Anarchist to Abolitionist: A Bad Quaker's Journey

Remember That Time I Was Shot Through The Hand?

Before I tell the story of the first time I was shot, I need to tell a different story and give a little lesson in loan sharking. It will help with context.

The first thing to know about biker gangs, the Mob, street gangs, or whoever runs a loan sharking operation is that, in my experience, literally everything from Hollywood and the government stooges in the media is wrong. Please understand, loan sharks serve a purpose.

Consider living in Barstow, working some crappy job that barely paid the bills. Then, imagine some emergency came up, which forced you to go to Los Angeles for some reason, but the ratty car that gets you back and forth to work dies on I-10 on your way home. If this is the case, you have big problems. A county contracted tow truck will be there very soon to haul your car to a county contracted yard, and it will cost you big time to get it back. And it will still be dead. You'll have to get it towed to a garage and cough up more money to get it fixed. You'll be at the mercy of a mechanic you don't know and a garage you'll never see again.

That's fascism in action, and it's inescapable. Unless you have a relationship with the Brothers. Then you get to a phone booth (back in the days before cell phones), and you call your guy. A taxi shows up and takes you to the garage where your car is already being repaired. No one even brings up the topic of money, not even the taxi driver. The county doesn't get a dime from you. Your car will probably run the best it has ever run since you owned it, and you only have to arrange a friendly payment plan with the Brothers. That, in a nut shell, is the difference between the market and fascism.

The way the loan thing went was actually very simple. Let's say dude A needs money, there's some emergency, and he can't go to a bank for whatever reason. He goes to one of the Brothers, say dude B, and he borrows enough to get him past this emergency. Let's say A borrows $1000 from B. Let's also assume A gets paid weekly, they usually do, so that means his payments are weekly. On a $1000 loan he will pay $110 per week every week for ten weeks. In the end, if he makes all his payments completely and on time, he will have paid $100 to borrow $1000, that's 10%, for a ten week loan. I think that's fair.

If A can't make a payment, it's not a problem, so long as he pays the vig, which is $10 a week. If he can't pay the vig each week, some other arrangement must be made, for example maybe he has some object that B would like to own. If B finds that A has some possession worth about $10, then A can surrender that possession to B in order to keep the loan current. Or, perhaps A can offer some service to B to cover the vig, say wash B's car or mow B's lawn, or whatever they agree upon. This continues every week until A is able to pay off the loan.

No matter what Hollywood or the State has claimed, successful loan sharks almost never turn to violence to collect their payments. After all, a dead or injured man can't work and earn money to make his loan payments. It's simply bad business when a loan shark resorts to violence. And that's really what this is, business. It's not the senseless violence of Hollywood, it's simply people doing business in a voluntary way that doesn't involve government and their inherent regulations and violence. And, in most cases, business doesn't involve violence. In almost all cases, the State is the primary source of violence, not independent business people. For example, when was the last time you watched a Mom and Pop ice cream shop attack a Baskin-Robbins? The very idea is absurd! And yet the State murders hundreds, if not thousands of people a day, and most people don't give it so much as a thought.

Occasionally some thug robs someone, but it's the State that robs people continuously. And anyone who resists the State's theft faces a violent and deadly domestic military we call "police". Loan sharks do not behave in this fashion. They are usually honorable people with principles and standards of behavior, unlike the domestic military who will drag you out of your car and beat you for a minor infraction, or choke you to death on the street for selling a loose cigarette.

Having said all that, loan sharking can have a twist. Let's say our friend A can't make his payments, but he can make the vig each week, and this happens often. Our friend B collects his vig each week but the loan principal remains unpaid. After one hundred weeks, B has recouped his investment of $1000 and every vig payment after that is pure profit. Eventually A will fall into some money or whatever, and will pay off his balance, and that will be pure profit for B as well.

The twist comes after B has recouped his investment. He may reward a friend or business partner by giving him A's loan as a gift. He may or may not tell A about theexchange. Maybe B is too busy to go and collect $10 a week from A, so he gives A's loan to a junior partner to encourage him or reward him for loyalty.

