Ruthless (2 page)

Two

Life in the Coal Region

Speedy Butelo, Jake Pupko and I were struggling up the cinder bank that spilled out of the abandoned Sayre shaft on the north side of town. The company burned coal to heat the mine in winter and dumped the residue outside the coalhole. Over the years the pile grew to about 300 yards high, and getting up it was like climbing through sand. Making it harder that day in 1944 were the five gallons of gasoline we were carrying after a fourth friend had lifted them from another mining operation. We did not want the gas to go to waste and had a plan to put it to good use.

Finally, we made it to the top of the plateau. Going down was a lot easier and more fun than coming up because you could take a running start and jump off the bank, and the loose cinders cushioned your landing. We had other things in mind that day, however.

Scrounging around, we found some old tin cans, filled them with the gas and doused the entrance to the mine. The hole was about six feet by six feet, and we splashed the gas all around for a good 15 feet inside. We saved a little and poured an igniter trail to the outside. We did the math and figured that 15 feet outside the hole was far enough to be safe.

I lit a match and held it to the trail. No
dice—it
didn't catch. We moved a little farther in and Speedy tried with another match. No luck.

Two steps closer, we tried again. Damn, nothing. The stupid trail of gasoline would not light.

Now we were about three feet from the entrance. Jake was suddenly overcome by bravado. “Screw this!” he said and grabbed the entire book of matches, lit it and chucked it into the hole.

kaboom!
It was like somebody flipped the switch on a 747. It blew out with such force that it burned off our eyebrows and singed our hair. We smelled like chickens that had been plucked with a blowtorch and were certain we had passed through the gates of hell.

Not only that, but the blast ignited the cinders and the mountain caught fire. We spent the rest of the afternoon stomping, beating branches and throwing dirt on the flames, anything we could do to get that fire out.

We were eight years old at the time.

Mount Carmel, where I was born in 1936, is a small mining town in northeast Pennsylvania. You pronounce it with the accent on
Car,
CARmel. State Route 61 runs through the center of town. The whole place is about one mile square with streets laid out in checkerboard fashion. When I was growing up, Mount Carmel had more than 17,000 people but has shrunk to only a third of that today.

I am reminded of something David said in the early 1980s when we were driving through town to a reunion of his mother's extended family. He turned to me and remarked, “You know, I wouldn't want to live in Mount Carmel.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You couldn't affect the world very much from here.”

This was before he had risen very high in the organization, and I suppose it was a harbinger while also an accurate assessment of Mount Carmel's place in the world.

The day of my birth, January 19, my dad tried to drive my mother to the hospital but his car got stuck in the snow, so he took her back inside the house. He called our family doctor, Dr. Allen, and he came down. But his car got stuck in the snow, too, so I was born at home.

I lived in Mount Carmel until I was 17, and, despite David's assessment many years later, I have to say it was a great place to grow up. In the 1930s and 1940s, the prevailing attitude to just about everything was
laissez-faire
. So long as you did not break the law
too much,
you were okay. You could bend it quite a bit, though. I have carried that attitude with me my whole life, and I am certain my children absorbed some of it.

People were hard workers and most worked in the coal mines. The town was like a little Europe. My family was Polish, but there were also Slovaks, Italians, Irish, Germans and others, truly a great potpourri of humanity.

Football was king. People lived and died by the fortunes of the high school team. If you were on the Mount Carmel football team, you could do no wrong. You could be caught robbing a store, and the cop would scold the storeowner for reporting you. (Criminals who didn't play football, however, did not have it so good. The cops were tough on anybody messing with the hardworking people of Mount Carmel.)

On Friday nights in the fall, the band and cheerleaders marched down Third Street from the high school to the stadium, and the town turned out to cheer them on and follow in behind. After the game, people would head to Mattucci's, a bar and restaurant, to relive the game with drinking buddies. Great times.

We were too poor to afford an actual football, so we stuffed rags into a sock, tied off the end
and—presto
!—we had a makeshift football. We kids played touch under the corner streetlights and relived the glories of the evening in our own way until our mothers called for us to come home.

Most of the homes in Mount Carmel were row houses, small but cozy and comfortable in a way. People did not know any other way to live. They were born in to it, and that was life. When people died, the funeral director came and the casket was laid out in the parlor so friends and relations could come to pay their last respects.

Back then, a miner could buy one of those houses for $2,000 or $3,000. A miner made around fifty bucks a week and could raise his family on that. During summers I sometimes made pocket money by picking huckleberries and selling them door to door for 35 cents a quart.

One summer, my childhood friend Joe Sarisky stole a case of dynamite, ten gallons of gasoline, blasting caps and fuse from a bootleg coalhole. When the big companies felt that a mine was played out and no longer financially worthwhile, they would simply abandon it. Then a couple of enterprising guys would come in and continue to work the hole, and they could make a decent living that way. One of these abandoned mine shafts was where Joe got the dynamite. Some other kids and I spent that summer blowing stuff up in the woods. My mother, had she known what I was up to, would have said, “Now, Ronnie, don't get hurt,” but she probably wouldn't have stopped me.

