CAR THIEF
Snake says he got his nickname, not because of the set of his eyes in his triangular face or his mesmerizing nonstop line of gab, but because of his pet, a huge python he's had since he was a boy. He took the reptile with him in his backpack when he ran away from home and an abusive father at the age of twelve. He claims the snake is so big now it must be fed whole pigs, but not very often. Snake has intricate tattoos on his body, some of them half-finished. Several of his front teeth are missing.
Snake is downright irresistible to women. At twenty-eight he's been married more than once and has four children by several different women. One of his ex-girlfriends shot him in the knee with his own .22 squirrel gun when he tried to throw her out of his house.
"I'm an artist. I draw real good. I never been to school for anything, but I been tattooing since I was fifteen." Snake's dream is to go to commercial art school. He plans to get a license to deal in exotic animals to pay his way. He came close to making this dream come true the last time he was out of prison, and was actually enrolled in a technical college. To pay his tuition and rent an apartment, he bought a bunch of snakes, a three-foot-long monitor lizard, iguanas, various parrots, and a pink cockatoo -- that said, "Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Oh, shit!" over and over again when it was in trouble-from a guy who said he was selling his personal collection to make some fast cash for "a family emergency."
"That bird talked good. I mean real good. That son of a bitch could almost hold an intelligent conversation with you. I felt nervous with this bird, man." Snake said he figured to resell this menagerie and make a tidy profit. "The cockatoo alone was worth three thousand dollars."
It hadn't occurred to Snake, when he met the seller late at night in a bar and got the whole kit-and-kaboodle for less than half the original asking price, that the animals might be hot. They were the loot from a pet store robbery. The animals were confiscated eventually, and Snake was arrested.
He has a temper, and that has gotten Snake in trouble as well. "I was at a red light, and there were some black guys in the car next to me, I think it was two brothers. I was drunk, and one of them kept looking over at me. I said, 'What the hell you looking at, nigger?'
"'Fuck you,' he says.
"Jumped right out of my car, right in the car with them, and went to work on one of the guys. The guy driving went between two cars and sideswiped both of them. Cop pulled us over, and I'm still scrapping in the back seat.
"But like I said, I never did anything really bad. I just had that attitude, you know." In fact, Snake may be most dangerous when he is in prison. He tells this story about being pressured by another inmate to have sex. "I was a pretty strong little guy back then. I worked out a lot and got kind of bulky. I wasn't near as big as this nigger was. That motherfucker was so strong he could shoulder press 225 pounds twenty-five times. I caught him on the weight pile, and when he got up to about rep number twenty-three, and he was straining and everything, and he didn't lock his elbows -- boom! -- I took a little poker and stabbed him. I wanted him to snatch his head back, like you do when you hurl yourself. Then the weights would have come right down on top of his head and just splattered his skull, but it didn't happen that way. He had good reflexes, and he bent forward. The weight fell on his neck and broke his backbone. Now, he don't weigh half what he was lifting, because it put him in a wheelchair."
I met Snake when he was being held in a county jail, one of the most modern and sophisticated prisons ever built. The outside of the building looks like a modern version of a medieval fortress, all cast concrete. Inside, it is an eerily bright glass house. Bars are replaced by floor-to-ceiling multilayered plastic windows. The guards occupy central control rooms with 360-degree views of the prisoners' cells and common areas. They can see all of the inmates all of the time. But Snake is kept alone in confinement, because he has made a name for himself by dismantling the tamper-proof cells. "Here two weeks ago, they were trying to figure out how I got security screws out with my fingers when they had caulking behind them. I only had to get one screw out and the others were a breeze. I had a tool, and I tore that shit all apart. The sergeant up there was fucking with me. You fuck with me, and I'm going to fuck back. I got my pride. I can sit up in that motherfucking cell butt-ass naked for a week, and it don't bother me. I'm used to it now. If you ask these police in here who's the smartest inmate they ever seen, nine out of ten will say it's me."
