Most of my friends came up the same way as I did or worse, and by my sophomore year we were ready to graduate from smoking pot and dropping ecstasy to something much worse. Our reign of terror began on a steel-gray day, after I’d beeped my friends to pick me up early from school. We found ourselves driving through a wealthy town nearby, passing one big house after another, all with empty driveways. Nobody was talking as the radio played.
“Yo, let’s rob a house,” I said.
And that was all it took. Within a few weeks we’d hit so many houses I’d lost count, and I decided to bow out before we got caught. My friends, on the other hand, were just getting started, and by the time they discovered they weren’t cut out to be career burglars it was too late. By then the cops had several accurate descriptions of the car, and one day after school my friends got pulled over and that was that.
Unfortunately, my absence wouldn’t keep me out of trouble. My friend driving the car had decided to drop a few tabs of acid earlier that day, and it was just my luck that they started to kick in right before his interrogation. He gave a full confession, and even spelled my last name for the detectives.
Since it was my first offense, the judge let me off easy, with sixty days of county time—two-thirds of which I served in Riverhead’s maximum security prison on the east end of Long Island. When I walked onto the minor tier it didn’t take long to realize I didn’t stand a chance against most of the brothers there in a fight. The majority of them looked like grown men, while I don’t even think I had my sideburns in yet, and I knew my survival would come down to balls and making people like me, the second being impossible without the first. It was a valuable experience, living with murderers and violent offenders and actually becoming close with some of them. I would later apply the same logic to my interactions with the emirs and guards, and it would work just as well on them. It’s funny—in America the criminals are the ones you do your time with, but in Syria they’re the ones who run the prisons.
After someone who was supposed to be a close friend ratted me out, I had learned the hard way to be careful who to trust in life, but I’d also learned how to break into places successfully, which meant that if I really applied myself I could learn how to break out of them as well.
Since his last brilliant idea for an escape got us tortured and starved for over a month, this time Theo let me do the planning.
The key, obviously, was finding a way to exploit the piss-poor job the welder had done when fixing the grate on the window. It was too high for me to inspect, so Theo got on all fours and I stepped onto his back so it was at eye level. The grate had twenty-three vertical wires woven around thirteen thicker wires going horizontally, and at a glance you couldn’t even tell it was welded on at all. I thought I might be able to just yank it off, but it didn’t budge. I tried again, summoning all my strength and thinking about my poor old mother, and got the same results—nothing.
“Oh well, there goes that idea,” said Theo, sounding relieved.
“No, fuck that!” I said, to let him know I was just getting started.
When they fed us I hid one of the metal spoons in the bathroom, and later I tried to break the bond of the weld by prying it with the handle.
“Is it working? Is it working?” Theo kept asking as I stood on his back.
“Would you shut the fuck up? I’ll let you know if it works!”
He started bitching at me to get off him, saying that I had better be nicer or he wasn’t going to help us escape. How serious he was I would have to wait to find out, because a 285-pound wrench was about to be thrown into my spokes before I even got a chance to pedal.
I think his name was Abdullah, though to be perfectly honest I’m not sure that’s right. What I do remember is that the door opened, and when it shut a second later, Abdullah was locked inside. At first I thought he was a member of the organization coming to interrogate us, but in fact he was a dentist, and one of the sweetest men I met during my time in Syria. He was very tall, towering above me with a huge belly that made him look pregnant. He’d been arrested by Jabhat al-Nusra after somebody in his town made a bogus complaint against him about some stolen dental office equipment.
It didn’t take Theo more than a split second to crouch down next to our new cellmate like a buzzard and start trying to win him over as an ally. The question I got from Abdullah after his first exchange with Theo in Arabic actually amused me.
“Why do you beat him?” he asked me in English, disgusted.
“Because he asks for it,” I answered, without
