I had to deal with one of Balistreris goons a couple of times. He was sickly stereotypical. Big, ugly, kind of stupid looking. And his first name was, of course, Joey (no lie). I FI’d him a few times at incidents he swore he had nothing to do with. :rolleyes: Never got anything to stick.
One time we stopped him on the freeway and he had over 30 Russian made SKS rifles in their original boxes stacked up in his van. Not illegal to have but had to wonder who he was going to distribute them to.
He died of a massive heart attack. Pretty young, about 45.
between eighth grade and high school I was sent to spend the summer with my sister, leaving my first girlfriend, Maria, behind. We wrote sappy teenage love letters back and forth all summer. A couple of days before I was put on the bus for home I talked my sister into letting me call long distance (it was very expensive back in the mid sixties) and talk to Maria to let her know when I would be home and to make plans to meet up ASAP. I boarded the bus the next day and got in very late. Early the next morning I headed over to Maria’s house feeling the thrill of seeing her again.
The house was empty. No one ever heard from that family again. They had left less than 48 hours after I talked to her. At fourteen, I had no idea what had happened, but later I realized that the only thing that made sense was that they had entered into the witness protection system.
Somewhere, there is a sixty seven year old lady who may have a chunky chrome ID bracelet with Peter engraved on it hidden in the back of her jewelry box that she occasionally looks at and fondly remembers her first boyfriend from so long ago.
Maria, if you are still out there and maybe a Doper, you are not forgotten.
An older relative’s college roommate (at Fordham) had a girlfriend whose brother was a harness racing driver.
Apparently, once a day (or maybe once a week? I can’t remember), at Yonkers Raceway in New York, one race was designated as the “driver’s race.” Apparently harness racing is really easy to fix, and this race was fixed, and the drivers would bet on it, and supplement their income.
And this driver would give tips to his sister, who passed them on to her brother, who shared them with his roommate, my relative.
I went to a public bath-house in Tokyo once. In the men’s side, there were two pools (tubs), each big enough for four or five men. One of them had three men in it. The other had one guy, heavily tattooed, all by himself. Nobody was speaking.
I used the busy pool, too, and minded my own damn business. :rolleyes:
I tried to go to an onsen some years ago. I was in Sendai, and my friends who live there, natives who go frequently, wanted to take me.
We couldn’t find one that would admit me. Lots of tattoos. Apparently tattos are much more significant, culturally, in Japan than they are in the United States.
Eventually we did find a place that let me in, maybe because nobody else was there at the time.