After Roman's capture and arrest, he finds himself behind bars waiting on the powers that be to decide his fate... will he be tried as an adult and sent to prison? Or will Mora & John find a way to throw Roman a life-line? Will Robb come to his son's rescue and turn his life around?
After Roman's capture and arrest, he finds himself behind bars waiting on the powers that be to decide his fate... will he be tried as an adult and sent to prison? Or will Mora & John find a way to throw Roman a life-line? Will Robb come to his son's rescue and turn his life around?
Treading Water
“God is dead.” Rev. Rob spoke the words with a conviction of a man describing a matter of fact, like night is dark or ice is cold. This coming from a man of God, himself a Methodist minister, former minister, Roman reminded himself as he continued to watch his father turning the soil in their backyard garden with his well-worn spade. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows over the upturned earth on a hot spring day, as Roman leaned upon the hoe in his hands and regarded his father carefully, he knew they were treading in deep waters where his father would speak his mind not caring how his words might be perceived. Normally, Rev. Rob chose his words very carefully when he spoke and Roman often felt he was getting the pasteurized version of his father’s thoughts, not the uncensored ones that ricoched in his father’s sharp intellect.
“Why don’t we go to church anymore… like everyone else does?” Roman inserted this question while Rev. Rob was preoccupied with wiping the sweat off his brow with his handkerchief.
“Church is for people who need to go to church,” Rev Rob said quietly, and returned to his work with the spade, the large plod of dirt the color of coal with a fat night-crawler cleanly cleaved into two wriggling furiously about. Roman thought silently about how worms regenerated themselves and most likely didn’t give a shit one way or another about God or church… one minute they’re just crawling around their little dirt clod neighborhood and the next WHACK… sliced in two. There was a life lesson in that Roman felt positive, then took his hoe and smashed the two wriggling worms back into the black earth.
Roman was jolted awake from sleep, the jailhouse sheets damp with his sweat, one lone light bulb cast a shadow into his cell as he scanned the six by eight foot box he was being held in until his court appearance and subsequent delivery to the Indiana Boys School in Plainfield where he imagined he’d reside until his eighteenth birthday where the authorities would probably kick his dumbass over to the Indiana State Penitentiary where he’d most likely serve out his sentence.
Roman swung his feet to the floor and recounted the days earlier events when Rob had come to see his son behind bars, caged like a dangerous animal.
Roman… why son, why… did you do this?” Rob asked (with such emotion in his voice)
“Didn’t I teach you the difference between right and wrong…?
I tried my best to raise you as good as I knew how to son…
JUST TELL ME… WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
I don’t know who you’ve become…
Seriously, tell me you know between right and wrong… tell me.
Roman had sat there, unable to make eye contact with his father.
“Yes,” Roman softly replied.
“Decisions have consequences. Roman…” Rob said.
Rob held the iron bars in his hands as if he were going to pull them apart and set Roman free.
“This…. Son… is the consequence for which you’ll pay. I’m sorry, but I hope you learn something while you’re…you’re in there.
Rob turned away and walked back down the hall away from Roman… the hardest thing he had ever done. He did his best to keep from breaking down in sobs, especially in front of Roman… tough love and all that. Goddamn no one had ever said how hard tough love was…. But Rob felt down to the morrow of his bones that this was the best thing for his son. Roman had to learn… and if it was going to be the hard way… then that was the way it was going to be.
When the jailers closed the steel door behind Rob, Roman curled up on the bunk in the fetal position and began to cry. He knew Rob was right… though it didn’t lessen the pain or the sting he felt being abandoned… alone.
Mora couldn’t she told Rob. I can’t. I just can’t do it… I’m sorry but he needs me and… he’s all alone… and if there’s a shred of strength left in my body to help him… well, that’s what I’m going to do. And she hung up the phone as Robe was still talking.
She turned to John and said… I’m sorry, but he’s the one who wanted to leave… now what… I’m supposed to just allow my son to get cobbled up by the system and not lift a finger to save him…?
