of yourself. During the first few days, myself and a hundred or so other recruits were in "holding" while paperwork was being done, forms processed, etc. and one last detail to be completed was a urinalysis.
Of course, I had never pissed in front of another person up until that point. Let alone a hulking, 250lbs Drill Instructor(DI)-who also happened to be black. Humiliation goes a long way to changing one's perspective on life, and that night/morning I learned true humiliation. I couldn't pee. I was the last man in the company to piss, and when it finally happened at a little past 3am, the DI called two other hulks of men (who also just happened to be black as well) to celebrate.

That the saying "you must destroy to create" would be a vast understatement if inserted here, I'd very much agree.

The first week or so is the hardest when adjusting to military life. I wanted to give up and walk away several times in the beginning. One night after lights out, I sat in my upper rack (basically a bunk bed) staring at the planes taking off from San Diego airport. I wished I could be on one of them that very moment, taking me far and away from this bitter, angry place. I imagined sitting with my lapbelt on, enjoying a drink and saying "fuck you all" in my head as the plane lifted off and away.

Then, just a night or two later, I finally began thinking past that point of liftoff. I imagined the landing, and having nobody there to great me. I thought of what it would be like to hang out with my friends, where they would ask "Why did you give up?", and I wouldn't have anything to say to them. I imagined the run-ins with other people I knew, where when they asked about why I-the guy who literally was born to be a Marine-gave up. I imagined awkward moments with dates, where they asked "So, what do you do?" and I had nothing to reply to that.
What sank in, however, was one final thought. One final question I asked myself before falling asleep, one final moment of clarity where I searched my soul for the real reason and motivation behind what I was attempting to do with my life.

"What do I tell my son-however far in the future I have kids-why I quit?"

When I woke up for reveille the next morning, it was the first thing on my mind again. If I quit now, what do I tell my son? I didn't have kids (that I knew of) at that time, nor did I even really have a serious relationship. It stuck, and I carried out my tasks the DI's threw at me with a new found zeal. I was not going to fail, not going to quit, never going to give up. All in the name of never wanting to shame the specter of future sons.

When I graduated on December 7th, 1996, I was proud. I was ready for anything that came at me, literally. Grabbing up my things, I scanned the crowd of people around me. Fathers were there with their sons, mothers were there doting on their new Marine son. Myself and a handful of other newly-minted Marines found ourselves in a corner, where we congratulated one another for the accomplishment we had just achieved. Between us all, we only had one another to hear those words as we were the few without family or friends there. It mattered a small degree, but in my mind at least, I had a future son that could be proud of me, and I could accept that.

Next stop: School of Infantry. The process of change is a long one, and the story is far from over now.

1/26/2010 3:51:07 PM

Let us now follow where I left off, which was graduation from the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. That Friday in December I felt on top of the world. All I wanted to do was get back home and put my middle finger in everyone's face that doubted me. I mean it, I really planned on visiting every single hangout and party and just put my finger right in the faces of the doubters. Not exactly the best of plans per se, but everything about my life at that point was raw. I felt the best I did in my entire life. I was doing something "good", and "good" was quite a change.

Change wasn't all that forthcoming, however. It doesn't just happen upon you one day where your entire perspective of the world is completely different. It's almost as if you have a chisel and a hammer, working on a block of marble, tediously chipping away bit after bit.

Arriving home I met up with a lot of old friends. Many were taken aback not just by my demeanor (one friend said I now walked like a Terminator, complete with head swivel and lock) but by the new found arrogance. Oh yes, I had become the stereotypical "boot" Marine. I felt I had the world in my hand and just had to let everyone know it. You would think something like that would make a person isolated quickly, but I found it worked better than any game I tried on the ladies before. My ego was fed more in that week back home than ever before.

