The Adventures & Misadventures of Rodney Grayson: the Gay Thief

By H. Libros

What constitutes my family? Is it my relationship: with my cadre of friends; with my errant brother, my wayward mother and my unknown father; or with my love interest that I perceive to be selfishly pursuing his own lifelong dream without patiently and adequately considering my wants and needs? Does shared DNA define a family, or is it more a matter of our shared experiences, common values and interests?
Since I am loyal to my brother, who I consider to be a madman, am I guilty of complicity in his crimes too? Is it right for me to feel superior to my brother because in my moral universe, my brand of crime is not as heinous as his? I am Rodney creature of the mean streets of New York City, a thief by trade, wrestling with myself over some of lifes little problems. Come along, hitch a ride!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456826208

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Copyright © 2011 by H. Libros.

ISBN: Softcover    978-1-4568-2619-2

ISBN: Ebook        978-1-4568-2620-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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SITE-MAP

INTRODUCTION

EPISODE I

FLASHBACK (1)

FLASHBACK (2)

FLASHBACK (3)

EPISODE II

A MEMORABLE HEIST (1)

A MEMORABLE HEIST (2)

A MEMORABLE HEIST (3)

EPISODE III

REPRIEVE (1)

REPRIEVE (2)

REPRIEVE (3)

REPRIEVE (4)

EPISODE IV

MY BROTHER’S KEEPER (1)

MY BROTHER’S KEEPER (2)

MY BROTHER’S KEEPER (3)

MY BROTHER’S KEEPER (4)

EPISODE IV

EPILOGUE

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION (1)

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION (2)

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION (3)

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION (4)

INTRODUCTION

Okay, let’s make the introduction . . .

My name is Rodney Grayson, but everyone calls me Lucky.

Why?

Well that’s beyond my comprehension because I am about the most luckless person I know.

But, I am pretty good at what I do.

What do I do?

I’m a thief!

No, not the kind of creep you might see in your local supermarket trying to conceal a glazed ham under his overcoat.

Nah!

I’m what you might call a heist specialist.

To quote a friend of mine: I steal for real.

I am the last one upon visual inspection that you would peg for my line of work, or my lifestyle for that matter. Why?

Well for one . . . I look like a washed-up boxer, who probably took a few payoffs under the table to take a couple of dives.

Let’s just say . . . picture Brad Pitt with a broken nose that never healed right, scarred knuckles from one too many bar brawls, and a nicotine habit that would make the Marlboro Man quit. Oh, and about the Brad Pitt thing, decrease the tan about 100% and that will be me.

And too add to my long list of things going against me—I’m gay!

No.

Not Elton John, gay, but nonetheless, gay.

Again, you couldn’t look at me and tell.

I am usually assumed to be trailer park trash or sometimes depending on what I’m wearing, homeless.

I most never get, gay-thief!

The crudely drawn prison tattoos that flows-over both lengths of my arms almost always get me in any hole in the wall, strip joint, shooting gallery or crack house. I just look like I belong.

Yeah, that’s me the walking contradiction.

About being gay . . .

Can’t really tell you when it happened or how.

Would love to pull out a violin and spin you some sad story about a family member molesting me—always knowing I was, feeling isolated until I ‘came out’, or having some encounter with the same sex that pulled me over to the other side.

Well, I can’t tell you any of that crap!

In fact, I came from a ‘privileged’ environment.

Not by birth of course; I was left in a hospital by a teenaged mother. But I had parents.

Their names were Greg and Robert.

Yeah neither of those names sounds feminine, huh?

Well, they weren’t, but they were still my parents. And the best parents any kid could wish for.

Back then as opposed to now, you didn’t openly flaunt your gayness.

So, Greg and Robert did what any self-respecting gay couple did back in those times—they pretended to be old college buddies who pooled their money together to buy a little house in a nice part of town and kept everyone else out of their business as they went about their lives.

But, I guess the desperate little housewives ran out of things to talk about, and then began targeting my parents for the gossip mill. Thinking quickly, my parents began bringing women around—lesbian friends—and soon produced a child from the visits.

Yeah, you guessed it—ME!

They hadn’t actually done the nasty with lesbian ‘covers’; they basically went to an adoption agency and came home with their instant bundle of joy.

Or so they thought!

Greg and Robert were sweethearts. I’ve never heard anyone of them say a mean word about any living creature.

But I didn’t have their DNA.

My genetics belonged to a teenaged hooker and a ‘john’ that probably fucked her in an alley for twenty bucks. So, needless to say—I drove my parents crazy. Why?

Who knows, when I was old enough to care about Mickey Mouse and colorful Jell-o . . .

The better they treated me the worse I got.

New clothes? Had the best of everything.

New toys? Had so many they had to donate bags to the Salvation Army each year.