Even if its from himself. I can’t leave him in there. I just can’t.
John nodded his head in affirmation and held Mora in his arms shooeing her to calm down. He knew the consequences… she’d go on a bender trying to numb the pain… and she’d quietly slip away from him and down into a bottle of gin with a never-ending stream of pills following. No… he had to be her rock. He had to steady her in these approaching storms and somehow find a way to save Roman from himself.
Just let it out… you’ll feel better… it gets easier the more you share… these words bounced off Roman’s ears over and over, every day for over a week, Dr. Stone, the group counselor, repeated yet one more time. He was one of three phycologist that worked-lived at the Y.E.S. House, a Youth Emergency Sanctuary, a drug and alcohol rehab center for young offenders, like Roman.
After six weeks of back and forth wrangling between the DA’s office and Mora and Roman’s attorney they had finally hammered out a deal. One year probation after successfully completing a drug and alcohol rehab program. One that was locked down and secured of course. The quickest anyone had completed the program was in four months. Roman was aiming for three.
There were seven other young men like himself, well not exactly… as far as Roman could tell he was the only one there who wasn’t a bonafide junkie or alcoholic. He just pretended to be to get out of jail and possibly being tried as an adult and going to the state pen with all the big boys to play with.
It was a co=ed facility and eight female beds but only six were currently in use.
Everybody was hooked on pills, coke or heroin… couldn’t stop drinking and crashing their folks car, etc. Roman liked to get fucked up as much as anyone else, or so he thought. He was a lightweight compared to these kids. But he also realized that it was Mora and John’s hard work in pulling strings to get him into this place so if that’s what it took… then by all means hell yeah he had a drug and alcohol problem, yessir.
Roman, Roman… I asked you a question. Dr. Stone repeated again.
Roman focused back in the group circle… and looked at Stone… he was sitting with ten other kids ages ranging from fifteen to eighteen, though there was this one girl Roman had a crush on that he knew was nineteen.
Twice a day, they sat in this circle… this safe-place… to open up and bare their darkest secrets to the group counselors, which today was Dr. Stone, he was in his mid-fifties Roman thought, salt and pepper greying hair with a beard to match, outdoorsy type, lumberjack wannabe maybe, with tortoise shell glasses and flannel shirts, old worn bluejeans and desert boots.
Lots of the kids did in fact do just that. Open up and spill their guts outs in front of the rest of the rest of the group, the stole booze and pills from their parents, passed out in school, expelled… molested by a relative and tuned to drugs to numb the pain… got high had unprotected sex and got pregnant… dropped out of school at sixteen with a kid of their own, and on and on they kept vomiting up their sad little stories… yeah, I’m a drunk, yeah, I shoot up… so what… you don’t know what kind of pain I have to deal with, was the usual response one got… and then it was Roman’s turn.
He did his best to compete with the other addicts but Roman’s stories lacked a certain ring of authenticity. For one… he truly didn’t know what it felt like to be in the grips of something so powerful and destructive as an addiction. That no matter how much you said you’d never do it again… when the time came and the opportunity presented itself. Just this once. Then I’m done for good. They’d slide back down that black hole.
Every counselor there tried to crack open the protective shell Roman had constructed around him. But Dr. Stone… he treated Roman like his personal Kilimanjaro or something… determined to summit the peak and get to the root of all Romans problems.
Ha, Roman thought… not gonna happen. These walls have been built to withstand much tougher scrutiny than yours Doc. So around and around they went, Stone trying to find a crack in Romans defenses and roman… trying to baffle the doc with bullshit.
“You can’t con a con…” Stone said.
“what…?”
A fisherman always spots another fisherman… Stone said.
Whatever, roman replied.
Sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with what’s brought you here, Stone said. You can’t tread water forever… either learn to swim… or you’re going to drown.
Roman knew exactly what he was talking about but it didn’t matter. He knew it would be a cold day in hell before he’d ever open up and “share” with the group his deepest and darkest secrets. But he knew that Doc was right… he wasn’t going to be able to sidestep through the entire program. Sooner or later the time would come and he ‘d either have to crack like an egg or split.