The officers wouldn't go quite that far in characterizing Snake, but they did admit that he was very imaginative. Nobody knows what he'll do the next time he gets out of prison, not even Snake. "I don't know," he says. "I might get back out there and fuck up again. You can never tell. Even if I did get in school, about the only thing I could do with the education is to better myself in tattooing, 'cause no company is going to hire me with my record. When you got a long record, everything goes real hard against you. It's the same old sad song. You get out there and get in trouble again, or you sit back with these little nine-to-fivers, make minimum wage, and live like a bum for the rest of your life."
***
I was working as a security guard. God help them, I don't know why they done that stupid move. Wasn't paying but nothing over minimum wage. But, give me a break! I know how to do this. I ended up making sergeant.
I was working at the parking field where they bring vehicles off the boats from overseas and store them before they get sent to the dealerships all around the area. Being a sergeant, I had the rover deal. I'd ride around and punch a key in a clock here and there, all over, so they can keep track of where you been and when.
They had radio call-ins on the night shift every fifteen minutes. You got to repeat your unit number, and let them know you're there and awake. When the guy at the back gate come on with his number, you could hear his radio in the background with that jungle boogie. He's one of them old homeboys.
I heard it, and I was going to say something to him about it anyway, but as soon as I get to the front gate, the captain calls me up, "Nah, nah, nah this and nah, nah, nah that. Not supposed to have no radios." On and on. I let them bring radios on the night shift. It's boring to sit there in the dark. So now the captain says I've got to call a meeting and give them all hell.
About this time, this Ferrari come in there. You got your Toyotas, and you got your fucking Subarus, even the occasional Porsche, but you hardly ever see something like this here. Pinkertons got the damn Porsches in a small fenced-in area by themselves. Boy, getting in there is like trying to get into Fort Knox. I don't know why they didn't have that damn Ferrari in there.
I seen it, and I used the phone in the truck to call up this kid that 1 knew. 1said, "Listen here, 1want you to call my truck when you get into this little store that's right across the street from the lots here."
"All right."
He gets down there and calls me up. I get done with my key round, and I says to the other guards, "Listen here, I'm running to the store. Any of ya'll want anything, cup of coffee or something? I'll bring it back."
When I come back through the front gate, I had this kid in the back of the truck laying down. I called a special meeting about the radio playing all the way to the back dock. So 1dropped him off first, and come back and got the people on the front gate to take them to the meeting. Put an old Pinkerton guy on the front gate, and went out and told everybody about the radios being banned on the job.
While I'm doing this, the kid is getting in the Ferrari. The Ferrari is so low to the ground -- I done measured it -- I told the kid, "You don't have to stop at the guard arm or anything. You can drive right through, underneath that son of a bitch."
I get back up front and the Pinkerton, old dumbfounded guy, says, "I was drinking my coffee, and all of a sudden, ZOOM! I don't know what it was. But I didn't open the gate nor nothing. I seen taillights for a second."
"You been working too long. You just need a vacation."
"I didn't raise the gate. I don't know how he got around it."
"You been drinking? Go back to your post. Leave you here for five minutes, and all hell breaks loose."
The kid waited for me at the jetty. I had an old Camaro at the time. I said, "Okay, you get in my Camaro, and I'll drive the Ferrari, and you keep right on my ass -- but don't hit me. I'm going to sell this thing." I called somebody, and he told me he'd give me ten grand for that car. I said, "Stolen, though. Stolen."
"I don't give a damn if it's stolen. I'd give you a lot more if it had papers on it."
"Okay, cool." He was a big coke dealer like Scarface. Huge house, three or four yachts -- one for every weekend in the month. This guy had it made, and he was crooked as a broke-leg dog.
I steal some tags off some Porsches and switch them around. Me and the kid did that all day long. I took that thing out and opened it up on a deserted highway, and man! I think I got up to 140 miles an hour in that damn thing, and I had to shut her down. I was a cloud moving at full speed, a thunderstorm waiting to blow up. That night, we headed out to Ft. Lauderdale.
It was like two in the morning when we finally got there. I said, "I ain't going to wake this guy up at this hour." So we went out on the strip and picked us up some pussy. The kid told me he was only seventeen, but I said that was okay. I got him in the bars, no problem.
