Читать книгу Unique Hustle - Will Castro - Страница 16

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“That’s when I got really hooked on cars.”

One day I had a JV baseball double header, and I called in sick to school. In the afternoon, I wound up going to Carvel Ice Cream with Marilyn and running into my baseball coach, and he told me, “I thought you were sick.” So he busted me. The following day I went to practice. He had me do ten laps around the park, so this is when I forgot about baseball and football and decided I was going to work and make money. My twenty-dollar allowance wasn’t getting me anywhere, and I had to pay for insurance for the car if I wanted to drive.

Now, it was around this time that I first ran headlong into tragedy. Kenny Williams was still my best friend; he made a great effort to stay connected to me when I moved from the city out to Long Island, and our relationship grew more even after I left the Lower East Side. He would come out with my mom every weekend and stay at the house with us. We’d watch Super Bowls. We were both Steelers fans growing up. You know, Franco Harris, Lynn Swann, Mean Joe Green, Terry Bradshaw, L.C. Greenwood, I mean, that whole Steel Curtain era meant a lot to us. Didn’t matter that we were from New York—that was our team together. Me and him were very, very big into football. Kenny was strange in a way; he never liked anybody getting in between us and our friendship, attention-wise. Kenny always wanted attention, always. So he didn’t like me having Marilyn in my life. He was one of those guys. Odd. He thought when someone finds a girlfriend, they forget about their best friend.

So one day, he drove to Marilyn’s place and brought my ex-girlfriend, Sophie. Marilyn answered the door and turned and said to me, “Oh, Kenny is here with your girlfriend.” And she was crying and pissed off that Kenny came with this girl from the city.

And I was like, “What are you doing here? Yo, Kenny, I’m not going anywhere.”

He said, “You’re messed up. You forget your friends in the city.”

I said, “No, I don’t. I’m here with Marilyn, and that’s it. I’m not going anywhere.”

So Kenny got pissed off. He went into my Pontiac LeMans, and, because he hooked up my radio, he disconnected it just to be spiteful. It was very heated that day because Marilyn wouldn’t stop crying. Her father was there, her father who was six foot four and 225 pounds. He lifted me up by my neck with his hand and said, “What the hell is going on here? My daughter is crying,” and I remember this because he lifted me completely up off the ground. As I write about it now, it’s kind of funny. But it was not back then. I was really small, and this guy was six foot four.

I said, “Can you let me go? Can you let me go?” It was crazy. And I told Kenny, “No, I’m not going,” and everything got calmed down. When I left the house, I went to go turn my radio on. The radio didn’t play. I was like, Oh, this guy disconnected my radio.

So a week went by. Kenny and I did not talk. I was pissed off at him, he was pissed off at me. We didn’t talk for that whole week. One night, I was working a shift at Mario’s Restaurant doing the valet parking. There was downtime when customers would be eating in the restaurant after I parked their car. So I decided to work on my radio, but I didn’t know what I was doing. But I eventually figured it out, and I got the radio to work. I was very proud about that. I was like, You know what? Ha ha. Kenny, you thought you were going to disconnect my radio. I hooked it up without you. I didn’t need you, because I always needed Kenny for everything—to fix my bicycles, fix my minibike, help me out with anything. Anything mechanical, I used to call Kenny. So I felt proud that I was able to do this on my own. I thought, After Mario’s, I’m going to take a ride out there with a couple of my friends. I’m going to go to the old building, and I’m going to show Kenny that I hooked up the radio—I hooked up my shit.


Willie’ s Shape and Shine flyer 1980s

Unique Hustle

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