Bored on the Wild Side

By Jason Laureno

Forty five years of stumbling, bumbling, and striving to make the American dream a reality. Beginning in the mid-1970s and hitting the brakes days before the 2020 elections, this compelling memoir shows us where we’ve been and where we might be headed via one man’s memories and experiences.
While it may read like a novel, every word is true: good, bad, and ugly.
Talk is cheap and some actions have expensive consequences. What’s worse? Regretting some of the things you’ve done, or wondering what might have been? Do you have the guts to chase your crazy dreams and live up to your highest ideals, or are your convictions as shallow as the ink on your T-shirt?
Filled with interesting characters, uncommon adventures, and gallows humor throughout, this is the tale of an individual who played it to the hilt until he was bored. Bored on the wild side.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Laureno
• Release date: Feb 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005902735

Book preview

Bored on the Wild Side:

Memories, Observations, and Misadventures

By

Jason Laureno

Bored on the Wild Side:

Memories, Observations, and Misadventures

Copyright © 2020 by Jason Laureno

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, address: [e-mail]

FIRST EDITION

While this is a work of non-fiction I have changed most of the names. Additionally, I

completed this without the benefit of an editor, so any errors are mine and mine alone.

Dedicated to my niece, Shelby.

I hope you’re able to enjoy as many good times as I have, with only the slightest amounts of sorrow and pain required to do so.

And to my beloved Jamey, for always encouraging me in this project, even when cursing the peace and quiet it required.

Contents

Bored on the Wild Side:

Photos

About the Author

Bored on the Wild Side:

Fuck! There. I’ve set the tone- and undoubtedly made my poor mother cringe for the umpteenth time. Fortunately, she’s always proven to be a good sport.

For what it’s worth, if you haven’t asked already, there’s no particular reason for you to be reading this. Come to think of it, beyond my own delusions of self-importance, there’s absolutely no reason for me to be writing it. I’m not (in)famous; not terribly likable or fond of most people; I’m overly opinionated, cruelly sarcastic and surly; spend as much time as possible in one altered state or another; and use fuckin like a comma in polite conversation. Those are my bright spots. However…in a time and place where an entitled frat boy douchebag can compile a collection of date rape stories and make the New York Times Bestseller List, I thought, how could anything I say be THAT unnecessary or unimportant (see the aforementioned admission of self-importance)?

The simple truth is that I’ve been living a life just like you and everyone else. And I don’t care who you are or think you are, everybody’s just people. I’ve done some things, I’ve met some people, and I’ve taken a lot of mental notes as life and time have passed- cursed as I am with a long memory. Currently, I’m at yet another crossroads in my life, but I’ve managed to buy myself a little time to write, reflect, and remember. Maybe it will even make some sense by the end. No promises. It’s just one life, it’s just one story, but it’s mine and mine alone-for better or worse.

Ask most people what they know about Staten Island (NY), and if you get any answer at all, chances are it will be about the garbage dump that’s visible from space. Or WuTang. Maaaaybe the ferry. And I’d be hard pressed to tell you much more about it. All the same, that’s where I was born to Susan and Thomas Laureno on December 17th, 1974.

Whether due to environment, circumstance, or some combination, my dad ended up a brawler. Doubtlessly due to the fact that my paternal grandfather was a remarkably unredeemable and utterly remorseless fuckup, my father’s parents had divorced when he was a child. When his mother eventually remarried a towering, brooding, ex-boxer from Ohio, my dad claimed to have basically served as his punching bag until he was finally driven out of the house in his early teens. He bounced around after that; never leaving Staten Island, but working and continuing to go to school as he effectively raised himself. After that came the Army (‘67 - ‘69), where he’d been made a Drill Sergeant, charged with training his peers to fight and die in Vietnam when he was just nineteen years old.

He might have made a decent career out of the military, but considering that he hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place he did his compulsory two years and returned to Staten Island. From there he worked a couple uninspiring jobs (boxing record players in a factory and mixing chemicals at American Cyanamid) until he eventually met and married the woman that would become my mother.

If my mom ever did anything wild or crazy, anything that made her stand out, or if there was anything she had been particularly passionate about prior to meeting my father, getting married, and having children, her mouth has remained shut-in keeping with centuries of Irish stubbornness. At one point she had worked as a secretary on Wall St. and driven a Plymouth Valiant, which she had loved. I’m certain there’s more to her story, but what can I tell ya? I wasn’t there. What I can tell you is that she’s the glue and often lone voice of reason and restraint in a family of semi-functioning parapsychotics.

At the time I was born, my father was a guard at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility; head of the riot team. Sing Sing, Green Haven, Attica, Riker’s…he essentially spent the 1970’s stomping through the worst shitholes and situations New York could muster.