There was a saloon across the street from our house, another to the left and a third in back. Three saloons just in sight of our house. I slept on the top floor, and in summer I could hear miners going down the street and bickering about something of no consequence. During summer it was so hot it was unbearable, and I had the windows wide open.

One evening my friend Eugene Stabinsky's father and another miner were going at it. The whole Stabinsky family had a habit of giving people lip and thinking they could get away with it. It wasn't working this time, though. “God damn you—!” I heard one miner yelling and then Stabinsky's father pleading, “Look, I'm a married man with three kids—” followed by
whap! whap! whap!
and then silence. Force overcoming reason. Then, a few moments later, “Hey, buddy, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. C'mon, I'll buy you a beer,” and they went back inside and kept drinking.

Nearly every block in town had a saloon, but there were nearly as many churches. The Irish had a church. So did the Slovaks. And the Italians. The Polish had two churches. Two factions of Poles had been unable to settle an argument, so, rather than have to look at one another on Sundays, they built separate churches.

One really great thing about the diversity in town was the fantastic variety of ethnic foods. For block parties, the women would get together and take pride in cooking up their national dishes for everyone to enjoy. I can still taste the homemade pierogies, babkas (a pie made from potatoes), soppressata (a dry Italian salami), lasagna, homemade doughnuts and my
all-time
favorite, pizzelles. These are light,
anise-flavored
wafers that I learned to bake and still do to this day. Taste one and you are hooked.

Next to football, the other thing that people in Mount Carmel respected was music. If a miner saw a kid who played an instrument being picked on, he'd say, “Hey, lay off the kid. He's a musician.”

My father, Anthony, was a musician. He could play piano, accordion, saxophone and clarinet. He had a band that used to rehearse in our living room, and I would lie there in my “go carriage” (that's what we called a baby stroller in those days) and listen to the music. When I was 11, I told my dad I wanted to start playing an instrument.

“What do you want to play?” he asked me.

“I dunno, a trumpet, I guess,” I replied, and that was how I started.

Music just sort of came to me. The first time I picked up a trumpet, I got a pretty decent tone out of it. If I heard a song once or twice, I could play it. I knew all the standards of the day, and by the time I was 13, I was playing gigs. One time Tommy Butkevicz and I went into the bar across the street from his house. Tommy played piano and I played my trumpet. Afterward, we went around and the miners gave us a dime or a quarter apiece, which doesn't sound like much until you realize that you could buy a new pair of jeans at Penney's for $1.50 in the
mid-1940s
. Nobody kicked us out or said anything, and that was my first gig.

My dad had an insurance brokerage, and in a back room he set up a little instrument repair shop. Students from the high school would bring in their instruments, mainly woodwinds, and he would fix them up. He always lost money on the deal but did it because he was a
good-hearted
guy.

Maybe it was because his own life had been rough. He was born in 1899; he was six years old when his father died, so my dad had to go to work in the mines to help his mother. In those days kids would lead the mules into the mine or help sort the coal from the rocks.

He tried a lot of different things to make money and eventually settled on selling insurance. Before that he had a soda company that went bust because people didn't return the bottles. Another time he had a gas station, and in the basement of our house he put in a big tank that held the gasoline. It was a half cellar that had windows and you could see in from the outside. One day a neighbor came over and said to my mother, “Helen, I don't mean to tell you your business, but your son Tony took off the gas cap and lit a match to see how much was left in the tank.” There's the old saying “If your time is up, your time is up.” Nobody on the block's time was up that day.

That was life in the coal region, the values I grew up with and what I wanted to instill in my own children. For three of the four, I think it has worked out pretty well.

When I graduated from high school, my father said, “If you go to college, study business,” but I didn't want to study business. If anything, I wanted to study music. I'd had a job playing at a country club six nights a week, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. In other words, I was ripe for the picking by the first person with a good pitch.

Three

Music and the Marines

One day down on Oak Street I ran into a recruiter for the Marine Corps, and he started talking to me, telling me about the Marines. His pitch worked, and I decided I wanted to be a Marine. Joining the military was a common option for guys leaving high school in Mount Carmel. A lot of guys joined different branches, but I happened to bump into a Marine recruiter first.

I enlisted and went to Parris Island, South Carolina, for boot camp. My first night there I thought, This is the worst goddamned mistake I ever made in my life. If you have ever seen Stanley Kubrick's
Full Metal Jacket,
that is exactly what boot camp was like. All we recruits got our heads shaved and were issued our uniforms and gear. That first night everybody, and I mean everybody, got his head slammed against the metal bunk or punched in the gut by the drill instructor. We stood at attention with all our belongings in front of our bunks, and the DI went down the row screaming and slamming each one of us. I thought I was safe, but just as he passed me, he shoved my head against the bunk and I saw blue flashes. What a welcome.

