Roger was a friend I had back in the beeper days. His father came back from WWII in the forties. They were Hamden boys, him and his friend threw a Dindu off the 41st Street Bridge in the 50s and killed him, got away scot-free. I did plaster and dry wall with this guy, went into drywall. I did do plaster with him. He was an older guy. He was supplying cocaine to half of Hamden. Whee tehyyarrested him he had five-gallon buckets full of money. He didn’t do any drugs, but drank heavy. There was this dindu on the payphone with his dog and some guy he knew he went up to this guy and shot him and this dog in his head. He was not a physically imposing guy but you didn’t want to fuck with this guy. He would tell people that he never put anything more than beer or aspirin in his body. That’s how the old school guys were, take advantage of the junkies, they were weak. We’d be drinking cheap beer in his living room, watching fights on TV, busting his ass on the hob—an old man out there working and he had bags of cash in his basement. Back in the beeper days.

There were times I sat in bars with old WWII guys and Korean war guys and drink rather than hang out with the junkies—who wants to hang out with junkies. Old Leo and I would workout in hundred-degree weather. Old Leo would drink his thermos of coffee in the morning and then later in the day he’s drink beer. People would say, “Hey, Leo don’t you ever drink water?” And he’d say, “No, that’s were fish fuck.”

He was much like the men in my family who had fought in WWII who thought the United States was the best thing out there, but it’s inherently flawed. And I believe that is exactly the way it is, that this is the best thing out there, but its fucked up. And like Leo said, “The government has no business in a man’s life and you can’t trust it.”

They’ve replaced the worship of God with the worship if government and most anybody with a brain in their head knows that the government fucks everything up. Maybe in the days of Genghis Khan when the government ran over everything and you got a little piece, maybe that was worth it.