American Outlaw - Jesse James [31]
We had few outlets there. Sports, however, was one of them. By law they were required to exercise us, so we played touch football in the yard. No tackling allowed, which was probably for the best. Lining up, I couldn’t help but laugh: I’d played on the best teams in Southern California for years. Now I found myself next to Stinky, the bad-check forger, and Danny, the blue-light bandit. It was kind of awesome.
“Go long, dirtbags,” I called to them, inserting myself into the game as quarterback. I tossed the ball in a wobbly spiral toward Johnny Pinece, a tiny black-haired boy who’d been cordially invited to the CYA for trying to sell homemade amphetamine. His ill-considered brew, handcrafted in the privacy of his own bathtub, was remarkable for the simple fact that it contained only two ingredients: Sudafed and old bleach water.
The ball hit Johnny’s spidery hands and bounced off like a brick.
“I was that close,” Johnny swore as we lined up again.
“You were right with it,” I said. “You absolutely were.”
Kiddie jail wasn’t all bad. At least I had the ball in my hand, reminding me of what I’d be doing when I got out of here. Two of my football coaches, Frank Stoudemire and Bill Pfieffer, had off-season positions in the Youth Authority as administrators, and although they never said as much, I could tell it kind of tickled them to see me playing touch ball with this gang of miscreants.
One fellow, however, didn’t find the sight of me amusing in the slightest. His name was Troy Zuccolotto, and he worked at the CYA as a guard. Troy was an erect, veiny man, with gigantic muscles and skin as orange and leathery as a catcher’s mitt. “Zuke” was a member in good standing of the International Federation of Body Builders; not only that, but he’d been crowned Mr. California or something, too, several years before. A fact his frosted hair would allude to.
We had only one weight machine in the CYA, a square, rudimentary Universal bench press with stack plates. We all fought among ourselves for the privilege of using it, but Troy used the petty power and candy-ass authority granted to him as a prison guard to skip the line and claim the machine as his own.
“What do you want it on, Zuke?” asked one of his little sycophants, readying to move the weight pin for the master.
“Whole stack,” Troy said, grinning proudly. “This is Zuccolotto we’re talking about.”
I despised him—his ego and his strut. Even worse, he was a bully. Our football games were touch, but when Troy would participate, they magically became physical tests of endurance. He was brutal, crushing kids seven years his junior and a hundred pounds lighter. Troy insisted on playing running back. Every play went through him. Stoner after stoner would come at the guard, and he would stiff-arm them in the face, or simply mow them over with the brute force of his testosterone-fueled rage.
“Chill out, dude,” I finally told him, one day when we found ourselves on opposing squads.
“Yeah? Who the fuck do you think you are?” he spat. “Are you tough, is that it?”
“They’re about ten times littler than you,” I said quietly, “so why don’t you just take it down a notch?”
Troy’s huge jaw tensed and clenched. I could see the cords of his neck pumping a quick slug of extra blood to his reptilian brain. “Tell me again what to do, fucko.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Ball,” Troy ordered.
His hapless quarterback handed it to him.
Troy came running straight at me. Steam was coming out of his nostrils. I held my breath as the huge, tanned wildebeest swung the full weight of his perfectly sculpted deltoids