Love? They smothered me in it.

But, I was destined for a difficult course in life.

And I drove them to early graves!

I was sent to the principal’s office so much that he had a special chair designated for me, until one of my parents clocked out of work and trudged down to the school to get me.

In one year alone, due to lost wages, my parents informed me that they could have paid for my first year of college.

I had an appetite for violence!

I fought all the time.

Although I had never once heard any one of my parents raise their voices above a whisper, I believe that watching Bugs Bunny hit Daffy Duck over the head endless times helped me with that.

I had been to every kind of head doctor there was when I was younger—a waste of time and money—if you ask me.

They could have saved that money for all the care packages that I would eventually need while serving time in the kiddy lock-up that I frequented, and then finally for the trips to the Big House that I would make as an adult.

I’ve had my picture taken by the police more than any super-model. You can currently go online and find several of me on www.wanted.com

—making goofy faces with my booking numbers held-up on a black plaque under my chin.

I honestly cannot remember a time that I wasn’t in police custody, serving some kind of sentence or being apprehended by the police.

Bail bondsmen made a fortune off my parents.

But, as soon as I was released, I would waste no time getting back to business.

I stole everywhere I went:

Church.

School.

Friend’s house.

Supermarket or Bathroom.

I stole so much that when I wasn’t stealing, I felt something was wrong with me.

At first, my parents were able to talk to my accusers, apologize and offer them a small monetary compensation to keep the authorities from getting involved.

But there is only so much palm-greasing and ass-kissing you can do when ‘the little bastard down the street’ has barged through your screen door, ransacked your house and taken your valuables.

In hindsight, I wasn’t really a thief back then. I was more of ‘a dummy with sticky fingers’. There is an art to stealing.

And I would soon learn that after meeting my mentor and teammates.

Yes . . .

I am currently in cahoots with a team of thieves that make ‘Ali-Baba and His Forty Thieves’ look like chopped liver.

And here’s the really odd thing—it wasn’t by design either—but my crew consisted of three other homosexual dudes and one crazy lesbian.

Really, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

First up is Vincent . . . he would be the equivalent of ‘Andre the Giant’ and would look like him if he were gay.

Vinny, as we call him, is about 6'9" and all of three hundred plus pounds. He has a taste for dressing in the most outlandish ‘get-ups’ he can find, but he is about the ‘softest’ human being I know. He cried when we went out to see Shrek. And even though he is about the size of a walking mountain, violence is not really his thing. But if the team is in a crisis, and I give the order, the poodle will become a pit bull to bail us out of trouble.

Next on the list is Jessica . . . just imagine a foul-mouthed, nasty attitude Marilyn Monroe—minus the ability to carry a tune. Jessica is the best accomplice to have while you’re on a job, but she’s the last social acquaintance that I would have outside of my profession. Truthfully, I’m a little scared of her myself, but I would as soon die than let her know that.

Then there is ‘the mother-hen’—Ron—who we have taken to affectionately refer to as Rhonda. He’s the team leader. At different point in our lives he has pulled each of us out of whatever we were doing and taught us the finer points of stealing. Then he brought us all together to make a team of unbeatable misfits.

Over the years, he’s given us all so much. I wish I could give him one thing—the use of his legs. I’m not much on medical mumbo-jumbo, but one morning Rhonda woke up and his legs didn’t work. A team of ‘white coats’ diagnosed him with something called spinal meningitis. Whatever name they labeled it, our leader is now wheelchair bound. But don’t be fooled, he’s clever enough to still run circles around any half-assed crook—motorized wheelchair and all.

Finally, we have Claude. He is a twenty-five year old Haitian heart-throb, abs of steel, good teeth, soft-spoken, well-groomed and impeccably dressed. He came over from Haiti, took a deep breath and started stealing everything that wasn’t tied down. We met. I taught him everything Rhonda taught me. But, I made one mistake . . . yeah you probably guessed it—I bedded my student.

And that has started the up and down cycle which is currently my life with him. We fight, argue, walk away, come back, love one another, and start the whole cycle all over again. But all things considered, he is ‘a professional’ and doesn’t let our personal life interfere with what we got goin’ in the streets.

There you have it, that’s the opening cast of characters that are at the epicenter of my life.

I get out of ‘the state pen’ today.

The Big House.

I am currently standing at my cell gate, smoking a cigarette and looking down at my watch repeatedly. The damn escort officer was late.

I had no problem getting in, but as usual it was harder getting out.

I blew smoke through my nose and took my mirror in my left hand, so that I could scope at ‘the goings-on’ on the tier.

No one was out but the tier porter who was mopping the concrete floors outside the cells.

His name is J-Lo, as in Jennifer Lopez, but the only thing the two of them had in common was their Hispanic heritage. The J-Lo I knew, on the outside, didn’t have a five-o’clock shadow.

