UnMade: Honor Loyalty Redemption

By Robert Walason and Joe Broadmeadow

With Foreword by Zac Stuart-Pontier, producer of Crimetown

For Bobby Walason, the turning point in his life began when he was thrown out of his house at age twelve. It was also the best moment in his short life. Forced to survive on his own, with no friends or family to turn to, his determination drives him

• Language: English
• Publisher: JEBWizard Publishing
• Release date: May 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733526432

Book preview

PROLOGUE

We know what we are, but know not what we may be

: Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 5

In the 1970s, Olneyville was a desolate neighborhood of rundown multiple family homes and small manufacturing shops, which sat in a valley across an overpass that ran above the Route Ten connector to I-95.

It was a short walk from the Italian, Federal Hill section of Providence. No emblems on street signs showing demarcation points, nothing separated one neighborhood from the other, yet it needed none. The intersection of Atwells and Harris Avenue was the boundary. Along Atwells, up on the Hill, sat cafes, restaurants, salumerias, social clubs, laundromats, pastry and veal shops, live poultry markets. All part of the fiefdom, the unofficial headquarters of one of the most feared of all Mafia Don's, Raymond L. S. Patriarca.

When gang-banging, street criminals thought about edging out of their Olneyville neighborhood and moving toward the Hill, the thought was a fleeting one. Patriarca deplored all street crime unless, of course, he ordered it. Bad for business, it brought unwanted attention from the police. Olneyville gangsters stayed in Olneyville; it was safer.

One day, a blond-headed, blue-eyed, scary guy, who would someday, scare very scary guys, crossed that bridge. Even way back then, Bobby Walason understood it would be suicidal to challenge the supreme power, it was far more sensible to join it.

And he wanted that more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life.

This story casts a light onto the ebb and flow of a dark side of American society, a look at the forces that play havoc with lives that go adrift on the streets of all our cities.

As a child, Bobby held out against cruelty no boy should ever endure. Kicked out of his own house at twelve, he lived in a cardboard box and survived.

Though the word survived is a stretch.

As an adolescent, there were turnstiles of reform schools, escapes, and then, even though he was underage, the adult correctional institution, known as the ACI. A prison for adult criminals where he was misdiagnosed, beaten by guards, and fought extraordinary battles holding his own against overwhelming numbers. Finally, they wrapped him in canvas and chains and shot him full of Thorazine—a drug he was allergic to.

As a young adult, there was little thought of a future; he lived hour to hour. Adrift in a world where no one would notice if he lived or died, he found a harbor of refuge in an even darker place.

A career path tailor-made for Bobby Walason as custom fitting as the expensive clothes he would soon come to wear. He became an enforcer in a Mafia crew. A manic-depressive Bipolar Type I enforcer for the mob.

A very scary guy who would come to scare very scary guys.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.

‘All's Well that Ends Well’ Act IV Scene III

PART ONE: Early Years

Chapter 1 Trouble is Never Far Behind

It shall do well. But yet do I believe the origin and commencement of his grief sprung from neglected love

Hamlet Act III Scene I

Bobby Walason, on the very edge of four, crawled under a living room sofa with a flaming candle clutched in his hand. The lights had gone off in the Oakland Beach three-decker he lived in with his father, mother, sister, and brother. He was in his pajamas, and he was cold. There was the sweet, musty smell of spilled beer, old food, and undone laundry. The apartment was tightly packed, untidy and decaying. There were no toys. No books. No joy.

Bobby was searching for his shoes.

Oakland Beach at the time was a small, depressed section of Warwick, Rhode Island, hugging the shores of Narragansett Bay. In the 1950s and ‘60s, it was populated by hard-working, hard-drinking shell fishermen, factory workers, and the unemployed or unemployable and their families. Many lived in a mixture of former late 19th-century summer vacation beach cottages—mere shadows of their original splendor-- or post-war tenements, most were renters.

In the future, gentrification would come to find Oakland Beach and the rarity of oceanfront property. But the Walason’s were about to leave this area long before Oakland Beach became a fashionable place to live.

Anything could happen in the Walason house. This time the pipes had frozen and Jane, Bobby's mother, had run next door to a neighbor she despised to borrow an electric heater. Desperation overcame the embarrassment of her situation. The moment Jane went out of the door, the apartment went dark. No heat and no light, the everyday circumstances of young Bobby’s world. Charlie Walason, Bobby's father, spent his money on Jack Daniels and Budweiser, not paying the electric company.

Now Bobby was cold and frightened and in the dark.

Bobby's candle licked the sofa—it sparked then caught fire. With his sister and brother, Bobby skedaddled, leaving behind a raging inferno, the intensity of which could melt a locomotive. Little Bobby burned the house to the ground. People would say the Oakland Beach fire was an omen—a portent of things to come—there was just something about the kid—that Bobby Walason would forever and always stumble on trouble.

