I’d been writing this sort of ‘intellectual’ porn (which really, I can’t imagine working for anyone); stories about people like Gordon and Ben, massive insertions, strange insertions, illegal insertions, pay-to-play, hotel takeovers, huge wads on hairy backs (for which I received a small bit of payola from Semenax) for years. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it. It started when I was in prison, because I was really unhappy with the way I was being sexually assaulted, and found that, similar to prison lawyers or elegantly literate men who could write love letters to women consigned to wait at home for their lovers to be released, I had a talent; a talent that would and did forestall a prolapsed rectum courtesy of Hank, Timmy, Big Timmy, Chinese Dwight, The Accountant, Liminal Phil, and Butch 3.
The series on Gordon and Ben, I actually had smuggled out by a friend and it ended up being published by Luridmax, an obscure French erotica publisher who focused mostly on golden shower and macrophilia narratives.
They are now out of business.
My brother Bernardo was right when he spoke of our father’s mercurial nature, the fact that he may have faked his own death—this was not out of the realm of possibility for Guillermo, but nonetheless, I am now the only living person who can both attest to the fixity of his death, as well as the manner of its deliverance.
Dad had easily convinced Bernardo that he was an ‘academic’ working on a thesis. There are two reasons this was done so easily. One is that my brother is a dipshit, an asshat and a moron. The other is that Bernardo could not and never was able to accept the the truth of what our father was: a criminal. He didn’t play violent video games as research for a thesis, he played them because he was a violent man who liked to play violent games.
I inherited this from my father, which is why I was the sole beneficiary of his will, the same will Bernardo and my sister are still battling over in a probate court somewhere, while I live off the full inheritance in Tenerife. My father taught me much more than my brother or sister about how to live in this world (I’m sure Bernardo has used the peanut butter and lie detector test advice dad gave us to amuse people at obnoxious academic parties for years). My dad taught me how to break the law and not get caught. Here are some things I was told, having become the favorite child early on when dad caught me stuffing a Snickers in my diaper at sixteen months:
1. Your best friends are leather gloves.
2. Three things to eliminate in a jam: teeth, hands and feet. DNA is popular, but it takes a while. Head in one bag, torso in another, arms and legs in a third, hands and teeth down a sewer grate. Dump the bag head in a residential garbage can thirty miles from where you dump the torso bag, and thirty miles from where you dump the arms and legs. Ideally, dump each bag in a different state. This causes the police to engage in typical jurisdictional squabbling and creates legitimate technical problems, which can give you an astonishing head start.
3. When choosing a new identity from the grave of a dead toddler in a cemetery, pick a common name. John Smith, Alan Phillips etc. Whatever you do, do NOT pick an antiquated sounding name — no Forbes Pennyworth DeQuincy, those sort of names draw attention no matter what.
4. Whenever possible, marry the new wife in international waters. She’ll think it’s romantic, what she won’t know is that it’s not legally binding. That way, should your bigamy ever come to light, you won’t be charged. You’ll just look like an asshole.
5. Always look like an asshole.
I loved my father Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe (né George Lazard). One thing I loved more than George though, was and is money. I was taught about this love by my father, so I know that in the end, while he might not have been ready to die, he would have respected my move. This is what’s most important to me. That while I’m certain he would have preferred to keep living, I put an end to it in a way I know he’d genuinely respect.
Bernardo with his PhD in Ancient Music. Sophia with her moronic dentist husband Lyell who’d say sorry if you hit his car. Spineless, weak people. Not me. Never me.
“You may be a piece of shit, Carlo. You may be a shiftless predatory fuck, but you’re my son, and for fuck sake, you make me a helluva lot more proud than your brother and sister, living their lives inside the lines. Honestly if I didn’t have warrants out at the time, I would’ve stuck em’ both in a sleeping bag full of rocks and thrown them in the river.”
Words like these from a parent, they feel real good.
It happened like this.
My dad had just finished a three-year bit. Bernardo and Sophia thought he’d been living in Tucson, running a ‘workshop’ on some type of bullshit.
I was looking at eleven more months of a six-year sentence for felony battery. Dad had been the only one who visited me (or the only one I allowed to visit) during that time. It was on one of his last visits that he told me he’d cut my siblings out of the will, because, as he put it rather succinctly, “Fuck em.”
By the time I made it back to my cell, I had the entire thing planned perfectly. I almost wanted to call my dad and tell him, but….
My cellmate, John Allan Richards, had terminal lung cancer, was facing compassionate early release after serving almost twenty years for bank robbery. We’d developed a good, quasi-paternal relationship over our time together. Once I learned about the will, I told John that, since he’d be getting out, and since he wouldn’t have much time left out there, I had a story to tell him. I wasn’t asking per se, but I knew that since his doctors had told him he should already be dead, that old-fashioned prison ethics would steer him in the direction I needed.