Several weeks later…
Roman was manning the front desk, the intake desk for new patients during the night when a young girl of sixteen was brought in after an overdose, maybe a suicide attempt, no one knew for sure. It was pouring down rain, a toad-strangler, grandpa would have said… and she looked like a drowned rat. Her dirty blonde hair matted to her pale face and deep brown eyes that flitted everywhere but romans. Her name was Angie… and Roman felt immediately protective of her like he would a lost puppy or stray kitten. She was brought in as a voluntary admittance by her mother and a doctor and a nurse… Roman called the rehab staff on call and stood there staring at this poor creature ready to collapse unto the floor like a puddle.
In the days, weeks and months that followed Roman and Angie were inseparable. They took long walks in the orchards on the property and talked about everything under the sun… she was a real honest to god junkie… a heroin addict… maybe some speed and coke to smooth out the rough edges in a speedball, a little grass, though not a drinker, she confided in him. Alcohol makes me crazy she said.
Her family owned a string of fast food joints across Illinois and Indiana, and were pretty well off she figured, better than most but not like the Rockefellers or anything. She seemed to know something about just about everything and was extremely intelligent, though roman figured not smart enough to stay out of a place like this.
Oh I come here about once a year she said…. It’s great to get away from my parents and school, so boring… this is my third time. I can leave whenever I want so…
Roman explained his situation. He held nothing back, told her every little gritty detail, finally he had someone to share his secrets with since Georgie was gone. Wow, you’re a real gunslinging outlaw eh? Some kind of gangsta…
Hardly, roman replied but smiled just the same.
One morning at breakfast Angie was gone. Roman found out that her parents had come for her in the middle of the night and without a word whisked her off back home to Indianapolis and get her ready to start boarding school.
Roman was absolutely crushed. His heart was broken. He felt that deep wrenching pain of a first love heartache. For days he moped around unable to stop thinking about her, and then one of the patients he had gotten to know was released and said he’d find out where she was and let him know.
Roman started to plan his escape.
Roman was laying on his bunk to be more exact and staring at the ceiling. He didn’t remember the exact moment when he decided he was going to be this bad ass criminal, it didn’t happen overnight, or like in the Godfather… he had no family ties in a criminal enterprise, no friends that were into the crime scene, no push from an older, more corrupt peer. No, nothing like that. Around the time he was attacked by Tim’s crazy father Roman became drawn to gangsters of old… he read books, watched old movies and devoured everything he could get his hands on, the likes of Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky… He had posters on his bedroom wall of Capone, Bonnie & Clyde, and John Derringer.
On a rainy Saturday Roman begged his mother, Mora, to take his to see the John Derringer Museum in Crown Point, Indiana. Who does that?
The common denominator between all of Roman’s criminal mentors seemed to be… no one fucked with them, no one would ever call them faggots or a pussy. They were the very definition of strength… power… fearless.
He wanted what they had, not what his father had.
Roman wanted to become the polar opposite of what his father, Rev. Rob, or Rob as he was being called these days, had become… at least that was what he told himself at three in the morning when he was out stealing cars… that was the only joy in his life anymore… cars. He fucking loved everything about them… especially how he felt when he got behind the wheel of one. It didn’t really matter which one… Roman had become a one man criminal enterprise.
There are real monsters walking among us, I mean creatures of the most inhuman and despicable variety mankind has ever produced, carrying out the most horrific acts a young mind could not possibly be equipped to deal with. The worst part is that they’re disguised to fit right in with the most upstanding and self-righteous adults you’d ever meet – that is truly what disturbs roman the most.
How many kids thought their only way out was suicide? How many young men turned into the one thing they all despised the most? The only way I get to sleep at night is knowing that there is a special place in hell for those animals, those people like mr. z… who preyed on the weak, the helpless, otherwise I’d lose my mind roman whispered… Maybe I already have.