The Walason’s moved to Olneyville, a Providence neighborhood that lacked almost everything except trouble.

Chapter 2 Low Expectations

Whatever you are, is what you will always be, and you'd better get that through your thick skull. Forget hopes and dreams, they're all bullshit.

Charlie Walason, Bobby's father.

Charlie Walason was a great believer in never spare the rod. He knocked his children around almost every day on the theory that even though he hadn't seen it, they must have failed him. In those early, formative years, Bobby did a lot of ducking and diving under his bed.

Children come into this world a blank slate. While physiologically functional, their outlook, self-confidence, ability to feel empathy or love, or being part of something comes from those who raise them.

In Bobby’s world, he and his siblings were peripheral to Charlie. Not someone to teach, or mentor, or encourage. Something to control and not waste energy or effort more than minimally necessary. Charlie didn’t care for his children so much as he endured them. There were few things in his life Charlie loved, and his children were not one of them.

Charlie loved beer. There was nothing in Bobby's childhood as unmistakable as the pop-hiss sound of a beer can opening, except maybe, Charlie's growl. Young Bobby, tow-headed and blue-eyed, would get 'the look' from Charlie and fear—cold and gloomy as an Arctic dawn—would grab at the boy's heart. His father ruled by fear and fists. Throughout Bobby's childhood, he witnessed too many days and nights of drinking, cursing, and horrific displays of inexplicable brutality.

Bobby-

"My father was a mean bastard, miserable about his life, and drank himself into oblivion. He'd get into fistfights with everybody. A tough, tough guy, he hung out with all the wiseguys, Ronnie Sweet and Big Moose Peri. Growing up—I heard all the stories.

We were decent kids, good IQs and everything, me-my brothers and sisters. Not that we were thoroughbreds, we were mongrels, but there was a good seed there. He told us we were all retarded—anything we did was never good enough. He never hugged me; maybe he did, but I don't remember him ever telling me he loved me.

Although he hadn't figured it out yet, Charlie Walason had mislaid more than his family, swapping everything for beer and broads. A good-looking man, Charlie was skilled with the ladies; and, he had a talent to cook.

§

Bobby-

"Yeah, he was a handsome bastard, had tons of broads, a real lady’s man. He was a chef, worked all the country clubs; the Ledgemont, The Rhode Island Country Club, Metacomet. He fucked around on my mother all the time.

One time he took all us kids to his girlfriend's house, made us sleep on the sofa while he went upstairs and spent the night with her. He did shit like that, screwed up guy because of the booze. A smart bastard—but fucked up. Just couldn't get hold of himself.

For starters, except for the drink in his hand, Charlie Walason hated everything and everybody. During his entire life, he met no one he felt compassion for. Everyone was his enemy. Maybe it was because he lived in an alcoholic haze, perhaps, like people said, Charlie was born vicious as a pit bull. People crossed the street to avoid dealing with the man.

Bobby

When he'd get upset, he' d beat us with this wide black belt, and then send us to our room. Not to go to bed, to get under the bed, in case he wasn’t done with us. I used to recognize my aunts and uncles by their ankles.

Chapter 3 That Fucking Leonard Swanson…

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock

The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,

Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:

But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o'er

Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!

Othello Act III Scene III

One night during the Korean War, Charlie tied on a titanic drunk, the next day he joined the Air Force. He left Bobby's mother, Jane, pregnant and broke. Jane feared to be alone; penniless, pregnant, and unmarried. She moved in with an amiable, hardworking guy named Leonard Swanson.

When Charlie came home, he searched the neighborhood and found Swanson having a beer in a local bar. Swanson, tall and lean, was no fighter. They say Charlie used an ax handle to beat Swanson within an inch of his life. He then took Jane back.

But Charlie never forgave her. A poisonous feeling, he called it—like acid in the blood, your capillaries all burning up. Charlie said he loved Jane and told everyone he knew that it hurt like hell to almost lose the one person you love. Yeah, he said, sure, he said, he understood Jane and part of the understanding was the fiery certainty she had betrayed him.

From that day on, any illusions Charlie had about a woman's loyalty disintegrated into rubble. He carried that pain every day of his life, and he made sure that Jane and all the children understood that he didn't believe his oldest son, Charles, was his own. With frenzied, burning blue eyes, he'd howl, hell-bent on shattering everyone's nerves, Fucking Swanson! That fucking Leonard Swanson!

Bobby

"He haunted her, you know, never-ending accusations and threats. He beat her, man—he beat my mother all the time—a man with a violent temper.