This was the case with a gentleman I will call Adam.

Adam borrowed some money from our old friend Chet. For about a year, Adam made his payment every week, but some of the principal still remained unpaid. Eventually, Chet gave the loan to me as a gift. After about three months paying me every week, Adam fell into some hard times and could only pay the $10 vig each week. I simply didn't have time to hunt down Adam every week and collect $10, so I gave Adam's loan to one of my crew members that I'll refer to as Alvin. Alvin needed the money and the experience would be good for him. Unfortunately, around this time Adam discovered a thing we used to call "speed," but nowadays, the kids call it meth.

Wikipedia

Under any name, for people who are susceptible to the power of amphetamines, they can quickly take over a person's life and cause them to do incredibly stupid things. Adam was not that smart to begin with, so speed made him stupid on a level rarely seen. He had a simple job, driving a water truck around town and dumping water on trees. But add speed to the mix, and he couldn't even keep that simple job. That meant he couldn't pay Alvin. Rather than renegotiate the loan that Adam thought still belonged to Chet, he decided to pull a shotgun on Alvin and threatened to blow a hole in Alvin's chest.

Alvin was not a person accustomed to violence, so when he came to me with this problem, he was quite unhinged. I was able to calm him down and get the details of the encounter.

As it worked out, Alvin arrived at Adam's house. Adam invited him into the living room. Alvin explained that Adam couldn't keep skipping his vig payments and Adam responded by grabbing a shotgun from over his mantle, and sticking it against Alvin's chest. I knew all about Adam's shotgun, as I had gone rabbit hunting with him on several occasions. It was a little .410 single-shot breach loading shotgun. I knew this shotgun well because I had received a similar one as a Christmas present when I was about fourteen-years-old.

I told Alvin I would take care of this mess, and I went to see Adam. He invited me into his living room, where I assured him we could fix everything, and Chet wouldn't have to know about anything. I told him, "Friends help friends, and I'm your friend." Then I asked Adam for a drink of water. I had been riding my motorcycle in the desert and was parched.

Adam went into the kitchen and prepared a glass of ice water for me, and as he did, I took the shotgun off the mantle and unloaded it, then put it back in its place. When he returned, I thanked him and began drinking the water. I could tell by Adam's general appearance that he was quite high on speed at the time.

After a couple long drinks of the ice water, I said, "You know, we can fix this whole mess, but you have to pay the vig, even if that means you have to give me something from here in your house."

Adam snatched up the shotgun and stuck it to my chest, "How about if I give you some lead?" This wasn't the first time a gun had been aimed at me in anger.

I answered, "If that's the way you think this thing should go, then jump, froggy, jump!" At times like this I usually said, "If you feel froggy, just jump." But I remember distinctly messing up the line.

I heard the snap of the hammer on an empty chamber, so I grabbed the shotgun by the barrel with my right hand, while whipping him with my cable whip in my left hand. I rammed the butt of the shotgun into Adam over and over, and whipped him until he let go of the shotgun. As soon as he did, I gave Adam the most thorough beating I have ever given to anyone, and I've given a few beatings. Eventually I stepped back, picked up the shotgun, cracked the breach, and loaded it, then I walked through the house and took anything of value that I spotted, including the keys to Adam's pickup truck. I piled it all in his junky, old pickup, and then pulled my dirt bike into the back of his truck.

When I returned to the living room, Adam was still laying on the floor weeping and apologizing. I told him the debt was settled and he was free of his obligations to Chet, but I was taking his stuff and his shotgun. I told him that if I ever saw him again I would assume he was trying to harm me and I would kill him on the spot. He believed me. I don't know if I would have, I was very upset at the moment. The thing is, I liked Adam, but I hated what he had become.