Oddly enough, at this point my dad’s increasingly Chuck Norris-like resume was being compiled largely by accident.

In the Army, when asked, he’d said he wanted to drive a truck- so naturally they made him infantry, but eventually sent him to Drill School rather than Vietnam; and when he took the New York Civil Service exam, he was hoping to get hired on with sanitation. But as the drug war heated up and New York soaked up a sea of heroin, the state wasn’t looking for garbage men as fervently as they were prison guards. And as stagflation tightened its grip on the ‘70s, a stable job had seemed a hell of a lot more valuable to a young man looking to start a family than whatever tasks that job might entail. His military experience (and bonus points for such on the exam) made him a shoo- in, and so into the mire he walked, voluntarily, for ten years.

The laughs started the moment I left the womb.

Just to get it out of the way, I’m a typical white American mutt. The family name is Italian, and my father’s maternal grandparents were legit, off the boat, non-English speaking immigrants, but I believe I’m more Irish than anything- with a smattering of English and German.

My mother’s delivery wasn’t easy. Her original due date was Dec. 19th, but her doctor was going on vacation beginning the 18th. Her options were to either induce labor early or risk having an unfamiliar on-call doctor in the delivery room if she went into labor before her physician returned. Additionally, option two came with the risk of a second doctor’s bill. My mom liked her doctor and liked her money even more, so she opted to have her labor induced. Ten hours into the ordeal, she was anesthetized to the point that she was scarcely bothered by the forceps that were deployed to eventually wrench me out by the noggin, not unlike a piece of raw chicken being fished out of a narrow drainpipe. The anesthetic had resulted in oxygen deprivation, and the forceps had caused additional bruising to my head and face. The overall result was that I was born such a deep and rich blue/black that my father took one glimpse at his precious newborn son, screamed something along the lines of That’s not MY fuckin baby! and flew into a rage that likely cowed the entire hospital. All while my poor, selfless mom, exhausted from childbirth and fading in and out of consciousness, fought to calm, console, and explain the circumstances from her hospital bed. Knowing them as I do, I often imagine my parents in those years as something akin to a young Archie and Edith Bunker. Now they’re just age appropriate for the roles.

Home from the hospital, I seemed to do well enough- aside from a tendency to run high fevers. At eighteen months one of those fevers peaked with a seizure, which then led to a spinal tap to check for meningitis. I proved clear of that particular malady, but in an effort to keep the fevers under control, my pediatrician prescribed a daily dose of phenobarbital- which my mom dutifully administered for the next year-and-a-half. She switched pediatricians at that point, and my new doctor immediately halted the pheno. So far as I’m aware I wasn’t damaged by it in any way, but what do I know. Doctors played it a lot more fast and loose back then, but then some of them still made house calls, too. Everything’s a trade-off.

My mom had an older sister with kids who lived out west, but her life was a train wreck, and she was never around, so I was always regarded as the eldest grandchild in New York: spoiled, encouraged, and doted on accordingly. Even Mister Rogers assured me I was the shit.

As 1977 wore on and the world received its introduction to the world of Star Wars, the universe also saw fit to introduce me to my new baby brother, Christopher.

As I grew and my personality began to take shape, a few things were becoming apparent: I was at least reasonably intelligent; I was as mischievous as I could get away with being; I adored music and singing as well as animals-being utterly obsessed with all things reptiles and dinosaurs; and I was a natural born smartass with a dark and precocious sense of humor. And fortunately, having always been something of a forward thinker, I already had my place in the world staked out, knowing full well I was going to be a veterinarian. Or a musician. Or Batman. Possibly all three.

By three I was attending preschool at Alphabet Land, where I graduated with bite marks after a classmate who neither understood nor embraced the concept of sharing latched onto my arm like a pit bull when I took my rightful turn at the glitter (my first crazy girl). By four, I had begun attending kindergarten at nearby PS-23, and it wasn’t long after that that I found myself in jail.

Of the things I remember most vividly from my earliest school days: riding the school bus home and being carried off by my mom when I inevitably fell asleep, planting bean sprouts in Dixie cups and watching them grow on the windowsill…no memory sings louder than that of my very first field trip- to jail.

In hindsight it might not have been either productive or necessary to parade New York’s youngest citizens through its dungeons, but the nation was embracing its new Scared Straight fetish, so there we were- being led into and out of holding cells, paddy wagons, and finally through a small cell block, where one downtrodden sad sack after another would warn us to be good and stay in school so we didn’t end up like them.

To be fair, it wasn’t frightening or traumatizing in the slightest. If anything, I’d been fascinated by the dangerous work and experiences of my dad. So far as I was concerned, there was practically a superhero living in the house-although that image often conflicted with the daily reality of having to hug and kiss him before work and assure him I was up to being the man of the house, just in case he never got to come home again.