We picked up three chicks. We crammed all five of us in this little bitty two-seat car. 1got one of them on the console, one of them is sitting in his lap, and one of them was laying across me and had her feet out the passenger side window. She was driving. They had a hotel room there, and we were having fun. So I took two of them, and he took one of them. But the girl couldn't get him to do anything. She couldn't even get him to take his clothes off. I got these other two girls, and I'm having a blast. I hear her saying, "Come on, Joey." Finally, this third chick comes to me, but I'd about had enough by then, I was tired out. We got back in the car, and I said, "What's the matter with you? What's your problem, man? That chick was fine."
"I didn't feel like it."
"Bullshit, man. Ain't nobody don't feel like fucking a chick like that there. That's a fine bitch, man." And she was. They were all pretty.
So we get down to this guy's house. He's got one of them damn Cuban girlfriends. She's real pretty, but she don't speak hardly any English. "He gone Cuba."
"What?"
"He go Cuba two hours ago."
"Two hours ago? Damn, I should have just come on. Did you get the money for the car?"
"What car? I do no business transaction. He take care all that."
"Oh, fuck. We done drove all the way down here for nothing." I wanted to get back to work, keep them from suspecting me. So we sat there a while, and then I said, "We're going to go hook back up with them girls, 'cause 1know where their hotel is. We're going to get back in there, and you're going to do something this time, or I'm going to come over there and beat your ass, take your pants off, and make you do it."
"Okay, okay."
We get over there. Me and the other two girls went out of the room. After about an hour of messing with him, the girl finally got him into doing something. Then, man, he started going like a rabbit. I think, "Cool." So I get into what I'm doing.
The next thing I knew, I hear, "You son of a bitch!" I look over, and he's done shit all over himself, and all over her. "Oh, my God!" He must have hit him a good one, and shit all over himself. It was the biggest mess. She got up. The two girls I was with are saying, "What the hell's wrong with him?"
We're lucky we got out of there with our damn asses still intact. We were outnumbered. I been shot three times by a chick, and I never hit one in my life. They can be real unpredictable.
After we got out of the hotel, I said, "What's your damn problem, man?"
"I don't know, man."
We been partying all night and into the next day, and it was getting late. I said, "Let's get heading home. I got to be at work tomorrow morning. I'll drive for a while and you sleep. When I start fading, I'll wake you up, and you can drive. We'll get back, hide this Ferrari somewhere, and try it again the next time I get some days off."
So we got to about Fort Myers or Fort Pierce or Fort Something, and I started getting sleepy. I weaved in the road a little bit. Nah, I'm not going to do this. So I put the car on cruise control right at sixty. I woke the kid up, gave him some coffee, turned the radio up, and sat there with him for a few minutes. "You good and awake?"
"Oh, yeah, I'm good and awake now."
"Okay, let's switch seats." We did that. "I got the cruise control on. Do not take it anything above sixty. Now do you understand?"
"No problem."
"I'm going to sleep."
I didn't get good asleep, I felt something, and my eyes snapped open. We're sliding sideways down the median.
"I FELL ASLEEP!" he screams at me.
"You dumb ass, get off the brake! Get off the brake!" He's steady on the brake. I'm trying to get the car back straightened out. "Get off the brake!" He's still pounding on the brake. Finally, I slapped the piss out of him, and he just curled up. I'm in the passenger seat trying to get the car to crawl back on the road, give it gas to get it straightened out. I got out of the median, and we're fishtailing in the middle of the road. I about got it under control. Damn back tire fishes off the asphalt, loses traction, and we go into a spin. The next thing I know -- BAM! -- we hit a tree. I went up to my shoulders through the windshield. I black out for a little bit.
I wake up, and this dumb little fuck is on the hood of the car with a crowbar stuck in between my neck and the windshield, trying to pry my head back through the hole in the glass. The impact split my head wide open. I said, "Okay, kid, okay. Hold on a minute! Get that shit off my head!"
"We got to get out of here, man. The police are going to be coming soon. We got to get out of here, man."
"Don't worry about it." The horn's going off. "Get down there and get hold of the fuse box. Snatch that motherfucker out of the damn firewall."
