01/07/01

Phebe and I made the mistake of signing over the Colonial to our son Rocky back in ‘98. He had pestered us like hell to sign it over to him with 5 acres of ground and then he turned around and sold the fucking place to cover a huge drug and gambling debt he racked up. Should have known he was up to something. I guess you could say we were conned. What the hell did we know? He had a dry wall business back then and it looked like he was doing pretty well for himself. Some Mafia guys in Newburgh were looking to crush his balls. Rocky said he tried to do what he could to settle his debt without selling the place, but unfortunately this involved a lot of burglary on his part and a lot of stolen copper. Rocky got the shortest sentence of the crew. He testified against the others and helped bring down a mob boss. They’ll probably kill him when he gets out. One of the things he testified about was going around with a couple of buddies offering home repairs to old people who live alone. One of the guys would get the homeowner to follow them outside and the other would sneak inside and grab whatever cash and jewelry they could. Some fucking model citizen I raised. We all got screwed pretty good. Now we got a family of New Yawkas living 100 feet away, their damn Shetland Pony got out last October about a week after they moved in and barely survived a fall through our rusted septic tank. I guess you could say the pony almost did a Mexican Mike. Someday when I have the courage, I’ll have to recount that one with a little more gusto. Let’s just say I earned my Eagle Scout badge that day wading in the remnants of the last 25 Christmas dinners putting a strap underneath it to hoist it out and save the damn runt thing. What else could I do? Those little kids of Tommy’s were hysterical crying.

Devil got his due, I guess.

Yeah, I’ll get my price one day, and then I’ll be on to my next adventure, you can be sure of it!

Maybe the Old Moa will make his escape to New Zealand after all! In grand style!