Being the eager new Marine, I decided to report to the School of Infantry three days early. Part of the reason I left after just a week (we were granted the option to go on leave [basically paid vacation] for 10 days after boot camp, although we had not actually earned 10 days. It would put everyone negative about 6 days or so, and I calculated that burning just 7 would mean I could go on leave again in a month) was I didn't really have a home to stay at. I slept at a friend's house for a couple days, then another, but quickly tired of it. I was a new man, a new person, and couldn't stand to continue to sleep on someone else's couch.

I reported for Marine Combat Training at the School of Infantry, Camp Pendleton, just one week after graduation. I didn't realize that there wasn't going to be another class until the new year, and I was assigned to mess duty. For the entire holiday schedule.

Right there, that checked my ego quick. I found myself, new Marine and all, scraping garbage at 4am every morning. We worked from 3:30am to 11:30pm every day, with one hour for lunch. We had a burly black Corporal who enjoyed playing his best impression of a Drill Instructor every morning, kicking garbage cans and yelling until he was hoarse.

I hated it. All of it. There was nothing to the entire routine, and I obstinately followed orders as a Private should. I didn't have the awareness that comes with experience to understand the why's and what's of what we were doing. All I saw at that time was a handful of Corporals and Sergeants who were all black, enjoying their day with us playing silly games. They had the luxury of doing it-being that they were permanent personnel their schedule called for one day on, and two days off. We were their work force, and all they had to do was ensure we did what we were told.

It wasn't that bad looking back on it. I made it out to be more, as I showed up early and got stuck on mess duty I had nobody to blame. I called my recruiter a few times to ask why I was never issued orders to do recruiting assistant. Especially over the holidays, it pissed me off to no end he left me hanging. I had brought in 4 guys before I even left for boot camp! Come to find out later, he was facing charges at that time for sexual misconduct with some female recruit. I didn't know that until almost a year later, but all I saw at the time was him dicking me around and me stinking like garbage 24/7.

I got New Years Eve 96-97 off, and took a shuttle to San Diego with two Marines I had befriended, and got piss drunk so much we lost track of time. We were in a cab yelling at the cabbie to take us to a bar-any bar!-right this fucking minute! So we get dumped off at some country/western Navy bar near downtown. We swagger in, cheer during the countdown, and drink until I can't remember how I got back to the barracks.

The year now was 1997. I wore the uniform of a Marine, but as I said before I was raw and unfocused. There was a lot ahead, but starting this year off I was still a ball of anger and hate, and little had changed about my outlook on race except that I did my best to focus on their rank and not their color. It was ingrained in my already, the instant obedience to orders and direction, but that month on mess duty already tested me. I began to block out the afterthoughts, those moments where you go back and rethink what someone had said or done and wonder why they did. I just focused, and focused more, and kept myself moving and going so that I didn't begin thinking just how bad I wanted to punch someone.

It's awful to admit this. Even if I never said a word, the racist thoughts were still there. Pushing back on those thoughts was my discipline to just do what I'm told. When it was finally over and we were dismissed to begin training finally, I was looking for any excuse to unload on someone. Unfortunately, I was given that excuse and much more.

A group of Marines and I were corralled and then lined up into a platoon. A Sergeant, a man of average height and build, came up and asked who had been a squad leader or guide in boot camp. A few hands went up. He directed them to stand in front of us, then asked who had been in boy scouts or was an Eagle Scout. Another couple hands went up, and he pointed them to stand with the first group.

Then he asked us, "Who thinks they can kick any one of these guys' ass?"

My hand was alone in going up above my head. Fuck yeah, this was what I wanted to hear.

The Sergeant comes up to me and points to the head of the platoon, telling me to walk over to a spot by a pole. He then grabs the biggest guy from the squad leader/guide/boy scout group, and walks him over to me. He's got about 20lbs on me, and is easily 4 or 5 inches taller. "When I come back, one of you will be standing here", he mutters, looking sideways at me. "I don't care how it happens, if you want this job, it means a meritorious promotion. Figure it out.", and then he walks away.

