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Lucky Little

“Get the phone!” I hear Kenny scream from the other room. “Somebody pick up the damn phone!” It’s about 1:30 am on a Sunday morning which is still an early Saturday night in Alief, Texas 1983. We didn’t have cordless phones at the time but just a long chord that could accommodate any place in the house. Just follow the chord. Start at the jack in the kitchen, around the ice chest that sat where a refrigerator should have been, follow, over the table with the overflowing ashtray and empty beer bottles, follow, up across the cable TV wire heading the other direction. Our cable hook up was even worse than the phone. We had cut into the cable connection in a line about 6 houses down. 3 houses down worked for a little bit but 6 houses down had more channels. We had about 200 feet of long black cable that ran behind the back fence down to our house. It went unnoticed because behind the house was a bayou. What we in Alief called a ditch. Basically a 30 foot deep trench that ran through all the neighborhoods to catch all the water so it didn’t get into the neighborhoods and into the houses. So the cable runs 6 houses down. We had snagged a roll off the back of a cable truck and after we got ours hooked up we unloaded the giant spool and the rest of the cable to some friends. Up through the backyard and in through my bedroom window. From there we had enough to reach every room. If you wanted cable for the time being you just went and unplugged from one TV and then hooked it up to your own. “Somebody answer that f…king phone!” Kenny yells. I finally track the phone down in Rocco’s room. Rocco is out of town laying low after the big fight the previous weekend. The newspaper article read ’20 Shirtless Hoods Attack Party in Sugar Land’. The police had a list of names and Rocco’s was at the top. That’s another story all together. “Allright already…I’m coming, I’m coming…” I call out to the phone. “Hey hey”, I pick it up. “Hey bro, what’s going on?” it’s Rocco. “Word just got to me that you guys raided a party tonight, at Maureen’s.” He was right. I had taken a few of the ‘candidates’ over to a party to get into trouble. I wasn’t much of a stealer, I did like to fight, party and spend time with the girls though. I had other ways of making money, stealing just didn’t sit well with me since my dad was a cop and all. I had my fill of fighting from the last weekend with a few marks to remember it by. We were just out looking for some fun. Even though it was Maureen’s house, or at least her parents that were out of town, her step brother was the one throwing the party. I don’t even remember the kid’s name. Anyway, so he sees us coming and wants to make a truce before we even get in the door. He’s been to a few other parties that we attended and has seen how it can end up. We weren’t bad kids necessarily but we did love to live fast and loud. We were called ‘the Locals’. Many different people will tell you the way we became to be called the Locals but the true story is this. We did have a few in the crew that were a little farther out of control than the rest. A surf shop had opened up right on the corner across from the high school, Alief Hastings, just a walk up the road from the much newer Alief Elsik. The store had all the cool stuff a surf shop should have. And, it just happen to be, many of the Locals loved to skate and surf. On a bender one weekend, soon after the store opened, a couple of the guys decided it would be fun to back their truck straight through the glass windows of the shop at 2 o’clock in the morning and load up with goods. So they did. It went so well they did it again a few weeks later. The shop owner decided to close his doors and move to a new location. On the front glass, after he had loaded his last truck of merchandise and office furniture, he taped up a note. ‘We’re outta here. You win, Locals!’ Sorry, I got a little sidetracked there. This is usually about the time I’ll get ‘that look’, from somebody that has heard the story a thousand times, to “get back to the first freaking story!” So anyhow, there’s nobody at the house that would want to fight, probably Wilhite and Quint are talking with the party host ensuring him there will be no Viking behavior, and me and a few other guys are taking in the dance floor full of girls, when... boom, the record player stops. It wasn’t like the scratch of the needle going across the record because somebody bumped the stereo cabinet. Everybody knew that sound. It almost always meant the album was fried from the hard tip pointed metal needle having just grinded across the lines of music engraved in the vinyl. Brutal sound. Funny how it became so popular. “Mick, what the hell?” I whisper to the knucklehead who just unplugged the stereo. “Plug it back in dumb sh.t!” I commanded through my gritted teeth and barely open lips, and more said with the look in my eyes that said, “I’m about to punch you in the face, idiot.” Boom, he plugs it back in and the music starts back up before anyone even noticed. Mick jumps back on the dance floor wooing some girls with some drunken attempt at a dance move. That was close. That wasn’t a cool, we gotta get moving. You never want to stick around unless you have business. Remember we’re 16 and 17 years old at this time. This was play time, let’s play and get out of here. Taking the lead, I pull together a couple of the guys for the plan. All of us couldn’t know what was going on, it left too many people with information they didn’t need to know. No reason for everyone to take the heat if things went south. In our group it kind of went that way anyway. If one of us was suspect, all of us were suspect. We gather at the back of the kitchen. “Well, now that dumbshit here almost got us busted we need to get going.” Grab some trash bags from the pantry and load them up with all the food in the fridge and the pantry.” “What?! Do what?!” one of the guys asks. “Keep it down!” I tell him. “Get the trash bags and fill them up with all the food their parents left them when they went out of town. Are you deaf?” They didn’t need to hear it again. If they asked again they knew the next thing out of my mouth would have been ‘get the f..k outta here’ and they knew that meant don’t hang with us, period. They started to shuffle around trying to be inconspicuous. These were good guys probably performing their first ‘heist’. Bad company, I’ll tell ya… Before I walked out to go to my car I said, “Grab a couple of pans, maybe some utensils, a toaster or something, I don’t know, surprise me.” They knew to meet back at Joey’s or at our house later. Little did I know one of the numbskulls would lift a vacuum cleaner. A vacuum cleaner that almost got ME put in jail. Back to the phone call, Rocco says, “The step-brother called the police, they want the vacuum cleaner back.” I’m thinking, “the vacuum cleaner down in the water and mud, at the bottom of the bayou, that I chunked down there just 5 minutes ago, after I had finished slapping around the fool that brought it to my house? That vacuum?” “Unbelievable!” I reply. I knew we didn’t want to stay on the line very long and I knew Rocco didn’t have to say anything else so I said, “I’ll get it handled”, and we hung up. “Dammit, what the hell Bobby?” I ask myself out loud. Kenny’s all pissed off and half passed out, he yells from the far bedroom, “Get the phone!” I holler back, “Wake your ass up! I need a ride! Right now!” I’m thinking out the situation. Go get the f..king vacuum cleaner out of the ditch, get it Maureen’s with my only choice being on the back of Kenny’s Ninja street bike at 2am with him cranky to say the least, make sure the cops aren’t there when you sneak it back into the house. I had to make two calls for it all to be handled and I had to make those calls before I left the house. Details had to be mapped out perfectly. The first call was to Ronnie…

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