Mornin’ Lucky J-Lo said as he maneuvered his mop pass my cell.

I didn’t answer.

He and I had had a beef when I first arrived.

I was in the shower.

I was the only white-boy in the shower house at the time.

He hadn’t known my pedigree then.

Probably thought he had ‘an easy piece of ass’.

Just for the record, I don’t mess with jail queens—. Yeah, I’m picky like that!

Anyway I continued to run my washcloth over my naked body. The steam hovering all over the shower house was a good screen to block the lone guard’s vision.

But it was not enough to hamper my own.

I saw the homemade shank in J-Lo’s palm.

I inwardly smiled to myself.

This would be too easy!

He took the shower next to mine—telling the poor SOB previously showering there to get lost in Spanish.

Like, I understood prison. I understood Spanish too.

He began washing up.

It would have been a normal thing to do but his ‘hard-on’ kinda made his actions not so common.

You just getting here? he said to me, in a ‘girlie voice’ that didn’t match his look.

I make it a point never to look at a naked man with a hard-on, unless we’re fucking.

So, I said nothing.

Yo! You hear me talking to you white boy?! he barked.

I ignored him and continued to wash.

He took a step closer.

MISTAKE!

A really big one!

Back-off, I hissed, as I took a step towards him. It was a step that he didn’t even realize I took.

It closed the distance between us.

In a knife fight, it was essential to have space. He needed it to work the blade in his palm. Without it, the knife is useless—.

What—! was all he managed to get out.

I hit him with a solid blow to his six-pack.

He doubled over.

I then dropped a two punch combination on his jaw.

My knuckles dug into his gaping mouth.

His eye ballooned.

I heard the guard’s keys jingling loudly as he ran toward us.

A knee caught J-Lo beneath his chin. He dropped like the stock market on Black Friday. I was handcuffed and hauled off to ‘the hole’.

J-Lo got to spend a few weeks in the facility infirmary. I killed roaches for two months in solitary confinement. He sipped his meals through a straw for a while . . . When I got out, I was known as ‘the crazy white boy’ from the shower.

Works for me!

I didn’t have a single problem after the J-Lo incident.

Spent my time playing chess and betting on any kind of sports event that the convicts running the gambling racket could get set up.

No one came to visit me.

No care packages came.

No letters were passed out to me when the guard handed out mail.

But, I had a safe five digits on my account. I could buy anything that the joint had to offer, from cigarettes to jail-house booze. I may not have had all the ‘cushy things’ that some of the prisoners received, but I was ‘well off’.

Here comes the escort guard now Lucky! J-Lo yelled from down the tier.

My mirror caught sight of the pail-faced, fat slob as he slowly trudged towards my cell.

Hank? Yo Hank . . . you up man? I called out to my neighbor.

Yeah, yeah, Lucky, I’m up kid, Hank said. I heard his slippers shuffling towards the front of his cell. Here, I said, passing him a few cartons of cigs.

Aw man! You’re a swell guy, Lucky. Hank said as he reached his wrinkled arms between the bars to retrieve his bounty.

Hank was a ‘true blue convict’. A real good dude! I didn’t mind looking out for him. Quietly, I knew that Hank would never see the light of day again. He had been convicted of shooting and killing two state troopers. In New York State that means an unofficial death sentence. Although Hank wasn’t actually sentenced to death, the parole board would never release him. He would leave prison in a box similar to the one he buried those two state troopers werein, but his would be much cheaper.

Sure thing Hank, I said, reaching my hand through the bars to shake his.

You be good out there, Lucky, you here"! Hank warned before going back to sit on his twin bed to watch whatever program he was watching before I had taken him away from it, moments ago.

The jingling keys were getting closer now.

I took a deep drag off my smoke and plucked it into the toilet bowl.

The guard shuffled up to the cell gate.

I’m going to ask you a series of questions; don’t answer anything except for what I ask, got that? The fat guard asked.

I just nodded.

Can’t hear you, he barked.

Yeah, heard you, I said curtly.

Good, he said before looking down at a card in his hand.

Full name?

Rodney Grayson, I replied.

Date of birth?

Eight, twenty-three, seventy-one, became my automatic answer.

Height?

Six-one, I answered.

Weight? Hundred-eighty pounds.

He flipped the card over.

Hair color?

Blond.

Eye color?

Brown.

Any cuts or tattoos?

Numerous . . . This answer covered that question in prison, when the guard is too lazy to note all the tats and scars, and you’re too tired from showing them over and over.

Residence? Brookdale Men’s Shelter, I said, although, I wasn’t actually going to a shelter. I never give prison officials the place where I will be laying my head.

Open forty-six! The guard yelled down the tier to the other guard in the control booth.

