Lessons from an inadvertent teenage terrorist organization
Make no mistake. This is fiction. All references to actual persons, places, or events is purley coincidential.
When I was 16, my best friend Andreas literally shot the sheriff with a 357. Didn’t kill him though. Somehow the bullet shattered his jaw and blasted half the teeth out of his mouth. But he didn’t die. That morning Andreas stole his dad’s revolver, got on his bike, and rang the doorbell at around 8:30am. Boom! Right in the fucking mouth.
In this TED talk, I’ll explain some of the lessons I learned from being a scumbag degenerate, and I used what I learned from that experience to grow personally and professionally into what I am today. In fact, everything I learned about business and marketing, I’ve learned from selling weed.
In July and August, the town is in full bloom, and moving through the streets, it feels like one of those Normal Rockwell paintings: small town, nuclear families, friendly neighbors, unlocked doors, kids riding bikes, small shoppes, americana, ice cream, et cetera, et cetera. And just like one of Rockwell’s illustrations, it’s a charming cover for all the horrible shit that was actually happening in the world.
It’s like Ronald Reagan’s America down there. Almost everyone was white, middle-class, and feigning respectability. On the one hand, yes, it was all phony bullshit, but it was also very real, a collective delusion inspired by family vacations in movies, TV, and advertising. Behind the smiles and neighborly waving, alcoholic dads are fucking their secretaries and pill-popping moms are banging the mail man. Shit like that.
But for a couple weeks out of the year none of those things matter, and everyone tamps down their resentments just enough to maintain an air of decency, which isn’t easy when the main activity is day-drinking on the beach.
Drinking in public is a crime of course, and subject to a $1500 fine. But nobody enforced that as long as you weren’t too sloppy – as long as you didn’t smudge the veneer of respectability. The police department well understood their assignment: to maintain the illusion long enough for people to spend their out-of-town dollars on in-town food and liquor.
Panic panic panic! Our town gets overwhelmed with strong undertones
The panic over pop-up parties started the year we were 15 – the first summer after the first year of high school. In June a bunch of seniors from Newark planned a day trip to the beach in Long Branch, a much bigger town about 30 minutes away, to celebrate their graduation. The whole thing snowballed on social media and about 5,000 black kids showed up on a single day. So the town’s overwhelmed and everyone freaks the fuck out. Videos go around with swarms of amped up 18-year-olds drinking Hennessy and smoking blunts on the beach, taunting the cops.
Looking back on the situation, it’s already funny, especially since they’ve legalized marijuana. But that’s how things were, and probably still are. We’d hear adults having out-loud meltdowns over their property values, saying things like: “what if it happens here”, “we don’t want to be a spring break town”, “Long Branch is becoming a shit hole”, “what we need is a bigger police presence”. And occasionally someone would pull out some unsubtle doublespeak shit like: “those kids were behaving like animals and we need to protect ourselves and our town”. Everyone knew what that meant.
And so the panic set in. Frazzled town committees and homeowners associations sat for hours in long listening sessions with concerned residents, all of them pulling their hair out and giving carefully worded speeches to one another. Finally, they put out action plans, wrote new laws, and released public statements promising that they will “not tolerate unsanctioned pop-up flash mobs” and promising to “hold the organizers responsible both civilly and criminally”.
These new laws were mostly unenforceable. Lots of our friends were under-18 and working at ice cream shops and burger spots that were open until midnight or later on the weekends. All you had to be guilty of was: looking like you were 17 or younger and being outside after 10pm.
They could fuck with you if they wanted to, and that was the point.
Our quaint little tool shed traphouse gets busted
I met Andreas in the first week of middle school. Andreas and his friend Ryan had been sitting alone at a big round table in the corner of the lunchroom, and one day I decided to sit there too. We liked the same kind of music and shared an interest in smoking cigarettes, drinking, and chasing girls. Needless to say, we bonded quickly.
When we actually got our hands on alcohol and weed, it was obvious Andreas was a fiend. That crazy asshole was always trying to convince us to smoke weed with him somewhere sketchy like the bushes behind the mall or the woods behind school. I don’t believe in deterministic nonsense like addictive personalities, but Andreas made a good case for one.
Now the cops really didn’t have anything else to do but give traffic tickets and chase local stoner kids, especially in the off-season. The police force was almost entirely men – former high school athlete townie types who were winced at the idea of leaving their hometown to go to college – and they had an instinctive distrust of weirdo kids like us. They’d see us walking the nature trails in the park, to be fair probably going to smoke a joint. So they’d stop us and interrogate us with stupid questions like: where are you going, do your parents know where you are, why are you wearing all black on a hot day, blah blah blah, the usual cop bullshit.
By our second year of high school, we started hanging out and smoking weed in the old shed in Andreas’ backyard, and he started selling us dimebags – a real sophisticated criminal enterprise. We thought we were safe there, and anyway, it was better than getting chased by rent-a-cops through the woods behind the mall.
At school rumors spread that Andreas was “selling drugs”. That was all it took. Once the police department heard about it, they set up a surveillance operation, filming us from an unmarked car parked on the street for 3 straight weeks, ending in a raid on our quaint little tool shed traphouse. I guess they expected something pretty sinister to be happening, but when they actually busted in, they found a few stoned teenagers and 14 grams of weed (not that much – about enough for 10 to 15 large sized joints, in case you don’t know). It was me, Ryan, Andreas, and Andreas’ girlfriend Gina.
