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of that: chasing women, drinking, and gambling. There was a pretty Spanish girl about my age with big breasts who was babysitting their kids. Billy wanted to bang her, but it was too difficult with his wife in the house, so he told me I should. I actually did wind up messing around with her. I think he got a kick out of that. I mean, he seemed like a cool, tough customer, but on the inside he was just a wounded kid who needed someone like me looking up to him.I recognized that about him, even at the time, because I identified with him. Most of the things Billy did were self-destructive. He never really hurt anyone else.
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    W HILE I WAS STAYING IN J ERSEY WITH HIM, WE BROKE INTO a place in the middle of the night and robbed it. Billy always had some scheme or plan. “All we have to do is break through this cinder-block wall and we’ll be in the back room of the store where they keep the night’s receipts.” So there we were in this back alley with all these tools—screwdrivers, crowbars, the wrong kinds of tools, really—trying to hack and chisel our way through this wall. It took hours. At one point, Billy whacked my hand with a slap hammer and it started to swell up. When we finally crawled through this minuscule hole we’d made, it was like a scene from a movie—we were in the wrong place. It was a grocery store. But fuck it, we robbed it anyway. We took food and soda, and I guess they had a little bit of money, too. I mean, I don’t even remember what we got, but we got something. Billy was always deep into the bookies, always on the run from them. I gave him my share of our take so he could pay them off.
    The really funny part is that the cops actually tracked us down the next day and questioned us about it. They didn’t think we did it, but they thought we might know something. They said, “Whoever did it, they were professionals, because they bypassed the wires in the wall without setting off the alarm. That’s why we know it couldn’t be you fuckin’ idiots.” When they left, I said to Billy, “There were wires in the wall? You didn’t tell me there were wires in the wall.” He was dying laughing. “That cop was looking right at your swollen hand saying no way we could possibly have done it—and we’re the fuckin’ idiots?”
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    O NE NIGHT, B ILLY GOT A GUN AND WE DECIDED TO ROB A bar in Stapleton. It wasn’t really as premeditated as that sounds. We were just looking to do something, and that’s what we settled on. I didn’t even know why I was doing this stuff. Billy knew what he was doing. He was robbing a bar. Me? I was just trying to fit in with him. I sawhim as someone who cared about me, and I wanted to show him that I was worthy. Anyway, we went to this bar on Bay Street, and we were there for a while, drinking, playing pool in the back room, and plotting our next move. This is what I mean; it wasn’t even a plan. We were just trying to figure out what we were gonna do. We knew we wanted to do something.
    â€œShould we rob this fucking joint or what?”
    â€œIt’s still early. Let ’em get a little more cash in the till, make it worth our while.”
    While we were discussing it, this guy Robert Holder showed up, picked up a pool cue, and joined us. I knew him a little. His brother Dallas had been involved with wiseguys, got arrested, then flipped and ended up going into the Witness Protection program. This was back in the days when the Witness Protection program wasn’t as full as it is today. Now it’s like the Holiday Inn; you can’t get in. But in those days, it meant something. It was like, wow, the guy fucking disappeared. He ratted out the wiseguys and now he’s gone. Anyway, Billy let this guy Holder know what we were doing, that we had a gun and we were going to rob the place. I don’t know what he was thinking, because this guy, whose brother was a rat,