My cell door began clanking open as the magnetic hold was released, and I was now free to step onto the tier.

Spread arms apart, the guard instructed me as he did a quick pat-down of my person.

Why?

I still didn’t know the answer to this—like I would try to steal a pillow or something from hotel crap-shoot.

I followed the profusely sweating ‘pig’ as he led me out of the block, and towards the administration building.

Once there, I sat down and waited with a bunch of other soon to be released convicts.

Grayson! the dumpy-looking chick behind the Plexiglas window yelled.

I went to the counter where she had a bunch of forms laid out.

Listen, because I am only going to say this once . . . if you are leaving with any of the state’s clothing, like socks, underwear, t-shirts—fill out form eight. Monies will be deducted from your account before you are processed out. If not, she placed a bag marked ‘laundry’ on the counter. Then place everything in this bag and change into your street clothes.

Not all inmates have the luxury of having family or friends send them clothing to leave in. So often times, the state will provide you with a chocolate brown monkey suit, a white shirt, and a pair of black shoes that will make people think you were straight out of the Seventy Day Adventist Movement.

I knew that I had a clothing package waiting for me. I told this to Miss Dumpy-looking.

Let me look, she said before sighing loudly.

Yeah . . . , good help is hard to find!

After about ten minutes, of digging around somewhere in the back, she returned with a cardboard box that had my first and last names on it.

Here, she said.

Thanks, was all I could say to keep from cursing her out.

I slipped into the room marked, Change, and went about my business discarding my prison greens for expensive clothing that wasn’t my style at all—Claude! I had specifically written him a letter telling him what clothes to snatch out of my closet and mail them to me. But judging from the snazzy threads in the box, he went shopping instead of listening.

After I had finished dressing, I looked myself over in the full length mirror attached to the back of the entrance door. Not bad, I said to myself. I looked like a bum who had just hit the lotto.

I gathered the state’s crap and stashed it into the proffered laundry bag.

The state doesn’t believe in wasting anything and soon some ‘poor cat’ will be sliding into my used socks and boxers.

Here you go, I said, sliding the box towards the check-out clerk.

Is everything here? she asked, while looking at me over her Benjamin Franklin glasses.

I felt like unloading a stream of profanities on her at this point. But, I know how things work. If I cursed her out, she would slow down my paperwork, and I wouldn’t end up leaving until close to midnight.

No thanks!

I might be a little foolish at times but I’m not stupid.

Yes ma’am, everything is accounted for! I said while showing her the worst dental work she had probably ever seen.

Go have a seat. Someone will call you soon, she said, hauling the box with the laundry bag inside off the counter.

Yep, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

Two hours later, me and a bunch of identically suited convicts were being led outside the front gate to freedom.

While the bored looking guard was telling the group about their behavior on the bus ride back to New York City,

I began walking off toward the parking lot.

Hey, Hey buddy! Where you going? He snapped at me as I walked away from his little speech.

I just nodded my head at the pearl-white Lexus near the prison’s entry gate.

That your ride? he asked with a look of disbelief on his face.

Yep, was all I said.

Claude sat behind the wheel waiting.

I walked to the passenger side and got in.

He pulled away like a phantom.

Soon, we were on our way.

We didn’t say a word to one another as the Lexus purred quickly on the road.

I know Claude as well as I know the back of my scarred knuckles.

He had something on his mind, and he wouldn’t speak until he was sure that it came out of his mouth like he had arranged it in his head.

I waited.

After about twenty minutes or so he spoke finally. Were you engaged in any kind of sexual activity while you were in there? Claude asked in his dead-pan manner.

Clearly if the role were defined between us, he would be ‘the raging nagging wife’, and I would be the husband that was trying to watch the game and ignoring him.

I lit a cigarette.

You shouldn’t smoke in the car. You know it sticks in the upholstery, and it damages my sinuses, he said. So, I flicked it out of the window.

About five minutes passed between us.

I sighed.

No, I said firmly.

Because if you would have had—so much as a blow job, I would not sleep with you ever again. Claude said.

His eyes never left the road as he spoke.

I know him, and I knew that the mood would lighten now that he had said what was on his mind, and that he had heard the answer he had wanted.

I leaned my head back into the headrest. Claude was checking me out! I could feel his eyes on me. His peripheral vision was working overtime.

He had not laid eyes on me for eighteen months.

I was ‘a prisoner’s prisoner’.

That meant that I didn’t allow friends or family to come visit me. I never sent home any pictures, and I only wrote once in a blue moon.

I did my time—that was it.

I didn’t worry about what went on in the streets.

I never touched the phones.

I never looked for anyone to do anything for me on the inside. I was practically born in prison if I know nothing else, I know how to do time.

Very early in my incarceration, Claude sent so many letters and pictures, that I had the administration put a