The Marine in front of me is also a Private, and after a quick second or two he says "Fuck this, I can't fight." Riding a tidal wave of testosterone, I yell at the entire platoon if anyone wants to take my spot, come and get it. Nobody moves. This is not the position you want to put me in, but here I am in it deep. There is nothing worse than unbridled authority, and here I am with absolutely no leadership training, bludgeoning my way forward with my fists and elbows. It's ridiculous looking back at how simply awful I was, enforcing my orders with a punch here or a kick there.

I earned my first stripe by literally beating the shit out of the competition. There were fights in my platoon almost daily, and I found myself acting like the worst kind of leader-the "do as I say or I'll knock you" type. The entire setup only fed my ego, and when I was tested I responded with brute force. Don't like it? Fuck you, I'll put you in the mud. Someone didn't wake up for watch? I'd beat them awake. Our "scribe", basically just a simple secretary job, decided to put me and another squad leader on watch one night even though I had done it the night before. So when I woke up much earlier than expected, with one of my Marines telling me that the schedule says I was to be on watch, I immediately went to the scribe's rack and slapped him awake. Being about equal size to me, he got up and we went at it. I finally managed to get him face-first on the ground, yelling in his ear that I was going to break off his arm and shove it up his ass for fucking with my sleep.

He complained to the Sergeant the next morning, and I was told that next time I should take it out of sight of the platoon. No admonishment, no condemnation of what I had done. Just a simple "go away now". This environment did no good in bringing about any change for the better in me, only serving the base qualities I had at the time. Might equaled right. So long as I was running the show, everything went smooth.

It was just about the worst I ever acted while wearing the uniform of a Marine. No, I take that back. It was the worst.

Graduation came, and I finally found out what career I was going into. Because of my juvenile record, even though I had scored a 98 on the ASVAB, I had to go in "open contract". Which was basically anything the Corps needed at that moment, I'd be shipped off to school to learn. I was told "Comm/Elec, 29 Palms, CA".


Where the fuck is 29 Palms?

1/26/2010 3:52:07 PM

It was after dark when the bus rolled down CA62 towards the base. All I could see were lights in a seemingly boundless, bright, orange haze that was "mainside". I was pretty excited-my first duty station! That it was for schooling didn't detract much, this was a real base! One of the first thoughts I had while driving up the main strip to the base gate was "I wonder how many strip clubs are out here! Hundreds I bet!"
When the bus came to a slow stop and the door opened, it was quiet. Not just because me and the handful of other fresh boots from SOI/MCT were still half-asleep, it was cold and quiet outside. No rush of traffic. No sounds of a city. I was told 29 Palms was the biggest base the Marines had (I was also told that I would be in some people's prayers but the fuck was I paying attention to?) I didn't get the notion this place was metro-big. It turned out that, in square miles, 29 Palms was the biggest in terms of area. In terms of misery, probably up there too.
I stepped off the bus to the first person on my right to check in. Some swarmy PFC who called my name "Private EDGECRUSHER". I corrected him and said "PFC now". He looked up and said "It says PRIVATE, Private". Being the ever-so-bigger dickhead I was, I then said "Good, then add FIRST CLASS to the end, fucker".

First impressions are pretty lasting, and me and him never got better than that.

In the morning, the lights flickered on at 0530. Instead of shouting and screaming, there was a gradual hum as you heard the base outside coming to life. I got myself up, showered, and changed back into my Alpha uniform to report at 0800. Walking out into the main common area of the squad bay at about 0700, I see only a Sergeant and another PFC at the check-in desk. Inquiring about reporting in, they confirm that yes, be here at 0800 as a Staff Sergeant will process you in, and welcome to the Stumps. Chowhall is about two barracks that-a-way.

Pushing outside into the morning, I was taken aback by what I saw. All the images and thoughts I had of base life, strip clubs, whatever evaporated when I saw nothing but dirt. Everywhere. For miles. The lights were just that-lights. I could see a mountain in the distance covered in snow (Big Bear) but the squadbay I just came out of was one of a half dozen or so around. Towering over this dustbowl were three story barracks pitted about in odd spots.

