- 1971 Another new start.
It didn't take my mom long to realize I was in a very bad school, but we were stuck with the house and there were no options. She wasn't even upset when I failed seventh grade. You have to attend class to pass and I had missed most due to cut classes and suspensions. I believe this was on her mind when she decided to remarry. Out of the blue she told me she was getting married to a man I had never heard of and that we were immediately moving to Florida.

I had never lived anywhere other than Georgia and South Carolina, so Orlando was a shock to me. My new step-dad was upper middle class on a fast track to being wealthy. Wealthy enough for Bob to rob, though I lost contact with Bob during these years. Ken Stapp was a good guy. A rather smart man, driven by ambition. He was also a good parent. I hated him. I had been the man of the house for too long to accept another. I hated him before I met him and I continued to hate him until I left home at seventeen. After I no longer lived with him I began to appreciate him. But while I lived in his home I would never see anything other than the man who had taken over my job. My job to protect my mom and brothers.

During the two years I lived in Orlando as a member of the Stapp household there are only a few events worth mentioning. Ken had two children, Liz and Ricky. Liz was two years my junior and Ricky one year younger than I. So I remained the oldest. In Orlando we road a bus to school, but unlike South Carolina our Orlando schools were all white. Union Park Junior High was so calm and peaceful that it made me uncomfortable. There were plenty of teenage politics involved, but after the war zone I just left, I didn't care who was friends with who. There were bullies at the school, but even though I was just a seventh grader, I was a big seventh grader. Plus I am sure my confidence and experience telegraphed itself. So the bullies wisely left me alone.

There was however a fight, and it was a big one. It started over my brother Curtis. Curtis went to a different school, but rode the same bus home as Ricky, Liz and I. A group of kids were picking on Curtis so I told them to leave him alone. Words were exchanged so they said they'd see me when we got off the bus. There were a lot of them. Can't remember the number today, but I'd say around ten. All my age or a year younger. They got off at a stop before mine and dared me to follow. I told my siblings to ride to the next stop and go home, then got off. It wasn't until after the bus pulled off that I realized Ricky, Liz and even Curtis had got off the bus too. A new friend I had made, Tony, had got off too. The gang of kids starting talking. Drawing on Bob's lessons I didn't say a word, just attacked. To my complete surprise, all my siblings followed me into battle.

It was a big fight. I saw my new friend Tony get hit in the face immediately. He raised his hands and said he'd had enough. Kid's heart was in the right place, but he wasn't a fighter. Curtis had never been in a fight and was the youngest there by at least three years, but he fought like a tiger. He put one kid out of the fight with a leg bite. Neither Liz nor Ricky had ever fought, nor did they know how to fight, but they did all they could. Ricky got beat up pretty bad, but none of the guys was willing to hit a pretty girl, so Liz attacked them with out getting hit. Neither did much damage, but they did keep enough occupied that I didn't get overwhelmed. When it was over one of our attackers ran off, but the rest were hurt and out of the fight. My siblings weren't bothered again.

After this famous fight I developed a little gang of my own. We experimented with pot, which none of us cared for, did some light weight theft to build our club house, which was in a high tree in the woods. I know a fourteen year old today wouldn't be caught dead in a tree house, but back then it was pretty cool. At fifteen my parents went to Mexico for a week vacation so I skipped school that week and stole my step dad's car. It was a week of being a big shot, taking friends and even girls to the beach every day. It was amazing I never got caught. I would have gotten away with it had I not wrecked the car. Ken Stapp was not happy. Later that year my mom dropped me off where I worked (a restaurant) on her way to the airport, where I learned that I didn't work that day. No cell phones back then, so I had to walk home, which was about twenty miles in the Florida heat. I made it about five miles before I gave up and stole a car. That too would have worked out had I not kept the car for a week, then abandoned it in the woods near our neighborhood. It took the cops two weeks to figure out I was the car thief and arrest me. As a juvenile I didn't go to jail and all I got was a warning and a sealed record. My parents were another matter.

We had been living in a rented house, so that summer dad bought a nice house with a pool in upscale Winter Park. Nice area, nice neighborhood, great school. Glen Ridge Junior High, like all the schools we had seen in Florida at the time, were all white. No blacks and no Hispanics. Winter Park was so nice it made me uncomfortable. I loved the place, but I never felt like I belonged. I was now in eighth grade at fifteen, so a big kid, but this school had a good football team with lots of big kids. One of those big kids got upset with me because I was spending too much time talking to his girlfriend. He caught me off guard after school with the football team backing him up. He started talking smack so I followed Bob's instructions: attacked without saying a word. I put that poor guy down so fast no one ever bothered me again. The football player's girlfriend became my girlfriend. She didn't last long. I liked the idea of girls, but I wasn't into all the work they required.
In ninth grade I turned sixteen and my step-dad bought me a car. It was a 1972 Ford Pinto hatchback, brand new, with factory installed mag wheels and Eight-Track Tape Player (You'll have to Google that). Though it was just a little Pinto, it was a beautiful car that I loved. It had a tiny motor, but handled like a go-cart. It had no top end, but man could I drive that thing through traffic and turns. And I loved to drive it. The first time I bought gas for my own car it cost .31 cents a gallon, and it was hard to keep it in gas. During ninth grade I found that I loved to race. Not to drag race, because anyone could out run my Pinto on a straight road, but on a course that I picked--one with tight turns, or through town--no one could beat me. Racing was a thrill for me. I think the first I had ever experienced. I loved it. The first time the Winter Park City Police tried to pull me over for speeding I decided to give it a go. I won that race too. The cop never even managed to get my plate number so I got away clean. Before ninth grade was over I would have several more police chases and I got away from every one. Even though I raced all the time and drove like a maniac under normal conditions, I don't believe I got a speeding ticket during this time. It was not good that I figured out I could out run the cops. It made me think I couldn't get caught. A belief that would stick with me through most of my life.

