The Sound Grass Makes

On the afternoon of our disappearance, me and Frankie were running our ‘Eat the Rich’ hustle at a country club in Beverly Hills.

Frankie parked cars; I piloted the snack wagon. This was more than a lifetime ago, every day since then abandoned to the run. Back then, we were beautiful teenage babies with Johnny Rotten posters nailed to our bedroom walls. The Ramones…The Violent Femmes…The Misfits…The Clash. I was crazy for Pat Benatar, but Frankie didn’t dig rocker chicks.

That should have been a sign.

The world was already half off its axis by 1985: Preppies dressed head-to-toe in green neon, storms of Alberto Vo5 hairspray splitting apart the sky. On TV, forever smiling guys in Wall Street suits and yuppie convertibles sowed the seeds for our undoing, but somehow it all felt hypnotizing—like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The more you own, the more you are.

Why not eat the rich? We were making four bucks an hour at a club where members pulled into valet in Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces, all dressed in the latest designer clothes from the most exclusive places on Rodeo Drive. We parked their cars, opened their doors. All our lives, we’d felt invisible. Just latchkey kids, shuffling around old courtyard apartments, spread across the asphalt flatlands in the shadows of the Valley. I guess you could say we were affluent-adjacent, though hardly an honest dime had rolled our way all summer. Frankie blamed Washington, something called trickle-down economics. He said they’d forgotten to turn the tap on.

When I think about it today, across so many years of hiding, I try to understand why I would throw my life away for ten-thousand dollars? My life for the money in a mobster’s wallet. I replay that moment in truck stops and gift shops where the words begin to bend from southwestern to southern. And in every hideout late at night where the silence grows so absolute, you lie awake waiting for footsteps.

But I’ve never found any good excuses, symptoms mostly. We were seventeen, our childhoods were almost over, and maybe we felt cheated out of something important, something vital. Or maybe I was greedy, believed I’d earned some worldly desserts for almost graduating high school. I had my rationalizations. My father walked out when I was eight. My mother served cocktails at a local bar on the strand in Hermosa. She scoffed when I talked about going to college, but whispered she’d find me a top plastic surgeon if I wanted cartoon boobies. Maybe it was a lot of things. Maybe it was listening to “Anarchy in the U.K.” fifty-thousand times.

Our hustle involved golf carts. Nobody hired caddies anymore and the march of progress temporarily made rich men easy to rob. Some kept their wallets close, but most stowed them in golf bags, strapped to the backs of new motorized carts. It was my job to drive the snack wagon. In our hustle, I was the scout. The club dressed me up like a country club virgin—high black ponytail, oozing white Benetton. I sold beers and Cokes and peanuts and pretzels and seven-dollar ice cream sundaes, where the worst forever asked about cherries.

Most were older men with world-beating smiles: movie producers, foreign businessmen, old-time rock and rollers, sheikhs playing a round in flowing headscarves. Some were friendly, most were dreadful. Men accustomed to having their way forever had their eyes on me. That day, the pervert was a meaty, anvil-headed guest named Joey Imperioli. Joey ordered two beers, peanuts and a sundae, and after pulling a half-smoked cigar from his teeth, made a show of all the money he’d brought with him to California, then tried stuffing a bill down my top. I lurched and we watched a hundred dollars tumble to the grass below. Joey was three times my age. He was a made man in a New Jersey crime family, a killer I learned too late.

“Give daddy some cherries,” he breathed in my ear, looking at the money next to my shoe, then brushing his eyes up the rest of me. Here was the man that I wanted to rob.

I drove up to the front, to valet, threw Frankie our bat signal, and just like a tomcat Frankie’s whole body shifted beautifully in midair, tossing keys to the other boy, and in two snapped fingers he was sitting by my side. We parked off the sixteenth fairway, behind the trees. Joey’s foursome was chipping on, his cart parked next to the sand trap behind.

It was thrilling watching Frankie sneak-up on that cart, all of him moving with such great certainty, like there never could be any reason for doubt. Frankie slid the wallet out and pocketed Joey’s money. There wasn’t any time to look. Only after, did we see what we’d gotten ourselves into: forty bills, $500 apiece, which along with the pocket change came to $20,365.

Christ.

Joey and the other men had their backs to us as they walked to the green. One man held the flag, while another crouched low and studied his line. Off to one side, Joey spoke with the fourth guy. My eyes swung back and forth between Joey on the green and Frankie behind the cart, as if keeping my eyes on the man I loathed could help bring back the boy I loved.

From his pocket, Joey pulled out a little black notebook. Not one of those cheap numbers, but fancy, rich, the cover either leather or a softly brushed moleskin that sparkled in the spotlight of the noonday sun. Joey had one of those stubby golf pencils and was writing something down slowly—like a loan shark might tally a bet. Whatever it was, it must have been important for Joey to keep that book so close while leaving twenty-grand for the taking behind.

As Frankie turned and began to slink back, for an instant I felt every molecule of summer air crackling around me. I felt justice, victory. I was already spending Joey’s money. Maybe it’s in a mobster’s nature to sense these unlucky moments—because that’s when Joey turned around. He saw Frankie sneaking away, and it took him no time to figure it out.

Joey spiked his putter and yelled so loud the birds scattered. In the trees, all my good feelings evaporated, replaced by a panic so iron hot it melted everything inside me. Frankie wasn’t on his knees anymore. He was standing straight up, bouncing side to side on his toes, searching for any way out. Joey, meanwhile, looked like a bull ready to charge. He was wearing a loose-fitting black tennis shirt, and from underneath it he pulled a gun.

Everything happened so fast; only in my memory does it seem to move slowly. I could have driven away—nobody had seen me yet. Instead, I sat anchored in disbelief. Frankie dodged back and forth across the fairway. There was no way Joey could catch him with his feet, but Joey had a gun, and Frankie couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Frankie danced, sprinted, cut, dodged. He should have turned and sprinted on a line, but Joey kept pointing that gun. Somehow, Joey cornered Frankie, cut him off near the green. He lunged at Frankie like a linebacker and caught him by the ankle. Frankie twisted and tried to break free, but Joey brought him down hard, pinned him savagely and climbed on top. As the other men looked on in shock, Joey began to throttle Frankie.

This was more than I could take. From my hiding place, I bolted out. I ran up screaming, “Stop! Stop!” and that’s when I saw the gun on the grass. Joey was pressing on Frankie’s windpipe and Frankie’s eyes were searching for air.

“Shoot him!” Frankie gasped.

What happened next is hard to explain. Midnight arrived in the middle of the day. Everything seemed to disappear except for Joey’s gun. No glimmer of the next forty years, no angel on my shoulder telling me to stop. My body seemed to move without me.

The trigger brought the gun to life. I don’t remember much after that.

What I do remember is the sound the grass made as we fled. How the blades kept growing longer beneath us: green, fringe, fairway, rough, the knee-high stalks between the trees. And how the longer they grew, the louder the blades became as we tore through them.

I wondered: Is this judgment? The further we ran, the louder they hissed.