It Chooses You (11 page)

Ron: I went through a little bit of trouble to take some stuff out of my closet and throw it on here for you.

Miranda: Yeah, thank you.

Ron: Not much trouble. Just a little.

Miranda: Well, I really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time. What did you say you do for a living?

Ron: I’m a corporate owner.

Miranda: Okay. Can you elaborate on that?

Ron: I run a financial-investment corporation. I use margin — I use the money from the banks, and then I take the money from the brokerage room at eight or nine percent only for each day that I use it. If you borrow it for a day and you sell the stock the same day — this is what people don’t know — if you have ten thousand dollars, you can borrow ten thousand dollars from the brokerage firm, and then that’s twenty thousand dollars. You can use that twenty thousand dollars that day and sell it the same day, and the ten thousand dollars you borrowed from the brokerage firm, you don’t pay any interest.

Miranda: Okay.

I’m not especially terrific with numbers, so it was as if he’d just thrown some confetti in the air and called it words. I tried to listen harder — maybe I would really learn something here. Maybe he could explain taxes to me later.

Ron: If you hold it overnight, you owe them that money for one day, nine percent interest for just a day divided by three hundred sixty-five. So it’s almost like pennies.

Miranda: Right.

Ron: It adds up if you hold it for weeks and months.

Miranda: Right, I see.

Ron: You see what I’m saying?

Miranda: Yeah.

Ron: I’m a numbers person. I’ve always been good with numbers. Always loved numbers. Very quick with numbers. In elementary school I was an A student up until about fifth grade, when it came to fractions. Then I had a little trouble.

Miranda: Right.

Ron: And because of that, I had what you call thousands of hours of blackjack experience when I first started in Atlantic City. Unfortunately, I had beginner’s luck. I wasn’t good but I had beginner’s luck. And so I won. And then after a while, I lost. And I won and I lost and I won and I lost and eventually I lost and I lost more than I won.

The discussion of blackjack was long and detailed. He tried to explain what card-counting was, why it was illegal, and how what he did was legal, even though, technically speaking, it was card-counting. Asking a question was like merging onto the freeway — I had to accelerate and jump into one of his pauses.

Miranda: What are your plans for the future?

Ron: Well, I’ve had a period of several years of my life that was torture and torment. And I didn’t have the option to get married.

Miranda: Right.

Ron: Can you read into that?

Miranda: No.

Ron: It’s about to be over in a couple of months.

Miranda: Okay.

Ron: And it was business-related.

Miranda: Okay.

Ron: Business-related Martha Stewart–type —

He lifted his pants leg a little bit to reveal a house-arrest anklet.

Miranda: Oh, okay. Okay. Right.

Ron: It’s just about over.

Miranda: It’ll be nice to have that off.

I said this cozily, almost maternally. The important thing was to continue behaving exactly as I had before I’d known he was under house arrest. A lot of people might have flinched, but hopefully he noticed that I had not. He leaned in toward me as if this next thing he was about to say was ultra-classified.

Ron: I’m going to tell you something that’s fact. An anklet can mean any one of three things. If you’re gang related, you get one on, or if you’re a threat to the community because you have more than one so-called victim, which could be business-related or —

Miranda: Right.

Ron: — a sex offense or a drug dealer. Not small-time but what they consider a dealer-dealer.

Miranda: Right.

Ron: If you’re any one of those four, you’ll get one of these on. People think because you have that on you’re a sex-offender. Because sex-offenders have to have them on.

Miranda: Right. Right.

Ron: But the thing is, so do gang people. So do, like I said, drug dealers. So does anyone who the parole board thinks could be a threat to the community. I did do prison.

Miranda: Really. Okay. Well, what was the hardest thing about prison?

Ron: The people. The inmates. Very difficult being around so many people who are so scandalous, that’ll look to take advantage of someone who’s considered weak.

Miranda: Yeah. Yeah.

Ron: And to be totally honest with you, I was definitely considered to be weak. I was older. I was mellow. I was laid-back.

Miranda: Yeah.

Ron: I put on a little bit of a front the way I walked, just like when I’m outside. I walked with an attitude, so that if there’s gangs or something they kind of pick up an attitude from me, like “Don’t mess with me.”

Miranda: Right.

Ron: I don’t walk slow. I don’t walk like an old man. I have a certain walk, a pace and a clip. And I always notice who’s around me, and I always have done that.

Ron was exactly the kind of man you spend your whole life being careful not to end up in the apartment of. And since I was raised to go out of my way to make such men feel understood, I took extra-special care with his interview. But as he talked on and on (the original transcript was more than fifty pages), I realized that I don’t actually want to understand this kind of man — I just want them to
feel
understood, because I fear what will happen if I am thought of as yet another person who doesn’t believe them. I want to be the one they spare on the day of reckoning.

Brigitte had stopped taking pictures and was hanging out near the door with wide eyes. Alfred had become very still and silent somewhere behind me.

Miranda: What do you love to do?

Ron: I love to sing.

Miranda: What do you like to sing?

Ron: I like — for example, there’s a song called “A Teenager in Love.”

Miranda: The Everly Brothers?

Ron: Dion and the Belmonts, or maybe just Dion. Sometimes I really feel like I want to belt it out and just release that tension.

Miranda: Yeah — people who sing, it’s like they can pour out emotion in a way that other people can’t.

Ron: Well, I tell you — here’s the bottom line of what people have always told me. They said I’ve always been good with kids. I worked in Reseda through a court-order monitor — when the husband had a court order for the wife that required somebody to be there for the kids, or the wife had an order, I was the one there. So that shows you how risky of a person I am, okay?

Miranda: Yeah. Yeah.

Ron: The court checked my background out. I did that in the ’80s part-time. And I actually had a problem because a lot of the kids were requesting me and the agency says, “Hey, Ron. There’s too many people requesting you.”

Miranda: Yeah.

Ron: I’m good with kids. I know how to get down on their level and enjoy myself with them. Not a Michael Jackson type, but —

Miranda: No, I understand. What’s been the happiest time in your life so far?

Ron: A happy time was when I had a three-year relationship with a younger girl when I was twenty-six, a girl that I truly, truly loved. But she was too young to marry. And I told her, “In a couple of years, when you’re eighteen, if you feel that way, let me know then.” But I knew she would spread her wings and see what life was all about. I was smart enough to know that.

Miranda: So that was a happy time?

Ron: That was a really happy time. Another good time was being with a woman out here that was much older than me. Until she had to go into a home. I actually had to call her two sons that were about my age to let them know that she was going to hurt herself.

Miranda: That must have been hard.

Ron: I mean, it was like a steady, very steady thing with her and I. And she was much, much, much older than me.

Miranda: How old was she?

Ron: I’ll just say she was well into her seventies. But she was slender. She was clean. She was soft-spoken. She was warm. She was the love of my life.