Fortunately, however, he did always make it home, and as the calendar swayed from the ‘70s to the ‘80s, I received news that a big change was coming for us. We were moving! To the land of Mickey Mouse!!!

Port Charlotte, Florida. I’d thought my mom had said Poor Charlotte and I immediately burst into hysterics, convinced we were finally being condemned to that poor house she was always going on about.

Sadly, as it turned out, that wasn’t too far off from the truth.

My paternal grandfather, to be blunt, was a lifelong con man and a pathological liar. Which is not to say that he was without legitimate talents, quite the contrary. The man had had options. It’s just that his good deeds were never so grand or plentiful as to cast a very dark shadow over his many ills and shortcomings.

In truth, my grandpa had been a talented mechanic- known at one time for being the only man on Staten Island able to fix the problematic automatic transmission on the Ford Edsel. He was also a quasi-successful dirt track driver and a skilled musician. Not to mention a charming, self-confident son-of-a-bitch. But, on the other side of the equation, he would do things like create fraudulent degrees to obtain jobs he wasn’t technically qualified for- like oceanfront architect. But hey, no harm bluffing through that, right?

Perhaps the most frightening thing is that I can’t say I believe he would have necessarily failed in such endeavors- at least practically speaking. Because the man was most definitely not without skills or intelligence. It’s just that for one reason or another, perhaps it was simply a part of his makeup, he could never leave the schemes and bullshit alone and play anything straight. Sooner or later he’d get found out, or it would be discovered funds had been misappropriated- always something shady. And then he’d slink away to set up shop somewhere else. Lather, rinse, repeat.

My parents worked hard and saved harder; my mother had been anticipating the next Great Depression since she’d been a sperm cell. They’d purchased their modest home shortly after they’d been married, and by this point they owned it free and clear. Now, it sounded like they had a golden opportunity to trade up to a life of comparative leisure in a subtropical paradise.

I don’t know the circumstances that led to my grandfather’s exile to Florida, but that’s where he was when he lured my parents with tales of swaying palm trees and the crystal clear, bath warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico The pitch was that he’d been kicking ass and taking names in SW Florida’s development boom. Essentially, he had the connections and the sway to build my parents a veritable castle for a fraction of what it should cost, even by Florida standards. With the cost-of-living differential being what it is between New York and South Florida, they could sell their home in New York and enjoy an idyllic semi-retirement in the sunshine state. Their brand new house was to be paid off, leaving them with a comfortably fat bank account to spare. Just like the postcard. And just as illusory.

Despite his harsh childhood and the disappointment borne of his father’s innumerous casual lies, my dad has always believed in family- often to his detriment. And so it was that when he arrived in Port Charlotte he didn’t find his castle waiting, but rather an unremarkable block home with a dramatically sloping floor that was only seventy-five percent completed. To make matters worse, he soon learned that his father had essentially pissed his money away playing big shot contractor amongst the local rednecks. Always quick with an excuse and a lie, grandpa hadn’t even had the decency to move away when the smoke cleared. Not only were my folk’s retirement fantasies dashed, the house was so over budget that the money generated via the sale of their home in New York wasn’t even enough to cover it. By a lot. And the house still needed to be finished. Utopia, as many have learned, is just Florida’s stripper name.

There was no turning back at that point, so while my dad worked to make the house habitable, we spent a couple months living with a cousin that had settled in Port Charlotte some years earlier.

On my first day in Florida, I found a dead snake, learned what sand spurs were by stepping on them with tender bare feet, narrowly escaped our new neighbor’s free range German Shepherd, got sunburned, ate entirely too much candy, and threw up.

Once he’d finished the house, dad got a job operating heavy equipment for a local construction outfit. On evenings and weekends I’d accompany him to new condominium complexes, poking around for turtles, snakes, and frogs while he watered in newly planted shrubs and sod to earn a few extra bucks. Mom stayed home to tend to me and my brother. Chris was only two, so he wasn’t yet doing much outside of shitting in his pants and blowing spit bubbles, but I was enrolled in Neil Armstrong Elementary School (NAES) to finish kindergarten. Times were tough for my folks, but they were young, strong, and determined to pull themselves up.

My kindergarten teacher, an aged spinster named Miss Newland, turned out to be a bit of a sadist, but I only mention that in passing. Truth of the matter is that she wasn’t all that far outside of the disciplinary boundaries of the time- particularly in the south. She did make my friend John drink a substantial amount of liquid soap as punishment for lying once- which even then I knew to be fucked up- but that was about the worst I saw personally. But what can I say, a little embarrassment and the occasional swat on the ass never killed anybody. Soap induced diarrhea might leave a deeper mark on one’s psyche, but I digress.

