Sal in the Suburbs

By Rick Smith

Growing up in a town run by organized crime, with a father involved in organized crime, "the life" was all Sal ever knew.  Well, that, plus what he learned watching '80s sitcoms and movies.

 

But sometimes life throws changes at you that force you to reexamine who you really are and what you want out of life.

 

Can Sal adjust to a new life hiding out in the suburbs, wearing polo shirts, discussing 401Ks, and fighting battles against suburban moms and neighborhood kids?  Or will he go back to his old criminal ways, inflicting pain and blowing his cover?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rick Smith
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223908364

Rick Smith

Sal in the Suburbs is the first novel by Rick Smith.  It won't be the last.

Book preview

PART 1:  THEN

INTERLUDE

What makes a person bad?  Are you born bad?  Do you learn to be bad from the people around you?  I know I’m not asking questions that people haven’t asked before, but I don’t think anyone has ever really told me the answer, either.

Let’s say you took one of those fighting dogs, something like a pit bull.  And he’s good at what he does, so after he kills one of the dogs he’s fighting, he’s treated well afterward.  Maybe he’s given some good food and told what a great dog he is.  So, he’s done his thing, received his rewards, and he’s happy.  Then, let’s say you take that dog and put him in a dog pound.  He doesn’t know anything other than what he knows, so he kills one of the other dogs.  Except in the pound, they tell him what a bad dog he is.  He doesn’t get any treats, he realizes something’s wrong, and he’s not happy.  And, this new world he’s in, the pound world, makes no sense to him.  The rules here are entirely different from what he’s been taught his whole life, and he doesn’t understand the new rules at all.  So, is he a bad dog?

CHAPTER 1

I grew up in a small town in New Jersey outside a big city in New Jersey.  Although I’ve never been to Italy and barely knew my grandparents who were from there, let’s just say I was a descendant of the kind of people who controlled these towns.  It’s a bit of a different era for my type of people these days, with chain stores, the Internet, Nicaraguans, and backyard meth, but I grew up during the time when my people still had some control of the situation.

My father grew up in the time when our kind completely controlled the place.  No crime took place unless it was approved of ahead of time, and there was always some sort of arrangement between my people and the authorities that kept everyone happy.  Those days are gone now.  As I said, it’s a new era.

My father didn’t graduate from high school, which really wasn’t a surprise.  He just wasn’t the type to sit down, learn, read books, and take tests.  So, at some point, he ditched school and started doing jobs here and there for what I’ll call the management of the neighborhood.

My dad was a tough guy.  He wasn’t afraid of a fight, had no qualms about inflicting serious damage on his fellow man, and generally kept his cool.  He actually had a lot of the makings of someone who could have gone a long way in his chosen field, except he had one major character flaw that prevented the Higher-ups from fully hiring him:  he was occasionally unpredictable, and when he was unpredictable, he was very unpredictable.  This was a bad flaw to have in this line of work.

When you do the kind of work I’m talking about, you want to put together a crew of consistent characters who react in ways that you would expect.  The last thing you need to be thinking through when a situation gets majorly fucked-up is how the people around you will react.  You need to know how people will react ahead of time.  You just do.  Otherwise, when something bad happens, and trust me, something bad will eventually happen, if you can’t predict the reactions of those around you, the chances that someone, including you, will get pinched, go up big-time.  And as well as my people take getting pinched, inside, nobody wants that.  It’s just not good for anybody.

My dad was the bad kind of unpredictable.  For a minor affront, it could even be something so minor that nobody else noticed it, my dad might take a pipe, or whatever, and club a guy in the forehead.  If that was part of the plan, fine, but if it wasn’t, as I said, that’s not good for anybody.  And then, when someone would call my dad on it, he’d say, What?  You didn’t hear what that guy just said to me?  Are you fucking kidding me?  He was practically begging me to bash his fucking skull in.  Plan ruined, cover stories are created, a new plan is put in place, and hopefully nobody gets pinched.  It was this kind of stuff that limited my father’s career aspirations to, as you might say, a role as an independent contractor.  He’d be called when they needed a role filled and when my father couldn’t fuck up that role too much, but that was it.  No permanent job, and no way he’d ever be, as they say, ‘Made.’

