Corrections officer is just one of many ways to describe a parent’s duty. Once when we discovered “somebody” had purposely shredded pages from a hardcover library book and nobody confessed, Ryan held a trial in the living room for “criminal damage to property,” calling each of our three eldest children to the witness stand. When Fern ignored our subpoena, offering up household chores instead (“I’m just washing windows over here,” she cooed nonchalantly), we knew we’d found our culprit. Another time as Irie and Leo boiled up bedlam in the back seat of our van, Ryan drove toward the Winnebago County Jail, swerved into the parking lot, and threatened to drag them inside. “I have plenty of connections,” he growled. He was melodramatic, over-the-top, and outright laughable, but other parents he met through criminal defense launched grenades, plumb-full of explosives, not blanks.
When a woman named Liberty Cabot suspected her seventeen-year-old son, Jared, of stealing from her purse, for example, she made the mistake of calling her husband, Wayne Pomeno, down at his biker establishment to complain. An associate of Hell’s Lovers Motorcycle Club, Pomeno was the quintessential tough guy, and he admitted his reaction to Cabot’s phone call wasn’t pretty. “I went ballistic,” he told police. By his own reckoning, Pomeno was an automatic weapon with a chamber full of ammo, and his stepson was the spoiled punk tripping his trigger.
Somebody had burglarized Pomeno’s private residence weeks earlier, and now, more than ever, Pomeno was convinced that his wife’s kid was the offender. This biker knew how belligerent he could get, especially when provoked, and he claimed he begged Cabot to keep Jared as far away from the bike shop as possible. If the kid showed his face, Pomeno warned, he’d have a hard time practicing restraint. He was splenetic, pacing and kicking tools around the garage.
According to Jared, however, Cabot did just the opposite. She woke her son from a late-afternoon nap on the sofa. How many moments in mothers’ lives are spent mastering the art of the wake-up call? We rouse our babies for birth, orchestrating flashes of light with our furious labor, and they emerge as if baptized, awash in luminescence. And so begins the painstaking litany of years, waking our children from literal and proverbial sleep. Sometimes we’ve got to knock sense into their heads.
“You need to work things out,” Cabot said to Jared. “Make things square.” She gave him specific instructions to meet Pomeno downtown. Maybe, she urged, Jared could help with bike repairs in his free time to pay his stepdad back. Was she an idealist, truly believing in the possibility of reconciliation between her son and husband, or was she actually an accomplice, uttering beneath her breath, “Spare the rod and spoil the child”? Either way, Jared’s grandfather was seemingly also either optimistic or duped. He personally chauffeured Jared down to the bike shop while Cabot ran a few quick errands. She would be there soon, she said, to see how it all turned out.
The faint trail of leather, ink, and hot rubber led bikers and friends of Hell’s Lovers to the repair shop and clubhouse. Motor oil burned like incense when Jared walked in that day. Jared’s grandfather attempted to chaperone him through the repair shop and into Pomeno’s office, but the boss stopped him at the door. “It’s OK, old man,” he said. “Go on and wait outside.” Jared was a black belt, after all, the kind of boy who would “kung fu up” to protect himself, if necessary. Jared could handle himself, and Pomeno wanted this done man-to-man, one-on-one. But when Jared entered his stepdad’s office, an entourage of Pomeno’s friends was waiting for him behind the door, which they quickly locked. Pomeno grabbed Jared by a chain around his neck, as if he were a disobedient dog, then he yanked him flush against his tight chest, close enough to steam the kid’s face with his hot breath.
“If you weren’t your mother’s kid, I’d kill you,” he said.
Somebody embraced Jared in a bear hug from behind and restrained him, with the help of another unidentified lackey whose strong arms pushed him, hunched over, onto a rolling swivel chair. That’s when Pomeno pulled out a baseball bat from behind his desk, perfected his stance, kicked around the dirt at home plate, and began thwacking the butt end of his Louisville Slugger against Jared’s chin. Within seconds, pockets of blood bulged from the boy’s bone like cysts.
“You don’t want to fuck with Hell’s Lovers,” Pomeno cursed.
When he finished his portion of the assault, he signaled his cronies to take turns drubbing Jared with bamboo rods on his back, his arms, and his legs. Who needed the justice system to corroborate Jared’s alleged burglary when Pomeno could take matters into his own hands, vigilantism in its most gruesome form? Which old-fashioned method of corporal punishment for disobedience did the beating most resemble—flogging, birching, caning, or something else altogether? When the muscled fists of Pomeno’s henchmen finally released Jared, his whole body tingled with pain, as if his funny bones had ruptured.
“That’ll learn you,” Pomeno said and signaled for his buddies to open the office door. Lacerated, bloody, and swollen, Jared cowered his way out of his stepdad’s office. He never looked up or sideways when leaving, instead shuffling slowly to his grandfather’s car in the parking lot, where he resumed his spot at
