The Fence - Dick Lehr [18]
Nineteen eighty-eight was a big year for Smut. For one, he and Indira were past puppy love. They were inseparable and acting beyond their years of seventeen and sixteen. By summer’s end Indira was seven months’ pregnant. Fatherhood was on Smut’s mind. But it wasn’t his only concern. The year was also defined by deepening troubles at home and in the street.
Smut’s parents smoldered in anger and tension. Mattie, saying she could not take her husband Robert’s abuse anymore, moved out. “I’d just had enough,” she said. Her husband, she said, was a “control freak,” always yelling whenever she went out with friends—Where the hell you goin’? They argued about his drinking. “I wanted him to stop,” she said. Robert never hit her, she said, but when he drank he was “abusive with his mouth. I got sick of hearing it.” Mattie moved in with another man.
Mattie was Smut’s anchor, and suddenly she was gone. He took it personally. “This hurt me a lot because I didn’t understand why.” Mattie was no longer there to stand between Smut and his father. “My father changed for the worse and my home life became a living hell.” Smut got mouthfuls from him—how he was no good—and Smut wanted out of his father’s line of fire. He stayed at friends’ apartments. He sold coke. He spent his time with Indira.
“I was running the streets.” There were also secrets and lies. Smut and his older sisters knew where their mother was staying, but their father did not. They lied as he angrily tried to figure out Mattie’s whereabouts. To see Smut, Mattie picked him up at one end of West Selden Street in her new friend’s car. She’d take him out to dinner. Smut pleaded with her to come home. Mattie assured her son that she loved him. Eventually, six months after she’d left, Mattie returned home. “I came back to my children.”
Nineteen eighty-eight was also the year Smut’s luck on the street ran out. Mattie had been home only a little while when one of Smut’s friends came by the house late one night. It was October 5. Smut climbed into the friend’s car and the two drove to Canton, a suburban town located south of Boston. They left their car and, in the dark, snuck to the back of the Coleman’s Sporting Goods store. They broke a window, got inside the store, and grabbed some guns. Driving away, north on Route 138 toward Boston, they were pulled over by the local police. They were arrested the moment police saw the automatic weapons.
Smut had broken into the big time. Within weeks, he was indicted for breaking and entering with the intent to commit a felony, malicious destruction of property, two counts of theft of a firearm, and possession of a firearm without a permit. The charges carried heavy prison time. “Before this, when he got in trouble, he got out of trouble. I posted bail, whatever,” said Mattie. “But I told him there’s going to be a time when I can’t help.” Smut’s timing also could not have been worse. On October 12, seven days after his arrest, Indira gave birth to their daughter. They named her Shanae.
Smut found himself juggling court appearances with hospital appearances. “I was a knucklehead, the things I did,” said Smut. But self-awareness did not stop him. Over the course of the next twelve months while the gun case was pending, Smut ran up a slew of new criminal charges. In December, he was charged with receiving stolen goods. Four months later, on March 14, 1989, he was caught in the suburban town of Norwood popping the ignition on a car. The next week, he and three friends were arrested by police in Waltham, Massachusetts, driving two stolen cars, a Chevy Camaro and a blue Oldsmobile. The next month, he was busted by Boston police for coke possession. In August, he was caught trying to use a screwdriver to steal a car in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, and later that month, he was stopped by police for driving while his license