The Carbones Meet the Mob

by
Nelson R. “Buzz” Kellogg
© 2005
2

I grew up in a small, nondescript town in central

New Jersey. But I can only say that from the perspective
of adulthood, and many more towns I have called home.
During my early growing-up, until age twelve, my
hometown was both “just the right place,” and a magical
place. To be sure, my little town was not blessed with
anything I know of that an adult would claim as a
bragging right. I don’t know of a single important event
that ever took place there, except, of course, to the
individual lives of its inhabitants. I don’t think anyone
who ever attained the slightest bit of fame or infamy
came from there or, for all I knew, even passed through.
My father, it was true, was born in my grandfather’s
house, which was across the street and several dwellings
down. But that, too, was unremarkable. Lots of folks
were born and laid to rest there. It was also a town not
easily placed demographically. It was a community that
was pleased to call itself middle-class, though it held
onto that distinction only with some effort.
My grandfather, who made it through the Depression
only with grit and determination, doing chores for other
people and depending as well on what income the
children could bring in from their jobs, was a factory
worker for most of his life. He owned very little, and
what he ran mostly belonged to other people. My father
 3

was the only one of his siblings to go to college and

became the music teacher in the same high school he
attended as a youth. This, I was sure, put us in the middle
class of America, not because I knew any better, but
because that is what my parents told me, and I always
believed them. Had I been less naïve, perhaps I would
have seen all the exceptions to a homogeneous middle-
class existence in our town as embarrassments or
nuisances, but the way I incorporated them into my
nascent world view was to see them as exotic and nearly
supernatural.
For example, directly across the street from us, on
the corner of Center Street and Whittier Avenue, was
Bud Clark’s house. Bud, or “Clarkie” as we used to call
him, was perhaps seventy years old around that time,
though it was hard to tell. He was a lifelong bachelor
who inherited his house from his parents. He made what
accounted for a living by fixing lawn mowers and
“refurbishing” old bicycles. My older brother was given
one of those bicycles one Christmas, and even a first
blush it didn’t look quite right. That was because the
rims on the bicycle, instead of being chromed, were
rather lumpy-looking, and spray-painted silver. When my
brother once made the mistake of lightly bumping into a
4

curb with the front wheel, the entire thing crumpled in

upon its own rusty circumference.
Clarkie’s house looked very much as though it had
never seen paint. It was bare gray wood and shingles. To
the best of our knowledge, no one except Mr. Clark had
ever seen the inside of his house except for himself, and
the brief glimpses we kids were afforded when he would
crack the front door and sidle inside. All we could see in
those snapshot images were stacks of yellowed
newspapers that reached to the ceiling. We used to make
a game of guessing what might be in that ancient house.
The windows were all dust and pollen to near opacity.
Bud Clark had perhaps five teeth, and fewer clothes. He
seemed always to wear the same things, the same
trousers and shirt, which also looked like they had never
seen detergent and water. He didn’t drive a car. He would
leave town only once a year. Every May he went to the
Indianapolis 500. The fire department would make an
annual, desultory visit at Clarkie’s place, telling him that
he had to mow the chest-high weeds behind his house as
they constituted a fire hazard. After they would leave,
Bud Clark would always take out a lawn mower, fire it
up, and push it about four feet into the weeds where it
would grind to a halt. He would then walk back to his
front porch to sit down, leaving the mower where it was.
 5

My personal sense of aesthetics was perhaps

nowhere better in evidence than in my absolute
admiration of my best friend, Walter’s, household. Every
Christmas, Walter’s family would get a tree that was
brilliant blue, and well-anointed with artificial snow.
Walter’s mother had a huge vertical pile of platinum-
blond hair and drove a pink and black DeSoto. They had
plaster of paris animals chasing each other around the
front of their house, and a family of cement deer on their
front lawn. They also had these amazing colored balls,
about the size of bowling balls, on their lawn and on
pedestals. They ate Twinkies. And Wonder bread with
cinnamon and sugar on it. Whenever I was over there, I
thought I was in heaven. Which brings me to some other
inhabitants of our little town.
In today’s world we have become inured to any
number of terms to define and categorize our young
people. Geeks and nerds. Greasers and gang-bangers.
Jocks and cheerleaders. Goths and cave-dwellers. When I
was young there weren’t as many pigeonholes for kids.
True, one might be really smart (an Einstein), one of the
vast majority, or a bad kid. We did have a name for the
bad kids. They were called “hoods.”
The Carbones were hoods. In point of fact, we didn’t
know who among this little group were Carbones by
6