That’s not to say the Higher-ups weren’t grateful to my father.  When he was on his game, he did a good job.  You couldn’t question his toughness, and he was completely loyal.  He was just a little bit too crazy.  So, the Higher-ups made sure my father had day jobs that he maybe had to go to here and there, and those jobs provided him with some income and kept him from doing anything too stupid when he wasn’t busy doing jobs for them.  As funny as this sounds, the Higher-ups helped him get a job as a daytime security guard.  Yeah, the fucking rooster guarding the henhouse.  But that job was a bit tough for him to keep because he wasn’t always so great at showing up on a consistent basis.  So, then they got with the union and had him put in factory jobs where attendance was a bit more optional.  The union asked that he generally show up, and he did, although then he’d find a cozy place to rest for the day, which he did very well.  My dad had to be the most well-rested person in the history of people.  He was Olympic class.

From the pictures I’ve seen when my father was young, he actually was a decent-looking guy.  He told me a lot of stories when I was growing up about how much he got around with the girls, but as with everything with my father, it was impossible to tell what was truth and what was bullshit.  If you believed everything my father said, you’d think he owned the mayor and was secretly running our town.  But, you know, from the pictures, maybe he wasn’t so full of shit.  He looked okay and had money coming in, which, in our shitty town back then, was something.  And I’m sure when he met women, he made it sound like he was some sort of Made Man.  Which, as I’ve said, he wasn’t, and never was going to be.

My father met my mother when he was 30 and she was 20.  She was the opposite of him:  shy, quiet, and plain.  What she was thinking when she hooked up with my father is beyond my comprehension.  Maybe he told her he wanted to be a committed family man and father, I have no fucking clue, but the two of them together was a ridiculous idea.  My guess was that she was probably just sitting there, done with high school, working some shit job, wondering if there was anything better to life.  And then my dad walks in wearing a flashy suit, acting bigger than he really was, and she thinks that maybe he’s her way out.  I don’t know, they never talked about shit like this, so I’m only speculating here.  But what a fucking masterpiece those two were together.

They got married a few months after they met.  I don’t know what the hurry was.  Maybe my dad was full of shit, barely had any luck with the ladies, and really wanted to fuck her, I don’t know.  For a guy who said he got around a lot, I’ve never been able to figure out why he was so quick to give her a ring.  But he did, and here we are.

I was born a year after they got married.  If my father had told himself that he was going to change his ways and be a good dad, that’s fucking comical.  From what my mom told me, my dad lived his life the same way as before I was born.  He made sure not to trip over me, and any time I cried, she said he’d yell at her, Make that shit stop!  I need to get some fucking rest here!  As if she could magically control a crying baby.

Back in the day, he was strong, and she said he did like to pick me up and toss me around.  She once told me whenever anyone was over, he was the proud dad, holding his son and bragging about how this boy was going to run the neighborhood someday.  And then, after they’d leave, he’d be back to the same shit.  Shut that fucking kid up!  What the fuck is wrong with that kid?  I don’t know, Dad, maybe I cried a lot because I WAS A FUCKING BABY.  That’s what babies do, dipshit.

I don’t think it took my mom too long to figure out the deep pile of shit she found herself in.  She was a cook, she cleaned the house, she took care of the kids, and on the rare occasion my dad wanted to fuck, they fucked.  Mom, was that better than working in a bakery?  I never kid myself; maybe my gene pool isn’t so bright on either side.

Two years after me came Dante.  What a sweet little guy Dante was, even as a baby.  I’m not saying he didn’t cry and make a mess, because that’s what babies do.  But even when he was just a little guy, he was always running around with a big smile on his face, hugging some stuffed animal or sticking his hands down his diaper to play with his dick.  Sometimes, a kid is just born with some magic that makes everyone else around them happier, and Dante was that kid.  I think he even made my father a little bit happier, which was something not easily achieved outside of the Jets covering the spread.

