Read American Desperado for Free Online Page B

beautiful. He was the most crazed Outcast there was. But because he was still serious about football, he attended high school so he could play on the team. I started working out with him at his high school gym, even though I was still ineighth or ninth grade. Back then they used to have fraternities at the high schools. They were organized to keep kids out of gangs. Fraternities were mostly groups of popular kids who looked down their noses at kids like us, who didn’t have families or whose dads were in illegal lines of work.
    All the fraternity kids worked out together at Petey’s high school gym. They’d hog the equipment. They acted like they owned the place. One day a fraternity kid said something to me under his breath. I confronted him and his friends, and they giggled at me like a bunch of girls.
    Next day I came with a gun. The fraternity kids started to say something to me, and I took the gun out and started shooting into the ceiling. I wasn’t going to hit no kids, but they didn’t know that. Boom, boom, boom . They hit the floor, screaming. It was hilarious.
    When I told the Outcasts what I did, nobody said, “You did a wrong thing.” They laughed. We were like a pack of mad dogs running the street. There was no reasoning among us. I don’t know what made us flip out so bad, but we were all gone.
    P ETER “PETEY” GALLIONE : Jon was a wild kid. He looked two feet tall when I met him. But he would take out a gun and start shooting like a cowboy in a Western.
    I have tried to figure out what made us so crazy. Jon had lost his parents. His Italian family, his father and uncles, were well known in the streets, but Jon was alone. It made sense why he was wild, but only up to a point. All of us went so far beyond “normal bad” behavior.
    Teaneck was an ideal place. There were rich areas, middle-class areas, and poor neighborhoods. It was a well-balanced city. I was from across Windsor Road in Teaneck, the wrong side of the tracks. My family was poor, but it’s not like I starved. The schools were of high academic standing. My group of friends and I should not have turned out as we did. When I look back on what put us overthe edge, I believe it was drugs. In the early 1960s a wave of drugs came through, and we all got wacked out of our minds. The drugs accelerated our craziness. Drugs lowered everybody’s inhibitions for violence and crime. Drugs allowed us to put guns in our hands and not give a shit.
    Some of the kids in the Outcasts had parents in the Mafia. But we didn’t want to be a part of that. To us, the older generation of Mafia men were like company men at IBM. We didn’t want to have bosses. We wanted to be our own bosses.
    The Outcasts was a gang that was organized to be against organized gangs. What the Outcasts were about was we disliked society.
    J . R .: In the early 1960s people were square. Kids were into the Beach Boys. I didn’t want to run around like a Beach Boy. I dressed weird. I wore suede boots with points, velvet pants. I wore a beret. I carried an umbrella. The umbrella looked good, and I sharpened the tip so I could stab people with it. Nobody thinks of an umbrella as a weapon, but it’s a very good one. You can kill somebody with an umbrella.
    All of the Outcasts wore crazy, crazy outfits, with umbrellas and capes. Some Outcasts got pachuco tattoos—the cross with slashes on it—that Mexican gangs used. So-called normal kids in their ironed pants and shirts with button-down collars looked at us like we were weird, but to me, they were the weird ones.
    We disliked people, but we all had dogs. That was the funny thing about the Outcasts. Even when I was roaming around the street, sleeping in different places, I got a Doberman. Our dogs were gods.
    P ETEY : Dogs were trust, loyalty, unconditional love. You didn’t have to be anything for your dog to love you. We loved our dogs. If my dog wanted meat, I’d do a stickup to get meat for my dog.
    When the Outcasts came