birth, or who was just part of the circle. I think one of

them was named Anthony, but we just called them all
Carbones. The name itself became a kind of synecdoche.
They wore black leather jackets with lots of zippers, and
kept of cigarette at the ready behind the left ear. They
would drive around our neighborhood in their
hoodmobile.
Now, the hoodmobile was a special kind of car. It
didn’t have to be a convertible, but it was better if it was.
And in the years before muscle cars, there was another
way to have your ride reflect masculinity and badness.
The owner would put bags of sand or cement in the
trunk, lowering the back end while raising the front end.
This made the car look like a rocketship taking off. The
other modification was to take a chisel and hammer to
the muffler. This did nothing for performance, but it
made the car amazingly loud, especially from a stoplight.
Everyone knew when the hoods were around.
The Carbones lived in a fragile-looking bungalow all
the way down Center Street, and right up against the
railroad tracks that ringed the town. Right on the other
side of these tracks was a very large industrial yard filled
with all manner of scrap metal. Not a junkyard, but sheet
steel and blocks and lathe-turnings of brass left over
from machining operations. The metal was off-loaded
 7

from freight trains, and then taken by forklifts and front-

loaders into the “works,” which melted down the metal
and used it to fashion huge industrial-sized tanks. The
tanks would get hauled away on big flatbeds, and the
entire operation was called Buffalo Tanks. The works ran
day and night, with huge spotlights playing out over the
fields of twisted metal, and diesel locomotives idling all
night long. This was not exactly the sort of zone one
would choose to live in unless by economic necessity
alone.
On the Carbones’ side of the railroad tracks and
behind their house was a long, desolate field, not because
they had invested substantially in prime real estate, but
because nobody else would live around there. The side of
their house that faced the street had a few broken
windows, and a very wide and yellowed shade (sort of
like the backside of those old retractable classroom maps
of the world) that always hung skew-wise over a beat up
couch. Often, one couldn’t detect any activity inside the
bungalow from the street, but occasionally you would
hear some shouting, some screaming, and a slammed
screen door from the back and then the rumble of the
hoodmobile. If you were on your bicycle, it was time to
leave and get back to an actual neighborhood.
8

One Sunday, after Sunday dinner, I got together with

my friends at my end of Center Street, and we just
started riding our bicycles around, in circles out in the
street, then jump a curb and ride on somebody’s lawn,
and generally whooping and shouting to each other.
Now, when I say “jumping curbs,” that was actually
possible for everyone but me. Everybody else had much
lighter, kid-sized bikes, of about the same size of what
would be a Stingray bike, except those hadn’t been
marketed yet. I had a black monster of a bike. It was a
Schwinn, but I don’t know the year of its manufacture. It
was made of very heavy gauge steel tubing, with a big
fat saddle, big balloon tires whose cross section was
thicker than my arm (which isn’t saying all that much),
and it had a big fat helical spring mounted just in front of
the handle bars, and cantilevered to the front fork to
absorb all that shock…the shock that wasn’t already
taken up by the tires, saddle, and just the sheer mass of
the thing. When the bike was lying down, it took all my
strength to just tip it upright, so I chose to lean it against
things, like trees and houses. I could not jump any curb
with my bike (except going down) but I could run into
the face of the curb, and my huge balloon-tired wheels
would just roll up and over it.
 9

So this particular Sunday afternoon, we all decide to

go for a little adventure ride. Almost always when this
happened we would have no idea where to go, so we’d
ride around in circles for a while, shouting suggestions to
each other and making a racket until something like a
“herding behavior” broke out, and someone would take
off in a particular direction, and the rest of us would
form an unruly gaggle of “bikers” going out to see what
there was to see.
That afternoon the pack broke out heading to the
other end of Center Street, the part that terminated in
Buffalo Tanks. Maybe there would even be some freight
trains going through, something I always found
particularly exciting, especially since you could get right
up close to them (they were going at switching speed,
about five miles per hour) and you could feel the
thudding of the giant diesel as it passed you, blocking
out all other sounds completely. I, for one, loved trains.
On our way we passed by Billy Wrin’s house. Billy
lived just on the other end of my block, in a house with a
covered, wrap-around porch. Most Sundays, from April
to October, Mr. Wrin would be sitting out on his porch at
a small table with two other men (whom Billy called his
uncles) playing cards, drinking beer, and smoking cigars.
They would be kind of yucking it up, but I could rarely
10