When I got back to Alvin's place, I was still buzzing with adrenaline. I was violently shaking. I had never reacted like that to any situation before. I wasn't afraid, I just couldn't stop shaking. I did a line of coke with Alvin and that helped calm me some. I gave Alvin all the stuff I had taken from Adam, including the shotgun and the pickup keys, and updated Alvin on the ending of Adam's loan. I told Alvin to figure out a way to get Adam's truck back to him, as we had no right keeping his only means of transportation. Then we did a few shots of whiskey.

I didn't plan on telling the Brothers about what had happened with Adam, as I knew they would have a far more harsh ending for Adam than I thought was necessary. That was a mistake. I should have gone straight to them with the story. It would have prevented a lot of pain and blood.

Rather, I parked my dirt bike at home and took my Mustang downtown to hang out and calm my nerves. That was stupid, I was already pretty buzzed at that point. By the bowling alley, I saw a friend and associate I will call Rodney. He had been out of town for a while, working in Bakersfield, so I was happy to see him. I asked him if he would like to have a few drinks.

Rodney was one of the few people I knew that could keep up with me drinking whiskey. So, I just walked into the grocery store and walked out with a bottle of Jack Daniels. They were in the process of closing for the night and didn't even see me. Or maybe they did and just didn't want the consequences of stopping me, considering who my friends were. Either way, Rodney and I spent the next few hours consuming that bottle of Old Number 7.

At some point, Rodney told me that our old friend, Le Mans, from the gas station story, was back in town, living at his old place like nothing had happened. Evidently, he had made things right with the Brothers. I told Rodney about loaning him money that time, and that, since I never sold the hash, Le Mans still owed me the money. About the time we finished that bottle of Jack, in an idiotic drunken stupor, I decided to go get my money from Le Mans.

Wikipedia

So drunk I could barely walk, we climbed into my Mustang and I drove us over to Le Mans' house. It was a single level duplex, and Le Mans lived on the right side. As we walked by his precious car, I picked up a landscaping stone about the size of a football and smashed his headlight. I may have smashed his windshield as well, I'm really not sure. The events are a bit fuzzy in my brain. I do clearly remember walking up to his bedroom window and throwing the rock through the window, while shouting orders to get my money right now. The rest of the night is lost to my memory, but due to circumstances, I have to assume Le Mans paid me on the spot.

The next morning, I woke up in Mojave on the bench at the Greyhound bus stop, my car nowhere in sight. I didn't know where it was, I didn't know where Rodney was, and I didn't know how I got there. At first, I didn't remember anything about what happened the night before with Le Mans. I walked around Mojave for a few hours, looking for my car, but with no success. Eventually I called Alvin from a pay phone and he came to pick me up. We drove around Mojave some more, looking for my car, and then decided to go back to California City to look there.

Back in California City, we headed to the bowling alley parking lot. Flashes of the night before started coming back into my brain. Alvin made a round of the bowling alley parking lot, as we scanned for my Mustang. Alvin's car was a 1965 Falcon painted with a psychedelic-colored falcon on the hood with its wings running down the doors to the back fenders. It was quite a sight.

As we rounded a turn in the parking lot, a guy shouted to Alvin to "Hold up dude!" as he came jogging towards the driver's side of the car. All of the windows were down and another friend/associate was in the seat behind me. I was in the front passenger seat. I recognized the guy as a close associate of Le Mans, and suddenly I remembered what I had done to Le Mans and his car the night before.

Alvin stopped the car, but I told Alvin we needed to leave. He said he wanted to wait to see what this guy had to say. At that moment the associate behind me shouted "Ben! Watch out!"

Le Mans had come up behind us on the passenger side of the car and was pointing a gun almost exactly at my right ear. Fortune, luck, chance, or some higher power was helping me that day, because Le Mans was not a violent person, and was not accustomed to using a gun. A moment before he pulled the trigger, he closed his eyes and turned his head away, so he wouldn’t see the deed, or maybe just so he wouldn't be splattered in the face with my brains. Either way, the turning of his head to the right changed the angle of his hand, and therefore, the trajectory of his shot. Also, I turned at that moment and threw my right hand toward the gun. The bullet passed through my right hand, missed my head, and struck Alvin's radio, fragmenting into at least two chunks. One fragment hit Alvin's dash near his speedometer, the other fragment hit Alvin's right knee.

