Good Rat Bad Rat

By Ed Canto

When an eight-year-old boy went from playing cops and robbers in the streets around Boston to chasing down criminals with a real badge and gun, he knew that there was nothing else he’d rather do for a living.

High-speed pursuits, drug busts, domestic assaults, burglaries, kidnappings, medical calls. Ed has seen it all.

For six years, he patrolled the streets, proud of serving the community where he and his family called home.

Until the day it all came crumbling down around him…

Ripped from the headlines.

Suddenly, the lead story on news outlets around the country, Ed found himself going from hero to zero overnight at the evil intent of the Nobodies. A series of false accusations and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he now faced going to prison as a disgraced cop.

Hitting rock bottom, and the bottom of a bottle, he found himself back where it all began, only this time he had nothing to lose. Everything built to a single moment that would define the rest of this life and realized that being on the wrong end of that gun could make a police officer do unspeakable things.

Leaving all law enforcement and everything he ever loved behind, he must do something he never thought he would have to. He regretted nothing, did what he had to, and found himself in the most unexpected place.

Breaking his twenty-one years of silence, this is the first time Ed Canto will tell his true story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662442483

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Good Rat Bad Rat

Ed Canto

Copyright © 2021 Ed Canto

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-4247-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-4248-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Rat Bastards

The Rec

Cops and Robbers

Coach Watson

The Spill Test

Revenge?

Here I Am!

Step Right Up!

Myra

Farewell Middlesex

Sir, Yes, Sir!

Win the Battle, Screw the War

Big Ben

To Serve and Protect…on Mother’s Day

The Taste of Blood

The Offer

Who Am I?

A Pound of Pressure

Say Yes, Shake No

Starting Over

A New Beginning

Beantown

Samantha

Going All In

The Final Chapter

Introduction

The strong midafternoon sun glared down, gently warming all that it touched in the room. The bricks of the fireplace, the stone benches and statues, the gold-lined wallpaper, and at last, the floor. The pink shag carpet seemed to come alive as if firmly planted, growing out of the ground that my father built, taking on its own personality. The massive bay window helped to heat the room, and no matter where you were, the beams of sunlight would somehow always find their way to you. There were very large drapes on both sides, acting as the perfect hiding place for when my mother would come looking for me. At the foot of that window was where I would lay, sprawled out on my stomach. My head turned facing the window so that one side of my face caught the heat of the sun and the other the heat of the carpet. Like a cat searching for warmth, I’d laid there most sunny days, drenched in the golden sunlight, dreaming of somewhere, or something. The noise and confusion of the world outside could not enter here, nor was it welcome. It felt like being in another world, a faraway place, a peaceful place. There would be no other room in the world that would make me so happy, so content, and so safe.

Many lessons would be learned inside that bay window and many more outside it.

My father was a smart man, but not how most people would describe intelligence. In fact, it was only in the later years of his life that I began to suspect that he couldn’t read, and, only after his death, did I learn he never graduated high school.

No matter what needed fixing or assembly, somehow my father never needed guidance or directions. I found that amazing as a child. To me, there was nothing he couldn’t do.

I’ll put this together, no problem, I don’t need the directions, he would say.

In fact, he had built that very house, the house that made me feel so safe and secure as a child, and he couldn’t have picked a better spot for that bay window.

It was a single-family, ranch-style house with a full-finished basement. Of course, it had all the brick, masonry, and wrought iron that most of the other Italian homes had in the neighborhood. It had its share of those classic ’70s square mirrors, with the gold squiggly lines through them that when grouped together made up an entire wall. My dad had built everything in that house that was either made of wood or stainless steel. Most of his work was still there. I guess true craftsmanship never lets time get the best of it.

He constantly had a side job going, which always included some kind of construction or masonry work. There were many times I would accompany him on these side jobs, if only to hand him tools or to keep him company along the way. My father seemed to always have another way to make money for the family, in addition to his full-time job in steel manufacturing.

Never give up an opportunity to make money, Eddie, he would say, if you don’t make it, someone else will.

He had a distinct ability to read his surroundings and everyone in it. He wasn’t the type to throw the ball around or to sit down and have one of those father-son talks that you see in movies. No, what he did was much more valuable than that. What he did was teach me about life, real life, and the way things are affected by the way things affect you. He eventually taught me about my own character and the kind of person I would become. I watched him, I learned from him, and I was proud of him. Imagine that, all without one ball being tossed or one word being read.

Always try to be the best at whatever you do, Eddie, he would say, and never stop trying to master your craft.

It would be many years later that I would finally understand what he meant by master your craft.

It was only recently that I was able to reflect back to those early days and write about them. I have written only a handful of things over the years, all of them poems and all them about the passage of time.

I have written poems to my two beautiful daughters, in hopes that they will someday read them when I’m gone and smile. I had a poem published in my high school yearbook, in hopes that my classmates will someday read it and reflect on it when they were young. And I have written my father’s eulogy, in hopes to give my mother a sense of comfort and help her heal. I fear it has only helped me.