"Where's the fuse box, what's the fuse box?"
"Dummy, the thing's got all the little shit in it." He went down in there fucking around, and he finally got it out.
I got one of them big Rambo knives in my damn boot, so I use the handle to crack all the glass. Then I cut the clear plastic sandwiched in the middle of the glass to keep it from flying allover when it's broke, and pulled my head out. I didn't think I was hurt all that bad. I tied my hair back and braided it, put my hat on. With the hair and the hat, it pretty much held my head together, but I kept getting drops of blood coming down across my eyebrow.
This car had a phone in it. It had a fucking Alpine stereo system in it. I mean, it was jammed packed, loaded. I told the kid, "Okay, we got to get all the fingerprints off the car." We had just cleaned the car up a little earlier for the guy who was going to buy it, so there weren't no fingerprints on the outside. There weren't too many fingerprints on the inside, but we cleaned off the steering wheel, and we cleaned off the dash, the stereo, just went to work on it. I had a bottle of Armor-all, and it's a real oily based stuff, so I sprayed that everywhere.
I'm doing good when I'm sitting down, but when I stand up, I start to getting real dizzy. I said, "We got to get out of here now." We was on a long strip where there wasn't no lights, there wasn't no exits, there wasn't no nothing, just cars passing us. That's why we had so much time. It's pitch black outside now. We got back up on the road, and I said, "Hold on a minute, help me get my balance here. Stand right there." I hauled off and knocked the shit out of the kid. Motherfucker, he hit the ground. He says, "I was expecting that a long time ago."
"Now come on up here and help me get over to the road." We get up to the highway, and some guys picked us up in an old Chevy truck. He must have thought I didn't know what was going on. The kid started running his mouth about the car, "Oh, yeah, it was a Ferrari with a phone in it and this and that." Oh, shit.
"What's wrong with your friend there, man?" the guy says.
"He went through the windshield." Why don't he just tell him we stole the car on top of it, you know? He's flapping his jaws, and the guy eases the choke out on us. I watched him pull it out, but he didn't think I seen him. The pickup coughs and dies.
"Damn, there's something wrong with the truck. I got to pull over and see what's wrong with her." He pulls to the side, and he says, "I don't know what it could be."
"Thanks," I said, "we're going to try to get a ride on out of here." We walk on down the road a bit, and I said to this kid, "I saw him choke the engine down on purpose, you dummy. No shit, dummy. He's going to go call the police. We got to get out of here."
I watched. They turned the headlights off, but I seen the shadow of the truck go across the median. Shit, he's got a good nine miles before he can get to another exit that way, so we got a little time. About thirty minutes later, here come the same guys again. "We got the truck running. You still need a ride?"
"Yeah, sure." I'm getting in the damn truck, and I look in the back. There's plastic bags with a phone cord hanging out of it. I thought, "These fuckers just went back and ransacked the car. Good deal. They done got their fingerprints all over it. Hell, I'm in the clear now, I'm good to go."
They get us down to a Waffle House, and we go in and order us some coffee and everything. I said, "I got to look at my head." I got in the men's room and pulled that hat off, pulled my hair back, and 1was split all the way to the back of my head. I said, "God damn!" 1 could play around with my skull in there. Shit. "I got to get to the hospital, man. This motherfucker is worse than I thought it was."
"How we going to get out of here?" the kid says to me.
"Call your mom."
"Oh, man."
"Call your mom, man. I can't call my mom, you know. Call your mom, she'll come and get you, she'll come and get us. Tell her we had an accident in my dad's car."
I realized I had left my house key in the Ferrari. "Shit, if they trace that key, I'm in trouble." So when his mother got there, I said, "I left my house key in the car, and I got to get it. I called triple A. They might have come got the car already, but let's see." We rode down there to the next exit, and we didn't see the Ferrari.
We get back to town, and I had them drop me off to Baptist Hospital. 1 played the amnesia trick on them. "I don't know. I split my head open, and this guy dropped me off down here in the parking lot."
"Who are you?"