Although my mom and dad never talked much about what my dad did for a living (aside from his factory jobs), it was hard to hide the occasional night when my dad would come home with bloody knuckles or a gash on his face.  As I’ve said, sometimes things just don’t go according to plan, especially with my father around.  If I ever asked my dad about it, either he’d say, Mind your own fucking business, or my mom would say, Sal, don’t.  And I never heard her ask him about anything.  She knew what he did for a living when she met him, and all of the women in our neighborhood knew that you never asked guys who were in the business about anything that happened.  Nobody says anything, exactly how it should be.

One thing my dad never did was hit us.  He never hit us.  Which, knowing him, is a big, fucking surprise to me, but he never did hit us.  He drank a lot, and he wasn’t shy about telling us:  (1.) We were a bunch of fucking pussies, (2.) We were a bunch of fucking losers, (3.) We were a bunch of fucking pansies, or (4.) He couldn’t believe a tough guy like him made a bunch of girls like us.  But he never hit us.  Which is actually probably lucky for him, because if he had hit us, let’s just say that I have a long, long memory, and he would’ve paid for it in ways you cannot imagine.  The problem with being a tough guy who’s an asshole to his kids is that the kids might grow up and be even tougher assholes.

INTERLUDE

You know how you hear about those kids from China or wherever who move to the U.S. and become fluent in English just by watching TV?  I always felt I was kind of like that, except instead of learning English, I learned what families were supposed to be like.  Yeah, I know TV is a bunch of made-up bullshit, I’m not an idiot, but I always had a feeling that life in the Cunningham household on Happy Days was a little bit more like reality than life in my shitty household.  You never saw Mr. C sitting on the couch watching TV with completely bloodshot eyes caused by the half-empty bottle he was clutching in his hand with a death grip.

And it wasn’t just my father who made life seem a little less normal.  My mother lurked around the house like a ghost housekeeper, saying nothing, making beds, and cooking meals.  I swear there were days when I didn’t hear a peep out of her.  And it wasn’t that I didn’t love her; she was my mom for fuck’s sake.  I just always wished that someday I would get to know her.  I swear I’ve never met anyone who spoke less than she did.  I never knew what ran through her head, and I probably wouldn’t have been too surprised if, one day, she tied all of us up and took an axe to us.

But back to my dad.  So yeah, I’ll admit it:  I always wanted Mr. C to be my dad.  Mr. C never drank and always had good advice for Richie and Joanie, and he let his kids do their thing and learn lessons when the shit hit the fan.  And he owned a hardware store.  How fucking cool is that?  My dad struggled to hold a job that mostly required him to just show up, but Mr. C. owned a hardware store.  Of course, the irony is that if Mr. C’s hardware store was in my town, guys like me or my dad would’ve shown up to offer protection and take away pretty much everything he was stowing away for Little Richie’s college fund.

I know it’s sad to say that I literally sat there dreaming Mr. C was my father, but I did, and I’m not going to lie about it.  And I bet I wasn’t the only kid in my neighborhood who dreamed shit like that because life in my house probably wasn’t all that different than life in most of the houses on my street.

Mrs. C was pretty cool, too, but she wasn’t who I wanted for a mother.  I wanted Laura Petrie from Dick Van Dyke.  I don’t know what it was about Laura, but their house was always spotless, she was a good mother to little Richie (what is it with kids on sitcoms in that era being named Richie?), and she was a great wife for Rob.  Yeah, she fucked up a lot of shit and got into all sorts of messes, but when she did, she and Rob fixed everything together, and it all worked out well in the end.  I don’t think I ever saw my parents work out shit together.  If my mom ever fucked up something, Dad would kind of shove her aside, fix the situation, give her a look like, You’re a dipshit, and he’d walk away with a smug look on his face.  I’m sure he felt like a Big Man around her.