When he was leaving he told us, “Listen, I'm going to come in here in the morning and I'm going to say, ‘Platoon 420, hit the deck.' If you're not standing at attention in front of your bunk by the time I turn the light on, God help you.”

The next morning my eyes were wide open, even though I'd always had a hard time getting up early. I jumped out of bed just as he was walking into the barracks. He turned the light on, and a kid named Beltz in the top bunk next to me was still sleeping. The DI reached under the upper bunk and pushed him up; he banged his head against the next bunk and woke up flying through the air. That was how we started. Boot camp was rough.

There is an attitude in the Marines that goes, “Every Marine is, first and foremost, a rifleman.” No matter what else you did in the Marines, you had to be a rifleman. That started in boot camp, and when we had to qualify on the rifle range, I earned the top shot out of the hundreds of guys who qualified that week. We had to shoot an M1 Garand rifle from 100, 300 and 500 yards, into a
20-inch
target. At 500 yards I could hit the bull'
s-eye
at least eight out of ten times without a scope, just using the sight on the rifle.

The following week we had mess duty, and I didn't have to wash a single pot the entire week. In the Marines you got rewarded if you did well. On the other hand, if you failed, you got punished. One guy in our platoon didn't qualify on the rifle range. They made him march ten feet in back of the rest of the platoon with his pants on backward, his shirt on backward, his hat on backward and his boots on the wrong feet. He was referred to as a shitbird, and when he marched out of step the DI kicked him in the
shins—
whap
!

Rewards and penalties, it is called, and L. Ron Hubbard said that these should exist in Scientology as well. If you did your job well, you were supposed to be rewarded, and if you did poorly you were meant to be punished, such as by being paid less. Under David, the rewards went out the window for Scientology staff members and only the penalties remained. During my last twelve years working for the organization, I never got a liberty, not a single day off. I was not the only one in that boat, either. In the Marines, though, the policy was properly applied.

Ten weeks after having my head slammed against the bunk, I graduated from boot camp and said to myself, “I can make myself do
anything.
” I became a disciplined individual. I turned from a civilian into a Marine. From then on, if I had to do something, I could make myself do it. That's a characteristic you can't get anywhere else as far as I know, except maybe the 101st Airborne or the Navy Seals. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.” There's truth in that statement, and I used what I learned in boot camp in raising my kids, minus the yelling and abuse. But I did instill accountability in them as well as a work ethic.

After boot camp, they sent me to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for advanced combat training. One week I was chosen “Marine of the Company.” The reward was a weekend pass, so I went up to Pennsylvania.

As I was returning to base that Sunday, there was a violent snowstorm. All the buses were canceled. Planes were canceled. I got back 12 hours late. They restricted me to the barracks for two weeks. There was no excuse, no excuse for failure in the Marines. Rewards and penalties.

“You say you couldn't make it back? You're a failure. You're a shitbird.” That was the attitude, so I spent the next two weeks in my barracks.

After a month of advanced combat training, I was transferred to Quantico, Virginia. I worked in battalion headquarters, and my duty was to file a report by noon each day with an accounting of who was present, who was missing, in sickbay, whatever. The last thing my superiors wanted to do after drinking all night in the clubs was to mess with these reports, so they were extremely happy when I was able to get them filed on time each day.

By 12:00 I was done with that duty, and I asked the sergeant major, “What do you want me to do now?”

“Do whatever you want, kid. Just keep doing your job,” was his reply, which meant I had the rest of the day off.

I used the time to go down and see if I could get into the band because I really wanted to play music. I had an interview and audition with one of the band members, who told me, “You qualify, but our TO [table of organization] is full up.”

That was kind of a disappointment for me, but I figured, What the hell, and gave up on getting in the band. I started working out in the gym and began dating a girl in Philadelphia named Loretta Gidaro.

Later on, I heard about a talent contest on the base, and I decided to go down and play my trumpet just for the hell of it. And I won the show! First prize was $12.50, which I cashed in at the PX, caught a train and went up to Philly for the weekend to visit Loretta.

I came back to work on Monday morning and was greeted by a scowling battalion adjutant.

“You traitor!” he screamed at me. “What the hell are you trying to do to us?”

“What do you mean, ‘What am I trying to do?'” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“You know it. You had this whole thing planned all along!”

“Had
what
planned?”

“The commandant has ordered you into the band immediately!”

The base commandant was at the talent show and he heard me. He ordered me into the band!

I spent the last year and a half in the Quantico Marine band and studied music theory and harmony at the Naval School of Music, and for the rest of my life I've used what I learned.