The Best Laid Schemes

"I don't want to play around no more.

I see that black cross painted on your door."

It was a Sunday afternoon, and we all sat at the side of the warehouse in a semi-circle, as if around a campfire. A.S. explained the initiation rite, and we listened intently and with respect. (A.S., which stood for ‘Always Stoned,’ was a tough, older Puerto Rican hard-rock dude from the projects who happened into our little scene.) He had us each of the four of us roll a blunt, filled not with the shitty tre-bag stuff I was used to from Murder Avenue, but with the step-up nickel-bag green that we never copped as every dollar counted. After we each rolled our own personal stuffed blunt, A.S. had us each light it up, take a toke and pass to the left. Essentially this meant that the only oxygen we got was the brief moment between puffs. We continued to do this until the blunts were extinguished, and we were so incredibly zooted that standing was not even remotely an option.

We sat there and exchanged the usual stories — graffiti tales, which girls put out, fights — laughing our heads off, and mean-mugging anyone who walked by our little motley crew. A.S., while obviously high, was in much better shape than the rest of us, and presented a plan to make some quick-dough. He worked nearby as a custodian of sorts in the office of a theater, and said there was a safe there that was filled with cash. The plan was simple: we roll over a hand-truck, he loads the safe on to it, and we wheel it to the alley behind E-Rock’s house, which was two blocks away. A.S. said he knew how to get it open easy.

Now you’d think being as stoned as we were we'd make a plan to do this on a later day, but no, instead we promptly wobbled over and got to it. I recall feeling like there was a small amount of thick air between my sneakers and the sidewalk which helped me glide down the street. Getting the safe to the alley was easier than we’d imagined, with us not even catching a glance from anyone walking by. Once we got back there, things took a turn for the worse.

After much work, sweat, and blood — A.S. ripped his hand wide-open trying to pry at the safe with a crowbar — we got it open. Much to our surprise, there was no cash but hundreds of canceled check and perhaps $200 worth of subway tokens. We shurgged, laughed a bit, and divvied up our score.

•

Of those of us there that day, all but myself went on to get involved in varying degrees of crime. (Though I did my fair share of petty wrongs.) Last I heard, A.S. was robbing people via an elaborate set-up scheme using the personals pages of the Village Voice, leaving his victims beaten and tied-up in their own apartments. Some real next-level shit. E-Rock ended up a gun runner and a junkie, eventually catching a pretty serious bid. Once he got out of jail, he seemed to turn himself around, cleaning up and getting a civilian job. Eventually his demons caught up with him, and he turned back to drugs, dying homeless and alone. I still think about him often. Johnny Correct — who I was closest with as he felt like the little brother I never had — also ended up doing a bid after cutting someone's face up badly with a tin can. We lost touch once he went away, but ran into each other a lifetime later and he's doing alright, repairing vintage radios and growing vegetables somewhere in the midwest.

Words by Lee Greenfeld © 2020
Photograph by Carl Purcell, 1955

Names, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the
author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.