I never dreamed Rob Petrie was my dad.  As cool as he was, reality is reality, and there was no fucking way my father was going to be a comedy writer on a hit TV show.  In no universe could I ever imagine that.  Now, a hardware store owner, that could’ve happened, and I would’ve been lucky to have a father like that.

Don’t even get me started on fucking Willis and Arnold on Diff’rent Strokes.  They weren’t even born into that shit – they were adopted – and they still found themselves in a life that was a million times better than mine.  Yes, I know TV is bullshit, but still.  Sometimes, it felt like it was all I had to compare my life against, and here are these two assholes who get adopted by a millionaire.  Fuck me.  Wasn’t TV supposed to make you feel good?  Maybe I shouldn’t have watched so much TV growing up, because dipshits like Willis and Arnold winning the life lottery made me feel worse about my situation every time I watched that piece of shit show.

Anyway, no one’s ever asked me one of those rich kid questions like, Who’s your role model?, but if they had, it would’ve been any number of TV characters, and I would’ve sounded like a complete asshole.

ANOTHER INTERLUDE, BECAUSE I’M ON A ROLL

So, my house wasn’t a house that was going to send me to Harvard, not that I knew what fucking Harvard was back then.  I never gave two shits about school other than to use it to begin practicing some of my future trades, including general menacing and extortion.  As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The thing about me, and anyone who knows me would say this, is that I’m not a bad guy.  No one who knows me would say I’m a bad guy.  And I don’t say shit about anyone else.  But, like anyone else, I’ve got to make a living, I’ve got a certain set of skills, and I use those skills to make that living.  Guys like me, with my life experiences, usually don’t go work in an office or be a salesman or something like that.  It wasn’t like I grew up around a bunch of people with legit jobs, and my high school guidance counselor (for the record, I didn’t have one, or if I did, I didn’t know it) wasn’t telling me, Here are a bunch of colleges that are a good fit for you, I think you’d be great in marketing, and if all else fails, have you thought about the Coast Guard?  From a young age, I think it was pretty clear I was someone you don’t fuck with, and when you’re someone who nobody wants to fuck with, there are certain career options that open up to you.  Especially in my neighborhood.  Where I grew up, every boy was always trying to prove how tough he was.  Right or wrong, that’s how you were judged, and no one gave a shit if you were smart but were a wuss.

Even at a young age, I was physically built in a weird way.  I was taller than most of the boys my age, but I was thin and probably looked like someone who was weak.  Except I wasn’t.  I didn’t have big arms or anything like that, but my strength surprised anyone who tested me.  And I had really long arms, which, if you’re in a fight, well, that comes in very handy.

Being tough isn’t just about how you’re built.  So much of being tough is mental.  As the great poet Mike Tyson once said, Everyone has a plan ‘til they get punched in the mouth.  You have no idea how true that is.  I’ve been in so many fights with guys who thought they were tough until they found out they weren’t.  And then they just lost their shit and fell apart.  I have beaten up so many guys who were bigger and stronger than me that I’ve lost count.  My edge in a fight is I’ve been in so many that I’m much more experienced than just about anybody.  It takes a lot more to make me lose my shit than the guy I’m beating on.  Which is how I win.

I’m always calm.  Methodical is a word I like.  I totally understand what Tyson was saying, except I don’t get rattled when I get punched in the mouth or when someone pulls a knife.  I stay calm.  I adjust.  A lot of times, I smile.  If you want to send a signal to someone when they think they’ve just taken the upper hand in a fight, just smile.  It freaks the shit out of them.  It helps them to understand that they’re not dealing with someone who is inexperienced in such matters.  It may also make them think that they’re up against a sick fuck, which is fine by me.  I’m no sick fuck, but if you think I may be a sick fuck, that’s to my advantage.