In high school, I wrote poems for other guys so they can give them to their girlfriends and pass them off as their own. We would sit down and have a meeting, either in the gym or library or during a study hall, where they would tell me specific details about their girlfriend, tidbits of personal info, or private jokes they wanted to be mentioned. Anything that would be sure to make their girl cry and be sure to get them laid. I charged them, of course.

I am a believer in learning from the mistakes of others when at all possible. I also know that some mistakes just have to be made. People are truly a result of their own life experiences, a by-product of each hug, each kiss, each fight. Had I run away like John did and chosen not to fight on that cold winter day, then the very essence of who I became would cease to exist. Had I not scraped the driver’s hair and blood off the windshield or come within a pound of taking a life, then my timeline ceases to exist. Would I be the same person today? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

I have learned that most people try to escape their past but, in reality, never will. Someone once said that time is a predator that stalks us all our lives. But if you kill the predator, if you avoid its powerful bite, then you become someone unrecognizable. Another version of yourself. If you had the chance to erase the single, most profound mistake you have ever made, would you? Could you then live with the person you would become?

A pound of pressure makes all the difference, and some mistakes just have to be made.

Chapter 1

Rat Bastards

It was early February 1978, and I was like any other eight-year-old kid growing up in Everett, Massachusetts, a stone’s throw from Boston. A quick five-minute bus ride for those of us who remember when riding the T only costed a dime. Imagine, a dime to ride public transportation or to make a call on a public pay phone. Spotting a telephone booth today would be as rare as finding a 1943 copper wheat penny. Back in the day, we called it a rape dime since that was all it cost to make that emergency phone call for when the shit hit the fan. Funny, to this day I still keep an old rusty dime hidden away in a compartment of my tackle box. Why am I keeping that dime in there and who do I plan to call?

The Goodie Shop on Elm Street had rows of public phones. I missed checking them to see if someone left a dime in the return slot.

And I am still searching for that 1943 copper wheat penny, part of me knows I will never find it. I won’t stop looking.

The mounds of snow were piled high. From the tops, I could see all the way over to the Rec Center and Glendale Park, which sat three blocks away from our house on Clarence Street. The infamous Blizzard of ’78 had struck. The storm crippled the city and shut down the entire public transit system. No cars, buses, or taxis. No motorized vehicles of any kind were allowed to be operated for days. Not even the roar of the planes flying in and out of Logan airport could be heard. For the first time, the city had an eerie calmness to it, a quiet hush that blanketed the entire city. In the distance, there was the humming of a snowblower, the scraping of a steel shovel along the frozen pavement. Other than that, silence. It was as if someone had pressed a pause button, or perhaps the city awoke and found itself in an episode of The Twilight Zone. In a city where sirens and squealing tires reigned, the serenity of the fallen snow had given us all a much-welcomed break from reality.

When it was over, 27.1 inches of snow had fallen over a span of twenty-four hours. All I could remember thinking was when my best friend John was going to get here so we can start construction. After my father and brother had finished shoveling, I was barely able to see my grandparent’s house over the huge banks of freshly thrown snow. In Everett, the houses were very close, with either a garage or chain-link fence separating them. To a city kid like me, none of these barriers were much of an obstacle, but still, they divided the properties and who was responsible for what.

Our house was unique in that it sat directly behind my grandparents, nestled back off the busy street. As a child, it felt safe and secure as if nobody knew it were there, shielded in the watchful eye of my nana. I miss waving to her as I sprang from my front door to begin the daily walk to school three blocks away. Her rear window faced the front of our house and the walkway I used to get to the street. I can close my eyes to this day and see her waving. I was all too excited to look up and see her smiling face framed in that window. It was as if we had a top-secret code that only we knew. She never missed a day of seeing me off.

There I went, with my Six Million Dollar Man lunch box in hand, along the side of her house and up the long driveway that led out to the street. No longer protected. No longer seen.

But that day, nothing was open. No stores, no restaurants, no schools. Steve Austin would not be carrying my PB&J, nor would Nana be perched in her window.

During the night, the city plows had nowhere to pile all the snow, and so, we were one of the lucky ones. Clarence Street was where the DPW decided to dump, push, and build up a gigantic mountain of plowed snow. It must have stood twenty-five feet tall in the middle and slowly declined outward in height, where it finally met with the sidewalk. It was our own winter wonderland, but more importantly, it was the perfect place to begin.

I had finally made my way to the top when I heard John come bounding around the corner of Birch Street. When he did, we made eye contact. He froze in his tracks. His eyes grew wider as he surveyed the mountain before him. He looked up at me as I put both arms and clenched fists above my head. We both knew what we had to do.