Look John, I never wanted to bring it up — it’s too hard, this sort of language. I told him how my father Guillermo had molested my sister Sophia from when she was five to thirteen. John had three daughters. It would strike him where I needed him struck. “Jesus fucking Christ, Carl. This is no good. No, this is just no good. And he’s out there still?”
I told him he was.
“I sort of suspected John,” I told him. “Sophia was always sick, always sad, had no friends, acted too clingy when I brought male friends home. I knew my dad, I knew he was a sick fuck, there wasn’t anything I’d put past him. But it wasn’t until I was sixteen, going through his VHS collection looking for porn that I found the tape. It was the only one with a handwritten label.”
“What’d it say?” he asked, looking already like he wanted to reach through the prison, send his arm through the streets of Philadelphia and rip my dad’s throat out.
“It said ‘Little Blondes’...”
“For fuck sake!” he cut me off.
“I know, I know. I put the tape in. Well, there she was John, Sophia. I turned it off right away. I knew there’d be other blondes. I mean, fuck sake, she was mostly a redhead.”
“Alright, Carl. I want to help you with this. Cause this…I can’t abide this.”
It’s not just a myth of film and television that pedophiles are considered to be subhuman scum in prison. Just as in the real world, they’re seen as such. Everything came into motion so easily. He actually coaxed the information out of me, which was beautiful. I told him where my father lived and where my father drank, because I knew those things. He was still sending me letters, often just written on coasters from the bar. John’s date was coming up soon. The cancer had spread to his brain, he was starting to forget things and would wake up with subdural hematomas that looked like mandarin oranges. I think I’m making my point.
Carl was released on June 15th, 2009. We had a party for him, Vino brought an empty Tide container of his best pruno. At the end, when he was leaving the cell, Carl took my head in his hands and looked me in the eyes.
“I got this, John. Fuck this bullshit. I can’t abide it. I just cannot abide it. Plus, it’s likely bullshit, but maybe if I can do one good thing in this life, make some stab at redemption or whatever, God might not shit on me so heavily.”
I told Carl I loved him. I did love him. Then I slipped him the piece of paper with my father’s address on it.
July 3rd, it was in the news, which is how I heard about it first. It took Bernardo a few days to call and tell me, probably ‘cause he was playing the ocarina or some bullshit at a recital in Sonoma or Marfa.
Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe, aged 69, was leaving the bar he drank at regularly to walk to his home three blocks away. In the neighborhood, most people avoided San Felipe. They heard he’d done some shit, and he never smiled. But, if you had a flat, he was gonna fix it for you. As he approached his home, John Allan Richards, notorious for a bank robbing spree that stretched from Abilene to Austin and released from prison weeks before on compassionate grounds, approached San Felipe in the middle of the street, brandishing a handgun and visibly limping. He was heard to shout, “Hey, short eyes!” immediately before pressing his revolver against San Felipe’s head and pulling the trigger. San Felipe died instantly. Richards did not run or hide his gun. Instead he sat on the curb next to the body. When the police came he was taken to central booking. There was no clear motive for the slaying, and police were perplexed as to why a man who’d just been released after serving two decades in the penitentiary would execute what appeared to be a stranger, resulting in his return to the penitentiary.
For three days, police questioned Richards. They pressed for his motives, enquired as to his relationship to the victim—these sort of police questions. Richards would only say one thing: “He had it coming.” Police were at a loss to understand. San Felipe had served his time in prison, mostly for wire fraud or the occasional aggravated assault. There was nothing that would explain a revenge-motivated execution in the middle of the street.
On his fourth day of interrogation, Richards asked Detective Leslie Morris to get him a Sprite. He said his mouth was dry from “talking to you fucking goofs for so long.”
When Detective Morris returned to interview room eight, Richards lay slumped on the floor, dead. An autopsy later revealed him to be stuffed with tumors, and his personal physician later stated his surprise that Richards was still living.
The will went through probate quickly. I received very little in terms of liquid assets or investment products. I did, however, inherit an antique briefcase. Inside this briefcase was a small card — “It’s a boy!” The envelope held the key to a storage space. The day before the funeral, I rented a car and drove for an hour. Behind a bunch of lamps and stolen dishwashers I found a suitcase containing one and a half million dollars in small bills.
Once my lawyer informed Bernardo and Sophia’s lawyers that the will was incontestable, Sophia apparently expressed surprise that I was alive. I hadn’t seen them for over fifteen years.
At the internment, I stood mixed in with a group of mourners at a nearby funeral while Guillermo’s was happening. I watched Bernardo deliver his ‘clever’ speech, and Sophia her saccharine one. Once everyone was gone, I left a bouquet of tulips and a bottle of Wild Turkey on dad’s grave. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I’m sure nobody wanted to see me either.
Before I left for Tenerife, I paid for John Allan Richards’ tombstone. He had no family, and no money, and would’ve been buried in a potter’s field. He’d done me a great service, and really, John had never done anything worse than rob a bank. A thing that, really, all of us are entitled to try.