And I know how to talk in ways that let people know they’ve gotten themselves in a situation that perhaps they should think about getting out of instead of getting deeper into.  I know this sounds funny coming from me, but the last thing you want to have happen is a physical confrontation.  There are a lot of variables in a physical confrontation.  Is the other guy tougher than you thought?  Is he hiding a gun?  Will someone else help him, and then you’ve got to deal with two people?  If you kill the guy, what will happen?  So, over all my years, I’ve developed the way to talk, and I’ve got the demeanor to help people know that they have options other than having me beat the shit out of them.  And when you let someone know that they have a few ways out, and you make sure they don’t take too much of an affront to what you’re saying, then they might be inclined to take one of those ways out.  And, when someone takes a way out you have offered them, always, and I mean always, treat them with respect.  A way out from a physical confrontation against someone who may be tougher than you is always a smart choice.

THE INTERLUDES KEEP COMING BECAUSE I’M STILL ON A ROLL

I know this is going to make me sound completely stupid, but I didn’t know I was a bad guy until I saw the movie My Bodyguard.  From my point of view, I wasn’t doing anything that a lot of guys in the neighborhood weren’t doing.  Fuck, my dad was doing this kind of shit, just in a bigger arena.  The truth was that in my neighborhood, if you were tough, you did certain things, and if you were weak, certain things were done to you.  How was I to know what I was doing was considered by society’s norms to be bad when I was just repeating what I saw going on around me?

My Bodyguard isn’t a complicated movie, and the gist of the movie revolves around four main characters.

Character #1 is Clifford the Wimp.  Clifford is new to his high school, stands 5 foot nothing and probably weighs 80 pounds, and has terrible, floppy hair.  No doubt, he’s an easy target for just about anyone.  And when I saw ‘anyone,’ I mean anyone.  At my high school, on any given day, I doubt he would’ve made it from the front gate to his locker without getting his money taken and his underwear pulled over his head.

Character #2 is Moody, played by a young Matt Dillon.  No shit, this shitty movie was a springboard for Matt Fucking Dillon!  Not long after this, he was killing it with The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and The Flamingo Kid.  Dillon absolutely dominated 1980s movies, so I want to give credit where credit is due:  Dillon is a legend, and this movie helped him get to legendary status.

Anyway, Moody is the bad guy, up to general mayhem and taking money from pussies like Clifford.  And the funny thing is that the young Matt Dillon - who was skinny and tall then, not the kind of plump guy he is now – looked a lot like I do.  As you might imagine, it wasn’t a big leap for me to identify with Moody.

Moody terrorizes Clifford, which leads Clifford to engage Character #3, Freak Ricky, as his bodyguard to protect him from Moody.  In essence, Clifford’s fueling the arms race here, one-upping Moody by going up the tough guy food chain.  Look, it’s a strategy, so I can’t fault him for that.  The backstory on Freak Ricky is that no one knows his backstory.  Everybody thinks he’s like a mass murderer or something like that, so everyone’s afraid of him, but it turns out he’s Freak Ricky because his younger brother died and he’s having a hard time with that.  To make himself feel better, Ricky’s been building a motorcycle out of junkyard parts.

So, what do you think Moody does?  They’re in an arms race, so he one-ups Clifford the Wimp by finding a tough guy higher on the food chain:  Badass Mike.  Badass Mike looks like Mr. Clean, with a bald head and bulging arms.  I’ve got to admit that I’m not thrilled about the casting of Badass Mike because the guy looks like he’s 30 years old.  Can’t Hollywood find anyone who looks really tough and is age-appropriate?  It’s like Rizzo in Grease.  Stockard Channing was playing Rizzo, a high school girl, when Channing was in her thirties.  And don’t even get me going about Cha-Cha, who looked like she might’ve been 50 when they filmed that movie.

Anyway, in my neighborhood, if a grown-ass man like Badass Mike got involved in petty high school shit like this, well, that wouldn’t look good to anyone, and there’s a good chance there would be repercussions towards Badass Mike in the neighborhood.  But I guess that’s neither here nor there.

