American Desperado by Jon Roberts, Evan Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

brother-in-law.
    He had a silver Corvette that he loved. Before he left for Iceland, he would jack up the car in the garage so the tires would float a half inch above the floor. He explained to me, “This way my tires won’t go square.”
    The first night he left for Iceland, I cranked his car off the jacks and drove into New Brunswick. This was a little shithole town where kids would pass the time by drag racing on the streets. Even though I didn’t have a license, I was a good driver. But I wasn’t experienced with the ice that Maine had in the dead of winter, and the Corvette was a lot more powerful than my Outcast Impala. My first night out, I raced some kids in another car and spun that Corvette into a snowbank.
    My sister flipped. But we found a guy who filled in the mangled fiberglass body on the Corvette with Bondo putty and repainted it. By the time my brother-in-law returned, I had the car back in the garage on jacks looking cherry. The night he came home he went straight to the garage, inspected his car, and pointed to the tires like he was teaching me a lesson. “See. My tires are perfect.”
    The guy could supposedly catch a Russian submarine, but not me wrecking his car. What a moron.
    T HE ONLY thing I had connecting me to the world of normal people was basketball. That’s what kept me in school. I fantasized that I would be a professional ballplayer. They put me on the varsity team in Maine, even though I was in ninth grade.
    There was maybe one black kid in the school. His name was Ray Archer, and we got friendly because he was on the basketball team. Ray’s dad was an officer in the military, and Ray had a lot of confidence in himself, even though he was a minority.
    One day Ray got into trouble after school. There was a little café in town, with a couple of pool tables and a soda fountain, where kids hung out. There were townie kids from the high school and college kids from the nearby college, Bowdoin.
    Bowdoin was a weak school in most sports except lacrosse, and the lacrosse players were very arrogant. They would come into our hangout and try to steal the high school girls. One day the Bowdoin kids got into a fight with Ray. They called him a “nigger” and beat him up.
    I wasn’t there for the fight, but when I saw Ray with hisbusted-up face the next day, I was mad. I don’t care if somebody calls somebody else a “nigger” or a “wop.” What made me angry was how the college kids thought they were better than us townie kids. They were like the fraternity kids in New Jersey looking down their noses at everybody. I decided to show them who’s going to look down on who.
    Ray wanted nothing to do with another fight, so I got another kid from school to help out. Melvin Abruzzi * was an Italian kid originally from Boston, and he was a freak of nature. He was a monster who must’ve weighed three hundred pounds. Once you talked to him, you realized he was a true idiotic moron. He was borderline retarded, but his parents had faked him into the classes for normal kids. Stupid as he was, he was a great guy because he would fight anybody.
    I brought him with me to the hangout in town and waited for the lacrosse fucks to come in. And they did come in, and Melvin and I had a terrible fight. We picked the one day to fight them that they were carrying their lacrosse sticks from practice. They beat us bloody with those sticks. They chased us out of there. When we hit the sidewalk, I said to Melvin, “This is bullshit, man. I’m doing something else.”
    The lacrosse kids lived in a fraternity house by the Bowdoin campus. I waited until my brother-in-law went to Iceland and took his Corvette off the jacks. I filled a glass apple-cider jug with gasoline and drove to the fraternity house. I waited until the lights went off and gave everybody time to get into bed and start dreaming.
    Then I carried my cider-jug Molotov cocktail up the lawn to the house. There was a nice big window in front. I lit the rag