understand what they were saying. But when my

curiosity would get the better of me and I would try to
get closer to their card game to hear what they were
laughing about, they always would see me sidling up to
the porch and they would tell me to scram. Mr. Wrin and
his friends were all built the same: big and beefy, with
combed-back hair. As long as the whether was suitably
spring-like or warmer, they would be in tee-shirts, the
sleeveless kind.
Well, our screaming bunch of road warriors picked
up Billy, and off we went. Mr. Wrin shouted something
after us about when he wanted Billy back to do such-
and-such a chore he hadn’t finished. We were just all
excited to be riding down the middle of the street (there
wasn’t very much traffic around here, and when one did
round a corner everybody would shout out “CAR” and
we would split into two groups on either side of the
road), the wind in our hair, trying to scare up something
interesting.
We got to the end of Center St. and couldn’t go any
further. There weren’t any side streets down there either.
We looked across the tracks at the barbed-wire-topped
chain link fence, and nothing seemed to be going on at
the Tanks. There also weren’t any trains in motion. A big
nuthin’ to do. We’d just have to ride to another part of
 11

town. We turned around, headed back where we came

from, when somebody said, “hey, guys, look at that.”
The object of interest was the field behind the Carbones’
place, which we had never really noticed before. There
was a dirt drive going back there.
Somebody piped up, “hey, ya’ wanna go back there?”
“What, are you crazy? This is where the Carbones live,
and their crazy!” “Yeah, but listen, there’s no sound, and
there’s no car in the back. Nobody’s home. We could go
back there and race our bikes over the dirt slopes an’
stuff.” “I don’t know, you guys, what if they come back
while we’re back there?” “Oh, what’s the big deal? It’s
probably nobody’s actual property. And if they tell us to
get out then we will. We’ll just tell ‘em we didn’t know it
was anybody’s property, ‘cause, you know, there aren’t
any signs to ‘keep out’ or anything.” “Yeah, and what are
we gonna do anyway? There’s nothin’ happenin’”
So we kind of slowly went down the dirt drive, but
my heart was starting to pound already, like this was
more of an adventure ride than I wanted to take. When it
opened up into the field, which was also mostly dirt and
dried grass, it was kind of cool. I got my battleship of a
bike going as fast as I could, and then rode over some
potholes and rocks, and watched, over my handlebars,
my “shock absorber” move in response, ever so slightly.
12

I was a pretty skinny kid, the lightest, by far, of any of

my friends, and my own mass didn’t make the big spring
deflect very much. Then somebody saw it. I don’t know
if it was Ricky or Jimmy, or Billy, or George, or me, but
I don’t think I was the first. There was a big fat tree in
the middle of the field and what looked like a large tree
fort up in the branches.
Everybody ditched their bikes at the base of the tree
(I was last) and climbed a rickety ladder up to the
platform partially obscure by walls. Now this was
exciting. I imagined that it had belonged to kids who
were now grown, or maybe even dead! I liked to build up
dramatic scenarios in my imagination unless I were
somewhere, anywhere, in the dark and alone. Then it
could be a little overwhelming. But it soon became
obvious that this had been visited a little more recently.
There were some girlie magazines, and there was a large,
ominous candle on one side, and there was some stuff
painted on the boards that comprised the walls, but I
didn’t understand all of it.
I was still looking around like any seventy-five
pound detective trying to piece together a crime scene,
when I suddenly noticed I was alone. I looked
groundward and saw the last of my buddies nearly at the
bottom, and most of the rest of them getting on their
 13

bikes and pumping furiously. Then I looked across the

field in the direction of Center St. and I saw the
hoodmobile, kicking up swirls of dust. As my friends
rode out of their, I heard one of them say, “Hey, Stevie’s
still up there.” This was followed by a chorus of several
others yelling, “we gotta get outta here!”
The fear began rushing in. What was I going to do?
There is only one reason the Carbones would be out in
the middle of this field, and that was the tree fort. They
already saw the other kids take off, and decided not to
pursue them, but they were walking deliberately my way,
flicking their cigarettes away, leather jackets open (it was
hot) with undershirts beneath. And their was my huge
bicycle, right below me, baking in the sun. My knees
wouldn’t obey me, and kept collapsing, but still I did my
best to get out of the tree fort and to my bicycle. I made
it down just before they reached the tree, and with a
superhuman (for me) effort managed to get my bike
upright faster than I ever had, but as I tried to speed
away, the pedals just wouldn’t move fast enough to get
any acceleration. The biggest of the three just walked
over and intercepted me and, with a single push, sent me
sprawling to the ground, temporarily trapped under my
black monster.
14

