Laissez Faire

In first grade, my parents gave me a key to the house and basically I took care of myself after school for the rest of my childhood. My playground was the golf course across the street. Initially, it was a place to sled in the winter. I have many fond memories sledding for hours, doing jumps off sand dunes. The forests and trails and streams which look small today to me, were enormous expanses of wilderness. My friends and I would look for errant golf balls hit into the woods and sell them for 25 cents apiece to golfers. It was idylliic... but something happened around middle school. Paul, the Armenian, I had known since kindergarten started to sway me to the dark side.. as boys you always try to see how much you can get away with. Test people’s limits. That was the beginning of a 3 year period which led to my foray into black market fireworks dealing, petty theft and arson. 3 years later, i would no longer speak to my delinquent friends. This period of my life and these stories were held between us. 

It all started one summer afternoon, Paul had a magnifying glass and we were hanging out in the forest. like 2 curious boys we were lighting fires and putting them out. at one point the fires got bigger and bigger. then one got out of control and we couldn't contain it anymore. we threw things to try to put it out. and ran out from the billowing flames...  I remember some astonished golfers yelling "Fire!" and started chasing us. luckily we set the fire by the train station next to the golfcourse so when we escaped we blended into the crowd of onlookers hiding by feigning similar shocked expressions. You would think arson would scare us from illicit behavior but it didn't stop. 

Paul stole something from a drugstore in front of me and egged me on to do it too. My first theft was a calculator of all things.... I think I slipped it under my shirt and walked out the door. Paul couldn’t believe I did it. It was followed by stealing school lunches. I went to the same junior high that Louis ck went to. The school where he stole science lab scales to sell for his pot habit. The trick to stealing lunch was to get a tray of food. And slowly inch backwards until you were no longer in line but heading back to your lunch table.I refined my ‘craft’ in the cafeteria... which I would later use at stores in Boston. If I saw my 12 year old self today, I would give him a smack in the head and tell him to cut it out...we frequented Harvard square a lot. in the intersection there's a newsstand called out of town news. being boys, we went to the adult magazine section...with bag in hand. we stood there among dirty old men. but instead of free lunch we just put magazines into our bags...stacks and stacks of them we pilfered and then hid in the golf course. being entrepreneurs, we decided to sell them. all of our activities happened in the bathroom in middle school. 

with the proceeds of our illicit sales of our magazine sales booming. we heard a rumor from older kids there were fireworks being sold in haymarket.. the Italian section of boston where 2 Italian dealers would sit on a bench next to a basketball court with low rims.  with such vague directions, we went into town with the bills in our pockets. this was the first time i skipped school. we moved into our next phase of enterprise, fireworks. completely illegal in Massachusetts.indeed we saw a miniature basketball court and a couple old Italians sitting on a bench. we made an order. we'd like bottle rockets, roman candles, and jumping jacks and some m80's. they were sold in gross or bricks. an obscene amount of fireworks. we would make this trip many times. each time keeping some fireworks for ourselves and lighting them for fun, selling the rest for a profit... i saved up enough money to buy a stereo system with a record player. my parents never knew how i came to afford it. 

so with magazines and fireworks in line, we expanded our enterprise into music.there was a record store which sold cassette tapes.these are a little different from magazines as they are labeled electronically and can be detected in metal detectors.my friend Joe and i were thinking about how to pull this off. we grabbed a few.. and had them in our pockets and were trying to devise ways to strip off the tags by the detectors when we were caught.they took polaroid pictures of us. and we were banned from the store. we weren't to be prosecuted... but they did call our parents and we had to be picked up. it was embarrassing. for my transgrssions, i had to perform 3 months of community service.i shelved books at a library.everyone thought it was a side job, i was an honest boy making some extra cash... but it was to avoid a criminal record at 13 years old. 

at this point my parents forbade me to hang out with my 2 friends. the last i saw of Joe was when we were in a drug store together. he was hauled away for shoplifting. that was it. i started focusing on school in 10th grade as school records start counting for college admissions.