That summer, after ninth grade, several things happened. First I got a job pumping gas on the Florida Turnpike: the Turkey Lake Service Plaza. It was a fast paced, high volume station with millions of tourist visiting the newly opened Disney World. This was back in the day when self-service gas pumping was rare. So I was one of eight or so guys pumping gas. Credit card usage was also rare in those pre-digital days, so nearly all purchases were cash. (Yes, the stone age.) It didn't take me long to realize that I was handling hundreds of dollars in cash daily and had a bottomless pit of gasoline that was never audited. I did what Bob had taught me to do. I stole from the rich to give to the poor. I was the poor. I was working part time making $1.80 an hour, so earning about $36.00 a week, but stole about $120.00 a week.

Through the summer I started surfing with step-brother Ricky. Ricky was the better surfer and more into it than I, but I had the car and liked the beach so Cocoa Beach and Sebastian Inlet became our stomping grounds. There we tried marijuana again. Neither of us smoked much, but we liked it better than the first time so got high several times. At Ron Jon's Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach (which was a small hole in the wall then but is a name brand today) I met one of the strangest guys I have ever known: "Captain Purple". He was the stereotypical 60's hippy, late twenty's, long blond hair, worn leather and faded blue jeans. Drove a purple van with California plates. Manufactured and sold acid. The acid was called purple microdot. Of course it was.

He had strict rules. He sold a 100 dose bag, for $50.00 a bag. He sold nothing else. He wouldn't sell a single hit, nor would he sell a bag of 200 hits. If you wanted a single hit you were out of luck and if you wanted 200 hits you had to buy two bags. At the time acid sold for $2.00 a piece. When I met the guy there were several surfers attempting to purchase acid from him, but they only had enough for five hits at $2.00 a piece. Captain Purple didn't break his own rules and since they didn't have $50.00 between them they were out of luck. At that time, $50.00 was a lot for a sixteen year old to have, but I'd stole plenty from the gas station, so I was flush. It seemed like an opportunity, so I bought a 100 hit bag for $50.00, sold five to the surfers for $10.00, made them happy, then sold the rest to other strangers before I left Ron Jon's parking lot. In less than an hour I'd made $150.00. More than I could earn at the gas station in a month and more than I could steal in a week. Before leaving Ron Jon's I bought another 400 hits from Captain Purple and took them to Orlando with me. With little effort those were gone before the next weekend. Without meaning to I had become a drug dealer. A regular customer for Captain Purple.

I'd sold more than 1,000 hits of acid before I tried the drug myself. I wasn't scared to sell drugs, but I was terrified to do them. Ironically it was my fifteen year-old step brother who convinced me to do so. From that first bag he wanted to try one, but I wouldn't let him. In the first week he tried to steal one from me but I caught him. He tried to get a friend of his to buy one from me but I caught on and prevented it. I just didn't want my step-brother doing drugs. But on one of our surfing trips he convinced me, so we both dropped a single hit at Sebastian's Inlet. We tripped so much that we both broke our surf boards on the inlet's dangerous rocks. We purchased new ones at Ron Jon's so our parents wouldn't know (they had bought our boards for us since we couldn't afford them, at least they didn't know we could afford them).

Driving home late that afternoon we were still tripping when a Florida State Trooper pulled us over. It was the first time I'd actually stopped for a cop. He asked me if I knew how fast I was going. I had no idea, but didn't want to say that. My car had a top speed of eighty-five, so that was my assumption. The speed limit on this two lane road was sixty, so I said seventy. The Trooper gave me a hard look. He pulled me over because I was doing five miles per hour on a busy two lane road. I must have been driving in first gear the entire time. He pulled me out of the car and showed me a line of cars behind us that went back further than I could see. I passed his sobriety test, so he searched the car. I'd sold all the acid and was clean except for too much cash, but he couldn't do anything about it. I swore to him that I wasn't doing drugs, which he clearly didn't believe. After some yelling all he did was follow me most of the way back to Orlando with the promise that if I went below fifty or above sixty he'd put me in jail and call my parents. I drove home at fifty-five miles per hour with an acid produced little purple guy running beside my car telling me I could out run the State Trooper. It was difficult to ignore the little guy, but I managed. I kept selling acid, but it was nearly a year before I took it again.