“Well, what we got here, huh?” That was the shortest

of the three, the one who drove the car and whose name,
it turned out, was Anthony. Anthony lit another cigarette.
So, what the hell you kids doin’ up their anyway, huh?
D’ja take somethin’, huh? Huh?”
The one who knocked me off my bike shoved me up
against the trunk of another tree, and then the three
circled around me. “Honest, I didn’t take ANYTHING!
I hardly even SAW anything. I didn’t know this was
yours, Honest.”
“Hey, Anthony, I’ll make the little mutha talk,”
hissed the third. He took out a switchblade, and opened
the pearl-handled weapon with a ssnikk. “Okay, ya’ little
pisser, whaddya take?” The biggest one had his
switchblade very close to my chest, and with his other
hand was leaning against the tree, breathing down on me.
In fact, they were all moving in closer. “Empty ya
pockets,” said Anthony. “Now!” As I tried to get my
hand in my right front pocket, without getting any closer
to the leering big hood, my legs started shaking, and my
knees started to give out, on the right side first. I started
uncontrollably sliding toward the big guy’s blade point. I
was afraid I was going to wet my pants. My hand landed
upon a balled up paper napkin, from Sunday dinner, and
a penny: the total contents of my pocket. I held it out
 15

pathetically as an offering, hoping for mercy. “That’s it,”

I squeaked, my normally high voice up about another
octave. “That’s all I have, really. Just a penny. And a
napkin.”
The Carbones looked at each other. For just a
moment, they seemed confused, unsure of what to do
with or to me. It only lasted a moment, when suddenly I
heard this commotion coming from the other end of the
field. All my friends were pedaling furiously across the
dirt, yelling, “They got ‘im. They got Stevie.” My
friends were followed closely by a big car bouncing
across the potholed hardpack dirt of the field.
The big, green Buick Special ground to a halt. Three
doors opened up, and three barrel-chested men got out.
Mr. Wrin yelled, “Let the kid go.” The three were
striding up to where I had been pinned by the Carbones.
“Stevie. You alright? They do anything to you? Huh?” I
made some wobbly response that I was okay. “Alright,
then, all youse kids get on yer bikes an’ get outta here,
right now. Don’t hang around, get back home.” I
couldn’t have been happier to comply. I retrieved my
black cruiser and was at the back of the pack riding back
out toward Center Street. Without slowing down, I
looked over my shoulder just before I was out of earshot.
I saw the three big men crowding around the Carbones,
16

and I heard Mr. Wrin growl, “So, ya’ like scarin’ little
kids, do ya’, ya’ greasy shitheads. What. Ya think that’s
funny?” And then I was out on the street. Heading back
toward Billy’s house, where I assumed we would
reconnoiter.
Soon we were riding around in Billy’s driveway,
trying to get the whole story put together. “Hey, Stevie,
what did the Carbones do to you? We tried to get my
Dad over there as soon as we could.” “Yeah, whadthey
do?” “Man, could you believe that tree fort? I wonder
what they do up there? Do you think they’ve killed
anybody up there?” “Shuddup. I wanna hear what they
did to Stevie?” “Yeah, what happened?”
I realized, for the first time, that I had an eager
audience, and that I had secret knowledge to impart to
them. I had this insight before I blew the opportunity. On
the other hand, while I could exaggerate, I didn’t indulge
in lying, to my friends or anybody. And, as far as the
experience felt to me, something really DID happen. So,
I gave sort of a building narrative, even while some of
my friends protested, “we know that part, we were there.
What did they DO to you?” So, when I got to the part
where they knocked me down and pushed me against the
tree, I slowed back down in deference to the drama. And
 17