Alvin slammed his foot on the gas and the Falcon came alive, fish tailing out of the parking lot and down the street. I was temporarily deaf from having a revolver fired about three inches from my ear, but I shouted a location for Alvin to drive to.

The Brothers' safe house was no more than a mile away, so we got there quickly. They took us in and hid the Falcon in the garage. One of the ladies there took the lead in caring for us. She looked at Alvin's knee first because the way he was acting, you would have thought he was going to die. It was basically a scratch with a little splinter of the bullet sticking out. The worst pain for Alvin was when he finally saw how much of my blood I left in his Falcon.

The pain of cleaning my wounded hand was almost more than I could endure. There was a badly burned circle on the back of my hand that was a little over an inch across. In the middle of the circle was the entry wound,and the exit wound was in my palm, near the base of my thumb. Somehow it didn't break any bones. The cleaning process involved a squirt bottle of salt water that the lady put into the wound. She forced the salt water all the way through it and out to my palm. I can't describe the pain, but at that moment, I thought of my dad as a nine-year-old boy with his left hand hanging in shreds. I knew I could handle this. Afterward, cocaine and codeine eventually took the edge off the pain. I just wished they had given me the drugs first.

Once everything had settled down, I told the Brothers that were present, everything that had happened. They were not happy with me. They said I had to stay in that house until this thing was fixed. No contact with my family or anyone outside. Alvin was allowed to leave, but he first had to clean the blood out of his car. The Brothers didn't want him driving around in a vehicle that looked like someone was murdered inside. After he cleaned his car up, he was to stop by and tell my mother that I was in Bakersfield helping a friend fix his roof. Alvin was to tell her I would come home as soon as we had it done. Mom, being out on the ranch, had no phone, and I was a good roofer, so this would all sound plausible to her, if Alvin did his job. And Alvin obeyed and did as he was told.

Over the next two weeks, California City saw a series of reprisals, as the Brothers cleaned up the mess I had made, while Le Mans and his friends tried to fight back. Adam, on the other hand, slipped further into a speed-induced lunacy. The Brothers had put the word out that no one was to sell him any drugs, so Adam went to Lancaster to try to score some speed down there. Somehow, while in Lancaster, he had upset the local Lancaster Brothers and subsequently vanished. None of us knew what happened to him and none of us asked. We assumed his remains were at the bottom of some mineshaft, deep in the desert. I also didn't know what happened to Le Mans and of course I didn't ask. The Brothers were not brutal, but they were fast and efficient.

In response to my stupidity, Le Mans should have come to them. The Brothers would have made me correct things with Le Mans with fair compensation. Le Mans knew I was riding with the Brothers. You can't just kill someone over money, and you can't touch someone who rides with the Brothers without asking permission. When everyone follows the rules, no one ever needs to get hurt. But when people break the Brothers' rules, the Brothers have to step in and keep the peace.

I have to step away from the narrative for a moment and say some things. So called "organized crime" is actually a display of the failures of government being corrected by the market. Every kind of "organized crime" be they the Mob, biker gangs, or inner city ethnic gangs, are a direct result of government failing to fulfill its promises and the market stepping in to fill that need. Granted, these gangsters are not perfect. They may not even be nice, but they are at their roots, businessmen providing a service that the government has promised but failed to provide.

Let's take a moment and think about the appeal of inner city gangs, specifically those gangs that target young black men as their primary recruits. What is lacking in the market that creates a need for these types of associations? What stimulates their creation and fosters their growth? I'll answer that in a moment.

Back in the 1800s, gangs developed in the big eastern cities because immigrants were pouring in with little or no job prospects. The existing city governments did nothing to protect the immigrants from crime and abuse by the poor, who were already in the cities, competing with the immigrants for those few jobs. So, Irish, Italian, and Jewish gangs developed to both protect their ethnic brothers, and control localized crime by taking a tax from all criminals in their area, while taxing local merchants for protection from those same criminals.