Badass Mike pushes around Freak Ricky, takes the motorcycle Ricky was building to get over his dead brother, and tosses it in a lake.  I’ll be honest:  I didn’t love this move by Mike.  Most people I know have something they truly cherish, be it an object or person, that’s more important to them than you can imagine.  If you try to separate that item or person from whoever you’re terrorizing, they’ll lose their shit, become irrational, and then things can get out of hand.  In this case, Mike and Moody were fucking with Ricky over a motorcycle that had no value to them, so why would they do that?  What’s the strategy here?  But they did, and that triggered an unfortunate chain of events for Mike and Moody.

Freak Ricky fishes the motorcycle out of the lake.  Moody’s feeling tough again because Mike has his back, so Moody goes to take the bike from Freak Ricky.  Again, what’s with the fucking motorcycle, Mike and Moody?  Let it go.  But they don’t.  Mike tells Ricky to give the bike to Moody, which makes Ricky pile onto Badass Mike for the big showdown.  Once Ricky gets the upper hand on Mike, Moody jumps into the fight.  The tables have turned again, with things looking bleak for Ricky.  Until ... shaggy little Clifford summons the courage to jump on Moody.  With Clifford hanging around Moody’s neck, Freak Ricky dispatches Mike.  Badass Mike is no longer badass.  He’s just Mike.

Instead of helping Clifford, Freak Ricky decides to let Clifford fight his own battle against Moody, providing a little coaching here and there.  It’s not looking good early, with Moody laying, like, twenty good licks on Clifford.  Personally, I think Clifford would’ve been headed to the hospital by now, but I didn’t write this piece of shit.  Finally, you’re fucking kidding me, Pussy Clifford beats up Moody, magically landing a bunch of good punches and breaking Moody’s nose.

I want to be clear about something:  there is no fucking way, never never never, that a pussy like Clifford could beat up a guy like Moody.  I don’t care if Moody was drunk out of his mind and hadn’t slept for a week, he’s still beating the ass of Pussy Clifford.  Yeah, maybe on a good day, a big freak like Ricky could take down Badass Mike, but no way is Clifford kicking Moody’s ass.  This is beyond fiction, and at that moment, I lost a lot of respect for whoever had made this shitty movie.

Nonetheless, when Clifford punched out Moody, I found myself calling bullshit on this while the entire theater erupted in cheers for Clifford.  They were literally cheering for this shaggy little pussy.  And I remember thinking, Fuck, because deep down, I knew I was Moody.

INTERLUDE FROM AN INTERLUDE

I fucking hate My Fucking Bodyguard, and I’m glad that movie is so shitty that even though it has Matt Dillon in it, and even though I have 200 channels of cable TV, they never replay that shitty movie.

That movie was the first time I truly understood that I was a complete dick, a dick that society didn’t want in society.  Even worse was that I was learning this when I was something like 10 years old.  Fuck.  Yeah, I bullied kids and took money from them, but fuck, to have a whole movie theater turn on you like that, and you’re only 10 years old, well that hurts deep down.  That’s some heavy shit to deal with when you’re still young enough that you’re coming home from school, grabbing a bag of potato chips, and watching Tom & Jerry and Scooby-Doo.

So, I reassessed myself and made some hard decisions.  I certainly wasn’t going to quit the only trade I knew.  That was out of the question.  But, I decided to learn from Moody’s mistakes.

From then on, I decided I wasn’t in the thieving business.  I wasn’t going to steal from kids and give them no services in return.  That type of arrangement probably wasn’t the most sustainable arrangement anyway.  At some point, a fucking nerd was going to blab to the officials, their parents, or maybe their Badass Mike-like older brother, and then I was going to have some problems.  And the problem with being Top Bully is that once you’ve been unmasked as a fraud, as Moody was, it’s hard to get your mojo back.  And I had a lot of mojo and wasn’t going to give it up.

I decided to leave the thieving business and more officially get into the protection business, just like a lot of the older guys around me in the neighborhood did.  When you’re in the protection business, you are getting paid to provide a service, so everybody feels good about what they’re receiving.  Everybody wins.  Moody said he was in the protection business, but, really, he was in the thieving business.  I wasn’t going to do that.  I was going to provide honest services.

Also, I wasn’t going to make people