''As for me, I think he thought my name was Punching Bag. One time, I don't remember what I did. Hell, I was maybe three or four, he threw me across the room, and I landed on a bedspring. Broke my nose, today I have trouble breathing because of that toss in the air. He was certifiable, once, my mother wasn't around, and he wanted to go out. He nailed my shoe to the floor with me in it. I spun like a top until he came home."

All during his childhood, Bobby had prophetic dreams about a life in the greater world outside his apartment, and away from Olneyville. He longed for a place in that world—he wanted it with all the enthusiastic, immobilizing passion of the abandoned and aimless child he was.

He pictured himself a member of a real family, with doting parents, a mother that cared and a father that loved him. He watched faces of people in the neighborhood, the happiness, families laughing-playing together, looking like they were sharing life's joys and heartaches.

And maybe they were. But for Bobby, he endured just heartaches alone.

Bobby

I'd have these conversations in my head, me talking to my father and mother about school and clothes and sports. I'd see a television show about a family, and I'd be the kid with the dog. I was that kid; it was real to me.

His mother did try to defend him, but she was a weak, gentle woman who could not even protect herself. No one could tell which way the wind was blowing with Jane, not a sign on her face or in her manner. Charlie Walason left serious footprints on her; there was strange submissiveness in Jane, almost a paralysis.

Charley’s control didn’t end with Jane and Bobby, he was generous in brutality and terror for all his children.

Charley didn't allow Bobby’s sister, Patty, to go out with boys. Boys have one thing on their mind, he told her. And you-you always with that fuck me look on your face. The boys want to fuck you, he said, You know they do. Patty, 12 broke out in tears and ran down the stairs.

All of Charlie's threats and words of warning didn't stop a continuous flock of horny, hormone-charged boys from coming around.

Then, one day, twelve-year-old Patty went for a walk with a boy from the block named, Joey Hanley. When she got home, Charlie was waiting. In Charlie's blitzed mind, Patty was just another woman that had failed him. Her pretty face and sexy figure reminded him that all women were whores.

That the only pleasure women ever got in life was first breaking your heart—and then breaking your balls.

Patty tried to run. But Charlie was quick, his oversized hands, always red and swollen at the knuckles, clamped on the young girl's wrists. You sneaky little whore, he wailed.

When he squeezed, Patty shook like a girl suffering from a terrible affliction. Her head dropped back as though she was some ritual offering, she fell to her knees-begging, screeching in panic and pain. Charlie slapped her face and blood spilled from her mouth and nose.

Ten-year-old Bobby, convulsed with physical terror, watched as his father beat his sister. Then suddenly, without warning, he was in another place—a dark and mysterious space in his head. The feeling made him shudder. Out of the blue, the terror was gone, and he was filled with a fury that set fire to his brain. There was a light and then a noise.

It was the first time they came, the noise and the light.

Bobby charged his father, flailing at him with fists and feet and then things got blurred. Charlie let go of Patty and slammed Bobby with the back of his hand. Bobby felt jangled, flippy —but not frightened and there was no pain. Letting loose a low growl, he went after his father again.

With a closed fist Charlie struck Bobby down. Through clenched teeth, he growled, There you go, this is what you get when you go against me.

Bobby was filled with a fury that his father had not seen before, and Charlie didn't have enough to get it out of him. He punched and kicked Bobby, as he lay curled on the ground, tearing at his father's legs.

Despite the enraged violence of his father, ten-year-old Bobby fought back. In Bobby’s young mind right and wrong was an unclear concept, he had no benchmark to go by, but he sensed this wasn’t right. The first inkling of a condition that would play a big part in his life appeared for the first time.

Like the lines from the Emily Dickinson poem The Lost Word, Bobby lapsed into irrationality. A ten-year-old boy challenging a full-grown, brutal, violent man.

I felt a cleaving in my mind

As if my brain had split;

I tried to match it, seam by seam,

But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join

Unto the thought before,

But sequence raveled out of reach

Like balls upon a floor.

Bobby-

He was giving Patty such a beating, a vicious beating. He took her pants down, slapped her ass and face and pulled her hair out. I lost it, I hit him and when I hit him—Patty got away and ran off to the children's center—DCYF they call it today. After a while my brother Charles, he ended up there too. Then it was just my mother, my kid sister Cindy, and me. My mother, quiet as a mouse, always blinking back tears stayed still, and inside herself, it was as though she was invisible.

Chapter 4 Crimes on Stage

I am thy father's spirit;

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night

And, for the day, confin'd to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes, done in my days of nature,

Are burnt and purg'd away.

Hamlet Act I Scene V

With Patty gone, Bobby avoided being at home. The less contact he had with his father, the better off he’d be. Carrying the mix of innocence tinged with memories of the violence in his home, Bobby wasn’t afraid on his own. Thriving in his imaginary world and pretending the family at home was anything but the reality.

Wandering the streets, he searched for somewhere, or