Eventually, the Irish gangs were hired by the cities as police, which almost crushed the Italian and Jewish gangs. (Please read the book "Gangs of New York".) Then, government handed the remaining gangs an act of salvation, that being prohibition. And not just of alcohol. Around 1900, nanny government barfed out laws forbidding many vices that offended the tender emotions of those seeking to perfect society through force of law. Prohibition of alcohol, prostitution, gambling, and loans, were the big money items that funneled millions of dollars into the pockets of the competing gangs, but it went far beyond that. Price and wage controls, along with building restrictions and mandatory union membership, drove money into the hands of the gangs, as they provided the services that society needed but government had outlawed or regulated.

Jewish gangs faded due to several reasons, perhaps the most important being the tight family structure of Jewish families with the added drive to be in a "respectable" profession. But due to the incredibly easy money to be made and, I believe, the Catholic faith of the Italian mobsters, the Mafia flourished.

Inner city black gangs of today have a very different origin. If you step back in time to the 1950s, there were no black gangs. None. But there should have been. There should have been someone to stand up for the poor black people and powerful gangs would have done just that. But the family structure of the poor black families of the first half of the twentieth century, along with the incredibly powerful faith of those people, didn't make room for gangs. Also anytime these poor blacks began to organize outside of churches, the KKK would move in and murder the leaders, and often burn the churches where the leaders attended.

Then along came fascism. The 1960s saw the introduction of "The Great Society," which was a mobilization of government along with key corporations, which, no matter the intentions, broke the power of black families, while driving them away from their faith. Welfare money flowed into poor black neighborhoods, rewarding unwed mothers with free government food and cash, relieving young black men of the responsibility for their actions. This broke the family bonds, and drove the people away from their faith, and redirected that faith to government, and specifically the Democratic Party. This was the point in time when LBJ made his famous statement about having the black vote secured by the Democrats for the next 200 years, except he used derogatory terms as he often did in regards to black people.

But there was a glimpse of hope.

The late 1960s saw the original Black Panthers in California and some northern cities, along with men like Malcolm X. Had that movement continued unabated, I believe it would have eventually drove the negative influences of government out of black neighborhoods. But this was not to be. The FBI, who had ignored the Mafia for so many decades, saw very clearly the danger of empowered young black men, and they literally took aim at the leaders and the members, as the KKK had for the first half of that century.

Free government money and the fist of the FBI did what the KKK could never do. They broke the unity of black families and redirected their faith away from God and towards government, and many of the black clergy were as guilty as the FBI in everything except the violence. It was Stockholm Syndrome on a massive scale, and it worked.

The lack of family unity in the inner cities caused a need in the market. People need family, and gangs provide it. Inner city gangs, for all their flaws, provide a family structure for young black men. Prohibitions provide cash to fuel the gangs, and the structure of the gangs give young men a sense of togetherness and fellowship. But gangs don't threaten the powers that be. Gangs will never divert faith away from government. Gangs will never provide independent development and invention, therefore gangs are not in the least way a threat to the State. Just like the Mafia, inner city gangs actually help convince the civilian population that they need government to protect them, especially when the clergy actively preach the praises of government. That is why you will never see a government program that will ever be successful at deterring inner city gangs.

A variation of this pattern can be used to explain biker gangs and gangs of other socially displaced people, like illegal Hispanic immigrants.

Okay, rant off for now. Let's take this back to our narrative from the Mojave Desert and my hijinks with Le Mans.

In case you were concerned about my lost Mustang, it was at Rodney's mother's house. In a drunken stupor, I had dropped Rodney off there and just left my car in the driveway with the keys in the ignition. I never found out how I got to Mojave.

In two weeks, I was back home with my hand bandaged from a "nail gun" related accident. No one thought a thing about it. I often hurt myself when I worked too hard. I'm well known in my family for being clumsy.

Next chapter

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