"Right now, I can't remember. But I'll remember later, 1promise." Amnesia patients are admitted automatically. So they took me in there and sewed my head up. I'd take the stitches out later myself. 1 just wanted them to sew my head up. I said, "Don't cut none of the hair. Just sew around it."
"We got to shave a little bit of it. How 'bout just little strips of hair."
"Okay. I feel like my hair is real important, maybe I'm a musician or something." I was giving them all kinds of lines of shit.
They put me in a ward on the second story. I got my clothes out, put them on, went out the window, and hauled ass. Got to work, and everything. Shit, I hadn't had no sleep in so damn long it was pitiful. "Man, you look like shit," the guy on the front gate says.
"Yeah, it was a wild weekend. I was partying. Hadn't had no sleep."
"You think you'll last through the shift?"
"Oh, yeah, shit yeah, sure."
"There was a Ferrari stolen on your shift before you went on your days off."
"You're shitting me. I didn't know we had one of them. Oh, yeah, that red number. That red Ferrari? They stole that?"
"Yeah, that one."
"God damn. Stolen?"
"Sometime on your shift. Better fill out a report on it."
"What do I say in the report? I didn't even know it was gone. I can write, 'Ferrari stolen on my shift.' " I said, "It had to be when I called that damn meeting the captain wanted, because the guy I left on the gate did say he saw something go by real fast. Since he didn't open the gate, I figured he had just fell asleep and was dreaming." That's what I did.
About three days later, they brung the car in. I eased back there and got my key out of the ashtray. Luckily, they didn't find that key. The car had been sitting at the impound station all fucked up.
I still kept my hat on. The guy said, "Damn, looks like somebody's head went through the windshield, and they had to cut him out."
"Then they caught him then," I said.
"Naw, they got away."
"How'd they cut him out, and they come to get away?" I was playing it good.
"Oh, he must have cut hisself out."
"That's a hell of a motherfucker then, boys."
"You ain't, shitting, to go through the windshield, and then cut yourself out." The hole was right in the middle of the windshield. I took the mirror out and everything when I went through.
About three weeks later, I hear they got the guys who stole the car. I call the kid, and I say, "Hey, Joey, man, they caught some kid and blamed him for stealing that car."
"Yeah, I know."
"A thirteen-year-old kid."
"Yeah, I know."
"How you know this before me?"
"That's me."
"What? You're seventeen. You told me."
"No, really I'm thirteen."
"You little son of a bitch. Thirteen? You better keep your fucking mouth shut. You don't know me, motherfucker." His mother told on him, because she come down there to pick us up.
I was on another security guard post on overtime by this point, a big car dealership in town. While I was guarding the place, I broke into the owner's office and stole his personal checkbook, then stole his company car. I'd cashed almost twenty thousand dollars worth of his checks before I got caught that day. All day long, that's all I did was go from one bank to another, cashing checks before they pressed it into the computer. He only had about two thousand dollars in his bank account. I was making money drops, too, so I wouldn't have a lot of cash on me if I did get busted. I was raking in some bucks. When I cashed that last check, I didn't have no money on me.
They busted me and took me down to the police station. They got me for grand auto theft and uttering a forgery. Then another detective comes in there, and he says, "You know Joseph Xavier O'Conner?"
"Joseph Xavier O'Conner?" I says. "No, I don't. Uh-uh."
"He knows you. And his mother does, too."
"They do? Did I put a tattoo on him?"
"No, you stole that car with him."
"What car?"
"That red Ferrari."
"I stole a damn Mercury Sable, man. I didn't steal no Ferrari. I don't want to hear no shit like that. That damn thing didn't go nearly as fast as a Ferrari, and didn't look nothing like a damn Ferrari, so 1 know you got something fucked up along the line. You got your cases wrong or something."
"Naw, buddy. You are the one."
"What do you mean?"
"Naw, we got you. We took a blood sample off the windshield."
"I'm A-positive. How many thousands of A-positive motherfuckers are there in this city? Give me a break, man. I'll take you to trial, and I'll beat you."
"Not with his mother's testimony, you won't. And not with his either."
"Oh, okay." Just screwed me over. I never done nothing with nobody else since that time. I got sent to prison, as you might expect.