Chapter 2

Breaking into a House

Dom always had the tools. It was a pouch filled with these devices he claimed to have gotten from a dentist. We were none the wiser. All I knew was that Dom had been breaking into houses with Ralph and Merrill and everyone else for quite a while now and I needed to get into the mix. It was Me, Dom, and Wade. We had skipped school. We were looking for trouble. We were three kids who came from a poor section of Boca Raton, but were sent to live with the richest most arrogant people on the planet. And money was needed, to fuel our lifestyle. To fuel our lust for the virtues that was otherwise handed to these ungrateful bastards, free of charge.

The three of us found a house... It was in West Boca. A ranch house. Painted a rust red. In later years, I would tell people that the best way to fortify your home is to have a sign staked in your lawn saying you have some security service. Or a sticker to the left or right of your door saying the same. Those two markers were more of a deterrent to us than a pit bull in the back yard barking for no reason then the shifting of the wind.

We would drive around for hours. Looking for a home that had no sign. No warning. No indication that if I open up the door four minutes later I would have a patrol car pulling up. An overweight cop outside of it with his gun drawn. This ranch house painted in rust red told us nothing. Its lips were sealed and we were hers for the taking. We parked the Ford Fresco a block away and the three of us headed to the house.

So let’s lay it down. The cargo pants and it’s brother, the cargo shorts, were made for people who needed to hold a lot of devices, all of which are considered illegal and also somewhat depraved and usually violent. I would have probably been a fucking Rhodes Scholar right now if it wasn’t for the goddamn cargo shorts. They were invented for deviants.  Those pouches on the side. I kept my pipe in there. I kept the centerpunch which I used to shatter car windows in there. I kept a switchblade in there. And on this occasion, I had a pair of socks that once inside this red rust home, would go over my hands so I wouldn’t leave finger prints. We should have no crime in the world, but we do because of the cargo pants and its brother,  the cargo shorts.

Dominick was the entry man. As the three of us walk up to the house, he would cut off and head to the backyard. Merrill and I would head to the front door. There we would knock.

The entryman, Dominick, he was born a Greek. He had a chiseled face dashed with teenage acne, with blue eyes and tightly knit black hair. All girls in Spanish River High considered him an Adonis. He had his pick of the litter. All of us? We just thought of Dominick as the guy who can break into any fucking house we present him within 30 seconds or less.

He could. And he never said how. Didn’t want to know.  I never cared to be an Entryman. The entryman walks into the dog that was asleep downstairs. The Entryman is the one who comes home to the illegal alien maid who has a snubbed nose .45 that she got from her cousin Julio who lives down near Liberty City. An Entryman is the one who, if there is a problem, is the one who will have to resolve it. While he is resolving it the two guys on point are racing the fuck out of there like Seabiscuit at the Kentucky Derby.

Rule #1: Never let the Entryman hold the keys to the car.

Rule #2: You DO NOT talk about Fight Club.

 I knock. I knock again. Third knock.

“Who is it?” a dumb Greek impersonating a house wife asks.

“Open the fucking door asshole,” is how an Irish guy replies.

The neighborhood was silent. A working class area. No wife staying home to raise and nurture the little bastards. No, it was survival of the fittest. Or better known as “ survival of the have the best ass, suck the best dick, know the best jokes, have the best tits, be the best athletic, sell weed on the side club.”

The three of us, on the cusp of robbing this home, all came from houses that were not holy. Dom and Merrill’s parents separated. The mom’s taken their kids and moved them to West Boca. Only because of the schools. Seriously.

West Boca High Schools were zoned in true Boca Raton. Ground zero for the richest, most Jewish, most arrogant, most obnoxious, most reason why zombie films became popular (the zombie craze began the year after Boca Raton incorporated itself. Honest. Look it up.). So if you’re a single mom, the best thing you can do for your ‘Destined to fail” kids is put them in a good school system.

Now on paper, that premise seems to hold water. Now on paper, me entering my cock in the world’s biggest dick competition seems sound as well… But I digress. The school was a carbon copy of Beverly Hills 90210. The people were horrible. I learned what Goth was. People treated me like I was British because none of them had ever heard a Brooklyn accent so they just assumed it was Hammersmith, London. People drove Porches and Mercedes Benz. The football players were fucking gods (reason #1 why I joined the football team the following year, even though I did not know a single rule nor did I understand the concept of the game. What I did know is that the guys with the football Jerseys banged way more girls then the guys who were reading fucking “Dune” underneath the shaded area to not allow sun to strike them because they may sweat and it may make their globbed on eyeliner run).

WRITERS NOTE: Some of my best friends were Goth. I consider it a suburban thing, but nevertheless, these guys were way talented and they turned me on to “Skinny Puppy.”

So you are poor. And you are going to a makeshift, not entirely unlike the real thing, Beverly Hills 90210 High School (while that show is actually airing on Wednesdays Nights, I might grimly add). And you are seeing this world of wealth. You go to these peoples house and they are 40 room mansions. Indoor Movie Theater. Basketball court. I’m living in a shitbox and look at how these fucking assholes are living! So you decide to rob houses to catch up.

Dominick opens the door and we enter. From the right side pocket of my cargo pants (they were designed for this exact reason. Please see above), I pulled out a pair of socks and placed the pair over my hands. Merrill did the same. Dom already had them on so that means the fuck broke in and got his socks on all within 30 seconds. You have to admit that that is impressive. He was the best.

We started to rummage around the house. There was expensive shit everywhere. The three of us, we were looking around, not sure what to do. Then Dominick snapped to it and gave us a refresher: grab everything that is not nailed down and that may be worth money to the guy at the pawn shop we sell to in Deerfield Beach who turns a blind eye.”

We were stacking all this shit up in the living room. Every minute another one of us found something that the man at the pawn store would buy without blinking an eye. Soon the pile became too big for us three to carry. So I got an idea.

An idea is something where a counsel made up of rationally minded souls from the 1880’s can debate and vote on a concept or mental impression and determine whether or not it should pass. OK, that’s not true. An idea is actually 90% of the time really dumb. And then there are the 10% which are insightful and timeless and probably realized during a bowel movement.

And so I had an idea. We would get the car, pull it into the driveway, and then fill it would all of the stolen goods (don’t worry. I hate myself). Then we wouldn’t have to carry them to the car (hate myself). And then we can drive straight to the pawn store and sell it to that guy who will buy items from us without raising an eye (truly deeply hate myself).

Merrill goes out the front door and pulls the car back and into the driveway. We close the door behind him. Me and Dom are there. Ready and waiting. We load the back of the Fresco in seconds. I get in the front passenger seat. Dom runs over to the button on the wall for the garage door. He hits it. The driveway door goes up. Dom hits the button again. The door starts to come down and Merrill hits the gas and races out The door barely misses us. It was like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom without the underage Asian. On the driveway, Dominick enters and we take off. There was no stake or stickers on this rusted red ranch house. And we, as complete scumbags, took advantage of that.

I cannot remember how much I made off of that. Probably enough to buy weed and so forth. My other activities were keeping things lucrative. Although, all I could think of was the image of this family coming home and seeing this. My house was robbed in Brooklyn a few times. Coming up to see something you loved taken away was a bad scene. And now here I was. No different than the junky who robbed me and my family ten years past. I was that junkie. After that day I never went into a house again without being invited first. That scene was over for me. The others carried on for a bit. But then they started taking the guns. And the guns led to more problems. And the world kept travelling round and round and round.