So now, the police department had just spent about 4 weeks of time and resources on this investigation, and all they had to show for it was some stoned teenagers. Without a doubt embarrassed by their meager get, they started to bluff. They threatened to charge Andreas with intent to distribute, they wanted to know where he got it from, and they made up lies to try to get us to confess. But even at that age, we knew to keep our mouths shut.
Andreas got charged with simple possesion, and for the rest of us, all we got was that old junior criminal speech, “you have your whole live ahead of you…otherwise you’ll end up…promise me this won’t happen again…” Then they took us home to our parents.
And this is how we learned to never trust cops.
Shoveling shit against the tide…A silly revenge plot turns into criminal charges
Ryan was a ballsy fucking kid, and he wanted revenge. He lived next door to the police station and got the idea to reverse the surveillance operation. He set up a camera with a live stream from his bedroom window overlooking the station and the parking lot. We’d watch to see who was on duty when, and we’d tried to figure out what they were up to. We learned their routines and schedules, and although it didn’t help much, we used it to evade them as much as possible.
After a couple weeks, Ryan called me one day, cackling. “Bro, check out the stream. I think Detective Pizzini is fucking that lady cop, Officer Murphy”. There they were on tape, making furtive movements as they got into the van, and emerging disheveled 20 minutes later.
We did the logical thing and posted the video anonymously to the town forum. A supervisor fucking a subordinate at work. We thought they’d both get fired.
Instead the consequences would crash around us and smack Ryan in his big, round, smart-ass face. Two days later, on a Saturday morning, Sheriff Scavone and two other officers came knocking at Ryan’s front door. His churchmouse parents let thim in without question. So Sheriff Scavone’s standing in Ryan’s bedroom and ripping the camera off the windowsil, yelling, “do you have any idea what kind of fucking trouble you are in right now kid?”
Ryan’s parents are in the room now, and Scavone is lecturing him, pulling different made-up charges out of his ass, things like disorderly conduct, misdemeanor harassment, and felony obstruction of justice. Even his parents look terrified. But Scavone was totally full of shit because filming in public isn’t an actual crime, so he took the camera as “evidence” and left without arresting Ryan.
Terrified at school the next week, we tried to figure out what to do. Ryan was despondent, a dead look in his eyes, sure that he would soon be charged with a felony and spend the next couple years at an all-expenses-paid public boarding school – the Jamesburg Juvenile Detention Center.
Paranoia set in. How did they know it was Ryan? Some of our friends thought they’d tapped our phones, read our text messages, and that any one of us could be next.
Conspiracy theorists are made from disgruntled idealists
On Friday morning, they found Ryan floating in the bay. At the end of May, the water in Jersey is cold, but not freezing. They found his bicycle leaning up against the guardrail on the bridge. He was alive, but had severe hypothermia and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk. His doctors said he might be permanently brain damaged.
Sheriff Scavone told his parents that it looked like a suicide attempt, and assured them that he was probably faking it. “He would recover soon. It happens more than you think”, blah blah blah, more gruff paternalistic cop bullshit. He didn’t give a fuck about us.
The incident soured something in all of us, and set off something especially wild in Gina and Andreas. I vividly remember Gina screaming at us, “they did this! It’s a cover up and those fucking pigs are going to do to us what they did to him!”
Personally, I didn’t know what to believe. At the very least, a bunch of self-righteous dimwitted cops scared a 15-year-old so much that he tried to kill himself.
After that, we felt hunted, like we could be under surveillance at any time. Parents forbid their kids from hanging out with us, afraid that we’d poison their innocence, and even our own parents couldn’t protect us.
We were good kids. We cared about each other, stuck up for each other. But they made us out to be the enemy. And so we were.
And this is what started the whole terrorism thing. We wanted revenge. We were naive, but we thought we could pull a few pranks and expose their hypocrisy. We tried staging our own pop-up parties, but barely anyone noticed. Things escalated, and in the end, we’d be charged with arson for setting off fireworks in the courthouse, attempted murder for the ipecac and exlax incident, and kidknapping the county K9 police dog to help us find a lost stash of cocaine.
Fuck it, the party goes on
Ryan’s situation was tragic, yes, but it didn’t stop us from partying. About a year later, the pressure on us let up, and we got better at finding places where we wouldn’t get caught. Andreas was on probation at this point, and regularly violating it to see Gina and go to parties.
A typical Saturday night, Gina’s parents were out of town and about 10 or 15 of us were smoking weed and drinking cheap light beer in her formica kitchen.
With all the confidence of the spectre of fucking death, Sheriff Scavone opened the unlocked front door and walked right into the kitchen. Andreas spotted him immediately, looked horrified, and knowing that he was fucked, that fucking spazz booked it out the back door at top speed. Andreas made it all the way home until 5 officers took him down on his own front lawn. He was arrested and released to the custody of his parents. Scavone told him he could be facing up to a year in juvi for the probation violations, plus the drug test he was about to fail, maybe less if he was willing to cooperate.
Now Andreas is in bed, staring at the ceiling, his parents screaming at each other downstairs, his best friend is still a vegetable, and Gina’s parents don’t want her to see him anymore. 16-years-old and stupid, he thought, “what do I have left?”