We began hollowing out an entrance to what would soon be one of three entry doors into the fort. We were thinking on a grand scale, and with that amount of material to work with, why wouldn’t we? Minutes turned to hours. Lunchtime came and went, without either one of us mentioning the thought of food. Both our stomachs rumbled, neither would admit whose it was. We were two forty-niners during the gold rush, feverishly tunneling, scraping, and packing the snow into our very own first apartment. It was white gold, with the perfect amount of water to snow ratio that made for the perfect packing and perfect snowballs. Snowballs that would be used for our arsenal of defensive weapons that all-mighty snow fort should stockpile. Unfortunately, circumstances wouldn’t allow us to get to them in time when we needed them the most.

My grandfather had later told me that all he could hear from his front porch was our hands feverishly slapping and packing the snow from inside our fort. I knew when he was standing there. The smell of his cigar crept its way off the porch, over the snowbanks, and into the structure, giving it a much-needed homelike feel. The only thing missing was the unmistakable smell of my nana’s homemade gravy and meatballs. That would have stopped us.

Finally, after five hours of intense and concentrated work, John and I had completed the world’s most fantastic snow fort. Three separate ways in, custom ice shelves, valuable munitions, and, since John was a fellow Paison, an Italian flag on the roof made from my mother’s food coloring. Inside, it was five feet high in the center and sloped down to the smooth vertical walls that housed custom windows for lookouts.

We were men, tired from a long day’s work. For a time, we admired what we had built, with our own hands and knitted mittens. It was at this very moment that, for the first time of many more to come, I understood why my father loved building and creating with his hands. I finally got it, pride in building something from nothing. That day, I became my father. I built a great thing, something unique, something beautiful. And I, too, did not need directions.

It was a half hour after completion when it happened. We had built this awesome snow fort that cloaked us from the outside world, but we were indeed still in the grip of the city. A city that harbors dangers and disappointments around the next fire hydrant or parked car. We heard them coming.

We sat there in total silence, wishing that they would continue past us, down along the sidewalk, and disappear around the corner. Wishing that something, anything would steal their attention in another direction. Wishing…

Shit! I whispered loudly.

That was the first time either of us had sworn out loud. It made us feel like men again. If only for a short time.

Why did we have to put that damn Italian flag on the roof? Why did we have to be so damn proud of who we were? It was an open invitation for local punks and bullies to investigate what lay beneath. My grandfather had a funny name for all the local delinquents. He called them rat bastards, and when he did, his voice would have a nefarious tone to it.

I heard a loud shriek, like a battle cry from some ancient warrior heading into battle. The next thing I saw was someone’s entire leg come busting through the roof. At first, we couldn’t believe what we were looking up at. Did this just happen? Seconds later, the first of the entranceways were being demolished by two other felons. They jumped and stomped the perfectly round doorways that led to John and me.

They were laughing and crushing the fortress with the weight of their own bodies, somehow avoiding us in the process. It suddenly became very bright as the sunlight poured in, drenching every corner of the room.

For an instant, I thought, Man, this would have looked awesome with a skylight!

At that moment, I looked up and saw the faces of who was doing this to our structure. There were four of them. For reasons unknown, I locked eyes with the biggest. I had instantly put all my happiness, excitement, pride, and childhood aside and showed absolutely no emotion. I found myself in a standoff for what seemed like an eternity. I can’t really say what John was doing at that moment, perhaps he was in a similar showdown. Or maybe he just ran away. If so, why didn’t I follow?

I tried my best to look as tough as possible. However, when you’re sporting a knitted orange hat with a purple pom-pom, it isn’t easy to look badass. I always tried to be as tough as my cousins in East Boston but could never pull it off. They were always rumbling with hoodlums in their own neighborhood. But this day…would be my first rumble.

I remember he threw the first punch.

I jumped on the leader with every bit of adrenaline I had, delivering punches like Rocky Balboa. There was blood running down his nose as I made good solid connections. His legs buckled under him, and he fell to the cold white floor. He tried to block the punches but barely had the chance. I kept swinging. Right, left, right, left all the while watching his tough attitude drain slowly from his face. The others saw this and ran.

Finally, I could see that he had clearly given up. I stopped the onslaught of punches and helped him to his feet. With blood running down his face, I helped him wipe the snow from his coat and scarf. I’m sure that’s what Rocky would have done.

No words were ever spoken, just nodded at each other, and he slowly walked away. As he was leaving, I saw him reach into his pocket for something. For some reason, I wasn’t nervous. He turned back to me and smiled, and as he did, he threw something at me. I caught it with my right hand, never taking my eyes off him. He turned back around again and continued to walk away. I looked down at my hand to see what it was. It was round and warm. It had a familiar texture and smell that I recognized immediately. I smiled and couldn’t help but take a bite.

Ahh, the sweet smell of Papa’s cigar. When I finally opened my eyes, I thought that I was at the dinner table in my grandmother’s house, surrounded by food and family.

It was a tradition every Sunday. We would all gather at their house for