ONE
SATURDAY EVENING, APRIL 20,1974
Four of them were together that Saturday evening: Dave Shea, Cole Jennings, Bill Morris, and Tony DeFelice. These four had minor reputations as more than troublemakers.
Dave Shea was a handsome young man, tall and muscular, a football player. He was very charismatic. Every girl’s dream was to date Dave Shea. He had been his school’s quarterback for two years, during which his team lost only one game. In his senior year the team went undefeated. Besides that, he was an outstanding scholar. He was inducted into the National Honor Society in his junior year. His special subjects were mathematics, chemistry, and physics. As of April he had accepted a football scholarship at Rutgers University. Without the scholarship he would have been unable to go to college. But he had the scholarship and his future seemed assured.
But he had a dark side. It wasn’t alcohol. The fact was that Dave was a cheat. He did it on the football field, where he had an exceptional talent for knowing when officials weren’t looking and then clipping, face-mask violations, even for punching an opposing player in the nose. In close contact with a defensive lineman, he started his “trash talk.” Calling people names until he would get them to react. A trick that could get a star defense man ejected from the game, while Dave stood gaping and shaking his head, wondering what had caused the foul. In the chemistry lab he knew what results were expected from a problem in qualitative analysis and pretended to have achieved that result, when he really hadn’t. He was in fact a good player and a good student, but he had his little tricks to make himself look even better.
“You’re good enough, Shea,” Cole said one day. “Why not play it straight … ?”
“Look, Jennings. Your family will send you to college, no matter what. You’re smart, too, but you don’t need a scholarship. I do. I have to cover myself … be better than good …”
“Gotcha. But you are good enough!”
“Yeah? Well, I’m looking for a little insurance on it. The son of a wholesale grocery salesman who drives around the county begging for little orders … Hey! They add up their nickels every month, hopin’ there’s enough to make the payment on the car. I don’t want to live like that, Jennings!”
He didn’t want to live without sex either. He first shoved his big penis into a girl when he was thirteen years old.
She was seventeen.
“Jesus Christ! The guys said you’re … Hey, I can’t take all that, Shea.”
“Bet ya can,” he said, with a hard-on that ached for release.
He began to enter her slowly until he was buried deep inside her.
“God almighty! Hey! I wouldn’t have believed it!”
Eventually, Amy, who also declared she couldn’t possibly, did. And complained it hurt. But he couldn’t get enough, and after the first time neither could she.
Cole Jennings played basketball and was good at it. He was tall, six feet six, and had an indefinable agility on the polished floor that brought him recognition as a valuable player. His blond hair fell over his forehead as he dribbled toward the basket, dodging this way and that, avoiding the players trying to guard him, until at the last moment he passed the ball to a teammate close to the goal and charged in to take the rebound if the shot missed. He made most of his points by capturing rebounds and jamming the ball through the basket.
He, too, was an excellent student. One of them, Dave or Cole, would be valedictorian of their high school class.
As Dave had suggested, Cole did not need a scholarship, athletic or academic, to go to college. His father was senior partner in a major realty firm. His family could and would pay his tuition at any school he wanted to attend.
From the time he was old enough to drive, Cole had his own car. That night he was driving his graduation present, already given him though graduation was seven weeks away. It was a black Pontiac TransAm. His parents had always indulged their son. His graduation was no exception.
Cole was a responsible, thoughtful young man, and even if he could burn rubber he didn’t. Conservative, compared to Dave.
Dave envied Cole when he saw the beautiful black TransAm. Someday, he thought … someday … but he never even got to drive his father’s old Chevy. That car was too important to making a living for his father to allow his son to drive it.
Bill Morris played both football and basketball, though he was not the star that Dave and Cole were. He spent most of his time on the bench. Even so, he “went out” for sports and was considered a jock. All of these four were. He was not the scholar his two friends were, either; and his parents had been squirreling away money for years, in anticipation of his college tuition. Bill would not win a scholarship.
He was a solid young man, not heavy enough for football and not tall enough for basketball. On the basketball floor he wore plastic-rimmed eyeglasses held in place by a rubber strap behind his head. On the football field he wore no glasses and relied on a slightly blurry vision of the developing play. Since he was a guard and all but invariably was blocked after he did or did not block his man, it made little difference. He was dark-haired, and oddly was already showing, on his forehead, the initial evidence of baldness.
Of the four, many would have called Tony DeFelice the one most likely to succeed. They were all jocks, but Tony was a jock in a very different sense. He was a Golden Gloves boxer with a promising future.
He was a welterweight, knife-thin, with muscles as hard as the steel of a knife. Many were afraid of him, but he had been trained to restrain himself and never use his boxing skills outside the ring. His ambition was to go to the Olympics and then to turn professional.
He was an extremely intense young man, with hard eyes. People who knew him well were aware that he had a ready sense of humor and found amusement in all manner of things and people.
His family owned a score of packer trucks and collected trash and garbage over a wide area of Bergen County. They were said to be “connected.” They were a family of shrewd, hardworking Italian immigrants, who had hauled first in a single mule-drawn wagon and had gradually worked their way up to the considerable business they now owned.
On this humid April Saturday night it was the same old thing: nothing to do. They were silent as they listened to Bruce Springsteen sing his latest hit. The four boys had bought six-packs of beer and drunk twenty bottles between them. The remaining four bottles were on the floor of the backseat of Cole’s car. A little after ten Cole drove into the parking lot of Pizza Palace on the edge of Wyckoff.
The Palace might more realistically have been called the shack. It had only four small tables. Customers were expected to take delivery of their pizzas and drive them home. The boys ordered two pizzas and returned to the car to wait the twenty minutes until their pizzas would be ready. They opened their last four bottles of beer and talked about whether or not they should drive off during the twenty minutes and buy another six-pack or two.
They had sat there, drinking their last beers and talking aimlessly when Jim Amos came alongside the car.
“Well, if it ain’t...