Despite my parent’s financial hardships, I had a blast being a kid in Florida. Port Charlotte was still very much a retirement community then, but it was getting younger all the time, and there were always half a dozen or more kids in the neighborhood with whom to run amok. At least until some of the more churchy kids told their parents how many bad words I knew. The talent pool narrowed slightly after that. But as for the rest of us wee sinners, we weren’t so much raised as released back then. Outside of school we spent virtually every daylight hour chasing each other through razor sharp palmetto thickets and unattended construction sites in scenes that would have fit comfortably within the pages of Lord of the Flies. There were pockets of civilization, but beyond a few unavoidable main streets, which only needed to be crossed, it was possible to go virtually anywhere in town via a labyrinth of kid-beaten woodland trails and tunnels. Those precious hours between the end of the school day and dusk, those accumulated hours alone in the world, really served to give us kids an early sense of independence. Naturally, as time progressed we didn’t care to interact with our parents any more than was absolutely necessary.

Until the end of WWII, the land comprising Port Charlotte had been more or less untouched.

The short story is that the Mackle brothers were in the construction and real estate business in Miami in the early ‘50s. Eventually they came up with the idea to advertise in national publications, selling Florida home sites to snowbirds and prospective retirees on a ten-year installment basis via mail order. The brothers received thousands of inquiries and the money poured in. That money was then rolled into yet more advertising and more land (ultimately totaling hundreds of thousands of acres throughout Florida), after merging with the wealthy Florida Canada Corporation. A few deals and swaps later, the whole shebang was ultimately named General Development Corporation.

The terms of the installment contracts being sold were brilliantly simple. In a nutshell, $10 was your down payment on a future home site in beautiful, sunny Florida. And as you dutifully made your payments, toiled, and cursed snow over the course of the following ten years, General Development would be using the money you and your future neighbors mailed in to create the infrastructure of the unincorporated city or town to which you’d eventually be retiring. When your contract had been fulfilled, you’d receive a deed to your new improved lot, upon which you could then have your new home constructed- by the Mackle brothers.

To give credit where it’s due, land was cleared, canals were dug, and roads were paved where there had been none before. By 1955, Florida’s early development was in full swing, and the Mackle brothers were playing a leading role in it. And they were just getting started. As a result of the merger with Florida Canada, the Mackles had gained options on an 80,000 acre tract of land in SW Florida, upon which they’d planned to build their biggest project to date: a sprawling, modern city containing some 200,000 home sites: Port Charlotte.

As it happened, though, the whole mess just got to be too damn big to keep from going crooked. General Development was a public company by the end of the 1950’s, and while the Mackles allegedly pushed for an emphasis on home construction over site sales, other board members disagreed and ultimately prevailed. By the end of 1957, over 13,000 home sites had been sold in Port Charlotte, compared to around three hundred homes which had actually been built or were contracted to be built. The Mackles were forced out of the company by early ‘62, and GD continued to improve lots for which there was no demand- outside of real estate speculation.

Now divorced from conscience, GD was free to implement unscrupulous high pressure sales techniques and tightly controlled Potemkin village tours to draw more business. And since they owned or controlled just about everything in town- including the local property appraisal company- they began pumping up land values. In no time at all, they were selling unimproved lots on the fringes of future projects for upwards of three times what premium improved lots sold in the years prior were worth. People caught on to that pretty quickly, though. So then, to mask the artificially inflated land values, GD shifted to increasing the price of their homes, where it was easier to hide the manipulation. They also gave lot buyers the opportunity to trade in their land (at current GD property values) toward overvalued GD homes. The result was that a good many people were tricked into believing they were getting fair market value for their lots rather than overpaying for homes. Of course, this willingness of GD to take unimproved lots in trade further fueled speculation in out-of-state markets, implying that even the most worthless lots had finished home value equivalent to their market price- whatever that might have been. This churning made a fortune for GD until the scheme finally collapsed in the late ‘80s. But Port Charlotte had been established along the way, albeit with countless overgrown roads reaching out to nowhere.

As 1981 took shape, my parents were starting to gain some traction in their adopted home. Dad hired on as a cop with the nearby Venice Police Department and bought a shiny red Honda 400 motorcycle for the half hour commute to and from work. Mom stayed home and babysat for some of my classmates. I moved into first grade, which wasn’t quite the hostage situation kindergarten had been; and across the state, on the Atlantic coast, a kid my age by the name of Adam Walsh was snatched from outside of a shopping mall and murdered. Kids being kids, we added hiding from cargo vans and child molesters to our growing list of innocently morbid and violent play activities.

I liked Star Wars, Atari, and toy guns at least as much as any other boy my age. And I don’t ever recall a time when I didn’t have any friends, but as a kid I did choose to spend a fair amount of time alone. I was never into sports,