I must admit, I had them in the palm of my hand when I

got to the switchblades.
Before long, the green Buick pulled into the drive
and Mr. Wrin and his friends got out. One of them
brushed some dust off his trousers, but otherwise they
looked fine. They gave us a little look as they headed
back to the porch and their unfinished beers and hands of
cards. Mr. Wrin said, offhandedly, “Don’t you kids worry
about them creeps. They won’t bother you again. But I
don’t want you goin’ back there, either, ya’ got that?” We
all nodded. We were all in awe of the three men, as they
pulled up their chairs and started to talk, in somewhat
hushed tones, broken every once in a while by laughter.
Some of us tried, surreptitiously, to get closer to them to
hear what they were actually saying, but they spied us.
“Hey. G’wan, scram. Go play!” After a while, there
wasn’t anything left to talk about, and it seemed like the
air had been let out of the day. We got on our bikes to go
home.
But I still could hardly believe what I had just lived
through and was eager to find a new audience among
those who would understand. I wanted to get home and
tell my older brother and my Dad. I raced home, dumped
my bike in the back yard and ran inside. “Hey, Dad,
you’ll never guess what happened to me. Man, I thought
18

I was gonna die!” My father was in the living room. He

was putting in a baseboard and molding. He liked
carpentry projects like that. “That’s nice Stevie. But can
you see I’m busy here? I have to get this measurement
right, and I don’t want to have to do it again. I’ll talk to
you later.” My brother, on the other hand, was at a
friend’s house. And I didn’t particularly want to tell my
mother. I just felt she wouldn’t get it. I mean, it wasn’t
like I had an actual wound to show for it, and she
wouldn’t understand the kind of fear that comes from the
kind of jeopardy I had experienced. I couldn’t even tell
her exactly what Mr. Wrin and the other men actually
did, because they made sure we didn’t know. Now the
day was truly deflated for me. I was imagining that
Ricky and Jimmy and George, telling their various
households, were actually getting some good mileage
from telling their abbreviated versions of the stories, and
they hadn’t seen their own lives flash before their eyes as
I had.
Now, I certainly don’t want to give the impression
that my parents were cold, cruel, or indifferent. They
were good parents, and I’m sure, by their lights, they
were attentive and very interested in my young life. But
as I look back on it, the events of my life for which they
showed enthusiasm were important to them, much more
 19

than they were to me. For example, they went to my

various graduations, and even had cake for me at home,
and took pictures and were appropriately emotional.
Meanwhile, it was all I could do to keep from yawning.
Maybe it isn’t the same for all kids, but for me
graduations were such non-events. All they seemed to
demark for me was the passage of a certain number of
years, not any great accomplishment. I mean, what did
they expect me to do? If I had an actual choice, and I
chose to either flunk out or drop out, I would have
become a pariah, disowned by my family. And so, since I
was generally a compliant and eager-to-please child, I
didn’t do these things. What is that to celebrate?
On the other hand, surviving a showdown with the
Carbones, and having two switchblades play with my
worst paranoias, that was something to get excited about.
From the time I was a small child, I experienced my
older brother’s fascination with war movies and
westerns. The westerns I could locate in a distant time
and dismiss, but the war movies seemed very present.
Not only that, but they seemed to express what was
literally, a universal male experience. Somehow, I got the
unmistakable conviction from a very young age that all
males, at some time in their adulthoods, would
inescapably find themselves in conflict, and not some
20

metaphorical or psychological conflict, but a real front-

lines war situation, with guns and bayonets and hand-
grenades. I wasn’t a fighter of that sort, or even a tiny
version of one as a boy who liked to “mix it up” with
other boys. I can remember actually thinking that there
just wasn’t anything to be done about this, that it was just
my fate at some point, and I remember being terrified by
that thought. I didn’t want to get hurt, and I definitely
didn’t want to get killed. So, having looked at death (as
far as I was concerned) and lived to tell about it, THAT
was a real rite of passage, even if I didn’t voluntarily put
myself in that situation.
But for some reason, no one wanted to talk about it.
My family didn’t seem to get it. Mr. Wrin and his
buddies didn’t want to talk about it. And even my
friends, once they got the facts straight as they played
out, didn’t find the story very worthy of continued
conversation. Strange. I wonder what we’ll say is
important near the end of our lives as we look back over
the whole tapestry. Then, what will make the better
stories? What narratives will hold the magic?