To make it even more hard for my mind to wrap around, it was cold. Even in my Alphas, I shivered standing there. This was a desert? (It was the end of January)

I reported back with time to spare and sat waiting for the Staff NCO I was to report in with to show. When he did, he matter of factly took our Service Record Books, even offering a meek "congrats" when he saw my meritorious promotion just the day prior. He was a balding, early 30's type who shaved his head to blur the line where his hair was and wasn't. When we were done, he told us to change into our cammies and be back at 1300.

It was a weird feeling but the sort of environment I adapted too quickly. The Marines don't like to baby-sit you unless you can't handle yourself I found out. So, you were given a goal or tasks, but not micro-managed as to how you accomplished it. You just accomplished it, and kept moving forward.

I found that the next pick-up for school was a few weeks away, and that in the mean-time we'd be stuck doing busy work. It was about three says after arriving that I happened to be at the Company office when a Captain from 1st Tanks came in. That morning, I volunteered to augment H&S Company, Comm Platoon of the 1st Marine Division's 1st Tank Battalion for 12 weeks in lieu of school.

I always wonder about that morning, being in the right place at the right time. Instead of once again dropping into a training cycle, I was allowed to circumvent it, albeit temporarily, and go directly to the Fleet. I learned more about my MOS, about the Corps, and about being a Marine than I would have had I just simply gone to school for the next year. Well, it's hard to say that exactly. The lessons would have come, just at a different time, but I had them all before I even dropped into my first class.

What didn't get taught was how not to fight. I saw that Marines fought all the time, and NCO's were the left hand of God Himself (with some Sergeants asserting that they were, indeed, His Right hand). Once I left Tanks and went to school, I breezed through everything up until a couple days before graduation. Blew my knee out during morning PT 4 days before graduation.

So there I was, third in my class at graduation (the top 6 were separated by less than 1%), on crutches. My orders were modified, and I found out my next duty station was: 29 Palms.

Which was a good thing, looking back, because I never would have met Corporal Palmer then. He was the catalyst in changing not just my attitude in the Corps (which I swore was fine and dandy) but my underlying racial problem. Yes, he called me out the day he met me as a racist, and I still don't know how he did it.

1/26/2010 3:53:01 PM

more like NES-T

1/26/2010 4:03:57 PM

Now this is a story all about how my life got flipped turned upside down
And I'd like to take a minute just sit right there
I'll tell you how I become the prince of a town called Bel-Air
In West Philadelphia born and raised
On the playground is where I spent most of my days
Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool and all shootin' some b-ball outside of the school
when a couple of guys who were up to no good
started makin' trouble in my neighborhood
I got in one little fight and my mom scared and said you're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air
I begged and pleaded with her day after day but she packed my suitcase and sent me on my way
She give me a kiss and then she gave me my ticket put my walkman on and said I might as well kick it
First class yo this is bad drinkin' orange juice out of a champagne glass
Is this what the people of Bel-Air live like hmmm this might be all right
but wait I hear they're prissy and all that
is this the type of place that they should send this cool cat
I don't think so I'll see when I get there I hope they're prepared for the prince of Bel-Air
Well uh the plane landed and when I came out
There was a dude looked like a cop standin' there with my name out
I ain't tryin' to get arrested yet I just got here
I sprang with the quickness like lightening disappeared
I whistled for a cab and when it came near the license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror
if anything I could say that this cab was rare but I thought man forget it yo homes to Bel-Air
I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8 and I yelled to the cabbie yo homes smell ya later
Looked at my kingdom I was finally there to sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel-Air

1/26/2010 4:41:40 PM

jetskibro

1/26/2010 4:50:13 PM

All this time....... wasted

1/27/2010 9:40:23 AM

you're a pretty fast typer!

1/27/2010 5:08:03 PM